Keeping Up Appearances E-Book

Catherine Horwood

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 375

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The British have always been concerned about accent, appearance and class, but at no time during the twentieth century was 'keeping up appearances' more important than during the 1920s and 1930s. From the impecunious youth anxious to create a favourable impression at the local tennis club dance to female office workers advised by the Daily Mail that women in business kept 'their position partly, if not chiefly, by appearance', we peer into the intimate lives and anxieties of the middle classes as they dressed to impress. Choices were influenced as much by the advent of mass production, economic stringency, snobbery and the influence of America, as by personal aesthetics. Seemingly insignificant items such as ties, braces, gloves and hats, could convey a lack of breeding if worn incorrectly. This engagingly written and illustrated book explores the social mores behind one of society's most popular activities, and reveals not only how we dressed but why.

Leseprobe

Keeping Up

Appearances

A vivid, witty, original and above all highly enjoyable recreation of dress, manners and social codes between the wars. Horwood uncovers the world of the discreet dress agencies, which promised nearly new gowns by post with “courtesy, privacy and exclusiveness” guaranteed; the secretaries whose georgette blouses revealed far too much “cami”; the female professor of history at the L.S.E. who flew to Paris to buy a dress every time she published an article; and the unfortunate policeman who was shunned on a boating trip for wearing the wrong togs.

The study is much broader than conventional fashion history, using clothes to cast a search light on middle-class culture. Keeping Up Appearances marshalls copious evidence on the link between dress, class and decorum. A spruce yet suitable appearance was all important. As Fashions for All, 1925 warned ‘many a “marriage will not take place” notice has been traced back to a dusty black velvet frock.’ Horwood stresses the importance of correctness and propriety over voguishness for the well-upholstered, mature middle classes. As Ethyl Campbell, a London buyer said in 1939 “A woman should have a fresh wholesome appearance, turned out in such a way that it subtly conveyed, without investigation, that her underclothing was spotless.” A goldmine.

Professor Amanda Vickery, Queen Mary, University of London, author of The Gentleman’s Daughter (Yale University Press, 1998) and Behind Closed

Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Yale University Press, 2009).

The Twenties and Thirties were a glamourous time in Britain – for some. But they were also decades tinged with anxiety since dress codes were so nuanced and unforgiving. Catherine Horwood brings these interwar years of fashion – and just getting dressed – brilliantly alive with insight, subtlety and wit.

Juliet Gardiner, author of The Thirties: An Intimate History and The Blitz:The British Under Attack.

Keeping Up

Appearances

FASHION AND CLASS

BETWEEN THE WARS

CATHERINE HORWOOD

First published in 2005

This edition published in 2011

The History PressThe Mill, Brimscombe PortStroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Catherine Horwood, 2005, 2007, 2011, 2013

The right of Catherine Horwood to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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 unauthorised 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 978 0 7524 9557 6

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface to the 2011 edition

Introduction

1    Shopping for Status

2    Black Coats and White Collars

3    Business Girls and Office Dresses

4    In Home and Garden

5    From Seaside to Sports Club

6    Top Hats and Tulle

7    Everything to Match

8    Radicals, Bohemians and Dandies

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography and Sources

Acknowledgements

This book is about people and their choices and tastes in dress. Photographs alone cannot tell you why someone has chosen to wear a certain outfit or why they disapproved of it on someone else. Nevertheless, they are a vital tool in piecing together reality as opposed to fantasy. So I would like to start by thanking the Baxendale, Hendrick, Styles and Sharp families among others for scouring their family photograph albums and allowing me to reproduce their family memories, as well as friends, family and the oral history interviewees who also gave me access to their albums.

I would like particularly to thank those anonymous men and women who talked to me as part of my oral history research. Over endless cups of tea, we pored over old magazines and picture books together to retrieve memories that had not been thought about in many cases for over sixty years. Their testimony, together with the hundreds of records left by the respondents of the Mass-Observation Archive, added enormously to the richness of this work. I am so grateful for the unfailing helpfulness of Joy Eldridge and the team at the Mass-Observation Archive at the University of Sussex led by Dorothy Sheridan. I am also indebted to Monty Moss of Moss Bros, staff at T.M. Lewin of Jermyn Street, and Robert Fearn, Secretary of the Stourbridge Rotary Club for the information they shared with me.

The staff of the British Library, the British Newspaper Library at Colindale, the London Library, the Punch Library, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Bedford Centre for the History of Women at Royal Holloway College, have all been unstintingly helpful. I would also like to thank the staff at the John Lewis Partnership Archive; the Documentary Photography Archive at the Greater Manchester County Record Office; the Hat Works Stockport Museum of Hatting; Luton Museum Services; the Museum of Costume, Bath; Simpson’s Archive; the History of Advertising Trust in Norfolk; and the Oxfordshire County Record Office. My thanks go to Honor Godfrey at the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum for her continuing support. I am, of course, greatly indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Board for their generous funding of the research that has culminated in this book.

Over the years I have received hugely helpful feedback and support from a large number of friends and colleagues, in particular Barbara Burman, Carol Dyhouse, Edwina Ehrman, Martin Francis, Hannah Greig, Clare Langhamer, Clare Lomas, Sharon Messenger, Niki Pullin, John Styles, Pat Thane, John Tosh, Judy Tregidden, Alex Windscheffel, and everyone else who listened to and read my work over the years. An enormous thank you goes to Amanda Vickery, my outstanding Ph.D. supervisor, whose energy and enthusiasm have been an inspiration.

As the mother of three fashion-conscious daughters, I have no shortage of advice on how to ‘keep up appearances’ these days but I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my late mother who passed on to me her love of dress and dressmaking. As a young woman in the 1930s she always managed to be stylish at a time when quality did not come cheap, a talent that remained with her throughout her life. Finally, though he is often bemused by my fascination with schmutter, my love and thanks go to Paddy for listening, commenting and just being there.

Extracts from the Mass-Observation Archive are reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Trustees of the Mass-Observation Archive. Copyright © Trustees of the Mass-Observation Archive.

Every effort has been made by the author to contact copyright holders of images reproduced in this book. If any copyright holders have not been properly credited, please contact the publishers, who will happily rectify the omission in future editions. The author’s website address is www.catherinehorwood.com

Preface to the 2011 edition

In the six years since Keeping Up Appearances was first published, the boom times of the early twenty-first century have slipped away into recession. Imports of cheap clothes have meant that in terms of price, we have never had it so good. To a generation of young people the thought of buying quality rather than quantity is an alien concept.

Does this mean that we are further than ever from the days when clothes ‘mattered’? Far from it: a look around any public place shows that as much as ever, clothes are still a uniform sending out messages about the wearer’s background and beliefs. Ubiquitous jeans and trainers may have replaced flannel trousers, even plus fours, but the signals are remain similar. They are still saying, ‘Look at me, I belong to this group or tribe.’ The trick is being able to read those signs.

Social anxieties surrounding employment have returned as well. When we hear that in 2010, a major bank issued a forty-four page dress code for its employers, advising staff on everything from which buttons they can undo to the colour of their underwear, it’s pretty clear that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Understanding the reasons how and why a social group or class at any particular time in history dress the way they do remains as revealing of society as ever.

Catherine Horwood, 2011

Introduction

When Daisy was bidden to some entertainment for which she was tersely requested on her invitation card to don Morning Dress, she discovered, on considering her wardrobe, that she possessed no Morning Dress. … She did not think that she even had an afternoon dress … she certainly had not a rest gown (apart from her nightgown) or a tea gown … Life must be, to those who lived sartorially, a complex and many-changing business; they must be at it from morning until night, in order not to risk being caught in the wrong clothes. Daisy knew that she would never be any good at this game.1

R. Macaulay, Keeping Up Appearances (1928)

By the time Rose Macaulay’s heroine describes this ‘game’ in the 1928 novel Keeping Up Appearances, it had already been played for some time by the British middle classes. Clothes have always been a key component in that most British of rituals, maintaining class distinctions. Nevertheless, by the interwar years the rules were pettier and more challenging than ever before.

Broadcaster René Cutforth pointed out the pitfalls of getting it wrong:

the universal game was class assessment and judgement … what made the game more complicated was that different middle-class sections played it by different rules. In the matter of what was done and what was not done, every white-collared Englishman daily walked a tightrope over a deadly chasm.2

The middle classes had to be adept at this game, whether at work, socialising with neighbours, or holidaying at the seaside. But who were Cutforth’s ‘white-collared Englishmen’? And why were they so anxious about what they wore?

The complexities of interwar class are encapsulated in the comment of a 43-year-old office worker from London, who described himself in 1939 as ‘upper class by education (P[ublic] S[chool], Balliol), middle class by profession (sort of clerk) [and] lower class by residence (small house)’.3 In spite of his private education and Oxford degree, this man believed that neither his job nor his home matched up to the standard of his background and, because he felt he had slipped down the class ladder his position in society was ambiguous.4

Analysts during the 1920s and 1930s struggled to make their own class definitions. A survey conducted in 1927, in the days before accurate consumer targeting, looked at reading habits but found it hard to pinpoint clear differences within the middle classes. It defined the middle classes vaguely as ‘well-to-do and comfortably off’ while the lower-middle classes were significantly defined as having limited money but the same buying habits and social outlook.5

A review of the middle classes by Roy Lewis and Angus Maude shortly after the Second World War categorised them in terms of material culture. The middle classes were those ‘who used napkin rings (on the grounds that the working class did not use table napkins at all, while members of the upper class used a clean napkin at each meal) and that the dividing line between the upper-middle and lower-middle classes [was] the point at which a napkin became a serviette’.6 This deliciously captures the complexities of a stratum of society bounded at one end by top professionals mixing with ‘high society’ and at the other by a struggling group ‘newly emerged from the working class’. The latter were people who ‘had to dress to the public’ and were mocked as ‘all fur coat but no breakfast’.7 The middle classes were minutely stratified, ‘less a class than a society of orders each with its own exclusion rituals and status ideology … exquisitely graded according to a hierarchy of rank’.8

Yet rather than a strict hierarchy, the middle classes comprised segments more like an orange than a layer cake.9 Even people of seemingly similar status often chose not to socialise with each other. ‘The clergyman’s widow, in reduced circumstances, would not make friends with the elementary school teacher, though she might have her round for tea … The academic in cap and gown would not mix with the chain-smoking, shirt-sleeved journalist, nor the goggle-eyed motorist with the poet.’10

Class analysts Lewis and Maude estimated that 40 per cent of England’s population could be categorised as middle class by the early 1950s, using five ‘income brackets’: ‘A’, head of household earning more than £1000 per annum; ‘B’, earning £650 to £1000; ‘C’, earning £400 to £650; ‘D’, earning £225 to £400, and ‘E’, earning less than £225. The problem with this system, as Lewis and Maude found, was that some men in traditionally working-class jobs such as steel manufacturing, could earn in excess of £1000 per annum. Similarly, a young man just starting out in a profession might well earn less than £225. Just as in the case of the confused public school-educated office worker with a degree from Balliol, economic recession could alter a family’s income bracket while they retained their middle-class status.11

Any item of clothing could become unacceptable once it was seen being worn by the lower classes. Punch charts the route spats took as they slipped down the social ladder. (Punch, 19 April 1922, © Punch Ltd)

What bound all portions of the middle classes together were the ropes of respectability knotted against fears of unemployment and social disgrace. Yet they were the section of society least affected by the economic ‘depression’ of the interwar years. In real terms, although consumers across the middle classes may have felt they were becoming the ‘new poor’, in reality they were increasingly able to get more for their money. There was patchy unemployment all over the country but by the late 1920s average earnings had regained the losses of the early 1920s, only to drop again slightly in the early 1930s. In contrast, the Cost of Living Index did not rise again until the mid-1930s, having fallen steadily after 1920.12 The net result was that many people – particularly among the middle classes – were better off than they perceived themselves to be.

After the First World War there were new economical and political pressures on society which meant everyday life had to change. Many of these changes have been captured in travelogues such as J.B. Priestley’s English Journey and in histories such as Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Long Weekend.13 Both recreate a vivid picture of a Britain divided economically and geographically by the depressed economy in the north and the burgeoning new domestic industries in the south. Priestley saw that the ‘new industries ha[d] moved south … potato crisps, scent, tooth pastes, bathing costumes, fire extinguishers’, and was intrigued that a living could be made from them.14

Yet there was a living to be made. In 1931, 400,000 of the one million men employed as managers throughout England and Wales were based in the south-east, in addition to all the thousands of small businesses and retailing operations that would have been considered middle class.15 Most men saw job security as vital, especially as they were under pressure to provide a ‘family wage’. A wife who did not have to work was a key marker of middle-class respectability.

Because of this, most middle-class women expected to give up paid work on marriage and did not need to worry about keeping a job for life. It is not surprising then, that contrary to opinions held by some well-known women of the time such as Winifred Holtby and Ray Strachey, there were few career opportunities for middle-class women. Teaching and clerical work was available and there were opportunities within retailing particularly for lower middle-class women. But the pattern of many middle-class women’s lives in interwar Britain was traditionally school, briefly a job, then marriage, children and the usual trappings of domesticity.

For young middle-class women there were also new excitements to enjoy. Formal chaperonage at public events for girls was now outdated. Dancing and the cinema became an important part of their social lives. Smoking and make-up gradually became socially acceptable among all classes, encouraged by the popularity of the cinema and American films. All this meant that women ostensibly had far greater freedom of choice in how they looked and dressed. In reality, however, the constraints placed upon them by the society they moved in were still a controlling factor.

There was a surge in popularity of all sports and leisure activities which became more widely available across the classes and to both sexes. Women in particular gained once again in terms of becoming more physically emancipated through sport and travel. The practicalities of everyday living encouraged change. Many women now had access to a motor car as either a passenger or a driver. Contemporary dress historian James Laver recalled that ‘the daughters of the middle classes were whisked away in two-seaters; the daughters of the lower classes on the pillions of motor-cycles’.16

All these improvements had their influence on dress codes. In the 1930s, for example, increased holiday opportunities encouraged daring women to wear trousers on the beach or for sport and even as evening wear. By the outbreak of the Second World War freedom of movement was replacing modesty as the key fashion issue in leisurewear.

The revolution in dress in turn necessitated the rewriting of the codes by which men and women negotiated the formality and informality of their lives. Therefore it is hard to find a period in the history of dress, for women in particular, that witnessed a greater change than that between 1900 and 1939. By the 1920s and 1930s women’s clothes were seen as being healthier and less restrictive than men’s, a complete volte-face in dress terms.

However, although menswear design in particular appeared to be reactionary and thoroughly traditional, it was also being influenced by developments in sportswear particularly from America.17 Many changes in menswear were extremely subtle. However, such subtlety contributed to the male obsession with small details in matters of appearance, ‘the width of a lapel, the angle at which a hat was worn, the colour of handkerchiefs and hosiery’.18

Judgement by one’s peers was of primary importance. The overriding factor in matters of dress was social status rather than any attempt at individuality or sexuality. ‘Correctness in dress extended to the minutest particulars … Men were forever fidgeting with their tie to see that it was level and that the top button of the shirt did not show; women were forever feeling for the slipping petticoat and falling hairslide.’19 In contrast to their parents’ generation, interwar children, were relatively immune to the vagaries of changing fashions and class pressure. Opportunities for buying clothes were changing steadily during the interwar years. The arrival of the department store as a shopping forum by the end of the nineteenth century heralded a more forceful marketing approach by suppliers. The private dressmaker, the local draper’s shop and the Savile Row tailor all faced new rivals. Vast department stores provided a showcase for ‘correct attire’, demonstrating to a much wider public what they were expected to wear.20 Stores were able to stock their shelves with an increasing array of goods available through new technological processes of manufacturing.

The widening of markets for goods heralded the start of a democratisation of sorts. Cheap mass production of garments challenged the old class demarcations that Savile Row and haute couture stood for. These were indeed the first attempts to bring high fashion within the reach of all. These events were encouraged by the increasing availability of synthetic fabrics, which, although of basic quality, allowed for the manufacture of scaled-down Parisian designs. In contrast to the pre-First World War period, by the 1930s there was a strong ready-to-wear trade.21 The success of ready-to-wear in turn encouraged the development of mass-produced clothes, although the full effects of this were not truly felt until after the Second World War.22

Many of the items of clothing associated with the 1920s and 1930s are so familiar – the winged collar, the pair of gloves, the pinstriped suit, the floral frock – that the significance of choice, why people chose to wear what they did, when they did, is lost. There is no shortage of excellent empirical works which chart the changes in both men’s and women’s fashions during this period. However, taken out of context it is hard to pass on the wearer’s motives for either purchase or display, or to demonstrate the tensions between modesty and modernity.

Everyone, consciously or unconsciously, sends out a message with what they wear. Rebels are easy enough to spot, but those seeking the safe haven of respectability also send out visual signals through their clothes to display this message. The British desire to look respectable – in contrast, that is, to ‘looking a tart’ – has ‘at different times this century, kept ankles from view, cleavages hidden, colour sombre and figures rigidly controlled by inhibiting underwear’.23

The pursuit of respectability in the mid-twentieth century led to a definite feeling of ‘anti-fashion’ among the middle classes. The irony is that respectability forced the middle classes to change their appearance so that they could dissociate themselves from anything that might be considered ‘too cheap, too expensive, too formal, too slovenly, too old-fashioned or too trendy’.24 There is also a conceit in clothing that can deceive not just the viewer but also the wearer into believing the message of the garments.25 Which man or woman does not move differently when in full evening dress than when dressed for gardening? In a less obvious way quality clothes gave the wearer a feeling of confidence in their class status.

Much to the dismay of the middle classes, higher wages for staff – prompted by the interwar servant shortage – allowed them to take advantage of the ready-made clothing appearing in department and chain stores across the country. (Punch, 16 March 1921 © Punch Ltd)

Yet by the 1930s advertisements and the media were suggesting that one could no longer judge class distinctions by what someone wore. When Jaeger relaunched their clothing in this period, they claimed that ‘thanks to [us] you can no longer tell a shop girl from a Duchess’. The Daily Mail ran stories such as the difficulty that traffic staff had in 1936 of distinguishing ‘working girls’ eligible for cheaper travel tickets since ‘these days girls dress so ingeniously that it would be almost impossible for any omnibus conductor to detect whether a girl is of the working or middle class’.26 Just before the outbreak of the Second World War the author Antonia White praised this social levelling effect of fashion in the 1930s in Picture Post: ‘It was so easy to look smart when everyone from duchess to mill girl wore exactly the same type of clothes.’27

These all suggest that mass-production techniques were helping to level class barriers in Britain. Yet there is another side to the story that shows that this certainly was not readily accepted as happening among the middle classes. Here clothes mattered a great deal and were still important class signifiers. As the mythical mill girl gained access to better quality clothing, so the middle-class shopper had to find other ways to distinguish him- or herself visually.

Of course, this is nothing new. Clothes have been used as a way of demarcation for centuries. Feudal class recognition by dress was signposted by legislation, and clothing was used as a method of social control. Even after specific sumptuary laws had died out, the economics of society as much as its social mores dictated that it was always relatively simple to judge a person’s class through the newness, cleanliness and quality of their clothes. What makes the interwar period different and its dress codes important is the social unrest and struggle with modernity that they reflect. Unravelling the messages behind dress codes of this time helps us to understand the social and economic upheaval that was taking place in Britain between the two world wars. This in turn was to shape the postwar society for the rest of the twentieth century.

In an attempt to dissect the complexities of the interwar middle classes and their dress codes, this book has made extensive use of the Mass-Observation Archive now held at the University of Sussex. Mass-Observation was started in 1937 with the aim of doing ‘sociological research of the first importance, and which has hitherto never been attempted’.28 The object of its founders, Tom Harrisson, Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge, was to create a ‘people’s anthology’ of British life, for the people, by the people.29

In the early months of 1939 Mass-Observation began to send out monthly questionnaires or ‘directives’ to their ‘respondents’. Respondents had volunteered from a variety of backgrounds, though they were predominantly middle-class, and were identified only by a number. However, the archivists kept basic biographical details of each person for their own research purposes. By combining all these details it has been possible to work out the age of a particular respondent, where he/she lived, and what their occupation was, thus we are able to place them geographically as well as socially within the class structure of the time. It was even possible to establish precisely which part of the middle classes they came from, sometimes through their occupation but more often through their own replies to the directive on class.30

Founder Harrisson recognised that the real value of the replies to the directives was that they recorded ‘what people thought they were doing’. Whereas this might make the evidence unreliable for other forms of research, it was exactly the sort of information needed to find out people’s motives for wearing the clothes they did. Directives on dance, clothes, personal appearance, class and age differences, together with reports compiled by contemporary Mass-Observation researchers, all combine to paint a revealing picture of the fragmented interwar middle-class society. In addition, a wealth of material from magazines to shop and store records, from didactic literature to personal testimony, contributed to this book’s exploration of the relationship between dress and decorum between the wars.

In 1903 George Bernard Shaw commented that ‘acquired notions of propriety are stronger than natural instincts. It is easier to recruit for monasteries and convents than to induce … a British officer to walk through Bond Street in a golfing cap on an afternoon in May’.31 By 1939, in spite of all the social and cultural upheavals of the First World War and the economic progress made in terms of retailing and manufacture, the British middle classes remained steadfastly conservative, reluctant to step outside the cloistered and socially secure world of tennis clubs and bridge parties. Sporting the uniform of respectability, they were clinging to a class system whose days were numbered as the social upheaval of another traumatic world war approached.

ONE

Shopping for Status

Shun the cheap and shoddy as you would a contagious disease and … sink your all in a few perfect clothes. Well-made shoes, well-cut clothes of classic, lasting style, good hats, however few in number – these form the foundation of our lady’s wardrobe.1

Vogue, 1931

Where people shop has always been a good indicator not just of their taste but of their social aspirations. Vogue’s advice from 1931 encapsulates the aims of the female middle-class shopper. Achieving them was another matter. First, there was the question of how to pay for these quality goods. Salaries and housekeeping rarely matched expectations. Secondly, people’s loyalties to their traditional style of shop were being challenged as new types of shops and stores started appearing across the country.

During the interwar period large-scale manufacturers and retailers gradually changed the face of the British high street forever. Lawrence Neal, head of Daniel Neal’s, famous until the 1960s for their range of ‘sensible’ children’s shoes, wrote a review of British retailing in 1933.2 He divided it into six categories: department stores; multiple shops, such as Burton’s or Freeman, Hardy & Willis; speciality shops such as Austin Reed’s; the Co-operative Movement; ‘fixed-price’ chain stores such as Woolworth’s, Marks & Spencer or British Home Stores; and finally, small independent shops. In addition he looked at ‘clothing clubs’ and mail order, but makes no mention of the ‘hire’ and second-hand markets even though they clearly existed. Nevertheless, he accurately assessed that there was a wide and growing variety of retailing outlets across the country to suit all tastes and classes.

Most of England’s department stores had been established in the early twentieth century. By the 1920s major cities had at least one department store while mid-sized towns had large specialist clothing stores. Department stores sold 10 per cent of all clothing and footwear in 1920, increasing to just over 15 per cent by 1939.3 Sales were buoyed by the development of mass production. In 1920 there were also nearly 6,000 branches of smaller multiple clothing retailers, such as Burton’s and Freeman, Hardy & Willis, which grew to nearly 10,000 by 1939.4 Their market share rose from 8.5 per cent in 1920 to just over 20 per cent in 1939. These figures, when combined with figures from the Co-operative Societies, which went from 5 per cent in 1920 to 7.5 per cent in 1939, show how shopping habits changed within twenty years.5 In 1920 75 per cent of clothing and footwear was bought from small independent retailers but by 1939 this figure had dropped to 50 per cent as larger chain stores increasingly dominated the market.6

From the turn of the twentieth century department stores had aimed at the middle-class market.7 During the 1920s and 1930s, for example, within the Debenhams network stores were graded ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’, being ‘high class’, ‘popular to medium class’ and ‘just popular’ respectively.8 This was reflected in the standard of goods they sold. Management advised ‘C’ class stores to be ‘second in fashion, whilst the first burnt their fingers’.9

Stores increasingly used inducements to entice customers through their doors. Publicity stunts included celebrity visits and roof-garden fashion shows such as those held at Selfridges throughout this period.10 Simpson’s had three aeroplanes on the top floor of its store in Piccadilly in 1936,11 while Kennards of Croydon, a ‘C’ group store aiming at the ‘just popular’ market, borrowed two elephants from a visiting circus in the 1930s to promote a ‘jumbo’ sales event.12

Large retailers also encouraged consumers to linger by installing hairdressing and beauty salons and coffee shops. City businessman’s daughter Eileen Whiteing remembers taking tea with her mother at Kennards of Croydon ‘all to the strains of light music from the inevitable trio or quartette [sic], often of ladies only, hidden behind a bank of palms and plants’.13 Selfridges was also among the first stores to use not only celebrity appearances but also marketing of particular lines of clothing to capture sales. In the 1930s they devoted a section of the women’s wear department to promoting a range of clothes inspired by the popular female flying ‘ace’, Amelia Earhart.14 Earhart was one of many sports stars in the interwar years who endorsed clothing lines.

Stores which wanted to attract a higher class of customer concentrated on offering good service. Harrods Man’s Shop, for example, aimed to give a standard of personal service similar to that of a smaller specialist quality shop such as Austin Reed.15 Most major department stores offered to send goods ‘on approval’. Ordering an item ‘on appro’ was a form of mail order and a way of offering customers extended credit since they did not need to pay for the goods until they had been received and accepted. Eileen Whiteing’s mother, wife of a City managing director, regularly ordered a selection of hats ‘on approval’ from Aldis & Hutchings in Croydon.16 Harrods chairman Sir Woodman Burbidge claimed in 1933 that the approval system worked because advertisements had improved so much that ‘a woman would know that the article she was ordering would suit her requirements’.17 Figures for items returned are not available to confirm or deny his claim but it was undoubtedly a popular marketing ploy aided by a cheap and reliable postal system.

Stores tried to attract new customers with celebrity promotions such as this display put on by Selfridges in Oxford Street of a range of clothes inspired by American female flying ace Amelia Earhart and featuring the top model of the time, ‘Gloria’. (From the Selfridges collection at the History of Advertising Trust Archive)

Department stores such as John Lewis and Harrods carefully fostered and maintained their middle-class status. In 1932 Harrods regularly sent out brochures to their account customers to encourage sales. The John Lewis Partnership followed suit with ‘Customers’ Gazettes’ and ‘Monthly Special Notices’. There was great concern that the newsletters should avoid ‘such vulgarities’ as the use of words such as ‘kiddies’.18 Similarly, the chairman of the John Lewis Partnership was horrified by the ‘nastily cheap’ reproductions of women’s clothing:

I am writing this in ignorance of the opinion of the Deputy Chairman. I am waiting with real interest to hear whether she considers that for our real public, that is to say the cultivated people, who are thrifty but not ‘impossibly’ hard up, the kind of cheap-and-nastiness, that we seem to me to be failing at present to avoid, is of serious importance … I am not suggesting for a moment that the opinion of any one lady, however typical a customer she should seem to us to be, should be accepted at all uncritically. I have a strong suspicion that Sir Algernon has been misled quite seriously by the extent to which he has relied upon the guidance of his own wife whom I should certainly consider to be typical of the public at which I have sought to aim the steering of his company.19

Unfortunately, the reply of the deputy chairman is not recorded but clearly ‘cheap-and-nastiness’ is something to be avoided.

Department stores catering for the lower middle classes were challenged by the newer concept of chain stores selling only own-label clothes.20 One such clothing chain, C&A, openly targeted the lower end of the market. Retailer Lawrence Neal, writing in 1933, felt its new style of selling was ‘particularly interesting … in that it illustrates the combination of mass-production methods with a multiple distributive organization’.21 When C&A opened its first major store in London in 1922, it was among the first to offer only its own-label clothing, ‘the Height of Fashion at the Lowest Cost’. They made a point of saying that they did not offer a mail-order service.22 This was presumably in an effort to keep down costs.

C&A’s second major British store was in Liverpool. Advertisements for the opening played on the London/Paris fashion connection promising ‘the wonderful shopping atmosphere associated with Paris and the West End of London’.23 In contrast, advertising for the London opening had stressed the economic value of their clothes without mentioning Paris. Subsequently, no distinction was made between advertisements for its various stores, which soon included Birmingham, Glasgow and Southampton.24 C&A, aiming at the lower middle classes, rarely suggested emulation as a motive for buying their clothes. Apart from the initial mention of Paris and ‘the height of fashion’, thriftiness became their leitmotif.25

The small shops could not compete with department and chain stores in terms of advertising expenditure. Even C&A, among the top ten retail advertisers of women’s clothes, was regularly surpassed by store giants like Barkers and Selfridges.26 Barkers dominated West London, offering in its namesake store ‘high-class lines’ while its junior partners, Pontings and Derry & Toms, carried their middle-class counterparts.27 Nevertheless, there is little doubt that Barkers had to move with the times and introduce facilities such as tearooms and toilets as inducements to female customers to lure them away from the West End.28

In contrast, a local store could provide the personal touch that many middle-class consumers liked.29 Residents would be aware of the status of both the large and the small shops in their area. Mrs B. noted as a teenager that in Croydon where she grew up there was a ‘very nice shop … called Grant’s, and a not at all nice [one] called Kennedy’s’. She envied her best friend Susan who ‘used to have very expensive clothes from Grant’s’.30 Similarly, Cape & Co., a department store in Oxford, with a working- and lower-middle-class clientele, found it hard to compete with Elliston & Cavell, the ‘grander and larger business’.31

The upper-middle-class man or women would try to buy clothes in the leisurely manner of someone who had time and money to spare. Families were loyal to stores that treated them with the appropriate deference.32 Ella Bland remembers women talking of ‘my milliner’, ‘my furrier’ and ‘our tailor’.33 Shopkeepers would open the door for regular customers and ‘shop-walkers’, senior store staff, would cater for the needs of favoured customers. The walker in Brighton drapers Chipperfield & Butler was ‘always flawlessly dressed in frock-coat and tails’, recollects Leonard Goldman who worked there as a junior salesman in the 1920s.34 In Croydon Eileen Whiteing recalls her and her mother being given chairs to sit on in local drapers Aldis & Hutchings ‘while we made a leisurely selection’.35

The ties of loyalty could be strong. When Mrs A. moved from Wantage in Berkshire to Croydon in south London she continued to buy clothes from her favourite local drapers, Arbery & Son.36 Mrs R., an MP’s daughter from Gloucestershire, remembers her mother getting her clothes from a shop in Cheltenham called ‘Madam Wright’: ‘Practically once a week I think she managed to go there. She was pretty extravagant about clothes. They weren’t terribly fashionable, but they weren’t frumpish either, not at all. They were just like the sort of clothes you would expect from a shop that called itself Madam Wright.’37

Most towns offered a selection of clothing retailers to suit different price ranges. Worthing had ‘a considerable number of shops specialising in clothing as well as private dressmakers catering for the wealthy clientele of west and north Worthing, and the affluent areas nearby’.38 Lewes in Sussex had five shops that sold menswear. Although they may have had to pay a little bit more than in larger towns, locals felt no need to leave the town to buy clothing.39

Most towns in southern England had a selection of small dress shops called ‘Madam’ shops in the trade.40 One such was Joan Laurie’s of Worthing and Brighton, owned by a Mrs Fletcher, confusingly known as Madam Barnett.41 Records of such shops are rare since they were usually owned by individuals and documentation was often destroyed when they closed. Although there were fewer shops of this type in the North, they did exist. Leonard Goldman’s aunt Esther ran such a shop in the Gorbals district of Glasgow. He describes his aunt as having been ‘somewhat flamboyant’, saying ‘she knew what suited her and within the limitations of her background, she had, if not exactly good taste, then at least a flair, which certainly drew attention to her even in a fashionable [southern] resort like Brighton’.42

Esther Goldman’s shop would have been similar to the one set up by Blackburn-born Dorothy Whipple’s heroine in High Wages.43 Having worked for little money for a draper’s in her unnamed northern town, the heroine Jane decided to open her own shop. Whipple’s description of the window display on its opening day captures its trim modesty and daintiness.

In the window … was an elegant white embroidered frock with a yellow necklace laid on it. Three equally elegant white embroidered blouses were disposed on the other side of the window; and just where it should be was a bowl of yellow globe flowers to point the colour of the necklace. Jane thought it discreet, fresh and delicious.44

‘Madam’ shops such as these tried to offer a personalised service, knowing each customer’s requirements intimately. Eric Newby’s experience as a wholesale representative for his family’s London-based firm shows that little had changed even in the 1950s.45 A Scottish shop owner with a business in the Borders told him, ‘it seems to us that you are not au fait with the requirements of our ladies. They do not want mass-produced garments … our ladies would not wear such a garment, Mr Newby!’46

In the late 1930s there were also around 30,000 retail drapers and gentlemen’s outfitters, selling socks, shirts, haberdashery and underwear to a clientele they would have known well.47 As a young sales assistant in a Brighton drapery store in the 1930s, Leonard Goldman learned quickly that there was more than taste in clothes to master.

Several of the staff were from a middle-class background and as, in those days, accent mattered, it wouldn’t do to be heard using an ‘inferior’ one. One had to keep up with the Jones’s. But perhaps this was even more true when it came to the customers. If they spoke that way you had to match them. If they didn’t, your assumed upper-class accent somehow gave you the edge.48

BALANCING BUYING AND BUDGETS

For women with a comfortable income shopping was often a treat. For those on a lower income it was sometimes a struggle but nevertheless pleasure could be taken in the planning of a purchase and the shopping trip itself.49 Mass-Observation surveyed their respondents on shopping habits in April 1939, asking them to describe the steps leading to the purchase of a main article of dress. By far the most popular activity was window-shopping. Two-thirds of the women looked in shop windows for ideas while just under half used magazines and advertisements for inspiration. Vogue was the fashion mentor of the time with women across the middle classes referring to it as a fashion guide and mentioning it more than any other magazine.50

Not surprisingly, young working women under thirty showed the greatest interest in shopping for clothes. Few respondents took sales assistants’ advice, preferring to discuss what they might buy with female friends instead.51 Mrs B., a housewife from Dorking in Surrey, bemoaned the problems of dealing with assistants working on commission, which was common practice in many smaller shops and stores until the 1970s, showing that ‘service’ can itself be a problem:

The biggest pitfall to be avoided is falling into the clutches of the Jewish type of saleswoman, who will over-persuade you with glib patter. Then you will find yourself with a garment which usually spends the rest of its life hanging in your wardrobe and which reproaches you each time you see it. I am very easily persuaded by people like this, so the only thing to do is to avoid all such shops (they are a very definite type) and only go to big shops or shops where you know the salesgirls are reliable.52

This unmistakably anti-Semitic tone was not uncommon in references to sales assistants.53 Shopping for ‘costumes’ to go up to Oxford for the first time, Jenifer Wayne recalls her mother, with ‘Anglo-Saxon determination’ delighting in visiting little ‘gown shops’ in Soho, each with ‘its full-blown Jewess beaming in the doorway between the small plate-glass windows’.54 Yet, as Leonard Goldman confirms, a young sales assistant like him could get into trouble if a customer ‘swapped’, meaning walking out without buying.55

Outside the big cities those on a lower income also used the media and shop windows for inspiration, as Mrs E., a housewife from Burnley, showed:

I always study fashion articles, advertisements, women’s magazines to keep my ideas up to date. I never discuss with friends, but I take note of what well-to-do people wear, and notice photographs of the Queen or Duchess of Kent as naturally the fashion houses who dress these people should know what is coming in. I take every chance of studying the displays in the best shops though I could not afford to patronize them. Fashion in this locality lags behind the fashion in a large city like Manchester so I like to see the shops there.56

Professional working women were not above window-shopping either. The memoirs of Marion Pike, both a student and later staff member of Royal Holloway College, reveal that staff members frequently browsed the London shops for an hour before late afternoon meetings, enabling them to ‘get one’s eye in for really earnest shopping, which was done in vacations’.57