If you haven’t read Kate Davies’ blog post today, I highly recommend it. The whole post is excellent, as always, but one detail blew me away. Kate is interviewing Mary Jane Mucklestone, and she asks if MJM has a favorite piece of historic Fair Isle knitting. MJM goes on to describe a fair isle sweater that a soldier named Ralph Paterson was wearing when he was taken prisoner in Hong Kong during World War 2. It had been knitted for him by his wife, and he wore it for the entire five years of his captivity.
There’s a photograph of the sweater in the blog post. And if you become obsessed like I have, you’ll be happy to know that Susan Crawford apparently spends a lot of time on it in her forthcoming Vintage Shetland Project. Aaaand there are good number of additional pictures of the sweater on Tom of Holland’s blog here.
I titled this post “Synchronicity” because I spent quite a bit of last night watching a documentary on what the slow declassification of military documents from WW2 has revealed about the almost certainly avoidable bombing of Pear Harbor. We’re coming into a strange kind of omniscience relative to that time, and the knowledge is frightening. It was a comfort to me this morning to read about Ralph Paterson’s sweater.
The picture at the top of the post is one I took in response to Dana’s #widn tag on Instagram last night. Knitting and snuggling was clearly the thing to do. 🙂
I loved that post as well — I was watching a knitting documentary recently, and it included some sweaters knit by men in German POW camps during WW2 – fascinating stuff!
For sure! One thing that amazes me and that I love is how often you see photos of all kinds of people knitting during that period. It’s the most incredible counterbalance to so much of the rest.