Sweaters

From The Times, 10th November 1916.

SWEATERS.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES.

Sir,—Many of your readers ask how their promised 10,000 sweaters are going.  Well, Sir Edward Ward, omniscient and industrious, is packing 7,000 for Mesopotamia, 2,000 are here being classified, the remaining 1,000, and more, judging by the letters, are on their way to me.  So we haven’t done so badly; I admit I hadn't allowed quite enough time for delays, inevitable in these days, but I still wonder what the connexion is between the glory and grandeur of the Somme and the difficulty of procuring needles No. 7 in Slodgecumb-in-the-Mud.  But the main thing is that the promise is kept in the spirit, if not in the sweater, and that the men, our incomparable men, will have this little offering-of ours before the snow.

My correspondents are not less curious, actively and passively, than heretofore.  "Will you please write an explanatory history of the sweater movement to allay suspicions?"  Madam, in the whole story of criminal derangement, did you ever hear tell of a diseased lust for accumulating 800 sweaters a day in a garret in the Temple?  And what is the scientific name for a morbid passion for buying 10,000 half-penny stamps to acknowledge them?  I believe you are still haunted by the spectre of that elderly, alien, female enemy in the Mile End-road„ deriving enormous profits from the sale of your sweaters to her compatriots.

One sweater is, I fear, irretrievably lost.  To a venerable lady whose honoured hands have knitted for the men on every front I wrote. "If you thought well to stitch a card on the sweater giving the age of the knitter (it was something over 90), the happy warrior who wears it will be happier still."  All very decorous and well intentioned. but I spoiled the effect by putting my message into the wrong envelope.  It was not well received—and the Army is a sweater short to-day.

I have done the best I could with the acknowledgments, but there are still 176 unidentified parcels. I give what particulars I can of these in your personal column to-day, but I may say that your advertisement manager is not half so agreeable as yourself; Sir, and this is an expensive process.  So will ladies add the kindness of clear and complete cards to their good sweaters?

I approach the delicate ground of the future of sweaters.  While the London County Council, or it may be the Lord Chancellor himself by this time, are making up their minds what is to be done with my vile body, I am correctly forbidden to make further appeals.  The fact is my application for registration was late—I was turning the fire escape into a sweater chute that afternoon.

*   *   *   *   *   *

The above represents the most eloquent paragraph ever composed on the need of sweaters all the winter through, and the excellence of the printed pattern I have here for distribution.  Shall I awake in Pentonville if I ask your readers to take it as read?  I had almost forgotten—the sudatrix presents her duty, and, to my great relief, your readers' conduct is considered not otherwise than satisfactory.

Yours faithfully,

JOHN PENOYRE.

8, King’s Bench Walk, Inner Temple, E.C., Nov. 9.

[The reference to 'the most eloquent paragraph' puzzled me, but possibly it's the line of asterisks, representing snow.   

The sudatrix is I think his housekeeper - it means 'someone who sweats or causes to sweat' - a pun on sweater, I suppose, and a reference to the fact that in the early days of the war, John Penoyre was collecting sweaters of any colour, and dyeing them khaki, which his letters suggest was done in his flat. By his housekeeper, and not by him, I imagine.]