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| The classy dressers |
A cloche hat made of pink straw by Kilpin Ltd, 1920s.
Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, photographed by Cecil
Beaton in a diamond tiara made by the designer Ladoche.
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IT STARTED as a piece of academic research, but it blossomed
into a subject that rings bells with everyone. Clothes and
Class. Irresistible. And in the 1920s and 1930s, the fine
line between lower-middle and upper-middle, was a national
preoccupation.
Take that as a starting-point, and add the eternal truth that
everyone sends out messages with what they wear, and you have
a new slant on the society our grandparents lived in. Fashion,
far from being frivolous, was linked with the changes and
social unrest of Britain between the wars. It was all about,
as Catherine Horwood’s title so aptly says, Keeping
Up Appearances. It was about respectability, aspiration, and
snobbery taken to the realms of high art.
Here speaks the chairman of the John Lewis store in 1932:
“…our real public, that is to say the cultivated
people, who are thrifty but not impossibly hard-up…”
Unashamed demarcation of between the classes was part of common
parlance, and correctness of dress was inextricably bound
up with social status; your truly respectable middle-class
family man wore his three piece suit and tie even on the beach.
Catherine Horwood’s book, a glorious mix of shopping
and business girls, plus-fours and evening frocks, beach pyjamas
and Punch cartoons and Betjeman-esque nostalgia in abundance,
comes at the end of five years hard grind. It began with work
for her MA, a history of mixed bathing – still unusual,
apparently, in the early 1930s. Her essay on the subject,
Girls Who Arouse Dangerous Passions, won a prize in an academic
journal, but also set her wondering: why did she keep coming
across the phrase, “You Can’t Tell a Duchess from
a Mill Girl”?
“I didn’t believe it for
a moment. Yet as I looked at pictures of clothes in the 1930s,
there was a strange anonymity about them. Why the conformity?
It was a time when mass production was coming in and more
people had access to fashion. I wanted to look at the impact
of that – and that lead me to how few clothes people
had then (look at the size of wardrobes in that time, really
small), then on to the importance of hats and cloves, the
etiquette of men’s hats (as in when to lift them)…I
realised quite soon that clothes and class was a huge subject.
This was not going to be a ‘hem-line history’”.
Nor would it be enough to look at old copies of Vogue, fascinating
as that was. (She does use some delectable vogue quotes, such
as “Shun the cheap and shoddy as you would a contagious
disease” for instance.). What she wanted was to hear
real people’s voices. Her initial plan was an oral history,
and she interviewed several 80-year-olds. But how reliable
were their memories, coloured as they must be by what they
have done and seen in recent years?
Then came the breakthrough, what she calls her “golden
moment.” She went to the Mass Observation Archive at
Sussex University, and there she found hand-written responses
to a 1939 questionnaire with three topics: class, personal
appearance, and clothing.
It was all there, lists of what was in people’s wardrobes
and where they had bought them – “a grey flannel
suit for every day and dark pinstripe for best, five guineas
from Austin Reed”. It was the real thing, something
made resoundingly clear when by coincidence one 86-year-old
man happened to be in both her oral history and in the Mass
Observation Archive. “What a prig I was!”, he
said, looking back at his 1930s self. Catherine Horwood knew
she had stuck gold: she had got into people’s lives.
She is a latecomer to the academic world, her background seeming
rather to be the stuff of romantic novels. Her father was
Prince Yuri Galitzine; her ballerina mother, Clothilde, was
bought up in the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, where her grandfather,
Dudley Ward, was a close friend of the owner, the poet Rupert
Brooke.
Catherine was born in Primrose Hill, lived most of her married
life in a large house in Belsize Park, and has now moved with
her new partner, a fellow academic, into a flat just round
the corner from her childhood home in Chalcot Crescent.
She started her working life as a journalist, and became the
features editor of Good Housekeeping magazine. She had three
daughters, and for a while ran a second-hand children’s
clothing company called Castaways, until gardening took over,
and became a passion. She worked for the National Gardens
Scheme, regularly opened her garden to the public, and has
recently created a stunningly beautiful garden overlooking
the rooftops of London.
She was 40 when she started reading for her history degree
at the University of North London. She went on to do an MA
in Women’s History, and was persuaded by historian Amanda
Vickery to do a PhD. Now Dr Horwood, she moves form one to
piece of research to the next with unflagging energy and originality:
her next book, out in October, is called Worst Fashions, What
We Shouldn’t Have Worn But Did.
In Keeping Up Appearances, she feels she has opened up a minefield.
Snobbery was rampant, everyone knew their place, there was
very little social mobility; attitudes towards foreigners
were shocking, the tensions between the different strata of
the middle classes were omnipresent. At the same time, the
safe and comfortable world of tennis parties and garden fetes
was being threatened , and in a set of photographs from Stourbridge
Rotary Club Catherine Horwood saw the insecurity reflected
in the men’s clothes.
“In 1920, all those
professional middle-class men dressed differently –
there were flannels and blazers, boaters, a rose in the buttonhole.
Look at the same group in 1930, and all the individuality
was gone; all the men were in suits. They feared for their
jobs: if they conformed, they would be safer.”
She thinks that we must all breath a sigh of relief when we
look at our forbearers and the pressures that were on them.
And yet…For a long time, sine the late ‘60s, what
we have had in place of the guidelines has been confusion.
Dr Horwood thinks that now there is little reaction against
laissez-faire. “Dress-down Friday”, she says,
has been an abysmal failure; men would rather wear suits.
Women working in banks are all wearing dark suits. “We
like uniforms; it’s an identification. There is a reassurance
in following the code.”
Is it, one wonders, the same reassurance that the Rotarians
of Stourbridge, fearing for their future, were seeking? A
sobering thought.
Ruth Gorb
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