When Grandma was a Girl—Dignity of Fashions Parade

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21647, 13 November 1933, Page 61 (Supplement)

When Grandma was a Girl—Dignity of Fashions Parade

rKMBFR, 18G3—and a hot Bun pouring down niton the uneven road connecting Auckland with its fashionable suburb of Onchunga. There were all kinds of conveyances upon the road besides the regular services of omnibuses —sociables, open-and-closed carriages, cabs, vans, buggies and dogcarts. It was not as yet a very wellconstrueled road, but a good one for the times, niul tlit* more enterprising among the younger generation wont- riding along it on saddlehorses. Little knots of women in crinolines and gliawls, holding dainty parasols or solumbrellas, stood about in Queen Street outside the shop windows, as women do, discussing the things that were of interest then as now—fashions and puddings, and babies and books—"A Dark Jsight's Work," AVraxall's " Remarkable Adventures and Unrevealed Mysteries," " The Language of Flowers," " The Dream Book" and " Kveryhody's Pudding Book." Alongside the Queen Street wharf were ships loading and' unloading; the brig Wee Tottio from Launceston discharging cases of Hobart Town jam, apricot jams in jars and assorted jeliies; the Betty Perlbach from Hamburg, with its Christmas consignment of hock and sparkling hock, cherry cordials, gingerbread in tin boxes and real Havannah cigars; the far-famed, beautiful clipper ship Ida Zeigler, of 860 tons, with its consignment of now summer roods —silk shawls, parachutes, mantles, French flowers, ribbons and ladies' trimmed hats and bonnets. Or it might bo that the goods left bv the Chariot of Fame, Hie Green Jacket or Queen of the Mersey were already displayed in shop windows, with the manner of their reaching these shores duly advertised. With a grace and dignity of carriage the women walked, swaying their silk or grenadine crinolines from one shop to another. They wore quilted border shawls, or jackets and mantles of tissue and grenadine. Under the bonnets or flowery hats tlio hair was demurely parted, lian"in< T in a long, smooth, net-enclosed chignon to the nape of the neck. Some wore jackets falling full over the crinoline skirts, buttoning M p to the throat, edged with narrow lace, and trimmed with braid. On smarter creations fringes often formed a trimming on the skirt, with frills around the arm at and below the shoulder. "Children were diminutive replicas of their mothers, witli little tilting hats instead of bonnets. In the evening, when the women of Auckland sat in their drawing rooms or entertained their friends, they softened their outlines with fichus worn over the tight pointed bodices and looped up to show little puff sleeves. The bodices were cut well off the shoulder; long sashes, frilled and gauffered ribbon and pocketedgings also served to ornament the looped and trailing skirts. The furnishings of an Auckland home at this date were, of course, Victorian in style if not English in origin; and in the long mirrors with curly supports, a cupid holding a bracket of candles at the side, the fashionable woman, before going out to pay calls, could see the set and flow of her voluminous trailing skirt —preferably of oyster-grey —fringe-edged around the mantle, her small buckled waist and neat, in-adequately-trimmed throat-line, with its simple bow or narrow edging of lace. Her husband, if accompanying her to some social function, might come and take a look over her shoulder at his dundrearys, to be surmounted by a drab shell hat, his wide bow tie and the large velvet lapels of his - coat. Thick, bushy beards were much in vogue in the ISGO's, and it was formerly the boast of an old Aucklander that he was the proud possessor of the blackest and thickest in the town. With Christmas approaching there was in n smaller way as much to be made of the occasion as at the present time. The Crescent (Shortland Street) possessed suitable shops for acquiring -novelties ex Helvellyn, Queen of Beauty, etc. It was the age of workboxes—ladies' workboxes in walnut, rosewood and • mahogany, inlaid often with mother o' pearl, and gentlemen's writing desks "with private and secret drawers." Was there then this need in the good and faithful 'sixties for our grandparents to have secret drawers? Perhaps they were for keepsakes. In beaded retictdes reposed handkerchiefs Ecented with Larbalestier's Fan de Cologne, "patronised by Her Majesty and the elite of Auckland." The elite of Auckland were at this time more or less scattered. Some came driving in from Greenmount or Tamaki, to balls at Government House, their full silk skirts spread around them as they jolted over the uneven roads to meet the army officers and their wives at, perhaps, the last function they would attend before sailing from the colony they had helped to pacify. " The 'seventies were not a gracious age. They were unkind to girls, who had no girlhood, but sprang suddenly from childhood to the marriageable age of 17. '1 he girls of the 'seventies - parted their hair in the middle, brushing it demurely behind the ears, sometimes it was mounted on pads with a few curls left to fall over the shoulder. They wore tight bodices buttoning to the throat and finished with fringed crossovers. Children fared better in velvet or tartan silk frocks with tiny puff sleeves,' whito socks and little prunella boots. It was the era of large families; while the elder ones were going to balls and parties, the younger were being sent to or dragged to the photographer's in Queen Street, stood upon, leather-upholstered chairs and posed against their will. Nevertheless, they are very lovable, those Auckland children of trie 'seventies. In the 1880's, young Auckland, more or less immature in the earlier decade, was blossoming into girlhood. A bridesmaid of 1881, daughter

HELPING HANDS IN

of a, well-known Auckland resident, wore a largo white plush liat trimmed with a red plush bow; a dress of pink glace sillc ornamented with frills, with pull-backs to make it tight round the knees. She carried a small crimson mull 011 which was pinned a waxy-pink hyacinth. Her coming-out dress at Government House liad been of white net in many tiny frills, trimmed with sprays of lilies of the valley and silver tinsel. Brooches chains, lockets—all had their vogue at this timo. Hats were trimmed with muslin ruffles, belts were tight, waists squeezed in by tightly-laced corsets. Evening dresses had short sleeves and were puffed out with hustles behind and tightly-buttoned in front. Short hair, cut after the manner of the Eton crop, was also in fashion for a time. The young man of this period who cared for his appearance, wore a sailor straw hat, a wide, white-spotted tie, and, inevitably, a mous-

taclie. Tlio boards of an earlier period had given place to moustaches, just as tlie moustache in its turn was to vanish in the 1900's. In the 1890's, blouses and skirts were worn •—not a smart skirt, but a long, dowdy one; not an attractive blouse but high to the throat and belted at the waist. Hats were loaded with ilowers. Ellerslie racecourse held hundreds of women whoso appearance horrifies us in its complete lack of smartness or grace. However, they married, and became the mothers of the present generation, who, for lack of other invention, are harking back to Victorian styles, plus a cigarette between rouged lips. Old Auckland—old enough to have seen tho crinoline—has become so new that it has forgotten it ever had a past. Auckland, with its bridge parties, cigarettes, wireless, its many clubs, has forgotten the dusty album on the top shelf, whose gilt-edged pages hold securely the stock from which it sprang.

AT many a public gathering to-day it is customary to toast the health of the pioneers—brave anil hardy men and women, who laid the foundations of our social life in wild uncultivated regions, beset with dangers and difficulties undreamed of by their children's children. Conditions have changed, even on the farm, and to-day the lives led by our grandmothers wear an air of romance that «as not at all apparent to those philosophical, hard-working ladies. If one tiling is certain about those early days it is that the homes of our grandmothers were not furnished on the hire-purchase basis. In the early 'sixties comfort was not easy to obtain. Grandfather made his own table and chairs out of kauri or rimu cut in the nearby forest, beds wore often built of tea-tree and sacking, and the Saturday night bath was taken in a tub, sometimes in a beer barrel neatly cut in half. Tin plates and mugs did duty at table, candles burned in the bedrooms and a kerosene lamp in the parlour. The settler who possessed any more books than a Prayer Book and Bible was indeed fortunate; of carpets there were few, and if the rough board lining of the houses was papered, it was done quite frequently with old newspapers. The baking of home-made bread as our pioneer grandmothers used to do is now a well-nigh forgotten art. Jn the 'sixties everybody had to bake their own bread, nor was it the easiest thing to find the flour to bake it with, for tho pack-horse and paddle-steamer were unreliable forms of transport. Moreover, grandmother had to make her own yeast, a popular recipe consisting of mashed potatoes, mixed with a handful of sugar and hops, bottled, shaken, and left on a shelf for two or three days to ferment. The bread was then baked in a camp oven. Until the early settler found time to cultivate a garden, vegetables were exceedingly scarce. It is related by Mrs. Mary A. Williams, of Penrose, who was a girl of 10 when her father helped to found the town of Hamilton in 186-1, that a favourite substitute for eabbago with the early settlers was cow-thistle or dandelion, gathered in the paddocks, and boiled with salt pork. Such a poor dish would bo despised to-day, but it served its purpose before the vegetable garden became an adjunct to every farm, and was not considered distasteful. The early settlers' dinner was not always salt pork and dandelion, however. Mrs. Williams tells of tasty pigeon pies, for native pigeons were far more numerous in the bush than they are to-day. The birds were baked with lumps of solid fat, making a very juicy dish, nutritious and palatable. An old lady who was a girl when the llekat.d was born tells with an air of pride how she made a skirt and coat out of a discarded grey blanket when her own clothes became too shabby for wear. It was an old military blanket, served out from the army stores to her father during the Maori war, and she trimmed it with three rows of black braid torn from another old dress. Such extempore clothing was common among the early settlers thrown upon their own resources in remote localities not then served by shops and warehouses. Many of the early arrivals from England were well fitted out at the start, but no matter how careful their habits, pioneering life in the backblocks was not conducive to economy in clothes, and rough usage soon reduced them to rags. Years before shops served the settlers with their needs house-to-house salesmen did a thriving trade, and many of our grandmothers bought their first party dresses from a traveller's stock-in-trade, hawked from farm to farm on a pack horse. What would the housewife do to-day if she ran out of candles and kerosene to light the lamp, and electricity and gas were not in use? The pioneer housewives of '(>.'s pet about making " slush lamps " of their own, feeding a wick of cotton-waste from meat fat. They did not exactly floodlight a room, but they gave quite a good light for reading. Necessity, in fact, compelled improvisation. Mrs. Williams relates how her father, being unable to obtain paint, whitewashed the kitchen with a mixture of water and pipeclay, cut from the banks of the Waikato River at Hamilton. To whiten the clay, the contents of several bluebags were emptied into it and stirred round with the brush She also remembers him making an arinchajr, heavily upholstered in sheepskin, which, if it collected a lot of dust, at least had tho merit of being extremely comfortable. Many of these old sheepskin chairs are still to bo found in New Zealand farmhouses. Some of the needlework done by our grandmothers, now greatly treasured by their grandchildren, recalls in fanciful design long days and nights of laborious painstaking work. They were nimble fingers in those days, tireless in their devotion to tlie home. Tradition demanded fine lace curtains for the windows, crochet table covers and superfluous antimacassars, and tho more these ornamental tapestries were bandworked the greater they were prized. True, they needed constant work to keep clean, but work was not avoided in grandmother's house, and a little stuffiness was not objected to. Mrs. Williams treasures a crocheted window curtain she made herself over GO years ago. In it has been worked the design of an old-fashioned " swingletrco " plough, and the legend, " God speed the plough!" It used to hang in tho window of her sitting room overlooking the paddocks —a pastoral inspiration of prime significance. No story of the bnckblocks settlers' triais and tribulations can be written without a word of praise for the heroism of the mothers and the nurses who cared for them. In tho very early days the services of a doctor were out of tho question. If a medical man was within 10 or 50 miles of one's homestead it meant a long, wearisome journey on horseback for settler and doctor, with consequent dangerous delay, beforo assistance could be forthcoming. The nurse who was summoned in the middle of the night and rode in darkness over the rough clay roads and bridle tracks, was a heroic figure to whose skdl and personal bravery the parents of many of us owed their lives.