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From Fieldwork to the Pages of Vogue

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Further to my last post, my new article has just been published in the journal Textile History (May 2018).  This traces how the smock frock moved from being  a nineteenth century utilitarian overall worn by male manual labourers and particularly associated with agricultural work, to appearing on the front cover of American Vogue as an item of female clothing in 1915.  It discusses how the smock was used by artists, particularly those associated with the aesthetic and rational dress movements, and the influence that the smock had on children’s wear at the end of the nineteenth century.

figure 2

The importance of the actress Ellen Terry and her daughter Edith Craig in the transformation of the smock into a piece of women’s wear is investigated and also the garment’s influence on American fashion.  The smock frock, once a marker of a male manual labourer, managed  to bridge the gap between high fashion and workwear, and also menswear and womenswear, and become part of mainstream fashion, the shape perennially revived ever since the early twentieth century. The impact of the smock on children’s wear has also been significant, witness Princess Charlotte’s dress when she was photographed visiting her new baby brother just last week. How and why these changes happened are what my article seeks to at least start answering, and how a garment associated firmly with one particular gender can be transformed into something altogether more fluid.  This started off as a sideline to my main research but has turned out to be a fascinating subject in itself and the more I investigate, the more I find!

There are some free e-copies of my article for those who want to know more and get there first, link below:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/tTXs7jRuPhiGC4mZEHuU/full

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Artist’s Smock

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For those with messy jobs, an overall has always been necessary, to prevent other clothes from getting dirty.  The smock frock was one such overall.  However, the artist’s smock has almost become legendary in its own right, with its Bohemian vibe and association with artists’ enclaves such as St. Ives, although here also mixed with the maritime smock.  Whilst these garments have often been plain and voluminous, an oversized shirt if you will, as we used to use our Dad’s cast-off shirts as a cover-up for art at primary school in the 1970s, the smock frock was also used for this purpose by artists.

As they became increasingly mass-produced in the second-half of the nineteenth century and therefore cheap, artists could acquire them easily and inexpensively.  In 1893, George Frederick Watts, displayed a portrait of a youth in a ‘smock-frock’, according to the Graphic. Art historians have seen this as an earlier self-portrait of the artist as a younger man.  In the later years of his life, he was described as busying himself with artistic pursuits at his home Limnerslease, near Guildford, wearing white trousers and a white smock.  Part of his house is now the Watts Studios museum.  Mary Watts, his second wife, was also photographed wearing an embroidered smock frock while plastering ceiling panels for Limnerslease in 1890-3.

The sculptor, Hamo Thornycroft, was another well-known artist wearer of the smock frock.  As the Pall Mall Gazette reported in 1890, ‘He invariably dons a white smock frock of the pattern associated with village rustics, and his clay be-daubed hands complete the resemblance’. Vanity Fair published a drawing of him as part of its ‘Spy’ series, wearing such an outfit. It was dated February 20th 1892 and entitled ‘Bronze Statuary’, in the ‘Men of the Day’ series.

figure 4

So whilst every artist would wear some kind of overall, by the late nineteenth century the smocking on the smock frock, whether handmade or mass produced, also appealed on another level to many artists interested in dress reform and less restrictive clothing. Watts and Thornycroft were members of the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union, Thornycroft designing a partially smocked and less restrictive Liberty silk dress for his wife, dating from around 1885, now in the V & A Museum.

thornycroft dress

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O13850/dress-unknown/

The hand-crafted feel with embroidered embellishment similarly appealed to those working in the Arts and Crafts movement, such as Arthur Stone (1847-1938), a silversmith born in England but who worked in the USA.  His smock was hand embroidered with a dragon holding a chisel.

stone smock

http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/artists-smock-125700

By the early twentieth century, the smock had become fashionable informal wear for women, a protective overall for gardening, housework and artistic pursuits.  The move to become an acceptable female garment rather than something worn by male labourers was due to its artistic and dress reform associations.

For further on this subject see: ‘The Smock Frock: The Journey from Fieldwork to the Pages of Vogue’, Textile History, online or May 2018.

Smock Racing

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From the medieval period until the eighteenth century, the smock was a female under-garment, worn next to the skin to help preserve expensive outer garments.    The smock could be elaborately embellished with embroidery, a practice still carried out in the Elizabethan period.  The lady of the house usually worked the embroidery on the collar, hem and neckline, and round the bottom of the long sleeves, Queen Elizabeth having hers embroidered with caterpillars and birds. The term smock was superseded by the shift and then the chemise, all essentially the same garment.

IMG_20171121_120440_928

This is a rare example, dated 1580-1600, displayed recently in the ‘Lace in Fashion’ exhibition at the Fashion Museum in Bath, embellished with embroidery and Flemish bobbin lace.

 

A letter from a lady, May Kensington, in 1888, noted the smock races held in Mayfair during the reign of Queen Anne, when young girls would race for an elaborate smock or chemise.  This tradition seems to have continued throughout the eighteenth century.  In an account of ‘rural sports’ in Margate in 1808, the whole event was slightly ridiculed by the reporter.  The prizes were paraded through the town on a triangular pole before the sports started at noon, a typical showing of the prizes. Over a thousand people of ‘all ranks and descriptions’ attended. The ladies race, ‘under 60’ for a new Holland chemise, only had one entrant, a fisherman’s daughter, despite the fact that the prize was advertised as being equivalent to a fashionable gown and petticoat.  The amusements were directed by those of ‘a superior class’, the day passing generally with ‘fun and good humour’.  Parson Woodeforde’s diaries describe watching  a smock race in 1784 in Norfolk for Whitsun festivities, and rural sports such as races in a variety of ways, three-legged or wheelbarrow for instance, remained important events in the annual calendar.  During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it seems to have been not uncommon for girls and women to run and race, with even specialist female runners developing.  Locally, the names of those who were good at running were well-known for the annual and occasional events where races were held.  However, women were increasingly sidelined from participation from the early nineteenth century onwards.

Female races were increasingly seen as risqué, the women running in just their shift or other garments which allowed freedom of movement, so that they were showing off their bodies.  Decency and respectability were more important than winning a prize and it was therefore difficult to get participants.  However, men continued to run and, during this period, the smock also became associated with masculine attire, developing into a garment with a different usage.

Rowlandson’s 1811 print, shows such female racing:

rowlandson

A country seller?

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By the 1870s, the smock frock was seen as old-fashioned and associated with the countryside.  In the increasing urban sprawl of the late nineteenth century, the unspoilt countryside was looked upon with both nostalgia and as a source of purity.  To many town dwellers, those who lived there had better lives with fresh air and wholesome food, although the realities could be very different.  The smock became linked with the nostalgia that many urban dwellers had for their rural childhoods and the naturalness of the countryside.  It was a garment that could thus also be used to good effect by conmen.  In newly appearing suburbs, ‘the countryman’ often appeared dressed in a ‘snowy’ white smock frock to sell his home grown produce to unsuspecting housewives. In 1879, one purported to sell cheese and butter homemade by his wife.  Tasting the cheese, so as not to be duped, the housewife found that she had a bargain, the ignorant countryman selling his cheese for nine pence a pound instead of a shilling charged in the shops.  The deal was struck, the countryman disappeared and the buyer was left with a cheese that when unwrapped for supper was ‘hot and dry and rank flavoured’ and not at all what she had tasted on the doorstep.  The plug used to take the sample was tampered with, the good cheese placed at the end, so it appeared that the ‘rank’ cheese was being honestly tasted.  The butter too, was likely to have been tampered with, genuine butter cased over the filling of something else altogether.

Despite the Food Adulteration Acts of 1872 and 1875, food tampering continued, then as now, playing on consumer anxieties both about retailers and food producers and the sense of vulnerability and lack of control when not in charge over your own food production.  ‘Bad’ food became a preoccupation of Victorian reformers during much of the nineteenth century, spearheaded by the medical journal, The Lancet, and given publicity by magazines such as Household Words, run by Charles Dickens.  The desire for a bargain and to eat good food cheaply, was a preoccupation then as today, and without enforced regulations, the question of honesty and trustworthiness were paramount.  Some frauds were relatively benign but others were outright dangerous, such as sulphate of lime and alum in flour and sulphuric acid and lead in vinegar.  Meat too, could come from indistinguishable sources and indeterminate animals.  The appearance and manner of a seller was all there was to enable a judgement of somebody’s trustworthiness.  The smock frock was a useful tool to suggest honesty with its rural associations, even if in reality, the countryman’s ‘dairy farm [was]…situated in a back street in the rural regions of Whitechapel’.

 

 

A Gang of ‘Thimble Men’

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As the smock frock was so widely worn by working men, it could be a useful disguise for swindlers and criminals.  The game of thimblerig was one such scheme used by gangs who roamed the country to try and gain money, especially in the early 1830s.  1834 seems to have been a particularly bad year for this.  The game was, and is, well-known, the thimblerigger using sleight of hand to move balls or pellets or peas about under three cups or thimbles and asking the spectator to bet on where the final location was.

Around Wolverhampton, a gang of nine men were using nut shells instead of thimbles, the ‘sharpers’ [or swindlers] always winning.  Each played a part and dressed in appropriate clothing to draw people in to participate.  The ‘actors’ wearing smocks tried their luck and, having won, drew in the real customers, who, of course, lost.  A similar gang  were ensnaring people on the remote fell road between Durham and Gateshead, the gang variously dressed as a pedlar, a fashionable man, a sailor and a carter in a smock frock.  Engaging people they thought might be trapped in conversation, and telling tales about how they had just lost, or just won, at thimblerig, they would lead the unwary to the game where they were inveigled to join in.  There were tales of people losing all they had in just a few minutes.  One tea hawker, a man who travelled around remote areas selling tea door to door, often to people who did not have other access to such provisions, lost twelve sovereigns [a gold coin with a value of one pound] in six minutes, the proceeds of his sales which he was taking back to his employer in Newcastle.

Race courses were another forum for this trickery, a report about a very similar gang working the crowd at Chelmsford Races in July 1833 with a stock of characters from ‘a Bond Street exquisite’ to a labourer in a smock frock, acting as procurers and decoys, resulting in hundreds of people being ‘plundered’ of their cash.  It was obviously a situation which continued, William Frith depicting the fraud in his monumental painting of Derby Day, 1856-8, in the Tate Gallery.

thimblerigg

The newspaper reports connected the gangs with other criminal behaviour from pick pocketing to living with prostitutes, but it was a ruse that clearly continued to be worthwhile, the smock frock playing its part in the deception, helping to define people by their dress, in this case wrongly!

All the fun of the fair

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The annual Michaelmas Fair has just finished in our nearest town and although it is now all dodgems, haunted houses, terrifying rides to take you up into the air and drop you, flashing lights and loud music, such fairs follow a long tradition and were an important part of, and release from, the working calendar for labourers.

A report about a fair in May 1857 in Boston, Lincolnshire, was printed in the Stamford Mercury.  Held over several days, there were prizes for farm animals, cattle, sheep and pigs, which were also bought and sold.  Alongside the serious business was the pleasure fair, Wombwells, well-known for their travelling menagerie, presenting an exhibition of exotic animals and Chipperfields offering a circus.  A pig weighing 105 stone was displayed, which was nine feet long and insured for 150 pounds.  Other attractions were listed: ‘performing monkeys and dogs, knowing ponies, ‘industrious fleas’, twin calves, giants in smock frocks to make them look bigger, microscopic and stereoscopic exhibitors…a host of photographers’, which, of course, was still relatively novel.  Music and theatre were also an important part as was the slight edge – pick pocketing was rife and ‘suspicious characters’ ever present.

menagerie

Many of the patrons of the fair would have worn smock frocks, as seen also at York Fair above, Lincolnshire a county which contained several smock frock manufacturers and known as a place where they were frequently worn.  At the fair, they were used as a disguise to help the ‘giants’, their capaciousness no doubt helping to disguise some trickery.  They were probably used by the criminal fraternity too, both to help mingle inconspicuously in the crowd in order to pick pockets, as well as being useful for hiding any stolen property in their large pockets or just underneath.  Poachers, for example, in the same period used them to hide hares, birds and other animals from detection. Deception and disguise fully in action.

http://www.georgewombwell.com/

 

 

 

Harvest Wages

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Two sides of those engaged in nineteenth century farming are sharply contrasted by an article that appeared in the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette in September 1826.  It centred on the activities of the second Lord Huntingfield around the village of Huntingfield, in the county of Suffolk.  With George III nicknamed ‘Farmer George’ for his interest in farming and agriculture, and Thomas Coke, the first Earl of Leicester at Holkham Hall, Norfolk, known as a reformer of agricultural practices, an interest in farming, both arable and pastoral, was not unusual for the landed aristocracy.

Joshua Vanneck, Lord Huntingfield, was a Tory MP until 1819, although by 1826, ‘he had given himself up to such occupations’ as a farmer, cattle dealer and cattle doctor as his main interests, and for whom, it was said, he might easily be mistaken in his appearance.  He sold his own cattle and corn, riding his horse up to Smithfield in London for a day to attend the sale of his cattle.  He rode about the fields of his estate and inspected his farms, ‘to see what the men are about’, taking an interest in ‘his farming concerns’.

However, although his interest in his land was admirable as was his keenness to reform agricultural practices and animal breeding for example, like many of the elite, there seems to have been less focus on his workers and the often abysmal living conditions for agricultural labourers and their families. The correspondent noted forty or fifty agricultural labourers in their smocks or red sleeved waistcoats, standing still outside Huntingfield Hall, a Georgian mansion in Gothick style,  on a Sunday morning, during ‘church time’, that is between 11 and midday.  When enquiring in the village why they were there at that particular time, he realised that the men were settling up for their harvest work.  Those in the village were anxiously awaiting their return with the money to pay off bills to shopkeepers and other tradesmen. Harvest pay at this time of year was perhaps the best pay packet of the year, and could relieve debt and set families up for the winter.  As the correspondent noted, ‘I mention this to show how closely run the poor agricultural labourers appear to be’.  Harvest pay was more important than church attendance. There was no room for error or mishaps in the household economies of labourers, and harvest wages kept everything going.  Without them absolute poverty was likely.

Playing at being a farmer with the thrill of riding to London and back in a day with a relay of horses was all very well, but for the smock frocked agricultural labourer who did the day to day hard manual labour for Lord Huntingfield, harvest wages were necessary for survival or there was the very real threat of going hungry.

Saving the day…

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Reports in nineteenth century newspapers often blamed the smock frock for a catalogue of ills, from becoming caught in machinery and wheels, so causing accidents, to hiding identities and often criminal activity.  However, there are some examples of smock frocks saving the day.  Their capacious nature, although dangerous near machinery, could save life in other circumstances.

In 1841, an early train journey was being made between Duffield and Belper in Derbyshire, a year after the North Midland Railway Company opened the line and the same year that the first station was built at Duffield.  Train carriages were not totally enclosed during this period, especially for those not in first class, and the hat of a man dressed in a smock frock making the journey blew off.  Despite the pleas of fellow passengers, he also jumped from the train to recover his hat, which certainly had some monetary value as well as being an object of personal significance.  The train was travelling at the heady speed of around thirty miles per hour and therefore ‘it is a mercy that he was not dashed to atoms’.  Perhaps the wind caught in his smock frock skirts may have helped break his fall.

Apocryphal tales of skirts acting as parachutes during a fall, including smock frocks, were not unheard of in the nineteenth century press.  In 1904, a story was told of two boys who climbed to the top of a church tower in Derby to get to a bird’s nest.  They fought over the nest and fell off the tower in the struggle.  Both wearing smock frocks, they fell like a ‘parachutist’ does from his balloon and both survived.  Although the journalist in 1904 found this an unlikely tale and would not attempt to climb the tower and pinnacles himself in a smock frock unless also with ladders and a rope, the locals had the ‘utmost confidence in this legend’!

A smock frock also saved the day in an encounter with a wolf which was thought to have escaped from a travelling menagerie in 1846.  It had entered the cottage of woman in Redmarley in Gloucestershire, after the woman had left her young children there.  Attacked by the family cat which was killed by it, the wolf went back outside to eat the cat, thus saving the children who locked themselves inside.  Two men were travelling to Ledbury Fair, and obviously had some undisclosed connection to the family, as they wanted to leave their smock frocks at the cottage before going onto the fair.  The fair was an opportunity to show off to peer groups and have a good time.  The working smock frock did not seem to cut it on the sartorial front.  Approaching the cottage, the wolf was found guarding the front door and they were able to kill it with a hastily obtained pitchfork and pike.  Without the need to take off their smock frocks causing the men to stop there, the wolf may have killed more than the cat, as it seemed to have been hungry and in poor condition.

Strange oddities from the nineteenth century press, each giving small insights into how ordinary people lived and felt about their clothing.

An Encounter with William Gladstone

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In June 1891, William Gladstone, the former prime minister and in opposition until the following year, paid a visit to Holmbury St Mary, near Dorking in Surrey.  He attended church on Sunday, whilst staying as a guest of fellow politician, E. F. Leveson-Gower, whose family had first built a country house in the village in 1860 and had done much to promote the area as a country retreat for the wealthy but within easy travelling distance of London by railway.

In a report which appeared in several newspapers, on leaving church Gladstone was ‘accosted by a local carrier, attired in a smock frock’.  The carrier shaking hands with him,  ‘ventured a few remarks upon the poor-law out-relief system’, it would appear in much the same way that members of the public are now occasionally able to ambush electioneering politicians about various causes.  Gladstone had become more liberal over the course of his career, the investigative journalist, W T Stead summing this up in 1892:

At home his chief exploits have been the reform of the tariff, the establishment of Free Trade, and the repeal of the paper duty. He was the real author of the extension of the franchise to the workmen of the towns, and the actual author of the enfranchisement of the rural house holder. He established secret voting, and agreed to give effect to the Tory demand for single-member constituencies. It was in his administration that the first Education Act was passed, and that purchase in the Army was abolished. He has done his share in the liberation of labour from the Combination Laws, in the emancipation of the Jews, and in the repeal of University Tests.

W. T. Stead (The Review of Reviews, vol. V, May, 1892) p. 453.

The G.O.M., as the newspaper referred to him, that is the ‘Grand Old Man’, was seen as a friend of the working man in the days before the Labour Party, both in the town and country.  The carrier, emboldened by his first contact, and acting against type as a stupid, boorish smock-frock wearer, then wrote a letter to Gladstone outlining his ideas on the out-door relief system and the incumbent government proposals on it.  Delivering it to the house where Gladstone was staying, he also gave some home-made butter to Mrs Gladstone.

Both the letter and the butter were acknowledged by Mrs Gladstone, but nothing was heard from the G.O.M. himself, the newspaper reports suggesting that maybe he had run out of his postcards.  Gladstone was a well-known user of postcards and many survive from his hand. Growing in popularity since the Newspaper Postage Bill of 1870, postcards were at first seen as ridiculous, having no privacy, insulting in their briefness to the receiver, and debasing the art of letter writing with their necessary brevity.  For Gladstone, the economy of both the space and the cost seemingly appealed to him and he used them widely.  The Times reported on the history of the postcard on 1 November 1899, noting that Gladstone had ‘made countless numbers happy by the receipt of a card bearing his well-known writing’.  Thus by the end of the nineteenth century, they were seen as ‘most useful’ and ‘indispensable’, the text messages of their day perhaps?  The newspaper report in 1891 remarked somewhat sardonically about this encounter in Surrey however, that Gladstone ‘ought to have sent his customary postcard giving his views on butter-making’ to the carrier.  Although a swipe at Gladstone, it also perhaps, backhandedly, re-enforced the view for newspaper readers about those wearing smock frocks – they would understand comments about butter making, not Gladstone’s answer to a query about poor law proposals, despite evidence to the contrary.

 

http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/reviews/glad2.php

 

The Smock Frock Martyr

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In 1861, the Berkshire Chronicle reported on the case of the so-called ‘Smock Frock Martyr’.  William Winkworth was first in the service of Mr King in Beedon, a small village in Berkshire, where he was convicted for not attending church.  It would seem that he was a non-conformist, as after his conviction, he was then taken to ‘a chapel in Fetter Lane’, which would appear to be the Moravian Chapel in London, a church founded in the mid-eighteenth century which had a strong influence on Methodism.  Winkworth was paraded in his smock frock and ‘rustic clothing’, looking clean, tidy and healthy, and creating ‘much interest’.  He was a rural non-conformist martyr against the Church of England, omni-present and a powerful influence in rural villages.

Sometime afterwards, at a Michaelmas hiring fair, he was taken on by Mr Freemantle of Kingsclere in Hampshire, as a yearly servant.  However, a couple of months into his contract, he ‘absquatulated’ into Berkshire, where he was soon caught and brought before the magistrates.  Absquatulate is a very mid-19th century word, a blending of abscond, squattle ‘squat down’, and perambulate, put together to simulate Latin, an American fad which had developed from the 1830s.  This fad of inventing playful Latinesque words included discombobulate, more common today.  Behaving with ‘considerable cheek’ towards the police, he was then fined nine shillings by the magistrates for this misdemeanour, probably at least a week’s worth of wages. However, ‘he promised to behave better in the future’, and expressed great penitence for his actions.  The newspaper report was censorious of his activities though, and of his position as a non-conformist ‘martyr’ and ‘victim to intolerance’, with his ‘breach of one of the most obvious moral duties – that of keeping an engagement and working honestly for …[his] daily bread’.

His moral character was again questioned with his actions back with Mr Freemantle where he carried out disruptive working practises, presumably to highlight his situation of not being able to leave his position.  He stopped his plough seven times in one day to light and smoke his ‘short’ pipe. He also did everything to ‘annoy his fellow-labourers and Mr Freemantle’.  When Freemantle questioned him about this he answered supposedly in an insolent manner.  Freemantle went to Newbury Fair for the day leaving his carter to spy on Winkworth for him.  He said that Winkworth had sat by the hedge four times that day to smoke his pipe. Of course, this was before the days of regulated working days and stipulated breaks.

For this troublesome behaviour, Freemantle prosecuted him in court in Winchester, where Winkworth was found guilty and sentenced to a month in gaol.  This early example of working to rule was supposedly caused by Freemantle under paying by a shilling the wages he had agreed with Winkworth when he hired him, a charge that Freemantle denied.  Winkworth’s character was once more questioned by the newspaper which speculated that his celebrity as the ‘smock frock martyr’ may have made rural life too ‘slow’ for him, while querying the non-conformist choice of a man to stand up for their rights who frequently seemed to end up before the magistrates and in gaol.  Whatever the truth of the matter, it is an interesting tale of conflicting religious practices, the difficulty of work contracts for rural labourers, and possibly personality clashes, hung on the yoke of the smock frock.