The Drawer That Remembers: Trelispen’s Tea Towel Collection Nobody Meant to Start
There is a certain drawer in Trelispen. It’s the one below the cutlery, it sticks a bit in wet weather, and it contains the town’s memory — not the official version in the glass case at the Memorial Hall, but the other one, printed on cotton and folded into quarters.
Tea towels. The commemorative kind. Church fetes, school anniversaries, a bandstand that hasn’t stood for thirty years, and at least two rival designs about the ring road. Sold for three pounds fifty to raise money for something that was funded long ago, then taken home, used twice, washed once, and promoted permanently to the drawer.
Nobody set out to build an archive. Which is, arguably, what makes it one.
Sixty-One Towels and a Notebook
Ruth Tregaskis lives up on Pellow’s Hill and has been gathering them since 1989, when her grandmother handed her a linen one printed for the opening of the old outdoor baths. She now has sixty-one.
“I don’t call it a collection,” she says, “I call it the drawer. Everyone’s got one. They just don’t think of it as a collection because nothing in it matches.”
She keeps a list. Handwritten, in a small blue notebook, filed alphabetically by occasion rather than by date — “because half the dates printed on the towels are wrong, and I got tired of arguing with them.” Her favourite is not the oldest or the rarest. It’s a plain one from 1998, printed for a vicar’s leaving do, with a spelling mistake in the middle of the church name. She has two copies. She has never found a third.
Her rules for what counts are loose but firm. It has to have been sold in the town, or sold for the town. It has to have been intended to be used, not framed. And it must, ideally, be slightly disappointing in the hand — the cheap ones print sharper, she insists, and the expensive ones go soft and blurry after a decade.
The Stall That Has Never Quite Packed Up
Down at the Saturday market, in the parish hall with the radiators that clank, Elaine Behenna has been running St Fimbar’s fundraising stall for twenty-two years. There is a trestle table, a biscuit tin for change, and a shoebox of tea towels that has been quietly refilled since before she took over.
“People think we’re selling souvenirs,” she says. “We’re not. We’re selling something to do the drying-up with. That’s the whole point. If it’s too nice to use, it sits in a drawer and then it turns up at a jumble sale in forty years and somebody like Ruth buys it.”
She keeps the older stock at the back of the box — a few from the millennium, a couple from a flower festival in 2004 that nobody remembers but which sold surprisingly well. They go for the same price as the new ones, which she admits is “financially questionable but morally tidy.”
Her best seller of all time was not a landmark or an anniversary. It was a towel printed in 2016 with a recipe for a lemon drizzle cake on it, attributed to a woman called Marjorie who has since become mildly famous locally for reasons nobody can fully explain.
How to Read a Tea Towel
Ruth has a short guide, mostly delivered while making tea in her kitchen.
Look at the creases first. A towel folded the same way for thirty years tells you it was never used. A towel with a soft, worn middle and crisp corners was used properly and then ironed for guests — the highest honour a tea towel can receive.
Then look at the edges. If the hem is hand-sewn, it predates the mid-nineties. If there’s a phone number printed without a dialling code, it’s older than you think and the number is dead.
And finally, look at what has been left off. The ring road towel from 1991 announces the road as open. It does not mention the trees, the two public inquiries or the campaign group that produced a rival towel the same year with the words “still not too late” across the bottom. Both are in Ruth’s drawer, filed under R, “because it seemed unfair to separate them.”
The Ones That Got Away
Every collector has gaps, and Trelispen’s are unusually specific. There’s the Wharf ferry towel, printed in 1994 for a service that quietly stopped in 1996 — Elaine has seen one, once, at a car boot sale in another county, and has been mildly annoyed about it ever since.
Then there’s the school anniversary set from 1979, which came in three designs and of which only the middle one seems to have survived. Ruth has been offered the other two at prices she describes as “optimistic.”
And of course, the great missing one: a towel supposedly printed for the opening of the ring road’s second phase, in a batch of two hundred, of which not a single example has turned up. Nobody is sure it ever existed. Ruth has a whole page in the notebook reserved for it, just in case.
So What Goes on the Next One?
The market stall now runs an informal vote — a jam jar, a stack of ten-pence pieces, and a laminated card listing four options for the next printing. Past winners have included the library steps and the Christmas lights switch-on.
This year’s suggestions are already causing light disagreement in the queue. One regular wants the unstaffed sheds out on Chapel Street, on the grounds that a towel with an honesty box printed on it would “say more about us than a picture of a church.” Another is holding out for the bench at the top of Fennel Row, “because everyone’s sat on it and nobody knows why.”
Elaine is staying neutral, as ever. “I’ll print whatever wins. But I’ll say this much — the ones that last aren’t the pretty ones. They’re the ones that were slightly odd at the time. In forty years, nobody’s going to want a picture of a nice view. They’ll want the argument.”
If you have a nomination, or a towel you think Ruth ought to know about, the stall is open on Saturdays from nine until the biscuits run out. Bring the towel. Bring the story. The drawer has room.
