My Jumper Journey
This is rather a long blog, I’m afraid - but there’s rather a lot I want to say! The blog is all about my JUMPERS - or my SWEATERS as jumpers are known in the USA.
The excuse for the blog? To coincide with my birthday (see the blog from earlier in the month) The Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery is staging an exhibition of my celebrated knitwear. They are calling it “Gyles Brandreth: Fun and Fabulous Jumpers” . The exhibition will be running in two parts, between now and the end of the year:
Spring/Summer: 21 March – 2 September 2023
Autumn/Winter: 9 September – 23 December 2023
The museum is based in Petersfield in Hampshire and this is how they are describing the exhibition: “Gyles Brandreth is a writer, broadcaster, actor, former MP and award-winning podcaster, who knows the Petersfield Museum well because he went to school nearby, at Bedales, in the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s he became well-known for the distinctive jumpers he wore on breakfast television, inspiring fashion trends and bringing joy to many. Gyles designed these mostly one-off jumpers with his knitwear partner, George Hostler, and their ‘Gyles & George’ brand has been a favourite among pop stars and celebrities since the 1980s, counting Princess Diana and Elton John among its early fans. In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Gyles brought some of his favourite jumpers out of the closet and shared a jumper-a-day with his followers on Twitter and on Instagram. Many of these will be on display in this two-part exhibition. The Spring/Summer selection will include the famous I’m A Luxury sweater, while later in the year, the Autumn/Winter selection will feature designs that take their inspiration from performance and pantomime.”
If you want to discover more about the exhibition and me and my knitwear, read on . . . But only if you’ve got time: I have quite a lot to say!
I am honoured to have my jumpers/sweaters on show at this very special museum in Petersfield because it already features (among so many treasures) papers belonging to one of my favourite poets, Edward Thomas, as well as the costume collection brought together over many years by my former teacher and mentor, Rachel Field, for more many years, from the 1940s to the 1970s, head of drama at my old school, Bedales.
The craft of knitting has been part of civilized life for at least a thousand years. The verb ‘to knit’ comes from the Old English cnyttan, to knot. From fragments of material unearthed by archaeologists, we know they were knitting socks in Egypt in the eleventh century. We know, too, they were knitting caps for babies in Spain in the twelfth century. From the fourteenth century, there are several celebrated paintings of the Virgin Mary holding knitting needles: my favourite is ‘Our Lady Knitting’ by Tomasso da Modena, 1325-75. For hundreds of years, all the best people have been knitting enthusiasts, it seems.
That said, it was not until the nineteenth century that knitting really took hold as a creative pastime. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy have characters who knit in their novels. The celebrated French romantic artist, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, painted his masterpiece, ‘The Knitting Girl’, in 1869. Early in the twentieth century, both Virginia Woolf and Agatha Christie created knitting heroines of note. (It is clear that Miss Marple does much of her best thinking while knitting.)
In Europe and America, during both the First and the Second World Wars, people at home were encouraged to ‘knit for victory’. ‘Our boys need sox,’ was the line, ‘so knit your bit.’ In the 1930s, between the wars, people knitted for economy as much as style, to help keep themselves warm during the privations of the Depression.
What has been fashionable in knitwear has varied down the years. Once upon a time, the principle items that people knitted were stockings and socks, shawls and scarves, pretty clothes for babies and hardy sweaters for sailors. In the 1920s the future King Edward VIII, then Prince of Wales, made Fair Isle fashionable wearing knitted jumpers to play golf. His Royal Highness also wore knitted ties. In the 1950s Hollywood royalty – including Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly (who went on to become European royalty as Princess Grace of Monaco) – wore knitted ‘twin sets’, a matching cardigan and pullover made of wool or cashmere.
It was in the 1950s that I first started knitting. As a cub scout of six or seven I was taught to knit and awarded a knitting badge as proof of my skill. In the 1960s, at school and university, I wore outsize pullovers and cardigans – a student uniform of sorts. In the early 1970s I founded the National Scrabble Championships and, on the day of the finals, a friend brought me a hand-knitted Scrabble jumper to wear. It was a bright yellow jersey that featured a full-colour life-sized Scrabble board emblazoned on the chest. The garment caused quite a sensation on the day and, in a way, changed my life.
From that day on, colourful jumpers became my professional trade-mark. Through the 1980s I appeared regularly on British television and when I did I always wore colourful knitwear. Others did, too, of course, but no one else on TV had jumpers quite like mine – or quite so many of them. I had hundreds. For the most part, I designed them myself and made sure that I had them for all occasions – featuring hearts for Valentine’s Day, bunnies for Easter, daffodils for St David’s Day, Shakespeare on his birthday, Winnie the Pooh on mine, the Stars and Stripes on 4 July, ghosts and witches for Hallowe’en . . . I had at least one different jumper for every day of the year. And I had them for different times of the day, too: ones featuring boiled eggs (and fried eggs) to wear at breakfast and an assortment of trompe l’oeil evening jackets for nights out on the town.
In 1990 I gave up television for politics. After a dozen years popping up on game shows like All Star Secrets, The Railway Carriage Game, Give Us A Clue, Babble and Blankety-Blank, and seven years as a regular in Dictionary Corner on Countdown and three mornings a week on the sofa at Britain’s first commercial breakfast station, TV-am, I put away my bright knitwear and put on sober grey business suits instead. I became the Member of Parliament for the City of Chester. John Major was the prime minister then. Grey was the order of the day.
Once I had became a politician I assumed I could leave the jolly jumpers behind. Wrong. In my constituency, whenever I did my best to seem statesman-like, the local newspaper would manage to come up with another old photograph of me in a fun-knit with which to adorn its front page. At Westminster, I was appointed to the standing committee overseeing the legislation to privatise Britain’s railways. Leading for the opposition on the committee was John Prescott, MP. Whenever I got up to speak, he muttered in my direction: ‘Wooly jumper! Wooly jumper!’ Eventually I had to point out to him that the joy of a wooly jumper is that you can take it off at will, whereas the blight of a wooly mind is that you are lumbered with it for life.
Of course, Mr Prescott got the last laugh because, in time, he became deputy prime minister and was now wrapped in ermine and seated in the House of Lords. But my jumpers had their political advantages, too. Because I was the jumper man I was recognizable. In the constituency people knew who I was – and not every MP is known to his or her constituents. I was visible and accountable. And I could put my jumpers to work in aid of good causes. I gave them away by the drawer-full to raise money for charity. I remember that the novelist Jeffrey Archer auctioned one off for a thousand pounds. And the Duchess of Westminster, married to one of the richest men in the land, generously bought another for £ 2,000.
Some of my jumpers sold rather well at auction because the best of them were pretty classy. These were the ones specially made for me by George Hostler (1939-2018). George was a bit of a genius. He graduated from Durham University with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art and became a sculptor – exhibiting his work in the UK, across Europe and in Australia. In the 1970s he turned from sculpture to fashion, formed his own design house and began creating knitwear for, among others, Zandra Rhodes and Stirling Cooper.
His jumpers began to sell worldwide – at Harrods in London, at Bloomingdales in New York, in upmarket outlets in Germany, France, and Japan. In the early 1980s, walking through Kensington, I saw one of his jumpers in a shop window, went into the shop, bought the jumper and decided to find the man behind the label.
I found that he was based in Leicester, as head of the Design Foundation Department at Leicester Polytechnic, now De Montfort University. I got in touch; we met; we became friends; and over the next few years we began to create jumpers together for me to wear on television. Because George was based in Leicester and I was in London, I’d call him to discuss an idea, or send a doodle of a design to him on a postcard; he’d then create the jumper, parcel it up and send it up to London by train. I’d be at the parcels office at St Pancras station several days a week picking up packages from George.
The jumpers in this collection are almost all ones I created either with George or with my alternate partner-in-wool, the brilliant Linda O’Brien.
For a decade I wore novelty knitwear by day and night. (I even had a red-and-white-striped knitted nightgown – with knitted nightcap to match.) My wife wore the knitwear, too, and so did our children. The jumpers we wore at home were a little less loud than the outrageous ones I wore on stage when I appeared in pantomime, but they were still distinctive. I published knitting books and magazines. I judged knitting competitions. I opened knitting shows. For a few years I was director of a chain of hand-knitting wool shops. I was ‘the jumping Jack Flash of jolly jumpers’ (The Sun) and happy to be so.
And then it stopped. From the day I went into politics in 1990 for almost a quarter of a century, I wore not one of my colourful wit-knits. Even after I had lost my parliamentary seat and returned to television, I kept away from the novelty knitwear and stuck to shirts, ties and suits. Even so, my jumper-wearing days were not forgotten – and, perhaps, not surprisingly. The research shows that when people watch TV, they recall 83 per cent of what they see, but only seventeen per cent of what they hear.
In 2013, BBC Television beat a path to my door. They were making a documentary on The Golden Age of Knitting and needed my input.
‘Yey!’ I cried, ‘I’m a style icon.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far, dad,’ said my daughter, Saethryd. ‘Let’s just say that some folk think some of your jumpers are fun.’
‘And knitting’s cool again?’
‘Well, dad, Julia Roberts is knitting. Cameron Diaz is knitting. Winona Ryder is knitting.’
So knitting is cool. And good for the soul, too, apparently. I learnt that recently from Tom Daley, diving champion, Olympic gold medallist, and knitting enthusiast. Tom was born in 1994, after I had stopped wearing my jumpers first time round, and his jumpers are very different from mine – though just as colourful. I like his style and I’m pleased to say he tells me he likes mine.
In 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, at the suggestion of one of my Twitter followers, and on the basis that desperate times call for desperate measures, I brought some of my favourite jumpers out of the closet and posted a jumper-a-day on Twitter and on Instagram. I wore the jumpers on social media while reciting favourite short poems – the idea was to raise smiles and lift spirits. I then started wearing the jumpers again on TV – on shows like This Morning and Celebrity Gogglebox – and was amazed (and delighted) to find they were more popular than ever – and liked by people who weren’t even alive when I first wore them.
One of these millennial admirers was a young American, Jack Carlson, 34, an Anglophile archaeologist who spent much of his twenties sitting in rowing boats as cox to the US national rowing team. He got into fashion retail creating the Rowing Blazers brand making blazers for rowing clubs around the world. He came across the Gyles and George knitwear in one our books from the 1980s and decided this is what the world needs now.
We dipped our toe into the market with just eight designs, handmade in 100 per cent lambswool – and I simply chose my favourites, starting with a huge red heart on a deep navy background. ‘Gyles and George’ is what we call our brand and I am proud to say it has taken off around the world. We are now issuing a dozen new designs a year – except, of course, they aren’t ‘new’: most of them are around forty years old. And yet, to me at least, none of them looks dated. You can discover our current range here: www.gylesandgeorge.com.
Without realising it, I like to think George and I were creating ‘classics’ – fun and fabulous sweaters that have stood the test of time.
NOTES ABOUT EACH OF THE JUMPERS:
As I write, I’m not sure which my more than two hundred jumpers/sweaters are going on show in the exhibition, but I’m reckoning most of these will be in the first selection. I hope so.
1. CROSSWORD JUMPER. The crossword puzzle was invented by a British journalist, Arthur Wynne, who emigrated to the United States in the 1890s. The first crossword was published on the “fun page” of the New York World on 21 December 1913. Seventy-five years later, I designed this jumper to mark the anniversary.
2. VASE OF FLOWERS JUMPER. This is one of a series of fun jumpers I created where you have to see both sides of the jumper to get the full effect. On the front, you have a vase of flowers. The flowers look fabulous. On the back of the jumper, the flowers have wilted. The idea is: when I arrive I bring you a beautiful bunch of flowers. As I leave, and you see my back retreating, I am so sad that all my flowers have wilted.
3. STEAM TRAIN. In the 1980s I devised and hosted a teatime-television comedy show called for BBC1 called The Railway Carriage Game. For each episode I wore a different sweater, each emblazoned with a different steam train from the golden age of rail.
4. “I’m a luxury … few can afford.” This has become the best-selling luxury sweater in the world, not thanks to me, I have to admit, but thanks to the late Diana, Princess of Wales. In the 1980s she was living at Kensington Palace near Kensington Church Street where a number of the jumpers that George and I had created were sold. Diana bought one or two of our creations there and was photographed wearing the “I’m a luxury” sweater with her sons, William and Harry. She liked the look of the jumper and she particularly liked the message.
5. Crocodile Dundee was a 1986 comedy movie set in the Australian Outback and in New York City. It starred Paul Hogan as Mick Dundee and inspired this fun jumper which I didn’t design, but which was sent to me as a present and I have treasured it ever since.
6. I have created a number of jumpers featuring teddy bears. This is my favourite. (I tell my grandchildren that I sometime wear it back to front, so then I have a bear behind!). I love a bear, and my wife and I have a collection of more than a thousand teddy bears that now live in the Brandreth Bear House at Newby Hall, near Ripon in North Yorkshire.
7. BOW TIE. Of all the trompe l’oeil sweaters George and I created, this is probably my favourite. The pocket actually is a pocket! When we created the jumper in the 1980s, Joanna Lumley was the first to model it. She modelled it again recently – and both Joanna and the jumper looked exactly the same.
8. PIGGY JUMPER. In 1987, Linda O’ Brien and I created a book together called Knitability. Linda worked for several London fashion companies until she founded her own design knitting business in 1977. This is another of the jumpers that tells a story on both sides. I love the back because the pig has a little tail that you can tweak, if you fancy. (I think it was falling in love with this jumper that turned me into a non-meat eater.)
9. THE FIRST JUMPER! This is where it all began. This is the original jumper that was given to me back in 1971 when I founded the National Scrabble Championships and at the finals someone presented me with this remarkable piece of knitwear – a complete Scrabble board with a relevant message written in Scrabble tiles. Just as traditional hand-made-Persian rugs have intentional flaws because the Muslim artists believe that only Allah is perfect and has the right to create perfectly, I rather like the fact that my surname is mis-spelt on this jumper.
10. “WHAT THE **** IS GOING ON?” A number of the jumpers that we have created over the years have a message on both sides. This one was inspired by my time in government! Amusingly, I was told that I could not wear this one on breakfast television because of the four asterisks. I said the asterisks stand for the letters H,E,C,K and therefore the message was quite innocent. The producer told me that viewers might see a different word there …
11. POETRY TOGETHER. Poetry Together is a project that I initiated a few years ago with the wonderful support of The Queen Consort. Poetry Together brings young people (school children) and older people (often people living in care homes) together over poetry, tea and cake. Quite simply the young ones and the older ones learn a poem by heart and then get together to perform it together. This jumper was made for me by the brilliant contemporary knitwear designer, Susie Johns.
12. UMBRELLA JUMPER. This is a Linda O’Brien creation, a jumper that celebrates the British weather and manages to do so in glorious colour.
13. THE KANGAROO’S POUCH. I love this jumper, which was a winner in a knitting competition that I judged in the 1980s, because it’s so useful having that built-in pouch for keeping bits and pieces in. Today, inside the jumper’s pouch you will find a hand-knitted kangaroo who is also knitting!
14. PIGS MIGHT FLY. The expression “Pigs might fly” dates back at least to the seventeenth century, but I like to think that this jumper is as modern as tomorrow though obviously it owes a lot to yesterday. When we designed it in the 1980s, it was modelled by Bonnie Langford, the brilliant actress, singer and dancer, who I am sure has played Peter Pan and can almost certainly fly anyway.
15. CORGI JUMPER. I asked the brilliant designer Susie Johns to create this corgi jumper for me to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee in 2022. I wore it at one of the jubilee celebrations where I am pleased to say it was much admired by the Queen’s son, Charles, then the Prince of Wales and now, of course, King Charles III. The King has long been an advocate of wool, having been actively involved in the Campaign for Wool since 2010. The campaign is a global endeavour initiated by Charles III in order to raise awareness of the unique, inherent natural, renewable and biodegradable benefits offered by wool in fashion, furnishings and everyday-life.
16. SNAKE JUMPER. I wanted to look rakish when I first modelled this in 1987, so I grew a beard! This is a brilliant Linda O’Brien creation in which the snake’s forked tongue comes right out at you!
17./18. HEART JUMPERS. I had the idea for this jumper in the run up to Valentine’s Day in 1983. I wore it on TV-am (ITV’s first breakfast station, launched in 1982) when the programme’s brilliant presenter, Anne Diamond, and I decided to have a go at breaking the world record for the longest screen kiss. The record was then held by Jane Wyman and Regis Toomey who managed to sustain a kiss in a 1940 film, You’re in the Army Now, for three minutes and five seconds. Anne and I might have made the record books had our attempt not been abruptly interrupted by breaking news coming in from Moscow. A year later, I did manage to break the record with the wonderful Bucks Fizz singer, Cheryl Baker. Forty years later, at the time of the horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine, I was then working at This Morning for ITV and decided to wear a special version of the jumper featuring the colours of the Ukrainian flag.