Thanks to all our volunteers and visitors for giving us an Open Day to remember, a beautiful sunny day, lots of visitors – it was great to see the place buzzing with enthusiasm. We were also joined by Sketch Coventry who captured the site in a range of media. The garden was looking stunning – there’s still time to come and see it for our August and September Open Days.
We were lucky that our Open Days in May and June were generally sunny. Always lovely to spend time in the Tudor style garden, and many visitors have commented that it is hard to believe we’re in the heart of Coventry. Our next Open Days are July 9 and August 13. Come along and explore the history of the house and garden and enjoy a slice of homemade cake!
At long last the first Open Day for 2022 arrived, and what a fantastic day it was. We were blessed with a sunny, clear day with which to appreciate the blossoming garden (but cool enough to enjoy the hot drinks and cake which we’ve welcomed back for 2022!).
Enthusiastic visitors arrived a steady pace throughout the day and we were delighted that this included people who had been waiting for the opportunity to visit, were finally able to be welcomed. The story of our unique piece of medieval history has been spreading, as visitors came down from Manchester specifically to visit, and another visitor was from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. Our knowledgeable guides were on hand to give free tours of the house including the full size replica loom. We were also pleased to be joined by new volunteers who signed up at our recent volunteer event. If you are interested, we’d love to hear from you.
Thanks to our visitors for some lovely feedback including:
“Brilliant speakers, great fun going upstairs!”
“Thank you to the guides for a fascinating tour”
“Superb. Excellent talk by Maureen and lovely welcome by Audrey”
“Had a lovely visit, so interesting. Met some lovely people. Kev was so informative and very kind”
The next free Open Day is Saturday 7 May from 10am until 4pm.
Heritage Trust Network (HTN) held their annual conference titled “Recovery, sustainability and wellbeing” in Coventry on 19th and 20th November 2021. We were delighted to show them around The Weaver’s House.
HTN exists to help member organisations share their knowledge, skills and experiences as they pursue their own heritage restoration and preservation projects. Their Chief Executive Officer, David Tittle, has a wealth of experience in the field and was one of our founding Trustees (Spon End Building Preservation Trust). He was keen for delegates to see historic sites in Coventry and could not resist approaching us to see if we would like to host some visitors.
Naturally, we were happy to oblige and were delighted with the approving comments received. Hopefully, we will have provided some inspiration for fledgling projects that it can all work out well after the hard work.
Above, some of the gardening that Charlie has been doing recently at the site.
We are grateful to Charlie for his help in maintaining the garden during the busy growing season, and for supplying the photos.
But how would it have felt 100 years ago if this situation had arisen? Just as now, there would be big differences in people’s normal situations and the wealthy families in 1920 would have had a far more varied social life than the poor and therefore felt a different impact, but my thoughts turned to my own family, in particular my ancestors who lived in The Weaver’s House.
Joseph O’ Neil in 1928 compared to the same view today.
In March 1920 my Grandad, Sid O’Neil, was a six-month-old baby, living with his working-class family at 122 Spon Street (now The Weaver’s House), Coventry. In the small house there was also his older half-sister, Winifred, his twenty-four-year-old mother, Rose, and his father Joseph, who was forty-three. Joseph worked from home as a boot and shoe repairer whilst Rose looked after the household duties and the children, and thirteen-year-old Winifred was nearing the end of her school education.
The family had been through some hard times. Four years of war saw two of Joseph’s brothers killed, his first wife had died in that time too, and his young son. The world had then been swept with an aggressive flu pandemic which had taken it toll on the population, hitting harder than the war itself.
Some towns did close their theatres, dancehalls and churches during 1918 to slow the spread of the virus, but quarantining and social distancing was not something that was enforced, or even advised, and a second wave of the virus broke out after people partied together to celebrate the end of WW1. Unlike previous flu strains the flu virus of 1918-19 hit the young adults, aged 20-30, unexpectedly hard.
Over 250 years earlier quarantine had been used to try and stop a different deadly disease. A village in Derbyshire, Eyam, went into strict lockdown with the agreement of the residents to try and stop the spread of the plague in 1665. Unfortunately other towns and villages did not follow their lead, and many people died in Britain and across Europe. They had no medicine to treat the ill but tried many herbal remedies, including Angelica, which is a plant that can be found growing in The Weaver’s House garden today.
In 1854 quarantine was also used in an attempt to stop the spread of cholera as it was thought that cholera spread through ‘bad air’. It was a discovery by John Snow, that it was the dirty water causing the spread, that saved many peoples lives.
So if another pandemic had hit in 1920 might the authorities have acted in a similar way as today? And, if so, how would our restrictions have affected my ancestors daily lives?
Closing theatres and dancehalls probably wouldn’t have impacted them as I doubt they had the money to entertain themselves that way, but the closure of churches, schools and non-essential businesses along with strict social distancing would certainly have made their lives difficult.
Joseph may have found that his business started to decline quite rapidly with people not being allowed to bring him boots to repair, the odd few may have found their way to be left on his doorstep, but he certainly would have had a much reduced income. I doubt the government of the day would have offered much in the way of financial support for men like Joseph.
Food, which was usually purchased several times a week, would have had to be made to last longer and go further. As the house had no electricity they didn’t have a fridge to keep things fresh, and tinned goods would probably have been increasingly hard to find, and expensive. Shopping just once or twice a week locally and remaining two metres away from other shoppers and the shopkeeper would have been a new challenge for Rose. I doubt she would have had access to face masks but a carefully placed scarf or shawl may have been useful. But as time went on would the food supply to the shops start to run low, and would the people with more money stock up on what was available?
With the family living in such close proximity to their neighbours, simple jobs like hanging out washing, or popping up the garden to the toilet could have been tricky. Maybe a rota for washday would have to be devised. And a ‘shout out’ for anyone heading to the toilet in order to avoid each other. The toilet itself, being shared by numerous people, would be a hazard. There was no wash basin to do your ’20 seconds water and soap and sing happy birthday twice’ routine.
With no social media or TV all the new would be delivered via the radio or newspapers. Getting the message out to people to ‘Stay at Home’ would have taken longer, but respect for rules may have been greater. I imagine the local ‘bobbies’ would have been cycling up and down the streets checking no-one was loitering.
There was no NHS to protect, and few local doctors, so the fear of becoming ill may well have had people self isolating without needing too much reinforcement. If any of my family had become ill their best hope for any treatment would have been the workhouse. Not an ideal place to be at the best of times: it would most likely be crowded at a time like this.
For us, as weeks roll into months and some of our wages, for now, are supported, food is well stocked in the shops and our NHS system is coping, most of us are able to accept our current situation and know that, sooner or later, our lives will gradually go back to some kind of ‘normal’. For Joseph, Rose, Win and Sid a number of months in lockdown could have brought a lot of suffering. They would have been unable to see their extended family, contact with neighbours reduced to a quick ‘Hello’ from as far apart as they could get, and many hours stuck inside with nothing to entertain them. The worry about lack of money and lack of food would be constant, and they may well have become ill, more through poverty than from the virus.
With crowded living, reduced washing facilities, shared toilets, poorer diets and most likely poorer overall health, a virus such as Covid-19 and the necessary lockdown measures to tackle it would have had a devastating impact on my family, and many others like it.
We hope all our volunteers and visitors are stay safe and well at this difficult time.
We’ve put together a little photographic tour highlighting some of the interesting features of The Weaver’s House.
1. Old Meets New
2. The Back Window
The window showing the reflection of the Tudoresque garden reflects the changes the house has been through. The window is where Joseph O’Neil, resident in the late 19th and 20th century, sat inside at his workbench looking out onto the garden. The window now has glass, which it wouldn’t have had when the house was originally built.
These were a later addition, as in the original structure there were no extra levels at the front of the house. Changes to living arrangements brought the additional levels in later. Now the house has come full circle with the floors being removed again to create the 1540s appearance. Pause to think of all the feet that have travelled them, including a documented memory of Joseph O’Neil running up them to get his pocket watch and late wife’s rosary beads during the Blitz, the only possessions he was able to take as the rest was either damaged or looted.
4. The Timber Frame
This photo shows the skeleton of the terrace and how it was built. You can see the original wooden structure and the addition of bricks and new roof lines.
5. The Wallpaper.
A far more modern feature. Layers from different times reflect the popular style and colours of the day. These interesting layers were left deliberately during the restoration.
6. The Garden
The garden is laid out now as a Tudor working garden, to show the type of plants used for cooking, medicinal and household use. Over the years it would have become, more of a yard, toilet area, and in built on with the ‘Coventry Court’ buildings. It was a terrible mess by the 1990s when it was rescued by SEBPT, and a lot of hard work has gone into it to restore it. It’s now a very pleasant, peaceful place to spend time, and hard to believe it is so close to the ringroad and city centre.
As well as the interesting architectural features of the house, there is the personal history connected by families that lived there and in the rest of the terrace. Add to that the people today who are relatives of those previous residents and again we are connecting past with the present in a living history. We can glimpse into these families’ lives from archive research and from relatives’ stories and photos. We have had descendants from around the world visit us, fascinated to see where their ancestors lived, and walk in their footsteps. We have an ongoing research project to learn more about the lives of the families of Black Swan Terrace. This photo was from 2018, when we held a special open day to celebrate these families.
In this post Sara of the Weavers’ Workshop takes us through the process of rewarping our reproduction loom, a mammoth task!
The replica medieval floor loom is at last warped up following several wintry sessions in the freezing upstairs ‘solar’ of The Weaver’s House. We had no heating, but thankfully we had the benefit of electric lighting, so we cannot really claim to be replicating the task that faced John Croke in 1540, who would have only had a rush light with which to see by.
The warping up process was managed over several cold, lengthy sessions thanks to the technical expertise of Ian McClusky from the Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers and support from The Weavers’ Workshop (Margaret Annetts, Heidi Campbell and me). The Weaver’s House trustee, Peterson, assisted to get the technical elements of the loom working – so the shafts and foot pedals synchronised to create a workable ‘shed’ through which to pass the boat shuttle.
The loom is a faithful reproduction of the type of narrow floor loom used in medieval times to produce undyed cloth for the artisan workers in the area. It is hoped to demonstrate the weaving process as it would have been done at that time using a boat shuttle, but there is still work to do to find a suitable shuttle and master the technique. While weaving cloth seems straightforward enough in principle, setting up the loom and achieving a rhythmic approach to the weaving process requires great skill and it is amazing in these days of advanced technology, how the craftsmen of old achieved great things with what we regard now as relatively simple equipment.
You can see a full picture of the loom in the gallery.
If you are interested in traditional weaving, you may be interested in our post on weaving in Mexico, on a very similar loom.
We are looking forward to welcoming you to our Open Days for 2020. Come and explore a piece of Coventry’s medieval history at our fascinating site, which was rescued from the threat of demolition!
This year, you can visit us on:
Saturday April 4th Signs of Spring
Saturday May 2nd Wool Crafts Day
Saturday June 13th The Terrace Through Time
Saturday July 11th Heritage Crafts
Saturday August 22nd Fun in the Garden
Full details on each day will be available nearer the time, but you can see what is generally on the site on our What’s Here page.
For this year’s Heritage Open Days we will be open on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September (please note that there is no access to the loom on Heritage Open Days).
Entry is free but donations are appreciated. On Open Days we serve tea, coffee and our homemade cakes.
We generally suggest that the last entry time is 3.30pm, however if you want to be sure of enjoying a tour or a visit to our tea room please allow more time.
We will also be running a special Halloween themed day again this year. Details are to be confirmed, but you can see a little taste of what the previous Halloween event entailed here.
We look forward to seeing you!
We’re delighted to be involved with the Moving Blue project, which sees the colour with a Coventry history going back hundreds of years revived ahead of the City of Culture year.
The project kicked off on New Year’s Day and will run throughout this year.
Our trustee Sara Maycock is an experienced dyer and weaver and was able to contribute her knowledge to the project, as well as some pieces of woad-dyed wool!
At The Weaver’s House we have long been fascinated by the history of the famous colour Coventry Blue. Sara explained: “We’re thrilled to be involved with this project as the subject of ‘Coventry Blue’ is very close to our hearts. In medieval times, when The Weaver’s House was built, Coventry was a centre for the weaving trade, when the city was best known for its fine Coventry Blue cloth.
“We grow the woad plant in the garden, and although the plant is green and related to cabbages, it produces a fantastic range of blues. We have experimented with this natural dyestuff to see what shades of blue it produces, so we have an idea what Coventry Blue might have been like.
“We’ll never truly know what the medieval Coventry Blue looked like as the recipe was a closely guarded secret, but it’s wonderful to see the colour being revived as we head towards 2021.
“Blue is a thread that runs through Coventry’s history for hundreds of years and we’re excited that Moving Blue will be a connection to the weavers of old as well as looking to the future of the city.”
During our tenth anniversary year the Weavers’ Workshop created weaving inspired by Coventry Blue. If you would like to see more of this previous experimentation with natural woad dye and weaving, you can read more here.
During 2020 a different item will be painted in Moving Blue every day. You can read the full details on the 2021 website.