A Cultural History of Twin Beds

Hilary Hinds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350045422
• eBook ISBN: 9781000182088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A Cultural History of Twin Beds challenges our most ingrained assumptions about intimacy, sexuality, domesticity and hygiene by tracing the rise and fall of twin beds as a popular sleeping arrangement for married couples between 1870 and 1970. Modern preconceptions of the twin bed revolve around their use by couples who have no desire to sleep in the same bed space. Yet, for the best part of a century, twin beds were not only seen as acceptable but were championed as the sign of a modern and forward-thinking couple. But what lay behind this innovation? And why did so many married couples ultimately abandon the twin bed?In this book, Hilary Hinds presents a fascinating insight into the combination of beliefs and practices that made twin beds an ideal sleeping solution. Using nuanced close readings of marriage guidance and medical advice books, furnishing catalogues, novels, films and newspapers, this volume offers an accessible and rigorous account of the curious history of twin beds. This is vital reading for those with an interest in cultural history, sociology, anthropology and psychology.

1
Double or twin?

In 1892, the Yorkshire Herald announced, ‘The twin-bed seems to have come to stay, and will no doubt in time succeed the double bed in all rooms occupied by two persons’ (5 November 1892: 4). The Herald was ahead of the game, for this way of sleeping and the name ‘twin beds’ itself were new enough still to be making news in both Britain and the United States. As it turned out, the Herald was over-confident in its anticipation of the imminent triumph of the twin bed. It never completely ousted the double, but vied for position in the marital bedroom with its more traditional rival for the next half-century or so. Nevertheless, the unequivocal welcome given to the twin bedstead in the Herald’s article, together with the circumstantial evidence of its take-up in the last decade of the nineteenth century, prompts the question as to just what proportion of married couples stayed loyal to the traditional double bed, and how many opted for the newly fashionable twins. ‘Double or twin?’ was a question – variously inflected – that was raised and answered by sleep experts, social commentators and married couples for many years to come.

This question shadows the interests at the heart of this book. To investigate twin beds as a significant cultural phenomenon starts from the premise that this distinctive way of sleeping achieved a substantial degree of acceptance and adoption. The available evidence, drawn from a multitude of sources, from novels and films to advice books, advertising materials and the press, testifies unequivocally to the spread of this sleeping arrangement in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, definitive answers to the questions which follow – how many couples chose twin beds? When were they at their most fashionable? Were they as popular with working-class as with middle-class people? – remain frustratingly elusive, for there are no substantial, statistically reliable surveys to which to turn. This notwithstanding, partial answers can be glimpsed and broad trends in British couples’ sleeping preferences charted. These can be deduced in particular from newspapers and household advice books, which frequently comment on the popularity of twin beds, but literature and film also help us to gauge their evolving popularity and reputation. These materials suggest a century-long rise and fall for twin beds, between approximately 1870 and 1970: a steady and continuing increase in their popularity with married couples from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century; a period of equivocation and ambivalence as their cultural reputation and status changed; and a slow fall from grace, as they ceased to be seen as a desirable way for couples to sleep. This trajectory positioned twin bedsteads first as evidence of forward-thinking and rational householders, then as commonplace domestic objects and finally as risible signs of a failed marriage.

The late nineteenth-century press certainly took note of the advent of twin beds. They appeared frequently in its advertising copy: Messrs Watts and Co., for example, repeatedly advertised ‘The New Twin Bedsteads’ as part of their ‘immense stock’ of iron and brass beds in the Liverpool Mercury (21 March 1894: 1), but feature writers also showed an interest. In 1894, two years after the Yorkshire Herald announced the arrival of the twin bedstead, another regional newspaper, the Western Mail, confirmed its growing popularity: ‘Fashion has given its sanction to the use of the single bed; and large numbers of so-called “twin bedsteads” are now in the market, many of them made of costly woods, rich with carving’ (25 August 1894: 2). Not only were these bedsteads fashionable, they were also expensive. Buying new beds made a statement about your disposable income as well as the stylishness of this way of sleeping. By the 1920s, the manual The Complete Household Adviser was able to report that twin beds had become the norm: ‘“Single” beds (3 feet wide) are now the rule in most houses’ (n.d.: 21; original emphasis).¹ While it is impossible to gauge the accuracy of such a proclamation, the statement is unlikely to have been wildly inaccurate: such publications are, after all, dependent on conveying a reliable sense of current taste and fashion. Some thirty years after their arrival on the scene, however, it is striking that these beds’ status as ‘single’ still needs to be identified as new or unusual by quotation marks. Perhaps they were becoming the norm, but they were not yet so ordinary as to need no introduction. If these beds were ‘the rule’, they were a rule about which The Complete Household Adviser deemed its readers still to need information and guidance.

The popularity of twins showed little sign of abating through the interwar period. A 1928 article in the Manchester Guardian entitled ‘Modern Furniture: The New Bedsteads’ reported, ‘According to a well-known furnisher, the demand for twin beds in walnut has increased by fifty per cent during the last twelve months. This shows clearly their increasing popularity’ (28 June 1928: 8). The newspaper’s readership was principally middle class, and twin beds in walnut, while not as costly as mahogany, would certainly not have been within the purchasing power of those on a restricted budget. Throughout the 1920s, the London furniture store Heal’s advertised their Queen-Anne-style walnut twin beds at £26 each (Figure 1). To spend £52 on a pair of bedsteads, not to mention the mattresses and the new bedding needed to go with them, represented a considerable expense, equivalent to about £2,500 today.² This was not a purchase to undertake lightly. The following year, the Manchester Guardian followed up with ‘Beds and Bedding, Ancient and Modern’, reporting that ‘the big bed has gone quite out of favour, and single beds are popular everywhere. … furniture-makers everywhere are concentrating upon the production of neat and attractive single bedsteads’ (31 October 1929: 8). Thirty-five years after their introduction, the growing popularity of these bedsteads, and their impact on manufacturers’ production processes, continued to be newsworthy.

FIGURE 1 Advertisement for Heal’s Queen-Anne-style twin beds in walnut.

Testimony to the ubiquity of twin bedsteads was still to be found in the next decade. In 1934, the household advice book The Home of To-Day declared, ‘Single beds are now almost universally the custom’ ([1934?]: 114), and in 1936 the Manchester Guardian again noted ‘the tendency to replace double beds by twin single ones’ (4 January 1936: 8). There are indications here, however, of the broadening of the appeal of twins beyond the wealthier middle classes. The Home of To-Day was published by Daily Express newspapers, a title appealing to lower-middle-class readers, and the Manchester Guardian article noted not only the continuing market for twins, but also that they were being bought for use in ‘the small bedrooms of modern houses’. This strikes a very different note from the Manchester Guardian’s 1928 article about the twin beds in walnut. Here, instead, the twin bedsteads inhabit the small bedroom of the modern house, and their aura is not one of extravagance or opulence but of parsimony, focusing not on the purchase of new bedsteads but on the costs associated with such a change – namely, the need for smaller sheets. The advice is to alter old double sheets to fit the new twins: ‘Owing to the tendency to replace double beds by twin single ones … stocks of large sheets have to be adapted to the new requirements’ (4 January 1936: 8). Sheets from the old double should be cut down to single size, and the remnants used to make pillow cases, covers for ironing boards and glass cloths. The shift to twin-bedded sleep might be continuing, but it was doing so in circumstances that, in the hard-pressed 1930s, necessitated the exercise of careful and creative housewifery.

The economic depression of the 1930s required even the middle classes to tighten their belts and to make do and mend, but nevertheless twin beds continued to be discussed as desirable and fashionable objects making inroads into old ways of sleeping, and began to be chosen for the smaller bedrooms of new houses. When new beds were bought, perhaps with the purchase of one of the newly built houses that proliferated in the interwar period, twins were still popular. No longer associated only with those who had both the money and the space to switch to them (commentators frequently note that twins take up more space than a double), they were also finding a place in the bedrooms of those of more modest means.

There was, in these years, a growing association between twin beds and the new urban and suburban way of life. John Gloag’s Modern Home Furnishing, for example, published in a cheap paperback series, concerned ‘the furnishing of small and moderately-sized houses and flats’ (1929: 9). His advice explicitly contrasted with what had been possible in ‘those spacious Victorian times’ (ibid.: 9–10). Now there was a boom in speculative house-building, when much of the furnishing of the new small houses was achieved with the help of ‘hire purchase’ (HP) or credit schemes, enabling the spread of payments for costlier items over an extended period (Edwards 2005: 190–96; Scott 2009: 811). Such schemes had started in the nineteenth century, and certain companies, such as the Hackney Furniture Company, were closely identified with them. Their advertisements in the mass-market Penny Illustrated Paper in 1913 show that twin beds, costing £10 10 shillings, were among many items that could be purchased by the ‘system of Gradual Payments, originated by us’ (3 May 1913: 2).³ The expansion of such schemes between the wars put the purchase of new furniture increasingly within the reach of less well-off consumers. This transformed the furniture market, so that by 1938 the non-agricultural working class and the lower middle class accounted for 86 per cent of mass-market furniture purchases (Scott 2009: 811).

With this expansion into mass markets, twin beds lost any sense of being the preserve of the wealthier middle classes. Indeed, tarnished by new lower-middle-class associations, they became the target of scornful class-conscious comment. Gordon Comstock, the impecunious protagonist of George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), ‘belonged to the most dismal of all classes, the middle-middle class, the landless gentry’ ([1936] 1962: 42). Gordon has literary aspirations. He has published one small volume of poems and is currently writing a verse satire about the suburban clerks he sees at the Tube station every morning, ‘swarms of little ant-like men’, each with ‘the fear of the sack like a maggot in his heart’ (ibid.: 70).⁴ As he works on his poem, he asks himself, ‘What do they think? Money, money!’ (ibid.: 71), and the thought allows him to write another stanza:

They think of rent, rates, season tickets,

Insurance, coal, the skivvy’s wages,

Boots, school bills, and the next instalment

Upon the two twin beds from Drage’s. (ibid.)

Gordon derides not just the clerks’ anxiety about money, but also their social aspirations. As well as paying for necessities such as the rent, coal and boots, they also worry about paying school bills and the next instalment on the ‘two twin beds from Drage’s’. Their lives are impoverished on all levels – materially, spiritually and emotionally – owing to their desire for social betterment. Gordon’s contempt for them is merciless, his anxiety fuelled by his own impoverished and insecure social position.

The clerks purchased their twin beds from Drage’s, one of the largest furniture companies of the time, its success the result of HP sales. At its peak, it had only three stores, but the company’s dominance was secured through extensive advertising campaigns emphasizing the inclusiveness of their appeal: everyone was welcome. ‘All Classes Furnish at Drage’s. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor – shopkeepers, clergymen, and railway men – solicitors and business women – professional men and artisans. All receive the same cordial welcome’ (Scott 2009: 815, 2017: 53–8). However, on the evidence of Gordon Comstock’s verse satire, by the 1930s Drage’s represented the budget end of the market, their ranges tarnished by their affordability. ‘The Drage Way’ – the store’s advertising line from the 1920s – was not a way with which the more established middle classes wished to be associated.

Drage’s again serves as a touchstone of lower-middle-class taste and aspiration in the work of the best-known poetic registrar of the nuances and fine hierarchies of interwar class taste, John Betjeman. In his first collection, Mount Zion: or, In Touch with the Infinite (1931), Betjeman mocks the tasteless domestic accoutrements and emotionally impoverished lives of those marooned in suburbia:

… wifie knits through hubbie’s gloom

Safe in the Drage-way drawing-room.

Oh how expectant for the bed

All ‘Jacobethan’ overhead! (Betjeman 1931: 44)

The couple are nameless, identified only by the déclassé generic diminutives ‘wifie’ and ‘hubbie’. Like a tricoteuse of the French Revolution, the insouciant ‘wifie’ knits to pass the time, as a defence against the horrors around her. Her ‘Drage-way’ furnishings protect her, though from what is not specified – perhaps ‘hubbie’s gloom’, or maybe some horror beyond the house. She is marking time until she can retire to her bed, looking forward, the context suggests, to oblivion rather than passion, though whether she will experience it in a double or a twin bed is left unspoken. All we know is that it is ‘Jacobethan’, Betjeman’s contemptuous coinage indicative of inauthentic hybrid style and bastard identity.⁵ The word serves as the culmination of the poem’s delineation of the impoverishment of life in the cultural and emotional equivalent of Outer Mongolia: the ‘outer suburbs’.

Betjeman’s ‘Drage-way’ sneer at suburban taste confirms the associations of Gordon Comstock’s contempt to indicate that by the mid-1930s twin beds had become the objects of lower-middle-class desire, and further devalued by having come within the reach of such consumers by HP schemes. As their appeal spread further down the social hierarchy, what did this mean for the answer given to the ‘double or twin?’ question by couples choosing their bedroom furniture? The decade concluded with press reference to a survey of sleeping habits, but one undertaken in the United States, not Britain. Despite the American context, or perhaps because of it, the study was reported in the Daily Mirror with interest. ‘Wives 3 to 1 for Double Beds’ ran the headline, referring to a survey of 500 New York married couples. Twins, the survey suggested, were favoured more for pragmatic reasons, doubles for emotional or familial. New York couples were clearly more persuaded by the latter, as 75 per cent of the respondents still favoured the double, and only 25 per cent twins (Daily Mirror 8 March 1939: 16). Another survey, again American and this time of a small sample of 131 ‘typical’ families, was reported in Time magazine in 1944, and – although its results tell us nothing about British preferences – the study adds some nuance to these statistics and serves as a useful caveat about what precisely such figures might convey. Time reported that ‘87% of husbands and wives sleep in a double bed, but 42% of the wives think twin beds would be preferable’ (Time 43.16, 17 April 1944: 25). An enquiry into the kind of bed in which couples currently sleep produces one set of results, but when the question changes, probing readers’ wishes rather than their current arrangement, the picture is markedly different, for nearly half of all double-bedded wives would opt for twins. This discrepancy may indicate financial constraints, or a difference of opinion between the spouses. It serves, either way, as a reminder that even if such figures were available for Britain, their focus on the actual rather than the wished-for would give only a partial picture of the cultural status of twin beds.

At last, in 1950, explicit press comment on British predilections began to appear. The Daily Mirror, again prompted by American comment, reported that a Chicago bedding manufacturer had blamed the rising divorce rate on double beds, and recommended that people choose twins instead: ‘They would get more rest and be better able to meet the strain of modern life, he says’ (12 January 1950: 1). He claimed that preferences had changed since the prewar years. Now, he says, ‘68 per cent of American couples buy single beds, compared with 25 per cent before the war. “They just don’t go in for that cold-feet-in-the-back any more.”’ The Mirror draws a contrast with the situation in Britain, where ‘double beds are heavily favoured’, according to a furniture makers’ spokesman: ‘“Three double beds are sold to every two single ones,” he said’. This, once again, offers a partial picture, telling only about sales of new beds and not about the beds already in place in the nation’s bedrooms, and it tells us about them at a time of continuing austerity and severe limitation of consumer choice in the period following the Second World War. Nonetheless, it offers some indicatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series preface: Why home?
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: At home with twin beds
• 1 Double or twin?
• PART ONE Hygiene
• PART TWO Modernity
• PART THREE Marriage
• Conclusion: Together and apart
• Notes
• References
• Index