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>.

Male First Names

I thought that I’d better look at the male given names seeing I’ve looked at female names.  In the Family Tree I’ve done for SNR there are 120 direct males ancestors with 138 names of which 42 are different. This result surprised me. I thought there would be a smaller variety of names compared to women.  The list is as follows:

John - 25

William - 17

Thomas - 12

Robert - 8

George - 8

Joseph - 6

Richard -5

Samuel - 4

James - 4

Henry - 4

Frederick - 4

Edward - 3

Albert - 3

Warner - 2

Nicholas - 2

Hugh - 2

Charles - 2

Augustus - 2

Arthur - 2

Then one occurrence of each of the following: Wilfrid, Walter, Victor, Nathaniel, Michael, Kenneth, Job, Jacob, Isaac, Ian, Herbert, Gary, Francis, Elliot, Elijah, Eli, Edmund, Douglas, David, Christian, Cecil, Alfred, Adrian.

The areas that are difficult to research are not represented and this skews the results!

If you compare these names to the ten most popular Australian names for boys in 2013, the only duplicate is William (number 4 in Australia). However, you could argue there were two additional names: Jack (no. 2) is a derivative of John and Charlie (no. 6) is a derivative of Charles.

What's in a SURNAME?

Surnames became necessary when governments introduced personal taxation. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to "develop" and this leads to a large number of variations of the original spelling. No surname is 'fixed'!

It is believed there are over 45,000 different English surnames.

Most surnames originated from seven types:

• Occupational: based on a job or position in society [Heard, Pfeffler (pipe player), Spicer].
• Personal characteristic: based on nicknames that described a person. They may have described a person’s size, colouring, or character trait. [Bunn (from the French word ‘bon’), White, Pococke]
• Place name: where a person was born, lived, worked, or owned land. It might be from the name of a house, farm, hamlet, town, or county.  [Freestone, Kimberley (‘leah’ is a wood), Woolley]
• Estate name: name of their holdings, castle, manor, or estate, such as Ernle or Staunton.
• Geographical feature: Some examples are Bridge, Brooks, Bush, Camp. [Hilton]
• Patronymic, matronymic, or ancestral: from a given name (male or female).  Scottish clan names make up one set of ancestral surnames.  [Craig, Dixson (‘son of’), Dyson (from the Greek female name Dionysia), Harry, McCutcheon, Robinson, William/s]
• Signifying patronage: some surnames honored a patron. Hickman was Hick’s man (Hick being a nickname for Richard), Kilpatrick was a follower of Patrick.

Many surnames have more than one possible origin:

• Barry – three possible origins. It could be from the French word ‘bari’ meaning castle; from Norman/Irish origins as the descendant of Fionnbharr; or from the Scottish locational origin from the village of Barry, Angus, meaning rough, grassy hill.
• Bray –a number of possible origins: a locational name in East Berkshire or Devonshire, from the word ‘bre’ meaning hill or from ‘Brae’ in Scotland, or from the old Gaelic ‘O’Breaghdha’ indicating a native of Begia; or a nickname from the Cornish work ‘bregh’ meaning fine or brave; 
• Carne – of Cornish origins from the Cornish word ‘carn” meaning rock. It could be a geographical feature or a place name.
• Crofts – could be a nickname, a geographical feature or a place name.
• Folland – of Norwegian origin, either after location in Norway; or geographical, for a dweller of a beach where it is difficult to land ships.
• Joyce –origin is French, but was an early Irish name.  It could be a patronymic name from ‘Iodoc’ meaning ‘lord’ or it could be a place name from the village of Josse sur Mer, Calvados, Normandy.

Surnames in England also tend to be associated with, or concentrated in, particular areas and our ancestors followed this general trend. For example, the surname Bunn was from the East Anglia area; Hollebone from East Sussex; Dyson, Freestone, Hilton, Kimberley and Woolley from the north east of England (especially Yorkshire); Carne and Heard from Cornwell and Devon.