An Array of Hats: Sepia Saturday

This week's Sepia Saturday prompt photograph c.1920 shows  a young couple dressed in the  fashions of the times.  I focussed on the woman's large brimmed hat, with an excellent match from my family collection.

 

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This charming photograph is of  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. 

Beatrice's wedding photograph contrasts sharply with the very formal opulent dress style  of  her sister Sarah's wedding nine years earlier in 1910.
 

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, stylish dress with frills and a large posy set off by  long broad ribbons!   The sisters came from a family of carters and coal merchants  down three generations and George also worked in the business. 

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 the third Oldham sister  Edith.  

 

Edith's dress looks suspiciously like that of her sister Sarah's wedding dress - note the same bodice decoration, and the style of the sleeves and the hem. 

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,  Florence was the youngest of a large family of eight surviving children born to James Mason and Alice Rawcliffe, my great grandmother's sister.  Alice sailed from Liverpool  to New York in 1888 with six children under 11,  and two pieces of baggage.  to join her husband who had emigrated  a year earlier.  Five more children were born in New York, but three did not survive infancy.  

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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!

 The flowery language in the advertisement somehow gives the impression of  a large, elegant city store, but Earlston  is a village with a typical High Street, with  the population in the 1881 census noted as 1767 - and much the same today, but without the selection fo shops.

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Sepia Saturday gives an opportunity to bloggers to share 

 their family history and memories through photographs.

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