CONTENTS
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Lynn Knight
Dedication
Title Page
Preface: Family Buttons and Vintage Finds
1. The Jet Button: From Mourning to Glamour
2. The Blackcurrant Button: Elementary Sewing and the White-Blouse Revolution
‘The Lasses’ Resolution to Follow the Fashion’
3. Girls Rule OK: The Purple, White and Green
4. The Silver Thimble: The First World War and Munitionettes
5. The Shoe Button: Bachelor Girls Stride Ahead
Independent Living in the 1920s
6. The Mackintosh Button: Derring-Do and Fantasy Photographs
7. The Linen Button: Small Miracles on Small Means
A 1930s Button-Making Machine
8. The Baby’s Button: ‘Pray Let partiuclare care be taken’en off this Child’
9. Eva’s Glove Button: Model Gowns and Inexpensive Dress
10. The Interwar Fashion Button: Tennis and Afternoon Tea
11. The Edge-to-Edge Clasp: Kissproof Lipstick and Ginger Rogers Frocks
Instructions from Miss Towsey, Draper
12. The Twinkling Button: Stitch in the Chic
13. The Blue Slide Buckle: A Paintbox of Summer Colour
Buttons and How to Make Them
14. The Silver-and-Blue Button: Good Little Suits in Wartime
The Women’s Land Army: Uniform
15. The Land Army Button: Uniforms Not Uniformity
16. The Velvet Flowers: Hats
17. The Coat Button: Post-War and the New Look
Woman’s Clothing Budget
18. The Small, Drab Button: Office Life in the 1950s
19. The ‘Perfect’ Button: The Etiquette of Dress
20. The Doll’s-House Doorknob: Homemaking Large and Small
21. The Ladybird Button: Childhood
22. Suspenders: Corsetry, Scanties (& Sex)
23. The Apron Button: Domesticity
Buttonholes Step-by-Step
24. The Diamanté Clasp: A Little Razzle Dazzle
25. The Toggle: God, This Modern Youth!
26. The Turquoise Button: The New Kind of Woman
27. The Statement Button: Biba and the Hankering for Vintage
Clothing Prices: 1970–79
28. Pearl Buttons: Full Circle
Notes
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Copyright
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781448191536
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VINTAGE
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Copyright © Lynn Knight 2016
Lynn Knight has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Chatto & Windus in 2016
Illustrations by Willa Gebbie.
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780701188917
For my mother
Clarice Cliff
Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue:
The Story of an Accidental Family
I reach into the button box to find the spangled mother-of-pearl criss-crossed with lines and the smaller pearl buttons with serrated edges I remember from my childhood. Here too are workaday reds, blues and greens; flats, domes and globes, diminutive glass flowers and glinting diamantés.
I used to love the rattle and whoosh of my grandma’s buttons as they scattered from their Quality Street tin, but the tin has done its duty: my own button box is a Victorian writing case with zig-zag bands of marquetry and inlaid mother of pearl. I no longer hear the delicious sound of buttons striking metal but it is still a pleasure to delve for the button whose fish-eye holes, cut diagonally for thread, transform a simple square into diamond-shaped glamour.
As a very small child, I spent Friday afternoons at the house my grandma Annie shared with my great-aunt Eva. The Quality Street tin lodged on a window sill beside the one for Blue Bird Toffees which held my grandma’s cotton reels. Buttons stood in for both sweets and currency in the games of shop the three of us played; their kitchen steps were my counter, askew in the pantry doorway. These afternoons also meant Jacobean-print curtains, lemon-scented geraniums and a stained-glass bureau whose individual panes I could trace with my fingertips; there was a rag rug before the hearth and a radio but no television. When my mum came to collect me, straight from town, in her nail polish and belted trench coat, she brought the 1960s into their sitting room.
My grandma’s buttons reached back into the past with metal-shanked beauties from the nineteenth century and came forward into my childhood with the pale blue waterlily buttons and ladybirds she stitched on to the clothes she made for me. These buttons now sit among others I have amassed and some of my mother’s too. (She, having a mother who at one time sewed for a living, has made it her business to do as little sewing as possible.) I cannot see the buttons without conjuring up the garments they fastened; the eye-popping turquoise buttons from my mum’s sixties suit so very different in their message from the jet buttons of yesteryear, and the jet buttons themselves, different again from one another, whether fastening ankle-length Edwardian coats that just about swished clear of grimy pavements, or twinkling in a suggestion of upholstered, prickly bodices stiff with beads. I can hardly grasp the tiny buttons that fastened 1920s shoes; no wonder my great-aunt Eva’s handbags from that time always held a buttonhook. Octagonal buttons recall a trim jacket of hers from the 1940s, that era of morale-boosting suits; a silk-covered button comes from the Chinese-style jacket my mum wore in the late 1950s, while expecting me. A Times leader rightly described button boxes as ‘an epitome of family history’.1
My grandma Annie was born in 1892, the decade of the New Woman. Times were changing and this working-class girl was photographed standing proudly with the bicycle that took her to grammar school. My great-aunt Eva was born in 1901 on the day of Queen Victoria’s funeral. Not one for formal lessons, Eva left school as soon as she could and joined my great-grandma Betsy behind the counter of the family’s corner shop on the outskirts of Chesterfield, Derbyshire.
My great-grandfather’s name was above the door but, like many men in the district, he was engaged in industrial work of one kind or another; the shop was run by my great-grandma. This small shop served a straggle of terraced houses with basic foodstuffs, animal feed and occasional fripperies; linen buttons too, for sewing on to working men’s shirts: the majority of customers in this tight small community were the wives of the colliery and foundry men who worked nearby and relied on the shop for groceries and more besides.
There was an Edwardian fastidiousness about my grandma Annie, whereas Eva was as sprightly as the 1920s, the decade when she came of age. My great-aunt was a good playmate when my brother and I were small; if anyone was likely to lead you into mischief it was Eva. More than the many games we played, I remember my delight when, as a teenager in the early 1970s, I discovered clothes my grandma and great-aunt had worn years earlier and had carefully put away: floor-length ribboned nightgowns with lacework bodices, a black silk dress buttoned with tiny glass flowers; a shimmering art-deco scarf. Old was becoming modern and, in some circles at least, vintage was newly chic (though, back in the day, ‘vintage’ was plain ‘second-hand’). The magazines I read, 19 and Honey, showed young women who, when not reclining in Biba-like sophisticated poses, wore crêpe-de-Chine frocks set off with little leather handbags or beaded purses like the ones I found upstairs at Annie and Eva’s. Around this time, my grandma’s buttons acquired new meanings. I started raiding her button box for interesting finds to sew on home-made smocks and saw how glacé mint buttons and tiny pearl flowers complemented vintage clothes. Further discoveries awaited me in my own home: clothes worn by my mum as a younger woman, including a red tiered chiffon dress that shouted the 1960s.
Even now I can recall the thrill of those discoveries, see the jazzily patterned runner on the upstairs landing in Annie and Eva’s house, recapture the shiver of silk and the shock of that red chiffon. Many of the clothes have long disappeared but the buttons remain. The button that makes a play on geometry was Annie’s; best-dressed days saw Eva wearing buttoned gauntlets outlined in caramel-coloured leather – my grandma and great-aunt were no different from all the other women wanting to add a touch of glamour to their lives. Writer Jenifer Wayne lovingly recalls a purple dress that signified her becoming a woman; my own equivalent was a crêpe-de-Chine suit now remembered by a single button. ‘They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us’,2 said Virginia Woolf of clothes. The Button Box explores their role as emblems of security, identity and independence, and the key part they play in keeping up appearances. Favourite dresses, best coats, everyday overalls, children’s clothes: their buttons reach across the generations and the large and small stories of women’s lives.
BUTTONS, BEADING, JEWELLERY: jet was everywhere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scattered across fabrics and dripping from bosoms and shawls. Children’s author Alison Uttley recalled the jet buttons in her mother’s button box, ‘shining like new coal, cut into facets, flat and pointed and angular’.1 She could rub jet buttons to electrify them and make paper men rise up and dance.
Multifaceted and twinkling, or resembling the large, flat Pontefract cakes that were my great-aunt Eva’s favourite sweets, several jet buttons glitter in my own button box. The daintiest, with tiny metal shanks that fastened them on to nineteenth-century clothing, spangle with impressed flowers; the heaviest, a sturdy quarter-inch thick, for more robust garments, are well worn and chipped, while smoothly polished buttons of a later vintage await a little black dress. Buttons like these throw out an invitation to scintillate and sparkle, but their origins place them within the realm of mourning. What is more, the majority are impostors: most of the buttons we describe as ‘jet’ are actually pressed glass.
All things jet complemented the black clothing associated with bereavement. When George IV’s daughter Charlotte died in 1817 at the age of twenty-one, the fashionable showed their respect by wearing jet girdles with long pendants. The national mourning ordered by Queen Victoria on the death of William IV in 1837 led to its use in increasingly elaborate ways, but it was Victoria’s own prolonged mourning for her husband Prince Albert, from 1861 until her own death forty years later, that provides a vivid folk memory and led to her being recalled as a little woman in black.
Queen Victoria’s buttons were honed from Whitby jet, a form of fossilised wood that can take a high polish. Rare today and expensive in the nineteenth century, jet has been worn and worked since the Stone Age, with examples found in mainland Europe as well as Britain. The Romans used jet, but it was not until it became a fashionable symbol of mourning that jet transformed the fortunes of the Yorkshire coastal town, and the Whitby jet industry expanded from employing a handful of workers in 1822, to some 1,400 men and boys in the 1870s when the fashion was at its peak.
Victoria set the standard for jet, but it was the dour provincial industrialists, with their civic dignity and non-conformist sobriety, who cemented the look. Plain dress and plain speaking going hand in hand, they wanted to see their wives in dark colours, and as their fortunes were founded on coal – be they mill owners, button makers, silversmiths, potters, engineers, all relied on the dark, black stuff – it seems entirely appropriate that their wives glittered with it. Black clothing was practical too, among those dark satanic mills, hence its popularity as working dress.
Those who could not afford jet buttons and beading could nonetheless enjoy its effect. Buttons replicating jet were made in large quantities, the majority produced from glass manufactured in Venice, Bohemia and Austria, although a number of American firms also adopted European methods. Pressed glass was easier and cheaper to mass-produce, it was also more enduring: jet easily chips and flakes. Horn, vegetable-ivory and papier-mâché buttons were also substituted, as were lignite and ebonite. Ebonite looks the same as jet but, on closer inspection, gives off a whiff of sulphur. Of all the imitators, glass was best. It is hard to distinguish from the real thing and sparkles every bit as brightly on a black dress.
High mortality rates within the population as a whole provided all too many personal occasions on which black could be worn. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century mourning was an elaborate affair, subject to strict conventions and its etiquette, moving from full into half mourning and shading from deepest black into grey and mauve, was explained in numerous manuals. Deep mourning draped widows in a dull black gauze called crape, but though the fabric was sombre, the actual clothing might not be. Even the smallest draper’s shops sold mourning fabrics, while drapers of any size and department stores had their own mourning departments; some provided undertaking too, conveniently addressing all the practicalities of bereavement under one roof. The Peter Robinson store kept a mourning brougham outside, together with two female fitters dressed in black and ready to be dispatched with sympathy, scissors and pins. All dressmakers and drapers’ assistants knew ‘the correct scale of lamentation by trimming’.2 There was money to be made from the solicitous attention to death.
John Lewis sold fifty different kinds of crêpe. The mourning department of the Army and Navy Stores which, in addition to supplying the living and breathing middle classes with all and sundry, were ‘agents for the principal cemeteries and churchyards throughout the country’,3 offered multiple fabrics, including alpaca, cashmere, crape, crêpe de Chine, grenadines, poplins, paramatta, serges, voiles and worsted twills, plus more than a dozen black silks and satins. And then came the black mantles, ribbons and gloves; the silk neckerchiefs and scarves; the fischus, bows and jabots; the widow’s collars and cuffs, handkerchiefs and jewellery. Grief was a thriving business.
Grief had its fashions too, as pilloried in this irresistible mid-nineteenth-century skit. A lady is shown a widow’s silk – ‘Watered, you perceive, to match the sentiment. It is called “Inconsolable”, and is very much in vogue in Paris for matrimonial bereavements. And we have several new fabrics introduced this season to meet the demand for fashionable tribulation’,4 including a ‘splendid black’ velvet called ‘The Luxury of Woe’. The mourner is reassured that there is something to suit every sentiment, ‘from a grief prononcé to the slightest nuance of regret’.
Buttons added to the ornamentation of beaded and bejetted clothing. Flowers, like the delicate ones on my handful of small ‘jet’ buttons, provided incised decoration; birds, too. Like other buttons of their type, and jewellery, they achieve their effect by combining matt and polished decoration; gold or silver lustre added an even more ornate finish. Some jet buttons imitated the fabrics on to which they were sewn, recreating a taffeta sheen or the hazy shimmer of watered silk.
The Victorian predilection for mourning gave rise to unusual and occasionally ghoulish jewellery; some chilling buttons, too. In the early nineteenth century, single eyes were reproduced on paper, ivory or enamel and worn as mementos. Unlike a braided lock of hair fastened in a brooch, the single eye looks outwards, as if building a protective wall about the mourner and ensuring the supremacy of the dead. An example in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, a widow’s brooch circa 1790–1810, a watercolour on ivory circled in pearls, weeps delicate diamond tears. A set of buttons in a private collection, each one a single staring eye, must have been all the more disconcerting when faced in a vertical row.
Elizabeth Gaskell described the large number of brooches ‘like small picture-frames with mausoleums and weeping-willows neatly executed in hair inside’5 worn by the women of Cranford. My great-grandma Betsy had a crude version depicting a jet gravestone saying ‘My Dear Father’, with a space before the pin for a lock of hair. This example of the jewellery sold at the cheaper end of the market may have belonged to her mother; Betsy’s father died after the fashion for such displays had passed. Brooches, black-edged paper, mourning cards, In Memoriam verses – anyone who could afford to observe mourning rituals did so. More attractive family brooches also survive: a moon decorated with flowers, a shiny French jet pin, a small black heart as dark as the broken heart it surely represented – and are worn by me with barely a nod to their origins. The choice of jet for mourning jewellery continued into the Second World War: when my grandfather died, my grandma wore a pair of jet-black clips on her jacket; my mum, a black floral brooch.
Within weeks of the outbreak of the First World War, the Manchester Guardian advised the fashionable to add a black gown or at least a black tunic to their wardrobe for eveningwear. A black tunic could be worn over a white satin underdress, it suggested, reviving a fashion first seen almost 200 years earlier, during the period of national mourning that followed Queen Caroline’s death. Flexibility was key: ‘opportunities for sudden transformations are well to keep in mind at present’,6 its journalist warned, having no idea how long ‘at present’ would last. ‘Black, black, black everywhere,’7 was one woman’s recollection of the 1914–18 war. ‘Everyone seemed to be wearing black.’ Ostentatious display ceased, however. One etiquette manual reported that ‘quite a strong feeling has arisen against wearing black for relatives who have died on active service; a black band on the left arm is often the only intimation given.’8
It was hard to strike a balance between respect and practicalities for those with few changes of clothing to begin with. The narrator of Barbara Comyns’s semi-autobiographical novel, Sisters by a River, describes how, when their father died in the 1900s, she and her sisters had ‘not a shred of black between them’,9 and their mother made do with a semi-evening frock which ‘looked all wrong in the sunshine’. In A London Childhood, her account of the 1930s, Angela Rodaway recalls how her mother frequently dyed the family’s faded clothes to give them a new lease of life, but her spirit failed after the death of her sister-in-law when it came to dyeing her one and only coat. On this occasion, she let the drycleaner do the job; drycleaners offered an especially quick service for mourning. Formal mourning held sway until the stringencies of wartime rationing finally made it less practicable.
Many Victorians who went into mourning spent the rest of their lives in black; others of that generation adopted black for general dress. One of my mother’s early childhood memories is of meeting Betsy’s stepmother, a diminutive mid-Victorian, then in her late seventies (a distinctly late age in the 1930s). Her resemblance to Queen Victoria was striking. She swished into the corner shop in a rustle of coal black and, in true Victorian style, presented my mum with a pressed-glass dish inscribed: ‘For a Good Child’. My great-grandma favoured her own ‘ample severity of black’.10 Although she liked strong colour in blouses, Betsy’s outdoor coats and skirts were always the deepest black. The two garments of hers that survive, a black satin skirt with fancy trimming and a coat with an equally dense black sheen – unfinished examples of home-dressmaking – are quintessentially late Victorian, although they were begun much later. A day at the seaside in the early 1930s saw my great-grandma sitting in a deckchair, minding my mother. My mum played in the sand in a sleeveless sundress; Betsy did not remove her black toque and overcoat.
The velvet that became fashionable in the 1840s added its own shimmer to jet and was matched by the popularity of the cheaper velveteen, the mainstay of Lewis’s Manchester and Liverpool stores from the late nineteenth century until the eve of the First World War. With all its best-dress associations, velvet required considerable stamina to produce. Irene Burton’s mother worked at a fustian mill during the 1920s and Irene recalled sitting beneath a long line of cloth as a very small child, watching her mother at work. She and other women with their own long lines of cloth, walked ‘the velvet runs’, lifting tiny threads with a knife-like implement which raised the nap to form velvet. The women reckoned that they covered the equivalent of the distance from Stoke-on-Trent to Manchester and back during the course of each working week. ‘They walked and walked … down one side and up the other … So minute the tiny stitches.’11 The women wore clogs, and a piece of white cloth pinned to their right hip protected the velvet they brushed against while walking. Irene’s mother walked until her feet bled, and continued walking. From time to time, she paused to sharpen her knife. If the tip broke and interrupted her work further, she was fined.
A strip of jetted brocade and a black beaded panel from the 1920s are among the stray items that came to me when my grandma died. The panel’s long thin canes, known as bugle beads, were cut by machine, but the actual beaded trimmings were done by hand, often by home workers, adding a further skill to the long list of seamstresses’ sweated labour. The beaded garments worn by Edwardian ladies were elaborate confections; by the 1920s, beading was used differently, though in a manner demanding equal skill. Dressmaker Esther Rothstein recalled that the fringed and beaded dresses of that era took a week or a fortnight to make: bead upon bead, and thousands of them. The beaded panel (given to Annie, I suspect, for her to make use of the beads) is a surprising weight. It slinks and swings and would have scintillated during the Charleston, but the original dress must have been heavy to wear. Beaded gowns worn by a wealthy Liverpool woman Emily Tinne in the 1930s swirl in expensive homage to geometry. Gowns like hers are museum quality, but beaded cocktail jackets and sequined and bejetted frocks from all eras form the basis of the party wardrobes of many with a liking for vintage, mine included.
In the 1920s black was considered, mourning excepted, too old a colour for anyone under the age of thirty to wear; by the 1930s it was a mark of metropolitan chic. All the same, the novelist Penelope Mortimer startled her wedding guests by choosing to marry in black. Though black was the colour of 1950s cocktail dresses – ‘Black is right if you like a sophisticated look,’12 Christian Dior advised – it could also be a sign of non-conformity. Black has long had the power to disconcert.
The black dress is a blank canvas, capable of expressing everything from grief to sophistication and seduction, taking in decorum, respectability and servility. Never has one garment contained more meanings, depending on the occasion and the manner in which it is worn. A black dress can look ‘nothing’ until it is put on, and then, stunning. A little black dress can be safely relied on (and, in the 1960s, was derided by Mary Quant for that reason). A black dress transforms and emboldens the fictional Miss Pettigrew when she visits a nightclub, is worn by Olivia in The Weather in the Streets for her first assignation with Rollo at the start of their love affair; and was the uniform worn by Lyons’ Nippies and parlourmaids, and by old-fashioned shop assistants on whom the colour conferred anonymity as well as turning them into ‘a good background … if they [were] holding up a most beautiful gown’.13 In my childhood, black dresses belong to the women who served high tea in Cole Brothers and the Odeon Tea Room, memories which themselves exist in black and white, with a glint of silver: acres of starched linen tablecloths, quiet black frocks and heavy EPNS cutlery (plus thinly sliced bread and butter and cups of over-strong tea).
The last word on all things jet black belongs to E. M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady who, after agonising over what to wear for a literary soirée, finally settles on her Blue, and sets out for a fashionable address. ‘Sloane Street achieved … Am shown into empty drawing-room, where I meditate in silence on unpleasant, but all-too-applicable, maxim that It is Provincial to Arrive too Early. Presently strange woman in black, with colossal emerald brooch pinned in expensive-looking frills of lace, is shown in … Two more strange women in black appear, and I feel that my Blue is becoming conspicuous … Three more guests arrive – black two-piece, black coat-and-skirt, and black crêpe-de-Chine with orange-varnished nails. (My Blue now definitely revealed as inferior imitation of Joseph’s coat, no less, and of very nearly equal antiquity.)’14 On the next occasion the Provincial Lady ventures out, she knows exactly what to wear: black crêpe-de-Chine (minus the orange nails).
THE BLACKCURRANT BUTTON takes me straight back to childhood. It fastened a blouse my grandma often wore. This small glass button is a twinkling, iridescent mix of black, blue, green and purple, but I called it blackcurrant because it always reminded me of a fruit gum. My grandma read to me, played school with me, but the lesson I really learned with her was sewing (although, through my own neglect, I have forgotten much of what I was taught). My grandma’s Singer sewing machine had a sturdy black frame with gold decoration and a handle that gave a satisfying click when it slotted into place. Maintaining a rhythm was important; gaining speed took practice and I never attained the fluency of Annie’s professional days, when my mum recalls her Singer racing across seams, keeping pace with Dick Barton’s theme tune on the wireless.
Angela Rodaway danced to the sound of her mother’s sewing machine; she danced while her mother chopped vegetables but sewing was even better, ‘slower and more dignified … and, after a while, bright scraps of material and ends of cotton would appear on the floor and I would stop dancing to gather these “flowers”.’1 She also loved her mother’s rag-bag: ‘All the remains of past sewing were there, beautiful pieces from years and years ago.’2 My grandma also kept a rag-bag; it supplied the materials for my early lessons in sewing.
Sewing belonged to Sunday afternoons at Annie and Eva’s when I was about eight years old, after the last strains of Jimmy Clitheroe had faded from the radio and before ‘Greetings, pop pickers’ alerted us to evening. The first thing we sewed was a man’s handkerchief, a gift for my dad, and having mastered four straight lines and four corners, I progressed to an apron for my mum. How very Janet and John. It took greater skill to gather fabric on to a narrow band and trim the apron-front and its small pocket with braid. This was not a serious apron, but the kind of pinny women wore when guests came for afternoon tea which, in our household, was not an everyday occurrence. At some stage, I made a peg bag, an intermediate task, intended, I suspect, to teach me to sew neat curves. An apron and a peg bag: my poor mother; lessons in domesticity for us both. My brother, briefly ‘doing’ pottery at school – perhaps while the girls in his class were busy sewing – chose to make and decorate an ashtray, a far more appropriate gift for a Swinging Sixties mum. Next came an A-line dress with a small white collar, the collar a further stage in the seamstress’s vocabulary, being carefully curved and very much on show. The dress was sleeveless – one dressmaker said that an ability to fit sleeves well separates the professional from the amateur (although those who know the complex leg-of-mutton sleeves home-dressmakers grappled with in the 1890s, may disagree).
My grandma’s structured teaching, from straight lines to curves and collars, stemmed from her years as a teacher in elementary schools. Needlework was one of half a dozen subjects she taught in the years immediately before and during the First World War. The majority of teachers entering elementary schools at this time came into classrooms via the pupil-teacher system and Annie was no different. In 1909, she embarked on a three-year apprenticeship during which she divided her time between teaching infants and studying at a nearby Pupil-Teacher Centre. The Staveley Netherthorpe Centre, and others like it, enabled working- and lower-middle-class young men and women to attain a professional qualification and status without embarking on costly full-time study. Although they were less well trained than their college-educated colleagues and had fewer prospects, teaching provided young women like Annie with a dignified and well-respected occupation.
My great-grandparents were enthusiastic supporters of Annie’s continuing education and her decision to teach. And parental support was needed: pupil-teachers were still studying while their friends and neighbours were bringing in a wage; and there were books and stationery to pay for, and appropriate clothing to find. Pupil-teachers were expected to look the part.
An advertisement in The Lady for the Cameron Safety Self-Filler Fountain Pen – ‘The Pen for Every Lady’ was illustrated by six scenes: a woman signs for a parcel delivered to her door; another writes a letter at home. The third drawing takes us into the world of work, with a woman – a headmistress, perhaps – interviewing a female member of staff who stands before her in a white blouse, suit and floppy tie, her hands clasped behind her back; a further young woman takes dictation; two clerical workers sit side-by-side at a steeply sloping desk. Finally, a schoolgirl in a Panama hat marches forth with her briefcase. How busy women are, this advertisement suggests; although, on closer inspection, there are few types of worker represented.3
My grandma and those busy workers were part of an expanding professional class. Between 1881 and 1911, the numbers employed in teaching, nursing, retail and office work increased by 161 per cent, compared with a rise of only 24 per cent in domestic service and manufacturing. Teaching and nursing were the two professions that actively welcomed women, although the uncertain hours and stamina nursing required made that a less attractive prospect. The office work available was in low grades – the secretary and ledger-writers of the advertisement – and these women faced opposition from those who objected to ‘Missprinted’ texts; the small number of civil-service posts were fiercely contested, with extra tuition needed to pass the entrance exams.
Some young women were initially drawn to teaching because of the ladylike appearance and manner of the women who taught them. A ladylike appearance was no hardship for Annie – it was always said that, like the girl in the nursery rhyme, she was meant to ‘sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam’; friends described her as a lady, the highest praise for a young woman then. A photograph shows Annie and her fellow pupil-teachers in the familiar clothes of their calling. Several wear the high necklines that look authoritative but were simply fashionable dress, worn by leisured Edwardian women as well as workers. One or two wear the necktie some educated women favoured; another has a large, soft bow at her throat. All look the part: hair swept back from their faces (some in the exaggerated puffed-out styles of the day); well-polished boots or shoes peep from beneath long skirts. The effect is neat and tidy, undemonstrative.
Only one of their number is in any way decoratively dressed. On top of her blouse she wears a short-sleeved coatee jacket, edged with velvet. Three horizontal strips of velvet decorate her skirt, a button defining the edge of each strip. Coatees were ‘in’ in 1912, the probable date of the photograph, as were decorative buttons, and quantities of them, descending from throats and rising from hemlines. Chesterfield’s premier draper and costumier, John Turner, sold costumes (suits) and dresses festooned with buttons; the Derbyshire Times advertised paper patterns showing buttoned skirts women could make at home.
The advent of the sewing machine had transformed life for home-dressmakers as well as for professional seamstresses. From the mid-nineteenth century, when Isaac Merritt Singer patented his sewing machine, and other manufacturers followed suit, many more women sewed at home and newspapers and magazines began offering paper patterns on a regular basis. At least one home-dressmaker knew that for the price of a card of buttons, she could reproduce a fashionable theme. That woman was my grandma, the young woman in the coatee suit, although I am surprised to see a schoolteacher so fashionably dressed. Annie may have chosen to dress more elaborately for the photograph, although none of her classmates did. Even when I was a child she had a knack for adding trimmings and interesting flourishes to the clothes she made. Evidently, this was a skill acquired early.
Annie’s Netherthorpe tutor, Miss Lockhart, dressed like the young women she taught. The daughter of a Wesleyan minister, Miss Lockhart hailed from Yorkshire and was a former pupil-teacher herself. One of the growing band for whom no work meant no dinner, Miss Lockhart lodged nearby. Then in her mid-twenties, she was popular with her charges, who included a farmer’s daughter and the sons and daughters of colliery men – labourers as well as a colliery deputy. Staveley Netherthorpe’s admissions register gives my great-grandfather’s occupation as ‘Artisan, civil engineer’.4 ‘Civil engineer’ sounds like an upgrading to me, although around this time he was a foreman presiding over the construction of one of Chesterfield’s reservoirs. The children of artisans and tradesmen were precisely the types drawn to the pupil-teacher scheme. Teaching was a way to better yourself and move upwards and out of your social class. This was illustrated by Mabel Doughty, the headmistress of the infant school where Annie spent her apprenticeship. Miss Doughty, a woman in her thirties, was also an ex-pupil-teacher; she and a younger sister both taught, having trained locally. Their two older sisters were dressmakers, the choices made by the different generations reflecting the changing landscape.
Copperplate writing on my grandma’s gilt-framed certificate states that, in 1912, she satisfied the Oxford Senior Local examiners in Arithmetic, History, English Language and Literature including Composition, Geography and Needlework. ‘If she carries out the promise of her work here,’ Miss Doughty concluded, when writing a reference for her, ‘I am sure she will make a good teacher.’5 And so Miss Nash was launched into the world.
Within the elementary-school curriculum needlework usually meant plain sewing. Proficiency in this subject was regarded as a badge of femininity, and its importance was underlined. A female London School Board examiner of the 1890s thought all other subjects of secondary importance for girls. Spelling could be learned, she asserted, by copying words such as ‘herringbone’ or ‘cross-stitch’.6 Sewing drills were introduced: one elementary school Scheme of Work included sewing, thimble and knitting drills, thimble drill requiring girls to put on and take off a thimble numerous times, a test of no discernible value, except to instil obedience to go with the 3 Rs. The girls were instructed to produce six to ten stitches to the inch when hemming and twelve when sewing a seam, and to demonstrate these skills by joining two pieces of calico five inches in length (thereby accomplishing sixty perfect stitches in a row). Dictatorial stitching; no damp, crumpled rags or cobbled seams, and why five inches of calico?
A Board of Education’s Suggestion for the Teaching of Needlework in 1909 asserted that needlework appealed ‘directly to the natural instincts of the girls’.7 The seeming impossibility of separating entrenched notions of femininity from the skills involved made sewing a penance for many, including those with a better and more refined education. Some middle-class teachers, themselves constrained by hours of decorous stitching – Must we sit and sew? – paid scant attention to needlework. Plain sewing has its uses, however, especially for those embarking on independent lives, and could also forestall criticism by those who feared educated girls becoming uppity. When, in the 1880s, M. V. Hughes sat the entrance exam for North London Collegiate, a school established by pioneering educationalist Frances Mary Buss, she was amazed to discover that a written paper alone was insufficient: ‘Now, dear, just make a buttonhole before you go,’ the officiating mistress told her. ‘I confessed that I hadn’t the faintest idea how to set about it, and thought that buttonholes just “came”. Up went Miss Begbie’s hands in shocked surprise. “What! A girl of sixteen not know how to make a buttonhole!”’8 One week of practising later, assisted by lessons from her mother (who, having hated needlework herself had not inflicted it on her daughter), Molly applied herself to the task, with the aid of a needlecase specially made by her mother to show that Molly meant business. ‘It was a rule of the school that no girl should enter who couldn’t make a buttonhole.’10 M. V. Hughes went on to set up the teacher training department at Bedford College; later, she became a school inspector.
Around the time I started sewing with my grandma, I also learned hemming at school. The junior-school mistress who taught me was a teacher of the old guard and made clear her displeasure at our feeble attempts to sew. Like our nineteenth-century forebears, we too were given short strips of white cotton. I can see mine now, damp and quickly greying, with its mishmash of stumpy stitches, the occasional upright standing amidst others leaning at all angles. My failure did not disturb me unduly, although I was interested to see the other girls’ more proficient work, like the sly description of the sister in Barbara Comyns’s Sisters by a River, ‘who sometimes sewed us things … with tiny stitches, but never completely finished, pinifores [sic] without buttons and buttonholes, peticoats [sic] with the tucks only tacked … All the same it was nice to look at the small stitches, like a good example.’9
I attained some competence later. Domestic Science required another apron – a full pinafore this time, something for me to make and then wear while baking raspberry buns. I made a smock there too, with a floral pattern and short capped sleeves. For a while, until I discovered that a mixture of beaks and ears was impossible to fasten, the smock’s blue buttons were replaced by a set of animal buttons that came free with Petticoat (this being the era when childish things seeped into adolescent and grown-up clothes). By then, I was tackling facings and (briefly) tailor’s chalk. Soon I was sewing at home. Having escaped the view that sewing would define me, I made other hippyish smocks, plus printed cotton maxi skirts, in between doing my homework.
The question of educated women was a vexed one in my grandma’s day. While Annie was a pupil-teacher, the Derbyshire Times’s ‘Home’ columnist, ‘Domestica’, advised her female readers how to care for their ‘crowning glory’11 and reminded them that ‘excessive mental activity … certainly tells upon the hair’. Adopting a more elevated tone (though a no more enlightened attitude), The Lady asked, ‘Do Men like Highly Educated Wives?’: ‘Girls who are inclined to be bookish, women who are regular dragons at mathematics, fair ladies who are never so happy as when swimming in seas of science, take themselves so dreadfully seriously. They don’t seem to carry their learning as easily as men do … It oozes out of them in season and out of season. Nothing bores a man so much as the pedantic woman.’12 The journalist clearly cared nothing for the battles fought to counter what Virginia Woolf called ‘Arthur’s Education Fund’,13 whereby sons were educated but not daughters.
My grandma made no claim to be highly educated, but she was evidently troubled by similar schoolmarm accusations. Pasted into her commonplace book is a newspaper article advising that ‘the stuck-up school teacher is not the best kind of wife, and she fails lamentably as a mother’.14 (With marriage bars less rigorously enforced in teaching before the 1920s, women of Annie’s generation might anticipate continuing work after marriage, if their local authority approved.) The article concluded that the teacher ‘who realises she does not know everything’ but ‘takes the trouble to really learn’ would make ‘a splendid wife’.
Unsurprisingly, not every young woman seeking a profession wanted to teach. The increasing feminisation of clerical work made it a tempting prospect, despite opposition from those who felt that women should be crocheting at home and not in spare moments at the office. Others, including employers looking for lower-paid workers, sought to attract women into the workplace. A late-nineteenth-century Pitman’s manual reassured those entering the profession that ‘the type-writing involves no hard labour, and no more skills than playing the piano’.15 The fact that the word ‘typist’ came to refer to a woman shows how much things changed over time. The 6,420 women employed as clerks in Britain in 1881 represented 2.7 per cent of all clerks; by 1911, 124,843 women were employed, 18.1 per cent of the total. Their growing numbers gave rise to the term ‘the white-blouse revolution’, thanks to their uniform dress.
One such clerical worker was Edith James, a railwayman’s daughter born in 1893, the year after my grandma. A scholarship pupil – indeed, the first girl from Wellingborough awarded a high-school scholarship – Edith was offered a pupil-teacher bursary on leaving school, but declined it in favour of commercial work. (From 1907, high schools were required to keep some free places available so that poorer students could remain at school until seventeen and then proceed to training college with the aid of bursaries. However, the take-up was relatively low.) Edith’s family had no additional funds with which to support her, but her father eked out her scholarship money – £20 a year, for two years – so successfully that there remained just enough to train her in shorthand and typing, provided she learn quickly, and Edith did. When she passed her exams, the whole college was granted a day’s holiday in recognition of her speedy progress.
In 1908 Edith James found work with a local firm of leather dressers and manufacturers of boot and shoe uppers, leggings and gaiters. Throughout her employment, she spent her winter evenings studying shorthand at the Technical Institute, and took classes in French to assist her in translating letters for the export side of the firm. (Beyond this, Edith relied on schoolgirl French and German and dictionaries, and was amused to think of the hilarity with which the recipients must have greeted the results.) The method by which copies were made of the documents she typed will surprise today’s computer users: after signing, letters were copied into large bound books by placing each one on top of a sheet of tissue paper overlaying a wet rag. The book was then shut, put into a large iron press and screwed down for a few minutes. The moisture took sufficient ink from the type to make a copy on the tissue, but the letters were usually too damp to put into envelopes straightaway, and so had to be laid out to dry. Much clerical work was equally laborious.
Professional women like my grandma and Edith James had to be well turned out. Their white blouses required meticulous laundering to look their best and were easier to buy than to make. Though ready-to-wear garments were a godsend to busy professional women, their quality was frequently disparaged. In 1910, the dressmaking magazine Fashions for All described them as ‘one example of how money may be wasted. They are certainly cheap … but for the girl who has to make sixpence do the work of a shilling they are a snare and a delusion. Washed, the material becomes coarse, the lace tears, and the whole blouse loses its shape. A blouse made at home, by clever fingers, of good muslin simply tucked, will look well to the last day of its life.’16 There was a moral dimension too, as demonstrated by Home Notes: ‘To some, [ready-made clothing] is a sign of greater wisdom on the part of the women of to-day, who refuse to be the slaves of the needle,’ but, the article explained, ready-made clothes were often of poor quality and, what is more, were ‘a gross extravagance when their purchase means only increased opportunity for idleness, or a waste of time worse than idleness’.17 Women workers beware: after a long day in the office or schoolroom, they should go home to their sewing machines.
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