PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
Stop Press: I have bought some German trousers. Lovely material. Superb make. All their goods seem controlled and practically bellowing with Teutonic efficiency. But ... disconcertingly, although these new trizers (Pr Philip's word) are the right length, they seem very ample around the mid-areas. I thought that, perhaps, the mirror was at fault, but I am voluminous in them. I bought them with five pounds off, but they seem to be five pounds on. I never bothered much about volume when choosing, since all my anxieties are centred on length. Came about because my mother used to buy me four-foot trousers for two-foot legs, saying that I would grow into them. I am still trying and she is long gone.
Anyroadup, as they say in Walsall, I have just donned these German trousers preparatory, on a rainy and blustery day, to going to the pub, and I seem to be hearing a military band in the very far distance. The sound is enhanced by visions of little feathers in pork-pie hats -and slappen of ze lederhosen, that kind of thing. Whereas I normally sidle along in town, hardly noticeable at all, I am now conscious of a strut and the odd thought that, perhaps, I might look well with a moustache since I don't look at all well without.
Very worrying. Anyway, let's get on with it:
As she is bespoke
All over the North there are men of advanced years whose trousers come half way up their chests, although they are less frequently seen as years go by. These trousers can not, if the evidence of shop windows is to be believed, be bought. No-one will admit to making them or selling them. And yet there they are, parading the streets, a source of bafflement to al1 who observe them. At a stroke, they dispense with the need for a jacket. The foulest winters have never breached them. They would have deflected gunfire at Ypres.
As if one mystery were not enough, there is a second. These trousers are suspended from tiny braces, which are also not observed in shops. These are midget braces, minuscule things matching the tiny clogs people exhibit on their sideboards. These braces are the sort of things that might be worn by Cindy doll's husband, if she had one.
The combination of the two intrigues historians, social commentators and tailors, bespoke or otherwise, everywhere.
I asked a tailor whether he had every been asked for such trousers. He had not. They baffled him as they baffle everyone else. He suggested that the owners had, perhaps, left them to members of their families in wills, to be held in perpetuity like stately properties. Perhaps, he added, they were part of a job lot from another century which refused to wear out. Maybe, once upon a time, a gentleman went to be fitted who had eight-foot legs and a one-foot body and the establishment he patronised made up a large batch in error. It was not really for him to say. After 30 years in the trade, bustling about with chalk and tape measure, the mystery was beyond him. But he once had a farmer who carefully chose his fabric for trousers from a pattern book intended for thick overcoats.
The tailor protested that, if he were able to create the trousers, it would be like wearing a quilt. The farmer insisted. The tailor pointed out that no creases would ever adorn these trousers. They would hang like cylinders from the braces, perhaps even restricting leg movement or the circulation of blood when the farmer was involved in milking, goat chasing or such other simple rural pursuits as came his way while encumbered by an excess of fabric.
The farmer again persisted, against all the tailor's arguments, and was observed, later , walking stiff-legged around town, happy with the arrangement, his knee joints in a permanently locked position, much like Sir Alec Guinness when he came out of the hot box on Bridge over the River Kwai.
I was reminded of all this when, seated in the pub, I was treated to the arrival of a gentleman not known to me. I had been idly observing the elephant trousers up to then - trousers worn by fattish people which, when they walk, overlap in the bum area, like elephant legs. The new arrival had a pristine-clean short coat, trousers which lacked all substance so that they flapped around his knees like Tibetan prayer flags, a bald head, and a cheerful countenance atop a five-footish frame. "I thought it was Beau Brummel," cried the landlord by way of greeting. "More like Noah," replied the gentleman. And I had to agree with him.
This leads me to another sartorial yardstick: the Great Lancashire Bargain. There is hardly anyone in the county who can resist the massive price reductions frequently offered by enterprising traders, and this sensitivity to a bargain transcends all classes, income groups, and common sense. I have known people who were amazing bargains from head to foot. The insecurities of the thirties stalk the land like ghosts.
The Tommy Ball shoe emporium, housed in an old Blackburn factory, was, when I knew it, hardly of this ilk. Its bargains attracted coachloads of solid citizens from all over England and Yorkshire. But there is a quirkiness, even here, and it lay in the fact that each pair of shoes was connected by a piece of string which passed through holes made at the back. It had, therefore, become something of a cult thing at parties to observe the backs of people's shoes, and the wearers were well aware of that cult.
Shoes are not, in general, a great problem. Suits are. A professional man - indeed, a lecturer in accountancy - found an establishment where the goods on sale were said to be slightly marred by faults, and he came across this remarkable jacket, beautifully cut, and, what is better, fitting him perfectly. He was about to buy the entire suit when the proprietor asked whether he would not, first, like to try on the trousers in a cubicle. The professional man said he saw no reason to; he was obsessed by the quality of the jacket. The proprietor, a man of kindly disposition who knew better, insisted. The professional man emerged from the cubicle in some dismay. One trouser leg was half way up his calf, the other was of standard length; the seat of the trousers protruded like a massive balloon, and stood proud of his own, generous figure of its own volition.From his description, it would appear that he looked like Grock, the clown, as he proceeded. He seemed to be towing something. It reminded him of Les Dawson's proposition that one could never drown in an old- fashioned swimming costume, since the waterlogged wool caused the garment to drag through the surface water yards behind the wearer, like a great cloud of plankton. Reluctantly, he returned the suit to its rack and mused on the kind of deformed human being who would manage to occupy it with dignity in the future.
A terrible malady in Lancashire is the weak chest. Doctors do not diagnose the condition; mothers invariably do so. "He's always had a weak chest," they will say of some unfortunate offspring wrapped in brown paper, or worse, from birth. As a child, I had a friend with whom I necessarily shared a room on some family social occasion, and he had what his mother described as a weak chest. He was encased from neck to ankles in thick, greyish material, manufactured to a stiff consistency , and meant to be applied between the skin and whatever else was available for outerwear. I asked him some simple question as he was staring from the window at the morning light, and he turned to answer. The body moved without affecting the stance of the material in the slightest. He revolved within it. The material had an existence of its own, guided by another intelligence. He stared at me and the material continued to view the outside world. Or so I assumed at the time. He went on to wear similar garments provided gby the War Office and the result was much the same. Such garments are part of an immaculate conception.
A Lancashire journalist went for his Army medical examination at the start of the second world war and failed it, so that he continued his occupation. Some time later, a colleague met one of the Army examiners and asked him whether he remembered the man. "1 do," he said. "He had the smallest chest and the cleanest feet of anyone I have ever seen in my life." It is a commendation devoutly to be missed. I imagine that was a weak chest. At any rate, the journalist spent the period of hostilities eating peanut butter to give him strength, and his legs were often encased in leather up to the knees. He would have looked like a dehydrated Storm Trooper, a victim of some atrocity, had the Nazis ever arrived.
I have, myself, been victim of a bargain. Together with a dozen or so journalists, I was offered a suit length of black material for a laughably small sum. I accepted, as did all the others. I was then recommended to a small tailor in the centre of Manchester; small, that is, in business terms. Physically, he was a large and argumentative tailor, much given to waving sharp scissors. At any rate, he viewed the cloth curiously, felt it, then declared that it was not cloth at all. "1 do not know what it is," he said. "1 only know that it is not cloth." It looked like cloth to me. It fell in folds and so forth and had an observable texture. I advised him to get on with his measurements and not to be hasty or intemperate during his calculation of the inside "Where do you usually get your suits?" he asked. "Hector Powe," I replied. "He does a good suit does Hector ," said the tailor.
He finally produced a garment that fitted and I wore it to work. My friends were similarly robed. We soon found we had a problem. Any crease put into the material stayed there for ever. There was no way of erasing it. No amount of ironing touched it. I concluded that the tailor was probably right. It was not cloth. It was possibly something that had fallen from the back of a tar-macadam vehicle. I was wearing an alien thing. My friends and I dispensed with our suits immediately and ostracised the photographer who had sold them to us. He, poor fellow, persuaded his wife to have a skirt made from the surplus and the problem became my wife's. She volunteered to make the skirt.
A tackler (that is, a Lancashire mill overlooker) suffering from rickets and who, as a result, had bowed legs, went to be measured for a suit. The tailor, trying not to be offensive, seemed ill at ease measuring the legs. "Don't bother thisself about that," said the tackler. "Just make t' trousers straight. I'll bend 'em."
And Yorkshire thinks it has problems.
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
3 March, 2007