Author: SlopShop

Mending and Maintenance

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The ‘biographies’ of garments is an expanding research area, as the personal and physical relationship that we have with our clothes is investigated by academics.  How people care for their clothing, both today and in the past, can perhaps give us a small insight into how they regard their own garments.  In this era of fast fashion, where clothing is a cheap commodity that can be readily changed and thrown away, it is easy to forget how expensive and valuable clothing was, even the most common garments costing at least a week’s wages.  Smocks, like other working garments, were easily stolen, often by other working men, and sold and exchanged for cash because of this inherent value.  For this reason alone, their monetary value, their maintenance was a routine task.

However, the pride shown in clothing by working people during the nineteenth century is also visible in the smock by the very fact that it is often embellished, for example with embroidery, suggesting that their appearance and decorativeness was important to their wearer.  They could be cherished enough to passed on generation to generation.  Of course, there is some differentiation between those worn for best and for rituals such as weddings and funerals, and workaday ones, which were likely to be plainer and worn until they fell apart into rags, which could then be sold and recycled.

Looking at surviving smocks though, you can see the care taken to repair damage, to maintain the garment and keep it wearable.  The wear patterns of clothing, as a memory of the wearer, is both old fashioned object analysis and a fashionable topic itself, with the current FIT exhibition in New York, ‘Fashion Unraveled’, with its focus on altered, unfinished and deconstructed garments.  The imperfections and flaws of a garment are highlighted to emphasize the emotional as well as the economic impact of clothing for its wearer. Visible mending, as a way to enhance a garment and stop it from becoming obsolete and thrown away, has also had a new surge of interest.  Led by artists such as Celia Pym, the old skills of darning and mending, which all girls once learnt, are being re-learnt by people today.

The smock was made to be durable and guard against wear, one of the purposes of smocking in the first place, but in surviving smock frocks, wear patterns are often similar: fraying around the cuffs, holes in the skirt and the smocking rubbed and starting to become undone. A smock I recently examined in the Somerset Heritage Centre (see above) had the most beautiful visible mending with a series of holes all edged with blanket stitch.  Other areas were also patched and darned, suggesting the desire to maintain and preserve the use of the garment as best as possible (see below).  Even ordinary working clothing was required to last extensive periods of time, with its relatively expensive cost, so mending clothing was part of the everyday schedule.  It is a skill which has been forgotten but as debates around the effects of fast fashion grow, one that many are rediscovering.

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photographs @ https://swheritage.org.uk/

https://www.fitnyc.edu/museum/exhibitions/fashion-unraveled.php

 

 

The Art of Kate Greenaway

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Kate Greenaway (1846-1901) is famed for her illustrations of children in ‘old fashioned’ clothing, the girls often in neo-classical dress styles.  A talented artist, she was also on the fringes of the dress reform movement, which was influential for the upper and middle-classes as the aesthetic dress movement during the 1870s and 1880s.  The looseness of the smock frock’s form and the elasticity of the smocking allowed freedom of movement. Its simplicity and the Arts and Crafts feel of the embroidery, traditional and hand-crafted with care, was more appealing than over-elaboration and machine-made embellishment, fitting well with the movement’s ideals.

Greenaway’s drawings from the 1870s and 1880s adapted a style of dress that she had seen as a child growing up in Rolleston, Nottinghamshire, close to Newark, a centre for readymade smock frock manufacture.  Greenaway is often credited with introducing this style of clothing for children.  Her first book, Under the Window, published in 1879, featured boys in various coloured smock frocks.  A newspaper commented in 1880 that dozens of elaborately stitched and gathered smocks could be seen hanging in ready-made clothes shops if women wanted to study the newest fashion for children. The rusticating of children’s fashion was also noted in 1881, said to have been influenced by the illustrations of Kate Greenaway. Little smock-frocks were ‘all the rage’ with bright stitchery on the ‘old milkman’s elaborate yoke’.  For Greenaway, as in rural areas, boys wore smocks and she was criticised by Lady Harberton of the Rational Dress Society for children’s clothes that were ‘unsuited to the practical needs and comforts of boys’ and girls’.

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Greenaway may have popularised the style initially for boys, the smock fitting well into the trend for elements of play and fantasy in boys’ clothing of the period, for example sailor suits and kilts. However, unisex smocks followed the aesthetic for children’s clothing during the 1880s, influenced by the dress reform movements.  The style spread into everyday children’s wear, with variants of different qualities for different occasions, for example silk for best or occasional wear, becoming a ‘common’ fashion item, a situation that remains today.  Widely adopted and mass-manufactured, a constant demand kept prices low for consumers of all classes.  This adoption of a working garment, as with also the sailor suit although this had more militaristic connotations, became associated with middle-class dressing practices, although it was widely adopted across all classes.  By the late 1880s, ‘Liberty’ smock frocks for children were being sold throughout the country, for instance at Corder and Sons, high-class dressmakers in Sunderland, presumably made-up with Liberty fabric.

The Liberty Mab Smock, a revival of the traditional garment, supposedly based on Greenaway’s designs, remained popular and a stock garment for children of both sexes into the twentieth century. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future Queen Mother, was photographed wearing one in 1907 and Clara Frances Lloyd, who worked for Liberty, recalled making them into the 1920s. Lloyd, who worked in the embroidery rooms at Liberty, recalled that they ‘did more smocking than embroidery…[it] was a speciality of the house’, the popularity of the style aided by Princess Mary, who dressed her boys in smocks, thus giving them royal kudos.  Prince George and Princess Charlotte continue to wear clothing based on this smock today, now seen as classic garment.

princess charlotte

 

Carters and smocks

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Carters were essential to nineteenth century life, being the people who helped transport goods and produce around the country.  This could be on a fairly local scale, acting as local carriers, but they were also employed to move goods around by horse-drawn carts at dock yards and similar working environments, as well as transport quantities of produce around farms, a role the tractor would eventually take over.

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Carters at Liverpool Docks

They likewise could fulfil long-distance movement of goods, as haulage companies would today.  They were one of the occupations that became associated with wearing the smock frock in both rural and urban settings, carters and waggoners seen at hiring fairs, according to Thomas Hardy, in their smocks with a piece of whipcord twisted around their hats looking for work.  In the 1880s, looking back at earlier in the century, a gentleman remembered a driver in a smock frock waiting with his horses and waggons in Piccadilly, otherwise known as the start of ‘the road to Reading’, or the A4 today.  As the report remarked in 1884, ‘Few people nowadays ever think of that biscuit-making town as they saunter idly along Piccadilly’.

So strongly did the smock and the carter become connected that in processions and more formal occasions it was the dress that they chose to wear.  In 1846, for the Milborne Port Friendly Society procession, carters wore their smock frocks and straw hats decorated with red and green ribbons as they were in charge of a waggon parading the new church bells through the local streets.  Indeed, ‘Waggoner’s Frocks’ or ‘Carter’s Smock’ was a generalised name given to the garment in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example, the Workwoman’s Guide of 1838, which included instructions about how to make one.  These jobs and the people who did them, were probably one of the most visible wearers of smocks to observers in urban areas. A waggoner’s smock survives in Lincolnshire, owned by G. Codling, a waggoner of Nettleham, Lincolnshire.  On each button is a picture of a wagon and the name ‘G. Codling’, so this may have been a way of promoting the business as much as any practical dress by the mid nineteenth century.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the role of the carter diminished as horse power became mechanised and like the smock frock itself, was superseded by new jobs.  Along with shepherds, it, however, remained one of the occupations most associated with wearing the smock frock.

From Fieldwork to the Pages of Vogue

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Further to my last post, my new article has just been published in the journal Textile History (May 2018).  This traces how the smock frock moved from being  a nineteenth century utilitarian overall worn by male manual labourers and particularly associated with agricultural work, to appearing on the front cover of American Vogue as an item of female clothing in 1915.  It discusses how the smock was used by artists, particularly those associated with the aesthetic and rational dress movements, and the influence that the smock had on children’s wear at the end of the nineteenth century.

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The importance of the actress Ellen Terry and her daughter Edith Craig in the transformation of the smock into a piece of women’s wear is investigated and also the garment’s influence on American fashion.  The smock frock, once a marker of a male manual labourer, managed  to bridge the gap between high fashion and workwear, and also menswear and womenswear, and become part of mainstream fashion, the shape perennially revived ever since the early twentieth century. The impact of the smock on children’s wear has also been significant, witness Princess Charlotte’s dress when she was photographed visiting her new baby brother just last week. How and why these changes happened are what my article seeks to at least start answering, and how a garment associated firmly with one particular gender can be transformed into something altogether more fluid.  This started off as a sideline to my main research but has turned out to be a fascinating subject in itself and the more I investigate, the more I find!

There are some free e-copies of my article for those who want to know more and get there first, link below:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/tTXs7jRuPhiGC4mZEHuU/full

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Artist’s Smock

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For those with messy jobs, an overall has always been necessary, to prevent other clothes from getting dirty.  The smock frock was one such overall.  However, the artist’s smock has almost become legendary in its own right, with its Bohemian vibe and association with artists’ enclaves such as St. Ives, although here also mixed with the maritime smock.  Whilst these garments have often been plain and voluminous, an oversized shirt if you will, as we used to use our Dad’s cast-off shirts as a cover-up for art at primary school in the 1970s, the smock frock was also used for this purpose by artists.

As they became increasingly mass-produced in the second-half of the nineteenth century and therefore cheap, artists could acquire them easily and inexpensively.  In 1893, George Frederick Watts, displayed a portrait of a youth in a ‘smock-frock’, according to the Graphic. Art historians have seen this as an earlier self-portrait of the artist as a younger man.  In the later years of his life, he was described as busying himself with artistic pursuits at his home Limnerslease, near Guildford, wearing white trousers and a white smock.  Part of his house is now the Watts Studios museum.  Mary Watts, his second wife, was also photographed wearing an embroidered smock frock while plastering ceiling panels for Limnerslease in 1890-3.

The sculptor, Hamo Thornycroft, was another well-known artist wearer of the smock frock.  As the Pall Mall Gazette reported in 1890, ‘He invariably dons a white smock frock of the pattern associated with village rustics, and his clay be-daubed hands complete the resemblance’. Vanity Fair published a drawing of him as part of its ‘Spy’ series, wearing such an outfit. It was dated February 20th 1892 and entitled ‘Bronze Statuary’, in the ‘Men of the Day’ series.

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So whilst every artist would wear some kind of overall, by the late nineteenth century the smocking on the smock frock, whether handmade or mass produced, also appealed on another level to many artists interested in dress reform and less restrictive clothing. Watts and Thornycroft were members of the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union, Thornycroft designing a partially smocked and less restrictive Liberty silk dress for his wife, dating from around 1885, now in the V & A Museum.

thornycroft dress

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O13850/dress-unknown/

The hand-crafted feel with embroidered embellishment similarly appealed to those working in the Arts and Crafts movement, such as Arthur Stone (1847-1938), a silversmith born in England but who worked in the USA.  His smock was hand embroidered with a dragon holding a chisel.

stone smock

http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/artists-smock-125700

By the early twentieth century, the smock had become fashionable informal wear for women, a protective overall for gardening, housework and artistic pursuits.  The move to become an acceptable female garment rather than something worn by male labourers was due to its artistic and dress reform associations.

For further on this subject see: ‘The Smock Frock: The Journey from Fieldwork to the Pages of Vogue’, Textile History, online or May 2018.

Smock Racing

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From the medieval period until the eighteenth century, the smock was a female under-garment, worn next to the skin to help preserve expensive outer garments.    The smock could be elaborately embellished with embroidery, a practice still carried out in the Elizabethan period.  The lady of the house usually worked the embroidery on the collar, hem and neckline, and round the bottom of the long sleeves, Queen Elizabeth having hers embroidered with caterpillars and birds. The term smock was superseded by the shift and then the chemise, all essentially the same garment.

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This is a rare example, dated 1580-1600, displayed recently in the ‘Lace in Fashion’ exhibition at the Fashion Museum in Bath, embellished with embroidery and Flemish bobbin lace.

 

A letter from a lady, May Kensington, in 1888, noted the smock races held in Mayfair during the reign of Queen Anne, when young girls would race for an elaborate smock or chemise.  This tradition seems to have continued throughout the eighteenth century.  In an account of ‘rural sports’ in Margate in 1808, the whole event was slightly ridiculed by the reporter.  The prizes were paraded through the town on a triangular pole before the sports started at noon, a typical showing of the prizes. Over a thousand people of ‘all ranks and descriptions’ attended. The ladies race, ‘under 60’ for a new Holland chemise, only had one entrant, a fisherman’s daughter, despite the fact that the prize was advertised as being equivalent to a fashionable gown and petticoat.  The amusements were directed by those of ‘a superior class’, the day passing generally with ‘fun and good humour’.  Parson Woodeforde’s diaries describe watching  a smock race in 1784 in Norfolk for Whitsun festivities, and rural sports such as races in a variety of ways, three-legged or wheelbarrow for instance, remained important events in the annual calendar.  During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it seems to have been not uncommon for girls and women to run and race, with even specialist female runners developing.  Locally, the names of those who were good at running were well-known for the annual and occasional events where races were held.  However, women were increasingly sidelined from participation from the early nineteenth century onwards.

Female races were increasingly seen as risqué, the women running in just their shift or other garments which allowed freedom of movement, so that they were showing off their bodies.  Decency and respectability were more important than winning a prize and it was therefore difficult to get participants.  However, men continued to run and, during this period, the smock also became associated with masculine attire, developing into a garment with a different usage.

Rowlandson’s 1811 print, shows such female racing:

rowlandson

A country seller?

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By the 1870s, the smock frock was seen as old-fashioned and associated with the countryside.  In the increasing urban sprawl of the late nineteenth century, the unspoilt countryside was looked upon with both nostalgia and as a source of purity.  To many town dwellers, those who lived there had better lives with fresh air and wholesome food, although the realities could be very different.  The smock became linked with the nostalgia that many urban dwellers had for their rural childhoods and the naturalness of the countryside.  It was a garment that could thus also be used to good effect by conmen.  In newly appearing suburbs, ‘the countryman’ often appeared dressed in a ‘snowy’ white smock frock to sell his home grown produce to unsuspecting housewives. In 1879, one purported to sell cheese and butter homemade by his wife.  Tasting the cheese, so as not to be duped, the housewife found that she had a bargain, the ignorant countryman selling his cheese for nine pence a pound instead of a shilling charged in the shops.  The deal was struck, the countryman disappeared and the buyer was left with a cheese that when unwrapped for supper was ‘hot and dry and rank flavoured’ and not at all what she had tasted on the doorstep.  The plug used to take the sample was tampered with, the good cheese placed at the end, so it appeared that the ‘rank’ cheese was being honestly tasted.  The butter too, was likely to have been tampered with, genuine butter cased over the filling of something else altogether.

Despite the Food Adulteration Acts of 1872 and 1875, food tampering continued, then as now, playing on consumer anxieties both about retailers and food producers and the sense of vulnerability and lack of control when not in charge over your own food production.  ‘Bad’ food became a preoccupation of Victorian reformers during much of the nineteenth century, spearheaded by the medical journal, The Lancet, and given publicity by magazines such as Household Words, run by Charles Dickens.  The desire for a bargain and to eat good food cheaply, was a preoccupation then as today, and without enforced regulations, the question of honesty and trustworthiness were paramount.  Some frauds were relatively benign but others were outright dangerous, such as sulphate of lime and alum in flour and sulphuric acid and lead in vinegar.  Meat too, could come from indistinguishable sources and indeterminate animals.  The appearance and manner of a seller was all there was to enable a judgement of somebody’s trustworthiness.  The smock frock was a useful tool to suggest honesty with its rural associations, even if in reality, the countryman’s ‘dairy farm [was]…situated in a back street in the rural regions of Whitechapel’.

 

 

A Gang of ‘Thimble Men’

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As the smock frock was so widely worn by working men, it could be a useful disguise for swindlers and criminals.  The game of thimblerig was one such scheme used by gangs who roamed the country to try and gain money, especially in the early 1830s.  1834 seems to have been a particularly bad year for this.  The game was, and is, well-known, the thimblerigger using sleight of hand to move balls or pellets or peas about under three cups or thimbles and asking the spectator to bet on where the final location was.

Around Wolverhampton, a gang of nine men were using nut shells instead of thimbles, the ‘sharpers’ [or swindlers] always winning.  Each played a part and dressed in appropriate clothing to draw people in to participate.  The ‘actors’ wearing smocks tried their luck and, having won, drew in the real customers, who, of course, lost.  A similar gang  were ensnaring people on the remote fell road between Durham and Gateshead, the gang variously dressed as a pedlar, a fashionable man, a sailor and a carter in a smock frock.  Engaging people they thought might be trapped in conversation, and telling tales about how they had just lost, or just won, at thimblerig, they would lead the unwary to the game where they were inveigled to join in.  There were tales of people losing all they had in just a few minutes.  One tea hawker, a man who travelled around remote areas selling tea door to door, often to people who did not have other access to such provisions, lost twelve sovereigns [a gold coin with a value of one pound] in six minutes, the proceeds of his sales which he was taking back to his employer in Newcastle.

Race courses were another forum for this trickery, a report about a very similar gang working the crowd at Chelmsford Races in July 1833 with a stock of characters from ‘a Bond Street exquisite’ to a labourer in a smock frock, acting as procurers and decoys, resulting in hundreds of people being ‘plundered’ of their cash.  It was obviously a situation which continued, William Frith depicting the fraud in his monumental painting of Derby Day, 1856-8, in the Tate Gallery.

thimblerigg

The newspaper reports connected the gangs with other criminal behaviour from pick pocketing to living with prostitutes, but it was a ruse that clearly continued to be worthwhile, the smock frock playing its part in the deception, helping to define people by their dress, in this case wrongly!

All the fun of the fair

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The annual Michaelmas Fair has just finished in our nearest town and although it is now all dodgems, haunted houses, terrifying rides to take you up into the air and drop you, flashing lights and loud music, such fairs follow a long tradition and were an important part of, and release from, the working calendar for labourers.

A report about a fair in May 1857 in Boston, Lincolnshire, was printed in the Stamford Mercury.  Held over several days, there were prizes for farm animals, cattle, sheep and pigs, which were also bought and sold.  Alongside the serious business was the pleasure fair, Wombwells, well-known for their travelling menagerie, presenting an exhibition of exotic animals and Chipperfields offering a circus.  A pig weighing 105 stone was displayed, which was nine feet long and insured for 150 pounds.  Other attractions were listed: ‘performing monkeys and dogs, knowing ponies, ‘industrious fleas’, twin calves, giants in smock frocks to make them look bigger, microscopic and stereoscopic exhibitors…a host of photographers’, which, of course, was still relatively novel.  Music and theatre were also an important part as was the slight edge – pick pocketing was rife and ‘suspicious characters’ ever present.

menagerie

Many of the patrons of the fair would have worn smock frocks, as seen also at York Fair above, Lincolnshire a county which contained several smock frock manufacturers and known as a place where they were frequently worn.  At the fair, they were used as a disguise to help the ‘giants’, their capaciousness no doubt helping to disguise some trickery.  They were probably used by the criminal fraternity too, both to help mingle inconspicuously in the crowd in order to pick pockets, as well as being useful for hiding any stolen property in their large pockets or just underneath.  Poachers, for example, in the same period used them to hide hares, birds and other animals from detection. Deception and disguise fully in action.

http://www.georgewombwell.com/

 

 

 

Harvest Wages

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Two sides of those engaged in nineteenth century farming are sharply contrasted by an article that appeared in the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette in September 1826.  It centred on the activities of the second Lord Huntingfield around the village of Huntingfield, in the county of Suffolk.  With George III nicknamed ‘Farmer George’ for his interest in farming and agriculture, and Thomas Coke, the first Earl of Leicester at Holkham Hall, Norfolk, known as a reformer of agricultural practices, an interest in farming, both arable and pastoral, was not unusual for the landed aristocracy.

Joshua Vanneck, Lord Huntingfield, was a Tory MP until 1819, although by 1826, ‘he had given himself up to such occupations’ as a farmer, cattle dealer and cattle doctor as his main interests, and for whom, it was said, he might easily be mistaken in his appearance.  He sold his own cattle and corn, riding his horse up to Smithfield in London for a day to attend the sale of his cattle.  He rode about the fields of his estate and inspected his farms, ‘to see what the men are about’, taking an interest in ‘his farming concerns’.

However, although his interest in his land was admirable as was his keenness to reform agricultural practices and animal breeding for example, like many of the elite, there seems to have been less focus on his workers and the often abysmal living conditions for agricultural labourers and their families. The correspondent noted forty or fifty agricultural labourers in their smocks or red sleeved waistcoats, standing still outside Huntingfield Hall, a Georgian mansion in Gothick style,  on a Sunday morning, during ‘church time’, that is between 11 and midday.  When enquiring in the village why they were there at that particular time, he realised that the men were settling up for their harvest work.  Those in the village were anxiously awaiting their return with the money to pay off bills to shopkeepers and other tradesmen. Harvest pay at this time of year was perhaps the best pay packet of the year, and could relieve debt and set families up for the winter.  As the correspondent noted, ‘I mention this to show how closely run the poor agricultural labourers appear to be’.  Harvest pay was more important than church attendance. There was no room for error or mishaps in the household economies of labourers, and harvest wages kept everything going.  Without them absolute poverty was likely.

Playing at being a farmer with the thrill of riding to London and back in a day with a relay of horses was all very well, but for the smock frocked agricultural labourer who did the day to day hard manual labour for Lord Huntingfield, harvest wages were necessary for survival or there was the very real threat of going hungry.