Honiton Lace Veil

In 1993 my fiancée’s mother invited me to use a lace veil – which had been used by members of her family since 1866 – as part of my wedding outfit. I had not planned to use a veil, but I realised wearing this veil linked me to my new family: I became part of the veil’s story. Below I examine the features and sub-texts of the lace veil.

Lace is “a decorative openwork fabric in which the pattern of spaces is as important as the solid areas,”[1] and has been made since at least the sixteenth century using thread. Until the development of lace making machinery in the late eighteenth century all lace was handmade. The family lace veil was created in the mid nineteenth century using handmade bobbin part lace from cotton thread appliqued to machine made net. The veil is unique: no other garment would have the part lace pieces made or appliqued in exactly the same way. The veil is 185cm by 175cm in size, the piecework is intricate, the colour has matured from white to ivory, and the veil is lightweight and soft to touch.

Photo of Family Veil

The veil has been used on at least sixteen occasions, over six generations from 1866 to 2015. The names of women who are known to have used the veil over 149 years are listed below.

List of women who are known to have worn the lace veil

Year	Gen	Name – the owner of the veil also indicated.	Direct (D)/ Marrying a Direct/ Friend
1866	1	Isabella Dixson (Owner)	D
1890	2	Isabella Hibberd	D
1893	2	Helen Hibberd  (Owner)	D
1916	3	Helen Barbour	D
1923	3	Eva Barbour	D
1926	3	Gwenyth Harry (owner)	D
1934	3	Freda Barbour	D
1952	4	Joy Crofts	D
1956	4	Ruth Crofts (Owner)	D
1979	5	Linda Taylor	Marrying
1983	5	Pamela Kinnear	Marrying
1985	5	Meryl Joyce (Owner)	D
1986?	5	Joanne Maples	Friend
1993	5	Rebecca Hilton	Marrying
2014	6	Rosemary Devereaux	D
2015	6	Amy Devereaux	D

Unfortunately this list is not conclusive. There may have been other occasions on which the veil was used, particularly by Isabella Dixson’s new sisters-in-law or others in the late nineteenth century. The veil has also travelled widely, being used in Sydney, Brisbane, Mymensingh in India, Perth and Canberra, plus being kept by Helen Harry (nee Hibberd) in New Zealand for many years.

Ownership of the veil is vested in the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter, connecting the past to the present, and also connecting the people who wear it. Thus it is unique not just in design, but also in its own story.

Family folklore is that the veil is a piece of Honiton Lace, but this would be difficult to categorically authenticate without analysis of the thread. Textile specialists can easily identify the technique used for lace making, but it is hard to determine the location or year in which lace was made. Lace makers at the Powerhouse Lace Study Centre confirmed that the technique for this lace was handmade bobbin part lace, which is a feature of Honiton Lace.[2]

Honiton Lace has been produced in East Devon in England since at least the late sixteenth century. It is probable Flemish refugees brought lace-making skills to the area, as there are similarities between Honiton Lace and other Flemish laces. By the seventeenth century lace was a major industry of East Devon. The lace is made by pieces that were either laced together or mounted onto net grounding (before lace-making machines the net grounding also was handmade). The pieces are made using bobbins: four bobbins create a simple edging, but an intricate spray of leaves requires up to 32 bobbins. Lacemaking is a complex and time-consuming process, even for people with years of experience.

The Honiton Lace trade was waning in the early nineteenth century, mainly because lace-making machines were introduced, making lace cheaper and faster to produce. The first lace-making factory in East Devon opened in 1810, and by 1822 employed 1500 people. Honiton Lace survived the introduction of machine lace because it was piecework and able to be mounted onto machine-made net: the value added to the grounding by handmade piecework was significant. Demand for Honiton Lace increased significantly from 1840 when Queen Victoria’s wedding outfit used Honiton Lace for the flounce and veil. Local materials were used with the aim of promoting English industry to the wider world. The revival in the lace industry lasted into the early twentieth century and while Honiton Lace can be purchased in the twenty-first century, it is predominantly made as a leisure activity.

Leora Auslander wrote that: “objects not only are the product of history, they are also active agents in history,”[3] and the veil has three important sub-texts besides being a lace veil valued by a family. The veil: is part of a wedding tradition; is a product made for women by women; and was imported into Australia from England.

Firstly, when Queen Victoria married in a white dress, she did more than revive the lace industry; she impacted the way weddings were conceived and conducted, and she popularised the white wedding. A white wedding had connotations regarding moral and social value of marriage, particularly for the woman, who was expected to be respectable and well behaved. There were other changes taking place during the nineteenth century. People were more likely to marry for mutual attraction and emotional bonds; marketing of the wedding ceremony started taking place – engagement rings went from an option to the norm, people gave gifts to the newlyweds – and the social aspects changed, the wedding service went from being a communal event held on Sunday, to a service held privately with the isolated family group. The clothing worn by the bride and groom also changed. Prior to the mid nineteenth century, brides and grooms wore their ‘best’ outfit. After Queen Victoria’s wedding most brides continued to wear their best dress, which was not necessarily white, but would wear a white veil. It was the veil that set the bride apart from the rest of the attendees, and so it became an important symbol. Only the wealthy could afford a white wedding, and so white weddings became an aspiration of the growing middle class. By the turn of the twentieth century, dresses also were white, and the white wedding was entrenched.

Secondly, the veil is a product made by women for women. Honiton Lace originated as a cottage industry, but quickly developed a manufacturing hierarchy, with merchants at the top, employing designers, lace makers and finishers. The wages were low – less than a farm labourer – and so lacemaking became a job for women working in their homes. In the early nineteenth century at least one merchant paid employees via tokens, which could only be used in the general stores owned by the merchant, further diminishing the value of the wage.[4] The lace was expensive, and so lace makers could not afford to wear the lace. Wealthy women exploited working class women in the name of fashion, a theme that runs through the history of the fashion industry.

Thirdly, the veil was made in England and imported to Australia in the mid nineteenth century. The veil may have been purchased in late 1865 at David Jones, a large draper's shop that would become an important department store, who were advertising wedding outfits which had been “imported ex mail steamer Strathdon and Walter Hood… [including] a beautiful collection of ... veils in Honiton.”[5] Notwithstanding the possibility of this being the place of purchase for this veil, the advertisement demonstrated how Australia followed European tradition and sought to replicate English values.

Unfortunately, the veil cannot tell its own story. It is not able to record details, so even its origins are not confirmed, although details of users can be constructed to a certain point. The fact that the veil has been kept for 150 years shows its importance to the family. There are other veils from the same period that have been retained, but this veil could never be replaced.

Endnotes

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[1] Rosemary Shepherd, Lace Classification System (Sydney: Powerhouse Museum, 2003) 2.

[2] The Powerhouse Lace Study Centre was consulted about the lace on 17 January 2015. Volunteers staff the Centre and they are not textile specialists but have an interest in the historical pieces held by the Centre. While earlier newspaper articles described it as Brussels or Limerick Lace, it is assumed that the oral tradition about the veil is correct and the veil represents Honiton Lace.

[3] Leora Auslander, “Beyond Words,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 110, No.4 (October 2005) 1015-1045. DOI: 10.1086/ahr.110.4.1015.

[4] Pamela M. Inder, Honiton Lace (Exeter: Exeter Museums Publications, 1977) 8.

[5] "Advertising." The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954) 9 Dec 1865: 9. Web. 26 Sep 2015 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13122954>.

William Harry (1835 to1883)

William Harry’s family was from the village of Radyr in Glamorganshire, Wales.  Members of the family had lived and farmed there since at least the early 1700s.  William was born in January 1835 and he was baptised in the Radyr Parish Church on 17 January.  William’s parents, Mary (nee Williams) and John, had only married on 11 November 1834 – a little less than two months before William’s birth. Mary was 16 years old when William was born and she turned 17 in April 1835.  John was 20 years old.

The Welsh had followed a patronymic naming system up until the middle ages, where the last name of the son was the father’s first name.  This system was still used in some rural area of Wales up until the 19^th Century, but the country predominantly used fixed surnames. Mary and John adapted this naming system to suit themselves, and named their child Mary’s surname.

Over the next 19 years William was joined by nine siblings, eight of whom were brothers!

William became a blacksmith and worked in the railways. In the 1850s William and his brother John moved to work in Panteg railway works. William was working as an iron bar roller. This task involved operating the machine that rolls the iron into required shapes, most usually for train tracks. During this time he met a woman named Mary Williams, ironically the same name as his mother.

William married Mary in Stokes Croft, Bristol on 2 July 1861. Bristol is 60 kilometres southeast of Trevethin.  The Parish register describes them both as residents of the town, but they were both living in Monmouthshire at the time of the 1861 Census in April. It would seem that they were ‘on their way’ to Swindon, Wiltshire.

In 1840 Swindon was selected as a place to establish an engine building and maintenance works for Great Western Railway (GWR) Company.  The GWR was so named as it was working on railways west of London.  The “greatness” of the distances in the United Kingdom are not so great when compared to the vast distances in North America and Australia.  By 1864 the GWR network consisted of 955 kilometres of broad gauge, 309 kilometres of mixed gauge (three gauges enabling both standard and broad trains to travel along the route) and 653 kilometres of standard gauge; a total of 1900 kilometres crisscrossing the West, Wales and the Midlands of England (not much further than the distance between Brisbane and Melbourne!).

Swindon had been a small market town until the mid 1800s: there was no existing heavy industry in the area. Workers were moved in from the rest of the country, particularly from Wales.  A village for workers was built about two kilometres north of Swindon.  The new houses were built in what is now known as Cambria Place and Cambria Bridge.  Cambria is a form of the word Cymru, the Welsh name for Wales.  The area was also called New Swindon.  Mary and William Harry were two of the many Welsh people who migrated to Swindon to work for the GWR.  New Swindon grew quickly.  In 1895 R Jefferies, in “Jefferies’ Land: A History of Swindon and its Environs” wrote:

“Houses were built at a rate which astonished the country, and a new class of men, hitherto unknown in the neighbourhood, appeared, men who worked hard, earned high wages, and were determined to live upon the best they could afford.  The agricultural labourer was content with bread and beer, the mechanic must have meat, groceries, and other comforts. … Tradesmen found New Swindon a profitable place – a Wilshire California.”

Mary and William Harry arrived in Swindon, Wiltshire, England sometime after their marriage but before the birth of their first child in 1863.  All of Mary and William’s eight children – seven males and one female – were born in Swindon.  Despite the fact they family lived in Wiltshire, they retained much of their Welsh roots. In many ways this was understandable and reasonable. The family lived in a Welsh enclave in Swindon, they spent time in Wales and they possibly spoke Welsh at home.

Mary and William’s first child, Thomas William, was born in early 1863.  About 15 months later, Frederick Edward was born and a third son, John, was born a year later in early 1865.   Two more sons, William and Henry (Harry – thus called Harry Harry), were born in 1868 and 1870 respectively.

In 1871, at the Census on 2 April, the Harry family was residing in Cambria Place, New Swindon.   The household included Mary and William with their five sons along with Mary’s mother, Ann Williams, and four older children of Mary’s sister, Ann.  Not far away lived William’s two brothers, one of whom was married, who were also working on the railway.  Another brother had also been living in the area but had moved just prior to the Census. 

Mary and William had a further three children: Mary Ann, the only daughter, born 1872; Charles Evan born 1874; and Alfred, born 1875.

The railway works were difficult places to work.  Jefferies described them as follows:

“Passing between a row of fiery furnaces seven times heated, the visitors enter the rail-mill where the rails are manufactured.  This place is a perfect pandemonium.  Vast boilers built up in brick close in every side, with the steam hissing like serpents in its efforts to escape.  Enormous fly-wheels spin round and round at a velocity which renders the spokes invisible. Steam hammers shake the ground, where once perhaps crouched the timid hare, and stun the car.  These hammers are a miracle of human manufacture…  a mass of red hot metal [is] wheeled along and placed beneath the steam hammer, where it is thumped and bumped flat… The workmen wear shoes shod with broad headed iron nails from heel to toe.  Their legs are defended by greaves – like an iron cricketing pad; their faces by a gauze metal mask.  The clang, the rattle, the roar are indescribable… Out comes a mass of white-hot metal, it is placed on a truck and wheeled forward to the revolving rollers, and placed between them.  Sparks spurt out like a fountain of fire – slowly it passes through, much thinned and lengthened by the process; which is repeated until at length it emerges in the form of a rail.”

Sometime around the early 1880s William, Mary and their four youngest children moved from Swindon to the parish of Higher Llangynwyd, Glamorgan, Wales. William decided to leave the hard work of the railway and was working as a Hotel Keeper, operating a hotel called “Gelly” in the small village of Abergwynfi in the Afan Valley.  The entire population of Higher Llangynwyd was less than 10,000 and consisted of a number of small villages, the largest of which was Maesteg – ten kilometres from Abergwynfi. Originally the area had been owned by the Jenkins family who ran a farm called Gelli – hence the name of the inn! 

William Harry died at Abergwynfi on 21 January 1883 age 48. It seems that the railway had taken its toll on him. William had left the family relatively financially secure, probably through his well-paid work at the GWR.

Relationship to SNR = Great, great, great grandfather