The working life of Museum of London

I can finally show you my all time favourite photograph of Gertie Millar. As you can see, she is sitting on what is probably a flower stand in a fancy, striped playsuit acessorised by striped socks, lovely white shoes and a Struwwelpeter wig. The actress is surrounded by soft toys (what kind of animal is hanging next to her head?) as the photo alludes to Toy Town, a musical number from the revue Bric-à-Brac, which premiered at the Palace Theatre (the one where Priscilla Queen of the Desert has replaced Les Misérables) on 18 September 1915, roughly a year after the outbreak of World War I.

Revues were a new musical genre, which became increasingly popular just before the war. As we have seen, the plots of musical comedies usually demanded complete suspension of disbelief from their audience, but there was at least some sort of narrative thread linking the musical numbers. Bric-à-Brac was different. According to Ken Reeves, a connoisseur of musical theatre, who very kindly dropped off a copy of his book Gertie Millar and the Edwardesian Legacy at the museum last week, the revue

‘was in reality the chief and penultimate item in a bill of entertainment of six or seven items which was presented under the Bric-à-Brac title. [...] The entire programme of revue and non-revue items began with the instrumental playing of a march and it typically continued with an act by a comedienne who was followed variously by acrobats, a singer, a cartoonist or some other variety artiste or artistes, and these performers were succeeded by the Palace orchestra’s playing a selection of musical pieces prior to the playing of Bric-à-Brac. [...] The Palace’s programme of entertainment was brought to an end by the showing of a moving picture programme which was called The Events of an Hour.’

The actual revue consisted of seven scenes, with an interval between scenes three and four. Gertie Millar, as Polly Myrtle, sang Chalk Farm to Camberwell Green in scene one, appeared under various guises in scenes three and four, rendered Neville was a Devil (what a brilliant title!) in scene six and ended the revue with the duet I’m Simply Crazy over You.

The highlight of the evening was a number in scene seven, in which Gertie donned her Jumping Jack outfit to sing Toy Town, accompanied by 16 similarly clad chorus girls, all sporting ‘flam-coloured tousled wigs’ (The Stage). The theatre historian W. J. MacQueen Pope (1888-1960) was enraptured by the Palace Girls calling them ‘the finest dancing troupe of their kind the stage ever saw’ (Ghost and Greasepaint, 1951).

The Jumping Jack number reminded J.T. Grein of the Sunday Times of the ‘pit-a-pat of nursery days, long behind us, to which the mind turns back so willingly.’ According to the Tatler (29 September 1915) Toy Town was ‘the most beautiful scene of all … so exquisite as to make a success of the revue without anything else. When the curtain rises you hear a sigh of rapture go all around the hose.’

No doubt this sigh was also provoked by the set, not a nursery, as you might expect, but an Italian Garden, described by Grein as ‘amethyst merging into chalcedony, behind black cypresses that grew beside the balustrade of a marble walk’. This seemingly incongruous design was the brainchild of no other than the British Egyptologist Arthur Weigall (1888-1934), who had returned from Egypt a few years earlier. In 1905, the 25-year old Weigall had replaced Howard Carter as Chief Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt at Luxor and, as journalist, he would later cover the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun. In between, this Renaissance man successfully designed for the stage and moving pictures and penned film reviews for the Daily Mail.

You have to thank The Gramophone Company that it is still possible to hear Gertie singing Toy Town. According to an advertisement published in The Times on 15 November 1915:

‘The other day half-a-dozen motor cars pulled into the little village of Hayes Middlesex. The passengers in these cars were some of the most highly paid revue artistes of the world, consisting of the principals from the Palace Theatre who had come to “His Master’s Voice” Laboratories and Recording Rooms to re-enact the record Revue “Bric-a-Brac” [sic, contemporary accounts usually omit the accent].’

The wonderful facilities in this ‘laboratory’ meant that prospective buyers would ‘not only hear the voice of Miss Gertie Millar singing her hits, but you seem to catch the exclusive spirit of originality and individuality which characterizes all of Miss Millar’s work.’

This was good news for people outside London as ‘no matter how remote your home may be from the metropolis of the world, you can produce within the confines of your home, the record Revue of this year, “Bric-a-Brac”, in all its original purity and charm.’

Never mind the record, what about the dog, I hear you asking. The website of the National Portrait Gallery features a considerable number of photographs taken by Rita Martin. One of them is enticingly listed as ‘Gertie Millar as Jumping Jack with her dog “Chum” in “On The Tiles” a sketch from “Bric-à-Brac”‘. There is no accompanying image, but the description seems to refer to a photo from the sequence shown here.

Judging from Gertie and Chum’s interaction and the fact the our album contains the above photo of Gertie, this time in fashionable dress, I would not be surprised if the dog was hers, rather than a living studio prop. Gertie’s love of dogs was well known. James Jupp, stage door-keeper at the Gaiety for more than 30 years, recalled:

‘Miss Gertie Millar is an example of what talent and personality will do on the stage. There was a time when police had to marshal the crowds that gathered round the theatre to catch even a fleeting glimpse of her, as with her Pekingese, she darted from stage-door to motor-car’ (The Gaiety Stage Door, 1923, p. 55).

In 1934, no other than P.G. Wodehouse, then Gertie’s neighbor in Le Touquet in France, mentioned in a letter that he had been asked to ‘exercise her spotted carriage dog occasionally’.

I will give Gertie, her Pekingese, Mastiff and Dalmatian a well-deserved break now. I am hoping to get an appointment at the National Portrait Gallery and will report on Rita Martin once I’ve been there. For now, I hope you enjoy the photos as much as I do.

* Information about Weigall and his involvement in Bric-à-Brac is from Julia Hankey’s book A Passion for Egypt: Arthur Weigall, Tutankhamun and the ‘Curse of the Pharaos (Tauris 2007).

On 25 January 1909 The Times published a lengthy review of a ‘New Musical Play, in Two Acts’, that had premiered at the Gaiety Theatre two days earlier. Part of the reason why the article was so long was the comedy’s complicated, if not very original, plot. When the play moved to the Knickerbocker Theatre in New York the following year, one critic described it as the ‘familiar he-fell-in-love-with-one-who-was-beneath-him-in-station type’ (The New York Times, 30 August 1910). Similarly, Richard Traubner in his guide to operetta (Routledge 2003) thought it was a show of the ‘typical department-store-salesgirl-meets-disguised-rich-earl-spurns-and-finally-accepts-him variety’.

Gertie Millar played Mary Gibbs, a girl from Yorkshire, like the actress herself, who works as a shop assistant selling sweets at the extremely thinly disguised Garrods department store. As you would expect, Miss Gibbs has many admirers, an entire chorus of ‘dudes’. Now more commonly associated with The Big Lebowski, the term dude had been popular since the 1870s and was used to describe well-dressed gentlemen and/or men who had no experience of life outside a big city, as is supported by the lyrics of the dudes’ song:

‘A fashionable band of brothers / Are we, You see!
Whatever one has done the others / Must do It too!
Our clothes and hats are made to match, / They show it! They show it!
We have one bill for all the batch, / And owe it, and owe it!’

The main dude is Lord Eynsford, the son of the millionaire Earl of St. Ives, who pretends to be a humble bank clerk so as not to frighten off Mary. When she finds out the truth she decides to leave London, but not before making a last visit to White City. The Great White City had been erected the previous year to the north of Shepherds Bush as the venue for the 1908 Olympics and to house an exhibition to celebrate French-British relations. The ground’s name derived from the cladding of its temporary structures, which was made of gleaming white marble.

To make the farcical plot even more complicated, during a visit to Garrods the bag of Mary’s cousin Timothy had been mixed up with that of Hughie Pierrepoint, an ‘amateur criminal’. Timothy finds himself in the possession of the Ascot Gold Cup, which Hughie happens to have stolen from the country house of no other than Lord St. Ives. Timothy also makes his way to White City where he disguises himself as a marathon runner, ends up the first to enter the stadium and is hailed as the winner of the race. Needles to say, in the end, somehow, all turns out well and Mary gets to marry her Lord.

As Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell show in their book Theatre & Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes (Cambridge University Press 1994), in the Edwardian age female consumption and the stage were closely connected (foreshadowing the role of Hollywood a little later). Setting a play in a department store provided many opportunities for product placement and one New York critic noted ‘Of course, an audience let loose in a dress-making establishment doesn’t care much about plot so it is not surprising that the gowns surpass the narrative in prominence’ (quoted in Richard Traubner, Operetta: a theatrical history, Routledge 2003).

Our Miss Gibbs was not the first play to use this ploy (sorry, couldn’t help it). One of the Gaiety’s earlier successes had been The Shop Girl (1894) partly set in the ‘Mantle Department at the Royal Stores’. In 1906 The Girl Behind the Counter was performed at the Wyndham’s Theatre in which ‘Winnie Willoughby’ masquerades as a shop assistant at the Maison Duval where customers and chorus sing that ‘They’ve been shopping till they’re dropping …’.

While The Times critic bemoaned the improbability of the plot of Our Miss Gibbs (as if musical comedies ever had probable story lines), he noted nevertheless that ‘the work of the shop itself is being carried on very much as it would be in a real shop’. This verisimilitude must have been aided by the fact that Messrs. Harrods Ltd., never missing an advertising opportunity, provided the dresses for Act 1.

It was in the second act, in the Court of Honour of the Franco-British Exhibition, that Gertie finally donned her dark blue Pierrot costume and performed one of her most famous numbers, Moonstruck, written by her husband Lionel Monckton:

‘I’m such a silly when the moon comes out; / I hardly seem to know what I’m about;
Skipping, hopping, never never stopping, / I can’t keep still, although I try.
I’m all a-quiver when the moonbeams glance; / That is the moment when I long to dance.
I can never close a sleepy eye / When the moon comes creeping up the sky!’

Thankfully a recording of Gertie has survived and you can sing your own version with the help of this fabulous website (it is song no. 20).

Gertie was supported by a chorus of no less than eight similarly clad chorus girls. Following the publication of the Belgian writer Albert Giraud’s cycle of poems Pierrot lunaire: Rondels bergamasque in 1884, Pierrots’ moon-madness was often depicted, although I’m not sure Giraud’s poems were in the forefront of Lionel Monckton’s mind.

It would be wonderful to know who exactly was responsible for the outfits for the Moonstruck scene. As was customary, the programme for Our Miss Gibbs provides a full list of the designers and costumiers involved in the production. Overall responsibility lay with the prolific Attilio Comelli (1858-1925), who not only had been the house designer for the Royal Opera House since the 1880s but also found time to design costumes for Christmas pantomimes in Australia where many of his beautiful drawings are still preserved.

Comelli is at the head of a long list of illustrious names, but I don’t know (yet) how exactly they would have worked with Comelli. Not much is known these days about the French designer Jeanne Margaine-Lacroix, but according to The New York Times (24 March 1912) she ‘created the Sheath, and the Slashed Skirts’. Madame Lucile, one of the most famous dressmakers of the time, often provided dresses for the stage and Gertie was also one of her private clients.

There is also a ‘Miss Fisher’, probably ‘Mary E. Fisher Ltd, Costumiers, 26 Bedford Street, Covent Garden WC’, who advertised as provider of ‘Historical and Fancy Dresses of every description specially designed for Hire or Purchase’ in The Play Pictorial in 1914. ‘Madame Herbert’ might be Madame Pauline Herbert of 8 Orchard Street, who was praised for her ‘charming work’ in the same publication.

The costumiers B.J. Simmons & Co, founded in 1857, worked on many productions in the West End and had a workshop in Covent Garden until 1964. And of course the company now simply known as ‘Angels’, but in 1909 still named after its founder ‘Morris Angel & Son’ was also involved.

I have not yet tracked down Burkinshaw & Knights, or Johns & Bonham, but I suspect they might have been responsible for the suits of the dapper dudes. And if you know more about Conwyn (???) Garden, I’d like to hear from you.

I would have loved to have seen this no doubt super-lavish production and I am sure would have been enthralled by the Moonstruck scene. However, Gertie’s Pierrot costume is, in my view, surpassed by an outfit she wore in the 1915 production of Bric-à-Brac, which will be the subject of my next, and probably last, Gertie installment, as well as the mysterious photo album the images in this post are taken from.

For now, have a quick look at Gertie playing Pied Piper to a troupe of 12 child pierrots, who seem to be sleepwalking, one of the most bizarre images I have seen in a long time (if the link doesn’t work, or you cannot enlarge the image, click here and search for ‘Gertie Millar Pierrot’.

Last weekend I took some of our lab coats home. We have a washing machine at work but washing powder is of course verboten and I thought they needed some serious enzyme action. I am disappointed. They are not as dazzling as I expected them to be from the TV ads of one of the products I used. But my disappointment probably has another, deeper reason (doesn’t it always?).

I think I was hoping for a complete transformation of these standard issue coats – into what exactly, I don’t know. I am aware that lab coats are mainly meant to be useful, but couldn’t they also be a little bit exciting? That they are not, is probably the reason why we only tend to wear them to protect ourselves from objects (you might think this kind of object does not exist in a dress store, welcome to the freezer room).

Occasionally – very occasionally, I swear – Hilary and I discuss our dream work wear and we have found it to be a tricky business. It is not easy to find something that combines utility with beauty and with the need to preserve (or acquire?) authority. Hilary came upon this beautiful Vogue pattern, which has the added advantage that it is ’straight from Paris’ (via America, mind). It would make a lovely lab coat, but I’m not so sure about the authority situation, and it would need serious customisation to be super-practical.

I always thought my favourite uniform would be a jumpsuit-type-thing. At my last workplace I was known to don my Tyvek suit at the slightest provocation (I kept it in my desk drawer, just in case …). I loved my boiler suit, but even I have to admit that it wasn’t very flattering (white does nothing for me), it didn’t have any pockets and, true to its name, there were microclimate issues.

Having always been an admirer of Constructivist art and design, I thought Rodchenko’s overall might be it (scroll down a bit on this page), but now that I have looked at it again, I’m not so keen on the leather trim. A friend recommended Ernesto Thayaht’s TuTa, which I really, really like, particularly as I have just realised I have a detailed pattern in a book at home. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy also looked very good in his ‘Arbeitsanzug‘.

Maybe a flying suit like the ones popular in the 1980s could work? Here is a beautiful example from our collection:

This one was bought from Austin Reed, oh yes, and worn over a T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves with the suit’s legs tucked into thick, white, woolly ankle socks. The look was completed with Dunlop plimsols, also preserved at the Museum. And this was six years before Top Gun!

I could have suits in different colours, one for each day of the week (or for particular moods) with a lamé number for special occasions. I could even have my name embroidered in a suitable spot, a non-negotiable requirement for the kind of work outfit I’m after.

Or maybe a smock, like the one below, apparently worn by a milkman as a bit of an advertising gimmick around 1900? But who would do the smocking?

Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you do? If you have found the perfect solution, want to share a fabulous customisation job or provide the address of a supplier of practical, yet stylish, work wear, we would love to hear from you! And you don’t have to be a girl.

PS: Gertie Millar’s story will be resumed next week.

Before I write about our Gertie Millar photo album, I thought I should introduce her. Not that she needs much introduction. There is a lot of information on the internet (216!!! images on Flickr alone), so I will try to stick to the basics.

Gertrude was born in Bradford on 21 February 1879, the third daughter of Elizabeth Miller [sic], a worsted-stuff worker and dressmaker. Gertie later claimed that her father was a wool merchant called John Millar, but he was not listed on her birth certificate (ODNB). According to Gertie’s obituary in The Times (26 April 1952):

‘Gossip in her heyday said that she had been a mill-hand and worn the clogs; but the records state that in December 1892, at the age of 13, she was the female Babe in the pantomime The Babes in the Wood at the St James’s Theatre, Manchester, that in December 1899, she was Dandini in Cinderella at the Grand Theatre, Fulham and that during the intervening years she was appearing in pantomime and comedy in provincial towns.’

Gertie could not have found a better time to arrive in the capital. With the first performance of In Town on 15 October 1892 at the Prince of Wales Theatre, a new type of entertainment had been introduced to England, which perfectly suited Gertie’s talents: musical comedy. In Town had been produced by George Edwardes (1855-1915), aptly named to dominate the London theatre world during the Edwardian age. Since 1886, Edwardes had been running his own theatre, The Gaiety on Aldwych, and he opened a second, Daly’s Theatre off Leicester Square, in 1893.

Edwardes next musical comedy, A Gaiety Girl (1893) was so successful that, for a while at least, he stuck to this winning formula with The Shop Girl (1894), The Circus Girl (1896) and A Runaway Girl (1898). Gertie’s appearance as Dandini coincided with Edwardes’ switch to boys, title-wise, and she was engaged to tour in the role of Isabel Blyth in The Messenger Boy in 1900. Music had been provided by Ivan Caryll and Lionel Monckton, the latter a lawyer turned critic and songwriter. Monckton took a shine to Gertie and made sure she was cast as the bridesmaid Cora in his next collaboration with Caryll. The Torreador opened at The Gaiety on 17 June 1901 and ran for a staggering 675 performances.

Gertie did not have the lead role, but apparently brought the house down when, together with a chorus of bridesmaids, she sang: ‘Keep off the grass, / Keep off the grass, / Conduct like this I won’t pardon. / Play at your ease, but if you please, / Keep off the grass in the garden!’. Soon Monckton added another song for her: ‘For I’m not a simple little girl, / I’m not a goody-goody girl, / I know exactly what is what , / I know what’s right but I prefer what’s not’. Monckton seems to have expressed his own feelings for Gertie in a second addition, a duet with Dora, ‘A Ward in Chancery’ (i.e. a minor in the care of the court), extolling the virtues of ‘Captivating Cora’. By 20 December 1902, Monckton and the 28-years younger Gertie were married. (By the way, if you want to read these fascinating lyrics in their entirety and sing along, karaoke-style, have a look here.)

As you can guess from the above, musical comedies were not exactly highbrow but they had beautiful scenery, even more beautiful costumes and … girls, lots of them. It is may not suprise that King Edward, with Queen Alexandra, was in the audience when the re-built Gaiety opened in 1903 with The Orchid, another Caryll/Monckton collaboration, this time with Gertie in the lead as The Hon. Violet Anstruther, Principal Pupil at the Horticultural College (don’t ask).

The review of The Orchid in The Times (27 October 1903) gives a good idea of what an evening at The Gaiety was all about. The article starts with a list of characteristics a critic would expect from a ’serious’ play: it had to be witty, poetical, comment on life, illuminate politics, provide social critique and rational amusements (among a few other things). The writer then imagines the response of The Gaiety:

‘I don’t want to make you think about yourselves or any one else; I want to make you forget to think; when you come to see me, do, if you can, be merely frivolous and forget your worries. I am inconsequent, irresponsible, irrelevant; I know it, but just see what a lot of pretty girls I’ve got; I can’t teach you anything, but look at these gorgeous dresses – the programme will tell you how many different people have been employed in the making of them; I can’t get nearer to throwing light on our national life than the caricature of a living politician, but I can tickle your ears very pleasantly for an hour or two if only you will let me.’

The audience went to The Gaiety and Daly’s to have a good time, to look at the girls and to check out the frocks. Like the Gibson Girl in America, the Gaiety Girl became a fashion icon and Gertie Millar was probably the most famous of them all. She made a big impression on the young Noël Coward who remembered in 1966 (The Times, 26 July) that the star was well groomed on and off the stage:

‘I remember Gertie Millar who was always beautifully dressed and emerged after a show in a flurry of scent and flowers. It left a tremendous impression. As a small boy I used to wait for hours to see her and once she gave me a red rose from her bouquet which I kept for years pressed in a … volume of Chums. (Chums was a boys’ magazine published between 1892 and 1942.)

I don’t know when a photo of Gertie first appeared on a postcard. Some actresses were said to spend more time in the photographer’s studio than on the stage and judging from the number of postcards that have survived, Gertie’s seem to have been very popular. We only have two in our collection, the one at the top of this blog is from around 1906, the one below shows Gertie as ‘Mitzi’ in The Girls of Gottenberg from 1907 (Edwardes obviously wanted another stab at his Girl comedy successes).  The photographs in our album are different and only a few ever appeared on postcards, as far as I can tell.  You will finally see them next week when we pick up the story in 1909 with Gertie’s probably most successful performance, as Mary in Our Miss Gibbs.

PS: I should mention, the description of Gertie I used for the title is from A.E. (Albert Edward) Wilson’s Edwardian Theatre (first published in 1951):

‘Hers was not perhaps the conventional standard of beauty but there was a real charm in the saucy tilt of her nose, in the buoyancy with which she took the stage, and the air of joyous delight and good nature with which she entered into the fun and frolic of the business.’

PPS: After reading my last blog one of my colleagues pointed out this article about the return of Pierrots. There must be something in the air.

The whole thing started about two years ago with a photo album, which I showed to a researcher looking at gowns by Lucile. According to the notes on our database, one of the dresses had been designed for the actress Gertie Millar and, sure enough, she wore it in one of the photos. That was quite exciting in itself but what really gave me palpitations was a group of images showing Gertie dressed as Pierrot and as Jumping Jack.

At first the obsession just manifested itself in an email to my long-suffering colleagues in Retail insisting that the photographs had to be incorporated, somehow, into our retail offerings (no luck yet, but they have been busy).

Another symptom appeared about a month later when a bric-à-brac shop near my home was selling a pierrot costume. It was an all-in-one made of a cotton fabric in a dirty orangey colour with enormous white pompons and was displayed, spread-eagle, in the window. After a few phone calls to the owner (the shop has unusual opening hours) I finally manged to have a closer look. The costume was very similar to Gertie’s, came with two pointy hats and was a bargain, or so it seemed to me, at £120. For about a week, and despite my usual pecuniary difficulties, I was hell-bent on buying the outfit, not for the museum (there was no ‘proper’ provenance) but for myself, not to wear (I don’t really do fancy dress, unless I really have to) but to keep. This is extremely out of character because I don’t collect things for myself (if you discount books, one should discount books). Eventually I was talked out of the purchase, something I very much regret, almost as much as not acquiring the stuffed dik-dik a few years earlier (that still hurts).

With the costume store refurbishment and the new galleries and all, the obsession somewhat subsided. The only tangible sign was the photo of Gertie on the screen of my annoying, so-called ’smart’ phone. About two weeks ago it started again, but this time with a vengeance (which would account for my blog silence). I was looking for something in the ephemera store and came across this 1920s catalogue for fancy dress, which of course included suggestions for pierrot and clown outfits. I should have known better, but I decided to have another look at the album. Of course, one thing lead to another or rather, Gertie led to Bend’Or, Eileen Molyneux, Margaine Lacroix, Madame Herbert, Attilio Comelli and a whole lot of other people I suddenly felt the urge to know more about.

Have you ever found yourself searching for something on google books and decided you absolutely had to check all 224 results? Have you ever shouted at your computer because ’snippet view’ cuts off just where things seem to get interesting? Or, have you, by any chance, decided to finally go to bed and almost turned off the computer when you suddenly realised that you could try another data combination on the ancestry website and then not switched off the computer and were still sitting in front of it, in your pyjama (or whatever you wear or don’t wear at night) 45 minutes later? Or, and I am particularly embarrassed about this one, have you glared at the librarian when she did not want to give you the key to the archive room where you were going to check a very important object file because the library had closed 10 minutes earlier (sorry Sally)? If you have, you know what I am talking about. One day curiosity will kill the curator or one of his or her colleagues, I’m sure.

Despite all this ‘research’, there a still a few loose ends, books to consult, people to meet, places to see and I am also now wondering whether anyone will be interested in any of the things I found out. Well, you don’t have to read the next few installments but I will have to get it all off my chest. For now have a look at this, it is very lovely.

Students and other assorted YPs (‘Young People’, as I like to call them these days) are a common sight in the costume store. (Strangely, Hilary and I are ‘fashion’ curators who manage the ‘dress’ collection held in the ‘costume’ store, but that’s another story). They often come alone or in groups, with or without tutors, to look at objects and to ask interesting questions.

The visit recorded in these images (by Richard Stroud, one of the museum’s three photographers) was slightly different. The students had come to take photos for a micro site connected to the web pages of the Fashion History & Theory BA course at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design.

Before their first visit, the second-year students had told me what type of objects they were interested in, e.g. something to do with ballet, a frock coat, a pair of shoes, or some such like. I took out a few things they might like, they made their selection and went off to do some research.

For the website they had to provide ‘two different kinds of information about the object: one empirical and museological the other subjective and perhaps popular or personal’. It was the second bit that most interested me. I often find that visitors look at objects in very different ways and I wonder who learns more during our visits.

A few weeks later, the students were back and tried their best to take good photos without a professional backdrop (one day, there will be one!), limited lighting (that’s where the table lamp comes in) and the mannequins and object stands we have. (No objects or dummies were harmed in the process, there was method in the slight madness.)

I love the resulting web pages and am amazed at some of the related illustrations and information the students have found, starting only with the sometimes sparse descriptions from our database. Please have a look here and judge for yourself (wait for the quote to disappear, click on ‘FHT Projects’ and then on ‘Museum of London Website’ at the top). I hope we can do this again (we had a lot of fun as you can see) and I’d love to know what you think.

I am prone to melancholy but last week I was not the only one haunted by the noon-day demon. Maybe it’s not surprising. The parties are over (well almost) and although I am glad I don’t have to schlepp my one decent pair of heels to work any more, I will miss seeing my colleagues in silver sparkly outfits and festive ties.

As always when big projects end, and this is pretty much the biggest I have ever been involved in, there is a huge anti-climax and we should all have been issued with complimentary ‘Now What?’ T-shirts. Of course there is lots to do: some snagging, managing interactives that develop a live of their own (artificial intelligence might be possible after all), sorting out all the things you haven’t got round to in the last few months and … filing.

While most of us have started to re-adjust to our new lives, many of the people involved in the new galleries still seem to move around in some sort of slow-motion fish tank bubble. It doesn’t help that we attended a year’s worth of leaving dos in the last two weeks. Thankfully everyone seems to have found a new job elsewhere or within the museum or decided to do some major travelling. Still, good-byes are very sad.

We had some bad times and our full share of hairy moments, but let’s just remember the good ones (in no particular order):

Hollywood in Deptford
Being part of the preparations for, and the actual filming of, some of the AVs (audiovisual components) for the new galleries was the perfect get-away from lifting mannequins (the gentlemen seem to agree).

Watching a Master at Work
We all learned a lot by watching Janet (Wood) studying a piece of clothing to see how it wants to behave and giving it all the help it needs (some objects can be peculiarly reluctant to being put on display, I might come back to this in the future). Janet is a great teacher and her underpinnings are always beautifully constructed and sewn. Somehow it is strangely satisfying to know that a structure beneath a dress is beautiful in its own right (maybe an exhibition idea?) even if it might be hidden forever.

The Sewing Club
For a few weeks our workspace turned into needlework heaven: cane ribbons were assembled, mannequin feet were padded, sleeve ruffles precision-hemmed and fichus draped. Thank you to all the volunteers and roped-in ex-volunteers that gave their time for free!

Fanshawe Dress Eureka Moment
The big one: putting on the Fanshawe petticoat on its unwieldy mount and carefully constructed underskirt and realising that we might actually be able to sleep again.

Helping Hands
A project like this won’t come together without people with different work habits, opinions, tastes and senses of humour finding a way of getting along. Looking through the images taken during our work with the dress objects recently, I noticed the hands. Collaboration rules!

In my quest to find out more about our slightly mysterious ‘fausse montre’ (fake watch) chatelaine/equipage, I pinned all my hopes on its fob seal. In keeping with the rather cheap nature of the watch, the seal is set with coloured glass, rather than a gemstone, which made it all the harder to make out the animal it seemed to depict.

Fiddling with our camera’s macro setting and blowing up the resulting image didn’t really help. So I set out to find a partner in crime, who emerged in the person of Hannah Power, one of our Applied Arts conservators. She had already cleaned the watch and thought it would be relatively easy to take an impression without any harm to the object. That’s where the dentist putty came in.

I’m quite sure you could use other brands, but don’t take my word for it, I’m not a conservator. I believe Hannah chose this particular one because it sets pretty fast. Below are the different stages: spreading the two components onto a smooth surface, vigorous mixing, careful application and … the reveal. (In case you are wondering, Hannah doesn’t always walk around with a high-viz vest over her lab coat, but we were right in the middle of installing our new galleries and if you found a clean-ish vest you held onto it.)

As I had began to suspect, the impression showed a pelican. ‘Doesn’t look like a pelican to me’, you might say, and yes, there is no pouch. The following is not for the faint-hearted. In medieval Europe it was believed that pelicans had a special way of coping with a food shortage: they pricked their breast until they drew blood, which they used to feed their young. This mistaken belief apparently had something to do with the fact that pelicans press their bill into their chest to empty the aforementioned pouch. Pelicans became one of the prime emblems of self-sacrifice (and also of the Passion of Christ), which Queen Elizabeth I found too hard to resist.

Pelicans were, and are still, used in coat-of-arms where they are usually shown in two versions: alone, in which case connoisseurs of heraldry speak of ‘a pelican vulning herself’, or with their young (usually in a nest), which is called ‘a pelican in her piety’. It is the last version that seems to be depicted on our seal.

The use of emblems in embroidery or for jewellery became particularly popular after the publication the Emblemata of Andrea Alciato, in 1531, followed by many similar compilations of emblems, usually in large parts copied from Signor Alciato. Emblems consist of three parts: a heading or motto, an illustration and a commentary or moralising text. When Geffrey Whitney published the first English emblem book in 1586 he followed the established formula. On the bottom of page 87 he showed a pelican in her piety under the motto: ‘Quod in te est prome’ (literally: bring forth what is in you – not a bad motto). The verse below starts: ‘The Pellican, for to revive her younge, Doth peirce her brest, and geve them of her blood’.

The popularity of the pelican emblem can be observed in many examples of the amazing early 17th century gloves in the Spence Collection, owned by the Glovers’ Company and now housed at the Fashion Museum at Bath. Scroll down to No. 23370 on this page, or have a look here.

Pelicans obviously were still popular in the late 18th century, when our watch was probably made. So how does all this help us with our fausse montre? Not very much, I fear. So far I have been unable to connect the pelican emblem to any ancestors of Lord Harcourt, who bequested the watch to the Museum, but then he might have acquired it during his lifetime.

It is not clear whether the pelican gloves in the Spence collection were made for a gentleman or a lady, but my hunch is that the pelican was more of a female emblem. And the watch is an equipage, usually worn by women, rather than a pocket watch with a string. I like to think that it was given as a present to a devoted mother but I now doubt that I will ever find out. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. And if you want to further your pelican studies, have a look here.

PS: Apologies for the long gap between this and my last post. By now you might have seen our advertising campaign for our new galleries and/or have seen some reviews. We have all been working very hard to get it all ready. Only one week to go!

The main reason for my obsession with the eighteenth century fashion of wearing two watches is a ‘fausse montre’ (French for fake watch but so much better-sounding) that I discovered in our Strong Room (that’s where we keep our valuable objects under many locks and keys).

The description on our database is not particularly revealing: ‘Pinchbeck chatelaine with false watch. 4 suspension chains, one attached to watch key, 1 to glass fob of swan [more about that later] & 2 attached to false pocket watch with blue & white painted enamel dial’.

The watch formed part of a bequest by William Edward, second Viscount Harcourt (b. 1908), who played a very important role in the foundation of the Museum of London. He was chairman of its Board of Trustees from 1965 to 1975, and then of its Governors until his death in early 1979 (and he now watches over me every day from a very nice photograph propped up in my office).

As you would expect, Lord Harcourt had very distinguished ancestors, including the Most. Rev. and Rt. Hon. Edward Venables-Vernon-Harcourt, Archbishop of York (1757-1847) who married in 1784 Lady  Anne Leveson-Gower (1761-1832), daughter of Sir Granville Leveson-Gower, 1st Marquess of Stafford, who held several high government offices. I mention these particular ancestors because they were around when this kind of watch was worn.

Why would a member of such a wealthy family wear a fake watch? Well, fausses montres were not necessarily cheap. On my beloved Old Bailey website it is recorded that in February 1796 a certain William Lee stole a ‘diamond fausse montre’, worth £40, amongst a very, very large number of other valuable items from a jeweller in St James’s Street. Quite a lot of money for a fake watch if you consider that a farm labourer would have probably earned no more than £15 per year.

Members of the royal family thought nothing of giving fake watches as presents. King George III’s son Prince Frederick wrote to his brother, the Prince of Wales, from Hanover in 1781: ‘I must give you the commission to distribute a few trifles which I have sent directed to you to be given among my four sisters, one fausse montre is for the Princess Royal, and the other with the sypher [sic] upon is for Puss.’

The popularity of dummy watches coincides with the rise of the two-watch fashion in the 1770s. Edward J. Wood wrote in his book Curiosities of clocks and watches from the earliest times (1866): ‘The foppery of wearing two watches was soon approved and adopted by the ladies; but it was found to be too expensive to wear two real watches, and accordingly a true watch was worn on the left side and a sham one on the right side of the person’. He then somewhat contradicts himself, and proves my above point, that ‘false watches were in some instances of gold and silver, and sometimes enriched with jewels and enamelled miniatures at the back.’ These miniature portraits were disguised as watches so that you could contemplate the face of a beloved while pretending to check the time. Bring it back!

So what does all this reveal about our very own fake watch? As it is a chatelaine/equipage it seems to have been made for a lady. I am aware the following statement is not very scientific, but I think the watch nevertheless has a manly air about it and I have to admit that is now proudly worn by William Oxtoby, one of the gentlemen in our Pleasure Garden display.

Our watch is definitely of the cheap variety. Made to look like gold, it is made of pinchbeck, an alloy (not entirely sure what that is, chemistry was never my strong point) of copper and zinc invented by a certain Christopher Pinchbeck, a London clockmaker, in the early 18th century.

I thought the animal depicted on the seal might provide a clue and connect it somehow to Lord Harcourt’s ancestors (it might of course not have been an heirloom but rather a curiosity Lord Harcourt picked up during his lifetime). I didn’t think the animal was a swan but because the seal is made of glass, I found it very hard to photograph it in a way that showed the bird (or dragon?) clearly (looking at it with the naked or be-spectacled eye is even less revealing). So I asked Hannah, one of our applied arts conservators, to make (take?) an impression. If you always wanted to find something interesting to do with dentist putty, have a look at the next instalment.

For the last weeks (months? years?) we have been hunting for accessories for our Pleasure Garden figures and have assisted them with posing for photographs. Yesterday, and I cannot tell you how happy I am to write this, we have moved the last mannequin to her new home.

This has reminded me of a few rules which they don’t teach you at (dress) curator school:

Rule No. 1: Wear presentable socks as you might have to take off your shoes at short notice to step into a display case. If you happen to know in advance that several of you will have to take off their shoes simultaneously and that there is a chance you might be photographed (see below), you might even consider coordinating your hosiery.

Matching socks could be a nice conversation topic while you are steadying a mannequin because you have to wait for someone to fetch the tool that tightens the grub screw, which holds the mannequin’s pole. It goes without saying that you also need footwear that won’t take ages to take off and even longer to put on again.

Rule No. 2: Carry make-up with you at all times as your nice colleagues from the Press Department might suddenly feel inspired and demand you to be photographed while you are steadying a mannequin. You might want to stock up on miniature make-up samples, carrying around a full-size make-up bag is just not feasible (and will be frowned upon by the technicians).

Rule No. 3: You must ensure that at least two pockets are incorporated into your installation work wear as you will need to be able to use both hands. The pockets have to be big enough to hold all of the items below:

• emergency socks and make-up
• gloves, so you don’t get chocolate onto 200-year-old clothes
• mobile phone in case a supplier arrives unexpectedly and no one can find you because you are hidden under a mannequin’s skirt trying to find the aforementioned grub screw (although it is unlikely that you will have reception or be able to answer the phone at that point)
• tool used to tighten the screw so you don’t have to wait for ages on full display on a bad sock day
• little box with pins of various sizes (you could pin those to yourself but you might regret it)
• assortment of pretty silk ribbons
• money for coffee/chocolate or to give to the intern who has to go out and buy more pretty ribbons
• scraps of paper that you will mysteriously accumulate during the day
• keys for display cases (or you will put them somewhere safe, forget where that was and get into big trouble with Security and a whole lot of other colleagues)
• little bits of melinex and plastazote (this should be a life rule!).

On dress-up days (you might expect to impress a fashion journalist with your knowledge of ball end hex keys), finding space for all of the above might be difficult. Presentable women’s clothing rarely seems to have an adequate number of pockets.

Rule No. 4: In the run-up to an installation period, regular attendance at a gym is advisable. You will particularly want to strengthen your thigh and stomach muscles and make sure that your knees are in good order. Your upper arm strength will also be tested, but unfortunately lifting mannequins seems to do nothing much to bat wings (not that I really know what those are …). Gym visits once in a while might also help with the effects of extreme chocolate consumption, which you might become prone to.

That’s it. Print it out and keep it in a safe place for the next time you have to install 60 or so mannequins and more than 150 accessories and things will run smoothly (well, they never do, but it helps to be prepared).