Figure 1.--
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Figure 1.-- |
Some interesting details are available on specific families as well
as articles from fashion magazines. We have also added some historical accounts as well as published memoirs. We have also included named portraits, even though there is often little information available. HBC's English readers are encouraged to provide HBC information about their personal experiences or historical accounts with which they are familiar. These personal accounts add greatly to the other information HBC has garnered from fashion magazines, catalogs, and available images. Often the personal perspective is not avialable from these other sources. Thus these personal accounts are a very important part of HBC.
HBC has commpiled a list of 1940s experiences from both literary sources and accounts provided by readers. These include both war-time accounts of life on the home front as well as well as life in post-war England where economic conditions were still difficult.
Film star Micahel Caine or Maurice as he was then called at the time was evacuated from London during World War II. He was not well treated and his mother had to resuce him.
Diana Mitford, one of the noted Mitford sisters (Nancy, Unity, Diana, Deco, and ???). Diana had two sons, Alexander and Max. A 1941 photograph image here
shows the two boys and their nanny. Alexander is about 2.5 years and Max, 14 months. Alexander wears a very short dresses without socks and the strap
shoes or sandals which were commonly worn by British boys for school or summer play wear. The ones for boys almost always had the center "T" bar or two double straps. Only girls and very small boys wore the Mary Jane style single strap. Alexander does not appear to be wearing a smock, but rather a dress like a small girl might wear. Max's outfit is harder to make out, but he looks more like a gender-less baby rather than a little girl. Dresses for boys had passed out of fassion after World War I, but small boys in Europe were still sometimes dressed in dresses or more commonly smocks as late as the 1950s. This was especially true of artistocratic and wealthy families. Wealthy children raised by nannies were often still often dresses in traditional clothes and because they had limited contact with other children, there clothing could sometimes be different than the mainstream fashions worn by most boys from less affluent families. This often changed abruptly when the boys at about 8 years old wre sent off to their boarding preparatory schools.
Harry Smith remembers his and his brother's evacuation in 1939 and living away from his mum as an evacuee in the early 1940s.
Here we will add brief accounts that we acquire that are not detailed enough for a full page. Readers are encouraged to sibmit more detgailed accounts, but it is not necessary if they prefer just to send along brief sniptes that we will archive here.
I was a wartime child and well remember some of the odd clothes I was made to wear as I was growing up during the 1940s and 50s. Clothes rationing was in force
and therefore appropriate dress was not always easy to find or afford. Thinking back to those long distant days I suppose my parents did a good job in clothing us
children in very difficult circumstances--at least we had something to wear.
I was born in 1939. I don't know whether it was the austerity of the War period and the time after the war when materials were still not available or whether it was
simply that boys were still boys and not 'young men'. Today we seem to go out of our way to make boys them seem older--in my view, todays' modern fashions are simply a way to get them to spend more on clothes and other fashion accessories. The market rules not parents.
I want to thank you for your splendid web-site, especially for the pages dealing with corduroy which I remember wearing as a boy. They were available in many glorious colors. I also had a cord bomber jacket. I remember that my first pair of long trousers were cords. The cords I wore as a boy have now been replaced with denim. Corduroy is still available, but the quality is not a patch on the corduroy that was around i the 1940s and 50s.
HBC readers interested in 1940s Britain may want to look at the actual recreation of a 1940s house, one in a series of television programs aimed at showing real people trying to live in an actual period house and funishings and dressing in 1940s style homes.
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