For centuries, London’s social season revolved around debutantes. Yet in 1958, the final debutante curtseyed to Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh at court. The tradition that thousands of girls had gone through in order to officially “come out” into society was over. Gone were the presentation parties that had transformed from formal affairs requiring that girls wear a court dress with a train, carry a bouquet of flowers and a fan, and wear three feathers in their hair to less formal parties requiring mere day dresses.

When, in 1957, it was announced that the following year would be the last Season for presentations, the palace was inundated with thousands of requests from eager mothers, aunts, and grandmothers wanting to present their eligible girls. With The Last Dance of the Debutante, I wrote a book about a one of these young women whose life changes forever because of the people she meets and events that unfold during the 1958 Season.

So, if so many women were trying to bring their girls to Buckingham Palace to curtsey to the Queen, why did it all end?

The origins of the debutantes

The presentation of girls at court to the monarch was a tradition that started in Britain during the eighteenth century. When an aristocratic girl became of age to marry, she would be brought to court by a sponsor—usually her mother or another older female relative—and presented to the monarch. Once this was done, she would be officially “out” on the marriage market.

For the duration of the Season, a girl would be invited to balls and parties in order to meet eligible, single men who she might then marry. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a girl would have been expected to secure an engagement in her first or second Season. If she did not, she risked being “put on the shelf” and faced the life of a spinster. If she was not an heiress in her own right, this could mean being economically dependent upon a relative or being forced to take on work as a governess or lady’s companion in order to make a living for herself.

Who could be a debutante?

By the time that 1958 rolled around, the rules around debutante presentations at court had long been set in stone even as the world outside of Buckingham Palace was modernizing.

A girl could only be presented by a woman who herself had been presented, thus keeping the pool of debutantes restricted to a privileged few. A debutante’s chaperone would apply to the palace for an invitation by writing to the Lord Chamberlain. He would then draw up a list of girls who would be offered invitations. Those invitations included the invitation itself and two cards that allowed the girls entry to the Ball Supper Room for their curtsey to the Queen and to the reception afterwards where they would be rejoined by their chaperon.

The exclusivity of requiring a chaperon who had herself been presented meant that some girls with great wealth but more modest family backgrounds might hire a professional chaperone to shepherd them through presentations and the subsequent London Season. In researching The Last Dance of the Debutante, I also found that divorced women would not be received at court, a restriction that showed the palace was way behind the times in a country where divorce was becoming more and more common.

A dying tradition

The answer to the question of why the tradition of debutante presentations at court stopped in 1958 is a multi-faceted one. The easiest explanation is that the monarchy wanted to distance itself from the practice.

Allegedly, the Duke of Edinburgh called Queen Charlotte’s Ball—one of the highlights of the debutante Season where debutantes acted as handmaidens and curtseyed to a giant cake meant to represent the Queen Charlotte of the 18th century—“bloody daft” and put an end to it being held at Buckingham Palace.

Always one for a good quip or soundbite—especially the shocking ones—Princess Margaret is supposed to have looked around a debutante party and said, “They’re letting every tart in London in.”

Although I would call into serious question Princess Margaret’s slur against these girls, it is true that the debutante presentations had far more diplomats’, bankers’, and barristers’ daughters in their ranks than they did dukes’, earls’, and barons’ children. The British upper crust, devastated by two wars, had changed in the first half of the 20th century, so much so that an Edwardian would hardly recognize the Season’s parties.

However, an equally likely explanation for the demise of the debutante presentations is that the monarchy recognized that society was moving on. Queen Elizabeth began her reign with the first televised coronation. She was supposed to represent modernity in a Britain that had experienced incredible change in the years after World War 2.

The final debutante presentations took place in 1958, just before the Swinging Sixties, second-wave feminism, and the sexual revolution would change British life forever. More opportunities were opening up for the girls who would be debutantes as well. Although university attendance was by no means commonplace for girls, it was possible and doors were opening up. More and more girls also worked, including many of the previous years’ debutantes.

Debutante life after 1958

The Season and its focus on debutantes did not immediately stop because the palace put an end to presentations. The Season soldiered on for a few more years, with girls’ families continuing to hold coming out balls and parties to bring their daughters out into society. However, by the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, the practice was all but gone in Britain.

There has been an attempt to revive the Season in the 21st century, but the efforts have been very modest compared to what once was. In other places such as Vienna and the United States, the debutantes traditions unique to those places continue on. However, it seems unlikely that the British debutante will have her heyday again.

My book The Last Dance of the Debutante, an unforgettable tale of female friendship amid the twilight days of Britain’s grand coming out balls is available in print, ebook, and audiobook. Further information is available on my website.

World War 2 wasn’t only fought on the battlefields of Europe but on the Home Front, and the stories of those who stayed behind in Britain live on in vivid detail thanks to an extraordinary project that let people tell their own stories.

Researching The Whispers of War

When I sat down to write my second historical novel, The Whispers of War, I knew that I wanted the story to feel very grounded in the day-to-day detail of every day life in London during the outset of World War 2.

The book follows three friends: Marie, a German expat working as an assistant to a university professor; Nora, an erstwhile socialite working the Home Office’s Air Raid Precautions Department; and Hazel, a matchmaker to London’s singles who is struggling with her own domestic troubles. As the war ramps up, Marie finds herself first being forced to first register as an “enemy alien” and then face the possibility that she and her extended family could find themselves interned in a camp for the duration of the war.

As much as I wanted the friendship between the three friends to feel real, I also wanted their London to be grounded in detail. I never want to write a book that feels as though it starts with a date line (in this case August 25, 1939) and then floats disconnected from what is happening in the larger world at that time. Essentially, I wasn’t satisfied with letting a few mentions of the blackout and barrage balloons serve as scene setting for this book. I knew that I needed to find the rich detail that could make the story come to life.

A great deal of the research as a historical novelist does often goes unseen. Instead, it creates a sort of underpinning or foundation on which a story can unfold and grip readers. To build that foundation for The Whispers of War, I decided to turn to the Mass Observation diaries.

What was Mass Observation?

Mass Observation was founded in January 1937 as an “anthropology of ourselves” meant to record British life across every level of class and location. The organizers did this in two ways. The first was by recruiting a team of official observers tasked with going into public situations to record people’s behavior. The second, however, was far more interesting.

The organizers invited hundreds of volunteers to fill out a series of questionnaires and make regular diary entries. The diarists wrote about the intimate, sometimes mundane details of their lives as well as their thoughts and feelings about the world around them.

“It is the personal accounts that will always fascinate us most,” said Simon Garfield, editor of the book We Are At War: The Remarkable Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times which used the Mass Observation archive at the University of Sussex to follow five diarists throughout the early years of World War 2.

How much of their lives those who participated in Mass Observation left behind varies wildly. Some wrote regularly, while others only kept up their entries for a few weeks. Put together, the result is an intimate portrait of British life that is also completely individual.

On the brink of war

The founders of Mass Observation couldn’t have known when they started the project that they’d soon be uniquely positioned to capture the hopes and fears of a nation going through incredible crisis. By the end of the summer of 1939, however, it was clear that Britain was on the brink of war with Germany.

With hindsight, it’s surprising that anyone though Hitler might actually back down and withdraw his troops from Poland after the September 1, 1939, invasion that sparked declarations of war in Britain and across Europe. Yet on September 3, 1939, Tilly Rice wrote, “I myself have felt all along that war would be possibly be averted at the last moment...I haven’t felt swayed by the alternate waves of pessimism and optimism that affect those around me.”

Rice, who would eventually have to evacuate her home in Surrey for Cornwall, wrote again after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s radio announcement announcing that Britain was at war. She writes that the national anthem followed Chamberlain, and her family all sat in silence before retreating to their own rooms, no doubt stunned at the news.

Ellen Porter, an evacuation officer based in London, wrote about an air raid siren that sounded over the capitol day day of the declaration: “I go to the basement, where I have previously been working with four others. Some of us try on our gas masks and adjust straps...We sit there keeping perhaps rather self-consciously calm and cheerful.”

Life during the Phoney War

Despite the initial efforts to prepare Britain for attack, the period until spring of 1940 has become known as the “Phoney War” because little seemed to happen before Hitler’s blitzkrieg across Europe. It is no surprise then that the diarists spend time detail domestic matters. We learn about the rules and regulations forcing people to carry their gas masks with them everywhere—and how many adults began to leave them behind when the feared Luftwaffe bombers didn’t immediately appear. Some diarists wrote about the difficulties of making their way in the dark of the blackout, a ban on all light pollution to try to deter those elusive air raids.

Christopher Tomlin, a paper salesman from Lancashire, wrote about the government’s short-lived attempts to shut down movie theaters at the beginning of the war. “BOREDOM!” he writes in all capitals. (This is the same man who, on April 8, 1940, wrote “Hooray, the war begins at last!” about the British navy’s attempts to push back German ships off the coast of Norway.)

Taken together, Mass Observation gives a good sense of the pendulum of public opinion. If one were to delve into the archive, held by the University of Sussex, it would be possible to track the fortunes of Britain throughout the war.

The Blitz changes everything

After a period of seeming inaction, the Blitz would change everything.

When Germany launched the months-long bombing campaign on London and other cities that would stretch from September 1940 into 1941, the freelance writer from Slough Maggie Joy Blunt wrote, “Raids on London every night. Homes destroyed, death to hundreds. The city in flames.” Yet she adds, “There is something in the Britisher when his life, his heritage or whatever is threatened which refuses to be beaten, or perhaps it’s the refusal to accept the idea of defeat.”

It was this attitude that carried people through six long years of war until Victory in Europe—or V-E—Day on May 8, 1945. With the war officially over, one diarist recorded seeing signs in shop windows advertising goods like batteries that had become particularly hard to come by during the war, and the ration on petrol began to ease.

However, some like George Taylor, an accountant in Sheffield, remained skeptical. On May 9, 1945, one day after the war officially ended, he took down his blackout curtains and packed them away in the loft “ready for the next war.

“If we do leave this house before then, they will go along with the fixtures,” Taylor wrote. “I hope, however, that we shall be able to forget their existence.”

My book The Whispers of War, a story of friendship and loyalty on the British Home Front, is available in print, ebook, and audiobook. Further information is available on my website.

As a former journalist, I have long been fascinated by the life and work of a British journalist who holds claim to the biggest scoop of World War 2, a event that launched an extraordinary career that spanned decades.

Early life

Despite the colorful life she would go on to lead, Clare Hollingworth’s early life is relatively unextraordinary. She was born in Leicester and raised on a farm. After attending domestic science college and spending some time working, she won a scholarship to London University and then went to Zagreb University to study Croatian.

Hollingworth began working as an activist for a charity in Europe that would be credited with saving the lives of thousands of refugees from pre-war Nazi Germany. According to her obituary in the New York Times, her work secured visas for between 2,000 and 3,000 people before it came to an end in July of 1939.

After she returned to London, Hollingworth talked her way into an assignment working as a stringer for the Daily Telegraph.

The scoop of the century

On August 28, 1939, just three days after she was sent to Poland, she borrowed a British diplomat’s car and drove to the border with Germany. According to the New York Times, “Alone on the road from Gleiwitz…she watched as the wind lifted a pieces of the tarpaulin that had been erected on the German side to screen the valley below from view,” and saw a hundreds of German tanks. It was the invasion of Poland that would mark the start of World War 2.

Hollingworth raced back to Poland to call her editor. Her story ran on the front cover of the Daily Telegraph with no byline under the headline: “1,000 tanks massed on Polish border. Ten divisions ready for swift strike”. It would prove to be one of the biggest scoops in the history of journalism.

Prime Minister Nevill Chamberlin warned Germany that it had two days to withdraw from Poland or Britain would declare war. At dawn on the day of the deadline, September 3, 1939, Hollingworth awoke to German bombers and artillery fire near her hotel in Katowice. When she called a friend at the British embassy in Warsaw to warn him, he didn’t believer her so she held her phone receiver out the window so he could hear it all unfolding. Mere hours later, Britain and Germany were at war.

A storied career

Hollingworth would go on to cover the war from multiple fronts in Europe and North Africa. After World War 2, she would report on major breaking stories and conflicts like the Vietnam War, the Cambridge spy ring, various conflicts in the Middle East, and multiple wars.

“Often under fire, occasionally arrested and possessed of such a keen nose for covert information that from time to time she was accused of being a spy—both by local governments and by the British—Ms. Hollingworth was friend, or foe, to seemingly everyone in a position of power in the world at midcentury,” the New York Times obituary recalls.

Hollingworth she slept on the floor of her Hong Kong flat well into her 90s in order to keep from going soft. She carried a revolver, wore a safari jacket most of her life, and hated housework thanks to her years in domestic science college.

Her first husband divorced her after 15 years, citing desertion because she was always out reporting. “When I’m on a story, I’m on a story—to hell with husband, family, anyone else,” she said in an interview with the Guardian in 2004.

Hollingworth was not universally liked, but in reading her interviews one gets the sense that that consideration hardly mattered. She was respected, a doyenne of conflict journalism in the twentieth century.

Clare Hollingworth died in her Hong Kong flat in January of 2017 at the age of 105.

One of my favorite bars in London is called the American Bar in the Stafford Hotel on St. James’s Place. You can imagine my delight then when I realized that the American Bar was also a favorite haunt of Nancy Wake, one of the most dynamic, fascinating spies of World War 2.

Born in New Zealand in 1912 and raised in Australia, Wake ran away from home at 16. She used £200 that she’d inherited from an aunt to get herself to New York City and London where she trained as a journalist. In the 1930s, she was a European correspondent for the Hearst newspaper group, and while she was working in Vienna she witnessed the rise of the Nazi party and its terrorism of Jewish people.

A spy’s origin story

Wake was living in Marseille with her French industrialist husband, Henri Edmond Fiocca, when Germany invaded in 1940. As an interned person, she quickly became involved in the fight against the Germans as a courier for the French resistance. At this time, she also began to work for Captain Ian Garrow’s escape network, which smuggled Allied internees, POWs and other people out of France to Britain.

Nancy Wake in 1945 (courtesy of the Australian War Museum via Wikimedia Commons)

Wake’s status as the wife of a wealthy industrialist afforded her privileges others didn’t have including the ability to travel more freely than most people. However, Wake also freely admitted to using her sexuality to move through German checkpoints, calling herself “a flirtatious little bastard.”

Wake was so successful as an agent that the Gestapo began calling her the “White Mouse” because, despite suspecting her of working for the Resistance, the Germans could never catch her doing anything criminal. To try, they tapped her phone and began to intercept her post. Wake was eventually arrested in Toulouse but released after four days after one of her fellow Resistance fights lied about her being his mistress, claiming that they needed to hide her identity from her jealous husband. (None of which was true.)

By November 1942, Wake was the most wanted person in Marseille with a 5 million franc price on her head. Garrow had been betrayed and arrested, but he was able to escape from France into Spain. Wake continued his work, but eventually she too had to flee. She also escaped to Spain through the Pyrenees after seven attempts. (For those who have read The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, this is the crossing that is described in harrowing detail during part of the book.)

After her escape, Wake made her way to Britain, but her husband stayed behind and was captured. Despite being tortured, he refused to betray her, and the Gestapo executed him. Wake didn’t learn of his death until after the war.

The SOE and a return to France

In Britain, Wake joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the espionage and sabotage organization that helped local resistance groups.1 By all accounts, she was a good shot, fearless, and feisty. Vera Atkins, who oversaw all SOE agents in France, called her “a real Australian bombshell” who “put the men to shame by her cheerful spirit and strength of character.”

Wake would go on to prove that strength of character over and over. She once parachuted into Auvergne where she was discovered tangled up in a tree by Captain Henri Tardivat who ran a maquis (a group of rural guerrillas fighting against the Occupation). He reportedly said, “I hope that all trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year.”

“Don’t give me that French shit,” she replied.

Wake recruited members to the maquis and was involved in multiple attacks on key strategic points including bridges, convoys, and railway tracks. She once rode a bicycle 190 miles and back in 72 hours through German checkpoints in order to send a message to London when her wireless operator was killed. (She later called this “bike ride” her proudest moment.) She could also be ruthless, such as the time when she killed an SS man with her bare hands or when a group of men was dithering about killing a girl who was a German spy. Wake said she’d kill the girl herself if they wouldn’t, prompting the men to finally see out the execution.

The maquis Wake operated in was such a thorn in Germany’s side that 22,000 soldiers were sent to defeat them. The maquisards suffered only 100 casualties. The Germans suffered 1,400.

After the war

Wake was widely decorated, receiving honors including three Croix de Guerre, the U.S. Medal of Freedom, and Britain’s George Medal. She continued to work in intelligence at the British Air Ministry—with a brief stint in Australia for a political career that never got off the ground—before marrying an Royal Air Force officer in 1957 and moving back to Australia.

Wake’s husband died in 1997, and in 2001 she moved back to London, taking up residence at the Stafford Hotel. It had been a haven for British servicemen and American GIs during the war, and the general manager of the American Bar at the time was a fellow resistance worker from Marseilles. She would visit the bar every morning for her first gin and tonic of the day, and it now bears a plaque commemorating her.

At the very end of her life, Wake moved to a home for ex-service men and women, where she lived until her death in 2011 at the age of 98. Her ashes were scattered at a ceremony in the woods outside Verneix in France. Determined that it should be a celebratory occasion, Wake left instructions that there should be a boisterous drinks party afterward.

Wake wrote about her extraordinary experiences in her autobiography The White Mouse. If you are interested in reading more about her and other women spies in World War 2, I would recommend The Women Who Spied for Britain by Robyn Walker.

Although it remained neutral during World War 2, Portugal played an important role that placed it firmly at the centre of global politics. Not only did Portugal have valuable resources that both the Allied and Axis wanted access to, the city of Lisbon became a stop for many refugees from occupied Europe looking to travel on to places like the United States, Britain, and Canada. The city also became a hotbed for espionage with intelligence officers from both sides countries risking the censure of the Portuguese government in order to run clandestine operations.

Portuguese neutrality during the war

At the beginning of World War 2, Portugal’s dictator Antonio Salazar declared that the country would remain neutral. He pointed, in part, to the 550-year-old Anglo-Portuguese Alliance between Portugal and the United Kingdom, which declared that the two countries would never participate in wars on the opposite sides. His decision was bolstered by the fact that the United Kingdom did not call on Portugal formally for assistance during the war.

However, neutrality in principle is slightly different than practice. Portugal had strong economic and diplomatic ties to the United Kingdom, while also dealing with Nazi Germany in the form of the sale of the mineral wolfram (tungsten), which was vital for the manufacture of arms.

Salazar and his Estado Novo government were not the only ones on the Iberian Peninsula with an official policy of neutrality and a more ambiguous practical policy. General Francisco Franco’s Spain also declared itself neutral while maintaining close ties to the Axis powers. This caused tension on both sides during the war, threatening Portuguese neutrality at times.

Onward journeys

Because Portugal was ostensibly sitting out the war, it became a logical place for refugees to aim for while fleeing German-occupied Europe. Many crossed from France into Spain and then stopped in Lisbon, trying to arrange the visas needed for their onward travel to places like the United States, Britain, and Canada. Refugees had to collect the correct paperwork from various government bodies. This could be a long process, leaving them stuck in a sort of limbo in the capital city.

During this time, it was common to hear many different languages spoken in the city’s famous cafés as people waited for their visas to be processed. The wealthier refugees might also amuse themselves by visiting the city’s many hotel bars, and at night they could venture to Estoril Casino to dine and gamble. However, even the well-to-do sometimes found themselves growing short of funds while they waited for their paperwork. Lisbon’s jewelry market became flooded with people trying to sell diamonds and other precious gems to fund their indefinite stays in Lisbon or to purchase passage on ships or planes.

No matter whether refugees had funds or not, all lived under fear of attracting teh attention of the Polícia de Vigilância e Defesa do Estado (PVDE). The Portuguese state’s police force was in operation until 1945, and had a fierce reputation for ruthlessness. The PVDE monitored foreigners in the country (among other things) and those running foul of its officers might find themselves arrested, imprisoned, or possibly tortured.

A hotbed of espionage

Despite the fierce reputation of the PVDE and the Portuguese government’s strict order that no foreign espionage activities should take place on its soil, Lisbon quickly became a city of spies during the war. Allied and Axis countries both ran intelligence and misinformation operations out of Lisbon with Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, Spain, and the United States all dispatching spies to the city.1 The Americans even nicknamed Lisbon “the capital of espionage.”

It should hardly be a surprise that Lisbon’s refugee situation meant the city suffered a temporary housing crisis during the war with hotel occupancy skyrocketing and the prices of those hotel rooms going up as well. Some of those hotels became known for being favored by Allied or Axis spies, although in some places its likely that the shortage of space meant that enemies rubbed elbows with each other while walking through the lobby.

The most likely place for spies on opposite sides of the war to meet, however, was the casino. Because everyone who could go to Estoril Casino went, it was not uncommon for agents from different intelligence organizations to gamble at the same tables. It was, in some ways, the expression “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” writ large.

It probably goes without saying that spying in Lisbon could be a dangerous operation. Anyone caught running intelligence operations in the city would have faced arrest at the hands of the PVDE and would have faced deportation from the country. This, however, did not seem to stop any of the countries from operating.

The end of the war

Although there were times where it seemed that Portugal might be pushed to finally enter the war on the side of the Allies or the Axis, Salazar managed to toe a difficult line and kept Portugal neutral. After the war, Salazar did call for flags to be flown at half mast upon learning of Hitler’s death, and he allowed a prominent German diplomat to settle in Lisbon. Yet at the same time, Portugal aided the Allies in the final stages of the war and was accepted into the United States’ Marshall Plan because of it.2

Ultimately, by the time World War 2 ended, Portugal found itself wealthier than it had once been without suffering the deprivations that many European countries had.

A Dark and Deadly Journey (Evelyne Redfern #3) comes out September 23rd and is available to preorder from your favorite independent bookstore or online retailer in print, audiobook, and ebook.

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The End of the War & Austerity

Sadly for people living in Britain, the end of the war was not the end of food or clothing rationing. In fact, by VE and VJ days, the amount of clothing coupons someone could rely on had shrunk dramatically. Compared to the introduction of clothes rationing in 1941 when 66 coupons were allotted to the average person per year, the coupon allowance dropped to 24 coupons for eight months between September 1945 and April 1946. Likewise, what those coupons could buy decreased as the government changed the points value of certain times throughout the rationing years.

One reason for this was that Britain was nearly bankrupted by World War 2 having incurred massive debts. Additionally, the economy had not yet recovered and returned to what it had been before the war.

In order to regain Britain’s economic footing, the government kept rationing in place, leading to the period known as the Age of Austerity.

Another challenge that the end of the war presented when it came to clothing was the demobbing of millions of servicemen and women. As they were sent home, men were given a “demob suit” at a demobilization centre. This would usually include:

• a double-breasted pinstripe suit or a single-breasted jacket with flannel trousers

• Two shirts and collars with collar studs

• a tie

• shoes

• a hat

• a raincoat

They would also receive 90 coupons to rebuilt their post-war wardrobe.

Servicewomen who were demobbed usually received coupons and cash.1

The End of Rationing

Restrictions on purchasing clothing in Britain were finally lifted in March 1949, nearly four years after World War 2 ended. This meant that clothing could be purchased without coupons for the first time in eight years.

Harold Wilson, president of the Board of Trade at the time, spoke about the end of the clothing ration in this video for British Pathé.

I think it is important to remember that when Christian Dior’s famous and groundbreaking New Look collection debuted in Paris on February 12, 1947, Britain was still in the depths of rationing. The New Look rejected wartime austerity with its full-skirted silhouettes, and it must have been a breath of fresh air to the French fashion industry which had been so battered during the war. However, it would be two years before those huge, iconic skirts that could require up to 25 yards of fabric could even be imaginable across the English Channel.

My book The Dressmakers of London, a novel about two estranged sisters who are forced back together when they unexpectedly inherit their mother’s London dress shop during World War 2, is now available in print, ebook, and audiobook. Further information is available on my website.

When the British Board of Trade (BOT) declared the start of clothes rationing on June 1, 1941, it undeniably changed the face of fashion in the country. However, the advent of rationing was far from the only measure taken, and as the war continued the British people on the Home Front had to contend with several other schemes that further challenged how they thought about fashion.

Make Do and Mend

If clothes rationing was meant to reduce the waste of labor and raw materials needed to buy clothing and distribute clothing more fairly among the population, the Make Do and Mend scheme was supposed to encourage people to take steps to make their clothing last.

Courtesy of the National Archives

Launched in 1942 as part of a joint effort between the government and groups like the Women’s Institute, Make- Do and Mend encouraged women to mend clothing rather than buying new and care for their family’s garments to make them last. Women were also encouraged to alter their clothing, rip out old jumpers to knit new ones, and repair whatever they could. Only when garments were threadbare and unusable should they be thrown away.

This scheme was supported by a poster campaign from the Ministry of Information, as well as news reels, educational pamphlets, and classes.

CC41 and Utility Clothing

One of the most influential schemes when it came to British fashion was the Civilian Clothing Order (CC41) or the Utility scheme. This program, which extended well beyond to clothing to shoes, furniture, and other fabrics and textiles, was meant to standardize both the products that consumers could buy and also what those products were made from.

Utility clothing, shoes, and furniture were easy to spot because of the CC41 stamp marking them. This was known as the Utility mark or sometimes the “cheeses.” Clothing with the CC41 mark is now highly collectable by vintage enthusiasts.

Under the Utility scheme, the government dictated what kinds of cloth could be produced in order to make the textile and garment industries more efficient. It also standardized how much cloth was produced and its quality, with Utility versions of cottons, wools, and leathers were all produced during this time.

The garment industry was also instructed as to the types of clothing that could be made at this time, setting out restrictions that were meant to save on valuable inches and yards of cloth. The Utility Clothing Scheme restricted the design of women’s garments by dictating that skirts and dresses had to be made with no more than four knife pleats of two box or inverted pleats and only five buttons. Men could no longer buy trousers with turned up cuffs, and the length of their socks was limited to nine inches which caused such uproar that the issue was brought to the floor of the House of Commons.

It wasn’t just large-scale manufactures that had to learn how to navigate the BOT’s restricted. Dressmakers were forced to adapt, and the CC41 scheme becomes a major plot point in my book The Dressmakers of London!

This video goes into more depth about Utility clothing.

One thing that I think bears mentioning is that despite the restrictions that the Utility Clothing Scheme introduced when it came to fashion, the war was not a dull, drab, and grey time in fashion. Pattern and color were hallmarks of Utility clothes, and one of the things I enjoy about the above video is the emphasis on the fact that one Utility-designed dress could be produced in a number of different fabrics in order to bring a sense of variety to the public’s wardrobe.

Another highlight was the fact that some of Britain’s leading fashion designers including Norman Hartnel1, Edward Molyneau, and Digby Morton under the umbrella of a group called the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers designed Utility clothing. This meant that the average woman might be able to purchase a dress, skirt, or blouse from a designer who never would have been within her reach before the war. Drawing in some of Britain’s top designers to the scheme was meant to boost morale, injecting a touch of glamor and sophistication into rationed clothing.

My book The Dressmakers of London, a novel about two estranged sisters who are forced back together when they unexpectedly inherit their mother’s London dress shop during World War 2, is now available in print, ebook, and audiobook. Further information is available on my website.

Because so much of this book focuses on the day-to-day running of a dress shop and the pressures that wartime rationing put on a business like Mrs. Shelton’s, I knew when I started to write the book that I was going to have to go deep down the rabbit hole of research related to “fashion on the ration.” Fortunately, I found many great resources, and I thought I’d share some of that research with you.

I found as I began to write this article that there was a lot I wanted to share. The article started to get rather long, so I’ve decided to break it up into several parts, which I will share across the next few weeks.

Wardrobes Before the War

I love clothes and always have. I enjoy the creativity that goes into dressing, and I find that, much like makeup, clothing can be a wonderful form of self-expression. I also, like many people who enjoy clothes, think quite a bit about how much clothing I own.

As I began to research The Dressmakers of London, I found myself fascinated by what a woman’s wardrobe would have looked like before the war. In her wonderful book Fashion on the Ration, historian Julie Summers lays out an all-season wardrobe by the numbers. In the late 1930s, the average woman1 might have owned:

• 7 dresses

• 2 two-piece suits

• 2 skirts

• 3 overcoats

• 1 macintosh

• 5-6 pairs of shoes

• Stockings, hats, gloves, and undergarments

These clothes might have come from a department store or a smaller dress shop. A woman might have had some or all of her clothes made for her by a dressmaker or—if she could afford it—one of the London or Paris fashion houses.

One great difference between then and now is the durability of clothing. There was no fast fashion as we know it today. Clothes made before the war would have been constructed with an expectation that they would last season after season. Generally, the quality would have been higher, and with that the expectation that a woman would wear her clothes for much longer than we do today.

The Ration Comes In

The declaration of war in September 1939 immediately changed fashion. Many clothing manufacturers pivoted their focus to begin producing things like the incredible number of uniforms required by the British military. Fabric such as silk, which was used to make parachutes, became unavailable for purchase. Because of the pressures on the fashion industry, it became difficult for some people to afford or access new clothing, particularly if they were less well-off.

These changes were among the factors that prompted the Board of Trade and its president Oliver Lyttleton to introduce clothing rationing. Rationing was meant to more equally distribute clothing to the British population, save valuable resources like cloth and labor, and improve the clothing that people did have.

Food rationing had been in place since 1940, but clothing rationing was only introduced on June 1, 1941. The Board of Trade announced it before a bank holiday so retailers could be properly briefed and prepared when the shops reopened to customers. This also meant that consumers couldn’t panic buy and stock up before clothing rationing began.

How It All Worked

Everyone in Britain had already been issued food ration coupon books before the clothing ration came in, so the Board of Trade instructed people to use their remaining margarine coupons toward their clothing. (They were then issued a separate coupon book for 1942-1943, no margarine coupons necessary.)

Each type of clothing someone might wish to buy was assigned a point value, which would correspond to the number of coupons you would have to surrender along with your money to purchase a garment. For instance, when rationing first started you might need:

• 11 coupons for a dress

• 2 coupons for stockings

• 5 coupons for women’s shoes

• 7 coupons for men’s shoes

Initially, most people were allocated 66 coupons for the year.2 This British Pathé film shows how it all added up.

(Fair warning that the video really feels like a relic of its time after :43)

If you think 66 coupons for an entire year’s worth of clothes feels tight, you’re right. Those men and women who had extensive wardrobes before the war could rely on rotating through their clothing to make it last longer. However, the average person would soon have to face difficult decisions about what to prioritize as their clothes wore out. People struggled, especially when trying to decide whether to buy a summer dress now or save those coupons for the purchase of a higher-value item like a coat to replace one that was falling apart later in the year.

Things only became more difficult because the number of coupons issued shrunk during the war. Here’s a look at how rationing became even more restrictive throughout the war:

• 1941: 66 coupons per person

• 1942: 48 coupons per person

• 1943: 36 coupons per person

• 1945: 24 coupons per person

Unfortunately, the dwindling number of coupons was not the only thing people had to contend with…

Look out for part 2 next week when I’ll be diving into the various government schemes to encourage people to make do with the clothing they had during World War 2 and how they changed the look of British fashion.

My book The Dressmakers of London, a novel about two estranged sisters who are forced back together when they unexpectedly inherit their mother’s London dress shop during World War 2, is now available in print, ebook, and audiobook. Further information is available on my website.

On paper, Noor Inayat Khan should have been one of the most unlikely spies of World War 2. However, an inherent steeliness in her personality led her to defy her superiors and continue working as the sole Allied wireless radio operator in Paris at the height of the war. Now she is celebrated as one of the most well-known female Special Operations Executive (SOE) operators thanks to her incredible self-sacrifice and her dangerous work.

Born on New Year’s Day in 1914, Khan was the eldest daughter of Hazrat Inayat Khan and Amina Sharada Begum (originally known as Ora Ray Baker). As well as being a musician, Hazrat Inayat Khan was a Sufi leader and founder of the Inayati Order. For at time, the family was based in Moscow, where Hazrat performed, before moving to Britain and then to France.

Hon. Assistant Section Officer Noor Inayat Khan (code name Madeleine), 1943

Although Khan grew up as a pacifist much like her father, when Germany began to invade its neighbors, Khan felt compelled to act. She enrolling as a trainee Red Cross nurse in France. However, when Germany invaded that country in the spring of 1940, she and her family only narrowly escaped by boarding one of the last boats to evacuate British citizens.

In Britain, Khan enlisted in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAFs). She was not British, and she told her recruitment officers that when the war ended she would campaign for Indian independence. However, she was accepted into the service and selected to train as a wireless operator. Then, in October 1942, she was recruited by the SOE, likely for her radio skills and her fluency in English, French, Spanish, and German.

While Khan excelled at all aspects of radio operation, there were concerns about how well she would hold up in the field. Her superiors believed she was too “childlike” to be an agent, and she frightened easily. One of her officers recalled her reaction when she was put through the paces in a mock interrogation:

She was so overwhelmed, nearly lost her voice. As it went on she became practically inaudible. Sometimes there was only a whisper. When she came out afterwards, she was trembling and quite blanched.

However, after completing her training in 1943, the 29-year-old Khan was given the code name Madeleine and parachuted to Occupied Paris where wireless operators were desperately needed. On the ground, she became the first female wireless operator stationed in France.

She initially made contact with PROSPER, a network set up to bring British arms into France to support the French Resistance. However, ten days after Khan arrived, a double agent betrayed PROSPER and almost all of the high-level members of the network were arrested. The SOE encouraged Khan to return to Britain, but she refused, continuing to broadcast. Soon she became the only active wireless operator providing an intelligence link between Paris and Britain.

Khan was constantly in danger when she operating in Paris. Because the Germans were aware that there was an active wireless operator working for the Allies, she spent her life on the run. This meant zipping around on a bicycle, hanging her conspicuous aerial wherever it might be reasonably hidden, transmitting her information, and quickly breaking her radio down before the Gestapo could track her signal and capture her. She broadcast information about drops of arms and money, as well as the status of the resistance networks. She is also believed to have been “instrumental in facilitating the escape of 30 Allied airmen shot down in FRANCE,” according to a posthumous commendation.

Khan’s bravery was unquestionable. Wireless radios were large and bulky, and not discreet even when broken down into their component parts. One story goes that she was riding the Metro in Paris when she was stopped by two German officers who wanted a look at her case. She told them that her radio was a film projector, and even opened it up to let them see. Amazingly, they didn’t recognize the radio in front of them or that the woman they were speaking to was Agent Madeleine.

Ultimately, Khan was betrayed by another woman who sold Khan’s address to the Germans. On October 13, 1943, she was arrested at her apartment by the Gestapo. Not only did they find her transmitter, but they also found a school copybook in which she’d meticulously recorded all of her transmissions and security checks. This was directly against SOE orders, although there is some dispute about whether she misunderstood the SOE instruction, “Be very careful in the filing of your messages” to mean recording them down rather than transmitting, or “filing” them. Either way, the German’s would go on to use her notebook to transmit messages as her until early 1944 when the SOE realized that something was amiss.

Khan tried multiple times to escape from her prison in Paris but each time was captured and returned to her cell. Eventually she was taken to Pforzheim, a German prison, where she was badly mistreated and spent most of her days heavily shackled.

On September 11, 1944, she and three other female prisoners were sent to Dauchau. Two days later, Khan and the other women were executed. Her last reported word was, “Liberte.”

No one knew what happened to the operative known as Madeleine until after the war when Vera Atkins, who had worked with Khan in the SOE, went searching for the agents who had gone missing in the war. Atkins realized that Khan had been mistakenly identified as a woman who had actually been killed at Natzweiler. Atkins was able to learn the truth of Khan’s death and inform the War Office which, in turn, told her family.

Khan was posthumously honored with an MBE, the British George Cross, and the French Croix de Guerre with gold star. Although her months operating in France were short, the information she was able to broadcast was considered invaluable during a time of extreme danger. Her incredible bravery and dedication to the cause is as remarkable as her death was tragic.

Today she is remembered with a memorial bust of Khan—the first dedicated to an Asian woman—stands in Gordon Square in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of in London, as well as a number of plaques and other commemoration across Britain.