Barbara Brackman's MATERIAL CULTURE: Morris Muse: The Wardle Family

Friday, April 17, 2026

Morris Muse: The Wardle Family

Collection of the Whitworth Museum University of Manchester

Elizabeth Young-Wardle Wardle (1834-1902)

in the early 1890s with a sewing box.

Not a conventional muse but an important business woman & artist

In 1857 Elizabeth Young-Wardle married distant relation Thomas Wardle, heir to a dye works in the area of Leek in Staffordshire, England and gave birth to 14 children before 1878. Despite marathon motherhood Elizabeth made a career of needlework and embroidery for herself, her family and her neighbors.

Thomas Wardle is pictured with ten of his surviving children in the late 1870s. Textiles were the family business. In the 1870s Thomas and Morris became friends united by similar interests in antique textile processes. Thomas experimented with traditional indigo dyeing & printing methods that Morris commissioned for his prints. Morris and Elizabeth Wardle were both interested in traditional embroidered ornament.

Elizabeth and embroidery students 1888

Elizabeth and friends in the late 1860s began embroidering ecclesiastic hangings in traditional style, altar frontals and other decorations for local churches. Architects who were building and restoring churches commissioned the Leek women to stitch their ideas for traditional needlework.

Khartoum Altar Frontal at Bradford Cathedral
by the Leek Embroidery Society

Elizabeth became skillful at design, handwork, research and teaching and in 1879 after that last baby she organized The Leek Embroidery Society occupying a classroom, store and workshop space next door to her home.

Wardle House, 54 St. Edward Street

The Morris/Wardle collaboration also provided secular merchandise for William and May Morris's London shop, which sold embroidery patterns, kits, finished panels and furniture like this fire screen incorporating the needlework.

A few years ago a group of Lady Elizabeth Wardle's embroidery

memorabilia was auctioned. Now in the Whitworth Museum's collection.

The Society’s work for churches and hobbyists was in demand into the 20th century providing income and employment for many Staffordshire women. Patterns, kits, materials and finished needlework were sold in Wardle’s shop in New Bond Street, William Morris’s showroom in Oxford Street, Liberty & Company in Regent Street and at Debenham & Freebody, off Oxford Street.

Details showing stitches in Leek Embroidery Society work

Much of the thread is an Indian silk in which the Wardle dye mill specialized. Tussar silk grew wild in India with different qualities than cultivated silk, among them some negatives such as resistance to conventional dyes. Thomas Wardle figured out how to give the Indian silk permanent color and became the leading British importer for a product that was much in demand during the Arts & Crafts embroidery fashion.

Collection of the Whitworth Museum University of Manchester

Sample of Wardle's indigo block printing

When William Morris and Thomas Wardle began working together in the 1870s Morris persuaded the dyemaster to learn the art of woodblock printing. Wardle's mills became the leading site of the old-fashioned technology, printing Morris patterns and yardage for others.

Leek Embroidery Society members designed patterns but they also transformed Wardle's block-printed silks, velvets and cottons by laying embroidery stitching over the printed designs.

An altered print?

The Society used a rather narrow range of simple stitches that

showed off the Tussar silk's color and lustre well.

Another link between Leek and London was Elizabeth's brother George Young Wardle (1834-1910) who assisted William Morris, managing the business and perhaps using his painting skills to finish Morris's print designs.

Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum
Wreath or Poppy About 1880
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O250934/design-wreath-poppy/wreath-design-morris-william/

The V&A catalog for this watercolor on paper tells us (to my surprise!)
"Wardle was an excellent recorder of pattern....The draughtsman responsible for this technically adept drawing (intended as a guide for the printer to use when matching the colours) may not have been Morris, as his strengths were more conceptual than illustrative. Instead, it is possible that... George Wardle executed this design for production, working from Morris's first version....This design was intended as a guide for the printer to use when matching the colours. Pencil notes with instructions about the colours have been added to the drawing on the front and on the reverse."

From the Leek Embroidery Exhibition at the Nicholson Museum in 2013,

Detail Nine Orders of Angels. drawn by

George Young Wardle in 1864. Embroidery done in 1899.

This set of angels was embroidered by "Miss Winterbottom of Stone, Staffordshire, a member of Leek School of Embroidery," possibly Christina Winterbottom (1861-?) listed in the 1881 census in Stone as a "Shop Keeper Fancy And Embroidery" or her sister Amanda A Winterbottom (1858-1948) a "dressmaker." Christina taught at the Leek School.

George Wardle's tale had taken a dramatic turn in 1861 when he wed a notorious murder suspect from Glasgow. Madeleine Hamilton Smith had been tried four years earlier for killing her lover by poisoning him with arsenic, charges had not been proven in court.

The newspapers could not get enough of the crime.

"This case, regarding which such an intense interest has been excited, not only in Glasgow but over all Scotland, commenced this morning ...in Edinburgh. About a dozen .... ladies, were in court, and some of them evinced such a determination to sit out the proceedings that they brought their work with them and commenced stitching as soon as they sat down.... Madeleine Hamilton Smith, a very pretty girl, was placed at the bar...."

Glasgow Herald,- July 1, 1857

The jury weighed circumstantial evidence that she'd poisoned former lover Pierre Emile L'Angelier

....Madeline had purchased arsenic; L'Angelier was threatening to blackmail her but the jury delivered a verdict of "Not Proven."

Magdalene Hamilton Smith 1835 -1928

Among her names: Magdelene, Madeline, Lena

After the verdict she fled to London.

George may have met Madeline in London's Morris workshops where she possibly worked as an embroiderer. The business end of the shop was ably managed in the last decades of the century by two brothers Frank and Robert Smith---her relations?

During the years George managed Morris business the Wardles raised two children Mary and Thomas born in the early 1860s. In 1889 when George retired from the firm they separated. Madeline moved to New York City following son Thomas. After George's death in 1910 she married George Sheehy, a concrete contractor over 20 years younger than she. New Yorker Lena Sheehy died in 1928 in her 90s though loathe to admit her age.

Lena Sheehy with granddaughters

What Elizabeth Wardle thought of her sister-in-law has not been recorded.

Looking at the talented Wardles one realizes the Morris Arts & Crafts movement was a collaborative enterprise between like-minded artists and business people. William Morris gets most of the credit today but we would have less of a legacy without the Wardle family who provided design, production and materials.