Stitches in time

When Martha Ann Ricks was 76 she travelled from her home in Liberia to London to meet Queen Victoria. The daughter of a slave, who had purchased freedom for his family from his American owner and taken them to west Africa, she wanted to honour the Queen whom she believed had played a pivotal role in abolishing slavery. ‘She stoops,’ Ricks told a reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette of that meeting in a corridor at Windsor Castle on 16 July 1892, ‘and I don’t stoop though I’m older than her… But she has had troubles, great troubles. No wonder her shoulders are bent.’

Ricks considered herself fortunate that aged 13 she had been taken from the Tennessee plantation where she had been born and had thereafter lived as a free person. Quite how she saved enough to buy her passage to England was not explained, nor whether she travelled alone. But she made headlines and the photograph taken of her at the time was turned into a postcard for sale to the public (it’s now in the National Portrait Gallery, Martha dressed in a heavy black cape and extravagant bonnet).

In her diary, the Queen recorded that ‘the old lady was short and very black with a kind face’. No mention of the quilt that Martha had stitched herself and presented to the Queen was made, and the quilt has long since disappeared, possibly lost among the vast number of gifts from loyal subjects stashed away in Windsor Castle, Osborne House, Buckingham Palace. Its design, though, was recorded by the papers — a large coffee tree embroidered on to white satin, with berries of red and green, a man gathering the coffee, and a border of passion flowers.

In Looking for Martha’s Quilt (Saturday) on the World Service, Martha’s descendant Beryl Dennis and producer Penny Dale went in search not just of the quilt but also of Martha’s story.