Following Threads to Colonial Barbados

Samplers, pieces of embroidery made to practise or demonstrate needlework stitches, were an important part of girls’ education for centuries. In Britain, girls stitched samplers from the 17th to the early 20th centuries, gaining skills such as the literacy, counting, and dexterity they would need to be successful wives, mothers, and mistresses of households or, if they needed to earn a living, effective domestic servants or participants in the textile trades. Many girls throughout the British Empire – in India, Australia, and Sierra Leone – were also made to stitch. Some were sent to British missionary schools and made to make samplers with Christian messages, while other girls embroidered at home or at female academies. Though occasionally a piece of needlework made in Britain’s Caribbean colonies in the 19th century comes to light, finding examples from the 18th century is like finding a needle in a haystack, due to neglect, environmental conditions, or very few being made in the first place. However, despite the odds, two 18th-century Barbadian samplers have recently been identified in British collections.

Since 2023 the Royal School of Needlework (RSN) has been digitising its collection of approximately 10,000 textiles. Included in this collection is a lengthy, narrow sampler long believed to be English. It is, however, actually a sampler from Barbados – the earliest known Barbadian sampler in any collection. The RSN sampler is an extremely rare and significant material survival which illustrates what and how white girls were taught in the slave-holding colonies of the British Empire.

Upon first glance, and even closer inspection, the sampler, made by Martha Collymore in 1771, looks much like the samplers made in England a full century earlier. English samplers from the second half of the 17th century are narrow, long, and populated by the same bands of floral, figural, and geometric patterns. Almost all have at least one of the patterns seen on this piece, such as bands of stylised carnations and Celtic knots, a menagerie with clothed ‘boxers’ (male figures with hands up), and irises. The sampler features a narrow band of needlelace techniques at the bottom, just above an inscription which reads, ‘MaRTHa COLLYMORe HeR SaMPLaR ENDed DeCeMBeR THe 24 1771 MC IC SC KC IW MW’. The sampler’s widest band, with a rose flanked by two birds and a flame-stitched background (parallel flat stitches which combine to create zig-zag or flame patterns), is an outlier, the only part of the work that does not easily fit stylistically into the 17th century. It is this band that revealed 
that Collymore’s sampler was made in Barbados.

A sampler at the Victoria and Albert Museum made by Jane Rollstone Alleyne in 1777 is the only other known sampler to have a similar band, which combines a floral motif common to 17th-century samplers with a zig-zagging background more popular in 18th-century samplers. One can guess that with a pattern this rare the Collymore and Alleyne samplers were made under the instruction of the same teacher. The fact that the samplers are only a few years apart and both include patterns most frequently seen on earlier examples adds weight to this theory.

Alleyne’s uncommon name and online genealogical records made it easier to find her and discover that she was born and raised in Barbados, not in England, as was previously assumed. She was born in St James parish, Barbados on 31 December 1767; the inscription ‘10’, her age, at the bottom of her sampler corroborates the genealogical records.

Both the Alleyne and Collymore families had been in Barbados for over a century and were, as plantation owners, invested in the institution of slavery. While none of Martha Collymore’s genealogical records have yet been found, it is probable she was born in Barbados around 1760. Records for her probable parents, brother (born in 1758 in St Philip, Barbados), and maternal grandparents have been found in Barbadian documentation and match the sets of family initials on the bottom of Martha’s sampler.

Though we can glean much about Jane and Martha from their samplers, the anonymous teacher they learnt from remains in the shadows. While newspapers in Jamaica advertised both boarding and day schools for girls to be taught reading, spelling, French, music, dancing, and all sorts of needlework by English women as early as 1760, there are no such advertisements in extant issues of Barbados Gazette, established in 1731, or The Barbados Mercury, begun in 1762. It is likely that the families of the girls who attended these schools were able to afford their daughters’ education because of the financial stability and affluence afforded to them by slavery. Whoever the woman was who taught the wealthy white girls of Barbados, it is clear that she was borrowing from a historical English sampler tradition. Given that 17th-century band samplers are the English samplers to which she had access, she is unlikely to have come herself from England but, like her students, was a descendant of early English settlers on the island.

The Alleyne and Collymore samplers are significantly rare, important, and especially early examples of samplers made in British colonies outside of what became the United States. In addition to the RSN, V&A, and Philadelphia Museum of Art examples, the Barbados Museum and Historical Society holds two 19th-century Barbadian samplers; no doubt there are other relevant examples in private collections. Collymore and Alleyne’s samplers show us that the needlework produced by the daughters of wealthy English settlers in the Caribbean stitched together the schoolgirl aesthetics of the British Isles and its vast empire. This discovery illustrates that girls thousands of miles away from the motherland learned to play the part of model British womanhood a century late.

Isabella Rosner is a curator at the Royal School of Needlework.