Kate Macdonald
Courrèges: directional and expensive 1960s clothes designer.
housekeeping accounts: Betty’s household budgeting evidently expected her to not overspend on clothes for herself by including her clothing budget in what the family needed for food and paying bills.
Mondrian: Dutch artist whose distinctive geometric paintings in white, yellow, red and blue were used by Yves Saint Laurent in his clothes designs for women in the mid 1960s.
Pre-Raphaelite: women’s fashions in the circle of advanced nineteenth-century artists called the pre-Raphaelites tended towards the flowing, pleated and uncorseted and were much more forgiving to the figure than mainstream Victorian norms.
dickie front: a false shirt front used as a design feature, and to house fastenings like buttons.
Mod: music-focused youth movement whose fashions for women included miniskirts, white lipstick and straight tunic dresses that ignored the body’s shape.
muu-muu: loose flowing long gown of Hawaiian origin, designed for unrestricted relaxation.
The House of Usher: from the eponymous horror short story by Edgar Allen Poe.
Alan Badel: English stage and film actor, known for This Sporting Life (1961), The Lover (1963) and Children of the Damned (1964).
Pola Negri: brooding screen siren from the silent movie era, famous for projecting sexuality.
advocaat: does indeed look like custard and is made from eggs, brandy and sugar, usually between 15% and 20% proof.
directoire: very old-fashioned ladies’ underwear consisting of long knickers to the knee ending in an elastic cuff.
brawn: a jellied potted meat made from a boiled pig’s head.
chine: the backbone or spine of a carcass; also a name for the narrow valleys along the south coast of England caused by stream erosion near the sea. Bournemouth has at least eight.
Lionel Bart: famously bouffant English stage and film actor and director.
Sacha Distel: one of the few French singers to make an impact on British pop culture in the 1960s.
Richard Wagner: German composer of great nineteenth-century operas whose ideas were favoured by the Nazis.
Swarfega: a standby in the British garage, a green gloopy petroleum jelly used for cleaning oil off the hands.
Tebrax: brand-name for a shelving system.
Conran: one of the most fashionable names in British interior decoration in the early 1970s.
Breakfast Special: a pop music radio programme from BBC Radio 2.
Crimplene: proprietary name for a polyester non-crease drip-dry dress fabric, ubiquitous for cheap women’s daywear in the 1960s.
Ann Packer: British athletics gold medallist in the 1964 Olympics, and an Oxfordshire girl like Anna.
Angela Brazil: prolific and popular novelist of girls’ school stories from the early twentieth century.
Queensberry rules: the rules for the conduct of boxing matches laid down by the Marquis of Queensberry and published in 1867.
gas mantles: easily breakable mesh hoods surrounding the jet of a wall-mounted gas lamp.
Welsh nuts: a smokeless fuel made from lumps of anthracite.
green stamps: a forerunner of supermarket points, Green Shield stamps were given away at garages and shops depending on how many pounds you had spent, and could be exchanged for glassware, saucepans and other household goods.
Ned Kelly: Australian outlaw and folk hero from the nineteenth century.
Madame Arcati: an eccentric spiritualist medium in Noel Coward’s play Blithe Spirit, revived for a production in London’s West End in 1970 with Beryl Reid in that role.
Dorcas: a early disciple of Jesus, described in terms of her piety, hard work and selfless giving to others.
Madame Pompadour: Madame de Pompadour was the flamboyant, cheerful and very popular mistress of eighteenth-century French monarch Louis XV.
Dr Spock: famed advisor on baby health and care from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Jack Jackson: English band leader from the 1920s, whose Record Roundup music programme on the BBC Light Programme (later Radio 2) ran from 1948 to 1977. By the date of this column he would have been antediluvian in music terms.
Viva Zapata: a 1952 Western starring Marlon Brando as Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata wearing a distinctively drooping moustache.
Phyllosan: iron supplement tablets which had been fortifying the over-forties since the 1940s.
Bio-Strath: natural food supplement tablets made from yeast.
scatter pins: groups of small decorative brooches.
Pan’s People: the house dancers for BBC variety TV programmes and Top of the Pops, the Thursday night pop music show, a fixture on British TV screens from the late 1960s to 1976.
treadle: a non-electric sewing machine powered by a foot pedal, which rocks and backwards and forwards in a gentle pumping action, or treadling.
tension: the two sewing machine threads above and below the fabric need to have the same tension, which can be eased or tightened as needed.
Graham Hill: champion motor racing driver and road safety campaigner.
shooting brake: a large car with plenty of room to carry baggage, children and dogs, very similar to an estate car.
Min cream: a multipurpose wax-based household polish.
courgettes: in the 1970s courgettes were better known as young marrows; to call these vegetables by a fancy French name indicated wealth, sophistication and wide travel horizons.
ten pole: traditional unit of measurement for land, still used for allotment gardens. Ten pole is equivalent to 250m2, about the size of a tennis court.
whip and run seams: also called overcasting or oversewing, when the folded edges of the seams are stitched together on the right side, to be flattened out.
bust darts: a stitched fold in the fabric, one on each side of the chest, to form a curve in the profile of the garment, into which the bust will fit and not force the garment out of shape.
two left fronts: a common mistake in cutting out, when the pattern piece has not been placed on a double layer of fabric to ensure that one piece is the mirror image of the other, but merely cut out twice, producing two pieces of the same shape.
nap: on textured fabrics this raised surface can be smoothed flat in one direction, and change shade when unsmoothed in the opposite, wrong direction. If the nap is different on two pieces sewn together, then one of them has not been cut from the correct orientation of the fabric.
baste: tacking, or stitching the pieces temporarily together with a long running stitch. This stage is frequently missed out by experienced sewers.
bring notches together: paper sewing patterns use notches, black triangles sticking out from the cutting line, as a signpost to help the sewer fit the pattern pieces together the right way round. Experienced sewers rarely skip this step as getting the notches matched correctly can be crucial.
small oo’s: these are also signposts in a paper pattern, but in the body of the pattern piece, showing where pockets or darts need to be placed.
interfacing: a stiffening layer of thicker material to reinforce collars, waistbands and cuffs.
seam allowances: the 2cm-wide border area between the cutting line on the pattern and the anticipated seam line. Can be crucial when sewing around a curve.
Sheila Hancock, Ian Carmichael, Frank Muir, Cilla Black, Valerie Singleton, Richard Baker, Alf Garnett: Sheila Hancock (Annie, Sweeney Todd and the Royal Shakespeare Company) and Ian Carmichael (Bertie Wooster, Lord Peter Wimsey) were British actors; Frank Muir was a BBC comedy writer and radio raconteur; Cilla Black was one of the most successful British pop stars of the 1960s; Valerie Singleton was a longstanding BBC television and radio presenter; Richard Baker was a BBC television reporter and newsreader; Alf Garnett was the lead character in the BBC television sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, and was a byword for an unreasonable ranting curmudgeon.
trafficator: the direction indicator stick.
Blue Peter: long-running children’s BBC television programme, famed for its DIY activities.
Colcannon Supreme: colcannon is an Irish dish of cabbage cooked in milk and mashed with potatoes.
Zena Skinner, Delia Smith, Fanny Craddock: all three women were British professional television cooks and authors of hugely influential cookbooks.
Tommy Cooper: Welsh comedian, who specialised in performing as a failed conjuror, in variety shows and on television.
rec’: abbreviation for recreation ground, a public space for community sports.
halt: archaic term for a person with a limp, deriving from Luke 14.21, ‘the poor, the maimed, the halt and the blind’.
pebble lenses: glasses so smeared and dusty they looked as though the lenses were made from quartz rather than glass, so that she can’t see very much.
matelot: slang for a sailor.
Lido Di Jesolo: a beach resort north of Venice.
Milky Bars: she’s acting out a classic 1970s British television advert for white chocolate Milky Bars, featuring the Milky Bar Kid.
Good Lifer: the very popular BBC sitcom The Good Life began in 1975, about Tom Good’s earnest insistence on living self-sufficiently by growing and rearing all their food in their suburban back garden, to the dismay of his wife and the derision of their neighbours.
The Waltons: long-running American television series about a large and loving homesteading family set during the Depression and the Second World War.
carriage-style: large detached houses with the living quarters built above the garages, mimicking the stable-blocks of nineteenth-century estates where the grooms slept above the carriage buildings.
Evel Knievel: American motorbike stunt performer, who held records for jumping over cars and buses.
Valentino: not the Italian couturier, but the 1920s silent movie film star Rudolph Valentino who had been a byword for silent male passion.
Mrs Miniver: the leading character in the eponymous 1940 novel by Jan Struther, and the 1942 film played by Greer Garson, who represents stalwart, elegant English womanhood.
Auntie Mame: the character played by Rosalind Russell in the 1958 film based on the 1955 novel, who is a big-hearted and exuberant aunt who takes in her orphaned young nephew and introduces him to her wildly inappropriate friends and way of life.
hunt and peck: two-finger typing.
Jean Varon: British designer in the 1960s and 1970s most well-known for designing costumes for Diana Rigg in the 1960s television series The Avengers.
paddy: a temper tantrum.