History of crochet in Britain: a dated timeline

A nightcap in the Highlands

In 1812 or 1813, at Inverdruie in the Highlands, an old captain of “eighty-five or eighty-six” sat in his corner chair wearing a nightcap “made by his industrious wife in a stitch she called shepherd’s knitting”. Elizabeth Grant, whose great-grand-uncle he was, remembered that it “was done with a little hook which she manufactured for herself out of the tooth of an old tortoise-shell comb”, and that Mrs Grant went on “looping her home-spun wool as quick as fingers could move”, making caps, drawers and waistcoats for him. It is the earliest British description of hooked work we found. Treat the date with care, though. Grant began writing her Memoirs of a Highland Lady in 1845, when crochet was already in fashion, and finished the part that was printed in 1867. We read an 1898 impression of the John Murray edition, page 182.

The name is a clue. Thirty years later, Miss Lambert wrote that crochet needles were “sometimes called shepherds’ hooks”, and the simplest stitch in Mlle Riego’s 1846 book is “shepherd’s crochet”.

The first printed patterns are older than any British book, and here we rely on other people’s research. Ruthie Marks’s History of Crochet, posted on the Crochet Guild of America’s website and drawing on the Danish researcher Lis Paludan, says the earliest crochet patterns known were printed in 1824, for purses of gold and silver silk. She adds that between 1824 and 1833 the Dutch magazine Penélopé told readers to hold both the hook and the yarn in the right hand. We couldn’t open Penélopé ourselves; a library catalogue confirms only that it existed, from 1821. Paludan, as Marks quotes her, found it “impossible to find evidence of crochet in Europe before 1800”.

In Britain, the craft arrived as a fashion. Miss Lambert’s The Hand-book of Needlework (London, 1842) says crochet, “although long known and practised, did not attract particular attention until within the last four years”, which points to about 1838 (page 207). Two years later, in My Crochet Sampler, she put it “within the last seven years”, about 1837. The earliest British instruction book we could open, Mrs Gaugain’s The Lady’s Assistant (Edinburgh, 1840), hadn’t settled the spelling or even the name. Its title page offers “crotchet work”, and its contents head the section “Tambour, or Crotchet”.

Tambour was embroidery worked through stretched cloth with a hooked needle, and Marks traces crochet to it. An 1883 history of the Irish lace trade makes the same link: “Whoever suggested the tambour needle, for ladies to amuse themselves in producing crochet work, at the same time indirectly conferred a great boon on the poor.”

The pattern-book boom of the 1840s

Within a decade the shelves filled. A search of the Internet Archive for titles containing “crochet” dated 1840 to 1849 returns 40 scans: Mrs Gaugain in Edinburgh; Miss Lambert, Miss Watts, Cornelia Mee and Mlle Riego de la Branchardière in London; and New York editions, including reprints of Lambert’s two books. Many of the scans were made by the University of Southampton Library.

Lambert also explains why crochet spread so fast. In thick fleecy wool with an ivory hook, she wrote, it “may be learned without even looking at it, and has therefore been much practised by invalids and persons whose sight either needs relief, or has become impaired”.

Riego became the best known. Her Knitting, Crochet, and Netting (London, 1846) already uses double crochet and treble in the sense British crocheters still use. Her Crochet Book of 1847, the first of a cheap series, turns old lace into thread: Point d’Angleterre, Point d’Espagne, Point de Guise and a Mary Stuart collar, all “designed from the picturesque costumes of past times”, as the preface puts it. By 1870 her seventeenth Crochet Book carried “By appointment to H.R.H. the Princess of Wales” on its title page and a prize medal from the 1862 International Exhibition, awarded “for the skill displayed in the imitation of old Spanish and other costly laces”.

That 1870 book was built around antimacassars, the covers that kept men’s hair oil off chair backs. Its back pages carry a puff for Rowland’s Macassar Oil, the hair oil the covers were named after. Victorian crochet sold both the problem and the cure.

Ireland: crochet against the famine

Irish crochet was already being made before the Great Famine. The V&A dates a long fichu of “fine Irish crochet” to about 1840 (T.95-1969), and a sample book worked by the Armstrong family of Boyle, County Roscommon, in the early 1840s includes crochet samples (T.62-1951). The 1883 history of the lace trade, printed for an exhibition at the Mansion House in London, puts it this way: “Evidently it was known before the famine, but the famine brought out and proved its worth to the Irish people.”

The same history tells how. The Ursuline nuns at Blackrock, County Cork, added industrial training to their day school for poor children, and “in the year 1845 they received about ninety pounds on the work they had taught their scholars to do”. In 1847, when the orders for knitted jackets failed, Mrs W. C. Roberts of Thornton, County Kildare, had six or eight of her best workers taught to crochet. Each then had to teach three others, “until hundreds were taught”, and anyone who held back got no work until they had. The distress was so great, the report adds, that boys learned crochet too. Twenty-four of the best were sent out to teach in other parts of Ireland.

The two places then went opposite ways. At one time as many as 700 people around Thornton were earning money with the crochet needle, yet by 1883 someone was asking in Dublin for a teacher to go into Kildare and show the young people how to crochet. One of the 24 teachers, though, had gone to Clones, County Monaghan, at the request of Mrs Hand, wife of the rector, the Rev. T. Hand. The poor came for miles to the rectory to learn, and the 1883 report illustrates crochet labelled with the town’s name.

The report says Irish crochet “formed a conspicuous element of the great exhibition of 1851”, and it is blunt about the trade’s weakness: “The leading characteristic of this work is cheapness.” In the 1850s an order for shamrock-pattern collars at 12s 6d a dozen was cut by a rival offer to 2s 6d, and the goods were finally resold in Ireland for about 1s 6d, “almost too mean even for the poor Irish to buy or wear”. The Knitting & Crochet Guild’s summary says the crochet schools of the 1850s and 1860s declined, and that “most of the Irish crochet we know today” dates from a revival between about 1880 and 1910.

By then much of the best work was leaving the country. Alan Cole, who wrote catalogues of the lace acquired by the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A), noted in 1888 that in Paris Irish crochet “generally passes under the name of Point d’Irlande”, and that “the better classes of Irish crochet lace are not known in England at all”. At the Blackrock convent, on a visit reported in 1887, he found “Crochet is made here. But little or no progress has been made” with new designs.

Queen Victoria’s scarves

Queen Victoria did crochet, and the evidence we could check is in Canberra. The Australian War Memorial holds a Queen’s Scarf awarded to Private Alfred Du Frayer of the 1st New South Wales Mounted Rifles. On 11 April 1900, near Karee Siding in South Africa, his patrol rode into a farmhouse enclosure flying a white flag and was fired on by Boers hidden in a donga. Du Frayer got a semi-conscious comrade, Private Clark, up behind him on his horse and out of danger.

According to the Memorial, the Queen crocheted the scarves in the last year of her life and embroidered the royal cipher VRI in red silk in a corner of each. Half were meant for British soldiers and half for men of the colonial forces, but she died before she could present them. Du Frayer received his from the Duke of York, the future George V, at a military review in Centennial Park, Sydney, in May 1901. It was worn like a sergeant’s sash, over the right shoulder.

The catalogue is honest about the work. The scarf is 16cm wide and 183cm long with its fringe, and the width is uneven: the pattern should repeat six times a row, but “this is not always the case”. “Queen Victoria’s eyesight was poor when she made the scarves”, and the future Queen Mary, then Duchess of York, “recalled having to unpick rows to correct the stitching”.

The Memorial’s entries don’t agree on the details. The scarf’s own record describes it as khaki wool, while the history in the same record says the scarves were crocheted from deep gold Berlin wool, and that there were eight. The entry for a photograph of the scarf also says deep gold Berlin wool, but six scarves. We give both rather than choose. Beyond the scarves, we couldn’t find a museum or archive source for the other things often said about the Queen and crochet, so we’ve left them out.

Four stories the sources don’t support

Crochet is nuns’ lace from Renaissance Italy. Marks quotes the American writer Annie Potter saying crochet as we know it “was developed during the 16th century”, and Paludan noting that “a great many sources” place it in 1500s Italy as nun’s work. Paludan looked, found lace and a kind of lace tape but no crochet, and concluded that “all indications are that crochet was not known in Italy as far back as the 16th century”.

Crochet is Scottish, perfected in England. That is Miss Lambert’s claim in My Crochet Sampler (1844): crochet was “originally practised by the peasants in Scotland, with a small hooked needle called a shepherd’s hook” and reached “its highest degree of perfection in England”, while France and Germany, “although unjustifiably, have claimed the invention”. Mrs Grant’s shepherd’s knitting fits the first half. But Lambert gives no evidence, and Marks dates the first printed patterns to 1824, 20 years before she wrote.

Riego invented Irish crochet. Marks records that Riego “claimed to have invented ‘lace-like’ crochet”, today called Irish crochet. The V&A’s Irish fichu is dated about 1840, earlier than any Riego book we found (the earliest is from 1846), and the 1883 history says plainly: “It is not remembered into whose hands it first came.”

The Queen’s Scarf ranked with the Victoria Cross. The Australian War Memorial says some recipients later claimed it was of equal standing to a Victoria Cross, “although this was not the case”, and that they weren’t entitled to put QS after their names.

How one stitch got two names

The early British books name stitches by what is on the hook. Lambert’s 1844 key defines “plain single crochet” as one loop drawn through each stitch, which we now call a slip stitch, and “plain double crochet” as the one where “two loops are kept on the needle”. Riego’s 1847 Crochet Book calls the same stitch “Plain stitch, called French or double crochet”, then adds the treble, worked with the thread round the needle first. That is exactly today’s UK double crochet and treble.

The surprise is how early the American names appear. Ann S. Stephens’s The Ladies’ Complete Guide to Crochet, Fancy Knitting, and Needlework, published in New York in 1854, has a separate slip stitch, then a “single crochet” worked with two loops and a “double crochet” that starts with the thread over the hook. Those are today’s US names, 90 years before the 1944 leaflet below. Only her “long treble”, with the thread three times round, doesn’t match modern US use.

They didn’t win at once. In 1880 the New York Tribune’s Knitting and Crochet manual announced that, “after careful comparison of the most competent foreign authorities and of the patterns sent to this department from domestic sources”, it had “determined to change the code of terms in crochet hitherto used, and make it conform to that most in use among our subscribers”. Its new key defines single stitch, double crochet, treble, long and extra long exactly as Riego’s 1870 book does, with her plain stitch renamed double crochet. In other words, the names most of the Tribune’s readers used in 1880 were the ones we now call UK terms.

Clark’s Crochet Book (St Joseph, Missouri, 1915) still used double and treble in the British sense. J. & P. Coats’s Crochet Book No. 2 (Pawtucket, Rhode Island, catalogued as 1917) mixed the two: a single stitch for the US single crochet, a treble for the US double, and a “half treble” that is really a cluster. By 1944, the abbreviation key in a leaflet from the Spool Cotton Company, distributor of J. & P. Coats and Clark’s O.N.T. threads, read sc single crochet, h dc half double crochet, dc double crochet and tr treble, as US patterns do today.

Britain kept its own logic, and for a long time kept the old meaning of single crochet too. A Weldon’s Practical Needlework issue on doilies, undated but printed after 1913 (an advert in it cites a 1913 patent), still defines “s.c., single crochet or slip-stitch”. We didn’t find a source that explains why the US settled on its names, so we won’t guess. What the books show is that both systems were in print by 1854, that US publishers switched back and forth for decades, and that by the 1940s the split looked as it does now. The double crochet UK vs US guide has the full modern conversion.

Soldiers’ caps, make do and mend, and the granny square

Crochet went to war too. Weldon’s booklet Garments and Hospital Comforts for our Soldiers and Sailors, catalogued as from the 1910s, calls for working parties to make “shirts, nightingales, socks” for “the Sailors, Soldiers, and Territorials”. Among the knitting is a Soldier’s Ribbed Crochet Sleeping Cap in double crochet, using 3 ounces of Baldwin & Walker’s Primrose Petticoat Wool and a bone crochet hook No. 10, with “a loose folded edge which can be pulled down”. That is about 85g of wool.

The Knitting & Crochet Guild says that in the late 1970s knitting and crochet “were only just starting to emerge as fashion-related crafts after the make-do-and-mend ethos of the war and post war years”. Two pieces in the V&A show crochet being worn and sold for fun a little earlier. One is a hand-crocheted wool tank top in orange, black, purple and pink, made by Elizabeth Wilson, who wore it to the first Gay Liberation Front ball at Kensington Town Hall in 1971, which the museum calls the first open, publicly advertised gay dance in the UK (T.947-1994). The other is an unopened 1970s Airfix craft kit for a crochet belt, with orange thread, white rings and a red plastic hook (B.412:1-1998).

The granny square is harder to date. US publishers had whole books on it by the mid-1970s, such as The Woman’s Day Book of Granny Squares and Other Carry-Along Crochet (New York, 1975) and Illustrated Patchwork Crochet: Contemporary Granny Squares for Clothing and Home Decorating (New York, 1976). The earliest granny-style square we found in British print is a shawl in The Lady’s Crochet-Book, published by Hatchards of Piccadilly in 1877; our history of the granny square follows the motif from there, so treat any earlier origin story with caution.

The Guild, the archive and the blog years

The Knitting & Crochet Guild was founded in 1978 and launched its quarterly journal, Slipknot, the same year. It became a charity in 1990, when its Collection was also set up after an exhibition at the Bradford Textiles Festival, and in 2014 it was given the entire Patons archive. Its collection now holds more than 52,000 pattern leaflets from spinners, from long-gone names such as Woolworth to Patons, Sirdar and Wendy.

Then crochet moved online. Lucy of Attic24, in North Yorkshire, began blogging in 2008 and designing her own crochet projects that summer. She has since shared more than a hundred patterns free, and Wool Warehouse sells yarn kits for her blankets. She says she wanted her patterns to be “more than pages of abbreviated text and guesswork”, so she wrote photo-heavy tutorials for beginners instead.

How to read an old pattern today

Start by dating the pattern. In the British books we read, from Lambert in 1844 to the Weldon’s issue printed after 1913, single crochet or single stitch means a slip stitch, and plain stitch means double crochet. Long or long treble usually means a double treble, but Stephens’s 1854 long treble is a triple treble. The conversion table below covers the names we found. In a US leaflet before the 1940s, check the key, because double and treble may be British-style, and even “tc” changes meaning from book to book.

Then convert. For modern UK and US terms, paste the pattern into the US and UK crochet terms converter. It knows today’s names, not Victorian ones, so swap the old words by hand first using the table. Old hook sizes are numbers, not millimetres, and run backwards; the crochet hook sizes chart gives the old UK numbers next to mm. Treat a Victorian bone or steel hook number with care, as makers’ numbering varied.

Finally, the yarn. Old patterns give ounces and long-gone yarn names. One ounce is 28.35g, so the soldier’s cap’s 3 ounces is about 85g. Work out the thickness from the hook size and the UK yarn weights guide, then turn grams into metres with the grams-to-metres converter to choose a yarn you can buy today. We’ve read these books and leaflets, but we haven’t worked their patterns ourselves.

Common questions

Sources and scope

• archive.org/details/memoirsofhighlan00graniala
• web.archive.org/web/20160331223254/http://www.crochet.org/resource/resmgr/pdf/history-of-crochet-rm.pdf
• catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/brief/htid/umn.31951002797142b.json
• archive.org/details/krl00402951
• archive.org/details/krl00394037
• archive.org/details/mycrochetsample00lambgoog
• archive.org/details/knittingcrochet00brangoog
• archive.org/details/crochetbook00brangoog
• archive.org/details/crochetbookseven00rieg
• archive.org/details/ladiescompletegu00step
• archive.org/details/krl00377222
• archive.org/details/weldons-practical-crochet-v-24-n-285
• archive.org/details/clarkscrochetboo00clar
• archive.org/details/jpcoats-2
• archive.org/details/c-c-0217-1944-comp
• archive.org/details/krl00537000
• archive.org/details/mansionhouseexh00housgoog
• archive.org/details/IrishLace
• archive.org/details/cu31924014557130
• archive.org/details/supplementaldesc00sout
• collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O361975/
• collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O319861/
• collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O141006/
• collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O7985/
• www.awm.gov.au/collection/C94158
• www.awm.gov.au/collection/C1008969
• kcguild.org.uk/preserving/knitting-crochet-guild-history/
• kcguild.org.uk/collection/taster/taster-topics/irish-crochet-taster/
• kcguild.org.uk/collection/taster/taster-topics/pattern-leaflets-taster/
• web.archive.org/web/20260919131213/https://attic24.co.uk/about/
• archive.org/details/womansdaybookofg00newy
• archive.org/details/illustratedpatch00scha
• archive.org/advancedsearch.php

Sources checked 3 October 2026. Label facts come from the linked references; worked purchase examples and arithmetic are our own illustrations.