Keeping Up Appearances by Catherine Horwood

Author:Catherine Horwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

DRESSING FOR THE OCCASION

In addition to dances, all social events, such as trips to the theatre, dinner parties and, for a sophisticated few, visits to nightclubs, involved a ritual of dressing. The nuances of male evening wear during the interwar years were as highly categorised as an army officer’s battery of uniforms. Writer Bryan Magee remembers seeing his father put on his white tie and tails to go to formal freemason dinners in the West End, epitomising for him ‘a certain attitude to going out: in those days everyone used to dress up a bit when they went out, whatever the occasion’.30

While novelists such as E.F. Benson could make jokes about what a man might be expected to wear, with his heroine Lucia’s ruling of ‘Hitum’, ‘Titum’ and ‘Scrub’, for the aspiring middle-class man this was no laughing matter. ‘Hitum’ indicated white tie and tails, Titum, a black tie and dinner jacket, and Scrub, morning dress.31 Benson’s heroine Lucia would add these words to her invitation cards to indicate the dress requirements for her parties. No man wanted to risk being associated with Pont’s cartoon from his famous series on ‘The British Character’, entitled ‘Importance of Not Being An Alien’.32 The poor foreigner in question stands like a lone pine tree in a forest of elegant oaks in trousers that are too short and what is obviously the wrong waistcoat.

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