Increased Activities in Ypres Salient
226 THE YPRES TIMES
Revival of an Old-World Craft.
Specially contributed to the Ypres Times.)
By Henry Benson, M.A.
IN the course of the past few weeks I made an extensive tour through Flanders,
which included visits to Brussels, Bruges, Thourout, Ypres and Poperinghe. It
came as a surprise to me to find what wonderful progress the bobbin-lace industry
had made in the last twelve months. In the windows of the principal shops, and even
of cafés may be seen the familiar notice of pre-war days—"Dentelles Veritables."
The Cradle of a Mediaeval Craft.
The revival of this mediaeval industry has been beset by great difficulties for all
concerned, and but for the zeal of Queen Elisabeth and that enthusiastic society, "Les
Amies de la Dentelle," this occupation, which employs thousands of Belgian women,
would probably have perished with the war.
On sentimental grounds alone its death would have been regrettable, for Flanders
claims to have founded the art of bobbin-lace making, that claim being based on the
existence of the fifteenth-century masterpiece in the Church of St. Gomar (attributed
to Quentin Matsys), in which a young girl is represented making lace on a pillow
which she holds in her lap. Again, the peasants will tell you a pretty romance of
how the art was accidentally discovered by a Flemish fishergirl who, whilst thinking
of her absent lover, half unconsciously twisted the weighted strings that fringed her
net into a pattern roughly resembling that of a branch of coral which he had given
her.
American Assistance During the War.
The German invasion of 1914 nearly killed the Belgian lace industry because it
became impossible to obtain thread. The blue flax fields of the Lys had been devas
tated, and instead of the river being filled with boxes floating the finest linen fibre
in the world, it was given over to the military requirements of the marauders. Thanks,
however, to the kind offices of Mr. Hoover, an international agreement was drawn
up in the following year, whereby the United States was permitted to send American
thread to Belgium and to take out an equivalent weight in lace, which was sold in
the allied countries for the benefit of the Belgian women engaged in the trade. This
arrangement afforded each dentellière the opportunity of making three francs worth
of lace each weeknot a large amount, but sufficient to assure the continuity of the
craft. The Committee had 47,000 women on its lists, and I am told that more than
2,000 new patterns were designed between 1914 and 1918.
An Aged Lace-Maker Speaks Her Mind.
During those terrible years of war many of these women heroically insisted on
remaining calmly at their cushions making lace, whilst the shells burst before and
behind them. Soldiers in the Ypres Salient will remember the old woman who sat
near the station gates and finally had to be forcibly removed by order of the British
authorities.
At Thourout, a few weeks ago, 1 had a long talk with one of these gallant souls,
old Madame Souxdorf, a veteran of seventy-eight summers. Daylight was fast melting
into a twilight of pink and opaline hues, but there she remained at the door of her little
éstaminet before her snow-white cushion and bobbins, twisting and braiding the
threads of a mesh of Valenciennes, as she had twisted and braided them for more
