by Lisa Cohen
Madge had been in little contact with her family for ten years after she left home, but sometime in the 1930s the relationship had thawed. Andrew McHarg had given her a loan to help her buy her country house; he considered it a good investment. She had chaperoned her sister, Yvonne, around London and helped her find work. And when Hettie McHarg was diagnosed with cancer on a visit to London, Madge had cared for her until the end. Hettie died in 1938, and Madge buried her at Golders Green cemetery in North London. Now her father was failing: “One can only hope that the end will be peaceful and painless,” Madge wrote to Gerald, still troubled by “the horror” of her mother’s death. She thanked Gerald for contriving with their father to send her about twenty pounds a month, without which, she said, “I don’t know what I would have done.”
The effect of the war on clothing was not only, as she wrote to Gerald, that “nowadays one only wears plain suits & sensible shoes & pretty clothes are unnecessary & never seen.” It was also that fashion became the subject of policy discussions at the highest levels of government. “The news of the clothes rationing” was announced by the Board of Trade on June 1, 1941. The “Utility” cloth and clothing scheme and the subsequent “austerity” regulations were designed to use scarce raw materials carefully and to free labor for enlisted and civilian war work. (“Utility” clothes were those made from so-called Utility fabric; austerity referred to style restrictions on both Utility and non-Utility clothes.) The government was also concerned with ensuring a decent standard of living, to boost morale and prevent resentment in a deprived civilian population—a calculated response to the profiteering that had marred the home front during World War I. The various regulations “to restrict the amount of material used in each garment, to limit the number of models any one firm could create in a year, and to forbid absolutely the manufacture or import of all trimmings” (no more than two pockets and five buttons; no superfluous decoration), seemed to Madge likely to limit trade to such an extent that she would be out of work. Instead, they led to more work, both at Bourne and Hollingsworth and, a year later, for the Board of Trade itself, which asked her to consult on “coupons, clothes, style restrictions,” and more, when it introduced the austerity guidelines. “No salary attached,” she wrote to Gerald, “but interesting & I am quite keen to do it because I really do know so much more about the whole set-up than most of those dear old chaps in the B. o. T.”
With Paris cut off during the war, so the story goes, countries that had depended on French fashion were forced to design their own clothes. “I never thought of buying a hat in London” in the 1930s, Madge said, “which is very odd when you think of it.” It is hardly an overstatement. Charles James’s genius—his passionately sculptural approach to dressing women—moved her. “He had more knowledge of fashion in his little finger than the whole world of couture put together,” she said. But he was unusual and was in any case an American working in London. She supported Hardy Amies, but did not love his clothes. She occasionally wore the designs of Victor Stiebel, who was a friend, and of Digby Morton, who worked to translate men’s tailoring standards to women’s clothing and was known for his adventurous color sense. Otherwise, the perfectionism that characterized men’s tailoring and outfitting in England was absent from women’s dress: “It was always hit and miss,” Madge said. “You bought a pretty dress and perhaps you had your shoes dyed to match.” As for wholesalers, until the war most of them “were backward in styling,” she wrote, “had not sufficiently studied proper methods of sizing, and had relied on showy details to conceal their poverty of cut and fashion.” Now only cut mattered. At first, wartime restrictions required manufacturers only to adhere to certain fabrics; they could make their own choices of pattern and design. But in 1942, the Board of Trade went further and commissioned the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers to design stylish sample models that met the new austerity regulations and were simple to produce. The Board selected the samples most suitable for mass production and had them manufactured. The result was that during the war many ordinary Englishwomen were able to wear well-made clothes for the first time in their lives.
In the 1930s, Madge had helped found and chaired the London Fashion Group (an offshoot of the American Fashion Group), organized to promote English couture by bringing together designers, journalists, and manufacturers. The group also scheduled showings in London the week before the Paris shows—an attempt to make it easier for the powerful American buyers, en route to Paris, to see the work of English designers. It “died a quick death, of course, with the war,” she said, but its work was revived in 1942 by the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers, whose member firms included Stiebel, Amies, Morton, Edward Molyneux, Norman Hartnell, Peter Russell, Bianca Mosca, and Worth of London, for which Elspeth Champcommunal was now head designer. The Board of Trade granted the members of the group various exemptions so they could obtain scarce material to complete couture orders for export to North and South America. Madge worked on some of these export collections, which earned funds for the wartime economy, helped advertise English materials, built prestige for these firms, and kept them going when the luxuries they produced could not be sold in England.
In November 1941, in a letter that took four months to reach Melbourne, she wrote to Gerald: “Uncertainty with regard to all matters, especially one’s job, is a characteristic of all our lives at the moment. My job, thank goodness, continues & I love it for it takes one’s mind off the horrors of the war & keeps one occupied all day…In the meantime the problem of where & how to live is acute.” She was able to sell her country house and in 1942 bought another, in the village of Shoreham, in Kent, on a train line close enough to the city to commute to work. She was proud of this place, a Queen Anne house on the Darent River that was associated with the artist Samuel Palmer in the early nineteenth century, and she cultivated its extensive garden to feed herself and others. Fay Blacket Gill was still in the picture, but Violet Powell, who also lived in Shoreham during the war, remembered Madge complaining about Fay “in the abstract,” saying, “The person I want to come and live with me won’t do it.” Powell also remembered Madge being aggrieved that Fay had a new silk pajama case with her initials embroidered on it, upset both that Fay had made a black market purchase and that she herself could not have these things.
In June 1944, German V-1 bombs began hitting London, flying over Kent on the way, and the skies over Shoreham were nicknamed Bomb Alley. Also known as fly bombs, buzz bombs, and doodle-bugs, these forerunners of the cruise missile were frightening especially because of the way they cut out unexpectedly and went into a steep dive. Madge’s house was “very badly blitzed” that summer. “The fly-bomb fell only 50 yards away,” she wrote to Gerald,
just the other side of the garden wall. That and the river end of the garden are a complete shambles and all the garden side of the house badly damaged and the top floor practically non-existent, roof blown off, walls only skeletons, ceilings down, no windows left, doors blown off etc. All the (to us) all too-familiar damage. Luckily I was not there when it happened and no one was killed so the damage is only material, but what damage!…You know (or more probably you don’t know) what a maniac I am for order and cleanliness…One could do absolutely nothing amid the piles of plaster, glass, torn curtains, smashed china etc. etc. and I had to abandon it and stay in London. A friend who was away lent me a flat and there I had to stay, alone, during the raids, until another friend arranged for me to be a p.g. [paying guest] in Surrey, where the raids were less severe tho’ still noisy sometimes. I finally arranged for removal men to come and take away all removable objects and all curtains and carpets to be cleaned and stored, and I rescued some of my personal belongings…The chaos of my daily life is unbelievable. You see I have clothes in about five different places, (most in my office) have had all my private papers mislaid and a lot lost, so I have no references or addresses, my stores [of food] are still in the bombed house (or I hope they are for they are
beyond price in this rationed country and the result of two years of hard work, growing, pickling, bottling, making preserves etc. etc.) my personal odds and ends are god knows where, one trunk is left at an hotel, another at a friend’s and so forth. Every item of clothing I had in the house had to go to the cleaners…All my work in the garden has gone, the wall blown all over the place, and glass fragments everywhere. The greenhouse and frames ruined, and my crop of tomatoes was really beautiful, all ruined, hundreds of pounds of them—also the melon and eggplant which I was growing for the first time. All the spring planting was ruined, not a leaf left of the bush fruits, apple trees blown away and those left with their apples blown off them. Total disaster.
Through it all, Madge took only two days off from the office, but eventually she became so exhausted that she took sick leave from Bourne and Hollingsworth and went to recuperate in Elspeth Champcommunal’s childhood home on the Isle of Wight. In London, as in Paris, Champco lived with Jane Heap, whose life after she stopped editing The Little Review was devoted to teaching Gurdjieff’s brand of self-improvement. Champcommunal and Heap had been on vacation with Janet Flanner and Solita Solano in the Bavarian Alps when the war broke out. During the Blitz, they left London for the Isle of Wight, then moved to a farm outside London. But in the autumn of 1944, Madge and Champco were lodging together in a club in Grosvenor Street, so as to be able to reach their jobs. Janet Flanner saw them when she returned to Europe for The New Yorker that November. Madge, she reported to Solano, had procured her a pair of warm boots from Bourne and Hollingsworth, and Champco’s fashion sensibility had survived the Blitz: No German “planes in hundreds,” nor the “pyrotechnics” of anti-aircraft fire, nor “incendiaries like Catherine wheels” had dimmed her ardor for clothes. But the scene was grim. In Jane Heap’s words, “The streets were lined with broken glass, like snow swept up in piles…It is as if something came out of hell and blasted and blighted. One wonders where things go—an apartment building is hit and lies on the ground like a small mound of bricks and kindling, no furniture, no bedding, no carpets, nothing, nothing.”
The continued bombing meant that business at Bourne and Hollingsworth was slow. All of Madge’s money—sums that would have been “enough to live in luxury in a pre-war world”—was going toward “living in hotels, friends’ houses and incidental expenses, all in the utmost discomfort and confusion.” The end of the war seemed to be in sight, but thousands of people were in the same position. When friends offered her a room in an unfurnished flat on the top floor of an empty building, she did not relish it. “I never was brave,” she wrote to Gerald, “but four years of raids have considerably diminished my physical resources.” She lived for the last few months of the war in that room, “with rockets and sirens around.” She did not find a home of her own until December 1945.
As manufacturers began thinking about how to reestablish themselves in a postwar world, Madge started consulting for the charismatic owner of the West Cumberland Silk Mills, Miki Sekers, a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant who had made material for parachutes during the war and wanted to move back into fashion. Madge was his entrée, and he went on to commission designs from artists and was one of the first English manufacturers to produce artificial fabrics for high fashion. Madge had kept up with innovations in textiles in the United States, through a friend who had been the London correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily, and she decided that it would be valuable to the English fashion industry if she could learn about the new uses of synthetics and about ready-to-wear manufacturing and marketing in the United States. The Board of Trade agreed, seeing fashion as a way to help pay the country’s immense war debts, and arranged for her get the permits to take enough money out of the country to make a long stay in the United States possible. (Such sums were strictly limited then and for many years after the war.) Bourne and Hollingsworth gave her three months’ leave and underwrote her trip, a generous gesture, since her research would be shared with its competitors. The Board of Trade granted her extra clothing coupons as well, “so that I could appear well dressed and not shabby,” and Digby Morton made her a “splendid black suit, most beautifully cut, and suitable for most occasions.”
She left “the greyness of London” with one small suitcase, traveling on an American Clipper Flying Boat that stopped first in Ireland, Morocco, and the Gambia, then took off across the ocean, landing in Trinidad (where she drank her first orange juice in four years), flying on to Puerto Rico, and arriving in New York on the day Roosevelt died, April 12, 1945. She spent four months in the United States, staying in New York with Ted McKnight Kauffer and Marion Dorn and often seeing Mercedes de Acosta, then traveled to Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas, and Los Angeles to interview manufacturers. In California, she was excited by the sports clothes and leather clothing, completely new to her, and by the use of traditional Latin American motifs. She was happy to see Aldous and Maria Huxley, who were now living on a forty-acre ranch in the Mojave Desert. She was their first postwar visitor from England and seemed to them “pretty and gay but so serious,” with “none of that malicious wit and brilliance” of their milieu of the twenties and thirties. (“She thought Aldous was wonderfully ‘transformed,’” wrote Maria, his sight was so much improved.) Hedda Hopper devoted a large part of a column—otherwise full of news about Clark Gable, James Cagney, and Jane Russell—to Madge: “Talked with Madge Garland, who’s in this country making a fashion survey for a big British firm…The plane trip over cost $800. She traveled 10,000 miles getting here. She was pretty proud of her traveling suit and topcoat, both made from rugs.”
Back in London, Madge submitted her report to the Board of Trade (“where I expect it lingers to this very day,” she wrote thirty years later) and became an even more vocal advocate for English fashion. In a culture where quality was reserved historically for men’s clothing and where feminine chic was elusive, and at a time, given the devastation of the country, when anything to do with fashionable dress was even more easily dismissed as trivial, Madge insisted on the importance of women being well dressed and on the possibility that good clothes did not have to be the province of an elite. As postwar governments across Europe pushed exports to help pay off debts, many found ways to support new designers, provided that their fashions emphasized their country’s materials. Madge touted English textiles and argued for improved standards of design. One newspaper article on her return from New York, headlined “Dress Reformer,” described her as a “colorful, impudently gay, yet shrewdly practical, working woman,” who “says, and proves, that being well-dressed has nothing to do with being rich” and who is trying to get “pretty, well-designed, low-priced clothes made here to equal those in America.” The parallels between her work and Elizabeth David’s postwar education of the English palate are unmistakable.
And the demand was real. Life in England—“this poverty stricken island”—was difficult, dark, and meager long after the war was over. One waited hours in queues to buy meat (John Strachey, Minister of Food from 1946 to 1950, was responsible for postwar rationing); returning factories to civilian manufacture was a slow process; there were strict limits on the movement of money and goods in and out of Britain; the fuel shortage was acute. At Bourne and Hollingsworth, consumer need was so intense after years of wartime deprivation, and goods still so scarce, that Madge’s most difficult task was to keep merchandise on the shelves. Like many civilians and everyone she knew, she was constantly ill from malnutrition and stress. Her childhood back problems also returned. “I have a good job here & work for people I like & respect,” she wrote to Gerald. It “is really too big & exacting for my strength, still I have made it myself & it has much to recommend it.” The winter of 1947 was one of the coldest on record, and she kept warm at home by shutting up most of her flat, but her office at Bourne and Hollingsworth was “icy…With the temperature well below freezing this is no fun at all. Then the store is in partial darkness & absolutely deserted, the factory closed etc. a most gloomy outlook—we a
re all desperately depressed—& the blackout at night doesn’t add to the ease of getting about in frozen streets with treacherous mounds of frozen snow everywhere.”
When the postwar trade pacts were signed, in March 1946, she traveled to France to look at materials and styles that might be copied. The trip was “epic: fourteen hours from London to Paris—about as long as it took by packet in Victorian days. Hours of standing in queues, masses of papers and visas and permits and customs.” In Paris there were “no buses or taxis on the streets and only a handful of private cars. No one talks of anything but food and the situation is awful. The rations just are not sufficient, those who cannot afford the Black Market starve: it is quite horrible.” To get a seat on a train south she had to offer a bribe of 500 francs. She did business at the Syndicat de la Soie in Lyons, then went on to Cannes, where she was reunited with Evelyn Wyld, who had spent part of the war in an internment camp in the Vaucluse. Madge was her first visitor after the war, as she had been to the Huxleys, bringing news from England, butter from the black market in Paris, and coffee.