As Time Goes By: Food And Fashion In The Thirties
...As most small girls I liked to dress up, and remember finding Mum’s small amber-coloured cigarette holder, which she had used when cigarette-smoking became all the rage in the 1920s. I put it in my mouth and was instantly revolted by its horrible stale taste. Since then I have never wanted to smoke. And thank goodness Mum never became an inveterate smoker. She lived to be 96...
Eileen Perrin recalls what life was like in the 1930s.
Eileen's vivid memories are the stuff from which history is made.
On Friday evenings a gaunt-looking man appeared at the end of our street calling out what sounded like “Y’Ackney ! Y’Ackney !!” with a bundle of newspapers under his arm. It was the ‘Hackney and Kingsland Gazette’, a sister paper to the ‘Islington Gazette’, which celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2008. Its first offices were above an eel and pie shop in Islington High Street.
As most small girls I liked to dress up, and remember finding Mum’s small amber-coloured cigarette holder, which she had used when cigarette-smoking became all the rage in the 1920s. I put it in my mouth and was instantly revolted by its horrible stale taste. Since then I have never wanted to smoke. And thank goodness Mum never became an inveterate smoker. She lived to be 96.
At the back of Mum’s dressing table drawer I found a small round flower-patterned box of Phul Nana face powder. Knowing she used Yardleys face powder in a round fluted box with a bee on the lid, she had probably bought Phul Nana years before.
I researched and discovered that Phul Nana was sold in the 1920’s. ‘Phul’ meant Indian flowers and the word Nana was an allusion to the Nana Ghat, a place where it was said a mist comes across to hide the faces of goddesses who are crossing there. So, Phul Nana meant something like Indian flowers in the mist.
I recall other names, like Californian Poppy perfume and Bourjois Evening in Paris in a dark blue glass bottle with silver stopper, and the ever-popular Yardley’s Lavender Water, and Lux toilet soap, advertised in Womans Weekly as the soap ‘used by the Stars’. Oh, and Ponds Vanishing cream in a white opaque pot with a pink lid.
Thinking of this took me back to an afternoon when my older cousin Rosie, then nine-teen, had been introduced to the delights of Ponds by Mum. I watched them bending forward over the kitchen fireguard to look into the oval mirror over the fireplace as they smoothed the white cream into their faces.
In our upstairs front room we put on our wind-up gramophone and Rosie showed me how to do the Charleston. We both had shingled hair, which was all the fashion, and I had begun to feel I was very grown-up, though I could only have been about nine or ten at the time. I had my hair cut at Mr.Kosky’s in Bradbury Street.
On Sundays I wore white ankle socks with black patent leather ankle strap shoes, and would look in wonder at the pure silk Ballito stocking displayed on a dummy leg poised on the glass-topped counter of Z.Dudley our local department store in Kingsland Road, Dalston. Mum always bought her corsets there.
After every purchase the assistant would put the bill with the customer’s money into a cylindrical canister hanging on a wire just above her head and pull a lever which would shoot it right across the store to the cashier’s office, from where the change would be sent back in the same way.
In 1939 at the start of the second world war clothing was rationed and silk stockings disappeared, not to be seen again until the G.I.’s came over. America entered the war after their fleet was bombed at Pearl Harbour, Honolulu in December 1941.
The generous G.I.’s gave their girl friends silk stockings, and the young brothers and sisters enjoyed chocolate Hershey bars, while their mothers kept quiet about the odd tin of butter, dried egg or joint of bacon.
It was a shame that our family saw none of these.
In the 1930’s along the front of the counters in Liptons grocers, were large cube-shaped tins with glass lids, full of loose biscuits. Cheese was bought by the piece from huge blocks, cut by using a cheese-wire. The Co-op gave small gift tokens of tin to save up for free grocery: Pearks had Gold Tip tea in packets with coupons to cut out, saved towards a tea-set of lemon and white flower-sprigged china, which we had.
Butchers’ shops had sawdust on the floor. Shoppers knew the names of cuts of meat, chuck steak, shin of beef, neck of lamb, half a shoulder, belly of pork, calves liver, pigs fry, lamb tongues, and rump or fillet steak, cut to order and weighed on scales, then wrapped first in white, then brown paper. Greaseproof paper came in later.
Pigs trotters, cow heel and tripe was sold from Prince’s, a different kind of shop, near Dalston Junction, specialising in offal. You could buy ox tail or lambs tongues and brains, tripe, or brawn set in jelly in white enamel bowls, and blocks of beef dripping.
On Friday and Saturday evenings Best’s the butcher, opposite Ridley Road market, sold faggots, pease pudding and bright red saveloy sausages, all hot, and taken home in one’s own pudding basin.
Next door to them was Allardyce the bakers, from where we bought coburg or cottage loaves and crispVienna rolls, and for Saturday tea, cream horns and chocolate éclairs. Their jam doughnuts and Eccles cakes, bakewell tarts and apple turnovers were a constant joy to a small girl, whose mother bought these treats when Dad found employment again after the Depression when he was taken on full time night work for Odhams Press, at The Daily Herald, packing newspapers in Long Acre, London.
Some Sundays we had topside of beef, put to roast in the oven, and placed on a trivet above the Yorkshire pudding in its tin beneath, so that the meat juices could drip into the batter. This could only have been when Mum used the kitchen’s old black-leaded iron oven, built into the side of our open kitchen range. It would not have worked with the new-fangled gas stove, when the pudding always had to go on the topmost oven shelf. Our ‘afters’ were usually a tin of peaches or pineapple with custard.
On Mondays we had cottage pie. The cold beef was minced with onion, breadcrumbs and crumbled dry sage, moistened with Oxo gravy and done in the oven, with a rice pudding topped with nutmeg, cooked at the bottom of the oven.
Fishmongers had blocks of ice delivered to them in open lorries. Huge ice blocks wrapped in sacking were manhandled to the tailboard with big iron pincers. The ice blocks were carried into the shop on a man’s shoulders
Chemists’ shops had beautiful huge decanter-shaped glass bottles of brightly coloured water on the shelf above the shop window, and as in all shops - grocers, linen drapers or dress shops, they had chairs where customers could sit
