Something Wholesale (11 page)

My parents’ journey to Great Marlborough Street each morning was attended with some state. They used to travel from their house at Hammersmith Bridge by taxi, and always employed the same taxi-man for the run out and home. My mother insisted on the taxi because, she alleged, my father was too frail to travel by bus or train and my father used it reluctantly because he thought that public transport was too much for my mother. The real reason for this extravagance was that travelling with my father by any other means was such a nerve-shattering experience that no one who had undergone it was ever likely to repeat it.

In the course of five years the English had become a race who automatically formed queues for everything. It was not altogether a fault; in a world that was tumbling to pieces before their eyes it was the only way they knew of preserving their society from total anarchy. My father had failed to adapt himself to this new order; probably he had not even noticed that it had come to pass. Whatever the reason the results for anyone who was with him were extremely alarming.

‘Here’s a bus,’ he would say as we stood together in Oxford Street during the rush hour and, totally oblivious of a queue twenty yards long that had formed in the drizzle, he would launch
himself on to the platform. The first time he did this I followed his example and was ordered off the bus by the conductor. My father was allowed to remain on board.

‘Come on!’ he shouted to me where I stood on the pavement in grave danger of being lynched, ‘there’s plenty of room.’ No one said anything to him and as the bus drew away I saw a middle-aged lady offer him her seat. He arrived home half an hour before I did.

In his company a journey on foot was equally difficult. Like a man of the Renaissance my father was constantly being overcome by the wonder of the world in which he lived. Walking down a street he would suddenly glimpse some odd cloud formation in the sky or a man with a goitrous protuberance close at hand and without warning he would stop in his tracks in order to enjoy the sight more closely. As a result the simplest excursion made by our family resembled a street-fighting patrol in hostile territory. I would be some fifty yards ahead, still talking to my father, oblivious of what had happened; my mother would be lingering as innocuously as possible in the middle, waiting for my father to get going again; and my father would be somewhere down the street with his back to us looking at whatever had taken his fancy. My mother put it very neatly after one of these exhaustingly crablike excursions. ‘The trouble with your father,’ she said, ‘is that when I go out with him he always makes me feel like a street-walker.’

This was the reason for the taxi. The taxi-man was called Mr Walford. He was a real London cabbie of a type that is now almost extinct. His cab was of the same vintage, only the war had saved it from being condemned. It had buttoned upholstery; inside it was as dark as the grave. In the exposed position which he occupied in order to drive it Mr Walford wore several overcoats, but this was only when he was actually at the wheel in inclement weather. When he called for my parents he was always
exceptionally spruce in a snuff-coloured overcoat, a bowler hat and a cravat with a horseshoe pin in it.

He used to arrive at the house at Hammersmith Bridge, sound a prolonged blast on his horn and settle down to smoke his pipe with the flag of the meter still at ‘For Hire’ whilst my father completed his toilet. This usually took about an hour, but Mr Walford was never impatient and when finally my parents appeared, my mother elegant in furs and my father in a long tweed overcoat, he always gave them the same welcome. ‘Morning, Guvnor,’ he used to say in his hoarse voice, ‘Morning, Madam.’ In summertime he always wore a red rose in his buttonhole that came from his garden and before they set off he always presented one to my mother too.

I think that this was the only time in his stormy acquaintance with the internal combustion engine that my father was really content to be driven by somebody else. If anyone could be, Mr Walford was the ideal driver for my father. He made the same sort of noises at other road users that my father would have made if he had himself been at the wheel.

‘GRRRRRRR. Look where you’re going, can’t you!’ he used to shout at some luckless motorist who had the temerity to come abreast of him, causing the offender to swerve violently.

‘You’re quite right. Chaps like that shouldn’t be allowed on the road at all,’ my father said in corroboration. ‘SILLY KITE!’ he shouted, putting his head out of the window and glaring at the cause of the trouble who by this time was beginning to believe that he really had done something wrong.

So that he could carry on a running conversation with Mr Walford my father always left the window open between the front and rear compartments, but as both of them were a little hard of hearing they were forced to shout at the tops of their voices. The din they made added to the discomfort of my mother
who was already freezing in the draught produced by the open window.

On arrival at Great Marlborough Street the descent from the taxi was always accompanied by a good deal of ceremony, so much so that passers-by usually stopped to find out what was going on; but finally my parents arrived safely in the hall, the doorbell pinged behind them and, as they stood there trailing rugs and scarves, Miss Gatling would emerge from the Counting House and before they had even the chance to take their coats off would pour into their ears the news of some fresh disaster that was threatening the business. It was unfortunate that although what she said had always a sound foundation of truth the moment at which she chose to impart it was so inopportune that my parents took very little notice.

In the evening the whole process took place again; only by this time Mr Walford was anxious to get home to his supper and my parents had had enough too. I never found out how Mr Walford managed to find himself in the neighbourhood of Great Marlborough Street at six-thirty every evening but he always contrived to, except on the occasions when he ‘broke down’. Sometimes he broke down with my parents inside. On one occasion my father prevailed on Mr Walford to open the back of the taxi by lowering the hood so that he could enjoy a ‘good blow’ on the way home. The mechanism by which the hood was lowered had not been used since before the war and once the hood was lowered no power on earth was able to shut it again. As a result of his love of fresh air the taxi was out of action in Mr Walford’s ‘garridge’ where for two days the hood successfully resisted the combined efforts of the staff to close it.

Sometimes I was in such a state of penury that I too accepted a lift to Hammersmith Bridge in the taxi, but this was seldom a success. By the evening my father was usually rather grumpy and
the journey resolved itself into a gloomy post-mortem on the events of the day with particular reference to my own shortcomings.

My father was a member of something in the City called the Guild of Freemen. I never really knew what it was, but the Guild used expensive writing paper for its correspondence and my father possessed a parchment scroll on which he was referred to as being ‘Trusty and Well-Beloved’. Each year the Guild of Freemen met together for a great beano in the Guildhall, a banquet of many courses at which toasts were drunk. At the culmination of the evening the Archbishop of Canterbury made a speech.

One morning I found my father mulling over some impressive-looking invitations in his office.

‘The Guild of Freemen is having its banquet in a couple of weeks’ time,’ he said. ‘I thought we might all go. It will give you a chance to wear your decoration.’ He smiled at me disarmingly.

On the night of the banquet we assembled at my father’s house. Wanda and my mother were dressed in the splendid stuffs that are appropriate to such an occasion and I was wearing my father’s second-best suit of tails; a suit that had been made for him in 1895 by a tailor in Maddox Street with trousers that fitted as closely as a glove. That my father should have permitted himself a second suit of tails was a measure of the original suit’s dilapidation. We made a festive picture. Although we did not realise it, it was the last time that we should do so.

‘I thought we’d have a bottle of wine,’ said my father, ‘’28 Bollinger. It should be cold enough. I brought it home in old Walford’s cab,’ he added mischievously. ‘Sometimes they don’t give you much to drink at these sort of do’s.’

I was surprised to hear him say this, but my father had attended so many dinners in the City in his life-time that I did not contradict him.

He had hired a car to take us to the Guildhall. It was a pleasant journey. My father was in good spirits and made us all laugh.

At the Guildhall, where we arrived a bare five minutes before the banquet was due to begin, the women disappeared. My father and I were left at the foot of a staircase where two flunkeys were ladling something into glasses from an enormous urn.

‘That smells good,’ said my father, sniffing appreciatively. ‘Punch,’ said one of the men with a hint of reproof in his voice as if my father should have known what it was. ‘Well, let’s have some!’ said my father.

We were each given a glass of something strong and sweetish that seemed to have a basis of rum. After the Bollinger the effect was unpleasant.

As we took our seats in the Banqueting Hall my father turned to the waiter who was standing behind his seat and handed him something. ‘Just look after my son and I,’ I heard him say, giving the man a wink.

‘I’ll look after you, Sir,’ the waiter said. He was a saturnine-looking fellow, a little like Frognall the commissionaire at Throttle and Fumble.

The dinner began.

There was grace and soup and sherry and more sherry and fish and Moselle and an entrée and claret and I think there was some sort of sweet, rather dank, and port and innumerable toasts. And because my father had given the waiter something to encourage him to look after us there was twice as much to drink for us as there was for everyone else, including the Archbishop.

With the pressure on I soon found that I had a nervous compulsion to drink whatever was put in front of me. No sooner had I tasted a wine than a great hand in a white cotton glove appeared over my shoulder and refilled the glass. By the time the port arrived I was stupendously drunk. My father was drunk too, but
because of his age and his silver hair, the fact that his head was sunk on his chest and he was ostensibly asleep made him less an object of remark than I was. As if to belie his condition indeed he suddenly roused himself in his chair and said in a loud voice to no one in particular, ‘Very warm. Must get some fresh air,’ and incontinently left the room.

‘My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen. Pray silence for His Grace, The Archbishop of Canterbury.’ It was the toastmaster. To me he looked like a great, boiled lobster. As his Grace rose to speak I realised that I was going to be sick.

I too, rose; mumbled something to the woman on my left, saw through a haze a line of scandalised faces and made for the nearest exit. The door was guarded by two footmen in breeches and silk stockings. They had calves like Miss Axhead’s. I pushed past them through the door and was immediately sick. To my surprise I found myself not disgracing myself as I imagined I would be in front of a lot of chauffeurs in an anteroom but alone in the open air under the stars. I was in a bombed transept of the Guildhall and I was standing on a wooden cat-walk erected by workmen over what must have been the ground floor and the cellars of the building. The hole, for that is what it was, seemed very deep. It was surrounded by a high, medieval-looking wall. There was not a door or window to be seen. I was trapped.

My appearance was now so disgusting that I could not go back and take my seat with the other diners even if I had been capable of doing so. The only thing to do was to climb the wall, which was not difficult. I wondered what had happened to my father. He was far less agile than I was. I felt too ill to think about the agonies that our wives were suffering, abandoned by two drunks in the presence of an Archbishop of Canterbury.

From the top of the wall I looked down twenty feet into a City street. I commended myself to God and dropped.

I landed at the feet of a policeman, who shone his torch on me and regarded me with interest.

‘I’ve just been to the Dinner,’ I said with as much dignity as I could muster. ‘The one with the Archbishop of Canterbury.’

‘If you take my advice you’ll cut off home,’ he said, not unkindly. A cab was passing and he signalled to it.

‘Hammersmith Bridge,’ I said.

‘Outside the limit,’ said the driver. I told him I didn’t mind what it cost. All the way home in the cab I was sick out of the window. The taxi-man made me clean it. As I was sluicing it down with buckets of water another cab appeared with my father in it. He too was leaning out of the window.

Although he was in a similar condition to myself, no longer drunk, unlike me he was not at all contrite.

‘I can’t imagine what they gave us to drink at dinner,’ he said, self-righteously, as I poured a bucket of water over his taxi. ‘This is what comes of drinking a lot of jobbed-up stuff on top of a bottle of good wine. Never put a beggar on a gentleman, that’s what I say!’

      ‘There was nothing basically new in the latest

      London Designers Collection for Export …

      Very little handling of new colour …

      One inch drop in the hemline.’

British
Vogue
. September 1946    

I assembled my first collection in the Autumn of 1946.

It would be an exaggeration to say that I designed it; rather I found myself swept away by events like a man heading for Niagara Falls in a barrel while grizzled spectators offered advice from the bank. I was the convener; the nodal point of activity; Macbeth on the blasted heath without whose presence the ghastly apparitions that I was to see in the succeeding weeks would have no occasion to rear their heads.

The Collection I was about to make could scarcely be described as something that would shake the world. No newspaper, however desperate for news, would ever report it and no one but wholesale customers would ever see it in its entirety.

Day after day in the dog-days of Summer we sat in the showroom – my mother, the Head of the Model Workroom, and Kathie, the Stock keeper, whose job was the counterpart of Miss Webb’s
in Coats, and me – while the representatives of the silk and cloth houses with which we did business laid before us swatches of the stuffs from which the collection was to be made.

It was an exacting business. I soon learned the dangers of choosing materials simply because I liked the design, without first considering for what purpose I was intending to use them.

‘I like that. Do you like it?’

‘Yes, I like it.’

‘I think I like it. What are those things on it, cabbage roses?’

‘They look like Brussel sprouts to me.’

‘But what’s it for?’

‘Let’s pass it.’

‘Now I like that. You can use it on the cross.’

‘You can only use it on the cross.’

‘What sort of dress do you think?’

‘I think it’s cocktail. I can see it as a cocktail with a big bow at the back.’

‘Let’s keep off bows, for God’s sake.’

‘Don’t say “God”, dear.’

‘What do you think of it, Kathie?’

‘We had something just like it from Mr Flukes last year, Mrs Newby. It came in very late and it was all flawed. I shouldn’t be surprised if this was left-overs.’

‘Ha-Ha, Miss Ingles! You will have your little joke. This is Swiss and very exclusive.’

‘In that case we’ll be lucky if it ever arrives,’ said Kathie, gloomily.

‘Let’s pass it,’ said my mother. I was delighted.

‘You’re making a mistake,’ said Mr Flukes. He didn’t say as I expected him to, that we were making a mistake if we didn’t mind him saying so.

Most of the representatives of the larger firms were men of military appearance. Because the business they were in made it
easy for them to evade the sumptuary laws then in force, they appeared almost unnaturally spruce in contrast to the rest of the population. Almost to a man they were dressed in Savile Row suits which they had acquired without coupons. Some wore ferocious moustaches and bowler hats which they wore tilted over their noses like officers of the Brigade of Guards in civilian dress.

The horrors of war seemed to have had surprisingly little effect on them. These men were not purged by what they had seen. Far from having learned humility they brought to their work a brusqueness that would be unthinkable today, for they were in the happy position of being able to sell anything however unseemly and any reluctance we displayed brought a reminder that what was being offered was on a quota, with the implication that we were lucky to be getting anything. During these séances one of them whom I particularly detested use to refer to me in asides to my mother as ‘The Boy’.

In the midst of his multifarious activities my father always found time to appear on the scene to find out what we were up to. When he did so he showed a taste and acumen that were extremely acute, at variance with the conception of Olympian detachment which I had of him and, although a pretence of disagreement was made while he was present, as soon as he had left the room we usually confirmed his judgement by ordering the materials which he had admired.

These were the circumstances in which I set to work. Without really knowing what I was up to I decided that whatever else was made there was going to be a number of dresses which were not trimmed with little bows, decorated with beads or disfigured with drawn-thread work.

It was easy enough to control the Model Workroom. The decease of my predecessor, Miss Nuthall, had brought about a change in the leadership of the Model Workroom. The new
incumbent who had herself started at the bottom as a junior was far more lively. She too was longing to make more exciting clothes and, in the same way as Miss Stallybrass and Mr Wilkins, together we would have been a dangerous combination if only there had been any exciting clothes to inspire us; but unfortunately for us the world of fashion had ground to a standstill. In the Autumn collections made by the London Couture Houses there was little that was new. The colours were uninspiring and the hemlines fell one inch. The very sound of such a fall was like a knell, as if the lights were going out over Europe at the very moment when they were in process of being re-lit.

In the Wholesale, coats and suits still had square shoulders. Sometimes they were dropped shoulders with yokes which gave the wearer the appearance of having been decapitated by someone in a hurry who had trimmed down the neck and stuck the head back on again. Jackets were very long. Sometimes they had cutaway fronts, in which case they were called ‘Regency’. Hats were jaunty in a mannish way. It was an Amazonian time.

Evening dresses, like the gatherings at which they were intended to be worn, were dispirited. The most popular material was crêpe of which there seemed to be inexhaustible supplies in shades of beige and ‘natural’ or something hybrid that was called ‘greige’.

Shoes had sling backs and open ends through which the toes protruded coyly like thumbs. The style was called ‘Peek-a-Boo’. It was inappropriate as, apart from the design they were constructed as robustly as if the wearer was liable to be recalled to active service at any moment. Simple, unadorned court shoes were almost impossible to find. Perhaps no one wanted them – there is nothing easier than being knowing about fashion a decade after it has passed away.

For inspiration in making my collection I used the French, English and American Editions of
Vogue; Harpers; L’Officiel
, a remarkable magazine that was and still is a poor man’s guide to
the French Collections; pirated toiles purveyed by sinister little men with ‘connections’ in Paris; and my own native wit such as it was. The result was an unholy brew which was watered down and made ‘more sensible’ as my mother put it. It was fortunate that she intervened, otherwise the dress department might have come to a swifter end than it did.

As well as the regular staff we also employed outworkers who, now that the workrooms on the upper floors had been destroyed, (they went up in smoke in 1944) were responsible for the greater part of the production. The outworkers were elderly ladies who had been working for us exclusively, so far as we knew, for years. Most of them lived in distant suburbs. Together they constituted a remarkable secret army. Some were capable of really beautiful work and to these we entrusted the making of prototypes from sketches and toiles; others who were unimaginative or emotionally unstable were only given the repeat orders. One or two insisted on making their own models. They were the most difficult to deal with; free-lance in the worst sense of the word, they constituted the Achilles heel of Lane and Newby.

One of the most atrocious was a Mrs Ribble who had a workroom in uncharted country on the south side of the river, somewhere in the neighbourhood of London Bridge. No member of the firm had ever succeeded in finding it except my father and Brandon the porter who was sent there on some errand. On his return he had been interrogated as to what he had seen but all that could be got out of him was that it was ‘a mucky old place’. My father was even less successful. He encountered Mrs Ribble on the doorstep and as she showed no signs of inviting him in he had been forced to carry on a long conversation with her over a row of dustbins. Whatever secrets Mrs Ribble’s workroom concealed it seemed that they were not of a kind that she was willing to share with the world.

Less than a week before the collection was due to be shown she presented herself at Great Marlborough Street and demanded a large number of sample lengths. This was the first time I had actually seen Mrs Ribble.

‘Just give me some crêpe, dear,’ she croaked. ‘Paris says it’s going to be crêpe. Crêpe and pleats.’ She was a woman of indeterminate age, something between fifty and seventy, with fingers so heavily ringed that they gave her the appearance of being armed with jewelled knuckle-dusters.

‘But what are you going to make?’

‘Don’t you worry what I’m going to make,’ she said. ‘I know what you want. Something for Formal Wear. Something for the Evening Do’s. I’ve been making them since before you were born.’

I went to consult my mother. She was heavily engaged with a stolid, impassive woman called Mrs Arbuthnot who looked exactly like a black beetle. For years Mrs Arbuthnot had been making two-pieces for us. Every year she made exactly the same shape, apart from some minor variation, and every season it was as if she had never worked for us before in the whole of her life.

‘This is what I want but with the seam here,’ my mother was saying.

‘Couldn’t make that, Mrs Newby,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, pursing her lips. ‘My girls wouldn’t stand for it.’

‘But, Mrs Arbuthnot, “Newmarket” was exactly the same except for the channel seaming.’

‘“Newmarket” didn’t pay,’ said Mrs Arbuthnot.

I took my mother to one side.

‘There’s a Mrs Ribble in the showroom. She wants some sample lengths. She looks a terror to me.’

‘Miss Nuthall always used her. She makes evening dresses. Sometimes they’re all right but she’s very erratic. It’s not very clean work but if you get a couple of styles from her that sell she’s
very useful, especially early in the season. Mason’s wives seem to like them. The great thing is not to give her too much at once. Don’t give her much at all.’

Mrs Arbuthnot was showing every sign of striking her tent and leaving.

‘You haven’t left her alone in the showroom, have you?’

‘No, Yvonne’s there. Why?’

‘If you leave Mrs Ribble alone with your new models for five minutes they’ll be in Oxford Street in a week. Now, Mrs Arbuthnot, as I was saying, it really isn’t difficult. All you have to do is …’

‘That’s right, dear, give me a nice selection,’ said Mrs Ribble when I returned to the showroom. ‘Nice pastels and some jewel colours – and Paris says beige.’

When I told Kathie to give Mrs Ribble half a dozen lengths of crêpe all she said was ‘Huh!’

After Mrs Ribble had gone she came into the showroom.

‘If I was you I shouldn’t have given Mrs Ribble all those delicate colours,’ she said. ‘Last time she brought in samples they were all covered with food and oil. She’s got very dirty habits, Mrs Ribble.’

‘Well, why didn’t you say so before?’

‘You’re the boss,’ said Kathie, darkly.

It was now that my father showed himself possessed of a clairvoyant power that was lacking in the rest of us.

‘Quite nice,’ he said when I showed him some of the new models from the workroom. ‘But they’re not sellers. People don’t come to us for that sort of thing. It’s neither fish nor fowl. The Jews do them cheaper and almost as well. Let me see the costings.

‘I should scrap those three,’ he said. ‘Sell ’em to a Madam Shop. Put a hundred per cent mark up on ’em. Get rid of ’em!’

‘But they’re the best of the lot.’

‘It doesn’t matter. This isn’t a Couture House. Where are you proposing to get the repeats made? We’ve only got two workers
who can handle this kind of thing and they only turn out three dresses a week.’

‘I thought of making them in the Workroom. Doris says she can do them.’

‘Of course she can do them but what’s she going to charge for them?’

‘She says she’ll do them at a special price.’

‘I expect she will,’ said my father. ‘It isn’t her business and it isn’t her money. Do you know what the Workroom means by a special price? It’s twice what we have to pay anyone else for the same thing. The only way to make the Workroom pay is to give it all your specials and charge a thumping price for ’em. That’s the only way to pay the wages. Have you looked at the wages book lately? Have a look at it. Those three dresses were toiles, weren’t they? Put those into the costings as well and you’ll find that you’ve priced yourself out of the market.’

What followed I found even more depressing.

‘I think you’ve made far too large a collection,’ he said. ‘It happens every season. I was always telling Miss Nuthall but she never listened. Women in this business are like prima-donnas. However many dresses you make you’ll never have a perfect collection. There’s always something you need later on. It’s always better to wait and see which way the wind’s blowing. You can always make more.