Earlier this year I made a working copy of an old bobbin winder that once belonged to the linen weavers of Lopham in Norfolk. The winder was gifted to Thetford Museum in 1926 by Albert Tyler, the last of the Lopham weavers, and is now in the collection of Norfolk Museums at Gressenhall. This post includes photographs of the old and new winders, with some notes on how this simple wooden machine can transport me back in time.

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The photographs above show my recently finished bobbin winder, the old winder on which it is modelled, and the process of making the new one. I am grateful to the curators at Norfolk Museums Service for giving me access to take photographs and measurements of the winder.

I first noticed the old winder on a visit to Gressenhall Farm & Workhouse / Museum of Norfolk Life in 2022. It was only much later, when I recognized the winder in an old photograph in the same collection, that I realized its significance. The photograph (below) shows Louise Ellen Bale and Albert Tyler using the winder outside The Limes in North Lopham around 1915 or 1920. Ellen Bale had inheritied the linen business of T. W. & J. Buckenham from her sister, Georgiana Buckenham in 1905. ¹ The Limes was the Buckenham family home, with a weaving shed at the back housing at least two Jacquard looms. Albert Tyler was one of the weavers.² In the photograph Ellen Bale is using the winder to wind yarn onto spools. She appears to be wearing black, perhaps in mourning for her sister Elizabeth Susanna who had died in 1912. She has white feathers in her bonnet, and – in a curious reversal of roles – Albert Tyler stands behind her with a watch in his waistcoat pocket.

The Buckenham business closed in 1925 on the death of Ellen Bale. The bobbin winder was gifted to Thetford Museum by Albert Tyler the following year, eventually making its way to Gressenhall.

 

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For me, as a practitioner aiming to recover forgotten techniques, old tools and machines are valuable primary source materials. They provide a physical link to the practices and techniques of the artisans who made and used them.

Traditional implements like this old bobbin winder are the outcomes of technical evolution over centuries of trial and error. Though mechanically simple they can be highly nuanced and fit for purpose. They are a form of memory, crystallising the knowledge of generations of workers. Using or reconstructing these old tools reactivites dormant knowledge. It is a form of remembering.³

My initial motivation for remaking the winder was simply to acquire a traditional bobbin winder, but the project became a double reenactment: first, as I imagined and followed the processes of the carpenter who made the original winder; and second, by using the new winder I was repeating the actions of the linen workers who used the old winder all those years ago. I found myself turning into Louise Ellen Bale, with feathers in my hat and Albert Tyler looking over my shoulder.

A working reconstruction such as this achieves something that a written description or a photograph cannot. It reproduces, in the body of anyone who uses it, the patterns of movement of those who used it before: a physical communication between the living and the dead.

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Notes

1. See this post for more about T. W. & J. Buckenham ↩︎
2. See this post for more about Albert Tyler ↩︎
3. These ideas about technical evolution and technology as externalised memory are derived from the pioneering work of palaeontologist, archaeologist and enthnologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan, e.g.: Le Geste et la Parole (1964), translated by Anna Bostock Berger as Gesture and Speech (1993). ↩︎

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