Me and My Hair by Patricia Malcolmson

Author:Patricia Malcolmson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: hair, hairdressers, hair salons, hairstyles, good hair day, bob, beehive, Goth, afro, perm, blonde, wartime hair
ISBN: 9781909183162
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2013
Published: 2013-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

Gladys Carney from Gosforth, aged 18, in 1944 when she joined the Land Army and was stationed at Haydon Bridge near Hexham. The secret of her hairstyle, she said, was to cut the top off a lisle stocking and roll it up, using it as a pad to roll the hair around

We cannot know the full weight of British women’s efforts to achieve good-looking hair with Hollywood glamour. But we do know that even the government came to recognise that looking good was a key part of morale and that a fetching hairdo in a pinched, grim world was no small thing. We also know that many of the women who worked so hard to put on a good face - and present a good head of hair - were eager to find sweethearts, many of whom would be far different from the men they had known as youngsters. War brought not only rationing but also a great deal of freedom to young women, as well as higher wages than they or their older sisters had ever known. Who knows what comfort a small photo of a Hollywood look-alike in the jacket pocket of a battledress may have given a young soldier? Subsequent British and American films have made this link to home very significant indeed - and it probably was.

Women worked hard to achieve glamour, or at least decency. One woman remembers having 100 pipe cleaners in her hair - they took the place of curlers - worn under her headscarf all day, which she then painstakingly removed one by one and wound each curl around her finger. ‘I was very proud of my curls!’ she recalled years later. [270] A more common style adopted by many long-haired British women was to roll straight hair into arrangements such as those described by beauty columnist Ursula Bloom in 1942. ‘Hair is easier to manage dressed in long upward sweeps and tucked into neat rolls’, she advised. ‘Learn to shape a roll properly. Brush straight up with a spot of brilliantine, then curl round a tail comb, pin one end securely, and then train the other end to come towards the face almost like a curl. Fashion with invisible pins.’ [271] Another approach was what was sometimes called the Victory Roll, which involved hair rolled up tightly around the head, sometimes with a large curl formed at the front. However their hair was dressed, beautifully coiffed women on dance floors were wooed by men in uniform, from home and abroad. Some became war brides, destined to spend much of their lives in foreign lands or follow their husbands all over Britain. Others still became unwed mothers, sometimes of dark-skinned half-American children. For many, war claimed the lives of fiancés and new husbands. Few, one imagines, ended up with much in the way of Hollywood glamour.

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Some young girls, often taking their first job in wartime, took a while to come to grips with their hair and the style that best suited them. One fifteen-year old copied the adult fashion of snoods.

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