Lace songs and tells

 Researchers in Vienna have recently found that groups of people singing together can improve team work and interpersonal coordination. This would not have been news to Victorian lacemakers in the East Midlands area of England who encouraged the children in lace schools to sing as they worked at their pillows.

These songs, known as lace tells, improved concentration and were often linked to counting the number of pins worked in a lace pattern in a specific period of time. One Bedfordshire counting tell goes as follows:

Needle pin, needle pin, stitch upon stitch,

Work the old lady out of the ditch,

If she is not out as soon as I,

A rap on the knuckles shall come by and by,

A horse to carry my lady about –

Must not look off till 20 are out.

The children then worked 20 pins and if any of them spoke or looked away from their pillow before they had completed 20 pins the others would call out:

Hang her up for half an hour,

Cut her down like a flower.

The girl referred to would then place another pin and reply:

I won’t be hung for half an hour,

I won’t be cut down like a flower.

Other lace tells were related to local people and events. Many local lacemakers were unhappy with the treatment they received from the Buckingham lace buyer Mr E Godfroy who often paid them in tokens, which could only be used to buy food in certain shops, rather than money that could be spent anywhere. In revenge they sang this lace tell about him:

Nineteen miles to Charing Cross,

To see a Black Man ride on a white horse.

The rogue was so saucy he wouldn’t come down,

To show me the road to the nearest town.

I picked up a turmut and cracked his old crown

And made him cry ‘turmuts’ all over town.

Godfroy was known as the Black Man because he was the first lace buyer to get the lacemakers using black silk thread to make lace. Obviously many lacemakers would have liked to pick up a turnip (a solid root vegetable known locally as a turmut) and hit him over the head with it to ‘crack his old crown’. These are just two examples of lace tells collected by Thomas Wright in his history of lacemaking, based on his research at the beginning of the twentieth century. Others deal with a variety of subjects including romance, death, gruesome murders and each other’s appearance, which must have made for a lively school day.