MY GRANDMA’S TWO-TONE green button with square ‘eyes’ and modulated shape speaks of the 1930s. I only have to look at buttons like this to picture women going about their lives – walking down provincial high streets to change their library books or take tea in Kardomah Cafés. The front-fastening blouses of the period placed an emphasis on decorative buttons, many of them in the art-deco style, which were often labelled ‘fashion’ or ‘novelty’ when sold as a carded set. The composite materials from which they were formed and their moulded shapes and patterns demonstrate the degree to which art-deco design percolated down from the grandest of skyscrapers, cinemas and restaurants to even the simplest of interwar buttons. Buttons like these reflected expanding opportunities for leisure, and the clothes to go with it.
Tennis was increasingly the thing. In a memoir fittingly entitled Anyone for Tennis? Eileen Whiteing, who grew up in an outer London suburb she described as ‘unbelievably enclosed and exclusive’1, recalled its importance as social glue and the difficulty of obtaining membership to her local sports club which was something of a ‘closed shop’. Emma Smith, another child of the period, has described the agonies suffered through her father belonging to the wrong tennis club. It was even harder for single women. Home Chat’s ‘Mrs Jim’ advised Shy Suzanne of Hampstead, ‘I think you should take up golf, as you can always play alone until you are sufficiently proficient to play with other people.’2
The looser clothing of the period was ideal for sport. Stripes were permissible on the golf course long before they hit the high street. In 1927 it was reported that the ‘vogue for colour is spreading so rapidly that even the sacred precincts of the tennis courts and golf courses are not immune.’3 The ‘gaily coloured’ bandeaus worn by tennis players Helen Wills and Suzanne Lenglen made the newspapers along with their winning scores. The Illustrated London News anticipated a colourful Wimbledon that year with ‘eye shades in every colour imaginable’.4 From now on, players could dazzle their opponents with their fashion sense as well as their sporting prowess.
Anything loosely fitting and vaguely bright was deemed suitable for sport. In traditionalists’ eyes, the two were linked and equally suspect. ‘Men who might, in the absence of the war, have been content to grow roses and don sombre attire on Sundays, now speed along the highways in a “sports” car, or array themselves in “plus fours” of diverse colours. Their wives, instead of knitting or sewing, may put on richly coloured coats and depart to the tennis courts.’5 Modernity terrified some, though one pleasurable aspect of the advent of more casual dress was that it was now possible to look sportif without being remotely sporty.
Swimming was at least more democratic. New beach clothes revealed far more flesh than formerly and offered the brave opportunities for glamour and the chance to strut with a parasol. Beachwear gave rise to the pyjama craze, a way of introducing the Venice Lido – ‘La Plage du Soleil et des Pyjamas!’6 – to the British beach (and London’s West End: commenting on the ‘vintage period of sunshine’7 experienced during the 1932 summer heatwave, the Illustrated London News reported the appearance of bright yellow pyjamas in Tottenham Court Road and beach trousers in Oxford Street). For all the talk of swimming, a fashion-page description of a one-piece bathing suit for those who ‘really can swim’8 suggests that many were still just posing. Posing was probably the wisest option when the majority of costumes were home-knitted and, as well as becoming uncomfortably heavy when wet, sagged revealingly when the bather emerged from the water. Bathing costumes still had the power to shock an older generation unaccustomed to so much flesh. When, in 1925, the chorus of No, No, Nanette wore bathing costumes for one scene, Queen Mary looked away from the stage.
Calisthenics and other bends and stretches were a less revealing way to stay fit. Office workers were not exempt: ‘If your job is sedentary … watch your hips,’9 women were advised in ‘The Rolling Road to Beauty’, a feature on massage rollers. Dance classes gained in popularity for children as well as adults: many mothers, my grandma included, wanted their own Shirley Temple: my mum attended classes for several years. One of her ballet teachers, all arched eyebrows and peek-a-boo lips, could have stepped straight out of a Busby Berkeley musical. My mother also loved to run and was awarded a typical thirties prize, a Bakelite jewellery box, for winning a race. An uncle gave her a gramophone record, ‘I’m Happy When I’m Hiking’, a popular song of the time, although she tells me she was more intrigued by the record’s translucent blue colour than its message.
Hiking had come into its own (and was marvelled at by some: Elizabeth Bowen, compiling an anthology, observed to a friend, ‘Quite a large number of short stories are told, do you notice, by hikers’10). More seriously, public right of way was granted and pathways opened following the 1932 mass trespass on Derbyshire’s Kinder Scout. Walking tours became an acceptable way for young women to holiday with friends. Jenifer Wayne and a fellow Somerville student combined walking with a reading holiday shortly before the Second World War. Some of the more playful buttons of the period reflected a fondness for sport and games, including an Olympic button, a button resembling a checked yellow-and-black racing flag, and a rectangular domino.
Board games and card games required the least exertion. My great-aunt’s copy of Home Management lists the rules for nearly a dozen. Those higher up the social scale (or determined to climb there) could take up bridge. Along with the newest sport dresses and ‘Fashion Parades on the Beach’11, The Needlewoman promised its readers ‘The All-Conquering Bridge Coat’12, an evening jacket for those after-dinner games, which, with its elegant long fringing, may have given women the confidence to play a particularly difficult rubber. Really dedicated players could embroider a set of cushions with diamonds, hearts, spades and clubs. Like tennis and golf, card games played their role in affirming social circles and cementing neighbourly relations – or not. M. V. Hughes, who disliked card games almost as much as she disliked sewing and social pretensions, deftly resisted the overtures of the neighbour who knocked on her front door shortly after she moved to a new district.
‘We hope you will like to join the “Cuffley Ladies” – our little social circle here.’ Scenting working parties – card parties – musical evenings – my brain had to work quickly … I heard myself saying, ‘I’m so sorry, but I can’t join your circle. I can’t sew, or do anything useful, or play cards, or be sociable in any way; and I’m not a lady.’ It was this last remark that brought her to her feet.13
M. V. Hughes loved reading, however. A friendship with another new neighbour was instantly secured by a mutual love of books. (‘Books!’ a neighbour ‘exclaimed in rapture’14, on stepping into her house.) Molly was more than happy to dispense with housework, or anything else, and read. The interwar years saw a boom in reading as a leisure activity, especially among women; this was the first period in which universal literacy prevailed. Public libraries saw the benefits. In 1911 libraries issued 54,256 volumes; by 1924 the number had risen to 85,688, and in 1939 reached 247,335.
Circulating libraries were also popular; there were several to choose from, provided you could pay their fees. Boots Library had supplied women with books since the turn of the century; in 1926 it cost 42s a year to take out their books ‘on demand; 17s 6d to choose from all works in circulation and 10s 6d for the ordinary service’.15 By the mid-1930s, Boots was the largest circulating library of its kind with over 400 branches and half a million subscribers. Boots was cheaper than the smaller, exclusive London libraries such as Mudie’s and the London Library, of which Virginia Woolf was a member, but more expensive than W. H. Smith. Exciting developments were taking place in publishing: in 1935 Allen Lane published the first Penguin paperback, priced 6d.
These were extremely fertile years for novelists who used their work to address key issues in women’s lives, especially the ongoing quest for independence and identity, a desire shared by more than just bachelor girls. Vita Sackville-West’s elderly, widowed Lady Slane bemoans the fact that she has been a daughter, wife and mother, but has never been herself. E. M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady was light-hearted, yet still skewered contemporary concerns. The Provincial Lady herself is depicted as a great reader; the Diary teems with references to books and authors its readers are expected to recognise. The interwar woman could delight in her shared knowledge and blush – in recognition? – at the Provincial Lady’s admission that it was so much easier to express an opinion about Orlando before she had actually read it.
Women’s magazines proliferated. Woman, Modern Woman and Woman’s Own were among the new weeklies to appear. By the early thirties, Good Housekeeping was selling around 100,000 copies a month. Winifred Holtby baulked at the falsely romantic messages delivered by magazines at the lower end of the market, despairing of the young women who ‘swing daily to their offices in suburban trains and trams and buses, carrying in their suitcases a powder-puff and a love-story or Home Chat’.16 Holtby knew of what she wrote: readers of Woman’s Life could sample the fourpenny delights of ‘Her Passionate Lesson’, ‘Stolen Fruit’ and ‘The Flame of Love’.
When not reading, the interwar woman could listen to the wireless; by 1939, 75 per cent of all British families owned a wireless set. An advertisement for Ardern’s Crochet Cotton from the early 1920s, illustrated with a wireless and listening trumpet, managed to make even crocheting sound up-to-the-minute: ‘while you listen in.’17 Many of the embroidered tray cloths and cushion covers of that era were created with the wireless murmuring in the background. So many home-sweet-homes, cottage gardens and crinoline ladies were embroidered then, and have been found in antique centres since, thanks to an expanding and house-proud lower middle class. Women moving into married domesticity and with fewer children than their mothers, had more time on their hands. No wool-work fire screens and tapestries for them: they wanted colour and plenty of it (except when crocheting those ubiquitous doilies, fawn-coloured as well as white).
In Elizabeth Bowen’s 1938 novel The Death of the Heart, Mrs Heccomb surrounds herself with the symbols of interwar leisure. She has a ‘glossy’ wireless cabinet, ‘a scarlet portable gramophone, a tray with a painting outfit, a half-painted lamp shade [being painted to supplement her widow’s pension], a mountain of magazines’.18 However, her full glass-fronted bookcase, has ‘a remarkably locked look’ and her gate-legged table, ‘was set for tea, but the cake plates were still empty – Mrs Heccomb was tipping cakes out of paper bags’. Oh dear: no home-made cakes.
Afternoon tea became so popular that Royal Doulton produced a china afternoon-tea figurine. Eileen Whiteing and her mother luxuriated at Kennard’s tea room in Croydon with its palm trees and ladies’ orchestra (a china ladies’ orchestra was also available). Schoolteacher’s daughter Jenifer Wayne enjoyed occasional treats at a Lyon’s Corner House, while Virginia Woolf rounded off her shopping with tea at an ABC cafe. Other women sampled cafes like Pamona’s Parlour, with its ‘orange curtains, purple-and-orange check cloths [and] Art Pottery’19; the period’s liking for afternoon tea provided ample opportunities to flaunt exuberantly patterned crockery. The china manufacturer Shelley put the young tea-drinking woman at the heart of an advertising campaign. In her jazzily patterned shift dress, dangling earrings, white fur stole, multiple coloured ‘slave bangles’ and cloche hat embellished with feathers, the Shelley Girl was trying out every fashion at once. She appeared in 1926 when modernity was starting to hit the provinces and no one was quite sure what to do with it (or how to dress for it, either).
One Saturday afternoon in the early seventies, wearing my great-aunt’s buttoned gauntlets and clutching her art-deco bag, I took myself to a Chesterfield hotel to meet a friend for afternoon tea. Dressed for the 1930s, I wanted to recreate the mood. Today’s passion for mismatched vintage tea cups and home-made cakes would make such a mission straightforward; then, we were faced with thick white earthenware and a few dry biscuits in an otherwise empty, gloomy interior. It was hard to channel the 1930s in provincial towns – unless accidentally, in premises yet to be refurbished: one of my favourite venues as a young child was Woodhead’s cafe. There, the 1930s were still in full swing with wood panelling and fittings in chrome and pistachio green.
Jenifer Wayne’s grandmother insisted on dressing for tea when staying with the family at Christmas. She ‘would wash up the lunch things, rub her hands on a piece of lemon she always kept by the sink, go upstairs for her rest and come down at 4 o’clock in her printed silk dress and black velvet bridge jacket; then we would have … thin white bread and butter’.20 Those eating bread and butter needed a decorative cloth. No tea table was complete without a cloth with embroidered roses and tulips clustered in each corner. ‘Most women like to make these at home,’ Home Management advised, making the hearts sink of those who, like M. V. Hughes, had other ideas as to how to spend their time.