SMALL, DRAB BUTTONS have always been essential to women workers. Whether black, brown, grey or navy, shank or sew-through, these are not the pearls of the button box in any sense. Undistinguished buttons like these exist in quantity: my button box holds a small drab button for almost every working day of the month. Similar, yet different, like weekdays themselves – they fasten functional garments and, as surely as Monday morning comes around each week, are part of working life.
In 1945 Cora took a year-long secretarial course at her mother’s expense. At the local technical college she learned to type to music and, after ‘We’ll make a bonfire of our troubles and watch them blaze away’ was taught, in accordance with Pitman’s Shorthand Notebook, how to apostrophise ‘6 doz. Men’s Caps: 4 doz Boys’ Vests: and 3 doz Girls’ Tam o’ Shanters.’ On her first day in the secretarial department of a large industrial firm, Cora typed a letter to her grandad, outlining her various tasks – taking dictation, Gestetnering, distributing post, and so on. ‘It’s a bobby’s job,’ she told him, adopting the family phrase associated with any work that was none too taxing (so-called because the bobby on the corner-shop beat saw little to disturb his perambulations).
Miss Maskrey, the department supervisor, read poetry and encouraged sing-songs and knitting to occupy quiet moments. Those who, back in the 1900s, thought women should be at home in their pinnies and not unspooling wool across typewriter keys, would have had their worst fears confirmed. In 1950 Cora graduated to something more demanding, with better pay (£6 and more a week), as assistant to the Managing Director’s secretary: a desirable post with longer hours, more responsibility (and no time for knitting pullovers).
The MD’s secretary wore suits, as did Miss Roberts, secretary to the Company Secretary; Miss Maskrey favoured a smart conservative dress. Cora wore skirts and blouses, the majority made by Annie. Rationing was still in force, but my grandma continued to produce her trademark flourishes: blouses buttoned off-centre or tied at the throat. My mum added detachable ribbon bows, shortcuts for enlivening a plain blouse or dress – plaid bow Monday, scarlet Tuesday …
The other office junior with whom she initially ran errands and out-smarted whomever got in their way (as young women in an overwhelmingly male firm they needed to be deft at backchat) was her close friend, who later became my godmother. She too went on to something more rigorous than distributing Friday cakes and, when I was a child, was the only woman close to me who was an office worker. My godmother came to tea each Tuesday in the navy blue skirt, white blouse and navy court shoes that comprised her office ‘uniform’. These clothes were a window on to a mysterious adult world; even her Perspex pencil box and leather office bag fascinated me, as did the way she wore her hair in a neat French pleat which was nothing like her off-duty look. This female corner of office life conveyed something altogether different from that suggested by my father’s weekday suits and was far more intriguing because, one day, it might be mine.
My grandma’s work for the Provident Clothing Company was of a different order; my great-aunt Eva’s shop-work too; neither job held the faintest intimation of glamour. I gave no thought to my mum returning to paid work, but I knew I would work one day. I remember standing before the window of a (small, drab) dress shop as a very young child and deciding what I would wear when my turn came. By then, man-made fibres had transformed life for the office worker. She could hang her skirts and pastel-coloured blouses, as well as her stockings, over the bath to drip-dry. ‘Terylene – The Wonder Fabric of the Future … has outstanding advantages’, Marks & Spencer’s in-house magazine announced in 1955: ‘it resists stretching as well as creasing, it is quick drying and most important, it is shrink proof, moth proof and rot proof. What qualifications for a smart and practical skirt!’1 Home-dressmakers were equally blessed. Woman’s Illustrated recommended the ‘Jiffy Dress’ in candy-striped ‘Super Tremendo’ non-iron cotton. ‘You can make it in a jiffy, wash it in a jiffy … And you never need to iron it!’2 And all for 5s 11d a yard.
The world of work had changed since my grandma joined it. Personal service (a figure including waitresses as well as domestic servants) still ranked top of the list, but did so with lower numbers (23 per cent of women in 1951 compared with 39 per cent in 1911); and the number of women entering clerical work had risen considerably: 20 per cent, compared with 2 per cent back then. The picture of post-war work was a chequered one. Some of the women who disappeared from the workforce in 1945 were soon needed again as part of the post-war reconstruction. Joan Holloway who applied for posts as a nursery nurse in 1945/6 ‘received a sackful of mail offering interviews’.3 Within a few years, diverse shortages in areas such as textiles, clothing, midwifery, nursing, domestic service, transport and secretarial work led to recruitment drives. Not everyone was as fortunate as Joan Holloway: Gail Lewis’s Aunt Verna, who came to Britain from Jamaica around 1956 to train as a nurse, ‘endured and survived incredible racism … as she made her contribution to the super-exploited pool of overseas nurses who helped Britain supply “the best public health service in the world”’.4
The number of married women in the workforce was rising and would continue to do so. Whereas only 14 per cent worked in 1911, by 1951 they numbered 40 per cent. Despite this, the abiding image of the woman worker was that she was young and single – like Lucy, who, thanks to her breakfast of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, is so full of energy that her fingers fly across the keys of a newfangled adding machine: ‘Lucy’s a bright girl, that’s easy to see.’5 (So many messages in one advertisement.)
Professional women were making gains. By 1951 there were 6,487 women doctors, 150 barristers and 397 women engineers, and graduates such as journalists Katharine Whitehorn and Joan Bakewell, and children’s publisher Kaye Webb, were embarking on exciting careers. Nonetheless, when Kay Smallsure wrote How to Run Your Home Without Help (1949), she assumed that the majority of career women giving their homes a ‘brisk once over’ before they left in the morning only had themselves to please (and that those who were married would find life difficult unless husbands did 50 per cent of the housework). Most women still had jobs, not careers, and the default assumption remained that women were best suited to caring roles. ‘There is nothing healthier for a full body and mind than a day’s work in a job that creates happiness for yourself and others,’6 Woman’s Illustrated advised its readers in 1957. Inevitably, the world of work meant different things to different women. My mum loved her job but gave up work to start a family: there was never any question of her doing anything else. By contrast, Carolyn Steedman, whose own mother worked all her adult life ‘had no awareness of the supposed stereotypical mother of that era – lipsticked and aproned, waiting at the door’.7
Bobby’s jobs or not, creating happiness or otherwise, much women’s work was repetitive. Sandra Levine’s job was different, however, and must have seemed the height of sophistication when, in 1956, she was interviewed by Woman for a series depicting ‘Young Success’. Sandra was the receptionist for the London-based Finders Limited, ‘the agency that undertakes to find anything anyone can reasonably want’. Educated at North London Collegiate (the school that, back in the 1880s, required M. V. Hughes to stitch a buttonhole before admitting her to its ranks), she worked as an optician’s receptionist (for £4 10s) and a lab technician (£3 10s) before a secretarial course led to a job ‘finding the unlikely and doing the all-but impossible’. Sandra found a stuffed crocodile for a psychiatrist’s waiting room, two ‘cute cast-iron casseroles’ for a Texan’s wife, and having located a giant tortoise in Ecuador, arranged for its transportation to Michigan. ‘My head is crammed with the oddest facts,’ she told her interviewer, ‘such as where to buy red-headed parrots and out-of-print Agatha Christie novels …’ Finders Limited was Google avant la lettre – and with knobs on: not only did Sandra Levine locate the hard to find, she delivered it. ‘I learned more about life in six weeks here than I could have learned in six years at the laboratory,’ she said. ‘I’ve learned to dress smartly, talk easily to strangers, cope with odd situations and handle six phones at once’8 – efficiency personified on a salary of £8 a week, plus luncheon vouchers.
The other women in the series offered more standard fare, although the variety of jobs some tackled and the speed with which they moved from one to the next confirmed how easy it was to obtain work. Not all interviewees gave their salaries but, among those who did, a £15-a-week executive as ‘agent for an American business firm’9 ranked highest; then came the journalist responsible for the ‘Miss Manchester’10 column on the Manchester Evening News (£14 4s). A ballroom dancer and a show jumper provided a perhaps predictable period allure, as did the nanny to the children of actor Jack Hawkins (£5 a week all found). The new world of television was represented by an ATV production assistant, a ‘backroom girl’,11 earning £9 a week, while ‘Pamela’ who ‘parachuted into romance’12 by marrying the flight lieutenant who assisted her parachute instructor, probably fulfilled many a 1950s dream.
Sandra Levine had a head start in the matter of office clothes: her father, Isadore (Sid), was a tailor. Tailoring was in Sid’s blood. He started work in his father’s firm at the age of three, unpicking tacking threads and progressed, via buttonholes, to designing, measuring and tailoring, before graduating to his own business. (Still tailoring in his nineties, Sid never touched a sewing machine.) During the war, his factory supplied army uniforms, but when the need for these dried up switched to women’s clothing, assisted by his wife Millie who joined the firm to do the paperwork. Two hundred and fifty thousand coupons were needed to make the transition and Millie knew how to get them. She recalls how, wearing a black silk shirt and a black coat with a black fur collar, both designs courtesy of Sid (but no hat, as hats were still hard to come by), she set off to persuade ministry officials. Throughout her meeting, Millie smiled and flattered and crossed her legs in her black silk stockings, explaining that there was a good job waiting if only they had the coupons to buy the necessary yards of cloth. Millie’s flirting did the trick: they were issued with 350,000. Post-war shortages, including of textiles, meant there were still obstacles to overcome; bouclé wool was popular as it did not easily reveal flaws, and although the number of buttons that could be placed on coats was still restricted to six, Sid found ways to get round that. Millie and daughter Sandra were always the first to wear his new designs, effectively showcasing the business.
Earning money in the late forties and early fifties enabled my mum to buy new clothes, especially coats with their broad hug-me shapes of all-enveloping wool and often outsize buttons. Like many working women, she liked a new style each year: after the lime-green coat with Perspex buttons came a powder-blue swagger coat; and then a heavy black coat with a velvet collar and a dog-tooth check that could be belted or left to drape. How I wish I had those coats, let alone their buttons, but I do have a green button from the shawl-collared coat my mum wore in the late 1950s when she was expecting me and to which I gave new life as a young working woman some twenty years later.
The making and sale of clothes was changing. Department stores, with their ready appeal to women workers, were on the rise (as were the number of women employed in them). A retail assistant recalled selling a range of knitwear with the dolman sleeves that were all the rage: ‘I remember one line at 35s 6d, made in black, navy and maroon, which sold at an alarming rate and must, I feel, have graced every office in town.’13 In store and out, however, the old divisions and demarcations of social class were still thriving. One Woman interviewee, a twenty-one-year-old Under-Buyer for the Model Suit department of an Oxford Street store, had risen through the ranks in every sense, having started out as a trainee, and in Inexpensive Dress. Margaret M. Trump, who arrived at Marshall & Snelgrove in her New Look suit, was extremely disappointed to find herself allocated to Inexpensive Gowns and not to Model Gowns as expected. Staff took their cachet from the clothes they sold and her Buyer, ‘understandably anxious to rise above the “Inexpensive” stigma’, used ‘every ruse within her power to pull the trade of [the] department up-market’.14 Other aspects of department-store life also harked back to earlier times: like her nineteenth-century forebears, Margaret lodged in a hostel (the Debenham Ladies’ Club, at £1 10s of her weekly starting salary of £2 5s) and, in a further and disconcerting throwback, was told on arrival at the store that as a Margaret already worked there, she would be known as Mary.
Model Gowns apart, the variety, improved quality and ease of ready-made clothing was altering the landscape for good. When Skylon rose from London’s blitzed South Bank as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951, Vogue included a feature on ‘The Rise of the Ready-to-Wear’ in a special ‘Britannica’ issue and told its readers: ‘The most fastidious and fashion-conscious woman can dress immediately for any occasion in ready-to-wear clothes.’15 Vogue’s own editor Audrey Withers favoured ready-to-wear clothing; foreign fashion buyers sought British off-the-peg clothes.
Worthing dressmaker Esther Rothstein, whose staff had stitched beaded frocks in the 1920s, figure-hugging bias cuts in the 1930s, and conjured suits from linen sheets during the abstemious war years, tackled the competition head on. In 1951 she opened her own clothes shop.
[T]here was much improvement in this field by then. Indeed I was rather taken aback on one occasion when one of my clients, on seeing the dress I had just finished for her, remarked ‘my goodness, it is just like a ready made!’ … I still had my very experienced staff who began doing alterations to the ‘ready mades’ in addition to dressmaking which by this time was gradually dying out.16
Little dressmaking establishments may have been in decline, but the home-dressmaker was still a force. A 1950s advertisement shows a Singer Sewing Centre with a space-age appearance asserting its own place in the future.
Chesterfield had one or two of its own little shops similar to Esther Rothstein’s, including Miss Grieves and Marjorie Willett who were still in business and who, from time to time, supplied my mum with interesting clothes. Although she enjoyed that era’s hug-me coats, she preferred its slender suits and dresses. In 1953 she bought a double-breasted blue-grey suit with a hip-length waisted jacket for a wedding, and a short-sleeved blue dress with an extravagantly fluted peplum. Would that she had hung on to these. Both came from Miss Grieves who was given to wearing smart suits herself. Annie was still making some of Cora’s clothes, although by now, her creations were reserved for eveningwear in a decade which afforded plenty of opportunities for dinner dances.
Whether elegantly draped or stiffly petticoated, both 1950s looks were accompanied by costume jewellery and full make-up – ‘When you’re really going to town your make-up must be Max-Factor Pan-Cake’.17 Models adopted ‘kiss a butterfly’ pouts, broad-brushed caterpillar eyebrows and pussycat eyes. Static creatures all and, above all, ladylike, a look widely copied by young women striving to appear grown-up and dress like their mothers. Joan Wyndham favoured Max Factor Pan-Cake number 2, Coty powder and a dash of Yardley’s Cherry lipstick.
The highly stylised and exaggerated femininity of the period meant that permanent waves kept hair in its place, collars were stiff, blouses trim and neatly pressed, and that trousers – no longer sensible wartime wear – were unacceptable in many circumstances; a young employee joining Barclays Bank in 1952 was instructed: ‘no “bare” legs, no sandals and definitely no trousers’.18 Pierced ears were frowned upon – until the Queen had her own ears pierced. Lorna Sage described the ‘rich variety of sumptuary laws concerning fashion and decency’19: what was and was not permissible for nice young ladies to wear; older women too. Jenifer Wayne recalled the effort – and the bravado – required to maintain this pristine look. Radio actor Mary O’Farrell, a woman in her fifties, was in those days, described as ‘well preserved’.
Her originally natural red hair was kept tinted; she always came to the studio in a hat, earrings, make-up, conservatively elegant suit, coat or dress with a spray costume-brooch on the lapel; fine silk stockings and Good shoes … I came to know what went on behind it: with what gallantry it was produced.20
Mary lived in a mews flat near Broadcasting House, but the flat was down at heel and she shared the tiny airless space with a fragile elder sister she probably supported, and a great many cats and their ‘half-licked saucers’. Mary’s graceful appearance was exceedingly hard-won. On air, she was ‘radiant. I find it very touching that she could have walked out of that terrible flat, day after day, looking as if she had just stepped up from Bond Street.’