Obituary of Creassey Edward Cecil Tattersall

Creassey Edward Cecil Tattersall (1877–) was a well-known authority on carpets. He first joined the Victoria & Albert Museum as a cataloguer and then worked on the technical side. In 1915 he joined the Department of Textiles and 1934 became Keeper.

From The Times, 29 October 1957

Mr C E C Tattersall, a former keeper of the Department of Textiles in the Victoria and Albert Museum and a well-known authority on carpets, died at Lyme Regis on Saturday. He was 80.

Creassey Edward Cecil Tattersall was born in London, the son of Edward Tattersall, in 1877. He was educated at the City of London School and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He went to the Victoria and Albert Museum first of all as a cataloguer and then worked on the technical side. Eventually, in 1934, in succession to Professor A J B Wace, he became Keeper of the Department of Textiles, which he had joined in 1915. He retired from the museum in 1937. He was unmarried.

Tattersall's strong point was his technical knowledge, especially of carpets and he established the now widely adopted practice of entering, in any description, a short technical analysis of the weave and texture of the carpet in question. He collaborated with the late A F Kendrick in two important books published in 1924, 'Hand-woven Carpets, Oriental and European' (in two volumes), and 'Fine Carpets in the Victoria and Albert Museum'. In 1934 there appeared the most important of his non-collaborative works, 'A History of British Carpets', which dealt both with the historical aspect and with the great contemporary carpet-weaving establishments. 'The Carpets of Persia', issued at the time of the Persian Exhibition in 1931, was an extremely useful short summary of its subject. His 'Notes on Carpet-Weaving and Knotting', written for the Victoria and Albert Museum, has proved a very popular little book. Tattersall also wrote on chess.

Reproduced with kind permission of The Times
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