The long strings of a little apron

Inclement weather, to say the least. A delve into the old wooden chest that holds my mother's collection of textiles and fabrics seemed in order. A heap of offcuts and remainders along with swathes of material purchased with high intentions never achieved.  Ancient garments and items freighted with sentiment, each too precious to be forgotten - even if it has been. All this stuff could be abandoned instantly in an emergency but is harder to part with deliberately.
 
A small apron made from fabric decorated with cats stops my hand. Unused, it still bears a tiny label: Yateley Textile Printers Ltd (see extra). We quickly discovered that Yately Industries is a well-established charity (still based in the Hampshire village from which it takes its name) providing employment, training and accommodation for vulnerable adults who cannot manage in regular employment. Although their work now involves packaging and assemblage the charity's original focus was hand block textile printing. It was established as a small enterprise in 1937 by a nurse called Jessie Browne. I have found her story, and its ramifications, utterly enthralling.
 
Jessie was born, possibly in India, in 1888, one of six children of a distinguished military family whose menfolk served in the British Indian Army for several generations. Curiously, it seems her father married twice both wives being named Jessie. Our Jessie was the first child of the second marriage, and the only daughter. The family settled in Yateley after her father’s early death.
 
Jessie trained as an artist at the Slade School of Art in London in its heyday before WW1. Some of the students she must have known  latterly became famous artists. She excelled as a watercolourist but in 1910 changed direction and became a nurse. [Could this have been connected with the fact that the Slade Professor of Fine Art at the time was the distinguished surgeon Sir Henry Tonks?]
 
It seems that Jessie became specifically an orthopaedic nurse and she made her way to a ramshackle but visionary hospital in the village of Baschurch in Shropshire. It been set up in make-shift sheds in an overgrown garden by another remarkable woman called Agnes Hunt. It’s well worth reading about Agnes Hunt; I’ll resist saying more here but in collaboration with the exceptional Welsh surgeon Robert Jones, Hunt established the first outdoor facility for treating crippled children (mostly affected by TB) and later wounded soldiers, with a regime of fresh air, wholesome food and occupational therapy.
https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/features/2021/09/20/great-lives--dame-agnes-hunt/
https://online.boneandjoint.org.uk/doi/pdf/10.1302/0301-620x.30b1.187
https://medicalmemories.wixsite.com/medicalmemories/dame-agnes-hunt

 
 
During WW1 Jessie Brown went to nurse soldiers in France before returning to Baschurch and acting as an evangelist for new forms of orthopaedic treatment. She travelled around on a motorbike. Moving to Oxford she collaborated with distinguished orthopaedic surgeon G.R. Girdlestone in setting up outpatient clinics at the Wingfield (later Nuffield) Hospital. In 1923, by now a physiotherapist,  she responded at a week’s notice to an urgent call for a skilled person to treat the polio-stricken five year old granddaughter of the Prime Minister of Nepal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Shumsher_Jung_Bahadur_Rana  She remained in Nepal for the next ten years, attending to the child in the mornings and painting the landscape on the afternoons [where, oh where are these paintings now? She never bothered to sign them.] It was while she was in Nepal that Jessie came across the local craft of hand block printing on fabric – which she noted could be done with one hand only. She studied the technique carefully and collected traditional designs from Nepal, India and other countries too.
 
During this period Jessie’s interest in indigenous crafts brought into contact with another British resident the Hon. Irma Bailey herself a keen collector of Nepali art and design. (Some examples here https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2243&context=himalaya) who contributed a huge collection of Tibetan textiles and artifacts to Liverpool museum.
 
(As an aside, I must mention here Irma Bailey’s husband, Frederick Marshman Bailey,  a soldier, explorer and adventurer whose exceptional life  deserves a film treatment. Apart from numerous daredevil deeds and hair-raising escapes in the Great Game arena of the Himalayas he was the first to import Lhasa Apso dogs to the west as well as giving his name to the Meconopsis baileyi Himalayan blue poppy which my father tried, and failed, many times to grow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Marshman_Bailey )
 
 
Poor Princess Nani died in 1934 and Jessie returned to Yately to look after her mother. At this point she turned her mind and energies to providing work for disabled people who could not work in open employment.  With a friend, Grace Finch, who she had nursed, Jessie experimented with the hand block fabric printing technique she had observed in Nepal. Through trial and error, the two women taught themselves the entire process from mixing the dyes to cutting the blocks and in 1937 Jessie opened a small workshop for 8 girls, later ‘persuading an architect’ to build dormitory accommodation for a larger number of workers. This was the beginning of Yateley Industries which still flourishes today, having attained charitable status in 1963.
 
This was not the end of the story for Jessie Brown though. During the war she accommodated Canadian soldiers and ran canteens, then in 1944 she was called up to be  ward sister in a military hospital. The war  over, she set about establishing accommodation for retired disabled people in Yateley, still in use and run by a housing association. Now in her 80s Jessie moved to Reepham in Norfolk where she bought land and organised another housing association to establish purpose-built bungalows for elderly disabled people, with specially-designed (by her) wide doorways and raised flowerbeds. Before she settled into one herself, Jessie, by now in her 80s, accepted a invitation to spend a year with a niece in Australia. She arrived carrying one small suitcase and while there insisted on borrowing a bicycle to do the family shopping every day.
Jessie Brown was awarded an MBE which seems a rather meagre acknowledgement of her extraordinary life and achievements. She died in 1983 at the age of 95.
 
 
 
I still don’t know how the little cat apron came into my mother’s possession but what an enthralling canter through 20th century history it has taken me on. I have had to ignore some intriguing byways but am tempted to return to them . If anyone has stayed with me - congratulations!