The working life of Museum of London

This entry was supposed to be about Cecil Beaton following my perusal of The Strenuous Years, his diaries covering the years 1948-55 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1973). Having bought the book merely to check a quote, I thought I might as well read the whole thing. Unsurprisingly I loved it and was particularly struck by Beaton’s descriptions of his contemporaries. As a photographer, and maybe even more as a draughtsman and aspiring painter, Beaton had to have a good eye. However, capturing the essence of a person’s appearance in a photograph or a sketch is quite different from using words to conjure up a picture.

Maybe because I read the diaries around the time of the royal wedding I found one section particularly interesting. It deals with the Queen’s first Opening of Parliament on 4 November 1952 (King George VI had died on 6 February that year). Beaton loved the theatre and also enjoyed this particular ’show’. He found it greatly enhanced by the use of the kind of dress that invests even the oldest and most spindly-legged aristocrat with grandeur:

I always enjoy watching my fellow human beings; but now, in their traditional fancy dress – a fancy dress that has been tried, developed and improved until found to be flawless – the show could have gone on for ever. Ancient men with tired eyes, wrinkles, thinning hair, and all the sad outwards aspects of age, appeared perfectly cast as unique and remarkable characters, in these marvellous scarlet, black and white clothes. Grand soldiers or officers of state were stiffly encumbered with gold thread embroideries as if they were in their natural everyday habit. (p. 117)

Beaton thought the women present on this occasion lacked ‘hauteur’ and was particularly scathing about ‘those who by some devious means had trapped a man into a marriage’, focusing on one particular ‘tiresome, pushing little Lady … with her innate vulgarity of yellow, frizzy, musical comedy curls’ (pp. 117-8). Fashion forwardness does not really work for grand state occasions and Beaton applauded the approach taken by Helen Percy, Duchess of Northumberland (1886-1965):

The Mistress of the Robes, the Duchess of Northumberland, gigantically tall with wonderful jewels, wore a Knightsbridge horror of a dress, a crinoline of coarse, Parma violet nylon-tulle with self-same sausages, that was so daring in its bad taste that the effect was wonderful. (p. 120)

Wondering how soon after an event Beaton made notes and whether his diary entries were edited, I reread Hugo Vickers introduction to The Unexpurgated Beaton Diaries (Phoenix 2003). Vickers explains that after important occasions Beaton ‘would turn to the diary at once to record every minute detail’ (p. 9). Before publication Beaton ‘retouched’ his diaries ’shamelessly until he achieved the effect he sought’. In the original Beaton might have been ‘venomous’ about contemporaries who then, in the published version, ‘are hailed as wonders and triumphs’ (p. 11). Vickers gives a hilarious example of this method relating to Marlene Dietrich, which I leave you to discover for yourself. For whatever reason, maybe because royalty features heavily, no uncensored version of the diaries before 1965 have been published (I think), so the passages quoted here might have sounded quite different originally.

I enjoyed one description more than all the others. Not only could I easily and vividly imagine the person described, I also liked the sound of her. Beaton started reminiscing when he saw a funeral notice in The Times:

Lady Cecil Bingham, as she used to be known, was an American who married twice, and whose visual parakeet features, and wistful, pale blue eyes, stared out from the pages of weekly magazines under a large Leghorn shepherdess plate loaded with full-budded roses. [...]
As the years advanced, the earlier prettiness gave way to a ‘woman of the world’ smartness, and her gown was of draped, twisted gold brocade, and her waved hair dressed high, wide and handsome. When I was old enough to savour the outer periphery of grown-up society, Lady Bingham was past middle age. Her complexion was of the most dazzling pearly whiteness; but the hair, once a gold Edwardian brioche, had become shingled and fluffy, the nose more parroty, the cheeks rouged in an exaggerated lobster-pink that we seldom see, and the scarlet fingernails created an appearance that verged on wit. She wore tubular shifts of jewel-encrusted, pale-gold lamé, with always a wisp of tulle or chiffon to bind her to an earlier period. She managed to combine the flamboyancy of the Edwardian age with the chic of the ‘twenties. There was something wonderfully rich and pampered about her appearance: she seemed to make winter velvet more darkly sumptuous and face powder more feminine and alluring. Her bird-like impression was reinforced by feathers that she always wore: the paradise plume waving from her head, or the large ostrich-feather fan she carried as she danced. Her small feet and ankles were extraordinarily brittle. [pp. 186-7]

I love this passage. It almost makes me want to be old so I, too, can paint my cheeks in an exaggerated colour (I think I’d go for fuchsia) and see what I can bring to ‘winter velvet’.

Beaton was less kind to Lady Bingham’s sister, ‘Grace Lady Newborough, a handsome Boadicea with a blunt, wooden profile who, in her vast Gainsborough hat, her bust so proudly offered to the waves, was the prize-winning bore wherever she sailed.’ In her case, we can check Beaton’s assertions, at least the one about her looks. The photograph below shows our warrior queen at Ascot around 1909/10.

Here is another, entirely gratuitous, photo* of Lady Newborough from 1928:

What has this to do with the Museum of London, I hear you ask. Beaton remembered that

before it was practice for ladies to become shopkeepers, Lady Bingham had a hat shop in North Audley Street which she named after Marie Antoinette’s milliner, Rose Bertin. Perhaps Lady Bingham’s hats did not prove a financial success; but they gave her the opportunity to appear in different headgear three or four times a day, and her business did not prevent her from making weekend visits. (p. 187)

Luckily we happen to have Rose Bertin hats in the collection, perhaps not the most exciting hats you have ever seen, but lovely nevertheless. Here is the first one, a summer cloche from the mid 1920s:

The two ladies, Newborough and Bingham, were born Grace and Alice Louise Carr in Louisville, Kentucky. I have not found their birth dates, but I presume Alice first saw the light of day in the mid to late 1870s as she married her first husband Samuel Sloan Chauncey in 1894. He worked at, or was one of, Chauncey Brothers & Co, stockbrokers in New York City. The firm must have been pretty successful. When her husband died in 1899 at the young age of 39, Alice Chauncey inherited either one or one and a half million dollars, depending on which report in The New York Times you want to believe.

Alice Louise was said to be the ‘most beautiful widow in the world’ (The New York Times, 21/09/1908). She reportedly left a lasting impression on Lord Kitchener when they met in India on the occasion of the Delhi Durbar in 1903. The General ‘wrote long and interesting letters to the beautiful widow’ (Poverty Bay Herald, 10/11/1906), which were, however, not interesting enough as in 1908 Mrs Chauncey was rumoured to have wed Prince Miguel of Braganza (1878-1923), eldest son of the Miguelist pretender to the throne of Portugal (this is too complicated to go in here). The rumour was untrue and Prince Miguel married another American heiress the following year.

Alice, or Alys as she now styled herself, finally tied the knot a second time on Saturday 4 February 1911. Her wedding to Brig. Gen. the Hon. Cecil Bingham (1861-1934) apparently ’surprised London’ and The New York Times revealed that ‘even the closest friends of the couple were not informed that the wedding would take place till Friday night’ (6/2/1911). The newspaper also reported that Mrs Chauncey had ‘been prominent in London society for a number of years’ and had previously been linked to Lord Roseberry (presumably Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Roseberry 1847-1929), as well as his son Lord Dalmeny (Harry Primrose, 6th Earl of Roseberry 1882-1974).

I do not know the reasons behind Lady Bingham’s entrance into the world of commerce but I would like to think that a life of leisure was not for her and/or she could not find the kind of hats she liked in London. In any case, on 3 February 1920 The New York Times announced: ‘Lady Bingham A Milliner. American Wife of British General to Open Establishment.’ On 3 June 1921 an advertisement in The Times (you can see it at the top of this post) promoted ‘Hats for Ascot’. Beaton was not entirely right: the shop was not in South Audley Street but was located not far away, at 24 Davies Street. There ‘original designs at reasonable prices’ were sold as well as ‘model hats’ by the New York milliner Georgette and the Parisian milliners Maria-Guy and Caroline Reboux.

By the time the next advertisement appeared in The Times ten years later (24/6/1930), the company seemed to have gone into clothing. During a month-long sale ladies could expect ‘genuine bargains’ such as half price ‘Crepe de Chine dresses, French hand made Lingerie, Coats, Day and Evening Dresses, Sports Dresses. Tweed and Afternoon Coats.’ The type of clientele that would shop at Bertin would also have appreciated that ‘Orders for Country Dresses and Tweeds for Scotland’ would be ‘taken at reduced price during Sale.’

In a 1929 directory we have in the library, two establishments are listed under ‘Bertin Rose Ltd’: the millinery shop at no. 24 and a dressmakers at no. 20 Davies Street. Sadly we do not have any Rose Bertin gowns but we have the descriptions of two dresses worn at a presentation at court in 1931: Lady Marguerite Bligh opted for ‘a gown of ivory and silver lace and net over flesh pink crêpe de Chine’ with a silver train. Mrs. Darrell must have spent a few guineas on her ‘draped gown of pink satin, the bodice finished with a bow’, or rather on its train of the same material ‘trimmed with sable fur’ (The Times, 4/6/1931).

The millinery business was still going strong in 1943 when the cover of the April 24 issue of Picture Post featured a ‘cherry-laden toque … built up from a greengrocer’s punnet lined with ribbon.’ This was apparently ‘one of the exotic hats designed for Easter by milliner Rose Bertin.’

We do not have anything that ‘exotic’, but here is the second of our Rose Bertin hats, a winter cloche (sorry, bad photo):

Both hats were given to the Museum after the death of their previous owner, Lady Charles Montagu (1869-1942), a cousin of Lady Bingham’s husband, I believe. (If you want to see further Bertin creations go to Getty Images and search for ‘Rose Bertin’. This is not for the faint-hearted, beware of the bird!)

I do not know how much and how long Lady Bingham was actively involved in the running of her shop or shops. Rose Bertin & Company Limited was only dissolved in 1964 (The London Gazette, 27/11/1964). The funeral notice that had set off Beaton’s reminiscences had already been published in The Times eleven years earlier, on 5 November 1953.

I would love to have ended this blog with a portrait of our lady milliner. A photo published on the Library of Congress website supposedly shows a Miss Alice Carr, but there is something odd about it. By 1918, the supposed date of the photo, our heroine was in her second marriage, so was neither a Miss nor still called by her maiden name. Secondly, if it is really her, I want to know what face cream she used, as the person in the tiny photo looks much younger than the 40 years or so Lady Bingham must have been in 1918. But there is some resemblance of the sitter to Lady Newborough and I presume Alice/Alys was not called the worlds most beautiful widow for nothing. Have a look here, if you want to judge for yourself.

* Herald Post Collection, 1984.18, Special Collections, University of Louisville, Kentucky

I cannot believe it was more than a month ago that I last posted an entry. How time flies when you have deadlines to meet and wedding memorabilia to collect (more on this once the Collections Committee has had its say in a few weeks’ time).

While trying to find a new home for an Alice band type thing, I took out our hair box (don’t ask) and while it turned out not to be the right place for the Alice band type thing I rediscovered this most fabulous object (apologies for the polystyrene head, will try to do better next time):

Together with folding eyeglasses, monocles and swagger sticks, evening wigs firmly belong on my ‘must engineer comeback’ list. As per usual, I am not alone. Look at BaronnessVonVintage’s brilliant blog, featuring another gold thread wig.  It seems that these wonderful constructions originated in France, like the two examples on the Antique & Vintage Dress Gallery website. The name ‘R. Chigot’ is written on the lining of one of them (of course Chigot does not necessarily have to be French and could also be the name of the intended wearer, rather than the maker), the other one bears the label ‘Ideal – Paris’.

Sadly there is no label in our wig, but its object file contains two pieces of paper, each covered with the same handwriting albeit with a slightly different text. It almost seems as if the wig’s donor was trying out two different captions. Below are both texts (I’ve added a few commas), I let you decide what this is all about:

Gold lamé wig
Made in France in 1930 & first worn at a fancy dress ball in Dinard to complete a gold lamé dress copied from a “Dolly Sisters” musical comedy outfit.
Subsequently worn in Jersey, but frowned on [sic] by the conservative male of the period as too “outré”, it was reluctantly abandoned in a trunk & narrowly escaped destruction by the grandchildren of the owner.

Gold lamé wig / Fanshawe 1930
Considered extremely “outré”, metallic wigs made a brief appearance in the early thirties, but frowned upon by the conservative males of that period, they died an early death!
Bought for a fancy dress ball in Dinard to complete a gold lamé dress based on one worn by the “Dolly Sisters” & tried out subsequently in Jersey at local dances, it was reluctantly abandoned, buried in a trunk & now with difficulty rescued from my grandchildren’s dressing up box.
Is this the sort of thing that would be suitable not too personal? Actually the young man I was madly in love with wouldn’t go out with me if wearing it, so that was that!

Does that mean the wig had to go or the young man was abandoned? My money is on the wig … I wish we did not just have the donor’s last name and two initials, which might not even be her own but could be her husband’s. Then I might be able to find out whether Mrs Fanshawe grew up in Jersey and if so, how she ended up in London (that’s where she lived in 1972 when the wig was donated). Did she marry the man she was madly in love with? What did she make of Dinard, apparently a fashionable holiday destination on the Brittany coast in the 1920s? And most importantly, did she see the Dolly Sisters on stage?

I love the look of these dancing twins and wish we had something relating to them in the museum so that I could nurse my obsession. I have just ordered their biography and have watched a 1945 film with Betty Grable that is very, very, very loosely based on their extraordinary life story (not the best film ever but the costumes are pretty amazing). I don’t really have an excuse to write about them but I have to include at least one photograph. This one was taken by no other than Madame d’Ora (there are many others online):

But back to the wig. Following BaronessVonVintage’s example I did some research but with less interesting results, I fear. In a Harrods advertisement published in October 1928 in Vogue, the virtues of ‘piquant little Caps’ made of ‘tinsel fabrics, oxydised lace or shimmering sequins’ are extolled. Not quite the same, I know, but maybe they were forerunners?

In 1927, L’Officiel de la Mode (no. 69, p. 16) noted that in Paris ‘for the galas, we will see the smart woman wear beautiful silk wigs, not the vulgar wig, but executed, studied for them, the wig is acceptable and pretty only on this condition’. How true!

Three years later, in 1930, L’Officiel (no. 105, p. 6) reported what was happening ‘chez Desfossé’:

For evening wear, the hair is dressed still more becomingly: after having launched the small tight curls that can be added on the nape of the neck, Desfossé has just succeeded in perfecting a very new thing: when a good natural curl is finished, the hair is touched up with some sort of silver solution, then, dusted with a scintillating powder called “Diamantine”, that reflects a million lights. It is a very happy innovation that replaces definitely the evening wig.

I would not be surprised if evening wigs had indeed been rather short-lived. Not only because of the conventional males one had to contend with, but also because of the wigs’ weight (if ours is anything to go by) and, I’m quite sure, their scratchiness. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t gone off them. I’m sure there would be ways of overcoming these minor niggles in the 21st century. And, as my grandmother always said when grooming her poodle: who wants to be beautiful must suffer.

By the way, Desfossé still exists – check out the photos on their website (this might seem obvious, but make sure you click on ‘Photos’ for a slide show). The company was founded in 1895 by two brothers and seems to have been some sort of high-class barber shop catering for ‘hommes de qualité’. In 1925 they diversified and were getting into wigs and postiches (hair pieces) and, as it says on their website, ‘everything that in any way whatsoever touched upon the capillary universe’.

During my wig quest I also happened upon photos of Galliano’s 2008 spring ready-to-wear show. It seems that some sort of scintillating powder was put to good use on this occasion. The first hairdo reminded me of an evening wig in another museum but I much prefer the second.

As it said in another advertisement in Vogue in 1928, this time for Phyllis Earle Salons: ‘Your hair is one of your latent charms; but only an artist in hairdressing will bring out all its possible beauty.’

I am probably one of the last people on earth to come across James Hardy Vaux. He is a most fantastic source of information about the contents of men’s pockets in the late 18th/early 19th century. Why? Because he was not only a pickpocket, but a pickpocket who wrote his memoirs including very detailed accounts of his work practices and spoils.

Vaux was born in 1782 in Surrey, the son of a butler/house steward and the daughter of an attorney and, ironically, deputy warden of Fleet prison. From the age of 14 he started to hang out with bad company and to develop a penchant for nice clothes without having the means to afford them (the last bit somehow sounds familiar …). Vaux managed to be sentenced to transportation, and actually being transported, three times and it was in the Newcastle penal settlement in New South Wales where he wrote his biography together with a Vocabulary of Flash Language (first published in 1819). Have a look here if you want to know more abut this most extraordinary character.

I discovered Mr Vaux while researching two small objects which have recently been properly photographed. One of my colleagues in the picture library had asked for captions to make the images publicly available. Easier requested than done … Here is one of the objects:

I guess the titles of this entry gives it away. The object is the equivalent-ish of a Blackberry or whatever smart phone you possess or hanker after, i.e. a means of communication while on the road (obviously you’d still need paper to write on and someone to deliver your missive).

Carrying ink about your person was apparently something that had to be carefully planned to prevent disasters. The following is a (long) quote from Miss [Eliza] Leslie’s Lady’s New Receipt-Book, first published in 1847 (in Philadelphia, admittedly, but I suspect similar precautions applied in Britain):

To Carry Ink when Travelling. – Have ready a small square bag of oiled silk, or thick buckskin, with a narrow tape string sewed on near the top. Buy a small six-cent vial of good ink. The vial must be broad and short with a flat bottom; so that it will stand alone, and answer the purpose of an ink-stand. If the seal on the cork has been cut away, get a longer and better cork, and wedge it in as tightly as possible. Cut off a finger-end from an old kid-glove; put it over the cork, and draw it down closely till it covers both the top and the neck of the bottle, tying it on tightly with narrow tape. Then wrap the bottle in double blotting-paper and put it into the little oil-cloth bag, securing the top well. To prevent all possibility of accidents, from ink stains, do not pack the ink-bottle in a trunk with your clothing but keep it in your travelling-basket or reticule. We know that ink thus secured has been carried many hundred miles, with the convenience of being always at hand to write with, whenever wanted, in a steamboat or at a stopping-place.

If you did not want to go to all this trouble, and had no kid glove to spare, Miss Leslie recommended a ‘travelling escritoir’ [sic], no bigger, she assures, ‘than a cake of scented soap’. This contained a small ink bottle with close-fitting lid, pen holder, sealing wax, wax taper and even some ‘Lucifer matches with sand paper to ignite them’. Miss Leslie’s ‘escritoir’ is obviously slightly more luxurious than our object but apparently similarly small as ‘the whole apparatus can be safely carried in the pocket, or in a ladies reticule, or it may be put into a travelling-desk.’

James Hardy Vaux provides a further, contemporary reference to ink containers for the man or woman on the move. On 11 November 1808 he went to the Mermaid Tavern in Hackney having read that there was going to be a meeting of the freeholders of the county of Middlesex. Apparently, ‘at such assemblies riots and much confusion frequently occurred, which afforded a favourable opportunity for plundering the pockets of the company.’ Unfortunately this time the company behaved very orderly but Vaux nevertheless went to work: ‘I soon found myself standing behind a well-dressed man, who was wrapped in deep attention to the speaker, and perceived to my great joy that he had a small leather pocket-book in his inside coat-pocket, and also a very fine large snuff-box, evidently silver, from its shape and weight.’ It is interesting that Vaux thought he could detect what someone had about them just by looking, there must have been bulges. After using his scissors to cut open the gentleman’s pocket, Vaux ‘found that what I had taken for a pocket-book was in fact merely a pen and ink-case: the box, however, was a very elegant one, and quite new.’ Maybe Vaux’s bounty was a bit more like the box below because he decided to use it for snuff, which would not really work with a container of our kind (in case you are wondering, travelling inks often held two vessels, one for black and one for red ink).

Our box is made of wood, lined with red velvet and covered in black paper, or maybe even shagreen?

This term usually refers to the skin of sharks (little ones, I believe) or stingrays that were often, but apparently not always, dyed green. We have quite a few containers covered in shagreen such as this one (boringly empty):

Below is a detail of the shagreen and of the ink-case covering. Quite different, non? That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not both fish skin, but my money is on paper for the black one (famous last words …).

The metal inkstand has a swivel lid that can be securely screwed down. There is also a tiny pencil in a metal holder and a metal nib, both of which can be attached to a separate tube to make them longer and easier to write with. Why the ‘extension tube’ has a threaded protrusion on the other end, I don’t know, there’s nothing else to connect it with.

I also cannot fathom the purpose of the little spoon (and no, I don’t think it is an earspoon). I was wondering whether it was used for pounce, fine powder that soaked up superfluous ink. But normally that was dispensed via something looking a little like a salt shaker. Maybe the ink had to be stirred and not shaken?

With regards to the date, I am thinking late 18th, early 19th century. An advertisement in a book from 1835 shows something, albeit only vaguely, similar. I think we are looking here at the next generation.

Once I had worked out that ink pot is ‘encrier’ in French I found the ‘encrier de voyage’ below, supposedly covered in shagreen, or ‘chagrin’ in French. It is dated ‘c. 1800′ and was ‘adjugé’ or auctioned for 2,800 Euros in 2008. Not bad for a little inkstand.

You must admit, it looks very similar to ours. In fact, these items were often made in France, it seems. Below, finally, the professional photograph (not one of my bad ones) that sparked off this quest:

We were playing our own special version of the game of musical chairs in the costume store again last week. This usually starts with hunting for a space for one or more objects that have recently been repacked into more appropriate containers. Measurements are taken, options are weighed and invariably we find that some shelves have to be moved. After briefly discussing whether most if not all of the objects nearby will really have to be stored elsewhere while shelf rearrangement is taking place, we decide that most if not all of the objects nearby will really … and proceed accordingly.

Then comes my favourite bit: I march to the technicians and demand to be given the mallet. This is followed by some furious bashing (not of the technicians!), occasionally accompanied by some very mild cursing, and always resulting in the breaking of one or more of my nails, until the shelves are at suitable heights. Everything is put back in a completely different order and one of us is designated to write down the new locations for entering into the database. First, though, the mallet has to be returned. Upon seeing me entering their workshop, wearing a lab coat and nonchalantly swinging the mallet, it is customary for one of the technicians to announce that ‘here comes trouble’. This marks the end of the game.

While recording the new object locations I came upon a small tissue paper parcel. I thought it probably contained some accessories relating to a doll stored nearby but no, it held a most marvelous little object:

Now, if you are a native English speaker, which I am not, you will instantly know what this is all about:

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she did not know what to do;
She gave them some broth without any bread;
Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.

According to Wikipedia (I know, I know ..), the earliest printed version (1794) of this nursery rhyme, if that’s the right term, ended slightly more forcefully:

She whipp’d all their bums, and sent them to bed.

The rhyme seems to have been very popular with the Victorians, have a look here and here. According to our very sparse records about this object, it was donated to the Museum in 1956 and its date recorded as 1860-65. I am wondering whether it was made a little earlier on account of the shape of the shoe and for another reason.

The shoe (boot?) is beautifully made of Morocco leather with ornamental stitching on the sole:

The image above will give you an idea of the boot’s size. I presume it was not made for wear but for display, either in a shop window or a special exhibition. The Powerhouse Museum has similar boots in its collection, made in England in 1851, two examples are here and here (there are more). One is a ‘Balmoral Boot’, a kind of footwear that was apparently made fashionable by Prince Albert and Queen Victoria (there were male and female versions) for walking in the countryside, following the couples’ purchase of Balmoral Castle in 1852 (not the present one, a new castle was built a few years later and the old one demolished).

The shapes and colours of some of the dresses, as well as the hairstyles of the larger female dolls, also remind me of Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s painting of The Empress Eugénie Surrounded by her Ladies in Waiting from 1855, which hangs in the Château de Compiègne not far from Paris. Maybe this is a silly comparison, but look at the green lady in front, as well as the yellow lady top right and the dark pink lady top left, and compare with the boot.

The dolls were made with a lot of attention to detail and there are little legs peeping out from underneath some of the skirts.

Below are a few more pictures, hopefully, for your amusement. Let’s see what our next game will bring to light.

What do dress curators do when they roam around unobserved in their natural habitat (apart from roaming around)? What is their natural habitat? Which predators do they fear? And when and what do they eat?

As you can probably tell, I am trying to figure out what to talk about during my Meet the Expert presentation on 23 February. In an ideal world I would just show some pretty pictures while performing a dance routine (this one would be my preferred choice, but I’d have to find two colleagues to dance with …). Alternatively I could just go on about one of my many obsessions like Gertie Millar, Countess Mena Hamon and/or weird and wonderful objects I ‘find’ in the stores.

As I seem to be doing quite enough of that already, I thought I might describe what I actually do during a typical working week. Except there is no typical working week and much of what I do would make for a very boring Powerpoint (images of me contemplating a pretty but business-like colour scheme for a spreadsheet anyone?). Maybe I should forget about a ‘warts and all’ approach and just concentrate on the highlights?

Then again, maybe this is an opportunity to discuss some apparently quite commonly held misconceptions about the work of curators in general, and dress curators in particular. These seem to consist of one or all of the following, in no particular order:

1. We spend the vast majority of our time in the store looking at and/or researching objects and if we’re not doing that you can find us in a library or archive.
2. Our main raison d’être is to show items held in the store to students, researchers or anyone else who might be interested.
3. We are synonymous with textile conservators, i.e. we ‘repair’ objects and put them on mannequins. Related to this: we are all adept at sewing and can rustle up a replica garment in no time.
4. We are like the experts on the Antiques Roadshow, i.e. know instantly the date of any item of clothing or textile presented to us, will come up with an interesting story about it in less than 5 seconds and will accurately predict its market value.
5. We are constantly consumed with the desire to wear the objects in our care and think nothing of trying them on when no one is looking.

Maybe I should not dispel these myths? They conjure up a picturesque image of a collection of dress curators adorned in an assortment of historic clothing, ideally including a tiara or two, engaged in a little light tambour work while holding forth to an assemblage of visitors about a selection of objects in front of them, telling amusing anecdotes at the same time as discussing the prices that could be achieved should similar objects appear at an auction house near you.

I know this is more than a bit unfair. Why should anyone know what we do? There haven’t been many (if any?) documentaries about museums and even if there existed a TV series like, say, Costume Store Investigators, it probably would not be very accurate. And of course, no two dress curators are the same. And we do do some of the things described above, while not being allowed to do some of the others and also having to find the time to carry around objects and mannequins, peruse the database, try to come up with amusing anecdotes for press, sit in meetings, read minutes of meetings, learn to sew, run away from predators and forage for food.

If you happen to find yourself in the neighbourhood on 23 February, please drop in. I swear I won’t just talk about taking minutes! There will be time for Q&As at the end of my presentation/dance routine so if there is anything you always wanted to know about dress curators but were afraid to ask, you don’t need to be afraid no more!

Hope to see you there. I might even wear a tiara …

While rummaging around for objects (okay, while I was carefully perusing the hanging bays) for a project I am working on at the moment , I came upon this Schiaparelli-esque jacket:

I love the fabric, an eau de nil damask with a pattern of golden-yellowy flies and particularly how they were made to charge towards each other around some of the seams.

Here is a close-up of one of the buttons (the top front button has come off, but thankfully we still have it):

The jacket was donated in 1977 together with three evening dresses, which I will check out when I get a moment, particularly as one of the dresses is by Lasoirée, the evening department of the London company Lachasse. The other dresses, like the jacket, were apparently made by ‘a dressmaker formerly with Worth in Paris’, but there is no label.

I just spent a happy hour or so looking through the online archive of L’Officiel de la Mode in the hope to date the jacket a bit more precisely (you must check out the website, it is quite marvelous). It seems that basques were quite fashionable for a while in 1936/37, below is a jacket enticingly called ‘Fripon’ (rascal)  from Maison Worth itself from 1937 (no. 187, pages 36-37).

But I am more inclined to date the jacket to 1939/40ish, when deep basques seem to have been all the rage. You can see one Maggy Rouff example below, from L’Officiel no. 217, 1939 (pages 52-53).

The accompanying text (thankfully it is always in French, English and German) reads as follows:

The splendid Maggy Rouff collection is being shown under such a diversity of forms, colours, that it is arduous to single out a very definite trend from it. Nevertheless the 1880s line tends to assert itself and in many cases we find bustle effects and extreme importance given to the waist and hips. With the tailor-mades, styles multiply, and thin jackets are either long, straight, slightly dangling, or of unequal length in front and back, or even round, but with basque widened in the back by very pronounced godets; their skirts are slightly flared, preferably short and every often edged with satin, velvet or fur.

Here is a tailor-made by Chanel, from the same issue (pages 70-71):

The picture below shows how the jacket has been constructed. I don’t quite know how the wearer would have made the basque stand out, I had to use tissue paper (sorry you can see some of it in the back shot). I presume her skirt provided the necessary support.

Or maybe it was not meant to flare out that much, just fall gracefully in deep folds? In any case it is very lovely and I would be happy to have it in my wardrobe.

Valentine’s Day….I know, I know. BUT, this year why not avoid the over-priced roses and crowded restaurants and come to the Museum of London where there’s all sorts of fun things happening: readings, dance classes, vintage Valentines and most exciting of all (for a serious historian like me, obviously) is that the Museum will be blowing the dust from its collection of erotic objects. In partnership with Polari and Coco de Mer, it promises to be an evening with a difference. Call 020 7001 9844 to book and more details here.

I wrote my first entry about Mena Hamon and her husband only a few months ago, but they seem to have been part of my life for much longer (in a good way). Before I drag myself away, I wanted to put down a few, possibly entirely superfluous, musings.

It is only fitting to begin with another item from the Countess’s wardrobe (apologies for the not particularly good photo). This day dress is probably from the early 1930s and quite unlike the showstoppers we have come to expect.

The dress, or rather the fact that I have not shown it before, encapsulates the slight unease that I still feel about my representation of the Countess and her husband, something I have alluded to previously. When I first discovered the articles about Mena’s lawsuit against her first husband, as well as more and more information about Cheiro’s portfolio career, I thought theirs would make a racy story, full of scandal, leaving a trail of duped victims. The somewhat flashy clothes of the Countess seemed to confirm my initial impression (her shoes are of course beautiful and spectacular, rather than flashy, and there is nothing wrong with having a penchant for strong colours).

I am quite fond of the couple now, despite the whiff of con-artistry that no amount of Febreze would be able to eliminate. Seemingly unhappy with the hand they were dealt, they managed to reinvent themselves not just once, but several times (Cheiro seems to have a touch of Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull about him, a book I must reread). Mena and William seem to have been propelled by wanderlust and must have clogged up an impressive number of ship, train, and maybe even air miles (I don’t know whether they ever travelled by plane, but I am sure they would have loved it).

I like to believe that Cheiro’s and Mena’s search for scientific discovery was genuine, and their inventions were not just means of extracting money of unsuspecting investors. While I remain a sceptic when it comes to palmistry (not that I have experienced it, so maybe that will change one day), the Count and his publications seem to be revered in cheiromantic circles. Much has been written about the revival of the occult in the late 19th century, generally seen as a reaction to the collapse of the world and society as people knew it and the desire to find some sort of certainty and spiritual truth in uncertain and supposedly rational times. While palmistry is, strictly speaking, not a branch, if that’s the right word, of occultism, William also wrote about numerology and dabbled in some form of astrology in When were you born? Your future, marriage, character, tendencies, clearly shown and described by Cheiro (1913). (Apparently I am inclined to ‘brood and become melancholy’ – not entirely untrue – and would make a good sailor – hmmm.) He had his finger on the pulse of the Zeitgeist and it is not surprising that he and Mena spent their last years in Hollywood.

I will reserve seats for the two adventurers at my perfect imaginary dinner party. I guess I would have sprinkle truth serum over the hors d’oeuvres to make them tell me and the other guests what really happened, but maybe, by now, they would be happy to reveal all. Or maybe we would have more fun listening to fabulous tales of travels in foreign lands and encounters with the great, the good and the beautiful. I suspect in their case, though, the truth would be as interesting as the fabrications.

I do not want the slightly drab dress above to form your last impression of the Countess, she deserves better. Below is another one of Mena’s more colourful items of clothing, a panne velvet evening coat or dressing gown (I’m not quite sure which) in bright apple green lined in a colour that, considering the circumstances, I will call champagne.

Goodbye, or more likely, au revoir.

We are finally getting to the end of this story and as per usual I want to begin with some more objects from the Countess’s collection. The dress below, like the tomato-red number from the last entry, is also from the late 1920s and probably the most spectacular item from the Countess’s wardrobe.

The top part is very Paco Rabanne and made of some chainmail-like mesh of blue thread and folded strips of metal.

It must have looked spectacular and I like to think the Countess wore it with her very beautiful F Pinet shoes, possibly bought in the shop in New Bond Street (sadly the shoe nails have become rusty and caused marks on the insoles).

But let’s get back to the story. After their wedding in Jersey in April 1920, Cheiro and his wife seemed to have lived in Ireland for a while. In 1924 and 1925 they were listed at 21 Park Square East, a fine address near London’s Regent’s Park, moving to 13 Nottingham Terrace nearby some time before 1928. Two years later, aged around 64 and 48 respectively, the Count and Countess moved to Hollywood, where they apparently lived in an ‘old-world-looking house surrounded by over two acres of gardens and half concealed by palms and beautiful trees in one of the principal avenues’ (introduction by Major W.H. Cross to Confessions: memoirs of a modern seer, 1932).

We get an insight into Cheiro’s life in California from a letter to the magazine Liberty published in autumn 1971. It was written by Olga Rosmanith who published some mildly sensational novels in the 1950s (‘woman uncertain whether she will find peace or madness in orgiastic rites finds herself the intended sacrifice to a nameless god of evil – Unholy Flame, 1952) and was working as a journalist in the 1930s. When she met Cheiro

he was ill and had a deadline of two books of memoirs and palmistry. I offered to write them for him if he would teach me his science. So I was living in his house (to work at nights) in 1930 and met the people who came there. I met Paul Bern and Jean Harlow together, for they came to him for counsel. I loved her at once, a darling girl and nothing like her screen image of hard-boiled brassiness. Pure acting and very good.

Rosmanith also remarks upon a somewhat unexpected character trait of the palmist, discretion:  ‘Cheiro was a repository of star secrets which would make a very startling book since he knew things the gossip mongers never found out and was ethical and kept them secret.’

Cheiro continued to publish books, not entirely without gossip, and apparently also tried his hand at ‘movie scenarios’ before dying, aged 69, on 8 October 1936. The Countess returned to England, apparently taking her husband’s ashes with her, but we know that in 1941 she returned to the US, where this story takes another unexpected turn. On 16 January 1943 The New York Times reported the verdict in a recent court case:

Ex-Wife fails to Annul Second Marriage Of the Husband She Deserted 40 Years Ago
A wife’s suit to annul the second marriage of the husband she left forty years ago and her demand that, at least formally, he must once again take her to his ‘bed and board’ was dismissed yesterday in Brooklyn Supreme Court, the principal piece of evidence against her being the faded photograph of her baby boy on which she scrawled a farewell note in June 1902.

The principals were Henry A. Hartland, 65-year-old purchasing agent, of 18 Lawrence Place, Bay Shore, L.I., and his first wife, Mrs. Katie Hartland, 60-year-old English woman, living at 236 East Fourth Street, Brooklyn, who said that for sixteen years prior to 1936 she was the wife of “Cheiro” [...].

Seeking to have the marriage of her husband to his present wife, Harriet Hartland, in 1919, annulled on the ground that his marriage to his first wife is still valid, Mrs. Hartland charged that the defendant had left her in 1902 while she and her son Jack, were living in Boston. Mrs. Hartland said that several years later she was told her husband had died at sea [...].

Mr. Hartland testified that in 1902 he was working in Manhattan for $11 a week and sending $7 a week to his wife and child in Boston. He said that on June 23, 1902, his wife visited him in New York and that they attended a show and spent the night at a hotel. He said she returned to Boston and three days later sent him a letter containing a photograph of their son and on the back was written “Baby Jack at age of 2 years and 7 months. I send this in fond remembrance of our last night spent together in New York. Good-bye. Sincerely, your wife.” Mr. Hartland said he never saw her again until she called him on the telephone in April 1941, thirty-nine years later.

Justice Isaac R. Swezey ruled that Mr. Hartland’s second marriage was valid because prior to 1922 it was not necessary to obtain a dissolution decree. He also held that the first Mrs. Hartland had willfully abandoned her husband and declared that the note on the back of the photograph was a “directional beacon” and “a damaging shred of evidence.”

A previous article about the case in the same publication furnishes some further information. Jack Hartland first went to New York on his own to work as a shipping clerk. (This must have been after March 1901 when the couple is still listed as living in London in the census records.) He then brought over his wife and son Jack Albert to live in Boston ‘making occasional visits to them on week-ends’. As Katie upped an ran in June 1902, this arrangement could not have lasted much more than a year.

Following his wife’s disappearance, Jack apparently wrote to her relatives in England but never heard anything until the phone call mentioned above. Katie claimed that she had been ‘blitzed’ out of her home ‘on the south coast of England’ (quite likely to be true) and had come to the US to visit her brother, where she ‘accidentally’ (my inverted commas) found the name ‘Hartland’ in a phone book, leading to a relative of her former husband. Jack, who must have been dumbfounded, agreed to meet in a hotel in Manhattan where Katie asked for financial support, mainly to cover the medical costs of their now 42-year-old son in England. I presume the request was not granted as Katie then filed for divorce and temporarily alimony, which was denied. Probably desperate at that point, Katie resorted to the court action described above.

I wonder whether we will ever know what made Katie leave her first husband. I have mentioned in a previous entry that the couple’s son was born less than nine months after their wedding. Maybe they would never have married, had she not been pregnant. I also wonder why she did not live in New York with her husband, but there might have been a whole host of sensible reasons for that decision.

What about the son? I don’t know much and most of it comes from Judy, whose father corresponded with the Countess in her later years. She wrote that Jack Albert had ’sustained a severe head injury when a gigantic hoarding fell on him’ and later voluntarily, and only temporarily, entered a ‘mental home’. According to his mother, Jack Albert was a very good musician, but ‘erratic’. He died during the war and is probably the same ‘Jack A Hartland’ whose death is listed in Upper Agbrigg (Huddersfield area) in Yorkshire in 1942.

The Countess returned to England and according to an entry in the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress she lived in East Street, Chichester, West Sussex in January 1944. There are quite a few entries for ‘Mena Hamon’ in the Copyright Office, I presume the Countess hoped to obtain royalties from her husband’s work. Probably in another effort to make some money, the Countess sold her ‘antiques’ at an auction house near Chichester in April 1947. According to Judy, further auctions of jewellery and furniture followed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, so more of her former possessions must be around somewhere. It seems that Countess Hamon finally moved to a Nursing Home in Emsworth, not far from Chichester, and died in September 1969 at the age of 87.

There a few more things I want to say about this riveting (at least for me) story, so there will be a short postscript. For now I leave you with another detail of the beautiful Pinet shoes.

Now that we have established that Countess Hamon collected beautiful shoes, it is about time that we start looking at some of her other clothes. Judging from the items we have at the museum, the Countess had a penchant for strong colours. Below is one of her dresses (we have three), probably from the late 1920s.

The object is very fragile, that’s why I had to photograph it in its box, and why I could not really rummage around inside to look for a label, but I suspect there isn’t one anyway. I wonder whether she wore the dress with her red and silver Pluchino shoes?

In the hope that it will form a more complete picture in your mind to accompany the following text, here is a counterfeit of the Countess from the 1920s, taken from one of Cheiro’s books (from an internet version, which accounts for the, strangely fitting, ghost-like quality).

Amazing, non? I showed the photo to a friend who thought she had a touch of Mae West about her, not a bad thing in my book.

So, what do we know about the Countess? Having so far refrained from quoting much from Cheiro’s works (not that newspaper articles are necessarily more accurate), I want to start this time with Cheiro’s recollection of his first encounter with his future wife, as told in Confessions: memoirs of a modern seer, published in 1932.

Cheiro relates that his own palms clearly indicated that he was going to get married, albeit late in life. Nevertheless he ‘felt strong in the fact that I was a member of an anti-marriage society’, even when he was visited by a female client who had the kind of ’small and beautifully formed hands’, this connoisseur so admired. The palms of the 16-year-old girl foretold a ‘cruel fate’ and the palmist had to tell her that

she would marry within a year, lose her husband in some mysterious way that would for a long time prevent her remarrying. She would meet again and again the man she would eventually marry but be prevented from doing so for many years; finally, overcoming all difficulties, she would be successful in the end.

The young girl decided on the spot that Cheiro was the only man she wanted to marry. If she could not have him as her first husband, she hoped he was going to be her second. Years passed and lo and behold, the palmist and she with the beautiful hands met again, this time in New York. As predicted, husband no. 1 had disappeared, but as he had left no trace, the woman was going to have to wait seven years before marrying again.

Fate, or something else, would lead again and again to brief encounters of the two globe-trotters, in ‘China, Cairo, Monte Carlo and Paris’. On her return from a long sojourn in Egypt, where she had lived ‘in her own caravan, travelling the confines of the Sahara’ the mystery lady returned to England. There she was alarmed to read a newspaper advertisement announcing that Cheiro was gravely ill and appealing for relatives to come forward (you’d think that would have been the last thing he wanted). The woman rushed to the palmist’s side, nursed him back to health and, following a Mediterranean cruise, the wedding predicted so long ago, finally took place.

Luckily, Cheiro follows this romantic story with a ‘brief biographical sketch’ of his spouse’s career. She too can trace back her family many generations, although only to the 14th century, not quite as far back as the Count. Like her husband, Mrs Cheiro has many talents: while her formerly ‘extremely beautiful voice’ had been affected by an operation, she exercised her other artistic skills on inventing enamelled jewellery and developing ‘painting by crayons’.

That the Countess was indeed no bad draughtswoman can be seen from the cover of one of her husband’s books, published in 1928.

The Countess’s travels took her to Japan, China and the two Americas, where in Mexico she had the ‘unique experience of being kidnapped by bandits’. Having designed ‘her own electric furnace’ to aid her jewellery work, the Countess later used her ‘bent for chemistry’ to study ‘pests that injure plant life in various parts of the world’ (more of this at the end).  These accomplishments, so Cheiro, proved his theory that ‘persons with extremely small hands have a natural desire to attempt large things’. His wife’s work, so he predicted, ‘may in the end extend its influence to every nation of the world to whom the question of the protection of plant life appeals’.

I realise that this entry is already inordinately long, but let’s just add a few ‘real names’. It seems that Countess Hamon was born Katie Florence Bilsborough in Lanes in West Derby in 1882, which makes her 22 years younger than her husband. In 1891 (census data), the then 8-year-old Katie lived at 79 Derby Street in Prescot, Lancashire with her father Thomas, a wood broker and timber merchant originally from Manchester, her mother Kate, interestingly from Quincy, Illinois, and her two younger brothers Thomas and Joseph. Eight years later, in June 1899, Katie married a certain Henry Archibald Hartland in Kingston, not far from London. In the same year, some time between October and December, the couple’s only son was born, which makes me wonder whether the wedding was entirely voluntary. At the time of the 1901 census, which I believe was taken on 31 March that year, the couple resided in Battersea in London. There the 25-year-old Henry was ‘living on Means’ with his 19-year-old wife and little Jack.

Katie and Cheiro must have first met in 1898 and they eventually married in 1920. What did really happen to Katie in the intervening 22 years? Particularly, when did Henry disappear, or did he? Until the next, and possibly last installment, which will reveal a surprising twist in this tale, I want to leave you with proof that the Countess indeed had a ‘bent for chemistry’ (thank you, Judy, for scanning this for me). By the time the photo below was taken, the couple had moved to Hollywood and the image might well show them (and a mysterious stranger) in their living room.