 |
| Tessa Boase - Fleet Street journalist turned author |
One
of the most fascinating books of last year explored the once-widespread female fashion for wearing highly-feathered hats - and the campaign by a
small group of determined women to end what they called ‘murderous millinery’.
The author of Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple
Feather is Tessa Boase who lives near Hastings, in East Sussex, with her young
family. After graduating in English from Lincoln College, Oxford, she worked as
a journalist and commissioning editor for The
Daily Telegraph and its sister Sunday title, then as a freelance features
writer, before turning to social history, authorship and lecturing. When not
writing, doing amateur dramatics or walking the dog, Tessa produces olive oil
from a smallholding in the Sabine Hills, Italy - the work, she says, of many
years’ patient restoration. Here she discusses Purple Feather.
When was the fashion for feathers at its height?
For half a century, between
the 1870s and 1920s, birds were killed on an industrial scale for the plumage
industry. In every public place, from the opera house to the street market, an
astonishing array of birdlife could be seen jostling for space on top of
women’s hats.
Feathers from which birds?
Millinery trimmings included
small native species such as blue tit, robin, swallow, chaffinch and blackbird.
You might also see golden plover, heron, little owl, little tern, mallard,
kingfisher and jay. In many cases a whole bird (or several birds) would be
incorporated to dress a hat.
What about ‘windfalls’? Birds lose feathers when they moult.
Contrary to the soothing
stories put out by the plumage trade, no moulted feathers were used by
milliners. All came from slaughtered birds - taken all too often during
the nesting season, when breeding plumage is at its finest. So the plumage
trade killed not only adult birds but also their orphaned chicks which died in
the nest.
Was there an appetite for foreign species?
Increasingly so. By the 1880s,
as explorers and shipping routes carved up the world, an undreamed-of array of
exotic birdskins flooded the plumage market. The more striking the species, the
greater the novelty value to milliners and consumers. Brightly coloured
birds such as parrots, toucans, orioles and hummingbirds were particularly
highly prized.
Did the fashion extend beyond British shores?
Absoloutely. Demand soared in
the feather processing and fashion hubs of London, Paris, New York and Berlin. Milliners
were eager to serve every class of woman in every ‘civilised’ country in the
world.
Is it known what the plumage trade’s value was to the British
economy?
At its pre-First World War
peak, it was worth £20-million a year: that’s around £204-million in today’s
money, the equivalent to the combined worth of the UK hair and beauty industry today. A couture hat
might cost £5 - the equivalent of £500 today.
A £5 price tag would surely be beyond what all but the wealthiest
women could pay?
Single feathers and less
fashionable birds could be bought for pennies by poorer women to dress their
own hats.
Do you think the trade threatened certain species threatened with
extinction?
Without doubt. By 1914,
ornithologists estimated that hundreds of global species risked extinction.
For example?
Plumed paradise birds, great
and little snowy egret, blue-throated and amethyst hummingbirds, Carolina
parakeet, Toco toucan, lyre bird, silver pheasant, certain tanagers . . . the
list went on.
Were any native species particularly vulnerable?
Famously, the great crested
grebe. It was hunted relentlessly for its extraordinary head feathers which
stand out like a halo when the bird is in breeding plumage.
Who transformed the feathers into hat ornaments?
An army of invisible female
workers was caught up in the plumage industry’s coils. Feather washers, dyers,
trimmers, thrashers, willows and curlers - all labour-intensive processes
required before the adornments were dispatched to millinery trade warehouses.
Did the industry have an HQ?
London was the world’s feather
bourse. It was a very different industry to the giant textile factories of the
industrial north. The mostly female labour worked from crowded, unventilated,
small workshops, fanning east from the City to Whitechapel, Spitalfields and
Shoreditch. It was a shadowy, impenetrable, exploitative world where regulation
was minimal to non-existent.
With very low wages?
So low that many employees
took work home to earn extra pennies. Many resorted to selling stolen plumes on
the black market.
Would children have been involved?
Yes: nimble fingers were good
at ‘willowing’ ostrich feathers - lengthening them by tying feathery extensions
on to each frond to create that full, lolling head so desirable to ladies of
fashion. This work took place in homes, around kitchen tables, and was thus invisible
to the eyes of the Victorian factory inspectors.
How did you track down all this information?
Resurrecting the stories of so
many invisible or vanished women too two years of pretty painstaking research.
I sifted through the fashion archives of numerous museums, particularly those
in the V&A and the Museum of London.
What else?
I visited archive centres in
provincial towns, from Woking to Barrow-in-Furness, and I spent many hours at
the British Library poring through old newspapers and fashion magazines.
Crucially, I gained access to the RSPB’s notoriously secretive library at its
HQ in Sandy, Bedfordshire - a real treasure trove of unexpected
discoveries. I must also acknowledge the information and advice given to me by
numerous bird experts who were very generous with their time.
What brought the fashion to an end? Was it changing attitudes to
bird conservation, a shift in fashion tastes or legislation?
All these things played a
part, but crucial was the campaigning zeal of a group of remarkably brave and
determined women - kickstarted by Emily Williamson, who founded the Society for
the Protection of Birds in the Manchester suburb of Didsbury, and Eliza
Phillips, founder of the Fur, Fin and Feather Folk of Croydon, Surrey.
When was that?
Both societies started, by
coincidence, in 1889, then they joined forces in 1891 to become the RSPB. The
Royal Assent was granted in 1904.
But all for their pioneering work, neither woman is really the hero
of your book.
It was another woman who stepped
forward to propel the RSPB forward. This was, a member of the Croydon group, Etta
Lemon, who maintained a relentless focus - both on the frivolity of adorning
hats with slaughtered birds, and on the cruelty involved.
What was her campaigning strategy?
She used to name and shame
women whom she saw wearing ‘murderous millinery’ in church. She and her
followers also took the battle to the streets with billboard parades highlighting
the cruelty involved. The ‘feather fight’ was long and vicious - and Etta probably
did more than anyone to pave the way for the 1921 Act of Parliament banning the
import of plumage. This, in turn, led to further, more far-reaching bird
conservation legislation.
So the bird and wildlife charities of today owe her a debt?
The RSPB would not have become
the behemoth that it is had it not been for her vision, tirelessness,
determination and clarity of focus, so it’s surprising she has mostly been
overlooked by the charity she did so much to establish.
Perhaps your book will trigger some sort of a response?
Well, one pleasing outcome
since its publication is that Emily Williamson is now remembered in a plaque on
the house in Didsbury where she lived, while Etta Lemon’s portrait has pride of
place in a main meeting room at the RSPB’s
HQ.
What about Mrs Pankhurst, the famous suffrage campaigner of your
book’s title? Was she an ally?
To the contrary. Emmeline
Pankhurst was a dedicated follower of fashion, rarely seen in public without
feathers and furs. And she encouraged her militant followers to use fashion to
further the cause - to be, as she saw it, the most elegant ladies in the public
sphere.
How dispiriting for Etta Lemon!
Mrs Lemon thought it a bitter
irony that Mrs Pankhurst’s elegant supporters were all too often adorned in feathers,
wings and sometimes whole birds.
Hence the purple feather of your book’s title?
One notorious day in 1908, Mrs
Pankhurst stormed the House of Commons with a squad of militant suffragettes. What
was she wearing on her hat? A voluptuous purple feather!
• Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather: Fashion, Fury and Feminism,
Women’s Fight for Power (Aurum Press) is available as hardback, e-book and
audiobook.
No comments:
Post a Comment