Making Do

Military history is a mixture of things, from strategy, generalship, campaigns and the experiences of those who fight. Logistics is important as well, of course, as is the Home Front in ‘wars against the people’ where the distinction between front and rear lines become blurred. In 44 years of soldiering - and thinking about soldiering - I thought I’d seen most expositions of the art of military history. I hadn’t reckoned with Professor Susan Carruthers’s innovative and intriguing examination of the role that clothing played in the British experience of the post-war world. It really is first class, and is heartily recommended as a new examination of the impact of total war on an entire people, and the impact of war on this most vital of things - the fabric that makes the clothes we all wear and which gives direct and tangible expression to the ideas we have about ourselves, individually and collectively.

Her focus isn’t on the war itself, but on the effect and impact of war on an entire nation that had quickly to learn how to ‘make do and mend’ - certainly a feature of my youth during the 1960s which I remember well: my mother was and remains a superb seamstress - and looks at the role of fabric across America and Europe in a time of severe ‘textile famine’ at war’s end, examining the difficulties people encountered in obtaining such a basic necessity as clothing and footwear as uniforms were discarded after mass demobilisation. The complete absence of ‘nylons’ in stocking-starved Britain during the war and their role in the hands of the US serviceman using them as currency in a new and brutal form of cultural imperialism has long been a cultural leitmotif of the war on the home front, and certainly of American super-abundance and British poverty. The absence of nylons in fact was but one example of the enormity of the fabric famine Carruthers describes, and the slavery of sorts that followed. The post-war world was one of haves and have nots. What would everyone wear as uniforms were discarded and soldiers returned home, Nazi camps were liberated, and millions of uprooted people struggled to subsist? Fabric became utterly centric to postwar Britain and explains, surely, the revolution in clothing and style that impacted our society and culture in the 1960s when the famine at last began to abate. Clothes and footwear supplied a currency, she suggests, with which some were rewarded, while others went without.

I’ve read Susan Carruthers’s work before. This is just as good, written in lovely prose and entirely accessible to the general reader, looking at the (mainly post-war) period through a fascinating new lens. She doesn’t restrict herself to the UK, which the book is mainly about, but casts her net into the horror of Bergen Belsen, which British troops came across in shock 80 years ago this month. There’s plenty that might appear obvious: how uniforms infer status and role (just think about President Zelenskyy's wardrobe choices) on this theme but much of which is new and stimulating.

This is a fresh and refreshing examination of the end of war and of its immediate aftermath, from an unexpected but ultimately rewarding perspective.