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Lincolnshire Blue

16th September 2016SlopShopLeave a comment

The Royal Agricultural Society, established in 1838 and granted a Royal charter in 1840, put on shows which quickly became an important part of the farming calendar, with events across the country. The aim of the Society was to use science to help agriculture and so improve productivity to meet the needs of the growing population. In 1854, their show was held in Lincoln and was deemed to be a great success with 23,000 admissions on the second day, the city illuminated and the old gateway lit with coloured lamps in the evenings. The newspaper correspondent noted the interest shown by people in everything from implements to animals. However, he also remarked on the dress of the Lincolnshire labourers, inspecting machines designed to save them work, in their ‘blue smock-frocks curiously embroidered with the needle which they delight to wear. Could the Royal Agricultural Society not do something in the way of suggesting a better and more convenient dress for the labourer than this extraordinary garment! They have greatly improved the other denizens of the farmyard, and might now with advantage take steps by which to avoid the reproach of doing everything for the cattle and nothing for the human beings who tend them’.

In other words, the smock frock was part of the problem – not modern and scientific, but was still popular and no official alternative had yet been put forward to encourage its disuse. Blue smocks were common in many areas, along with green and brown. The town of Newark in Nottinghamshire was a centre of ready-made smock manufacture and associated with those of a blue colour in particular. As this was probably the closest large centre of smock manufacture to Lincolnshire, it is perhaps not surprising that blue smocks were common in the county. Lincolnshire Museums hold one of this colour, from the 1840s, and worn near Sleaford.

The capaciousness of the garment is obvious and this made them dangerous as farming began to embrace steam power and the machine age, as promoted by the Royal Agricultural Society. Apt to get caught in spokes and spindles and pull the wearer in behind, the smock’s days were starting to be numbered.

http://www.lincstothepast.com/exhibitions/treasures/smocks/

The Travelling Menagerie

1st August 2016SlopShopLeave a comment

Victorian non-elite provincial society is often seen as being insular and parochial, perhaps knowing little of the wider world, but the travelling menagerie and circus, which gained increasing popularity during the nineteenth century, added exoticism and a touch of foreignness to many locations. Showmen would travel around the countryside presenting both their rare, exotic animals, drawn from the colonies, and their performing acts.

One such showman was William Batty, who from the 1830s became one of the leading proponents of the animal menagerie and the circus generally. He toured the provinces, stopping in major cities such as Liverpool, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Portsmouth and Southampton. His acts included rope dancers, equestrians with various gymnastic displays, clowns, and exotic animals: zebras, elephant, lions and tigers. By the mid-1840s, his lion tamer was called White and he presented a group of performing lions, tigers and leopards to the paying public.

It was at one such show in 1850 at Market Hill in Barnsley that an incident occurred. As the newspapers reported, one Saturday night, just before Christmas, during a show, shrieks were heard that ‘Th’ lions out! Th’ lions out!’ It turned out that this was not true – it was actually a leopard that had escaped and had got hold of the arm of an unfortunate individual named Charles Fleetwood, presumably a spectator, dragging him to the side of the cage. Here, the smock frock he was wearing saved the day, the fabric both being strong enough to prevent initial harm and then the sleeve giving way, so that was all the leopard was left with, Fleetwood escaping with a ‘slight bruise’ to his arm.

As the report remarked, chaos had ensued, people inside the circus tent rolling amongst a ‘large fire-pan … [which] contained several gallons of blazing naphtha, and under the belly of the elephant without doing the least harm’, to escape the leopard. The fire was presumably to give an exotic atmosphere but was obviously another hazard. It was noted that three people had been seized by animals whilst viewing them in the last few weeks in different parts of the country, although they had displayed ‘a reckless temerity’ in getting too close to the ‘wild beasts’.

Even with the dangers, the wild beast menagerie, usually combined with a performing circus, remained popular throughout the period, Batty apparently worth half a million pounds at the time of his death. Despite how we may regard performing and captive animals today, for ordinary people across Victorian England, they opened a window onto a different world, as with the Great Exhibition during the same year, 1850, and possibly fuelled dreams of running away to a circus. And the smock frock proved the ultimate protective garment, not just from hard labour and weather, but also from the bite of a big cat!

http://www.circushistory.org/Frost/Frost8.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/0/20184882

A Portrait of a Rural Working Woman

1st July 2016SlopShop2 Comments

In researching smock frocks, I have been reading newspaper articles which detail ordinary people’s lives in a way that often gets lost in other historical evidence. One such article from 1879, detailed the life of an “ordinary” mother in Gloucestershire. It was recounted by Lady Stradbroke, whose subjective portrayal was of a respectable woman whom she knew personally. According to the account, the woman lived well and long, and was an example to the more feckless. Perhaps slightly patronising coming from a member of the elite but Lady Stradbroke’s aim however, was to get her peers to donate ready-made clothes to such women, as ‘the overworked mother has hardly time to mend and darn, and bake, and wash, and nurse the baby, much less to make clothes for herself and husband and children’.

Lady Stradbroke then detailed the un-named woman’s life: she had married at eighteen, her husband about the same age being an agricultural labourer with wages of 15 shillings a week. She also worked in the fields from 8 till 6 earning 10 pence a day. She brought up nine children and made and mended all their clothing. She got up at 5am and on washing days at 4am and was in bed between 9 and 10pm. At harvest time she got up at 2am and with the children went gleaning at daybreak. This was scouring the field for any of the crop that had been missed in harvesting and gathering that up for personal use.

On Saturdays, her work in the fields finished at 1pm, so she would walk to Bristol, three miles away, carrying a basket of clothes for her neighbour who was a laundress. She would do any shopping needed, which she called ‘marketing’, presumably buying at a market rather than in the modern sense of the word in reference to promotion, and carry home her flour and purchases. Saturday evening was spent baking, making a pair of trousers or smock frock, washing and ironing clothing for Sunday, and other jobs often until midnight. She would then attend church on Sundays.

Presumably from a local charity, she received a loaf of bread and material for a shirt on the 30^th January each year. Her children began to work with her ‘almost as soon as they could toddle’ and grew up respectful, as also her grandchildren, ‘with a great capacity for work’.

This account was thus looking back at a working life during the course of the nineteenth century, as the implication is that the woman was dead when the article was written in 1879. It is interesting that ready-made clothes, clothing that is made up as we would buy it today, was seen as a boon to such working women by this elite lady, saving time and effort, whereas other contemporary commentators railed against it for being of poor quality, literally shoddy (the recycled rags of old clothes) and also by the end of the century, too fashionable rather than respectable, respectability always something the working class should aim for in the eyes of their self-appointed superiors. There was also much consternation about the workers who made such clothing often for a pittance, the production of which increased after the sewing machine became more common place in the 1860s.

How true this account was is open to interpretation as it seems unlikely that Lady Stradbroke would know much detail, especially looking back in time. But the generalities of rural existence, certainly as presented in the 1870s, make it interesting with the focus on idioms and the everyday routines of a hard life.

Smocks and Pugilism

27th May 2016SlopShopLeave a comment

Bare knuckle prize fighting was a huge sport in late Georgian England and patronised by the Prince Regent and elite society. It was popular across classes and could make folk heroes of successful fighters. Huge crowds were drawn to the brutal and violent fights, which often took place in the countryside, providing a spectacle for the local population, with the attendant circus that followed the fight including gambling. Prize fighters were immortalized in cheap prints and books were written about the sport including Boxiana or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism by Pierce Egan published in the late 1820s, which detailed the career and fights of various boxers.

By the 1820s, the violence and spectacle attracted vast uncontrollable crowds and led to the clamp down on such matches by local magistrates, who prosecuted fighters for breaching the peace and encouraging gambling. It was no longer an aristocratic preserve but a free-for-all and opportunity for many to make money in any way possible. In May 1828, a match between Ned Neale and ‘Whiteheaded’ Bob was finally fought at Ascot Heath, near Windsor. Originally the fight had been planned to happen near Liphook, Hampshire, then at Bagshot, but the local magistrate or ‘beak’ in colloquial terminology, was Commissioner of the Peace for Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire and on their case, so a move to Berkshire was required. It was then a race against the clock to erect the stakes in a field to stage the fight, before the new local magistrate heard about it, the ‘panting crowd and foaming horses’ following closely, in their traverse across the southern counties.

Ned Neale was described as entering the ring in a smock frock and in the ‘finest condition’ and was the bookies favourite for the fight. After fighting sixty-six rounds which had lasted an hour and two minutes, the presence of a magistrate was announced. However, the magistrate couldn’t get through the crowd to stop the fight and it continued until the eightieth round and for another thirteen minutes, before the magistrate finally succeeded in halting the fight. Both fighters withdrew, neither side winning the £250 prize money.

http://www.romevillemedia.co.uk/index.php/component/joomgallery/misc-bare-knuckle-boxing-pictures/misc-136-202

Although the tone of the writing in the newspapers slightly frowned upon such sport, both the violence and, in particular, the type of crowd it attracted; pickpockets, coves, a motley throng, ‘the ladies’, the ‘great unpaid’, the fights obviously needed to be recorded in detail to satisfy their broad readership and perhaps a need for such salacious details across all classes.

In July 1827, a fight took place at Ruscombe Lake, near Twyford in Berkshire, between Jem Burn and Edward Baldwin, alias ‘Whiteheaded’ Bob, once more, who this time entered the ring wearing a white smock frock which was then taken off to fight. The seventy-six rounds fought were described in detail by the newspapers, Burn the probable victor although it was decided that a re-match should probably take place once the men had recovered, Bob’s face described as ‘actually hideous’, after the fight.

In 1820, at Mousley Hurst, a well-known fighting spot, Shelton and Cooper fought for 100 guineas, Cooper entering the ring wearing a smock frock.

http://www.moleseyhistory.co.uk/books/molesey/tm/tm_17.htm

It was still an immensely popular spectacle for working people although it was becoming increasingly difficult to outwit the magistracy. Why then did these prize fighters, folk heroes and the epitome of masculinity, enter the ring often in a long white embroidered smock frock? By wearing the dress of the majority of the crowd did it suggest solidarity with them – the idea that this supreme fighter was just like anyone else really? Did the whiteness add a degree of virtue perhaps, looking like a priest’s white surplice, and maybe suggest righteousness or perhaps divine intervention? Was it just a useful disguise to blend in with the crowd, especially if being chased by a magistrate?

I am not sure but it is interesting that such an example of violent masculinity, the prize fighter, men deified by the crowd and their followers, should choose the embroidered smock frock to parade their bravado before a fight. Presumably, the smock engendered the respect and status necessary to be a successful prize fighter, or maybe the fight itself was enough to show off their masculinity and strength. It is another example of nineteenth century clothing throwing a light on gender issues not being exactly how we imagined them. It is not the image of masculinity that we relate to today, particularly in the world of boxing where although showmanship still forms a large part of the experience, there seems to be a very different type of machismo present.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jozvIkq0QlkC&pg=PA198&lpg=PA198&dq=white+headed+bob&source=bl&ots=XbnwpU35I3&sig=cBE9nGsyBjIewnTZ9fpZyhn2aRk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=XUpwVZujDcrhywOu8oOwCg&ve

d=0CEoQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=white%20headed%20bob&f=false

The Embroidery of Smock Frocks

29th April 2016SlopShop2 Comments

Smocks, by the very nature of their construction, are decorated garments. If unpicked, the smock would consist of rectangles of fabric both for the sleeves and the body. Manipulating the fabric, gathering it up to form some kind of shaping, at the cuffs and across the chest, was brought about by smocking. This gave it ornamentation with a sort of honeycomb pattern and texture, along with a degree of elasticity. The garment was then decorated further with embroidery.

There are, of course, differences in the quality and design of embroidery work on smock frocks: some were workaday and relatively simple and probably ready-made; others were for Sunday best or for a particular occasion and would be finely worked either by female relations or professional needlewomen. All had some kind of embroidery though, even if somewhat plain. It may seem strange to us today, that working men’s dress should be so ornate. Embroidery was a skill taught to girls, particularly over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was a way for women either to embellish pieces for male family members as a sign of love and affection, or to earn a living. If done domestically, it could also be a method of personalising garments. Although the smock has often been put into the category of folk embroidery and compared to embroidered folk dress in continental Europe, men’s dress was often embellished with embroidery from the Medieval period onwards, certainly in the mainly elite examples which now survive in museum collections. For instance, the embroidered waistcoat had a long tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, so in this context, the wearing of embroidery by men was not unfamiliar.

Writers about smocks have often tried to explain the symbolism of the patterns that appear on the garments, for example, suggesting that certain symbols were linked to particular trades and so could identify the profession of the wearer. Although this may be true in some cases, generally the same patterns appear in smocks regardless of a particular individual’s circumstances, some probably passed around a family or community. Lack of evidence about where smocks have come from and who wore them in many surviving examples, also makes this a difficult theory to pursue. Where smocks were produced in large numbers, the pattern was drawn on and then worked, so smocks from one area may have similar patterns. In Newark, a town associated with smock making, metal pattern blocks printed the design onto the fabric which was then given to out-workers to embroider.

Interlaced and repetitive geometric patterns seem to have been most popular using roundels, spirals, zig-zags and diamonds, in usually no more than three different stitches, often including feather stitch or chain stitch. Naturalistic motifs, such as flowers and leaves, found their way into more ornate examples, along with designs such as hearts and crooks. These were all worked in the ‘box’, the panels either side of the smocked area. Thus the embroidery added to the surface texture and the smock’s character. It was normally done in the same coloured thread as the base fabric, although there are a few examples with contrasting thread colours. The embroidery played a practical role too, adding more padding to areas where protection was needed from wear.

The embellishment of the smock frock with embroidery gives the garment, what we now consider, its essential character. The care and time needed for this stitching on what was principally work wear or a working overall, indicates how important the smock was for both its makers and wearers.

Oscar Wilde and the Smock Frock

22nd March 201622nd March 2016SlopShopLeave a comment

The aesthetic dress movement became popular during the 1870s and 1880s with the upper and middle classes. Based on artistic dress and also connected to the Rational Dress Society, members were opposed to current tight-fitting fashions which altered the body and restricted movement. As Oscar Wilde famously quipped during his lecture tours in the 1880s:

Fashion is a merely form of ugliness, so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months!

Those associated with the movement, including Wilde, began to look at the smock and its free following form, elasticity and embroidery, which fitted with their ideals. Its simplicity and arts and crafts feel, was more appealing than over-elaboration and the machine-made.

Wilde made a series of lecture tours in the US and England in the early 1880s before distilling his theories into an essay entitled ‘The Philosophy of Dress’ in 1885. In this, Wilde advocated free flowing draperies and clothing falling from the shoulder rather than from the waist. Although he had classical draped Greek dress in mind as his ideal, the smock frock also fulfilled these criteria.

In a lecture that he gave in the US in 1882 entitled, ‘With Observations on Dress and Personal Adornment’, Wilde said that the only well-dressed men that he saw on his US tour were the western miners, who wore wide brimmed hats, cloaks which formed ‘a beautiful piece of drapery’ and high boots. ‘They wore only what was comfortable, and therefore beautiful’. He regretted the fact that when they made any money they would go east and put on ‘abominations of modern’ fashionable attire and he said that he asked some not to do this. They agreed but Wilde doubted that they would stick to their word.

A similar theme emerged in his 1883 lecture tour of the UK, which was an extension of Wilde’s US lectures. Depending on where he was, his allusion was translated for his audience, so instead of miners, the clogs and shawl of mill girl, the smock frock or the dress of the London milk woman, became the ideal. Several dress reformers, not just Wilde, were influenced by everyday working clothing. They saw it as being the most comfortable, practical and therefore healthiest dress, suited to that particular lifestyle. The working clothes of ordinary people were seen as ‘noble’, reflecting to a degree the class-based agenda of the dress reform movement. Whether the people who wore such clothes saw them as noble is doubtful, especially as they rushed to cast them aside in favour of fashionable ready-made clothing, this being the point in time at which the smock frock passed out of ordinary usage in the general population.

Such ideas were also scorned by newspapers reporting on Oscar Wilde’s lectures on dress in 1885. According to the ‘apostle of culture’ as a newspaper called him, it scathingly reported that he thought that the only well-dressed people were Lincolnshire plough boys and fisherwomen. One report continued, ‘Mr Oscar Wilde has now gone into the abolition of the coat and waistcoat and has pronounced himself in favour of the rustic smock-frock’. The smock frock appeared to answer the criteria for reformed dress but no longer suited the needs of the working population.

Oscar Wilde on Dress, J. Cooper, ebook, 2013, see:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_x2ssg6mRpsC&pg=PT3&lpg=PT3&dq=oscar+wilde+smock&source=bl&ots=uutAsduHSC&sig=2pDfvkfNT27o7IGJg2mtz2_U2YQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=XVZwVcn3MIqv7Aac0oPQDw&ved=0CFMQ6AEwCTgK#v=onepage&q=%20smock&f=false

Life on the Margins

11th February 2016SlopShopLeave a comment

Smock frocks frequently ended up in court, sometimes on the back of those standing trial and sometimes as stolen items. The stories that the newspapers tell of these trials show how hard life could be for labourers in the nineteenth century. The fact that a few court reports read in a humorous vein belies the essential truth that it was thought, by some, to be better ‘transported’ away from England, friends and family, than toiling further at home. Such a case was reported by the Worcester Journal in 1844. Henry Ladbury, a 35 year old labourer, was charged with stealing, including two smock frocks from other labourers and a scythe. Two out of three charges of theft were ‘clearly’ proved and he was sentenced to two lots of transportation for seven years each, the standard punishment for a felony if a repeat offender. Ladbury, presumably trying to remain upbeat, addressed the witness box when given his sentence saying, ‘Never mind, my lads, I shall want no scythes there, – no mowing in that there country’ – Poldark he was not!

The Reading Mercury reported in 1865 the case of Henry Aldridge, a bird catcher, who stole a smock frock from another bird catcher. In magistrate’s court, he asked if he could emigrate to New Zealand with a new suit of clothes from the parish, instead of serving a sentence in prison. Seemingly, life on the other side of the world, even with nothing, might be better than his current existence.

Clearly, for those living life on the edge of survival, perilously close to the margins, being caught committing a crime could also offer some respite, much to the chagrin of the authorities for whom crime prevention, much as it still does today, remained a perennial topic and vote decider for politicians. In 1867, Mary Ryan stole a smock frock and then tried to sell it to a second-hand clothes dealer for 6d, presumably to raise much needed cash. The smock frock was traced, although Ryan said she obtained it legitimately from a cowman. When sentenced to gaol for twenty-one days, she apparently remarked, ‘A very nice rest’. If she had been scrapping around to raise six pence, maybe a stay in gaol where shelter and some basic food was a given, was a ‘nice rest’. The authorities were clearly not keen that gaol should be seen as better than normal life, an argument that still rages today, but it does show the desperation of what life on the margins might be like.

This is backed up by another Worcestershire case from February 1838. Thomas Tudnall was an itinerant worker, tramping the country looking for work, wearing a smock frock. He also seemed to be a regular attendant in court, his conversation with the magistrate reported in the Worcestershire Chronicle:

Magistrate: Well John, how many gaols have you been in since you paid us a visit last year?

John: Not many, your worship, only Warwick, and Nottingham, and a few others, where they put me whilst I was looking for work.

Magistrate: And are you looking for work, or looking for a lodging in the gaol!

John: Any place will do until the weather gets warmer.

Tudnall was given a shilling to send him on his way, out of the city and to look for work. Being convicted of being a rogue and a vagabond, essentially for being homeless and not finding work and so having to beg, would seem to be his only convicted crime. A parish would be anxious to remove such a person from the locality to the nearest gaol, before the parish became liable for looking after them for the long-term.

The smock frock was an integral part of working life, worn, stolen, used to raise money, often without a second thought, and offers a small window into these working-class and poverty stricken nineteenth century lives.

Prisoner wearing a ragged smock frock from a collection of photographs of prisoners from Buckinghamshire – see: http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/leisure-and-culture/centre-for-buckinghamshire-studies/online-resources/victorian-prisoners/

Washing Machines and Smock Frocks

8th January 2016SlopShopLeave a comment

As we start to clear up after Christmas, perhaps we should think about how easy most domestic chores are today in comparison to the nineteenth century.

Laundry was one of the big domestic tasks for the Victorian household, vital for health and cleanliness, but back-breaking work for women. Wash day was traditionally Monday although completion of the laundry, the drying and ironing, was finished afterwards. It was an essential job for women, the urgency dictated by the number of garments a person had, and taking in the laundry of others to do too was often a way to make casual money on the side to augment household incomes. There were also professional laundresses alongside household ones, female run businesses, still an under-researched area of social history. During the nineteenth century, there were various attempts at making a washing machine, although they did not become commonplace for the majority until well into the twentieth century.

One such attempt was reported in the Exeter Flying Post in 1858. ‘Startling’ the laundresses of the city was Hancock’s Washing Machine, made in London. The contraption was described as being of a simple construction and was exhibited for all to see. A boy of ten or twelve years old was able to work it with ease. In the demonstration, four bed sheets were washed ‘thoroughly’ clean in five minutes, appropriately on a Monday, and a number of smock frocks cleaned in about the same time. Both articles chosen for the demonstration were known for their whiteness and so able to prove the efficiency of the washing. The newspaper commented, that if the machine became popular, ‘the washer woman’s occupation will be clean gone’ – a nice pun! A ‘materfamilias’ watching remarked “What, for gracious sake, will ‘em think of next?” A machine may have got rid of back-breaking work but it also meant the loss of livelihoods.

As a standard working man’s overall, the smock frock would have formed a large part of the laundry. Heavy and bulky when dry, they would have been even weightier when wet. As they were predominantly white, they were also a good test of a laundress’s skill and a reflection of a household’s cleanliness. The advent of a machine that would wash several smocks at once was probably welcomed by the washer woman in terms of a reduction in physical labour, although such household appliances did not become commonplace for another century, long after the smock frock had disappeared from general usage.

Christmas Celebrations

8th December 2015SlopShopLeave a comment

As Christmas party season comes upon us once more, it is interesting to note that in the mid-nineteenth century, the smock frock also put in appearance at one such event in Manchester, although this was held after Christmas on 6 January.

Mechanics Institutes had been established from the 1820s as a way of educating working men, part-time, either after work or on their days off. They usually provided libraries and often lectures on various subjects too. Manchester’s Mechanics Institute was founded in 1824 and strove to teach the principals of science, then seen as mechanics and chemistry, and in 1868, became famous as the birthplace of the TUC, as well as UMIST and the Co-operative Insurance Society. By 1847, the popularity of the Manchester Mechanics Institute had grown so that for their Christmas celebrations they could not fit into their own building but moved to the Free Trade Hall. This was in the same location that the famous venue remains today, the site of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, but in a different brick building constructed in 1843. This was demolished in 1853 to make way for the building that currently stands. Seats for two thousand people were provided and filled in the venue in January 1847, with a central space left clear for ‘rustic processions and mummeries’.

Wreaths and bushes of holly, mistletoe and other evergreens were provided as decoration, hanging from the ceiling, between pillars and as general embellishment, ‘tastily designed’. Refreshments were also provided. After toasts and speeches, the rustic procession got underway. It seems to have been carried out in the spirit of the Lord of the Misrule, a band of youths entering, ‘a rabble of supposed rustics full of mirth and jollity, shouting “Yule! Yule!”’ They proceeded to play pranks on those trying to be serious, tipping people’s hats and pulling at people’s clothes, the ‘merrie tricks supposed to have been very common among our forefathers’, although the reporter does sound a little doubtful himself.

All of those taking part in the procession, were dressed in rustic attire with smock frocks. This presumably distanced them from their immediate surroundings, not being their normal dress, and acted almost as a disguise, allowing the pranks and tricks to go ahead. It also formed a link back to their forefathers who were likely to have lived rural lives, before the pull of industrial towns with their lure of full employment uprooted families. This carrying on of a tradition was obviously important as it is mentioned by the reporter – it was a way of grounding a relatively new industrial society within older customs and from which their own new rituals could develop. However, smock frocks were not totally alien garments and would have been seen worn on the streets of Manchester, as well as by trades such as carters and butchers. The procession finished with the singing of the Yule song:

Come bring with a noise, My merrie, merrie boys,

The Christmas log to the firing, While my good dame she

bids you all be free, And drink to your heart’s desiring

A mixture of Christmas folk and rural traditions, the Yule log, the smock frock and encouragement to drink and be merry, I am not quite sure how this fits with the mechanics institute membership and their desire for education and betterment. Maybe it was a welcome release in the spirit of a good Christmas party on Epiphany.

William Morris

13th November 2015SlopShopLeave a comment

Before it closed at the end of October for the season, I paid a visit to Kelmscott Manor, the country home of William Morris from 1871, deep in the heart of the Oxfordshire countryside, close to the banks of the river Thames. I was on the hunt for smock frocks (though I did get distracted by the guttering…).

The aesthetic of smocks, as an unrestrictive dress shape, was undoubtedly popular with those seeking dress reform in this period, away from the sheath-like encasements, augmented with bustles, flounces and swags, of contemporary fashionable dress.

In this photograph, in the entrance hall of Kelmscott, of Morris and Rossetti with their families, Morris’s wife Jane and her two daughters wear loosely gathered and belted dresses which became known Pre-Raphaelite dress and was worn by those closely associated with the movement. Indeed, Jane was painted by her lover Rossetti in 1866-8 in his famous portrait, ‘The Blue Silk Dress’, wearing another similar softly gathered dress, a painting on display at Kelmscott, its jewel like colours shining out in the autumnal gloom.

These dresses were also akin to the medieval styles that Morris used for his tapestries and stained glass, amongst other things, during the same period. Their looseness and unconstructed nature, in contrast to the rigidity of contemporary fashion, which relied on structure and a defined silhouette with the crinoline and later the bustle, show a link to the smock.

A newspaper article from 1888 described a visit to the Merton Abbey works, Morris’s craft workshop/factory, in Surrey:

What strikes the visitor first of all in this rambling, delightful place where everything is quaint and striking is the figure of one of the workers, a white-haired man, with flowing hair streaming from below a large ‘penny’ hat; for his ordinary dress he wears a long blue smock-frock, daintily-embroidered around the neck and on the shoulders…

He is the foreman of the stained glass department and one of the original workers in the factory, having been there since 1860 when Morris first started production, and so a trusted friend of Morris. How much this was a uniform or just the choice of an individual artisan is not explained in the newspaper, the smock just feeding into the idea of quaintness. As his appearance is described as ‘striking’, maybe it was an individual choice. I therefore hoped to find more evidence of male smocks at Kelmscott.

This would have been an area and a period, from the 1870s, when smocks would still have been worn by the local rural population, although their use was starting to decline. So what is surprising then is perhaps the lack of smock frocks, aside from the loose Pre-Raphaelite dresses of the women. Does this suggest that, in general, they were not particularly well-crafted during the 1870s, to merit the attentions of the ‘founder’ of the Arts and Crafts movement? Many were workaday and bought as cheaply as possible from ready-made clothing shops – it is perhaps not until later in the century, that best smocks began to be seen as something worth preserving and their associations with quaintness and craft began, as worn by Morris’s own worker when they had all but disappeared from the countryside a couple of decades later. Morris himself was photographed in an undated portrait wearing an over-shirt or perhaps a smock, as his work clothes. They were being used as an overall but the association with hand-worked rusticity had yet to begin.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing I discovered was Morris’s caped overcoat, hung in the corner of the North Hall of Kelmscott. It was very evocative, as often clothing is, of the man who wore it, especially as we know what he looked like. Plain and austere, it catches the attention of visitors to the house as something intimately connected to the man, close to his body and perhaps imbibing his odours and body shape.

It was not a smock but as I began to look more closely I saw the label and started to wonder about Morris’s relationship with his clothes. It was labelled ‘H. J. Nicoll & Co.’ and Nicoll’s were originally ready-made clothing manufacturers who made their fortune in the 1840s and 1850s manufacturing paletots, a gentleman’s overcoat. They widely advertised their ready-made coats in the press at the time and also sold wholesale to tailors and outfitters to sell on. The problem was the way that these ready-made coats were manufactured, especially in the days before the sewing machine. Nicoll used middlemen to employ thousands of London East End workers to sew their garments, largely women. These out-workers worked for very little and had a precarious existence, partly because the work was seasonal. The profits all went to the middlemen, and mainly to the contractor, Nicoll. Contemporaries were well aware of the situation, with Charles Kingsley, author of the Water Babies, exposing the exploitation in his work Cheap Clothes and Nasty of 1850, along with the journalist Henry Mayhew.

The profits, however, allowed Nicoll to have a swanky Regent Street shop with large plate glass windows and a feeling of modernity – a palace of retail. They also gained an air of respectability, boasting that their customers included Prince Albert and the Duke of Wellington, and the company survived and prospered until the 1960s. Morris is said to be depicted wearing his Kelmscott coat on his statue on the exterior of the V & A museum.

Much as our clothing is manufactured today in the sweatshops of Asia and we don’t necessarily think about the human cost that went into the manufacture of a garment when we put it on, and how that might sit with our ideological or political beliefs, Nicoll and other similar ready-made clothing manufacturers, including those making ready-made smock frocks, maintained successful businesses throughout the period based on domestic manufacturing often in sweatshops. Their customers remained happy to buy from them whatever the origin of the garment’s manufacture, if it was the piece of clothing that they wanted, the price was right and the garment was easy to purchase. The idea of the hand-crafted beautiful object did not seem to extend to Morris’s own clothes and the smock was yet to be seen as such too.

For more about Nicoll see Clare Rose’s work:

http://www.maneyonline.com/doi/full/10.1179/0040496914Z.00000000039

Smock Shock

Deception and Disguise, Smock Frock Histories

Author: SlopShop