The working life of Museum of London

Most of our objects tell a good story. But not all are as fabulous as these snakeskin shoes, very recent additions to the dress collection.

You would think we’d bought them hot off one of London Fashion Week’s runways. But no, they were worn in 1945 by Gladys Sandford on the day of her wedding to Charles “Arthur” White. I will tell you more about Gladys and Charles in a future blog, today I want to concentrate on the shoes.

Looking inside the shoes, you can see a stamp looking a bit like two Pac-Men (Mans?) about to devour a ‘41′.

Clothing, like food, was rationed during and after the Second World War, from 1 June 1941 to 15 March 1949, to be precise, and the sign stands for ‘Civilian Clothing 1941′.

Let me try to explain. To buy clothes you not only had to have money but also coupons, which were provided in a ration book. You did not get receive many coupons, 66 per year at first, and later only 48. To put this in perspective, to buy a coat you had to spend 18 coupons. If you want to know the number of coupons for other items of clothing, have a look at these pages from a ‘Clothing Coupon Quiz’ published in August 1941, also from our collection (click on the image and you should be able to read it).

Not every item of clothing sold during the war had a CC41 stamp. This was only applied to so-called ‘Utility’ clothing, which was produced to strict guidelines. Skirts, for instance, could only have a certain number of pleats, buttons and so on, to save material. Below is a detail from the ‘Making of Civilian Clothing (Restrictions) (No. 6) Order from 1 May 1942′, which lists the ‘restrictions on making’ of women’s dresses (and maids’ dresses!):

We have a number of shoes with the CC41 stamp in the collection. Some were made with wooden soles to save leather. None of the shoes are made of snakeskin, but I guess there were not many other uses for this material during the war.

Gladys’ shoes were donated by her daughter Pat, together with a lot of other, beautifully presented material. Amazingly Gladys’ diaries from the period have survived and she noticed the purchase of her shoes on 18 October 1945. Pat told me that Gladys’ always said that the shoes were bough second-hand and had once belonged to an actress!

The last entry on these two pages is for 20 October 1945, the day of the wedding. As was her custom, Gladys was very matter of fact: ‘Arthur and I got married / went home tonight’.

Sadly, there is no wedding picture but there is an undated photo of Gladys, which I reckon was taken at about the time she met Arthur, in 1941/42  (I might just be hopelessly romantic). Charles was a lucky man and this as well as other photos of Gladys show that she certainly had a good eye for fashion.

Gladys and Charles White were happily married for almost 50 years, until Gladys’ death in 1995. There will be more of Charles and Gladys’ moving story in the future.

I have developed a new obsession: cane ribbons. We are putting the finishing touches to three 18th century gentlemen who are going to be photographed before being installed in the Pleasure Garden display in our new galleries. Their suits are from the 1770s, so the gentlemen absolutely had to have canes (walking sticks to you and me). Thankfully we have a really good collection of sticks, but they have all lost their ribbons (that seems to be a common fate).

Ribbons, or cane strings, as they seem to have been called, were attached to small holes either in the head of the cane or slightly further down. They were mainly ornamental but you could also wrap them around your wrist to let your cane dangle in a laissez-faire fashion.

Once I discovered cane strings, I saw them everywhere. Have a look at this 1777 fashion plate from our collection.

Another good one is here (you have to zoom in on the gentleman on the left – don’t get distracted by the doll!). And if you are really, really interested, try searching for ‘macaroni’ on this website (I know this sounds weird, but trust me …).

Apparently, the ribbons were bought from milliners. In the 18th century, milliners were a bit like haberdashers, selling flowers and pompons and such like as well as gloves and caps:

‘The Milliner deals in a great variety of articles principally for ladies wear … but this trade is not wholly confined to women, since the beau and fine gentleman has his solitaire or stock, his watch or cane-string from the pretty milliner … (The Monthly Review, 1761)

I guess VV Rouleaux is a modern equivalent and I knew I was going to end up there eventually. However, my first stop was Hand & Lock, one of my favourite places in London. I showed the very nice lady in charge of military adornments my pictures and she found a beautiful sword knot in one of her many drawers. It would have been perfect for one of the sticks, but it cost more than I wanted to spend. So I bought some Russia braid and some tassels instead.

One of the gentleman wears a wool suit with silver embroidery and I thought he would have accessorised it with a silver string and tassel. As you can see, this is still a work in progress but I will have to finish it by the end of today.

For the second cane I will probably go with a striped ribbon and gold tassels.

And I am thinking green and pink for cane no. 3. The tassels are not perfect (they could be bigger) but the really good ones just cost too much and I don’t think I could make one myself.

I wish canes, or even better, swagger sticks would make a comeback. They would be so useful in situations in which one is required to strike a pose. It seems they were also useful in other ways.

In 1800, a certain Gambado (slightly stupid ‘nom de plume’, I think) composed ‘Instructions for the Lounge in Bond Street’:

‘Let it be a fixed rule, never to be seen in the LOUNGE without a stick or cane; this, dangling in a string, may accidentally get between the feet of any female passing: if she falls, in consequence, that can be no fault of yours …’.

Skeleton suit boy is still being mended so I thought I’d tell you what I’ve been doing last weekend.

For some time now I’m obsessed with vertically striped socks because we had to find some for one of our Pleasure Garden gents. Meet William Oxtoby, 23 years of age, dandy on the make, trying to find love, preferably with a rich heiress. He is wearing his best suit: blue-green shot silk suit with silk embroidery from the 1770s, which no doubt he would have accessorised with vertically striped hosiery.

This type of fancy stocking seem to have been particularly fashionable in the 1770s and 1780s, check out the fashion plates below and also Charles James Fox in this print of 1788 (one of my favourite Museum of London objects).

They have also been mentioned on fashion blogs for a while now and even appeared in Alexander McQueen’s 2009 autumn RTW collection (that’s probablywhy they’re so hot at the moment). Nevertheless the only stockings we found that would have worked well with the colouring of the suit were from a re-enactment site in the US and … they were out of stock (haha).

So I turned to the dress curator’s best friend: ebay. Thankfully Emos and Goths also seem to be fond of vertical strips and I found two pairs for only £3.50 each with high cotton content. The last bit was important because I thought we might have to do some customisation.

The black stripes turned out to be too harsh for the suit and the fuchsia was just ludicrous and too 21^st century. Hilary heard that theatrical costumiers sometimes use bleach to get different colours so I thought I’d have a go.

Apparently thin bleach without additives is best, which is actually not that easy to find but I eventually got lucky in Waitrose. So on Saturday I assembled my bleaching kit. I am actually quite scared of bleach (well, one should be) so I wasn’t looking forward to this. HEALTH WARNING: bleach can be dangerous so do not try this at home without following the guidelines on the bottle.

I took all the necessary precautions: I had gloves (never do washing up without my Marygolds), a poking stick (well, a cooking utensil, really) and I kept my bathroom well ventilated, not much fun in this kind of weather.

According to one website, the recommended mix is 4 parts water and 1 part bleach, which seemed a bit excessive, so I started with a much lower dose. Apparently things were supposed to happen within 15 minutes but I poked and poked and watched and watched but the black stripes stubbornly stayed black (I started with the b/w pair, didn’t want to ruin them both). After 30 minutes or so and after increasing the bleach content several times, I just left the stockings to their own devices, occasionally checking up on them and doing a pit more poking.

After more than an hour the black seemed to slowly turn into brown and once the process started the socks lightened up quite quickly. After a good wash we now have stockings with medium brown and white stripes, still not ideal, but an improvement. After another trip to Waitrose the next day (the glamour!), I had a go with the fuchsia ones, but the dark pink dye was even more difficult. Have a look at the result.

I think the stockings are still too bright but I have not yet held them against the suit yet. If it doesn’t work we might have to dye the brown/white ones, maybe purple, or blue-green-ish to match the suit but I think I will spare you the description of that process.

So, when you come to the Pleasure Garden display in our new gallery (open from the end of May), look out for fancy hosiery and, if you like, tell me what you think.

That was the general reaction when we tried out one of the dress objects for the pleasure garden display last week. The object is a so-called ‘skeleton suit’ from the late 1780s.

In 1839 Charles Dickens remembered the skeleton suit as ‘an ingenious contrivance for displaying the full symmetry of a boy’s figure, by fastening him into a very tight jacket, with an ornamental row of buttons over each shoulder, and then buttoning his trousers over it, so as to give his legs the appearance of being hooked on, just under the armpits.’

Well, our suit is not quite like that, but you can see his points about the buttons. If you look closely, you can see a boy wearing such a suit on the right of this painting. Our suit is made from printed cotton, which has now much faded, but originally might have looked a little bit like denim.

Before I go on, I should introduce myself. My name is Beatrice and I am one of two curators responsible for the Museum’s large fashion collection. For the last two years we have been working on preparing the 70 outfits and more than 150 accessories that will go on display in our new galleries. Most will be displayed on ‘cut-outs’ (more about that some other time) but for the pleasure garden we have decided to use full-figure mannequins.

Pleasure Gardens were a bit like amusement grounds today, and were particularly popular in the second half of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The most famous gardens in London were Vauxhall and Ranelagh.

We will show 16 outfits from the 1740s to the 1840s in two cases in the new display. Of course you would never have seen them together originally, but we wanted to highlight particular gems from our collection. The main outfits, suits and dresses, will be original and so will be many of the accessories. To help us put together the right objects we invented a character for each figure. Our little boy is the three-year old Charles Winter, who has come to the gardens with his sister and father, Captain Winter.  Charles is very excited, has even suffered his hair to be curled because the gardens are so fun but is keen to get rid of his starched collar.

Speaking of which, we did not have an appropriate shirt for Charles in the collection, so we asked Amy, who is studying Costume Interpretation at Wimbledon School of Art to make us one. That’s what you see in the photo. It works perfectly and Charles will look even cuter once he is wearing his read shoes. In case you are wondering why he has a plastic bag over his head, we are worried the paint will scratch so are protecting it until installation.

Unfortunately we found that Charles’ arms were a little short (maybe not, what do you think?) so they have now gone back our mannequin makers for a quick fix. I will show you pictures of the finished Charles in a few weeks and I will write about some of the other figures we are working on.