What could you buy for 6d in 1934?

Well perhaps not buy outright, since 6d is your deposit on "a delightful Spring Frock in Fashion's latest style," and you would in fact be obliged to make fortnightly payments of 1/6 (1 shilling and 6 pence) until the balance of 12/11 was reached.

Oh, and there's 6d for postage too.

But you do get a free pair of black patent leather shoes, so its looking more like a bargain. J.A. Davis was one of a number of mail order clothing companies advertising in the issue of Picturegoer magazine (June 2nd, 1934) that this ad appeared in, and it was certainly the cheapest.

Corot, of 33 Old Bond Street, London, was the dearest. It offered two models: "miss innocence," a pure silk crepe de chine frock for 3½ guineas cash or 10/6 monthly (a guinea was one pound and one shilling - 21 shillings - the 'posh' pound!), and "fresh as the morning," a linen sun frock with matching cape for 2½ guineas cash or 7/6 monthly.

Doing some sums - "miss innocence" is effectively 73s 6d and nearly six times the price of J.A. Davis' frock (with its rather less romantic title of "model 12").

This disparity in prices points to the wide readership of Picturegoer magazine, although even Corot would not have been considered a 'high end' clothing retailer at the time. Prestigious department stores were offering couture copy model gowns for up to 25 guineas, which gives some perspective on the market.

There's lots to pick over here - I always enjoy the fortuitous abbreviation of 'artificial' into 'art' when referring to synthetic fabrics, which makes them sound much more prestigious and appealing.

And I am always brought up short by the colour options listed, with the quite customary use of a derogatory racial term for shades of brown. Nobody would have turned a hair at that term in those days, and within my memory I recall seeing coloured pencils being labelled the same way.

If I'm ever lured by the warm appeal of cosy nostalgia - "things were so much better in the old days, you could leave your door unlocked, kids had respect for their elders" and all that nonsense - that's something to bring me right back down to earth with a bump.

What could you do for £2 2s in 1933?

Advertisement from the Davis Standard (a Croydon cinema newsheet), November-December 1933. Eugène permanent wave, originally uploaded by Trevira.

You could perm your 'whole head' at Ede, hairdresser to the ladies and gentlemen of Purley. Or half your head for 25 shillings, if you were a bit strapped for cash.

£2 2s in 1933 would be equivalent to £111.09 these days, according to the handy calculator on measuringworth and using the Retail Price Index alone. This was a considerable sum to invest in a process that might last a couple of months before it grew out.

Ede of Purley favoured the Eugène system of permanent waving, developed by the Swiss Eugene Suter and his Spanish technical whizz Isidoro Calvete in London in 1917. There's some marvellously alarming photographs of their perming machines in the Wikipedia entry on the Perm (hairstyle), including this example from 1923:

Photograph from Louis Calvete, son of Isidoro Calvete, used under CC license.

It might look terrifying, but it must have worked, and indeed worked very well. So well that Eugene's name became "synonymous with permanent waving throughout the world," and you don't achieve that by electrocuting your clients!

And this little film from 1935, courtesy of British Pathé, shows a later system which used heated clamps allowing the permee [??] to wander about rather than being tethered by the hair to an electrical contraption:

FEMININE PICTORIALITIES NO. 42 - A HAIR NOVELTY

What could you do for 2/6 in 1924?

Where to dance, originally uploaded by Trevira.

You could go dancing in one of the palatial new dance halls that were appearing all over the country, the first of which was the (recently demolished) Hammersmith Palais de Danse, built in 1919.

The murky newsprint photographs don't give much idea of their scale and splendour, but you can make out the huge, 'oriental' style lanterns that became a signature feature of many of these Palais.

H.V. Morton made a visit to 'A Suburban Dance' recounted in his book Nights of London, published in 1926. His account helps fill those murky little photos with the people and life that is absent from them:

You give eighteenpence to a young woman who is imprisoned behind a brass grille, and you enter the dance hall.

The floor is covered with young men and girls fox-trotting to the music of an excellent band. The hall is large. Big yellow lanterns hang from the roof. Your first impression is that the girls are extraordinarily pretty and the men surprisingly ordinary. The girls have dressed for the dance; the men do not possess evening clothes. Here and there a star dancer has changed into a special kind of trousers, grey or black Oxford trousers as a rule, which billow over very pointed brown shoes. With these trousers he wears the coat and waistcoat of his lounge suit. Young men who do not dance linger in vague, drifting groups on the outskirts of the floor, smoking cigarettes and making comment. Pretty little wallflowers sit out by the dozen. Now and again two girls rise and dance together.

The music ends, the lights go up. Then a surprising thing occurs. In an instant men and girls have parted! The girls go over to one end of the room to sit on chairs ranged against the wall; the men group themselves in bands and coteries around the floor and light up the cigarettes which they had left parked on the radiator!

You look at the girls with interest. Most of them work in the big shops in the district. Each one wears a knee-short, tasteful evening frock and light stockings. You look along the rows of chairs and realise that here are seen the prettiest, neatest legs in London. In the Ritz, the Savoy, Claridge's, the pretty woman is easily picked out from the crowd; in this eighteenpenny suburban dance 'hop' a new beauty dawns on the sight of each minute; the girls are all between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. Perhaps that is the secret; they have abundant vitality and youth. They also have abundant lip-stick and powder, and one or two have Eton-cropped their heads.

It strikes you again and again that they are too vital and brilliant for the dull youths who lean against the wall and smoke cigarettes and whisper.

And if you'd like to see a glimpse of possibly 'the prettiest, neatest legs in London' the British Pathé film archive has a short clip of the Wimbledon Palais (the dance hall at the top of the advert) filmed in 1926:

DANCE TIME