I went on holiday to the Lake District, many times as a child and young adult but I had never been to Kendal. Kendal is towards the south of the Lake District and we went further north because we would always ‘pay a pilgrimage’ to Millom, where my grandmother was born, who I never met because she died when my mother was just two years old. She wasn’t even buried there but my mother could remember the houses where members of her family had lived. There were still very distant cousins living there.
In 2001, I again went on holiday to the Lake District and Scotland, in search of some nice tea rooms. What we hadn’t realised, when we did the planning for this holiday was that the outbreak of Footand Mouth disease would be rampant in the Lake District when we were there. We had to change our plans slightly, visit more towns because a lot of the rural areas were cut off from the public; there certainly wasn’t going to be any walking in the countryside. Hence a visit to Kendal; we saw the Quaker Tapestry Museum advertised, sounded interesting. There were two unexpected pleasures: a delightful tea room with home-baked food and a tea towel. What could be better?
The Quaker Tapestry Museum holds about 40, of a total of 77, beautifully, exquisitely embroidered. It was put together over the period 1981 to 1996: 15 years, 77 panels embroidered by more than 4000 people in 15 different countries. In Kendal, the Tapestry is exhibited in the Friends Meeting House Georgian building. This award winning exhibition has been compared to the Bayeaux Tapestry, a modern masterpiece of storytelling. The Tapestry shows the influence that the Quakers have had throughout history and into the present day: it shows items from the Industrial Revolution, developments in science and medicine, the abolition of slavery, astronomy, social reform and much more. It celebrates life, people and events across countries. It is simply magnificent. We spent hours there, returning once again after lunch, excited by the detail and being able to see things that we had missed the first time around. I have been back and again see things we probably missed the first time. I loved it and this tea towel is a good reminder of the part the Quakers have played in the social history of the world.
myteatowels 