An Array of Hats - Sepia Saturday

This week's Sepia Saturday prompt photograph features three Edwardian ladies, wearing large hats.  There is no shortage of that style among my extended family.

 An elegant portrait of Sarah Alice Oldham on her wedding to George Butler in Blackpool, Lancashire  and what a showy outfit, magnificently decorated large hat, and a large posy set off by  long broad ribbons!      Sarah came from a family of carters and coal-men down three generations and George also worked in the business.  

This charming photograph is of Sarah's sister, Beatrice Oldham who married Jack Clark in Blackpool, Lancashire  on 26^th December 1919. I feel the significance of the date after the First World War is not lost in this photograph,  where there is a certain air of informality and lack of ostentation,  with a large, but plain hat and a shorter skirt and the groom carrying a trilby hat.   It contrasts with the very formal opulent dress style  at Sarah's wedding nine years earlier in 1910. 

More large  hats were worn (above)  by Mary Jane Oldham, nee Bailey and her sister-in-law Sarah Butler, nee Oldham.    Mary Jane Bailey  and my grandfather William Danson were cousins.   Below is another creation worn by Sarah's other sister Edith. 

A magnificent array of hats (and buttonholes)  in this wedding group at the marriage in 1910  of  Wilfred Hyde and Annie Coombes, relations of my cousin's  wife. 

But to return to everyday fashion wear in hats:

My husband's great aunt Pat King, nee Hibbert, on the beach with her little daughter Annette, born in 1919.  


And even wee  ones can sport big hats

 

My mother Kathleen Danson, c.1911 taking part in a parade in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire.  She does not look too happy in her little bootees, frilly white dress and large hat.

                                      

                         

From the American branch of my mother's family -  Florence Mason, with her father c.1906.  Born 1898 in Brooklyn, New York,  she was the youngest of a large family of eight surviving children. 

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What if you were looking to buy a hat?  Here is an advertisement from my local paper "The Earlston Comet"  of 1891.  On the High Street, David Wallace, draper and clothier promised:

"An Immense and Magnificent Collection of every New and Fashionable  Dress Material....which for Variety, Superior Quality, Good Taste and Moderate Prices is unequalled in Earlston.

Tweeds in Cheviot, Homespun, Harris and Grampian makes, latest styles and newest mixtures, Black materials in great variety.

The latest novelties in Millinery, Flowers, Feathers etc.  Bonnets composed of Velvet and Jet, from 10s.6d to 25s.  The latest novelty in hats is Gladys in French Beaver, trimmed with Feathers.  All orders for this Department made up in the most Fashionable and Tasteful Manner." 

Note the reference to "black materials" - at a time when formal mourning wear was still the custom.  Somehow the name "Gladys" does not quite conjure up an image of a French beaver hat with feathers!

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Sepia Saturday gives an opportunity for genealogy bloggers  

to share their family history and memories through photographs


 

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