history of the home

In the Neolithic Village

/ Caron Allan

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you will have seen this one before… I do quite often repeat myself. Mainly because I know anyone who has already seen it will either have forgotten it by now, or will be happy to gloss over it once more, but there will be many people who (hopefully) won’t have seen it yet.

Recently I’ve been digging out photos and other pictures for posting on Pinterest – it’s one of my favourite platforms, as I’m a very visual person, I am inspired by what I see. And during this digging out process I found some more photos I took years ago when we went to Skara Brae, in Orkney, an island group off the north coast of Scotland.

Seeing those houses had been a goal of mine since I watched that iconic Simon Schama documentary A History of Britain, and I had to see it for myself. It’s not often something inspires me to that extent, but that really did. And because I a) love people and b) love history, I wanted to see a place where those two things met. And where so gloriously stunning as the neolithic village Skara Brae, unearthed during a violent storm in 1850, it was last inhabited four thousand years before that. This glorious place set my imagination on fire, and I concocted this short story…

The corridors linking the houses are dark, black-dark, and yet the children run back and forth giggling and jostling as children have always done. They barely pause in their running as the corridors narrow or curve. They laugh in and out of the houses, running amongst the groups, tribes, families. Outside, beyond the house, the sea and the wind roar, and strange creatures prowl the earth. But not in here.

In the houses themselves, the central hearth is the main light and although bright enough to prepare the food by, the illumination doesn’t reach to the farthest parts of the room where the animals are safely housed against thick stone walls. But their soft noises and comfortable smells lull the elders who sit by the fire and prod the embers or stir the cooking-pot by turns.

Soon the eye becomes accustomed to the dimness and it is possible to see not just vague shapes but the shapes of the bodies of the cattle in their pens, or the shapes of the drawings in the sand of the fireside floor, the simple outlines that accompany the story that is being told. A half-grown child, listening to the stories with wide eyes is given instructions and items of interest, are brought from the dresser to the one who speaks, who holds each thing up for all to see and recounts all that is known, the history of the item, the way it happened to be found or created, all that makes it special is told now to those who are gathered. They’ve heard it before. Even last night but still they all look and a discussion takes place, even the child speaks. He will be a fine man one day soon. They look on him with pride. One day, he will be the teller of stories.

The food is passed round, grain and meat and fish and coarse bread, flat and hot from the stones by the fire. Everyone eats and there is a strange hush over those in the house for a time. There is a ritual about eating. There is a ritual about being in the safety of a warm and solid home with the cattle and the fire. This is what it means to be at home.

It is evening, the day draws to a close and everyone is gathered in the safe warmth of the roundhouse, and nearby, there are other houses, with other people gathered, and the children are the running link between them. More stories are told, more conversation and discussion over the nature of the stars and their brightness, of the tides of the sea, of the path of the moon who guides the hunters and blesses the crops.

And over the way, along the dark tunnel then out into the air, in another similar house, the ancestors listen and smile as the brightness of the moon creeps in.

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Zips vs Buttons: The 30s: what were they like? Part 2

/ Caron Allan / 1 Comment

Welcome back to my foray into the 1930s. If you are over a certain age, the 1930s actually doesn’t really feel like an historical era but, you know, our mums’ and dads’ time, it feels ‘recent’. So it’s very easy to forget the massive changes and events that shaped, not just the 30s, but our own current era. I’m trying to give a little bit of the flavour of life in the 1930s in Britain.

This week I want to say something about technology, and about fashion. In some ways the two are inter-related. The zip? If you’ve never thought of that as a technological breakthrough—think again.

Can you imagine having no zips at all on your clothes? Trousers: buttoned or elasticated. Jeans ditto. Skirts, ditto. Jackets, jumpers, dresses… How would you close a long dress? Immediately any garment has got to be wide enough to admit either your hips or your shoulders, or depend entirely on button-type closures. Not that women habitually wore trousers in the 1930s, and jeans were very much an American work garment.

There was a reason men wore those long coats…

In fact the zip had been invented way back in the 1850s but in spite of lots of interest and various refinements of the design, it only became widely used in the early part of the twentieth century for boots, or for survival and specialist protective gear, and it wasn’t until the 1930s that it began to be used first for babies’ and children’s clothing, then for men’s trousers in place of the button fly. French fashion designers raved over its convenience, and emphasised that it had the benefit of preventing “The possibility of unintentional and embarrassing disarray”. (When I was a kid, public loos still had a notice just inside the exit reminding gentlemen to check they were ‘properly dressed’ before leaving the premises.) From there, due to the convenience and the ability to follow smooth lines, it came into the women’s and general clothing applications we know and love today.

Fashion was also the prisoner of technology with regard to laundering. Artificial fabrics had been around for a while, but were often confined to small items of clothing, or occasional items such as evening dresses or accessories, to avoid the need for frequent washing, due to their relative delicacy compared to natural fibres. Rayon and artificial silk required special laundering care, so it helped to have a maid with nothing better to do than to carefully iron your dainties.

Country wear for the well-to-do, especially for outdoor pursuits, was often tweeds by day, which were hard-wearing natural fibres, easy to launder—if you had a maid and somewhere to hang the garments to dry—and the pattern was great for disguising spills and light spatters (presumably blood from all the hunting…or maybe fish guts?). The colonies were still very much the mainstay of British textiles, with silk and cotton coming in from all over Asia, and the United States, either as fabric or as raw material to be made into fabric for the garment trade located in the Midlands and North. Hollywood’s glamorous influence on lifestyles meant that there was a greater demand for variety in fabric and in styles, and most women made the garments for themselves and their families at home, often completely by hand.

Very few households in Britain had washing machines in the 1930s, and tumble dryers were just a pipedream. Everything had to be washed by hand and dried naturally. The washboard and mangle (or you might prefer, wringer), were still depended upon as the main artificial aid to laundering.

But by the 1930s, with the exception of the very poor or very remote, the majority of British households had electricity. The National Grid was set up in 1934 to bring together all the separate private electric producers and their varying tariffs. In addition to this, manufacturing processes had been refined. The Great Depression hit American factory production, but in spite of this, the 1930s saw the increase of the household appliance: vacuum cleaners, washing machines, fridges, central heating for the well-off, electric cookers, and so forth began to be desirable objects. There were also home-grown manfacturers such as Ewbanks of Accrington, Lancashire, still in production today. The marketing of their products was aimed at women, who were advised to ‘talk it over with your husband’. The advertisers promised a new standard of cleanliness and efficiency. The emphasis was on keeping up with the times, being seen to be ‘modern’ and scientific, and the promise of making the drudge of domestic duties ‘simple’. For the many middle- and upper-class families who’d lost most of their ‘help’ to the better paying factories, these items were very much the must-haves of the generation.

If you think this gave women more time to chat on the phone, well… yes I suppose it did. Many middle class and upper class homes had telephones by the outbreak of the second World War. Households began to have telephones from the 1910s, thought they were often treated with grave suspicion and a certain amount of contempt. But if you think you could just wander from room to room as you chatted, you’d  be wrong. The telephone was fixed in an out of the way place – a back lobby or study, and there you had to go to make your call.

And you couldn’t just dial the person you wanted to speak to. No! Although some areas did have a direct-dialling service, most did not. For most households, well into the 1930s, you had to ring the exchange and ask for a call to be put through to the number you wanted. If dialling out of your own area, you might have to wait for this to be completed. You had time to go off, make a cup of tea, and maybe a sandwich, and then the operator at the exchange would call you back and tell you the connection had been made. There were some automatic exchanges but remember, this was still relatively new technology and there were still many refinements to the system to be made.

Famously, Alexander Graham Bell suggested using the word ‘Ahoy!’ to answer a telephone call, but fortunately Thomas Edison came up with ‘Hello!’ and that remains good enough for most of us. From the exchange though, you might have heard those well-known words, ‘Go ahead, caller, you’re through.’

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