Not so nostalgic:
Britain in 1945. No supermarkets, no motorways, no teabags, no sliced bread, no frozen food, no flavoured crisps, no lager, no microwaves, no dishwashers, no Formica, no vinyl, no CDs, no computers, no mobiles, no duvets, no Pill, no trainers, no hoodies, no Starbucks. Four Indian restaurants. Shops on every corner, pubs on every corner, cinemas in every high street, red telephone boxes, Lyons Corner Houses, trams, trolley-buses, steam trains. Woodbines, Craven ‘A’, Senior Service, smoke, smog, Vapex inhalant. No launderettes, no automatic washing machines, wash day every Monday, clothes boiled in a tub, scrubbed on the draining board, rinsed in the sink, put through a mangle, hung out to dry. Central heating rare, coke boilers, water geysers, the coal fire, the hearth, the home, chilblains common. Abortion illegal, homosexual relationships illegal, suicide illegal, capital punishment legal. White faces everywhere. Back-to-backs, narrow cobbled streets, Victorian terraces, no high-rises. Arterial roads, suburban semis, the march of the pylon. Austin Sevens, Ford Eights, no seat belts, Triumph motorcycles with sidecars. A Bakelite wireless in the home, Housewives’ Choice or Workers’ Playtime or ITMA on the air, televisions almost unknown, no programmes to watch, the family eating together. Milk of Magnesia, Vicks Vapour Rub, Friar’s Balsam, Fynnon Salts, Eno’s, Germolene. Suits and hats, dresses and hats, cloth caps and mufflers, no leisurewear, no ‘teenagers’. Heavy coins, heavy shoes, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, heavy leather footballs, no unbearable lightness of being. Meat rationed, butter rationed, lard rationed, margarine rationed, sugar rationed, tea rationed, cheese rationed, jam rationed, eggs rationed, sweets rationed, soap rationed, clothes rationed. Make do and mend.
– David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945-51
People talk a lot about traditional skills and oh what a shame it is that they’re dying out, but to be honest, I think there are some skills we should rejoice are no longer essential. Take darning, for instance. I’m all in favor of mending serviceable items instead of just throwing them away, but there’s a reason why darning socks belongs to the long list of chores that, for most of human history, men wouldn’t touch.
Darning socks, like many other things it’s much nicer to have done for you than to do yourself, is shrouded in unwarranted romanticism. The equation of sock-darning with feminine nurture was so sentimentally ingrained in western culture for so long that as late as 1967, Luis Buñuel could still use holey socks as cinematic shorthand for “motherless man-child” in Belle de Jour . The romance of darning conveniently obscures the fact that, as anyone who’s attempted it will have discovered, it’s classic women’s work — fiddly, prosaic and time-consuming.
Darning only makes sense in an economy where a pair of socks is worth more than the time it takes to mend them. In the late 1940s, after the privations of war began to ease — and, more importantly, after women had had a taste of earning decent wages for their work — a lot of wives, mothers, daughters and girlfriends must have found it hard to return to darning other people’s socks for nothing. That, presumably, is one reason why the Speedweve was invented.
I stumbled across this little gizmo from the ’40s on eBay and was instantly charmed by it. The Speedweve darner, “Lancashire’s smallest loom”, has all the hallmarks of the “as seen on TV” invention — a domestic gadget dreamed up in a garden shed by somebody hoping it would make his fortune. It even got a mention in Popular Science.
Darning, as Zoe’s post illustrates, is basically just filling in a hole by using a needle and thread to weave a small patch in the fabric. This can be a very slow and imperfect process, as well as being hard on the eyes if you’re using fine threads or darning black on black. The Speedweve works as a miniature loom, raising and lowering alternate warp threads of the darn, so all you have to do is pass the needle and thread between them like a shuttle:
Speedweve instructions
I tested the Speedweve last night on a pair of much-loved but holey wool tights, and found to my delight that using it really was as easy as following the instructions. After less than an hour I ended up with a not-terribly-tidy but perfectly adequate 2″x2″ patch.
If I’d had a bit more experience with the Speedweve and mended the tights before the hole got so big — or, better yet, before it became a hole at all — it would have taken me still less time. Even if I weren’t counting coupons, that’s still an acceptable trade-off by my math, since a pair of merino tights costs about the same as an hour of my time as a freelancer (my default “is it worth the bother?” yardstick).
What a pleasing little device! The fact that technological and market changes would render it totally obsolete within a couple of decades of its invention only increases its whimsical appeal.
The National Archives jumps on the bandwagon with a podcast on designers Norman Hartnell and Hardy Amies and their role in creating British style during the age of austerity. A transcript of the podcast is also available further down the page.
Fun fact: Hardy Amies (“His only handicap is his precious appearance and manner”) went to the same school as my boyfriend.
Back in the days when my job sucked, I used to work in an independent bookstore whose owner (whom I’ll call the Big Guy) was, to put it generously, eccentric. One of his less endearing quirks was a preoccupation with his female staff’s appearance rather than our performance. Exposed midriff was his particular bugbear. You couldn’t lift an arm to shelve a book without the fear that you’d turn around to find the Big Guy had materialized silently behind you and was now pointing with quivering finger and bristling eyebrows at the half-inch of offending flesh exposed by the riding up of your top. “What,” he’d growl, “is THAT?” In the end, fed up, I resorted to what I called the bookstore burqa, a roomy old castoff shirt of my boyfriend’s that came halfway to my knees, which I buttoned on daily over whatever I was wearing.
Little did I know that working women had the same problem back in 1949, when the phrase “sexual harassment” was not so much as a glint in Merriam-Webster’s eye. Their solution was a lot more becoming than the bookstore burqa. It was called the blixie — an all-in-one blouse/camiknicker set!
I’m off work at the moment with some vile tonsil thing. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good old-fashioned sick day on the couch, and I’m quite enjoying it, except for the hacking cough and the fact that I’ve sucked on so many Strepsils I can’t feel my tongue. Enforced couch time means I get to cuddle the kitties, drink tea and look at vintage film clips. I’ve come up with some fantastic finds.
Let’s kick off with two back-to-back “fashion police” clips from the 1940s. The first is American and comes to us from the Prelinger Archives via Glamourdaze. Here we see the wonderfully named Miss Ratherly Sterns, like a no-nonsense fairy godmother, make over a well-meaning but badly dressed protégé:
By contrast, in this British Pathé film from 1946, a disapproving narrator stationed in London’s Piccadilly Circus tears several women to shreds for minor fashion infractions. Give a girl a break, fella — clothes rationing has been in force for five years! I’m not sure about the “charming wimple” that eventually gets his seal of approval, either.
It’s a sign of how far we as a society have let ourselves go that even the Don’ts in these clips could stop traffic nowadays. They seem such sartorially innocent times by comparison. Fashion sins included things like “wearing the wrong hat or blouse with your smartly tailored suit” instead of “leaving the house in stained pink Uggs, a fake-down puffa vest with ratty fake fur trim, a t-shirt announcing I’M BRINGING SEXY BACK in gold lamé blockcaps and leggings two sizes too small with your underwear showing through”.
Can you keep a secret? I’m a total sucker for the makeover genre. That’s why I love films like Now, Voyager, TV shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and blogs like Already Pretty. The makeover genre is quintessentially American in the best way, with its relentless optimism, its inclusive ethos and its unwavering belief in the life-transforming power of self-improvement.
Here are two more videos via Glamourdaze, also starring Ratherly Sterns. The first contains useful advice on choosing hairstyles, makeup and necklines to suit your face shape — excellent if you’re trying to settle on your vintage look.
In this second film, Miss Sterns (would you dare to call her Ratherly? I wouldn’t) runs us through the basics of applying makeup. Note the total absence of eye makeup, the way blush/rouge is applied further back than today’s apple-cheeked ideal and the strict insistence on color coordination. Also, when did women stop doing their beauty routines sitting down?
This 1944 British Pathé clip about a school for mannequins (models) shows women learning to stand and move to show their clothes to best advantage and offers an interesting fix to keep wardrobe changes from spoiling your hair and makeup — put a (chiffon) bag on your head!
I’ve saved the best for last. Pattern for Smartness, a 19-minute film made by Simplicity in 1948, is vintage sewing paradise — a walk-through of the making of a dress from a Simplicity pattern using the tools and techniques of the time. The detailed instructional advice still holds true, and the evangelical tone is delightful. Who knew that a single home economics class could change you from a shuffling, pimply, badly-dressed troglodyte to a fresh-faced social butterfly with “that know-how look”?
