 Ond ydych chi'n gweithio, Elizabeth lived for 56 years as a widow. She died in 1835, in fact she merely made it to being Victorian. She was there a long time and sadly she outlived all six of their children and none of them had any children. So there are no direct descendants of James and Elizabeth, sadly. The extended family, yes, but not of them directly. It's worth having a little bit of a think about the recreation process itself. What is it, why, what are we trying to achieve here? There's a number of possible reasons for making a replica of a historical piece. You might want to provide a replica which can be used for display, particularly if the original is too fragile or something like that. You might want to investigate the production methods and the materials that are used. You might want to see what it would have looked like when it was new and how the piece would have looked 250 years ago when it was newly made. And you may also want to preserve the skills of the people who were making items in the historical period. And in this particular case there's something of all four in that. It's intended for display. I very much wanted to explore the techniques and the skills of the historical period and to get a feel particularly for how the piece would have looked when it was new because what we see today is inevitably faded and tarnished and it's rather good to get a feel for what it might have looked like. We sometimes look at the historical periods of embroidery and textiles and we think we're seeing what it was like, but in practice the colours have faded, the silver in particularly is oxidised and tarnished. We don't get a clear idea of what it looked like at the time. There's also part of the exercise which is interesting is to see how modern materials affect the process because some of what was used at the time is still available, some of it is not and we have to use as close a replica as we can. In terms of the project itself, I was working particularly with the Captain Cook Memorial Museum in Whitby in North Yorkshire, particularly with the Chairman of Trustees Sophie Forgan. It was Sophie who originally suggested that I have a go at replicating the Cook Waste Code in particular. I was looking for a project to have a go at and she had seen the original which is in the collection of the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney. They have quite a collection of Cook memorabilia there and part of it is the unfinished waste code that we were focusing on. Sophie was aiming for an exhibition which she has on this year in the Museum in Whitby entitled Fashion and Fibres Island Dress in Polynesia and this focuses on some of the fabrics and materials and styles of dress which were used in the Pacific in the time when James was exploring that part of the world. So she suggested that I have a go at reproducing the waste code particularly since it is stitched on Polynesian fabric which James brought back from his second voyage so it is actually using fabric from that part of the world. It was also there the idea was to recreate it and to complete it because this particular waste code was never finished. James died on his third voyage and Elizabeth stopped work sadly, never actually completed the waste code. So it would also give us an opportunity to get a feel for how it might have looked had it actually been finished, had he returned to wear it to court which was almost certainly what Elizabeth had planned. The image on the board there that you can see is actually from the State Library of New South Wales and that shows the left front of the original waste code. You can see the embroidery here down the front of the waste code and this is the pocket flap. Sadly you can also see some rather spectacular in-state which somebody managed to get on the waste code in the 18th and 19th century. So museum was not responsible and they were already on the waste code by the time the museum acquired it for their Mitchell collection. But that gives you a little bit of a feel for how it looks at the moment and I've got some more photographs shortly. The waste code itself is stitched on what's called tapper cloth which is a Polynesian bark cloth and the original tapper that Elizabeth used came from Tahiti. It was a gift from one of the rulers of Tahiti to James when he was on his second voyage. It's stitched on this bean cloth. I've got some samples here if you want to have a look later. It's made from mulberry bark, paper mulberry bark. So it's interesting material. It's sort of halfway between fabric and paper. Quite strange stuff to work with. There's a linen backing cloth for the embroidery which you can actually see on the picture here which shows the back of the waste code. This edge here shows you the tapper cloth and then here's the linen backing fabric and then the back of the stitching on the original waste code. It's stitched with silk thread and with metallic threads and you can't see them on this side but in these areas here you've got silver spangles sequence. It's not completed. We've no construction. We've just got the flat pieces. We've no buttons or anything in evidence. Some of it at least was guesswork along the way, hopefully educating guesswork. I'll show you what I came up with anyway. News of James's death and stopped the work on it. There's some interesting speculation we can make as to why she stopped when she did. Was she intending to do any more work on the waste code? She kept it along with a number of other pieces and eventually they were put on exhibition around about 1870 I think it was and then the New South Wales Government bought a large quantity of pieces that were exhibited and they were taken to Australia and eventually found their way into the Mitchell Collection of the State Library of New South Wales. Sadly it's not on display much unfortunately. I think it's a little too fragile and they don't want to risk it. So I had to see it from that collection which was rather good. So what I applied for funding for particularly was a research visit to go to Australia and New Zealand to look at the originals. I obtained photos of the photographs of the one we saw earlier but it's much better to go and look at it properly if you can. So I applied to the Society of Antiquaries and they were kind enough to give me some money in the genital of the ward and I also received some money from the Normandy Trust which is a charitable trust based up there with me. And they allowed me to visit Australia and New Zealand last May and June. I think it was a fairly spectacular few weeks out there. I was able to visit the museums and explore the items that we were interested in. First of all the State Library of New South Wales, the original waistcoat, and that's it in its box. I was, to call it a Yorkshire phrase, slightly gobsmacked at being allowed to get up close and personal with something quite so unique. I was also able to go to the Maritime Museum in Sydney and look at the map sample, which was also stitched by Elizabeth. That's a little later, stitched around about 1800 they think, in memory of her husband. So by that point she'd been a widow for nearly 20 years or so. But that's in the collection of the Maritime Museum and I was able to have a look at that as well. And then we went over to Wellington to look at the third piece which is attributed to Elizabeth and that's in the collection of Te Papa Tomerua, a museum in Wellington in New Zealand. And this particular waistcoat, which you can see in the third picture there on the left, isn't it? That one was finished earlier and was believed to have been worn by James, although it has been altered later. So that was something that I was able to use to get an idea of fairly boring things like his chest size. Because if I was going to make a copy of the waistcoat I've got to figure out how he was. I've actually now examined all of the embroidery which is attributed to Elizabeth. Those are the three pieces which he has believed to have done. And that was fairly amazing. And I learnt a huge amount from that visit that I wouldn't have learned from the, or hadn't learned from the images that I'd obtained. Measurements, details of the colours I didn't realise until I got there that there were actually three shades of each colour. Rather than two, it looked like two from the images. Some idea of the alterations that had been done to the Te Papa waistcoat, construction details, what sort of buttons she might have used and all sorts of things like that. And that made very clear to me and I think to anyone who wants to know more about it, just how important it is to look at the original item rather than trying to work from images and photographs. And I've got a much better recreation of the waistcoat as a result of the visit. I also got a fairly spectacular holiday out to be talking to you. But the main purpose was the museum visit and that was how that came into visit several museums in the UK to look at waistcoats from a similar period and also to look a little bit at other items of dress which was researched for this lot. As you can see, I've gone on today. There are a number of examples of waistcoats in the museum collections in the UK, particularly from the 18th century. There's some lovely collections of 18th century costume out there. And it was fascinating to look at the waistcoats from the 1770s, the period when Elizabeth was stitching the waistcoat that people were focusing on, and to compare how they were. And it was interesting. Ladies, we think we dress fancy. That's got nothing on 18th century men. These waistcoats were stunning. Silkyd broidery, metallicy broidery, bling everywhere. And bear in mind what we're looking at now is tarnished. That's a piece from the collection at Gwrthaw Paul, from the Cayshuffleworth collection. A cut down pieces of a waistcoat, but that's the lower hem. And you can see just how spectacular that one would have been. There's one from Leeds Museum's collection. Also again, 1770s. Rather lovely ribbon effect round the edge of that one. All embroidered. Silthread, there's some sequins on that one as well. This one, you can't see a lot close up, but this one's a German piece from the embroiderers guild collection at embroiderers guild house in Walton-on-Tentz. That would have been glorious in candlelight because it's got silver thread all over it. Now it looks sort of mucky grey, but it would have been stunning at the time. And then this is one from Leeds Museum's collection. Slightly simpler waistcoat. On linen, rather than silk, most of the others were stitched on silk one form or another. But it's interesting that, as you'll see, there's more embroidery on these than there was on Coup's waistcoat. Speculating a little on why, why is it less elaborate than some of the others? What was Elizabeth thinking about when she was doing it? A waistcoat was almost certainly intended for court wear. Had James returned from that third voyage, he would definitely have been invited to court to meet George III. He'd already met him after the second voyage. And he might well have expected to have been given a knighthood for his work on exploration. So the chances are this waistcoat was intended for James to wear to court. It's a relatively simple design. You can see on the image we've got here, this is actually on the neckline. It's the edge just on the side of the neck. You can see this would have been silver. Here's the silk embroidery. And then you've got a silver and green wavy edge there that would have been the edge of the fabric. It's a relatively simple design if you think back to the photos we looked at just now. Was she planning any more? Was it intended to be more elaborate? There's no sign on the original of any unstitched markings. I had a good look at it. I can't see any sign of ink or pencil marks or anything like that that indicated that there was more embroidery that she didn't complete. It's possible that she devised a sort of staged process. I can see a certain amount of logic as a sailor's wife to doing things in stages, finish one stage and then if he hasn't come back yet, mark out the next bit and stitch that and then do it to the phases like that. So whenever he arrived back, there would have been a level of work more or less complete. There's a possible logic to that. It might have been a class issue. The wife of a post captain, he was and then a post captain himself, they were at that point up a middle pass, but they were both from a best lower middle or even working class background. James' father was a farm steward. Elizabeth's parents had a pub basically. So it may have been that they didn't want to seem to be above their station in some way. They were also both heavily influenced by the Quakers. James was trained by a Quaker sea captain, his dinners apprenticeship, John Walker of Whitby and Elizabeth was actually fostered by a Quaker family for the first five years of her life because the pub was fairly frantic and her mum thought she'd be safer out of the way. So all the descriptions of James in contemporary accounts all describe him as a plain man. He didn't like elaborate dress. So it's quite probable that he said he didn't want anything too fancy. He may also have been thinking that a fairly plain design could also possibly have been worn with his uniform where a very elaborate fancy one like the ones we saw just now would have looked wrong. It may just have been to show off the exotic tappacloth, this strange new Polynesian fabric. I don't know of that, but it's interesting to speculate as to why she might have done this and what her thinking was. In terms of the stages of the process, from what I could see from examining the waistcoat, it looks as if she did the outline first, then the silver metallic stuff, the scroll work, then the silk embroidery and the spangles last. We've no information on how she was planning on completing it. We can get some idea of the size from the embroidered front edge, but beyond that we've nothing really to go on. There's no evidence of any buttons surviving. There's no fabric with it with button embroidery on or anything like that. So some of it at this point in terms of the completion had to be educated guesswork, which was quite an interesting process. We do know that James was six foot two, which was tall for Georgian times. Chest size, I tried various places. I did try Jason Hall around the corner on Savile Row, but sadly their archives only started in 1785, I think they said. So unfortunately that was some years after James died. I also inquired at Greenwich Maritime Museum because he was an officer there between the second and third voyage. I wondered if by any chance they'd got any records, but sadly not. So I had to base it on the Tepapa waistcoat that he wore according to all the stories, but that was altered later. If you look at it there is evidence of alteration on the waistcoat. We don't know who by, was it by Elizabeth or was it someone else, not sure, but it was with a cook extended family before it went to New South Wales. So I think it's unlikely that it was owned and deliberately altered by somebody else. My theory is that it was actually altered for Rear Admiral Isaac Smith. Now he was Elizabeth's cousin and he was a protégé of James. He sailed with James on the Endeavour voyage, the first voyage. He was one of the midshipmen on that voyage and I believe was actually the first European to set foot on the east coast of Australia. Because James said, go on Isaac, you go first. I'm just going to turn that one down. Elizabeth and Isaac both getting older, neither of them with any family and cousins, they lived together in their old age. To me that's a logical person that Elizabeth might have altered the waistcoat for. Sadly we've no records of Isaac either and there aren't even portraits or if there are I haven't managed to find them so if anybody knows a portrait of Rear Admiral Isaac Smith I would love to know because I haven't found any at the moment. Whoever it was altered for was four inches shorter and probably about four or five inches stater judging by the alterations that were made. It's made from the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree, brusenetia papyrifera, for those of you who are anorax and like the Latin names for things. I'm a biologist originally so I tend to go for Latin names I'm afraid. It's a common fabric in Polynesia, it's used for clothing, for wall hangings, certainly it's used more for clothing in that period. It's obviously a bit less nowadays because they've got access to other sources of material. Interestingly there's no tradition of stitching the tachycloths, no embroidery on it, certain amount of stitching just to hold the bits together but mainly it was painted or stained or printed. They haven't really got anything much in the way of thread or needles. They had some bone needles but certainly no metal ones and they haven't any fibres that they could make thread from. There was no cotton or silk or anything like that. So they didn't stitch it. Busted in the British climate is a good question because our climate sadly is not what they have in the Pacific. The Pacific climate would be wonderful but it doesn't work. And the one problem with tachycloths is that it's not woven, it's actually beaten so it's sort of glued together with the glue that's in the fibres anyway. So it tends to fall off when it gets wet sadly. I did try a few little experiments and I've got some of the pieces here if you want to have a look. I tried sticking some in a cold shower on the principle that that would simulate a rainstorm and tried washing some with a little bit of warm water and soap but it doesn't like it. So in practice the fact that James never came home and never wore it is probably what allowed the West Coast to survive. Because if he'd worn it and they'd had a go at washing it it would have been a bit of a disaster. The original cloth I got, a cloth that Elizabeth Hughes was from Tahiti I ended up getting mine from Tonga via mail order from a supplier in Hawaii which was quite entertaining. I'm told by the chap in Hawaii that they'd never met him in Tahiti any more sadly. It didn't use me because it took me about three quarters of an hour with a couple of emails backwards and forwards to make sure I got the right type of tapper cloth and then having ordered it online it took three weeks to come and it took James three years. So, you know, how we've moved on. The tapper was different. It's not a smooth surface it's rougher texture than Elizabeth's tapper. There are patches of glue and patches where there's been a big hole in it so they've stuck a patch on the back and you've got two layers of fabric and things like that. I was able to find bits of tapper that haven't got too many patches and holes in for the waistcoat when I made it. Interesting stuff to work with. Whether it would have actually been popular if James had survived and come back to war at where his waistcoat had caught is an interesting question. But given the weather problems I suspect not. I think it would have been an exotic feature but it wouldn't have taken off. Those two pieces on there by the way those are just some modern pieces of printed tapper just to show you how it's normally used if you like. Excuse me. In terms of embroidering the waistcoat I was able to get the pattern from the New South Wales images I had them printed off full size traced the pattern and pricked and pounded the tracing paper Those of you who have not come across those techniques basically what you do is you go along and you put little holes all the way along the lines of the design and then you pin that to the fabric and you brush powder through and it goes through the holes and leaves little dots all over the fabric and you then join up the dots. It's a boring job. I'll tell you. When you've got something this big you're pricking a lot of holes. But we got there and then I was able to draw on the tappercloth in pencil because it's close to paper in style I was able to just use a pencil to join the dots up so that worked quite well. The stitches are fairly simple but typical of the period there was tambourine which was very popular in the 60s, 1770s that's basically stitching a little fine crochet hook effectively and you push that through the fabric grab the thread and pull it up into a loop and you end up with something that looks a bit like chain stitch It's a lot quicker than chain stitch There is also chain stitch in there and loman short stitch It's a silk thread a single strand of silk thread that was used and I did the same The original thread that Elizabeth used is what's known as an S twist that's just the way the twist goes on the thread Mine was actually a Z twist which was twisted the other way but Elizabeth had used Z twist threads on the tappercloth so she obviously had access to both The particular range of threads I used which was from a firm called the Silk Mill had a colour range which allowed me to match Elizabeth's colours very closely and they were much the same size so I felt that the twist was the wrong way was a small problem that we could get over that one I was able to match the colours from the back of the waistcoat which was good because there were much less fading on the back so we could get a real feel for the original colours The metallic thread used was known at the time as wire nowadays we call it passing thread it's slightly different from modern goldwork threads if any of you are into goldwork embroidery because the thread is twisted more tightly around the core the metal strip and that means that when you stitch through the fabric you don't strip the metal outside of the thread so it was much easier to stitch with and then the silver spangles used as far as I can tell it was silver, a little bit difficult because of the tarnish but I think if they had been silver gilded on top of silver they wouldn't have tarnished as much as they did and in practice gold thread and gold spangles weren't really used at the time not in costume not of silver but no gold so one was certainly silver thread there and that's the embroidery in action as it was working on the right front of the waistcoat there that's the lower edge and heading up the front of the waistcoat both the metallic thread and the spangles I got from a firm called Benton and Johnson were one of the few suppliers that still make silver plated spangles rather than sequins the spangles are made silver plated wire onto a rod to make something that resembles a spring then you cut a lot on one side so you end up with little jump rings and then you squash them flat and so you've then got a flat piece of silver plated metal and you can tell the difference between a spangle and a sequin because a spangle will have a tiny notch somewhere around the edge where the two ends of the wire meet whereas a sequin is complete and I've seen those notches on Elizabeth's waist that work so they were definitely spangles that size having finished the embroidery was the guesswork bit and I was able to use three sources there the outline of the original embroidery gave me a length it gave me the shape of the front edge and the position of the pockets but it didn't give me any idea of the width of the pattern piece or the overall shape what I was then able to use was a couple of other pieces that is a waistcoat piece that's from the collection at York Museum it's an embroidered waistcoat it's been altered quite a lot and it's quite a lot smaller but it doesn't give me the basic shape of the waistcoat piece so that was useful in terms of working out a wide to make the piece and then the tape-happer waistcoat also gave me a chance to do it you could see here some of the alterations that have been made there's a piece that's been put into the side seam and there's one of these on each side of the tape-happer waistcoat and then this is the armhole which they've basically just cut down into folded the piece back and tacked it down but by measuring that length which was about 4 inches I was able to determine that they'd actually shortened the tape-happer waistcoat by 4 inches probably Elizabeth I suspect because I don't think she'd have let anybody else do it it was too precious to her I think so that gave me overall measurements which I could then cut down by 4 inches and extend the other way by 4 inches this goes on what had been seen in other waistcoats and one that's particularly interesting is this one this is the one I showed you earlier from Lee's collection that's the home waistcoat you can see it's quite similar to James's in terms of the amount of embroidery there and this you can see it's got embroidered buttons here and they were made around a wooden or card former it was quite common quite a lot of the waistcoats that I saw in museum collections had similar buttons so I persuaded a friend of mine who's a carpenter and joiner and was converting my garage into a studio for me at the time to make this nice little wooden polo mitts they're about polo mitt size as well they worked out quite nicely to use as formers and then I really took a little bit of the design from the waistcoat to use to make the buttons and that was commonly what was done if you look at other waistcoats the buttons pick out something in the design so that gave me some buttons to work with and then the construction process I started off making a mock-up of the piece because I wanted to make sure I got pattern piece shapes right and to get the hang of the design I used violin the interfacing material as a substitute for the tapper because that's a similar sort of non-woes and fabric linen and cotton and tried to use the same construction process as they would have used in the 18th century and that worked very well it's on the front here if you want to have a look at the mock-up the process I based on research in books about construction of 18th century costume it was all hand stitched using linen and silk thread as they would have done in the period I used homemade buckrub to stiffen the front edge that's basically linen stiffened with rabbit skin glue which wasn't really as messy as I thought it was or a smelly it actually worked fairly well it didn't stick the house out too much and the sequence of construction is slightly different the lining if you make a lined garment today if you do something like a waistcoat you make the outer, you make the lining you stitch the two together in the 18th century they didn't do it like that they made the lining of the back in with the back then they stitched the front to it then they did the buttons and the buttonholes and then they stitched the front lining in that was the last job and then they stitched the buttonholes you would turn them back and catch them down around the buttonholes and things like that that meant that front lining could be replaced much more easily if it got marked, damaged or whatever so there's quite a bit of logic to it but it did make for an interesting exercise in the way it was doing the differences so there's the waistcoat that's the completed waistcoat and the shape of it's quite interesting it was a string of bean it was James very skinny guy when he got the the size down and a little while when I made the mock-up I thought have I got that right but in practice if you look at the work of portrait of James that was done at about the same time as the waistcoat was being stitched around about the end of the 17th century and he's pretty slim on that so I think we have got the shape right there as close as we can without having James around to try it out which would have been wonderful and he was about 50 late 40s he was only 50 when that was done so it must have been a fairly fit guy I think I suppose running up and down the mast to the crow's nest and things like that he had to stay a bit fit and in terms of my costume what nerve am I doing on this foot well this costume that I'm wearing today is based loosely on my interpretation of what Elizabeth Cook might have worn because part of what I wanted to achieve with the project is to do some stitching in the museum at Whitby and anywhere else that will take me on to do some stitching to show people what women of the time would have been doing this is the pastime they had especially somebody like Elizabeth a skilled embroiderer so it's based roughly on the 1770s what they called at the time the middling sort middle classes but she was a tailor's wife so she might have had access to some slightly more exotic materials than most people would have done so Indian printed fabric some Venice lace for her petticoat perhaps that it's it's guest but it's my interpretation of Elizabeth it's all made by hand as far as I can I've used accurate methods of materials all the embroidery is done by hand the only bit that's cheating ever so slightly is the Venice lace which is machine made but I couldn't resist it it was just gorgeous and if I tried to make lace like that my niece does probably lace and she tells me how long it takes to make lace if I tried that which would have been needed lace I think I've still been making my costume ten years from now so sorry on the lace but the rest of it's all done by hand it's cotton and linen the stomach is silk and all the embroidery is my own and hash embroidered so if anybody wants to have a closer look later please do where do we go from here what do I do now I'm in the museum in Whitby which is why it isn't with me today for which apologies there it is in the case at the museum along with a child's dress from the 19th century that's on Tapperclough and a piece of modern tapper behind that belongs to a friend of the Sophie the chairman of trustees and that's in the Captain Cook Memorial Museum in Grey Plain in Whitby until the end of October the museum closes on the 31st of October so if any of you are up in that neck of the woods and would like to have a look at the waistcoat it's there in the exhibition I've got three days planned in the Cook Museum to do stitching days basically the bank holidays so Easter Monday Wind Monday and August Bank Holiday Monday I should be stitching in the museum in costume and I'm actually going to work on a copy of the map sampler seemed like a strategic pleased to have another go at so another piece of Elizabeth's embroidery and we'll see how we get on with that one I'm also doing some lectures like this about the waistcoat and potentially stitching days elsewhere so if anybody's interested in a lecture on a stitching day give me a shout I'll have my cards with me you can just take it away sorry about the published image and it's been suggested that what might be rather nice would be to take the waistcoat back to Australia and New Zealand to compare it with the original which is quite an interesting notion I've got to get in touch with my contacts in Australia and New Zealand to see whether they'd be interested in that in fact in about four or five years time we've got the 250th anniversary of the Endeavour voyage coming up so that might be a strategic time to take it back on display with the original which would be rather nice so we'll have to see how that works out so that's more or less the tale of the Captain Hook waistcoat I'm very grateful indeed to the Society of Antiquaries of London because I would not have been able to get anything like this with a replica if I hadn't had the funding from them and also from the Normandy Charitable Trust so I'm very grateful thanks there thank you for a huge amount of support and encouragement from Sophie Forburn the chairman of trustees at the museum and also from my husband Chris who was put up with all sorts of mayhem and chaos building work and all sorts in amongst all this project if anybody would like to follow a little bit more of what I'm up to in the future and keep tabs on what we're doing that's my website alisonlarkingroidory.com blogging the progress of the project and we'll continue to put other stuff of what I'm up to and really thank you very much for listening and has anybody got any questions?