Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 February 1911 — REVIVE BRITISH ART [ARTICLE]

REVIVE BRITISH ART

Blind, Deaf and Dumb Girls Skilled in Tapestry^

Mias Clyde Bayley Teaches, Afflicted Young Women to Become Financially Independent—They Are Under Care of the State.

London.—ln Shottery, scarce a mile from Stratford-on-Avon, a wise and clever woman has made a corner of peace and sunshine where some of the weak may slip out of the ranks that are marching too fast for , their strength—a little space where the grind of competition does not enter, inor the jar and clang of the industries of the great world; a space where the crippled and dumb and blind may develop their powers and quietly grow, sheltered from the oppression of the struggle for bread between weak and strong. The old cottage, with its beams dating back to Saxon times, its smart new thatch and lavender bordered garden, is the studio where are shown the iproducts of a factory none of whose workers is fully equipped for life, yet their powers have been so drawn out and developed under the guidance of Miss Clyde Bayley, the foundress of the industry, that they not only produce work of artistic value and lay the - foundations of future financial independence, claim through her instruction to be pioneers in the revival of British art For round the walls of the little cottage hang sumptuous hand-woven tapestries, here a proud display of armoTial bearings, there a subject picture • of great decorative value, mid beyond a rug of eastern design and coloring. On the floor lie strips and fragments of carpet, made after the nqantaer of those which the girls of Tabriz and Kurdistan have knitted with patient fingers through the centuries of labor, to the accompaniment of monotonous chant and song; on the table lies a figure subject finely woven in alike, beautiful in texture and strange color, the work of the lame girl who tnet us at the door. In a neighboring cottage live the weaver girls of Shottery, and strange Is the silence of the long room where they bend over their frames. No laughter, none of the light, foolish chatter of girlhood rises above the sound of knots and strings. Before one, large frame; four girls are seated; one is blind,, one deaf and dumb, another crippled, and the fourth can neither

read, wrjte nor spell, though she is of full age. Other girls work singly at smaller strips and panels, and as we pass one looks up with unseeing eyes, one or two smile as they see us, but can make no reply to our greeting cr questions. In an adjoining room a girl of 16, painfully stunted In growth, sits cheefully drawing a design for the next large panel the school will undertake, and we leave her intent over a branch of may, our queen’s emblem. And so they work in the sunshine with the wide green country about them, a fortunate few of the many infirm who pass perhaps their whole lives in state Institutions, where necessarily but little chance exists of developing what powers they may possess. Here at Shottery, under the care of the committee which receives them from the state, they spend three years learning to draw, to spin, to dye their wools and to weave, to study plant fei-ms for new designs, and if at the end of this time they have become efficient workers, they are taken on as weavers for a regular wage. The lame girl, for instance, former-' ly a sufferer from hip disease and infantile paralysis, has become a weaver of some note and la actually the most skilled worker in the school at present She has just invested in government stock the second SSOO that her own labor has won.