Connecting with Gertrude

1931, just outside of the “realm of eternal snow” in the Himalayas, Miss Gertrude Benham (aged 62) sat peacefully knitting in her tent.¹ Benham’s outwardly eccentric practice of knitting and embroidering in some of the most inhospitable climes of the British Empire was both a pleasurable pastime and an economic necessity, and more besides: “I am never lonely,” she notes in one of few surviving letters, “in my spare time I knit or do embroidery, of which I am very fond. I spend a great deal of time in painting and sketching.”² Benham’s diverse making practices enabled her travels; selling and trading her own work as well as tools, calico and threads supplemented her small inheritance and helped her to finance eight circumnavigations of the globe. Having learnt mountaineering skills under her father’s tutelage in the European Alps, where she climbed “practically every important mountain,” Benham set off in 1904, after her parents’ death, to travel the world.³ As well as being the first person to ascend a number of peaks in the Canadian Rockies, Benham’s most notable achievements were extended expeditions in Africa, including being disputably the first European woman to climb Mt Kilimanjaro (in 1909) and the ten years she spent off and on in India between 1909–1931.⁴ In addition to enabling her travels, Benham’s making practices, shaped her encounters with the communities she passed through, formed the basis for her relations with scientific institutions in the UK, including the Royal Geographical Society, and created the coordinates of her collecting agenda. The result of the latter was a collection of thousands of handcrafted objects—jewellery, costumes, accessories, metalwork, lacquer-ware, ceramics, toys, and religious articles—from around the world.