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).