Pearls and a Fur Jacket

Anne Scott-James was one of the ‘First Ladies’ of Fleet Street, though she preferred the title ‘one of the first career girls’. Her novel In the Mink, published in 1952, is a thinly disguised portrait of her pre-war and post-war years as a journalist. Richard Boston, writing her obituary in 2009, remarked of it disapprovingly that ‘her characters are uniformly lifeless. Whatever value it may have for the fashion historian, it is scarcely readable as a novel.’ Later on he adds that she had once not only fused, but actually melted his coffee-maker. Clearly this still rankled.

It’s true that In the Mink is not a brilliant novel, but it is much more than an entertaining period piece and I’ve continued to re-read it over the years with great pleasure. The worlds it describes are markedly different from our own, but the issues raised – how women handle power, how they are perceived in top jobs, how you cope with marriage, children and career, and, perhaps most interestingly of all, what the value of fashion is – are addressed with the prescience and clear-sighted intelligence you would expect from a woman with a First from Oxford. Her fictional counterpart, Elizabeth Gaskell, applies, as Scott-James did herself, for a first job as a copywriter on Venus, aka Vogue, in 1938. There follows this unnerving and arcane scrutiny by the Managing Director:

‘There is a lot against you, Miss Gaskell,’ he said. ‘You have no experience and you are not well dressed.’ (Alas for the garish tartan suit my mother and I had thought so smart.) ‘At the same time you can spell, your shoes are good and you write on die-stamped notepaper. You can come on a week’s trial and your salary will be two pounds ten a week.’

Within a month Elizabeth knows she has found her métier. She quickly masters fashion journalese circa 1938 (‘Invest in a dark brown brassière! Be courageous about hand lotion!’). She has also adopted the Venus dress code – a black costume, a single string of pearls, a fur jacket and a small black hat with a veil. (Bear in mind that at this stage Elizabeth is 20, albeit six feet tall.) Herein lies the major difference between fashion then and now. In 1938 the fashion goal was to look adult and sophisticated. There were no such things as teenagers. At 17 you became your mother. Sophistication was conveyed in one highly charged word: ‘Paris!’ To suggest glamour and possibly sin, popular novelists of the period had only to say: ‘She wore a frock that shouted Paris.’ Its modern equivalent – a dress that whimpered Primark – can never convey the same frisson of fantasy and desire. Then the Second World War broke out and like everything else fashion was rationed. Again Elizabeth mirrored Scott-James’s career when she moved to Fleet Street to become a feature writer for View (in reality Picture Post). With a selection of Cockney photographers she travelled a blacked-out Britain trying to find positive news on the Home Front. It was invaluable training. ‘On Venus forward planning was everything,’ ‘Elizabeth’ remarks. ‘Whereas on a fast moving weekly magazine, the skill lay in improvisation, one had to get on the phone, fix the thing and start on with it in one continuous movement.’ The black suit was summarily retired: ‘I lived in a bright-red travel coat, never wore a hat, lunched on sandwiches and tramped about in flat-heeled shoes.’ The end of the war not only brought the cessation of hostilities but also revealed a country ravenous for clothes, colour and novelty. It was at this point that Elizabeth Gaskell found herself back on Venus – only this time editing it. Concluding that other publications could do features more competently, she decided to nail the magazine’s colours firmly to the mast of fashion and beauty. It was a brave statement in the face of a fashion industry that had virtually disappeared, and continued rationing of beauty aids and cosmetics. Things like hand lotion, even for the courageous few, simply weren’t available. This section exactly parallels Scott-James’s own experience of taking up the reins at Harper’s straight after the war, and the portrait she paints of that time is one of the best parts of the story. Conditions were challenging to say the least. Magazine offices had been bombed and were relocated to anywhere with a roof. The printing industry, working with machines that had not been cutting-edge even before the war started, was not helpful. There was much teeth-sucking and murmurs of ‘You can’t expect that sort of quality nowadays – don’t you know there’s been a war on?’ Somehow, in her windowless cubbyhole which she was assured was the editor’s office, she managed, mainly by writing most of it herself, to get the magazine out and back to something approaching its former glory. The public, naturally, were not only not grateful but also took a high moral tone as to whether fashion should even be a consideration in a time of austerity – a view best summed up by a letter the new editor received after just one edition: ‘Why do we need fashion anyway?’ it demanded. ‘I have managed with two dresses and an apron for the last four years, and my husband says I am the best dressed woman he knows.’ Elizabeth Gaskell’s scathing response can only reflect Anne Scott-James’s own views on the crucial importance of good dressing. ‘The English hate fashion. A puritanical streak makes the island race despise clothes, fear personal beauty and feel shame in all colours except beige.’ She follows this up with what might well be described  as her mission statement:

I love fashion. My heart always beats in sympathy at Madame de Sévigné’s much quoted words: ‘Dieu, que j’aime la mode! ’ I don’t pretend that fashion is a ‘fine’ art but I would place it high among the decorative arts, perhaps somewhere mid way between pottery and architecture.

That clarion call as to the value of fashion never fails to move me – surely something that gives so much pleasure and so much employment should be celebrated not denigrated? Did ‘Elizabeth’ enjoy her new-found power and influence? It’s here that Anne Scott-James’s voice is most clearly heard. Her photograph at the front of the book makes it clear that she was a natural head girl – poised, groomed, imperturbable. But she was keenly aware that to wield power as a woman, you would automatically antagonize many people.

It is impossible to be a gentle timorous gazelle while you are creating a business, travelling the world and balancing the books. If you want to maintain a high standard of work the first thing you have to say is ‘No’ firmly to substandard work, and harden your heart. You are choosing to say farewell forever to the role of soft eyed gazelle.

She knows all the charges levelled at successful women. ‘Tough? I don’t quite know what people mean by tough, except that the successful are always called tough by the unsuccessful.’ Like her fictional counterpart Anne Scott-James married a fellow journalist – in real life Macdonald Hastings. He may have been a man of exceptional qualities, but on the evidence of this book he was rarely at home to reveal them. He was perhaps not suited to family life – his greeting to his wife, a few hours after she gave birth to their first child, was: ‘You look awfully tired considering you’ve been in bed all day.’ A comment that might make one wonder about the long-term future of the union. It’s clear that Elizabeth/Anne recognized early on that the domestic as well as the bringing-home-the-bacon rôle would fall largely to her. She remarks that it was much easier to be a married working woman before the war because of the plethora of help. Her own professional life was saved, after motherhood, by an elderly nanny who was successfully called out of retirement to care for the young Max Hastings. Kingsley Amis once playfully remarked that the chief motive in writing fiction was the desire for revenge and, if true, this may be why In the Mink isn’t a first-rate novel. Anne Scott-James clearly had very few scores to settle and enjoyed what she thought was the best job in the world. Her aim was to convey her own infectious enthusiasm about a vanished era of fashion journalism, and in this she delightfully succeeds.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 31 © Frances Donnelly 2011