Queer Hobbies: Ernest Thesiger and Interwar Embroidery

Abstract

It is generally accepted that the “Modern British Needlework” exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in July 1932 was the watershed moment in rehabilitating embroidery’s reputation as a modern art form paving the way for its acceptance into art galleries and art schools in the post-war era. This exhibition, however, was only one in a series of important displays of embroidery that took place throughout the Twenties and Thirties. Many of these included large exhibits of embroidery by men (disabled ex-servicemen, male artists, designers, aristocrats, celebrities and political figures) that today are largely forgotten. In reconsidering the interwar needlecraft hobby phenomenon, it is evident that some men, such as the artist Ernest Thesiger, were as instrumental in shaping the so-called “cross-stitch craze,” as women artists such as Mary Hogarth and Rebecca Crompton. Camp, charismatic and well-connected, Thesiger employed embroidery as part of wider process of self-fashioning in a historical moment that witnessed the increasing alignment of effeminacy and homosexuality. This article offers a brief overview of the “masculine needlework” exhibitions in the period and a reading of Thesiger’s “effeminate embroidery,” to show how the new “queer hobbies” of the interwar years were encoded and decoded by contemporary audiences.

Keywords:

• queer
• hobbies
• embroidery
• subculture
• effeminacy
• camp
• drag
• disability

Notes

1. I am very grateful to John Thesiger, who is researching a biography of his great-uncle Ernest, for information about Ernest’s marriage to Janette Ranken and his relationship with Willie Ranken. All images of and quotes from Ernest Thesiger are reproduced by permission from John Thesiger.

2. Intriguingly, E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia (1922) and Lucia’s Progress (1935) were “Cordially dedicated to the Marques of Carisbrooke.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph McBrinn

Joseph McBrinn lectures at the School of Art of Ulster University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He has written and lectured widely on Irish craft and design. He serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Modern Craft and the editorial advisory boards of Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture and The Irish Arts Review. His current research focuses on the intersection of masculinity and design. He is presently engaged on two book-length projects, Men and the Culture of Needlework (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) and The Disabled Soldier and Design Culture in Interwar England (in preparation).

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