The mystery of the Dalston Hall hanging

Through the C F A Voysey Society the author received a photograph taken in 1968 of a very large, C F A Voysey designed applique hanging, displayed in Dalston Hall, a Cumbrian fortified manor (now a hotel), along with a covering letter (of the same date) addressed to Barbara Morris (the late, Deputy Keeper of the V&A museum) describing its condition. As Voysey produced very few designs for hand-worked textiles the documented existence of a huge applique hanging designed by the architect, but now considered lost, was worthy of investigation. As the documentation came from a period before the widespread re-evaluation of avant-garde Victorian & Edwardian design, the concern was that as with much ‘Victoriana’ in the 1960s, the applique had simply been destroyed. The paper documents the detective work undertaken (identifying and accessing various primary sources), to firmly establish the object’s designer, provenance and finally, the likely fate of the hanging. It establishes a chronology for the piece and addresses notions of cultural value through time and changing circumstance as the hanging passes from a private realm to a corporate domain.