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History
of Limmerick Lace |
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click thumbnails for enlargements |
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| In
1829, Charles Walker brought 24 girls from Essex to
Limerick, to start up a lace- making school. This
was the beginning of Limerick lace, which came to
be the most prestigious and expensive of the Irish
laces. One of the reasons that Mr Walker chose Limerick
were the large numbers of unemployed young women who
could become his work-force. To get a place in the
lace factories was not easy, as each girl had to provide
a certificate from her doctor, a reference from an
influential citizen and proof of her age, which had
to be between 11 and 14. The social consequences of
the lace industry on the local area were immediate:
better housing, quality of life and even the ability
to put aside some savings. When Mr Walker died in
1843, about 1700 females were employed in the various
branches of the Limerick lace- making industry. |
| The
lace was a combination of tambour and needlerun embroidery
on a machine-made net, and was also known for its
large variety of different filling patterns (up to
47 on one collar). It was the availability of machine-made
net fabric, rather than the costly hand- made variety,
which had enabled the expansion of the lace- making
industry. |
| The
quality of Limerick lace came to rival and then to
surpass that of any other district in England. Mr
Walker proudly offered a large wager that he would
select a hundred Irish girls from among his workers,
who would produce any given piece of lace superior
to any similar work made by the same number of girls
from France, Flanders, Saxony or Germany. In a relatively
small amount of time, Limerick lace had become arguably
the best in Europe. |
| The
designs of Limerick lace were polished and refined,
but were also bound by a very conservative market.
As lace was such an expensive, luxury item, only available
or affordable to the very rich lace buyers would not
want to take risks with their purchases. The same
people who approved entrants to the lace- making schools
also organised and judged the lace- making competitions,
thus the designs developed in a very constrained way.
It was because of this conservative tendency that
new currents in the larger world of design did not
impact as they might otherwise have done on the world
of lace- making. This is illustrated by the rarity
of Art Nouveau lace designs at a time when the influences
of this new style were being felt almost everywhere
else. |
References:
Lace, a History by Santina M Levy,
published Victoria and Albert Museum,1983
Limerick Lace by Nellie Clerigh and Veronica Rowe,
published Colin Smyth, Gerrards Cross, 1995
The Crawford Municipal Art Gallery catalogue 1991,
compiled by Peter Murray
The Art Workers Quarterly, 1905 |
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