Among the Bohemians (26 page)

Augustus rarely did things by halves:

Henceforth I was to live for Freedom and the Open Road! No more urbanity for me, no more punctilio, and, as for clothing, according to my Golden Rule, the ‘importance of appearances’ insisted on at home, already made my neglect of them a duty.
But now a new kind of exhibitionism was born; in its way, as exact and conscientious as my father’s cult of the clothes-brush: a kind of inverted Dandyism.
If my shoes were unpolished, they were specially made to my own design.
If I abjured a collar, the black silk scarf that took its place was attached with an antique silver brooch which came from Greece.
The velvet additions to my coat were no tailor’s but my own afterthought, nor were my gold earrings heirlooms, for I bought them myself: the hat I wore, of a quality that only age can impart, might have been borrowed from one of Callot’s gypsies, and was as a matter of fact a gift from one of their descendants.
My abundant hair and virgin beard completed an ensemble, which, if harmonious in itself, often failed to recommend me to strangers…

… and so much the better for that.
Thus clad, Augustus felt himself to be at one with the rain, the wind, the sunshine and the brown earth, a living embodiment of the rebel.
Shining with silver and brass, down-at-heel yet bravely swaggering, his appearance told the world: ‘I have no truck with respectability.
I am a child of nature and a Lord of the Universe.
I am a
Bohemian.’ Dorothy McNeill now metamorphosed into the gypsy goddess Dorelia, her graceful figure swathed by Augustus in yellow folds or sculpted in blue draperies.
In his paintings her head is scarved or turbaned, and smocked children caper at her feet, which appear bare from beneath the folds of her long dress.
A bright medieval-looking tunic follows the contours of her form.
She raises her arms to the sky.
So successfully did Augustus re-create the gypsy image in his own life that his fame as an artist was soon inextricable from his fame as a symbol.
His extraordinary talent was bound up with his extraordinary appearance.
Those like him who adopted the image of the gypsies felt illumined by their unique charisma.

There was Betty May, as described by Anthony Powell:’… her hair tied up in a coloured handkerchief, she would not have looked out of place telling fortunes at a fair’.
There was Ida John’s friend Mary, the wayward daughter of Lord Borthwick, who appeared at a dinner party with kerchiefed head, short striped petticoat, bare legs and sandals like a vagabond gypsy.
John Sampson called her by the Romany word ‘Rani’, meaning ‘Lady’, and so she stayed.
There was Edna Waugh, who even after her conventional marriage would be overcome by the desire to run barefoot, climb trees, wear light cotton dresses, and sleep under the Stan ‘akin I imagine to the “raggle taggle gypsies’ ”.
The John children’s tutor John Hope-Johnstone paid homage to his employer by adopting an eclectic gypsy look, which included a corduroy suit with swallow-tails behind, a ‘diklo’ (Romany for neckerchief), and a big black felt hat.
Combined with his horn-rimmed glasses, he presented a distinctly odd spectacle.
Meanwhile at Garsington the villagers nicknamed their lady of the manor ‘The Gypsy Queen’, which Ottoline herself believed arose from her habit of wearing Russian linen dresses with a silk handkerchief on her head.
It is likely that at times, in her full skirts, her copper-red coiffure and her embroidered shawls, she was even more indistinguishable from the glamorous Kalderasà than she suspected.

In
The Silent Queen
(1927), the writer Seymour Leslie based his heroine Juanita on the model Chiquita (best known for Epstein’s bust of her).
This somewhat breathless teenager captivates the heart of the hero, Geoffrey, with her airy naiveté, but despite being completely one-dimensional, Juanita serves as a thumbnail sketch of the gypsy-girl type that frequented Bohemia both before and after the First War:

There steps out, running towards us, a small bare-limbed gipsy girl in sandals, her red petticoat flying, a black bodice laced in front, a coloured scarf round her neck, her black bobbed hair tumbling wildly about her face.
Juanita!
Throwing herself on and around me, she cries:

‘Pound,
you
must
lend me a pound, I’ve come all the way in this funny cab from Bloomsbury.
From such a good party.’

‘You’ve broken my only pair of spectacles, Juanita…

She was never still for one moment…

‘You look like a Spanish gipsy, Juanita.’

‘I love the gipsies,’ she replied, ‘and hate being in towns and having to wear stockings.’

‘Tell me everything,’ I asked…

Juanita is absurd, and she is not chic, but she has come a long way from the hushed crowd of darkened mourners that watched in the new century.
In 1901 she would have looked like a bird of paradise let loose in a graveyard.
To eyes attuned to the muted tones of acceptable wear, the red petticoat and coloured scarf flash and shimmer to stunning effect.

*

So many rules and observances governed the dress of the Victorian age.
It is worth remembering the appalling rigours which fashion and convention imposed on both men and women in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century England.
From the cradle to the grave, from morning till night, convention dictated what must be worn, how and with what.
Bright colour was very definitely to be treated with caution, for it had explosive potential.
In her book of etiquette written in 1898 Lady Colin Campbell is adamant that ‘decking [oneself] out in all the hues of the rainbow’ is an infraction of the rules governing taste.
It is quite wrong, she insists, to appear ‘bedizened like a harlequin’ – and for ‘harlequin’ read ‘harlot’.
Clothes worn for paying calls must be sober not gay; gloves should be either tan or of a colour harmonising with the rest of the lady’s outfit; ‘delicately tinted’ fabrics may be worn for garden parties, bazaars and flower shows.

Propriety was all.
Legs were treated as non-existent in the late nineteenth century; the problem of preserving modesty while bathing must have seemed at times almost insuperable.
Not even children were spared.
Gwen Raverat felt her heart bleed looking back at old photographs of herself and her brothers and sisters playing in their garden in summer, with their legs sheathed in black wool hosiery and button boots, their arms and heads covered.
She watched in horror as her room-mate got dressed one morning around 1900.
In the following order, this young lady put on:

  1.   Thick, long-legged, long-sleeved woollen combinations.

  2.   Over them, white cotton combinations, with plenty of buttons and frills.

  3.   Very serious, bony, grey stays, with suspenders.

  4.   Black woollen stockings.

  5.   White cotton drawers, with buttons and frills.

  6.   White cotton ‘petticoat-bodice’, with embroidery, buttons and frills.

  7.   Rather short, white flannel, petticoat.

  8.   Long alpaca petticoat, with a flounce round the bottom.

  9.   Pink flannel blouse.

10.   High, starched, white collar, fastened on with studs.

11.   Navy-blue tie.

12.   Blue skirt, touching the ground, and fastened tightly to the blouse with a safety-pin behind.

13.   Leather belt, very tight.

14.   High button boots.

Corsets were probably the worst thing of all.
As Gwen Raverat says, they were ‘very serious’.
When Margaret Haig (later the social reformer Viscountess Rhondda) was about to leave school, her mother broke it to her that she would henceforth have to wear a great box-like restraint from bust to thigh, full of whalebone and prickly bits.
As the bones broke one by one, Margaret rebelliously removed them.
‘Comfort has always stood high on my list of necessities,’ she wrote.
Not only comfort, but health.
In the worst days of tight-lacing the goal of an eighteen-inch waist was often achieved only at the cost of serious internal damage to women’s organs, as was confirmed when autopsies revealed livers practically ruptured by this self-mutilatory practice.

Men were not exempt.
Even in 1928 (after the invention of the zip-fastener) a disgruntled correspondent wrote to the
Daily Mail
complaining of the tyranny of men’s clothes: ‘The button and eyelet holes on my apparel (without overcoat) number 90.
Thus: coat 14, vest 6, shirt 9, trousers 6, undervest 4, collar 3, boots 48.’ And in the 1930s James Lees-Milne complained about the incessant changing of clothes deemed necessary at an upper-class house party:

We… first assembled in breakfast clothes at 9 o’clock.
We changed for church at 11.
We changed for luncheon at 1.30.
Those of us who went for an afternoon stroll in Windsor Park changed at 3.
We certainly changed for tea at 5.
Thereafter I do not think we changed again until the dressing gong went at 8.
Then we changed to
some tune, the women into long trailing gowns, and the men into tails and white ties.
Some of us therefore put on six different garments that day as a matter of custom, not vanity.

Whether down at the Drones Club or up the jungle, middle- and upper-class men until the Second World War and after were most tyrannised by the obligatory ritual of changing for dinner.
Even Bohemians often compromised grumpily with the conventions in this area; Murger’s Bohemians go to some lengths to scrape together evening clothes.
Until 1920 in the upper echelons of society, the tail coat with white tie was de rigueur for a dinner where ladies were present, and dinner jacket with black tie was expected when dining in all-male company.
Until 1939 many circles still conformed to the rule of black-tie dressing for dinner, whether at home, at the theatre or in a restaurant.
Few men were daring enough to challenge the might of the boiled shirt.
Wyndham Lewis was one, though his friends warned him not to:

‘For the sake of your car-
reer!
’ [my friend Harry Melville] would boom impressively at me, ‘you
must – four
times a week – make up your mind to put on a
boiled
shirt!’ But the boiled shirt game did not seem to me worth the candle.

Lewis defiantly turned up to an aristocratic dinner party in ordinary clothes, thereby earning the enmity of C.
R.
W.
Nevinson who, in his own ‘inoffensive white tie’ took the lapse personally.
The working-class Mark Gertler was more daunted by the prospect of social disapproval than Wyndham Lewis.
When the impeccable aesthete Edward Marsh invited him to an ‘at home’ he was driven to confess that he did not own a tail coat, and wrote begging for advice: ‘What do you think?
Would it be absolutely outrageous?
Please tell me honestly, as I should feel most uncomfortable if I were the only person in a dinner jacket.’ He would have to resort to borrowing or hiring if the tail coat turned out to be obligatory.

It seems that there were limits beyond which one just couldn’t go.
Gypsy finery was welcome in Bohemia, or even in the Tottenham Court Road, but it took more bad manners and effrontery than people like Gertler possessed to turn up at, say, the Royal Opera House wearing plain clothes.
In any case, evening dress was compulsory at the Opera, so to hear Mozart or Wagner one was forced into it.
When Ottoline Morrell generously decided to take the two Spencer brothers, Stanley and Gilbert, to Covent Garden to hear
Don Giovanni,
the problem instantly presented itself, for neither of them possessed evening clothes.
Unfortunately both Spencers
were extremely slight in stature – little over five feet tall.
Ottoline made a lot of telephone calls, and scraped together the rudiments of two suits.
With these, and the help of a great many safety pins, she got them kitted out.
They presented such an odd spectacle – Stanley’s coat-tails trailing on the ground behind him, the trousers buckled in folds around his ankles – that Ottoline feared they would be prevented from entering, so she spread her black silk opera cloak around them and (she being nearly six feet tall) escorted the diminutive pair up the stairs to the grand tier and finally to the safety of their box: ‘I felt like a great hen moving about with a brood of unfledged chickens under my wing.
From the front they were fairly well hidden; what the back view was like I didn’t mind.’

No such gauntlets needed to be run in Ottoline’s own home, Bedford Square, for here on Thursday evenings, before and during the First World War, up-and-coming Bohemia was welcomed in all its gaudy glory.
Ottoline was as hospitable to the older generation of artists and writers as she was to the new, but found the former reluctant to shake off the conventions.
Henry James was pained by his hostess’s willingness to admit such a rabble to her home.
Their lack of a dress code so greatly distressed his social sensibilities that he literally begged her not to descend to their level: ‘Look at them.
Look at them, dear lady, over the banisters.
But don’t go down amongst them.’

Though Ottoline daringly disregarded his injunctions, hers was a rare case.
Violet Hunt was an artistic hostess who rigidly insisted on her guests wearing evening dress until almost the Second World War.
Ethel Mannin insisted that dressing up came more from a sense of decorum than from snobbery; ‘… though we joked about boiled shirts,’ she remembered, ‘they were worn a great deal’.
It would seem that the tuxedo has still to die a lingering death.
Some might say that, uncomfortable and stuffy as it is having to dress like a waiter for ceremonies and banquets, it at least saves having to make complicated decisions or purchases for such occasions.

For the acquisition of clothes could be a daunting ordeal, particularly for women.
Ready-to-wear clothes were the exception.
Thus one had first to brave the draper’s, where pompous shop walkers addressed one as ‘Madam’ and pressurised one into buying things not really wanted; ‘… one was thankful to escape,’ remembered Viva King.
Middle-class people like Lesley Lewis’s mother had their own dressmaker or tailor.
Her crêpe de Chine or Macclesfield silk dresses were made up by the Mesdemoiselles Lehmann in Wigmore Street.
Daniel Thomas of South Molton Street would tailor the lengths of tasteful Scottish tweed sent to Mrs Lewis as gifts from Highland shooting parties into excellent, durable suits.
Her shoes were hand-made by
the firm which also made Mr Lewis’s boots.
All this entailed innumerable fittings, all the more anxiety-inducing because each frill, each buttonhole conveyed legible clues as to one’s social status.
An inch of hemline could spell the difference between respectability and being thought ‘fast’.
An ostensibly small aberration like omitting to wear a tiara to a court ball could cause disproportionate reverberations and give one an undesirable reputation.