POWERHOUSE COLLECTION

Booklet 'The Grey Sock'

Object No. 2001/45/2

This booklet was printed by the Soldiers' Sock Fund to provide instruction for knitting socks for soldiers during World War One. Proceeds from the sales of the booklet also went to the fund. The Soldiers' Sock Fund was one of a number of comfort funds and organisations launched in the first two years of the First World War in Australia. Among the others were the Australian Branch of the British Red Cross, the Lord Mayor's Patriotic and War Fund of New South Wales and the Australian Comfort Fund or ACF. By 1916 most of the funds had been consolidated into the Red Cross or the ACF. It is likely therefore that this booklet was published during 1914 or 1915. Soldiers' funds typically organised the manufacture and/or collection of clothing and foodstuffs for troops at the front. Woollen socks were particularly popular. Such contributions were made primarily by women and schoolgirls and were seen as the appropriate homefront manifestations of loyalty and patriotism by women. Thousands of women and girls participated, moved by personal and/or national and imperial loyalties. The organisations were often run by society women such as Lady Eliza Cullen, wife of Chief Justice Sir William Portus Cullen and daughter of wealthy grazier RHD White. Indeed the committee list in this booklet indicates that Lady Cullen was a member of the Soldiers's Sock Fund. She was also a founding vice president, and later president of the New South Wales division of the Red Cross. She held fundraising events in the grounds of the her Balmoral mansion, Tregoyd. Ian Hoskins Curator 2000