clarerosehistory.com

Hammer used by a woman chain maker in Cradley Heath, West Midlands c1900

The exhibition ‘All Work and Low Pay’ at the Women’s Library has been extended to August 2012, with additional tours and events. There has been a lot of media interest and great feedback from visitors. Some visitors have left accounts of their own experiences in the workplace – some of them showing obstacles that persist for women. Read some of their comments and download the information sheets for the exhibition here:

http://allworklowpay.wordpress.com/

Dreams of Empire, Japanese Propaganda Textiles

As part of my information-gathering for the Oxford Bibliography Online of Children’s Clothing I’ve been looking at changing dress-codes for children in Japan. I was put in touch with Dr Barak Kushner at the University of Cambridge, who has written about a fascinating collection of children’s kimonos from 1920s-40s Japan. The Marcuson & Hall Collection has textiles printed with children dressed as soldiers or writing ‘comfort letters’ to the troops, and girls’ kimonos with candy-coloured tanks and military helments. The disconnection with the realities of war is striking, even more noticeable than in the textiles for adults studied by Jacqueline Atkins.

http://www.barakkushner.net/dreams_of_empire_110245.htm

http://marcusonandhall.com/exhibitions/dreams-of-empire

The National Archives hold an incredible wealth of textual documents that are used by historians, and it’s common to find academics poring over medieval court rolls or World War I government records. What is less well known is their visual documents, especially the designs for patents registered after 1842. These cover all imaginable products, from pins to steel smelters and from ribbons to horse blankets. Where possible, samples of the products were preserved along with the patent registration, and bound into bulging leather-clad volumes weighing up to 10kg. The archive is trying to encourage designers to use this resource, and has posted some reinterpretations of historic designs on its website. The butterflies below are labelled with the reference numbers of the original designs – BT standing for Board of Trade.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/imagelibrary/creative-images-showcase.htm

Butterflies using textile designs from Board of Trade registers, The National Archives

The papers have announced the death of John Chichester-Constable, owner of Burton Constable. I first went there in 1986, when York Castle Museum was asked to lend some toys for a film being made there. As Keeper of Costume (and dolls), I drove out there with the toys and stayed to watch over them. The hall door opened to a scene straight out of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: grand rooms so cold you could see your breath, in spite of log fires stoked by an elderly retainer, and a general sense of impending decay. Chichester-Constable’s great achievement was to preserve this anachronistic house and its treasures, which included a whale skeleton mentioned in Moby Dick, and a fine collection of family portraits. He kindly allowed me to use a painting of three Clifford children, c1810, on the cover of my book Children’s Clothes Since 1750. Let us hope that his efforts have secured Burton Constable for future generations.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/30/john-chichester-constable?INTCMP=SRCH

In a Radio 4 programme airing on 19th December at 8pm Professor Hugh Cunningham considers the history of philanthropy and charitable endeavours and what we can learn from this today. I’ve been interviewed about my research on the archive of Dr Barnardo’s Homes, where I looked at the thousands of photos of children entering care. These photos showed the children not as ‘waifs’ or street urchins but as members of struggling families; families who were trying to do the best for their children against terrible odds. Most of the children entering Barnardo’s Homes before 1900 were older boys, which makes us wonder what happened to the younger brothers and sisters. From the case histories that have been published, it seems that parents (most often widowed or deserted mothers) would do all they could to keep young children and girls at home or with relatives, and sending older boys somewhere that promised them vocational training. That might be Barnardo’s, the Church of England Children’s Society, or a Naval Training Ship (which took boys  aged 11). A key aim was to keep children out of the ‘workhouse’ – even if parents ended up there. The status of the children is expressed in the clothes they wear in the photos: they enter wearing outfits that may be scruffy, but which are often chosen so that brothers match each other. As they leave Barnardo’s they are photographed in tailored suits, or naval jerseys which indicate they have been educated and are ready for employment. Workhouse boys were rarely photographed, but seem to have been dressed in generic working men’s outfits (often handed-down and badly fitting) and to have been trained only for dead-end labouring jobs. What interests me is that poor families understood the different meanings of these clothes; rather than protesting at the emphasis society placed on ‘respectable’ dress, the photos show that they were doing all they could to make their children look ‘respectable’.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b018b8s5/

historic documents and timeline

The opening of All Work and Low Pay was a festive occasion, with speeches from Sarah Veale, Head of Equality and Employment Rights at the TUC and Julie Howell, Director of Libraries at London Metropolitan University. We also had some songs by the choir Velvet Fist – tunes I have somewhere on vinyl! The exhibition is hard to photograph as the cases are so big, but these images give a flavour and there is more on the blog. http://allworklowpay.wordpress.com/

tools of the trade display