The Great Silence

by Juliet Nicolson

  Women were ecstatic at the unprecedented notion that they would have their own champion in the House. One of her campaign slogans had been ‘Vote for Lady Astor and your children will weigh more’. But tears welled even in the eyes of the most uncompromising of men who stood in the crowd on that extraordinary day.

  The following Saturday morning readers of The Times were informed of Lady Astor’s triumph. In the same edition of the paper the news was announced that the four magnificent classical bronze horses had been taken out of wartime storage and restored to their old place above the entrance to St Mark’s basilica in Venice. The world was beginning to settle.

  There had been some speculation as to what sort of hat, if any, Lady Astor would wear on her first day in the new job. On I December the new Member for Plymouth entered the tightly packed Chamber, until that moment an exclusively male preserve for over six hundred years. Nancy was wearing a black tailor-made costume with a long jacket and white collar designed by herself, set off by a velvet toque and polished, neatly laced black brogues. A hearty cheer went up. Eyebrow’s only rose when members noticed the strange sight of two women reporters high up in the press gallery, an area more conservative than the floor of the Chamber itself. Typewriters, for goodness’ sake, had only been granted admittance into the precincts a few months earlier! Winston Churchill, the Minister for War, glowered perceptibly, having compared the arrival of a woman in Parliament to the experience of being spied upon by a member of the opposite sex while sitting in the bath with nothing more to protect oneself than a sponge. Never much of an advocate of female suffrage and irritated by Nancy’s irreverence, Churchill, a daily devotee of Pol Roger champagne and more besides, could not bring himself to support a woman who was a vociferous advocate of teetotalism. ‘One reason I don’t drink’, she explained, ‘is that I want to know when I am having a good time.’

  However, watched with an encouraging smile by her husband from his place above the Chamber in the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery, the new member responded to the welcoming words of Speaker Lowther addressed to ‘members desirous of taking their seats’. She walked towards the Speaker flanked by her obligatory two introducers both wearing frock coats, the current Prime Minister on her left and a former prime minister, Arthur Balfour, on her right. Despite their differences, one married but nicknamed among close colleagues the ‘Welsh goat’ for his duplicitous attraction to women, the other an ascetic, unmarried Scotsman, they were affected by a similar nervousness on this particular occasion. As they processed towards the table at the top of the Chamber, Nancy had to hold out both her arms to try and restrict the undignified speed of their approach. Reaching the table all three were required to bow three times, but in his excitement Lloyd George forgot, so the choreography was at first spoiled. In the words of the sketch writer of The Times, the two elderly men ‘behaved with the ingenuous shyness of boys at their first dance’.

  After taking the oath and reading her declaration, there was another difficult moment when the elderly and short-sighted Clerk of the House failed to find the correct page on which Nancy was to sign the New Membership documents, and while he shuffled and fluttered the papers, Nancy was unable, even at such a solemn moment, to restrain her naturally garrulous nature, and turned to chat with a few of her Cliveden weekend guests on the front bench. Eyebrows were once again raised. Next it looked as if the only space left for Lady Astor was on the front bench itself, but she managed to squeeze into a corner that was still vacant near the gangway. Shortly afterwards, during a convenient lull in proceedings, she discreetly left the Chamber.

  The following week the Lady summed up Lady Astor’s arrival in Parliament as less that of a constituency representative than of ‘a symbol of the patriotic self-denial, endurance and courage that, shown in times of national peril, made women the true comrades of men’, and it saluted her presence as a signal that ‘the right to help govern the land they helped to save is one that few can now deny’. Lady Astor’s undeniable femininity encouraged women of all classes to expect their own professional ambitions to develop without any need to deny the characteristics of their sex.

  During the war thousands of women had learned something of the role of men and even in the smallest ways attitudes had begun to shift. In his family’s corner shop in Salford near Manchester, Robert Roberts noticed a new self-confidence among women. Wives no longer referred to their husbands as ‘my boss’ or ‘my master’. Having grown accustomed to earning their own wage they went out into the cities, exploring a world of opportunities previously unknown to them.

  Many widows had of necessity continued to assume the role of head of the household, although the incentive of a year’s dowry awarded by the Government to all those who chose to remarry was attractive enough for 38,664 women to have found new husbands by December 1919. Even so, with a shortage of men from whom to choose, there were some who preferred to find a new and man-less way of life. One woman, who had found the greyness of the preceding years more than wearying, was determined to find light and sunshine and used the personal columns of The Times to enquire:

  Would a lady wintering in a sunny climate who delights in giving pleasure to others take as companion a war widow who has done four years strenuous VAD war work. Now aches for sun and warmth.

  Added as an afterthought and by way of qualification for this plum position were the words: ‘four bridge player and golfer’.

  But with the passage of the wide-ranging Sex Disqualification Act in December 1919 professional opportunities were opened up to single women in countless areas of work from which women had previously been barred, including banking, accountancy, engineering, law and Parliament itself. The war itself had forced through these changes. Only the priesthood and the floor of the Stock Exchange remained officially male preserves, although the Civil Service continued to exclude women from high office and several London teaching hospitals refused training for women doctors. Marriage remained a barrier to most of these jobs, the assumption being that managing a home and bringing up children still took priority for a woman over a remunerated occupation. Many were driven to conceal their marital status.

  Votes for women had been part of a less specific but far-reaching rebellion against the traditional role that women were expected to follow. In January 1918, the 22-year-old Robert Graves had married the 18-year-old sister of the painter William Nicholson in the light, airy space of Sir Christopher Wren’s church, St James, Piccadilly. The marriage vows so enraged Nancy Nicholson that her husband was taken aback to hear the quiet savagery with which she managed to mutter them, while at the same time appearing so feminine in her blue checked silk wedding dress. He of course undertook to cherish her till death did them part in a tone of formality that he had learned on the parade ground. She seethed against the world, and against the chauvinistic society that told her that women had a duty to maintain the diminished population. She persuaded her husband to join the Constructive Birth Control Society. And then she became pregnant.

  Honesty, release and the expectation of a new freedom were all embodied in the philosophy behind the new designs for women’s clothes pioneered by one French couturier. In November 1919 pictures of Gabrielle Chanel’s chemise dress had filled the pages of Vogue: ‘A gown that swathes the figure in straight soft folds, falling at the sides in little cascades’. The editorial commended Chanel’s reliance on an uncluttered natural beauty, with a dress that showed only a slender pair of shoulder straps holding it up. The subsequent single-page spread devoted to Madame Lucille’s chiffons and to Poiret’s plumes seemed to be included simply out of respect for the old masters and appeared fearfully outdated. Poiret considered the Chanel look to encourage ‘cardboard women, with hollow silhouettes, regular shoulders and flat breasts’. Once the matchless pace setter of individuality in fashion, Poiret snorted that her clothes resembled ‘Cages lacking birds. Hives lacking bees.’

  One other French designer, Madeleine Vionnet, managed to survive the transition throu
gh the war years and become part of the revolution in fashion. Vionnet cleverly amalgamated a still lingering desire for femininity with the wish to dress without the restricting discomfort of corsetry. Her bias-cut clothes were exquisitely desirable. But it was the androgyny promoted by Chanel that dominated women’s fashion in Europe in 1919.

  Chanel had been abandoned in childhood by her widowed father, a travelling salesman for ladies’ corsets, to the care of several French aunts who threatened to sell her to the gypsies when she misbehaved. Her existence, she felt, was coloured black. Her hair was as black as a horse’s mane, her eyebrows the colour of chimney sweeps’ eyebrows, her skin dark like lava and she felt her character to be as black ‘as the core of a land that has never capitulated’.

  Chanel had spent several years in an orphanage at Aubazine where she learned to sew although not with great dexterity, never discovering how to avoid pricking her fingers. Rebellion undercut her childhood, before it established itself in her love affairs and her design for clothes. She was ‘naughty, bad-tempered, thieving, hypocritical and eavesdropping’. She was, she said, ‘a true Lucifer’. She dreamed of becoming a cabaret singer and started to appear in nightclubs, performing the two songs she knew best, ‘Ko Ko Ri Ko’ and ‘Qui a Vu Coco dans leTrocadéro’, which were so popular that the audience would simply clamour for ‘Coco’. Her nickname was established.

  Just before the war, at the age of 29, she had become the owner of a couple of shops where she specialised in selling hats which she made herself. Arthur Capel, an English mine and coalship owner of immense good looks, wealth and charm, financed the shops. Chanel loved him single-mindedly and he adored her in return. Despite his tendency to be unfaithful, he was no more capable of ending their relationship, he said, than of agreeing to ‘chop off a leg’. Accompanying the slim, blond and beautiful polo-playing Boy Capel (as everyone called him) to the races, Chanel was appalled by the ill-fitting ‘loaves’ she saw on female racegoers’ heads. The neat, austere head-hugging hats she designed in response were immediately coveted for their simplicity.

  During the war she discovered the versatility of jersey cloth as used by stable lads for shirts for training sessions, and began to make sweaters and waistless dresses for women from the same supple fabric. The ornate Edwardian costume that according to a scornful Chanel had ‘stifled the body’s architecture’ started to disappear. Chanel was after ‘moral honesty’ in the way women presented themselves. She had gauged the time for voicing these feelings to perfection. Thousands of women across Europe were feeling the same way. ‘Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence’, she said, ‘but of those who have already taken possession of their future.’

  The flamboyant colours of Paul Poiret’s pre-war designs and the theatricality of Bakst’s influential costumes for the Ballets Russes suddenly seemed tawdry and overdone. Chanel declared their bright colours ‘impossible’. They made her feel physically ill. She pledged to dress women in black. White and black, she felt, have an ‘absolute beauty’. Women dressed for a ball in monochrome or pale colours stood out as ‘the only ones you see’. And black, the colour of mourning, had always been the colour adopted both by rich and poor when in grief. Chanel’s use of black with its attendant contribution to the blurring of class barriers through clothes was undeniable. She chose to accentuate an elegant neck rather than covering up fat legs, she lowered the back of a dress, redirecting attention from a sagging bottom. A look of luxury was achievable through the severity of simplicity. Expensive poverty was the aim. She dared to suggest that clothes themselves had ceased to matter and that it was the individual who counted.

  She cut her hair short ‘because it annoyed me’. Everyone cut off their hair in imitation. She designed fur coats from rabbit rather than mink. Warmth became available to rich and poor alike and within the simplicity there was an elegance of style that had a mass appeal. Secretaries on both sides of the Channel hugged their high-necked coats around them. The British aristocracy came to Paris to be close to the source of inspiration. The non-French-speaking Duchess of Portland arrived to shop, braving all language problems with a label stitched into the lining of her coat stating ‘Je suis la Duchesse de Portland. En cas d’accident m’apporter au Ritz Hotel’. As hem lengths rose and flowerpot hats moulded themselves to the side of the head, a voluntary simplification of clothing spread across a wide spectrum of society.

  Disapproval that had stirrings in the Women’s Institute’s own house magazine, Home and County, was voiced in the publication of a letter about the old-fashioned use of feathers from rare foreign birds of paradise. The correspondent estimated that it took the death or wounding of ten of these young exotic birds to create a hat. Before the war a staggering death cull of 300,000 albatrosses had been recorded in one single raid, as well as the sale of the skins of 162,750 blue and chestnut Smyrnian kingfishers and 152,000 ospreys. H. J. Massingham, the celebrated naturalist, who was tireless in writing about and campaigning for the preservation of the old rural way of life, as well as founder of’the Plumage Bill Group’, begged for the practice to be halted and for members of Women’s Institutes all over the country to demand from the Board of Trade the introduction of a Plumage Bill.

  An advertisement addressing ‘The New Poor’ suggested ways the Sloane Street store Del Cot might help with cheaper fabrics and economic use of materials. Clearly the widespread use of secondhand clothes had prompted the advertisement. A retrenching in flashiness and consumption was mirrored by economic necessity even among the very rich. A popular ‘Exclusive Dress Salon’ in Buckingham Palace Road offered ‘little worn models bought from society ladies’. Customers were assured that the first-floor windows were not visible from the street so all fear of being spotted in such an establishment by a friend or, heaven forbid, the donor of the dress herself was eliminated.

  Despite a growing disbelief in the spiritual tenets around which the Christmas story was built, the run-up to Christmas was becoming increasingly frantic. Many families were looking forward to their first Christmas together for five years; the delays involved in demobilisation had meant that a huge number of soldiers had not reached their homes in time for the preceding Christmas. At the beginning of the month, on 2 December, a huge gale reaching speeds of 70 miles per hour tore through London and the Home Counties. A personal column advertisement from a demobilised soldier offered his £200 savings for a lodge or cottage ‘whereby he may earn his living by writing poetry’, thus giving him the best Christmas present imaginable.

  In Kent, young Mary Beale, who had been so frightened by the hedge-hoiking false arm of Tom Noakes, was still waiting for her father’s return. Her parents Dorothy and Os had married in 1916 while Dorothy was still in mourning for her mother who had recently died of breast cancer. On her wedding day Dorothy had worn a grey silk dress and a black hat. They had honeymooned over one weekend in a boarding house on the south coast and then Os had returned immediately to the front. They were deeply in love, and Dorothy missed her new husband dreadfully. In the spring of 1918, Dorothy had persuaded her sister-in-law Joan to accompany her on a reckless journey across the Channel and down to the south of France to meet Os. He too had been missing her and made the journey from Italy where he was stationed. Joan had turned an alarming colour with the motion of the Channel waves but Dorothy had assured her family that they would come to no harm. Privately, Dorothy did not care what happened as long as she could be guaranteed that Os would be waiting for her at the other end.

  But when the Great War was nearly over, Os had been given no choice in the decision to send him to Russia to join the White Army in their fight against the Bolsheviks. Dorothy had no idea when he would return. Desperately disappointed, she felt more impatience than sadness. Unlike others she at least knew he would be coming back, even if once again it would not be in time for Christmas.

  A lingering sense of the incompleteness of family life was backed up by fear of a return of the flu epidemi
c. Ovaltine continued to run advertisements reminding the public that ‘the bodily and mental efforts that maintained the will to win were not exercised without a serious depletion of national health. Lowered vitality, diminished reserves of strength, exhaustion of nerve, brain and body and debility are some of the prevalent symptoms of post-war reaction ... Ovaltine is the supreme nourisher for worn cells.’

  But for those in the mood to celebrate - and many were - the shops and magazines gradually began to fill up with suggestions for Christmas presents. Oxford Street was bustling again with still black-coated shoppers, and butchers’ shop windows had become invisible behind the packed rows of rabbits and turkeys hanging suspended by their feet outside. The opportunity to spend money had been denied for several years to those who had any and people were making up for lost time. Indeed the Lady magazine reported on II December that ‘Christmas shopping is in full swing and never were shops more attractive or their display of gifts more temptingly charming’.

  Among the ideas highlighted by Dickens & Jones department store as ideal gifts for ladies were a crêpe de Chine boudoir cap which came in a choice of colours including sky, pink, ivory or mauve. Mourning dress and in particular the black crape manufactured by Courtaulds had so long dominated the shops, but by 1919 the demand had dwindled and Courtaulds’ profits had not fallen so low since 1914. For the fashionable woman about to enter a new decade there could be nothing more desirable than a pot of Unwin & Albert’s liquid kohl, ‘an oriental preparation for darkening the eyebrows and eyelashes’ which achieved the much sought after Egyptian look. Make-up might come in handy for the households that were going to indulge in amateur dramatics. Black wax could be used for ‘character’ roles to make teeth disappear while some chemists were selling burnt cork as ‘ideal for negro and minstrel parts’. Arthur’s fur store had plenty of stock of the new skunk and opossum coats.