Ford Madox Brown and William Morris

A bell pull that names two designers

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a bell pull under museum number O89269. It is made of velvet embroidered with silks, and it has brass fastenings and a ring.

The embroidery is worked in stem stitches, satin stitches and couching, according to the museum's record.

A bell pull of this kind was a working object, not a picture. The brass ring and fastenings recorded by the museum show its function in use: a pull to ring a bell.

What the museum record attributes, and to whom

The V&A's record lists William Morris as the primary maker of the bell pull, with a primary date of around 1865. The same record lists Ford Madox Brown as a designer alongside Morris, so the object carries two names rather than one.

The V&A record gives the manufacturer as Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. It also lists Jane Morris as one of the embroiderers, which places the needlework itself, at least in part, in her hands.

Because the attribution to Brown rests on a single source, it should be read with care. The V&A description hedges the point: it says the bell pull was designed by William Morris or Ford Madox Brown, and that it was possibly embroidered by Jane Morris. The museum is recording uncertainty between the two designers, not settling on Brown alone.

Jane Morris's possible role as embroiderer, as recorded by the V&A, connects this object to the wider story of the women who worked the firm's textiles. Her embroidery work is covered in more depth on our page about Jane Morris as an embroiderer.

Dating the bell pull: two readings of one record

The museum record gives two date readings, and they do not resolve into a single neat chronology. According to the V&A, the design is dated to around 1865, while the embroidery, possibly by Jane Morris, is placed in the 1870s. The record also gives production dates of around 1865 and around the 1870s for the object as a whole.

Read together, these dates suggest a design from the mid 1860s worked into embroidery over the following years, though the record itself does not state that sequence as fact. On this object the record leaves the interval as a range rather than a documented sequence.

The designer attribution carries the same caution. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. produced the bell pull according to the V&A record, and the record names Morris as primary maker, but the designer is given as Morris or Brown without a decision between them. Any account that states flatly that Brown designed this bell pull goes beyond what the museum record says.

Who commissioned it and where it came from

The donor of the bell pull was Annette Wormald, described by the V&A as a friend of Jane Morris. According to the museum's record, Wormald commissioned Morris & Co. to produce furnishings for her home at Woodcote Hall in Carshalton, Surrey.

That commission detail matters for how the object is read. The V&A record ties it to a commission by someone close to Jane Morris, with Jane Morris herself possibly among the embroiderers. The friendship recorded in the donor information places the object in the personal circle around the Morris household as well as the firm's output.

The provenance trail in the record therefore runs from a private commission, through Wormald's ownership, to the museum. What the record does not give is the original location the bell pull was made for, or any account of where it hung before it reached the V&A.

What the evidence does and does not tell us about Brown

The sources supplied for this page do not establish Ford Madox Brown's birth and death dates. They do not record when or how he met William Morris, the span of their collaboration, or any other works the two made together with object records. Readers should treat wider claims about Brown's life and career accordingly, and check them against sources that document them directly.

This is a real limit, and it shapes what this page can honestly say. The documented evidence here rests on one object and its museum record. A single bell pull, however well recorded, cannot carry a full biography.

For readers who want the wider context, two pages on this journal set out the circles Brown moved in. The William Morris biography follows Morris's life and the firm's development on a timeline, and our page on Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites covers the artistic circle that connected the two men. The firm itself, under its founding name, is treated separately in our piece on Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.

If you want to see how the firm's textile designs translate into printed form, our collection of Morris and Morris-style prints gathers the designs currently available. Prints in the collection follow their own classification, and Morris-style designs are clearly labelled as such rather than presented as Morris originals.