This passage was written by Angela Thirkell in her novel Marling Hall set in the countryside of England which came out 1942 in the midst of World War II. In order to prevent the price of goods from skyrocketing, the British instituted a rationing system whereby people got an assortment of coupons that would allow them to legally buy clothing. Thirkell saw the humor in the scramble to keep well-dressed and within the law. Gold-digger is an insult usually directed at younger women who cultivate older men with money in order to share some of their gold via marriage or other means. Here, Thirkell made every woman into a gold-digger, or at least a coupon- digger.

Clothing for public wearing was more formal, more detailed, and as a result more expensive than what we wear now, so the value of coupons to women was far more than it would be today. True, men's fashions evolved very slowly, but the fabric wore out just the same.

This description of a pair of women train porters assigned to a town stop in England during World War II comes from the mind of the stationmaster Mr. Beedle. He, like many older people in the novels of Angela Thirkell, is upset by changes brought by the war: here, the disappearance of the squad of male porters he had commanded before the war broke out. Even though trousers make perfect sense for the physical job of hefting and toting bags and trunks, and pushing carts piled up with boxes and bags, they are part of the reason that the young women seem depraved to Beedle. And one would hardly expect their hands or hair to stay clean in the midst of all this dust and dirt.

Of course, women had been doing dirty work for time out of mind, think farm women and scrub women, and doing some of it in trousers, but that did not shake belief in the rule that women should not be wearing pants in public places. It was not until the 1960s, and only after a drawn-out public debate, that pants on women in the North Atlantic world were seen as anything but sloppy or overly sporty. So it was a big shift when by the late 1960s, women were wearing all kinds of pants whether or not they were embarked on a dirty job at a train station.

The hard eye belongs to a French woman, a retired governess, who had trained many an upper-class English family’s children, and it fell upon Lucy, the daughter of a well-off family in the English countryside during World War II. Lucy was dragging around a bag of fertilizer as she was a hearty, determined young woman who was keen on doing her bit for the war effort whether that involved looking after a garden or working at a hospital. This is from the book Marling Hall by Angela Thirkell which was published in 1942.

Lucy’s clothing was a mess precisely because she was working hard at something, and because of her general indifference to clothing, yet notice that she still wore a skirt and not pants. Only actively partaking in the dirtiest of farmwork would have made pants appropriate at this point in time. The retired governess recognized the shabby clothing was not on account of Lucy’s inability to afford anything better; Lucy’s shoes and her stockings and her hair indicated that she could afford what she wanted. And the retired governess, who had served the upper-classes, knew exactly the subtleties of dress which set off the well-off from the rest of society.

So laments a young man who is studying law but does not have a job in Angela Thirkell’s August Rising from 1936. Notice that being asked to dress for dinner, which one would think of as a burden of formality, would be preferable to the young man. Why? Because of his 4 suits, his most formal one, his dinner-jacket or tuxedo, is in the best shape. This was the era when men mostly wore suits for public wear unless their work demanded something tougher to withstand hard wear. And here even a young man of professional parents who was not yet earning a living would own a set of suits, one only for evening wear.

While we tend to think of clothing as something only women had to think about, men had to think about it too. And men’s suits were almost never made at home because tailoring, which involved creating a stiffer inner structure, took different skills and materials than dressmaking. One reason why men bought their clothing as ready to wear or had them custom made more often than women did.

These fictional characters, surely based on real people, were complaining about the coupon system used to ration clothing and fabric in Britain during World War II. I liked the scene for two reasons. First, a coat wearing out from spite is a funny idea. Second, this scene is a reality check on the nostalgic vision of the past when everyone supposedly supported all elements of the war effort. I recently had my students read an article on the era which stressed how government and magazines told women that not only must they help with war work, but they must see beauty as duty and look good for the men and for general morale. Although the illegal market in rationed goods was noted, there was little emphasis on how annoying such a rationing system could become.

Of course, the idea behind rationing was two fold: to limit consumption so that most goods went towards the war effort, and to prevent the wealthiest people from buying whatever they wanted and driving up prices. In addition, the British government introduced the Utility Scheme which limited prices and demanded a level of quality; again, this was an attempt to keep everyone able to buy something.

The scene above appeared in Angela Thirkell’s novel from Marling Hall from 1942. Ring velvet comes from the term wedding-ring velvet, or chiffon velvet, the idea being it was so fine that you could pull it through a wedding ring. Women turned to cloth turbans during the war, since fur felt and wool felt was hard to get, and they wanted some kind of hat which they saw as necessary to former public wear.

Ah, the power of a dress. The opening question is put by Mr. Tebben to Mrs. Tebben who have been married long enough to have grown children. She wore it on the trip when she met him for the first time, many years ago, when she was still Miss Ross.

Yet years later, admiring his wife in another altogether different blue dress, he remembered that first one. Old, altered, faded it may have been at the time, but it clearly made an impression on the man who fell in love with her.

There are dresses that do that.

This exchange is a hoot for a few reasons. First, that the young man Richard describes the dress as “ripping” by which he means wonderful; second, that he doesn’t know that a tea-gown which was a casual form of dress reserved to be worn around the house even if in the presence of family friends; and third, that Mrs. Dean is so well-off that she has to think, hmmmm... which white trailing haute couture dress does he mean? Ah, to have such a puzzle to solve. Apparently, she has one by Callot Soeurs, a Parisian house which shut one year after this book, August Folly, was published in 1936. And she has another one by Elsa Schiaparelli, the Italian designer, who also set up shop in Paris.

Poor Richard has a terrible crush on the older, married Mrs. Dean, one of the common sub-plots of Angela Thirkell’s novels. The older woman always thinks the young man is a bit of a goose, and nothing comes of it. Thirkell wrote novels set in the English countryside among people with plenty of money and fashion shows up in numerous ways in their pages.