Everyone was so much smaller in the old days

With love to dear Gwenn, originally uploaded by Trevira.

Of course they weren't all much smaller in the old days, but its surprising how often I'll hear that repeated. Madame, above, photographed in 1909, is a particularly good answer to that lazy generalisation.

And here's another:

now identified: Mercedes Gleitze, champion swimmer, originally uploaded by Trevira.

When I first uploaded this picture on Flickr I had no idea who this woman was, and hadn't a hope of deciphering the pencilled autograph across it. She wears a 1920s knitted swimming costume, which turned out to be a bit of clue.

A Flickr contact, alan.98, succeeded in identifying her as Mercedes Gleitze - a well-known endurance swimmer in the 1920s and 1930s who was the first English woman to swim the English Channel in 1927. This incredible feat, completed in just over 15 hours on a bitterly cold day in October, was, within days, beaten by Dr. Dorothy Cochrane Logan. Unfortunately Dr. Logan's 13 hour crossing was soon revealed as a hoax, which led people to doubt Mercedes' own achievement.

Determined to prove her case, Mercedes insisted she would swim the Channel again. Meanwhile, the prestigious watch company Rolex saw this new attempt - and the guaranteed attendant glare of publicity - as a golden opportunity to promote their recently patented waterproof watch, the Rolex Oyster. Miss Gleitze agreed, and wore the watch hung round her neck with a ribbon for her 'Vindication Swim.'

Unfortunately, her attempt at the crossing failed in waters that were even colder than her previous successful swim and she was pulled from the sea almost unconscious after enduring it for nearly 10½ hours. However, she had proved her stamina and endurance, the Rolex Oyster survived and kept perfect time, and Miss Gleitze supplied a glowing testimonial and was featured in subsequent advertisements for the watch. You can read a much more comprehensive account of this story here.

Mercedes Gleitze had the kind of sturdy figure that must have been perfectly suited for this kind of swimming. Although she looks 'big' she was obviously incredibly fit, not to mention incredibly brave and resolute. A thoroughly modern woman in the 1920s, and a name to admire to this day.

I can't help but notice that although she was 'modern' in her pioneering activities, her personal style was actually quite old-fashioned. Her long hair proves that not every woman in the 1920s chopped their hair into a short bob - even though it would have been even more practical for her as a long-distance swimmer. Footage shows that she wore her hair in two plaits which were then coiled round over her ears - Princess Leia style! - which was a popular strategy to avoid actually cutting your hair whilst still approximating the neat, short, fashionable look of a bob.

Miss Gleitze went on to complete marathon swims across the world - including being the first person (not woman, person) to swim across the Straits of Gibraltar in 1928. As if there aren't enough reasons to admire her, she used the money earned from her swims to open the Mercedes Gleitze Home for the Homeless in Leicester in 1933.

The fantastic British Pathé has come up with the goods again! This film supposedly shows Mercedes Gleitze shortly after her failed Channel crossing, although she looks rather too perky to have just been pulled from the waves to me:

A SPLENDID FAILURE

And here she is in action, setting off from Folkestone in 1926 on one of her failed attempts to cross the Channel:

THE CHANNEL WINS AGAIN

Plus fours - why?

plus fours and plus eights, originally uploaded by Trevira.

Having failed to find any photographs of outrageously wide Oxford bags (see a previous post) among my own fairly extensive collection of old snapshots, I realised I had a few good examples of another baffling men's fashion favourite of the interwar years - plus fours.

Originating as comfortable golfing trousers or breeches generously cut so that they billowed below the knee by four inches - hence the name - these garments became popular as leisure wear appropriate for all kinds of locations, not just the golf course.

That famous men's fashion leader, the then Prince of Wales (you know, the one who made cosy social calls on Hitler and abdicated to marry Mrs Simpson) helped popularise the trend worldwide. And despite their Bertie Woosterish associations these days, it wasn't just upper class twits sporting them, but men of all classes.

The two gentlemen at the top were from the North Shields, and because I have quite a bundle of photographs from the same family I know that they and their friends lived in semi-detached or terraced houses, and fixed their bicycles by the shed in the back garden. They are evidently not members of the landed gentry. The precise location has yet to be identified, but the date is somewhere in the mid 1930s, and I implied with my caption that the chap on the right's plus fours look particularly capacious. Note the Argyle patterned socks that seem obligatory with plus fours.

Mob of lads, North Beach, Scarborough, originally uploaded by Trevira.

This cheery crowd of youths from around the same date, or possibly a year or two earlier, display quite a range of men's leisure wear, with one brave pioneer in the middle in plus fours. Other photographs from this set show that these boys were camping in tents somewhere in Scarborough, and I'd be prepared to bet that this was probably their first holiday without their parents. Let's hope they behaved themselves.

plus fours, 1920s/30s, originally uploaded by Trevira.

These gentlemen are old enough to know better. The circumstances around this photograph are lost to history, but its fair to assume that alcohol might have been involved given the array of glasses at their feet. This does not explain the teapot, however, or the chap kneeling behind and holding something like a bicycle inner tube over his friend's head. Clearly none of this would have occurred had they been wearing sensible, double breasted suits.

From this limited selection of photographic evidence, it seems that plus fours brought out the light-hearted, jovial, devil-may-care aspect in a man's character. Something that may explain their virtual disappearance once the Second World War started spoiling everyone's fun.

But the fun can't end just yet:

plus fours?, originally uploaded by Trevira.

This joker from South Wales has either gone completely potty and had some plus tens made (imagine the trouble in store), or he's actually tucked his trousers into his socks for a laugh. I'll leave you to decide which.

By the way: can you picture wearing a pair of trousers (please refer to the Oxford bags post earlier) over these plus fours? Hmmm.

What I did on my holidays (in Cromer)

blackcurrant and cassis sorbet, originally uploaded by Trevira.

No this won't be a school essay!

But I always do plenty of research before our holiday breaks because I don't want to miss out on any good places to see, enjoy or eat at in the vicinity, and its always useful to find reliable testimonials online.

One of my best sources for travel information is Anne at I like, who shares an enthusiasm for the "Great British Holiday" and has impeccable taste. Her regular reports of her jaunts, with copious photographic evidence provided on her flickr photostream, are always full of places, attractions and businesses that are worth making an effort to seek out. (Of course, there's plenty of other good reasons for checking I like, but we're talking holidays here).

Anne's keen interest in unusual, quirky and/or neglected tourist attractions led her to establish the essential nothing to see here. This has developed into a prodigious online repository for the informed and discriminating tourist with an appreciation of the unusual/quirky/neglected.

Back to my holidays. We stayed at the Hotel de Paris at Cromer, which caters mostly to the silver-haired coach party crowd. Indeed, it proved rather hard to secure a booking at all, but it was worth the effort (and regular phone calls on the chance of a cancellation) for a sea view room that looked right over the pier.

Cromer is a modest little seaside town on the north Norfolk coast, which has little to offer the nightclubber or funfair fiend. It was perfect!

There's plenty of book shops and antique and collectors' shops for junk hounds, including Collector's World, easily found on Church Street, where I secured some brass fringes from a Mason's apron and a clutch of enamel badges. The friendly owner showed me an extraordinary set of Freemason's ceremonial robes - white with a red crusader's cross on - that had more than a passing resemblance to a Ku Klux Klan outfit.

Fine dining seems in short supply in the area, but I did really enjoy a (birthday treat) meal at La Griglia, and can wholeheartedly recommend their seared scallops starter, and seafood risotto made with "whatever's fresh from the market today." I would have taken pictures but the lighting was so low I could barely see to pick up my fork!

Mary Janes (award winning) Fish Bar on Garden Street supplied at least two more of our meals during the break, but don't try and sit down in the restaurant too late or the waitresses bellow at you "we're closed" as you push open the door (this was at about 8.30 p.m.) Don't let that robust Norfolk charm put you off though, the fish and chips are great. Just head to the take-out bit and enjoy your fish supper on a bench overlooking the nearby pier (weather permitting, of course).

In nearby Sheringham is the wonderful Ronaldo's Ice Cream parlour. Ronaldo's uses local cream, milk and fruit for its ices and spurns artificial colours and flavourings. It took some time to make up my mind:

Ronaldo ice cream parlour, originally uploaded by Trevira.

And then it turned out that they didn't have any chocolate cappuccino and Tia Maria on that day. Fortunately, my second choice - blackcurrant and cassis sorbet - was sublime and can be admired at the top of this post.

Finally, 'Joyful' West's Shellfish Bar, in Sheringham too:

'Joyful' West's Shellfish Bar, originally uploaded by Trevira.

which supplied freshly made crab sandwiches for my birthday lunch (eaten on the seafront and shared with some very cheeky starlings), not to mention the best dressed crab at prices half those I saw in Cromer.

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

Oxford Bags at their widest

"Oxford Bags" at their widest, originally uploaded by Trevira.

Sometimes stories get a bit distorted over time, as evidence is repeated second, third and fourth hand until little essential parts of it go missing.

This picture was found in the book These Tremendous Years 1919-1938 published by the Daily Express. Its a marvellous run through of all the major events, personalities, fashions and crazes of that period, and here - in the 1927 section - is a photograph of a man wearing extraordinary trousers.

The text explains things quite clearly:

'"Oxford bags" at their widest were seen in the West End of London when a man, wanting to win a wager, walked out in trousers measuring forty-eight inches across each leg. The fashion of extra-wide trousers, begun in 1923, though still popular among undergraduates was now dying out generally, but trousers have never got back to the narrow widths of pre-war days.'

So this isn't a fashionable young man pushing the stylistic envelope. In fact he looks like rather a grumpy middle aged man who wants to prove a point. Oxford bags were widely mocked, and even, according to Beverley Nichols, 'somehow connected with atheism, [and] effeminacy.'

This man is ridiculing Oxford bags, and the godless, sissy undergraduates that sported them at the time! You can almost hear him harumphing as he submits to the newspaper photographer's attention while he marches down the road.

But the interesting thing is I've seen this exact photograph reproduced in a popular men's fashion history book to demonstrate the extremes that Oxford bags went to, with no mention of the wager at all.

So a humorous wager and publicity stunt gradually becomes recorded fact and the context is lost to history.

UPDATE: Having given this some thought, the original caption to the picture is misleading. It claims that the trousers measure "forty eight inches across each leg," but I would suggest that that was the circumference, and not the width. A 24 inch width (two feet) is still pretty vast. This confusion between circumference and width might account for the ludicrous misreporting (and its repetition over the years) of the Oxford bags phenomenon.

And further - I've found another picture of this same man in a rather more jovial mood. Perhaps he'd just collected his winnings?

Scarves and buckles

Not long ago, I showed a visiting friend a British Pathé film (forgive the regular British Pathé references and links - I'm officially obsessed with it) from 1942 demonstrating some ingenious ways to wear headscarves. We were both filled with enthusiasm and inspiration so I dug out some old scarves for us to experiment with.

First the film, which is well worth the link leap:

TURBANS (issue title is WAYS AND MEANS)

My friend tried the 'natty little pussycat' with just one long scarf rather than the two recommended, and was so taken with it she left it on. Some of the other variants were possibly a little too complicated and involved pins so we left those alone (particularly prudent after a couple of glasses of wine).

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