Dressed For War

The Story of Audrey Withers, Vogue editor extraordinaire from the Blitz to the Swinging Sixties

Julie Summers

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781471181597
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

'Magnificent... Dressed for War works on many levels: as an evocation of an uncommon time; as a celebration of an uncommon woman; aspure, unalloyed fun.' Lucy Davies, Daily Telegraph
Dressed For War: The Story of Audrey Withers, Vogue editor extraordinaire from the Blitz to the Swinging Sixties is the untold story of our most iconic fashion magazine in its most formative years, in the Second World War. It was an era when wartime exigencies gave its editor, Audrey Withers, the chance to forge an identity for it that went far beyond stylish clothes. In doing so, she set herself against the style and preoccupations of Vogue 's mothership in New York, and her often sticky relationship with its formidable editor, Edna Woolman Chase, became a strong dynamic in the Vogue story. But Vogue had a good war, with great writers and top-flight photographers including Lee Miller and Cecil Beaton – who loathed each other – sending images and reports from Europe and much further afield – detailing the plight of the countries and people living amid war-torn Europe. Audrey Withers' deft handling of her star contributors and the importance she placed on reflecting people's lives at home give this slice of literary history a real edge. With official and personal correspondence researched from the magazine's archives in London and in New York, Dressed ForWar tells the marvellous story of the titanic struggle between the personalities that shaped the magazine for the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond.

1

GREEN SHOOTS

‘I always think of you as a bright, uncomplicated spirit in this muddy, involved world.’

– HUGH I’ANSON FAUSSET TO AUDREY WITHERS, APRIL 1924

Elizabeth Audrey Withers was born on 28 March 1905 in Hale in Cheshire, the second daughter of Percy and Mary ‘Mamie’ Withers. She had a sister, Monica, who was five years older and a brother, Michael, who arrived in 1910. Her upbringing was unconventional but very happy. It helped to sow the seeds of intellectual enquiry and enthusiasm for the world around her that would be the two strongest traits of her personality in adult life.

Audrey’s life spanned almost the whole of the twentieth century. She was born at a time when the man in the moon was part of celestial folklore and a mobile was something that hung above a baby’s cot. By the time of her death in 2001, she had witnessed two world wars and the development of computer technology. Over her lifetime, Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit of the highest peak on earth, and Neil Armstrong took a giant step on the moon. In politics, she saw the construction and destruction of the Berlin Wall, while in music, art and literature she witnessed some of the greatest changes of all time, including the birth and death of her favourite composer, Benjamin Britten.

At the time she was born, Audrey’s father was a general practitioner and had worked in his private practice in Hale since qualifying as a doctor. Both Audrey’s parents had suffered personal loss in their family lives, and this shaped them as parents. Percy Withers was born in 1867, the fourth and youngest son of John and Mary Withers. His childhood was beset by illness and he had suffered from an overwhelming terror of the dark. He wrote later of his shuddering fear of the cruelties of boyhood, ‘its dirty-mindedness, its terrors and deceits. The darkness of night was dreadful to me; to be left alone with it was to be abandoned to a presence that cut me adrift from all other experiences of life.’ As a child he found the company of other boys rough and crude. From them, he heard foul language and smutty tales, which he hated. He wrote,

I seem never to have known a day when ugliness and uncleaness [sic] were not abhorrent. Something perhaps too much of Puritanism, or at any rate, a queasy sensibility, has gone with me, quietly or aggressively, thro’ I believe every period of life. Nor do age and traffic with the world diminish it.

This highly strung, sickly child slipped into the terrifying territory of adolescence with a sense of wariness and often loneliness leading to blank despair. Home life was soon to be shattered by the death of first his father, when he was fourteen, and then his mother a year later, leaving the teenage boy to be brought up by his older brothers, Oliver and Sheldon, both doctors. Although there was no family money after the parents’ deaths, the brothers were determined that Percy should follow in their footsteps. With considerable sacrifice on their own parts, they put him through Manchester Grammar School where he ‘learned all too soon, and too grossly, the full implications of sex, and the beastliness that license, unschooled and misdirected, could make of it.’ Despite his over-sensitive nature and the ease with which he was shocked by crude and base ideas, he was persuaded by his brothers to follow them into medicine, matriculating at Owens College, later Manchester Medical School, at the age of nineteen.

A decade later, he met and married Mary Woolley Summers, known always within the family as Mamie. She was three years younger than Percy and the youngest of ten siblings. Her father, John Summers, had been born in Bolton but moved to Dukinfield, 6 miles east of Manchester, where he set up as a clogger making both the leather uppers and the nails for the clogs worn by the mill workers in the area. In 1851, John travelled to London to visit the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, where he came across a nail-making machine, advertised by the vendors as novel, utilitarian and economical. It cost £40, every penny that he had, but John Summers did not hesitate to buy it.

Within a year, he had enlarged his business and was delivering nails all over Lancashire, Yorkshire and as far afield as North Wales. The combination of the excellent railway network in the area and John’s determination to make a success of his business meant that it expanded rapidly, and by 1855 he announced a profit of £1,000. By the time his youngest daughter was born in 1870, John was forty-eight and his wife forty-two. Exhausted by eleven births in twenty years, Mary senior died a month to the day after Mamie’s birth, leaving John Summers with an orphan daughter and four sons living at home aged fifteen, thirteen, eleven and eight. Mamie was brought up by her older sister, Hannah, who was nineteen years her senior, and Nanny Walker, the family’s widowed housekeeper who stayed with the family until well into her eighties. Hannah was cruel, having not an ounce of human kindness, according to her brothers, and Mamie suffered from loneliness.

Hannah married and left home when Mamie was four and, a year later, John Summers died, leaving her abandoned for the third time in her short life. As a result, she grew up to be anxious and without a sense of belonging. The only happy times were when her brothers took her away on holiday to the continent in the summer. When she was nineteen, they insisted she should be educated at university. She went first to King’s College London, where she was awarded first-class honours in ancient History, and then to Oxford, where her older brother William had studied. Mary was one of the first generation of female students at Somerville Hall. Her closest friend was Cornelia Sorabji, who became the first woman to study law at Oxford and the first woman to practise law in India and Britain. The two of them remained friends for the rest of Mamie’s life and Miss Sorabji became Audrey’s godmother.

Percy Withers set up practice in Hale and soon he felt confident enough to buy a house and consider marriage as a ‘practicable and provident matter’. He knew that he would be offering his future wife a life of comfort as a GP had standing in the local community. He met Mamie at a party at her older brother’s house in the spring of 1895. He had got to know the family having treated one of their relatives for alcohol poisoning a few months earlier. He fell in love with her immediately and, with customary impetuosity, proposed to her a month later. Hannah and the Summers boys organised a sumptuous wedding for Percy and Mamie in June, with four little Summers bridesmaids. Mamie wore a dress of heavy ivory satin trimmed with deep Irish lace and a train borne by a tiny pageboy, her brother Harry’s 4-year-old son, Geoffrey.

They spent their honeymoon in Scotland and returned to Hale to begin married life in Albert Road, he as a GP and she as his wife, with a staff at home so that she never had to set foot in the kitchen other than to agree the menu. Four years later, their first child, Monica, was born. Five years later, Audrey arrived and eighteen months after that Percy Withers was struck down with bi-lateral pneumonia and their life was turned upside down. Without antibiotics, which would not be invented for another twenty years, pneumonia was often fatal. His brother Sheldon arrived to discuss Percy’s symptoms with the doctor, who refused to name the condition he most feared, simply saying he thought it unlikely that Percy would survive.

For six days during which Percy was unconscious and suffering from delirium, his two brothers, Oliver and Sheldon, with Mamie a constant nursing presence, took turns administering ice packs, oxygen, hypodermic injections and catheterisations. It was through their single-minded devotions that he woke up on the morning of the seventh day and began the long road to recovery. It took six weeks for him to be able to crawl out of bed and stagger towards a chair in the sitting room next door. It was not long after that his brothers broke the news to him that he would never again be able to return to practising as a doctor.

One afternoon while she was watching over Percy’s slow recovery, Mamie received a visit from her oldest brother, James. He had come to commiserate with his sister in her new and difficult circumstances. When he left, she waved him goodbye from the front door and turned around to light the gas lamp below the mirror as the night was drawing in. It was then she noticed an envelope. She picked it up and, when she opened it, found it contained a brief note and a cheque from her five older brothers made out to her for a sum that would keep her and the children in funds and comfort for the rest of their lives.

No one has ever revealed the actual amount of the cheque, but it meant that once Percy Withers had made his slow and painful recovery, he would never have to work again and they would be able to afford, eventually, to put the children through school and university. The money also covered Percy’s medical expenses, this being decades before the introduction of the National Health Service. With this one gesture of extraordinary generosity and the small annual stipend that Mary received from the Summers steel works, the family was on a firm financial footing for the future.

Once he was sufficiently recovered, Percy Withers decided that the family should sell the house in Hale and move to their holiday cottage on Derwentwater. Abbot’s Bay is a tiny inlet with twin promontories that lies four fifths of the way down the lake from Keswick, towards Grange and Borrowdale. The longer promontory was crested with magnificent Scots pines and a few hardy oaks and carpeted with moss and heather. Percy had built an Arts and Crafts-inspired cottage a decade earlier, which they moved into when Audrey was eighteen months old. This is where the memories of Audrey Withers begin.

Abbot’s Bay had neither running water nor any form of lighting or heating other than oil lamps and open fires. The house lay a good 5 miles on foot from Keswick, as there was no road along the west side of the lake. Everything had to be brought from Portinscale or Grange, the two closest villages, but each was still more than an hour’s hike there and back.

The daily strain of living at Abbot’s Bay was real enough for the adults, but for Audrey it was bliss. She and Monica had a governess who taught them lessons in the morning, but after lunch they were free to roam around the woods and into the low hills beside the lake. Percy taught them where to forage for mushrooms and which ones were safe to eat. Audrey loved the earthy smell of damp grass as she sought out the platesized field mushrooms in autumn, learning how to pick them carefully so as not to damage their gills. There was abundant wildlife around Abbot’s Bay: red squirrels, birds of all kinds and otters on the lake.

Audrey came across her first owlet when she was bending down, aged about three, trying to see if there was anything in the root of a rotten tree. A pair of dark, shiny eyes embedded in a head of fluff shone out at her. She stepped back instinctively as a baby owl flew out from the hole, hooting in protest. ‘Owl!’ she shouted to her father in delight. ‘I saw an owl!’

The acres of hillside were like a series of gardens. There were areas of Alpine flowers, of tiny, perfect roses nestling in the moss; there were herbaceous plants next to drifts of heather and swamp. Audrey learned the names of all the different mosses and ling on the promontory, and she and Monica rehearsed the names of the mountains that rose above the lake. To the north, beyond Keswick, the great riven face of Skiddaw, with Bassenthwaite lake stretching along its base, and Blencathra, the shapeliest of all British mountains, standing alongside it. To the south, beyond the oval of Derwentwater and its islands, ‘the massive jaws of Borrowdale, opened wide enough to disclose in dreamy contrast with the caverned front of Glaramara and the peaks of the Scafell group.’

For Audrey, the lake was both exciting and dangerous. She learned to swim off the jetty and loved the feeling of plunging into its cold, clear water and lying on her back looking up at the promontory. In calm weather, she and Monica paddled in the shallows, watching minnows and other fry darting to and fro beneath their feet. But when the storms whipped up the water and the waves crashed to the shore, Mamie kept the girls inside. She was afraid of the power of the lake and knew from experience how it could go from flat calm to a raging sea in just a matter of minutes.

Percy Withers took risks on the lake, and many of their friends and family predicted an early, watery grave for him. They thought he courted danger, that he was absurdly brave and recklessly risky, but he was unabashed:

I risked and enjoyed. It was not a superfluity of courage; it was not fool-hardiness. The lake, and most of all the angry lake, haunted me like a passion; not one of its moods but I wished to share to the uttermost. The gentlest of them was a bounty common to lovers and strangers alike; the violent mine alone.

This was the strange mixture that made up Audrey’s father. At once a brave, daring, not to say reckless risk-taker, with deep, violent passions, yet at the same time a man so puritanical and sensitive to life’s vulgarities that he could not hear a rude word or a coarse expression without feeling repulsed. The effect of this contrary character on the girls was marked. Monica, like her father, was unable to countenance any form of innuendo or profanity. Audrey said later that Monica could not read novels or watch television in later life in case she came across something remotely sexual. She never married and yet she travelled all over the world and was brave, like her father, not shying away from danger or from primitive living conditions. Audrey seemed to inherit none of her father’s abhorrence of sex, but she did embrace his zest for life. Her passions were every bit as strong as his and at times the euphoria she felt bubbling inside her like champagne would burst out and she would surprise people around her with her passionate exclamations of delight.

A tradition that grew up quickly at Abbot’s Bay was the 5 November bonfire. Percy would start collecting wood for the fire as soon as the last embers of the previous fire were cold. This was no casual wood-collecting, but an almost industrial undertaking. Percy and Mamie would take the children and their governess out in their boat after lunch and drop them at a bay further up or down the lake to play by the shore while they began the serious task of collecting wood. After the wood had been piled onto the boat, often to a height of 5 or 6ft, Percy and Mamie would row back to the bay to collect Monica and Audrey. This wobbling edifice would then make its stately and unstable way out onto the lake and back to the jetty at Abbot’s Bay, with Percy rowing in the bows and Mamie and the children desperately trying to steady the load. This was repeated many times before the great bonfire was ready to light. The November bonfire drew people on foot, in boats, and in carriages, from miles around.

Years later, during the Blitz, when Audrey was watching London on fire from the roof of her house in Little Venice, she was reminded of the awe-inspiring power of the bonfires on Derwentwater. The crackling and hissing of the wood as it split and twisted, the sap boiling in the green stems while the desiccated needles on last year’s pine branches would spit, giving off showers of sparks. She recalled the overwhelming heat from the flames as they stood in the glow of the fire, their cheeks red-hot, loving every minute of it, yet equally terrified by its intensity. Those memories returned as she watched the Blitz and she found herself both horrified and transfixed by the power of fire anew. She never told her father of this memory, nor of any others from her early childhood. She did not like to dwell on the past and always looked to the future. This was a defining trait in her character, and it meant that she was always prepared to consider something new rather than harking back to the safe and familiar.

Those early years in the Lake District were the happiest family years of all, a carefree existence where the only boundaries were those governed by nature. Audrey’s parents were remarkably free-thinking for the era, and this was something that would affect her outlook on life and periodically give her problems with authority. Her parents both voted Labour and were outspoken against fox hunting. They believed in social reform and supported housing projects for workers in Keswick. They encouraged the children to be independent, to ask questions and to read widely. There were no barriers to discussion other than the delicate subject of human emotions, which was out of bounds. If Percy Withers was uncomfortable thinking about what he regarded as base human activities, then Mamie Withers was even more buttoned up when it came to feelings. She was happy to talk about any subject under the sun, but she was incapable of showing emotional affection. This bothered Audrey, even as a small child, and she was instinctively more drawn to her live-wire father, whose energy and enquiring mind she found fascinating. Years later, Audrey put her mother’s lack of affection down to the circumstances of her childhood, but as a little girl Audrey missed the warmth and intimacy of the maternal bond.

Five years after Audrey’s birth, a brother, Michael Derwent Withers, was born. He was quiet and absorbed in his own world, something that would become accentuated over the course of his life. It is probable that he suffered from some form of mild brain damage, but there was never a diagnosis and Mick, as he became known, was seldom mentioned outside the immediate family. With three children, two of them in need of formal education, Mamie persuaded Percy that it was time to move the family away from the blissful but isolated life at Abbot’s Bay. It was with a very heavy heart that Percy agreed, and he never felt as happy again as he had done living beside Derwentwater.

The family rented property called Kylsant House in Broadway, Gloucestershire. The 1911 census lists Mary Lucy Cranford, a governess born in Calcutta, a cook called Lilian Annie Slater and two maids, Lilian Ludlow and Nesta Longsham. The family always had a cook as Mamie could not boil an egg. She was so undomesticated that when Lilian had the day off, she had to leave pre-prepared meals for the family ready to be eaten cold, whatever the season. The attraction of Kylsant House for Percy was the long, low, cloistered room that would be able to accommodate his library of some four thousand books. The house was built in the typical style of Cotswold properties from the seventeenth century, with gable...