Knitting by hand like our grandmothers - a dying skill

hand-knitting: the dying skill

Knitting by hand was very common indeed when I was young in the 1940s and 1950s. It was considered a skill which every housewife should possess and every female child should therefore learn. Like many other girls of my generation, I became very proficient indeed at it. I could do it quickly and without mistakes - and also without looking when the knitting was relatively plain. Consequently knitting was something to relax with, at the end of the day, rather than a task to concentrate on. Women spoke of actually needing to have "some knitting on the needles" - as the saying went.

Then, sometime in the late 1950s, something happened which I remember very clearly indeed and which upset me greatly: I had to face up to the fact that machines had arrived which could knit faster than me and produce a thinner and more delicate product. My hard-earned and high quality skills were no longer needed or valued. Difficult as it was to come to terms with, the lesson has been a valuable one in the rest of my life, as I have had to accept that certain old skills really do become redundant with progress and that new ones have to be developed and learned. (Yes, I do accept that hand-knitted chunky knits are still in demand, but to me they were easily produced. My skill was for finer and more intricate work.)

The skill of knitting in previous generations

In a November 2010 television episode of The Edwardian Farm, viewers saw Ruth Goodman, the historian who was living as the woman of the house for a year, sitting relaxing of an evening with her colleagues. She was knitting. That was what an Edwardian women would certainly have been doing - but she would never have knitted how Ruth Goodman was knitting.

Within a few days there was a repeat of a Miss Marple starring the elderly Joan Hickson. She too was knitting - precisely the way all the English women of her time would have done - women who had been brought up to the skill. It was how every women knitted when I was a child, and how I was brought up to knit.

To me, Ruth Goodman's way of knitting was 'the wrong way' and Joan Hickson's was 'the right way'. Obviously that is a matter opinion, but there is no doubt that Joan Hickson was able to knit efficiently and effectively, mainly without even looking, whereas Ruth Goodman was not.

This website Join me in the 1900s is also known as Join me in the 1900's and is © Pat Cryer.

The 1940s and 1950s are also written as the 1940's and 1950's