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BONFIRE Bonfire knitting Key to smugglers’ jumpers If, like me, you’re not a member of a Bonfire society, have you ever wondered about the smugglers’ jumpers, as you see them processing through the town on the 5th? Also, which colours represent which Bonfire society? Opposite is a quick guide. (Thanks to Sussex Flags for this.) So, who knits the Guernseys? Each bonfire society has a number of knitters, and the Stitchery in the Riverside also publishes online a ‘Free Knitting Pattern’, which includes details of all the different wool colours. Among other gems, this pattern tells us that every stripe – or ‘hoop’, as they’re properly known – is fifteen rows deep, whether the Guernsey is to be worn by a baby or a grownup. You learn something new every day! “Ideally the jumpers should be knitted in natural wool (it is self-extinguishing and doesn’t melt),” Saira Foden of the Stitchery told us. “But we can’t get the range of colours and it works out expensive.” So what’s the alternative? “Most of our Bonfire customers buy acrylic yarn and fire proof it”, she says. “They also, sensibly, wear cotton layers underneath, we understand, for warmth and protection (we sell the fire-check spray too).” And why smugglers’ jumpers in the first place? One suggestion we heard was that maybe they originated as a disguise – so everyone looked the same. Back in the years following 1847 when the Riot Act was read on the 5th, and the Bonfire Boys dispersed, they were subsequently recognised and arrested. “In those days, the likelihood was”, Nevill Juveniles’ Philip Amey told us, “that a lot of the Bonfire Boys may have been involved with the fishing industry, and their wives would have been knitting them Guernseys already.” Photo by Carlotta Luke “When I’m not knitting, I’m gardening, and this beautiful sunny morning the gardening won out!” Mary Newnham beams. Mary is one of five or six knitters producing smugglers’ jumpers each year for Nevill Juveniles, the Society’s Merchandise Manager Roger Palmer tells me. She lives in the Nevill, but she’s also a lifelong member (“for fifty years”) of Commercial Square, for which she also knits. “I probably knitted half a dozen jumpers for Nevill this year”, she says. “I knit the main body on the machine, then top and tail by hand. The Nevill colours – green and white – are easier on my eyesight than the Commercial Square – gold and black. The black’s trickiest!” Is it true, I ask, that smugglers’ jumpers are never washed? Mary laughs. “A true Bonfire person won’t wash their jumper”, she says. “I have a friend who’s never washed hers, and she won’t mind me saying, it reeks! But I wash mine – just once, at the end of each season. Mine’s been going twenty years now – though I knitted an extension, at some point, to make it longer.” The jumpers Mary knits are made of acrylic, then sprayed to make them inflammable. What she loves most about Bonfire is that it’s “a thing whole families do together”. Of course, loads of work goes on behind the scenes: “the knitting’s nothing”. Nevill Juveniles is held on a Saturday a couple of weeks before the big day (this year it was on 20th October). “Gets the smoke in the jumpers”, is how Mary puts it. Charlotte Gann 123