Author: SlopShop

Harry Potter and Herbology

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Both my daughters being ardent Harry Potter fans, the films had been on continuous cycle all weekend.  As I was passing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which was on for the umpteenth time, I was stopped in my tracks.  Hermione Granger was in her Herbology lesson, learning to pull mandrake roots, as you do with Professor Sprout, but she was wearing a smock frock.  Wow!  I am not sure why I hadn’t noticed before, but there you go.  You start looking and they start turning up in very odd places.

herbology2

In fact the whole class were smock frocked, although most of the boys were wearing more of an overall than a smock with no smocked gathering, and Professor Sprout herself, the wonderful Miriam Margolyes, was in something more akin to an academic robe with a hint of smock, the decoration of stems, leaves and vines echoing the embroidery found on some nineteenth century smocks.  The earthy tones of her clothing reflect her profession and compliment those of her class well and they are worn long, like the cloaks and robes that the pupils normally wear.

herbology

So the girls got to wear the male smock.  I can’t find any reference to what the costume designer, Lindy Hemming had in mind – there is quite a lot about the animatronic mandrakes and how they were made but no reference to the humble smock.  In drawings of the set, the characters appear to be in their normal robes so maybe the smocks were a later addition to give it a feel of the land whilst grappling in the earth, or dragon dung, with a mandrake. There is no reference in Rowling’s writing to overalls worn – only that ear protectors were needed against the mandrake screams.  Rowling describes Professor Sprout as having earth on her clothes and that the students became covered in earth by the end of the lesson.  The smocks are a nice shorthand to convey that certain earthiness and physical labour in the soil needed, of course, to repot mandrakes.

The smocks look very similar to the workaday ones worn by labourers during the nineteenth century, here sported by a youth in custody at Aylesbury Gaol in 1872.

prisoner

I would love to know the costume designer’s inspiration and thinking, and if they had the smocks made themselves.  If anyone knows, please get in contact…

 

http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Herbology

http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/leisure-and-culture/centre-for-buckinghamshire-studies/online-resources/victorian-prisoners/

 

The White of the Milkman

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Obtaining fresh milk was somewhat problematic for Londoners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.   The association with rusticity and the countryside was always there however, with milkmaids depicted in the illustrated Cries of London, for which there was a vogue around the turn of the nineteenth century.  They were the most beautiful and healthy criers, full of the joys of country air, with a bloom in their cheeks, especially when compared to the insipid pallor of those living in the city.  This famous image of one such milk maid was published as an engraving in 1793, drawn by Francis Wheatley.

milkmaid

 

It is probably something about the purity of the white of milk and the bleached whiteness of the smock frock that the garment came to be associated with milk men during the nineteenth century.  And purity wasn’t something that milk consumers could always rely on.  As detailed by a newspaper in 1856 under the witty title, ‘A New Milky Way’, consumers were informed that a new company had been set up to supply London with ‘pure’ milk, citing that they had begun to look upon the promise of pure milk as ‘pure humbug’.  With various food adulterating scandals current at this time, the newspaper welcomed milk that hadn’t been mixed with chalk and that didn’t leave a chalky sediment in a jug.  Their complaint was that they had previously been taken in by milkmen in smock frocks purporting to come directly from the country and evoking rural simplicity whilst selling an adulterated product.

Adulteration of milk was a common problem with up to a quarter of the supply found to be watered down or added to with chalk, to help whiten it, during the 1870s.  This interesting pamphlet, written in 1850, details the scale of the problems.

http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/observations-on-london-milk

Many cows had tuberculosis (also known as consumption), which was highly contagious and was passed into their milk, then consumed by humans to whom, the author supposes, the fatal disease was passed on.  So although drinking milk was associated with being healthy and the purity of the countryside, consumers found it difficult to trust what they were buying.  At Tettenhall in the West Midlands in 1862, a fight broke out between a milkman and a woodcutter.  As the milkman was driving his cart through the street, the woodcutter called out “There goes milk-and-water” and other similar opprobrious epithets.  The milkman, suitably enraged, got down from his cart to exchange words and then blows, but not having the woodcutter’s axe, came off the worst, his smock frock saturated with blood. Both survived to face each other in court, perhaps the tale of one unhappy consumer.

Large dairies around the outskirts of London were also set up, such as the Kilburn Dairy dating from the 1830s, to bring milk production closer to the capital although these too were dogged by  allegations about their purity.

dairy

However, in Truro, Cornwall, in 1881, a letter writer to a newspaper expressed joy that the city was to have a ‘good and pure’ milk supply from the Tolgarrick Dairy, the milk cans brought in on a stylish cart by a man in ‘the whitest of smock frocks’ and a shiny hat.  Outside London, it was common for dairy men and cow men to wear smock frocks so it was a natural extension to continue to wear them when delivering milk.  A milkman in a white smock was noted in Reading in 1854, going off to milk his cows, when he was caught up in a chase to catch a robber.  For city dwelllers, concerned about purity of the product, the smock frock seemed to have added reassurance value for consumers, although this could also be used for advantage by unscrupulous dealers.

The smock frocked milkman seemed to have entered the common vocabulary though and in 1870, this was assured when the song ‘Polly Perkins of Paddington Green or the Broken Hearted Milkman’ was published, the front cover showing the love lorne swain in a smock frock.  The song remained popular for the next century, the smock frock not lasting quite so long.

milkman

 

Image Courtesy of the Alfred Concanen Collection, Ward Irish Music Archives, Milwaukee Irish Fest.

Relaxing the Dress Code

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As the Queen becomes our longest serving monarch overtaking her great great grandmother, Queen Victoria, whose reign I am currently mired in with smock frocks, I post this entry.

Royal stories seem to have been just as popular in the nineteenth century press as they are today, although then as now, there were also periods where republicanism was more to the foreground, partly influenced by events in the rest of the world and probably partly by the actions of the royal family itself.  The popularity of Queen Victoria when she came to the throne in 1837 was by no means assured and she survived assassination attempts and hostility, particularly in the early part of her reign.

Starting a family may have helped her in her PR exercise.  In November 1841, the Gloucester Journal reported the birth of the Prince of Wales and the way that one man had reacted to it:

‘A Prince of Wales born!’ exclaimed the fellow. ‘Well! That’s what never happened in my time before; may be it never will again.  I’ll drink his health whether or not!’

As the paper noted, the man was ‘more fervent than rich’ but a handy pawnshop allowed the man to leave his smock frock and get cash to take to the pub to raise a toast.  A light-hearted story but one that shows how people’s clothes in this period were like a cashpoint.  The only problem was having the financial means to get them back again when needed.

By 1851, the Queen and her expanding family were perhaps making an effort to connect with more ordinary people.  The Great Exhibition, organised by Prince Albert and on at the same time, had been a great success with people from all over the country flocking to see the exhibits and special trains laid on to provide transport.  On a Sunday, the East Terrace at Windsor, recently remodelled in 1843, was thrown open to visitors so they could see the Queen and her court.  These links give some idea of what it might have been like:

https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/2100021/view-of-the-east-terrace-windsor-castle

https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/2101193/the-east-front-and-east-terrace-garden-windsor-castle

https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/700449/windsor-castle-east-terrace-the-queens-private-apartments

On this particular Sunday, not only the local elites were there but also a ‘vast assemblage’ of farmers and agricultural labourers.  In Kensington Gardens, which started off as royal gardens around a royal palace before Queen Victoria moved the court to Buckingham Palace, anyone who was ‘respectably dressed’ was allowed free entry on Saturday.  A similar rule seemed to apply to the East Terrace on a Sunday in Windsor.  However, that rule was relaxed on this occasion by command of the Queen, allowing ‘sunburnt’ labourers in their smock frocks to part-take in the spectacle.

The crowd of ‘thousands’ were entertained by the bands of the Grenadier Guards and the Royal Horse Guards before the Queen, Prince Albert and their children appeared and the National Anthem was played.  The royal party ‘promenaded’ for half an hour allowing the multitude to catch a glimpse of them before retiring to their private apartments, perhaps as seen here:

http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw145821/Windsor-Castle-East-Terrace-including-Queen-Victoria-Prince-Albert-of-Saxe-Coburg-Gotha

It seems that special dispensation was needed to get a smock frock within close proximity of the royal family…

 

Smock Frocks and Bloomerism

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I found an interesting snippet in a newspaper the other day which I really think calls into question the gender roles that we assign types of clothing and the illogicality of it, especially, but not only, in the nineteenth century.

Bloomerism was a dress reform movement started in the US, named after Amelia Bloomer although the originator of the garments was said to be another American, Elizabeth Smith Miller.  Having grown tired of being ‘shackled’ in long skirts and unable to complete simple manual tasks, in spring 1851 she advocated essentially shortening the skirt to make a tunic and wearing Turkish style harem trousers beneath to preserve the modesty of the legs.  Bloomer was a friend of Miller’s and promoted the style in her journal The Lily, where this type of dress became associated with Amelia’s name.  She called on women to put their health and ease of movement before fashion and the dictates of society.

The movement is thought to have reached England in the summer of that year when Hannah Cutler, a Bloomer supporter, travelled to London for an international peace convention.  Sightings of Bloomerism began to be reported in local newspapers as a curiosity and an oddity, often with detailed descriptions, showing how daring and radical the dress was for the time.  The satirical magazine Punch was quick to depict the extraordinary sight.  See

http://punch.photoshelter.com/image?&_bqG=3&_bqH=eJxtj09PwzAMxT_Nel7RKm2Vckhj05mtKcqfop4iiqpBGRQGJz49c

Advocates, such as Caroline Dexter, travelled around the provinces to lecture and promote such healthy dress and its benefits, although the press were usually fixated on their visual appearance. They tended to ridicule the meetings rather than examine the women’s reform movement in any detail.  This was the case in Chichester in November 1851 where Mrs Pannel was giving a not very well-attended lecture on Bloomerism.  As the newspaper reported in comic tone:

…the cause of Bloomerism did not gain much credit at the hands of the lecturer, for just as she was showing off her costume to advantage, the tape string broke, and her gaudy short petticoats fell tumbling about her heels.  The scene that took place at this moment was indescribable, but fortunately for the lady a gentleman ran to her assistance immediately, and instantly covered her corpulent body under a white smock frock, amidst shouts of laughter from the audience in attendance.

So this makes me ask several questions.  It was presumably okay to cover a woman in trousers with essentially a man’s skirted garment – a woman in just leg coverings was still scandalous; it was better to be dressed in a masculine garment than to display the outline of the legs; what was a man with a smock frock doing watching a lecture on Bloomerism; men in short skirts with leg coverings were acceptable but the same was not true for women – that is, men could wear short skirts but women couldn’t!

Dress codes and social conventions can be extremely complex and very difficult to untangle especially over the fullness of time when some social mores have been lost.  The smock frock calls into question several assumptions about masculine clothing, which maybe more malleable for the nineteenth century that generally supposed.

Bloomerism was a short-lived movement but it laid the foundation for later nineteenth century dress reform movements and the more general women’s movement which came to fruition in the twentieth century.

http://www.academia.edu/5053997/Caroline_Dexter_Bloomerism_in_England_and_its_introduction_to_Australia

Football and the Smock Frock

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Not a title I was expecting to write but research does take you to surprising places sometimes.  With multi-million pound transfers of footballers between clubs in the news, the football season not even started yet, maybe this is a chance to look back to the nineteenth century, when football was still much loved and very partisan, but perhaps not quite so glitzy.

Current premiership side Everton, playing as such from 1879, were in the news in 1894 when they contributed to the Theatrical Football Gala, to raise money for local hospital charities.  Starting off with a schoolboy football match, the two sides representing the north and south of Liverpool, the newspaper commented that this was the first time such a match had been played properly in Liverpool at school boy level and ‘if such matches as these were more often played there would be a distinct advantage in the football talent of this city’.  This match was followed by fun sporting events such as egg and spoon races and three-legged races before the main event, the football burlesque.

Football burlesque was a similar idea to the charity matches played by clubs today.  The home team of Everton was pitted against a team made up of music hall and theatre artistes in Liverpool, who seem to have played it for laughs as much as possible.  Although the ‘rain poured pitilessly down’, not unusually for February, the game was played in high spirits.  To give a comic air, the Everton team all wore smock frocks and top hats. The theatre team was in their own costumes.  Falls were numerous and amusing, there were ‘piles of struggling humanity…for no apparent reason’ and no one was sure how many goals were scored.  Nobody paid any attention to the referee’s whistle, off-side was given and a board bearing the title was placed around the offenders neck, and, by the end, the ‘mutual scores were enormous’ although no one was counting or seemed to care who had won.  It seems that a good time was had by all raising money for worthy causes and with a certain degree of abandonment, despite the weather. The smock frock took its place to add a comic dimension to the Everton footballers.

The comic potential of wearing essentially a knee-length skirt to play football in had also been seen the previous year in 1893 when the Derbyshire Courier reported on the defeat of the Riddings by South Normanton, a club still in existence today.  It was suggested, perhaps unkindly, that Harry Street, the goalkeeper, should dress in women’s attire or a farmers’ smock frock so there would be less probability of scoring goals between his legs.  The writer suggested that this could become an attraction in itself, spectators coming to see the ‘frock smocked goalkeeper’, implying the humiliation of Street.

Women’s football was a developing sport at the time, and would become huge in the early twentieth century.  However, it seems that they too chose to wear knickerbockers for ease of movement and practicality, risking scandal, rather than any skirted garment.  The smock frock in the 1890s was seen at outdated, comic and embarrassing to wear, especially for footballers!

 

http://www.donmouth.co.uk/womens_football/blfc.html

http://www.evertonfc.com/timeline

 

 

The Hop Harvest

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My hop has climbed into my apple tree and is frankly out of control and not likely to yield any harvest. Having lived in Herefordshire for a time though, the hop harvest has always held a certain fascination for me. Driving into Hereford would mean passing field of hops carefully cultivated over tall frames and so harvestable, unlike mine. The hop harvest was due, like all agricultural events, at set times of the year. In 1891, the months for the harvest were June, August and September, the hay harvest first, with a month’s grace until the corn harvest, and then hopping a fortnight after this. So we are still too early this year at the moment, but the report remarked that hopping was the most important of the harvests in areas where all three were carried out, Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Nottinghamshire, partly as there was generally more fine weather in September and partly because it was the last harvest and so also of a celebration. It is odd to think that our weather patterns, or at least the conception of our weather patterns, probably haven’t changed much.

Hopping in Kent has always been known as a way that people living in the East End of London could get out into the countryside for a couple of weeks, the time it took to complete the harvest, and have a working holiday. However, it was noted in 1843, that the ‘London importations’ had then vanished, the farmer using local men and their families. By 1891, Londoners were still going to Kent and Surrey but it was noted that farmers were particular about their labour, only employing people they knew were decent or no outsiders, so maybe this aspect has been over exaggerated for the nineteenth century. It was commented in 1891 that ‘London weaklings’ used to be ordered down for hop picking for medical purposes although this was now out of fashion. Local people still believed in the benefits though.

Green smock frocks were traditionally worn in Kent, and in 1843, a newspaper report noted that the hop harvest was such a rural event that new smocks, new corduroys and new half-boots were purchased to ‘regenerate’ their wardrobe. The thought of being paid good money, around 5 shillings a day in 1891, and the air of celebration presumably meant that new clothes were justified.

hopping

 

The harvest work was divided into pulling and picking, pulling exclusively for men as it needed a certain amount of strength and a good smock frock. Pulling up the poles and extracting the bine, required a specific technique and as the newspaper remarked, ‘Hence the need for a smock, for the bine, bruised by the pressure, stains irretrievably any ordinary clothes’. Although a new smock might have been purchased, they were used very much as working garments, and presumably their green colour was most practical with the ready staining. In 1843, it was remarked that hop flowers stained the hands as much as walnuts did, so a dark colour was seemingly preferable.

Once pulled, the hops could be picked, which was family work, from young to old, working around an oblong basket about three feet high. The celebrations came in the evening around the hop kiln when the hops were dried as quickly as possible to preserve their aroma. Stories, song, drinking and dancing to fiddles, oboes and pan-pipes, then took place after a hard day’s work, especially if a ‘Lucky Bough’ had been found. This was where all the leaves and flowers grew on only one side of the stem, as if twisted into this position. If found it was considered a lucky talisman, both to the finder and the harvest in general, and the ‘hearth over which it hangs’ and ended up dried ‘ is sacred’, a tradition carried on in country pubs today though I haven’t yet checked to see how many of these bines are actually ‘Lucky Boughs’. The hay harvest around here has just started – think I’m off for a pint of beer to await the hop harvest…

The Stage Rustic

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In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the rural audience was important for provincial theatre companies.  Indeed, Roger Kemble, the father of Sarah Siddons, the famous actress at around the turn of the nineteenth century, managed a company of strolling players. They toured the countryside and Roger was said to ‘have gone forth to proclaim the play at the doors of different farmers, accoutred in a smock frock and a grenadiers’ cap, and has been delighted to regale himself with a pint of ale at a hedge-side inn…’

This affinity with the countryside seems to have changed by the 1880s, when the comic character of the rustic seems to have been well-established in popular Victorian theatre.  As we saw with Lily Langtry, the act of wearing a smock frock could immediately suggest certain things about a character to the audience.  For example, simple, uncouth behaviour, being unsophisticated and probably uneducated, a typical country ‘bumpkin’, a term in usage during the nineteenth century and of sixteenth century origin, though the similar term ‘yokel’ was nineteenth century in origin.

This was helpfully summed up in an article entitled ‘The Stage Rustic’ from 1891:

There is the indispensable smock frock as well as the indispensable gaiters upon the melodramatic stage.  The old dodderer has them, and so has the young; so has the benevolent squire; so has his rascally son; so has the supposedly well-to-do (but about to be bankrupt) farmer; so has the gamekeeper, very honest, or very much the reverse, without whom no good rustic play can be concocted.

So along with the smock, the gaiters, which were protective coverings for the lower legs as seen in the photograph below, formed a coherent visual picture for rustic characters.

IMG_4142 B

As the article comments:

The wardrobe of rural drama is, it will be seen, very simple.  It has not many varieties, and it is delightfully cheap, for the same articles can be made to spread over a large period of years, which is good for the actors.  No parts are as easily dressed as those of the rustic school.

Characters were moving outside the vagaries of fashion and wearing similar costumes.  Although the article is slightly tongue in cheek, perhaps fitting with the comedy or farce that could be generated from yokels in smock frocks and gaiters, the simple character of the rustic had become stock for playwrights and for those in variety and music hall.  Its popularity now appeared to chime with audience across the country despite the often mocking caricature.

Roger Turnip was one such parody.  In 1879, a case of theft was reported in a Hastings newspaper, when the portmanteau of Mr J. D. Hunter, a comedian, was stolen.  The report lists the costume that he lost and includes garments for his rustic character ‘Roger Turnip’.  His costume was three pairs of trousers, a velveteen coat, smock frock and leather gaiters, so fitting with the report above.  Hunter had been performing at Margate and left the articles in his dressing room when they were stolen.  They were later found and a man sentenced for their theft.  Hunter himself, remained a comedian, associated in particular with the Pier Pavilion, on the pier at Hastings, where he was the manager as well as a performer, by the 1880s.  He played alongside such acts as the immensely popular comedian Arthur Lloyd and his wife Katty King when they visited the theatre, for example, ‘The Rival Lovers’ in 1888.  The character of the rustic in his repertoire had served him well.

http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/Hastings.htm

The Cricket Season

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The cricket season is well and truly on us again and it seems that a century or so ago, the smock frock played its part in the game, although not as a stand in for cricketing whites, even if it might have been suitable, if a little voluminous.

In July 1895, the Dorking and Leatherhead Advertiser reported the death of Isaac Baxter, aged 77, who was the blacksmith for the villages of Beare Greene and Capel Street, working his trade for over fifty years in a smock frock.  He was a renowned cricketer, living opposite the ground, and known for:

The vigour of his batting, as became the wielder of a sledgehammer, and as one of the swiftest over-hand bowlers in the South of England. Demur was frequently made as to whether his was fair bowling, or was throwing.  Eventually the question was submitted to some Surrey County players, who decided that it was fair bowling.  Once it was said his ball knocked a bail a distance of forty yards.

He would have seemed a formidable opponent with his upper body strength!

In 1890, a single wicket match was played in Cranbrook, Sussex, in the dress of ‘ye olden times’, the cricketers wearing ‘box’ hats.  I am not sure what they are, but the umpires had tall white hats and white smock frocks.  The smock frock was the right colour and added a certain gravitas to those charged with keeping order.

The inhabitants of Cranbrook certainly liked their sport.  A year later, Cranbrook Athletic Sports contest was revived after a ten year gap.  Half day holidays were granted by businesses to allow attendance with cheap fares on the railway to Staplehurst too.  Most of the events seem fairly similar to modern athletics competitions including running races, long jump, high jump and a mile bicycle race.  The one which drew my attention, however, was the ‘300 Yards Walking and Smoking Race, the competitors smoking veritable “Churchwarden” clays [pipes], and wearing smock frocks with high hats…Time 1 min. 41secs.’  Dressed similarly to the cricket umpires, I think that that competition might possibly just be frowned upon today and certainly in the context of athletics!

Cricket and smock frocks were also used to entice inhabitants of Chapel Row in Berkshire, to come to the local fair in August 1830.  Cattle were to be bought and sold and men hired for harvest work, but there was also prize money for a cricket match, with hats and smock frocks for good bowling, which might have been appealing to local labourers.

Order was to be kept at the fair with no fighting of any sort allowed though other amusements were provided.  Jingling was apparently a game where players were blindfolded and had to try and catch another who wasn’t but carrying a bell, hence jingling.  And I would love to try a treacled cake.  I haven’t been able to ascertain exactly what these were, but as treacle was a by-product of sugar refinery and this was before golden syrup was invented, I imagine that they were cheap sweet treats for the locals, who would have had very little other sugar in their diets.

chapel row

The Chapel Row Fair is local to me and sadly not on this year.  Maybe next year it will be back – perhaps a revival of jingling and treacled cakes might help!

The White Farm

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Smock frocks came in various colours: blue, green, brown, buff and black, as well as the ubiquitous white we tend to think of smocks as being today.  Their whiteness was a quality appreciated by contemporaries who remarked poetically, for example, about their cleanness, implying a shining whiteness, using adjectives such as ‘snowy whiteness’. Those kept for Sunday best, and thus cared for and so subsequently preserved down the generations for us, tended to be white.  White was the hardest colour to keep true.  The appearance of being clean needed time and therefore money to be achievable.  Smocks were given to women to wash either in the home or to the local laundress for a small fee.  Cleanliness was next to godliness, the clean smock respectable clothing to wear to church, at least at the beginning and end of its path through history.

The idea of this whiteness being taken to extremes caught my attention.  Dating from the 1890s, when smock frocks were starting to be seen as signifiers of a halcyon rural past and craft items themselves, only worn by elderly men in rural southern England, Lord and Lady Alington put on an entertainment for their visitors.  Lord Alington (1825-1904) was a well-known society figure of the day, the 1st Baron Alington of Crichel House, Dorset.  He was a race-horse owner and member of the Jockey Club for over fifty years, as well as MP for Dorchester and was supposedly called by Disraeli, ‘the Champagne of the House’ due to his wit and geniality.

http://www.horseracinghistory.co.uk/hrho/action/viewImage?id=2046

On 10 February 1892, he married for a second time, Miss Evelyn Henrietta Leigh, at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, a fashionable society wedding reported in the pages of the press at the time.

On the 29 August 1893, the Bury and Norwich Post reported that they were entertaining at their country estate for the first time since their marriage.  Their ‘particularly charming Home Farm’ on the estate had been renamed ‘The White Farm’, and everything was white including the buildings and decorations.  The men and women running the farm wore white smocks or frocks and every ‘beast and bird’ was also white:

From the huge prize bull to the rabbits, cats, and guinea-pigs, of four-footed creatures, and even the poultry all are white.  The prettiest thing I saw when there was a baby white donkey and three Persian kittens like snowballs.

The elaborate amusement was complete down to the last detail, including the snowy white smock frocks.  It was not noted in the report who was entertained then but the Prince of Wales and his daughter, Princess Victoria, certainly visited the estate at a later date, as seen in photographs at:

http://www.martinstown.co.uk/WEBSITE/king.htm

http://www.martinstown.co.uk/WEBSITE/OBJECTS/STURTPICS/GUESTS/keppel.htm

The excesses and extravagance of the White Farm are almost paradoxical to the very notion of white as a symbol of simplicity and purity. The entertainment seems to be a show of aristocratic fin de siècle exuberance in countryside where the smock frock had once been commonly worn. Located on the edge of Cranborne Chase in Dorset, its landscape was also part of the setting for Thomas Hardy’s novels, where the smock frock put in an occasional appearance.

As a footnote, the Crichel Estate gave its name to a set of planning procedures known as the ‘Crichel Down Rules’, established post-World War II.  These set out guidelines for landowners when government compulsory purchase of land is undertaken, the after-effects of land usage during the Second World War.  See:

http://thecountryseat.org.uk/2011/06/28/for-sale-a-landmark-for-landowners-crichel-house-dorset/

Cornish Smocks

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Over Easter I went to St Ives, Cornwall, staying in the aptly named cottage ‘Labour in Vain’.  I was very pleased to find on the harbour front, the ‘smock shop’, less pleased to find it was the maritime and fishing version, rather than that of the agricultural labourer.  Nevertheless, it was quietly thrilling to walk past such a retail establishment every day and come to terms with the fact that I am perhaps not the only one obsessing over smocks, be they of different varieties.

DSC08299

I even found the shop reproduced on one of Poppy Treffry’s fantastic quirky print tea towels.  As I spend most of the my life at the moment searching for the words ‘smock shop’ in a nineteenth century context, a sliver of excitement was definitely there!

Of course the word smock also has connotations for the artist, particularly those who settled in of St Ives.  Using local fishermen’s smocks as protective overalls – they were strong, durable and washable, the artist’s smock has become a whole different subsection of the smock genre.  The sculptor Barbara Hepworth made her home in the town and her smocks hang alongside her unfinished work in her workshop, now a Museum.  Today fishermen and sailors seem to favour the waterproof all-in-one, although this comment is just from observation so please let me know if amiss.  I am neither a sailor nor a fisherman – only a smock obsessive!

DSC08347

http://www.poppytreffry.co.uk/shop-by-category/homewares/tea-towels/st-ives-tea-towel.html