TigerTailTextiles: The Blog

On the 15th of February 1942, Singapore fell to the Japanese. Thousands of civilians and allied soldiers (including 1,000 women) were imprisoned in the notorious Changi Prisoner of War camp. For the first few months of captivity the prisoners were treated fairly well with food, medicine and events, however, that all changed as the prison became more and more overcrowded. It was built to hold 600 prisoners but, by 1944, it held over 4,000.  Food and medicine became scarce and the Japanese, who had not signed the Geneva Convention, ran the camp however they wished. Malnutrition, diseases, brutality and deaths from dysentery, malaria and vitamin deficiencies abounded.  The women were separated from the men and communication was forbidden between the groups. In 1942, an inmate, Ethel Mulvany, came up with the idea to create quilts to pass messages to their men disguised as an act of womanly kindness. Mulvany was a Canadian who moved to Singapore during WWII with her husband, a mil...

Elizabeth Fry was born in 1780 and, as a Quaker, she worked to improve the lives of the poor, sick and imprisoned. In 1813, Fry visited Newgate Prison, London where she was astonished by the appalling conditions that the women and children were being held in. The women’s section was overcrowded and dirty. They lived in small cells where they slept on straw and did their own cooking and washing. She began to work to reform prisons and pushed for legislation to make the treatment of prisoners more humane. In 1817, Fry founded the British Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners. She campaigned for segregation of the sexes, female matrons for the female prisoners, religious worship, education and employment. She introduced items into the prison for the women to sew and knit, to give the prisoners a purpose. She favoured patchwork as it meant the prisoners could sew in small, confined spaces and it was repetitive to settle their minds. Patchwork also grows over tim...

In 1973, Chile saw the end of democracy. Terror reigned with the country under military rule for 17 years. Anyone who opposed this rule was arrested, tortured and often killed. In the midst of this brutality, a group of impoverished women sought to inform the world of the human rights violations occurring. This is the incredible story of how sewing acted as a source of resistance. Augusto Pinochet was born on the 25 th of November 1915 in Valpara í so, Chile. He aspired to enter the army and was accepted into the War Academy in Santiago in 1933. During his time in the army Chile was never at war, instead, Pinochet was appointed as Commander for one of the concentration camps imprisoning Communists in Chile. In 1970 a committed socialist, Salvador Allende came to power after three failed presidential bids. At this time, Latin America was in the middle of a “red scare” because, the Communist, Fidel Castro had come to power in Cuba. The USA was worried about Allende, a Marxist, comin...