Annette Kuhn
The last blog, “Terrible waste of a brain”, looked at Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain (CCINTB) interviewees’ memories of their schooldays. Although interviewees were not expressly asked about their schooling, the issue sometimes came up when they talked about their early cinemagoing. It also arose on occasion when they were asked how old they were when their full-time education came to an end—about their terminal education age, to use the jargon. Along with a few mentions of school trips to the cinema, there are memories of playground gossip with schoolfriends about films they had seen and of swapping film star photos with friends.
More conspicuous in references to schooling, however, is a thread of memory talk that hints at education having been thwarted or curtailed—mentions of missing out on schooling or being prevented by their circumstances (poverty, a father’s absence or joblessness, say) from taking up educational opportunities. In these instances there is usually an underlying class and/or gender dimension. Very often it is the requirement of a school uniform that is recalled as the principal bar to getting into a “good school”, even where a free place was on offer.
Emerging from some of these accounts, though, is a sense of making the best of what was available to them by way of basic schooling. Also noticeable is a theme, apparent in some female participants’ memories, concerning the channelling of their talents and aspirations into other areas of life. What one participant calls the “clothing aspect” is prominent in these stories.
The clothing aspect is, of course, already present in the school uniform topos. In “Terrible Waste of a Brain”, Glasgow interviewee Nancie Miller’s repeated allusions to schooling and education are touched on. It seems that, although Mrs Miller left school at the earliest possible opportunity, she had not only received some post-elementary education (“I went up to my big school”), but had also, with her mother’s assistance, managed to surmount the challenge posed by the school uniform rule:
I had to get a trench coat. I had to get a gym tunic, I had to get a white blouse, I had to get a school tie, I had to get a badge, sewn on to the tunic. And we couldn’t afford any of these things. And my mother, I think it would’ve been her own, navy blue set of skirt, opened it up all up, washed it, turned it and made me a tunic, a very nice tunic. So much so, that the teacher asked me where my mother had bought it. She was very clever with her hands. […]. Very clever. It was a lovely tunic and for ages I used it as a skirt. The blouse wasn’t just white, it was kind of creamy and I didn’t like to tell her. The tie should’ve been a silk tie, but the colours were right, but it was a kind of… you’ve maybe seen them in the men’s ties, kind of knitted, silk knitted. […]. Erm I had a velour hat, which we’d to wear, so you see they were so particular, really so particular.[1]
Another kind of uniform-related challenge is remembered by an interviewee who had worked as an usherette and cashier in cinemas in Glasgow during the 1930s, when it was commonplace for public-facing staff to wear uniform. Sheila McWhinnie recalls that although a uniform was a requirement of the job, she had to meet most of its cost out of her wages:
At seventeen and sixpence was what you got for a wage, you’d to buy your own black dress, and what they supplied for a uniform was collars out of Woolworths, and say for six or seven usherettes, [the cinema manager] would send someone for seven collars let’s say, and you’d put them on your black dress and that was it! [2]
It is clear from Mrs McWhinnie’s account—she mentions several times in the course of her interview that she was obliged to foot the bill for most of her uniform—that, like the school uniform rule, this was experienced as an imposition.
This feeling surrounding school and workplace uniforms–as an obstacle or an unwarranted expense–stands in the starkest contrast to the ways in which the “clothing aspect” figures in memories of what was to be seen on the cinema screen.
Gracie Fields (centre) in Queen of Hearts (1936)
Quoted in “Terrible waste of a brain” is Manchester interviewee Ellen Casey’s memory of being impressed by the “marvellous dresses” worn by local celebrity Gracie Fields in Queen of Hearts, a film Mrs Casey remembers seeing on a school trip. When talking about her subsequent cinemagoing, she evokes something of the intensity of feeling that films inspired in her:
That’s when I felt on top of the world because I’d see them beautiful dresses and smart clothes! And I used to be, I really, I was absolutely obsessed with it. […] Even them days, the actresses you know. And you see eh Betty Grable and eh, you know, all that were going them days. And the beautiful, they had [shoulder] pads, they had their pads then you know, they had their padding on. They were tight, you know. And erm Bette Davis, and all these beautiful– Aw that was, to me, it was something to see you know. And eh a really erm tch, oh, how can I say? I was, I was really obsessed with it.[3]
The obsession this participant evokes is, in a way, its own pleasure. She knew she could enjoy such loveliness at any time–albeit vicariously–simply by going to the pictures. This feeling clearly goes beyond “beautiful dresses and smart clothes”, though. Such things, as Mrs Casey tells it, clearly stand in for all things “lovely”. She notes that she “would often wonder if, you know, will I be like that, will things get better you know. And you always had visions of being like [people in the films]. You know, seeing them. It was just lovely.” As she speaks, decades on, it is clear that this feeling remains very much alive for her.
I lie in bed now sometimes of a night thinking how thrilled I used to be. And how envious, when I seen all these lovely things and all that. And I thought, I wonder if I ever, you know. I wonder if I ever will get better and sorted out.[4]
These statements are expressions of a longing that is deeper and wider than films or cinema or clothes: a wish that all things “will get better”. The emotional force of these memories of gazing at the “beautiful dresses and smart clothes” in films carries a yearning, and perhaps a hope, for life’s imperfections and troubles to be soothed away
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For other participants, admiration for the beautiful dresses and smart outfits in films could be parlayed into a practical kind of “making do”. Making do is an essentially creative activity, which Michel de Certeau defines as a form of counter-hegemonic production, an art of “using” by “poaching” from the “rationalised, expansionist, centralised, spectacular and clamorous production” with which people are faced.[5]
Glasgow interviewee Mary McCusker recalls a specific act of film-inspired “making do”, citing her mother’s role in bringing a sartorial dream to life. Recollecting The Dolly Sisters, a 1945 Technicolor film starring June Haver and Betty Grable, she exclaims:
Oh! The clothes in it were oh, lovely. And being young, you know, you’re saying, “Oh!” So, I was growing out of this coat. And eh, my mother thought she’d be very practical. And they [Haver and Grable] had come out in this picture with beautiful pale-blue coats with fur. Grey fur muffs, grey fur hats and a big band of grey fur on the bottom of their coat. So here I had this wine-coloured coat and it had black fur on the collar, black fur on the cuffs. And my mother thought, practically, to get another month or two out of the coat, she would buy black fur and put it on the bottom. And I felt like, whoa! [claps and laughs] Whole cheese, right enough! Felt good! [6]
The Dolly Sisters (1945)
Mickie Rivers of Needham Market in Suffolk is among the CCINTB interviewees who say they were unable to continue their education because of the cost of a school uniform. Talking about her cinemagoing as a young woman, she echoes Ellen Casey’s and Mary McCusker’s sentiments about “the clothing aspect” and shares their eye for details of dress and fashion. Leafing through a 1930s film annual, Mrs Rivers exclaims, “Oh but look at the gowns they wore. Wonderful full skirts. Aw!” [7]
She contrasts the plenty (“full skirts”) of the fashions she saw in films with what was available to her as one of five children. “We had so little”, she says. “And like I said before, I had to be taken away from grammar school because my mum couldn’t afford a replacement uniform.” Watching films, she adds, she would “drool and dream”.
. . . But then she would turn daydream into action:
I wonder if I could do that to my old dress? I could do that. You’d see them with a dark dress and a different coloured sash. And you’d got about half a yard of taffeta. And spend all night making a sash. And, do a little bit of trimming somewhere else on the dress, to pick it up. You know. That was all inspirational, weren’t it?
Her mother helped, too:
My mum used to go to jumble sales and come home with a dress, outsize dress, and fit me out of it. Had to. Hadn’t got the money. I used to earn, when I first went to work, I earned seven and sixpence. I had to pay my mother seven shillings a week and buy my stockings out of the sixpence. The cheapest stockings you could buy were ninepence a pair. And they were lisle stockings with an artificial silk covering. And of course you got to want a pair of silk stockings. You went up to one and nine, one and elevenpence [for those].
[…] And then when I got a rise and I went up to ten shillings a week, I had to give my mother eight and buy all my clothes. The fact that my mother had seven shillings a week off me meant she’d go to a jumble sale as I say and buy something. I’d bring it home, unpick it, wash it, turn it, if it was turnable, and remake it. Had to, to have anything to wear.
She recalls that later on,
I got about a dozen sets of underwear, ready, for when I got married. But they’d all been made with bits that I’d cadged ’cause I’d worked in the factory of the… I worked in the office of the factory in Ipswich. And I was friends with Bob the storeman. And he used to give me oddments. […]. And I had to do a panel on a pair of French knickers. Or perhaps I’d go to a sale and there’d be a half a yard of what we called Sparva material. And that would make one half of a pair of pants. And you’d go and buy the other half yard at full price and you’d got, you know, things for next to nothing.[8]
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Ellen Casey’s, Mary McCusker’s and Mickie Rivers’s memory talk embodies a train of thought prompted by, and leading back to, the idea (or rather the feeling-memory) of earnestly desiring something that is beyond your reach.[9]
In Mrs Rivers’s account, especially, cinema comes across as rather more accommodating than the education system as far as “the clothing aspect” (and, in this topos, aspiration) was concerned. Her memory talk–the precise recollection of her wage rises, the careful recording of the pre-decimal cost of different sorts of stockings, the specificity in the naming of fabrics—all suggest that aspirations, longings, inspired by films could succumb to a certain amount of ‘making do’; that, drawing on her own skills and creativity, a young woman could create something stylish and desirable by, and for, herself using whatever materials came to hand–jumble sale castoffs, factory remnants, a scrap of taffeta.
The vividly remembered details are extraordinarily telling in terms of the emotional investment in, the craving to grasp, something more perfect, something over and above the mundane, something that transcends the ordinary, the everyday. They are revealing, too, of pleasure and pride in remembering the resourcefulness of channelling one’s skills and creativity into surmounting obstacles: here by fashioning, through ingeniously upcycling what was available, a stylish outfit out of not very much.
Women like Ellen Casey, Mary McCusker and Mickie Rivers would surely concur with Linda Grant’s dictum that “the only thing worse than being skint is looking as if you’re skint.”[10] “I could do that”, they declare; claiming, perhaps, that this, unlike getting a decent education, was one thing that a smart girl[11] could manage for herself.
With the exception of Nancie Miller’s, the interviews quoted from can be accessed via links on the CMDA website. All Cinema Memory Archive (CMA) items referred to may be consulted in both physical and digital form in the CMA at Lancaster University, by appointment with Special Collections.
If you wish to cite and/or re-use any of CMA materials, please consult the CMDA website for information on copyright and using the materials from the collection and for a citation referencing guide.
[1] Nancie Miller, Glasgow, 17 February 1995. NM-92-014AT001. Cinema Memory Archive.
[2] Sheila McWhinnie, Glasgow, 21 November 1994. SM-92-004AT001. Cinema Memory Archive.
[3] Ellen Casey, Manchester, 31 May 1995. EC-95-182AT001. Cinema Memory Archive.
[4] Ellen Casey, Manchester, 31 May 1995. EC-95-182AT001. Cinema Memory Archive.
[5] Michel de Certeau (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life, trans Stephen Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press): 31; cited in Annette Kuhn (2002). An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: I.B. Tauris): 123.
[6] Mary McCusker, Glasgow, 22 November 1994. MM-92-008AT001. Cinema Memory Archive.
[7] Mickie Rivers, Suffolk, 8 November 1995. MR-95-210AT002. Cinema Memory Archive.
[8] Mickie Rivers, Suffolk, 8 November 1995. MR-95-210AT002. Cinema Memory Archive.
[9] On feeling-memory, see Annette Kuhn (2023). Exploring Cinema Memory (Edinburgh: Argyll Publishing): 101-104.
[10] Linda Grant (2009). The Thoughtful Dresser (London: Virago Press).
[11] Annette Kuhn (2000). ‘Smart girls: growing up with cinema in the 1930s’. In Ib Bondebjerg (ed.), Moving Images, Culture and the Mind. Luton: University of Luton Press): 31-42.