No 85 GANSEYS pb 29.10.2010

A long time ago, but yesterday too. Rain On My Window (Tears in My Eyes) will be an ongoing tale of my early memories of life shared by my younger brother David on Whitehall Farm in Stronsay, Orkney, of our childhood on a working farm in the 1930s before we lost our innocence.
























No 85. GANSEYS

It was while visiting my sister in August that my jumper became a topic of conversation. Voss in Norway is her long time home.It is a great little Norwegian town and not a lot changed from the last time I was there over 16 years ago. Expensive though, my pounds were not worth a lot!!
In the Park Hotel of Voss I held the lift door open for an elderly Norwegian gentleman using two sticks to help his mobility after a dreadful car accident some years ago badly smashed both his legs.
I was wearing my favourite Viking knitted jersey, a gift from my Norwegian brother-in-law 40 years ago and nearly as good as new !! As I spoke English to him, he tapped my jersey and said “That is a good ganser. You cannot get them as good as that now.”
The name “ganser” hit me. At School in Stronsay we always called our jerseys “ganseys”. The fisherman wore them, dark blue and a heavy knit. The farm men wore them when dressed but not for work, much too warm on land. The patterns around them were many and varied. I believe every small fishing village had its own pattern. A sad aspect of that was that when a fisherman lost his life at sea, as all too many of them did, he could, if found after long immersion in the ocean, be identified by his gansey if by no other means. Even to a particular or peculiar family pattern.
My new found friend told me at breakfast next morning when I joined his table that the small opening at the neck with three frog fastenings was a “Ganser”, but one that opened all the way down, our Cardigan, was a “troice”, pronounced “troy-yah”. Now there’s a thing.
For long there are those who held that the name “Gansey” “ comes from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. I never did believe that, much too trite.
Guernsey a little Island some 6 miles by 4 miles lying 45 miles off-shore from France, much of it rocky. . Nonetheless, being of Viking Ancestry via Normandy, there is no reason why they should not use the word Ganser there too. A few days later on the open sea at high speed in a beautifully fitted out and extremely fast modern Catamaran en route Bergen to Haugesund to visit with our niece Susan and her family, I was similarly accosted. This time it was a young Icelander and his wife, both now working in England. They too took note of my “Ganser”, and the Icelanders also had the “troIce”. .



So right now when there is a “Gansey” project running and knitting experts are appearing from everywhere, dare I suggest the word has more of a Viking origin that a small almost French Island lying just off-shore to the South of the Cherbourg Peninsula.
The knitware of Norway is extremely good, and the whole of the Norwegian North Sea periphery has a great tradition of knitting the wool of the humble sheep into very special warm and breathable garments. Shetland, Fair lsle, Icelandic knitting, to mention but a few, have the greatest traditions of knitting going back several thousand years, as old burials in preserving peat mosses still show us.
In this age of expensive Central Heating and keeping old folks warm and Winter Heating Allowances a return to old-fashioned woollen garments just might save the Nation !!.
In Stronsay in my boyhood days we had on Whitehall Farm Mrs Peace, wife of Jock o’ Sound, our cattleman. We spent many a day in her house watching the magic as she turned raw wool from a couple of fleeces into the woollen thread needed for knitting. She would get a black fleece and a couple of white ones, blend the resulting threads of white and black into a speckled two-ply or even a three ply woollen thread. Her spinning wheel, older than she was, turned and whirred at a blurry and amazing pace under her practiced fingers, the raw wool vanishing under her hands onto the spindles of wool. By choosing whatever amount and thickness she wanted, a variety of colours and textures appeared.
On a rare occasion she dyed some wool. Not by the magic of natural old fashioned plants and oddities, but by Reckitts ready made dyes bought from the Van. She would collect a bucket of cow piss ( urine ?? ), catch as catch can !!!, to steep the newly dyed wool to fix the colours. In its own right an old fashioned practice. I do not remember the contents of the universal Chamber pot being used, but they used to be.
A rarity was for her to get a fleece of Shetland or North Ronaldshay or even a Holmey as the small island sheep were called that lived all year round on seaweed and fresh air on the many tiny Holms dotted around Orkney. That wool was special, used only for some very fine garment or shawl as a present for some christening or wedding or other. Fine as gossamer, soft as a baby’s cheek, warm as a beam of sunshine on a cold winter’s day.
More functional were her thick rubber boot stockings and the neck hugging ganseys she made. Using the mixed pepper and salt two-ply or three-ply wool, her fast fingers beat our eyes.
We tried to spin some wool under her direction, but either impatience or thick fingers undid us. Mind you, our fingers were nothing like as thick as her old work-worn ones, just that they felt so. When we did get a bit of wool to keep running for a bit we were over the moon.
After 1939 there was a War on and knitting became an Island passion for young and old as they turned out socks and balaclavas for the Forces.
Khaki and Airforce Blue and Navy Blue already spun and dyed wool was liberally distributed to anyone who could return a reasonable amount of finished articles. I think the Central School was the collecting point for all that activity but I would not stick too closely to that in case I get corrected. There were even classes to teach knitting to any who were willing. At Primary North School we were taught knitting , but few boys carried it any further !!! .

Foto published. A sketch of a shepherd knitting while watching his flock. Knitting is a skill that goes back thousands of years and was traditionally carried out by men as well as women.