THE LINEN BUTTON is the lowliest button of all, produced in vast quantities since the mid-nineteenth century and used, in different sizes, to fasten poorer-quality underwear, some babies’ clothing and working men’s shirts. During my mother’s childhood, labouring men fastened their collars with linen buttons whereas collar-and-tie chaps, like my great-grandfather, had the benefit of mother-of-pearl.
Linen buttons numbered among the items sold at the family’s corner shop. Like all corner shops, my great-grandma’s was a repository of many things, from starch and string to pig powders, pickles and broken biscuits. Aside from a dazzle of cheap dress rings – the shop’s one concession to glamour – linen buttons were the sole items relating to dress. Rings may seem inexplicable in a shop servicing a poor industrial neighbourhood where money was scarce and many goods retailed in quantities of two ounces, but, well into the twentieth century, corner shops sold some attractive tat along with essential goods. I remember similar rings from my own childhood – an expandable band that had to be wrestled from an elasticated card and turned your ring finger green, but whose stone shone every bit as brightly as a Woolworth’s gem. Unlike dress rings, linen-covered buttons were decidedly mundane, the linen stretched across stiff metal with holes stamped in it for thread. The button box contains three linen shirt buttons, attached to scraps of their original cards. Men wore these buttons, but it was nearly always women who sewed them on to husbands’ and sons’ shirts. My great-grandma Betsy sold no female equivalent, perhaps because no one female button was so ubiquitous.
In addition to being cheap, the linen button had another great virtue. Unlike more expensive buttons, these survived the mangle, that essential part of the weekly wash. ‘Will not break in mangling’1 was a virtue not to be underestimated for those with little money to spare for buttons or very much else. Worn by men doing filthy, heavy work, linen buttons needed to be robust. Much working-class life in the early years of the twentieth century required robustness of one sort or another, especially for those, like my great-grandma’s immediate neighbours, at the poorer end of the scale.
The wives of colliery and foundry men accounted for most of Betsy’s customers; the poorest among them strayed not much further than the corner shop itself, which was the place to catch up with neighbours as well as purchase groceries. The struggles they faced included clothing themselves and their large families – despite a general fall in the birth rate, the poorest families still had six or seven children apiece well into the 1930s – the tyranny of wash day and the many difficulties arising from insufficient funds, poor housing and consequent ill-health.
My great-grandparents took on the tenancy of the corner shop around 1905 and were there until their deaths in 1951. (Although my great-grandfather’s name stood above the door, he never stood behind the counter; the shop was run by Betsy and, later, Betsy and Eva.) Surprisingly few changes took place throughout that time, although the neighbourhood acquired a greyhound track and the illustrations on condiments and biscuit tins switched from depicting Edwardian women astride bicycles to athletic-looking young things dashing to the tennis courts or strapping on roller skates.
My great-grandma seems to have been well regarded locally, a view derived from multiple family stories and the fact that in all the years my mother played with the children who lived round about and who knew the corner shop well, no child spoke against my great-grandparents or great-aunt – and children are usually less concerned with neighbourly politesse. My great-grandma could not read or write but she could reckon, and she made a good fist of the shop; neighbours came to her for advice as well as groceries. In the 1930s two local newspaper vendors regularly vied for her attention and an invitation into the house; the one delivering the morning paper fared best as, arriving in time for breakfast, he was often invited to pull up a chair, whereas the other, arriving mid-afternoon, only managed a cup of tea.
Not all corner-shopkeepers were viewed in a positive light. Journalist Leonora Eyles described the difficulties they could make for the women dependent on their goods, deciding who was eligible for tick and over-charging those with little choice about where to shop. Helen Forrester, whose family descended into extreme poverty in Liverpool during the Depression, described a shopkeeper who sold bread by the slice as a ‘skinflint harridan’. I wonder what Helen Forrester would have made of my great-grandma who did the same when people could not afford the whole or half a loaf.
For many working-class families, low wages, variable shifts and intermittent industrial action meant that household budgeting was a fine art. In 1922 a Derbyshire woman, Mrs Blackwell, was awarded first prize in a Women’s Institute competition for the way she managed hers. The wife of a ‘working man’ in the village of Baslow, part of the Chatsworth estate, she received a weekly housekeeping allowance of £2 5s (a sum echoed in a contemporary advertisement for Rowntree’s Cocoa) and managed her expenditure down to the last halfpenny – a halfpenny went further than one might think. Half of her weekly income was allocated to ‘food and stores’, one quarter spent on ‘rent, rates, insurance, food and light’ and the remainder divided between ‘boots, clothes and sundries’, and a ‘reserve for emergencies’. Fruit and vegetables were not listed, but garden seeds and manure formed part of the emergency contingency, ‘emergency’ reserves being required to provide for irregular but necessary purchases in many a household budget.2 Everything was pared down to basics. The winner of a 1930 WI competition (prize: one pig, to add to her smallholding) grew a wide variety of fruit and vegetables, as well as herbs, and listed a substantial number of bottled, pickled and cured foodstuffs. Her home was a picture of self-sufficiency. Managing and getting by could be a full-time job.
Linen buttons probably accounted for a few of the pennies Mrs Blackwell allocated for haberdashery, along with sewing thread. Mrs Blackwell bought ready-made clothes, but could not escape the task of mending, that essential domestic chore which, in some people’s eyes, constituted female leisure (especially for domestic servants expected to tackle piles of darning on their afternoons off). For house-bound women, this was an opportunity to sit down, although there was little respite in replacing buttons, repairing frayed collars and cuffs and turning sheets sides to middle. Mending acquired an additional, unexpected role. In the days when reliable contraception was hard to come by, a pile of mending might come in useful. Even in the 1930s, the decade that saw the Family Planning Association established, and some fifteen years after Marie Stopes’s Married Love was published, contraception was still almost unmentionable; some married women who consulted their doctors for advice were merely told to ‘behave’ themselves. Margaret Forster’s mother was not the only woman to say, in effect, ‘I’ll be up in a minute,’ hoping that by the time she had finished sewing, her husband would have fallen asleep.
Winifred Foley, born in 1914, divided her Forest of Dean village into the ‘feckless, filthy and friendly’ at one end, and the ‘prim, prudish and prosperous’3 at the other. Though neither prim nor prudish, my great-grandparents were better off than many in the vicinity, and, as shopkeepers’ daughters, Annie and Eva fared better than their neighbours. Their ribbon-threaded nightgowns, hair slides, Dorothy bags, necklaces, lockets and brooches, not to mention silk parasols with crochet-hook curled handles, demonstrated that money could be found for extras as well as necessities.
Wherever you stood on the working-class scale, clothing was an expense. For the very poorest, clothing was ‘frankly, a mystery’4, in the words of the Fabian Women’s Group who, from 1909 to 1913, examined life for those who lived on approximately a pound a week in the London borough of Lambeth. ‘In the poorer budgets items for clothes appear at extraordinarily distant intervals, when, it is to be supposed, they can no longer be done without. “Boots mended” in the weekly budget means less food for that week.’ Boots were always a problem. During periods of especial hardship, such as industrial strikes, some head teachers administered boot funds along with hand-outs of food. Photographs from Annie and Eva’s childhoods show ragamuffin youngsters sitting alongside those from ‘better’ homes, broken-soled shoes lined up beside polished button boots. Equally striking are the starched white pinafores worn by the majority of the girls, despite the fact that many – including Annie and Eva – came from houses with no hot water and only one cold tap. Clean clothes were a triumphant achievement on their mothers’ part.
In 1913 Rebecca West introduced readers of the Clarion to ‘Mary Brown’, who appealed to that newspaper’s readers for cast-off clothing. ‘I want to go out to work to help my family, as things cannot go on as they are.’ She told how her three young boys and daughter were ‘so badly off for clothes that I am ashamed to look at them, and it breaks my heart to send them to school.’ When her husband’s fares and their rent of 6s 6d were subtracted from his weekly wage of 24s or less, there was not enough left for food. ‘If any of your readers can help me with some old garments for my children and myself I will go out to work. I can put my baby girl in the day nursery for 3d a day. I must go and do something to help, for we cannot live on 10s or 11s a week, which is what it amounts to.’ Rebecca West deftly linked Mrs Brown’s plight to a discussion of the clothes worn by theatrical performer Gaby Deslys at a time when the Bishop of Kensington and others were getting hot under the collar about Deslys’s ‘indecent’ scanty dress. What was immoral, West insisted, was the scanty clothing Mary Brown and her children were forced to wear. ‘Now, is that not indecent?’ she asked, in a typically astringent piece.5
For the very poorest little changed over the next twenty years. Helen Forrester, kept from school in the 1930s to mind her younger siblings, quickly learned that the one who did not have to leave the house would be clothed last, and fed last too. Her coat, hat and shoes were passed to her sister; by their second winter in Liverpool, Helen was dressed in rags and had no shoes on her feet. A Durham woman told the 1939 Women’s Health Committee that she sent her children on errands because she had no coat to wear and so could not go out herself.
Even those whose circumstances were less extreme found that clothing required considerable effort as well as ingenuity. Winifred Foley recalled that, in her youth, few people owned more than one change of clothing and that ‘clothes that today [the 1970s] cannot be got rid of at a penny a bundle at the tail end of a jumble sale would have been thankfully washed and hung out with pride’.6 Rose Gamble’s mother spent a lifetime going without. ‘She had no vanities, but now and again a pretty pattern would catch her eye, perhaps on a scrap of cloth in Dodie’s basket or on a roll of lino standing outside the ironmonger’s. ‘I’d like a frock of that,’ she would say, showing just for a moment that she still had an occasional thought for herself.’7
Fashion and poverty co-exist. Flora Thompson described how, towards the end of the nineteenth century, young women working away from home as domestic servants ‘helped to set the standard of what was worn’ by passing their mistresses’ cast-offs on to their mothers. ‘The hamlet’s fashion lag was the salvation of its wardrobes, for a style became “all the go” there just as the outer world was discarding it, and good, little-worn specimens came that way by means of the parcels … This devotion to fashion gave a spice to life and helped to make bearable the underlying poverty. But the poverty was there.’8 For the poorest, a change of clothing could achieve an especial transformation. A member of the Fabian Women’s Group recalled that ‘the astonishing difference made by a new pink blouse, becomingly-done hair, and a well-made skirt, on one drab-looking woman who seemed to be about forty was too startling to forget. She suddenly looked thirty (her age was twenty-six), and she had a complexion and quite pretty hair – features never noticed before. These women who look to be in the dull middle of middle age are young; it comes as a shock when the mind grasps it.’9
The access to new horizons wrought by the cinema, wireless and women’s magazines between the wars, plus the greater accessibility of affordable and fashionable clothing, led to an apparent merging of the social classes. For all the upward mobility of the period, there was still little understanding between them and some of those who remarked about factory girls now looking like duchesses could barely conceal their anxiety about young women not knowing their place. Others, like Lettice Cooper, applauded the change. Her state-of-England novel, National Provincial, set in 1930s Leeds, introduces Olive, who operates a newly installed button machine in a clothing factory and is one of those upwardly mobile young women. ‘Olive’s personal daintiness, her exquisitely ordered curls and polished nails, her fresh, fashionable clothes, were the result of much determination, and of a prolonged and valiant struggle.’10 Few would guess Olive came from a two-up two-down in which all water has to be boiled, and where her mother, with whom she shares a bed, constantly battles against the dirt from belching chimneys. Olive achieves the latest styles via a combination of home-dressmaking and off-the-peg clothes; her friend and fellow machinist, Violet, whose wages are her family’s mainstay, has an even greater struggle. ‘How Violet managed … to have the fur-collared coat and eye-veiled hat, the bag and gloves, powder and cream and permanent wave, and always to be abreast of changing fashion among her friends was one of the lesser miracles of modern civilisation.’11 Olive and Violet may be fictional characters but they typify the resourceful young women who made considerable efforts to dress fashionably and considered it a mark of personal pride to do so. Small miracles like theirs were performed every day of the week.