Context (Acquisition Details)
Donated by Elizabeth Blaney.
Father Carter returned to England before WWII. After the War the donor's Godmother, Miss Lucy Cook, became Father Carter's housekeeper. Miss Cook inherited the objects and photograph when Father Carter died in the early 1950s. On Miss Cook's death in 1990, the costume was given to the donor by Miss Cook's nephew, on the understanding that the donor would pass it on to an anthropological or ethnographic collection.
Event Date 2003
Author: rachel hand

Description (Physical description)
Accession register: Cloth worn as robe.
Event Date 2003
Author: Imogen Gunn (admin)

Context (Display)
Exhibited in Talking Textiles, a display in the Maudslay Gallery to celebrate the year of Africa 2005 and curated by the Textile Project team.
Captioned: 'Three kente cloths 2003.169, 2003.170, 2003.171
These large rectangular cloths are made of cotton and were worn in the early twentieth century. Silk is used for royal cloths, one of which is displayed in the West Africa case at the opposite side of this gallery. Each cloth, when fully unfolded, is almost three metres long and two metres wide. It is made from about 20 individually woven narrow strips, each about 10 cm across. The dazzling pattern on all three cloths combines stripes in the warp (the vertical threads) with supplementary weft-float patterning in the weft (the horizontal threads). Finally, the woven strips are sewn together edge to edge, so that the individual designs combine to form an overall pattern. The small display case behind you explains narrow strip weaving in more detail.'
Event Date 2005
Author: rachel hand

Context (References)
Illustrated in Tabitha Cadbury and Fanny Wonu Veys (2006). World Costume and Textiles at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in the Journal of Museum Ethnography No. 18, 'Looking Backward, Looking Forward': Papers from the Thirtieth Anniversary Conference Held at Manchester Museum, 9–10 May 2005 (May 2006), pp. 105-114

Figure 4. 'The newly refurbished textile display case during an exhibition o/kente cloths from Ghana. The three cloths, with a pair of sandals, were donated to the museum in 2003 and are accompanied here by a photograph of them being worn in the 1930s. From a photograph taken by Fanny Wonu Veys in October 2005.'

Event Date 2006
Author: rachel hand

Description (Physical description)
Cloth worn as robe. Wide horizontal and vertical stripes create a woven pattern. Primary colours are green and cream.
Event Date 9/8/2018
Author: Imogen Gunn (admin)

Context (Amendments / updates)
The 2005 Talking Textiles exhibition text noted that 'This group of objects - the photograph, the three kente cloths and the pair of sandals - were donated to the Museum by Mrs. Margaret Blaney in 2003. They originally belonged to Father Carter, who was given the costumes when he was working as an Anglican priest on the Gold Coast (now called Ghana) in the 1920s.'

However the register notes the donor as Elizabeth Blaney and Anglican priests are not usually referred to as 'Father', a term more commonly associated with Roman Catholic clergy.
Event Date 6/10/2022
Author: rachel hand

Description (Physical description)
Robe. Strips of cloth with green, red, blue and yellow horizontal stripes are sewn together to make a large rectangular piece of fabric worn as a robe. Sewn between these panels are yellow and green panels with two embroidered orange lines. Possibly Kente cloth.
Event Date 11/4/2022
Author: Louise Puckett