MUNDANE MUSINGS

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 86, 2 July 1927, Page 18

MUNDANE MUSINGS

Then lay three garters, half a pair of gloves And all the trophies of his former loves. What a sad mourning over a wellspent past! Lastly we find the Archbishop of Canterbury in conning over the comprehensive knowledge of his royal master, Henry V., remarking admiringly: Turn him to any cause of policy The Gordian knot of it he will unloose Familiar as his garter These, then, are the progenitors of those flimsy articles we see suspended temptingly from haberdashers shelves and on drapers’ counters, not to mention in numerous hues at any tram stop.

MY LADY’S GARTER Garters were not always the utilitarian articles they are at the present day, although it must be admitted that latterly they have, in a sense, come into their own again, as far as being decorative goes. In the 17th century they played an important part in a bride’s toilette, there being one old poem about that period that goes something like this: Then they got his points and garters And cut them in pieces like martyrs. And then they all did play For the honour of Arthur O’Bradley. Doggerel; but still it shows that garters were an adjunct of a groom’s wedding garments as well. In the old days a custom prevailed in Dieppe whereby the day after a wedding the guests roamed the streets wearing knots of ribbon cut from the garters of the bridal pair. Bather a strange way of celebrating a wedding! A ceremony in Prussia involved the sending of a garter by a princess to the king, who, tying one-half round his own sword, passed the remainder on to a neighbouring monarch as a token of good-will. Those were indeed the days of chivalry and romance! Samuel Pepys, who seems to have been an authority on most things from royal backslidings to the intricacies of a lady’s toilette, tells that on one occasion he “did call at the New Exchange and bought her (Turner) a pair of green silk stockings and garters and shoe strings and two pairs of jessamy gloves all coming to about 28s” —which was very creditable shopping on his part. In the same volume we find reference to a very valuable garter indeed. A lady friend of Lord Lambert, then a political prisoner in the Tower of London, connived at his escape by knitting him a garter, thereby receiving a sum of £ 100 —but we feel that there is something more than meets the eye here! Another garter, referred to in an ancient French book whose author long since passed into the limbo of lost things, is called the Magic Garter, and consists of the skin of a young hare cut in strips and some motherwert gathered in the first degree of the sign of Capricorn, dried and folded in two. “No horse can keep up with a man wearing this garter,” or so it was written.

In Pope's “Bape of the Lock” we find the young blood-about-town rhapsodising over his various conquests, the tokens of which he places on an imaginary altar: