#angelathirkell

[professorpski]

Clothing coupons which looked such an imposing array when issued melted to nothing before the onslaught of a coat and skirt, or a winter overcoat. A new kind of gold-digging was evolved by women of all ages, who took up the attitude that their husbands, sons, brothers and men friends would never need any new clothes and so might as well let them have their coupons.

This passage was written by Angela Thirkell in her novel Marling Hall set in the countryside of England which came out 1942 in the midst of World War II. In order to prevent the price of goods from skyrocketing, the British instituted a rationing system whereby people got an assortment of coupons that would allow them to legally buy clothing. Thirkell saw the humor in the scramble to keep well-dressed and within the law. Gold-digger is an insult usually directed at younger women who cultivate older men with money in order to share some of their gold via marriage or other means. Here, Thirkell made every woman into a gold-digger, or at least a coupon- digger.

Clothing for public wearing was more formal, more detailed, and as a result more expensive than what we wear now, so the value of coupons to women was far more than it would be today. True, men's fashions evolved very slowly, but the fabric wore out just the same.

You can find Thirkell's novels at Virago Books: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

[professorpski]

"Lady Emily was making a khaki scarf, had been making it for nearly a year, and was likely, as far as anyone could see, to finish a few days after the end of the war, if then.... What she achieved in the way of adding stitches, of losing stitches, of inventing stitches that no one had ever met before, of finding a long ladder where none had been five minutes earlier, of discovering a peculiar knotted lump twenty rows back and insisting on unravelling at that point because nothing was good or good enough for the soldiers and picking up her row with double its number of stitches, only those who have tried to guide a mother's early steps in knitting can understand."

Anyone who tried to guide a child's early steps in knitting would understand this as well. Recently, I got a girl started on a scarf, sent her home and have heard since that the thing was widening in weird ways that she could not understand or control. Similarly, my return to crocheting after decades created monstrosities; I did not seem to know when a row ended and it was time to turn around; I just kept adding stitches. The learning curve for making can feel steep at times.

By the end of this passage in Angela Thirkell's Marling Hall from 1942, we learn that Lady Emily's scarf varies in width from 9 to 19 inches, is 5 feet long, and she thinks she only half done with it. This is one of the funnier passages in this novel which can seem a bit impatient with humankind at points. But it was 1942 and the country was struggling desperately and I can understand how Thirkell's tales of life in the English countryside would be less cheerful than her pre-war works. Although they continued to turn on making sure that people married the right spouse who would make them happy, and not the wrong ones who made parents clutch their hair.

You can find these works at Virago Books: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

[professorpski]

Doris Phipps and Lily-Annie Pollett, though they looked incredibly plain and depraved in oyster satin blouses, tight-seated bell-bottomed trousers, red nails on dirty hands, greasy curls hanging on their shoulders, a cigarette forever glued to their lips, were really very nice, kind girls.

This description of a pair of women train porters assigned to a town stop in England during World War II comes from the mind of the stationmaster Mr. Beedle. He, like many older people in the novels of Angela Thirkell, is upset by changes brought by the war: here, the disappearance of the squad of male porters he had commanded before the war broke out. Even though trousers make perfect sense for the physical job of hefting and toting bags and trunks, and pushing carts piled up with boxes and bags, they are part of the reason that the young women seem depraved to Beedle. And one would hardly expect their hands or hair to stay clean in the midst of all this dust and dirt.

Of course, women had been doing dirty work for time out of mind, think farm women and scrub women, and doing some of it in trousers, but that did not shake belief in the rule that women should not be wearing pants in public places. It was not until the 1960s, and only after a drawn-out public debate, that pants on women in the North Atlantic world were seen as anything but sloppy or overly sporty. So it was a big shift when by the late 1960s, women were wearing all kinds of pants whether or not they were embarked on a dirty job at a train station.

This fashion in fiction is from Growing Up published in 1943. You can find reprints of Thikell's works at Virago Books: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

[professorpski]

...Lucy, in a very old shapeless coat and skirt, a shabby felt hat, dirty string gloves, dragging a large bag of some evil-smelling stuff, was not an object of aesthetic pleasure. Then Mlle Duchaux's hard eye observed her well-groomed hair and well-cut, well-cleaned shoes and her well-fitting stockings and recognised her at once for what she was.

The hard eye belongs to a French woman, a retired governess, who had trained many an upper-class English family’s children, and it fell upon Lucy, the daughter of a well-off family in the English countryside during World War II. Lucy was dragging around a bag of fertilizer as she was a hearty, determined young woman who was keen on doing her bit for the war effort whether that involved looking after a garden or working at a hospital. This is from the book Marling Hall by Angela Thirkell which was published in 1942.

Lucy’s clothing was a mess precisely because she was working hard at something, and because of her general indifference to clothing, yet notice that she still wore a skirt and not pants. Only actively partaking in the dirtiest of farmwork would have made pants appropriate at this point in time. The retired governess recognized the shabby clothing was not on account of Lucy’s inability to afford anything better; Lucy’s shoes and her stockings and her hair indicated that she could afford what she wanted. And the retired governess, who had served the upper-classes, knew exactly the subtleties of dress which set off the well-off from the rest of society.

Angela Thirkell began writing novels set in the English countryside in the 1930s and she was still writing in the 1950s. Virago has republished her books: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

[professorpski]

"It's bad enough Mrs Dean having to eat one of Mrs Phipps unspeakable suppers, without being asked not to dress. Anyway, my dinner-jacket suit is about the only decent one I have. My blue suit is too shabby for words, and my brown one's as bad, and I can't dine in flannels, and I won't see my way to getting any new clothes just now."

So laments a young man who is studying law but does not have a job in Angela Thirkell’s August Rising from 1936. Notice that being asked to dress for dinner, which one would think of as a burden of formality, would be preferable to the young man. Why? Because of his 4 suits, his most formal one, his dinner-jacket or tuxedo, is in the best shape. This was the era when men mostly wore suits for public wear unless their work demanded something tougher to withstand hard wear. And here even a young man of professional parents who was not yet earning a living would own a set of suits, one only for evening wear.

While we tend to think of clothing as something only women had to think about, men had to think about it too. And men’s suits were almost never made at home because tailoring, which involved creating a stiffer inner structure, took different skills and materials than dressmaking. One reason why men bought their clothing as ready to wear or had them custom made more often than women did.

Angela Thirkell set her stories in the countryside of England and wrote interconnecting novels where characters and events appear in more than one. Her novels date from the 1930s through the 1950s. Although fashion is not central to her stories, I find her passing comments revealing of how people thought about clothing. You can find her books at Virago Books: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

[professorpski]

She raised her long amber necklace with one hand and let if fall heavily on her coral necklace, her silver chain, and her coloured wooden beads, with a gesture of final doom.

This strange conglomeration of jewelry is won by Mrs. Grant, an annoying woman, dubbed “the Englishwoman Abroad” by novelist Angela Thirkell in The Brandons from 1939. Thirkell dresses this character in a hodge podge of garments and fabrics as well as accessories to indicate her lack of sense shows up both in all she does which is mostly annoy people. Someone who doesn’t have the sense to know she is always annoying and inconveniencing people hasn’t the sense to recognize the lack of harmony in her clothing and ornaments. Her material foolishness reflects her general foolishness.

Thirkell wrote novels set in the English countryside from the 1930s through 1950s, and several characters, including the annoying Mrs. Grant show up in more than one of them. You can find them as reprints from Virago Press: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

[professorpski]

'I say, when you come to us, you couldn't possibly wear that ripping white trailing dress, could you?' 'The Callot or the Schiaparelli?' asked Mrs. Dean interested.

Oh, to be able to ask which haute couture gown. As this indicates, Mrs. Dean, a character in the novel August Folly by Angela Thirkell, is a wealthy woman. She refuses to wear said gown to dinner away from her home because it is a tea-gown and too informal. As she explains to the young man who brought it up, “I must dress up a little more when I am having my first dinner with your parents.” A good reminder that not everything haute couture was the most formal of evening gowns, and some were for lounging around your own house.

This novel was written in 1930 which indicates that grown women were still wearing tea gowns which had first surfaced in the late 19th century as loosely fitting dresses worn without corsets and thus worn for less formal occasions in one’s own home. Of course, the 1920s was supposed to be a period when the corset was discarded but many women had to wear corsets still in order to create from their curved bodies the test-tube silhouette which became the fashion.

You can find Thirkell’s books in reprints from Virago Books here:  https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

[professorpski]

...a torrent of complaint burst from the company, each member of which had a personal grudge against the whole coupon system. Mrs. Marling's Burberry, wearing out from sheer spite, had run into fourteen coupons. Miss Harvey had been forced to give two coupons for a piece of blue ring velvet to make a turban....

These fictional characters, surely based on real people, were complaining about the coupon system used to ration clothing and fabric in Britain during World War II. I liked the scene for two reasons. First, a coat wearing out from spite is a funny idea. Second, this scene is a reality check on the nostalgic vision of the past when everyone supposedly supported all elements of the war effort. I recently had my students read an article on the era which stressed how government and magazines told women that not only must they help with war work, but they must see beauty as duty and look good for the men and for general morale. Although the illegal market in rationed goods was noted, there was little emphasis on how annoying such a rationing system could become.

Of course, the idea behind rationing was two fold: to limit consumption so that most goods went towards the war effort, and to prevent the wealthiest people from buying whatever they wanted and driving up prices. In addition, the British government introduced the Utility Scheme which limited prices and demanded a level of quality; again, this was an attempt to keep everyone able to buy something.

The scene above appeared in Angela Thirkell’s novel from Marling Hall from 1942. Ring velvet comes from the term wedding-ring velvet, or chiffon velvet, the idea being it was so fine that you could pull it through a wedding ring. Women turned to cloth turbans during the war, since fur felt and wool felt was hard to get, and they wanted some kind of hat which they saw as necessary to former public wear.

You can find Thirkell’s novels which run through the 1930s onward at Virago Books: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell