This shot's a bit fuzzy, but i still like the feeling it captures -- relaxed and warm, divvying up a perfect avocado with the baby after a morning at the pool.

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today however we are northwest of Lettice’s flat, in the working-class London suburb of Harlesden where Edith, Lettice’s maid, is paying an unexpected call on her beloved parents whilst her mistress is away visiting her own parents in Wiltshire. Edith’s father, George, works at the McVitie and Price biscuit factory in Harlesden and has just recently been promoted to Line Manager, and her mother, Ada, takes in laundry at home. They live in a small, two storey brick terrace house which opens out directly onto the street, and is far removed from the grandeur of Lettice’s Mayfair flat, but has always been a cosy and welcoming home for Edith. Usually even before she walks through the glossy black painted front door, Edith can smell the familiar scent of a mixture of Lifebuoy Soap, Borax and Robin’s Starch, which means her mother is washing the laundry of others wealthier than she in the terrace’s kitchen at the rear of the house. Yet with her father’s promotion, Edith’s mother is only laundering a few days a week now, and today, rather than soap and starch, the delicious scent of freshly baked bread greets her.

 

“Mum!” Edith calls out cheerily as she opens the unlocked front door and walks in. “Mum, it’s me!” She takes a deep breath and inhales the aroma of a loaf in the kitchen range’s bread oven. “Something smells good.”

 

“Edith! It isn’t Wednesday! I wasn’t expecting you today!” Ada gasps in delighted surprise, glancing up from her work on the kitchen table to the door leading from the hallway into the kitchen. “What a lovely surprise!”

 

Edith walks across the flagstone floor of the kitchen and embraces her mother. “Hullo Mum.” Ada opens her arms and embraces her daughter as lovingly as she can, anxious not to get flour on Edith’s smart three-quarter length black coat - a second-hand remodel that Edith did after acquiring it from a stall in Petticoat Lane*.

 

“Watch my floury hands, Edith love,” Ada exclaims before placing a kiss on her daughter’s cheek. “I don’t want to ruin your fancy coat with white finger marks. Pop the kettle on the hob and pull up a chair. Keep me company whilst I finish this,” She indicates to a half shaped loaf on a baking tray before her. “And tell me how it is that you can visit me on a Friday that isn’t your day off. What’s Miss Chetwynd up to now, that she’s not at home? Gone back to stay with her friends in Cornwall, has she?”

 

“Not this time, Mum.” Edith takes the kettle from the range over to the small plumbed enamelled sink standing on bricks in the corner of the kitchen and fills it with water. “She’s gone home to her parent’s house in Wiltshire for a big ball, being held for her. So, I thought I’d take advantage of a few light days and slip in unannounced to see you.” She takes the tarnished old kettle and hangs it over the range’s fire to boil. “I hope you don’t mind, Mum.”

 

“Mind?” Ada scoffs as she starts fussing with the cups and the flour cannister on the table in front of her. “Why would I mind my only daughter coming to visit?” She pauses and watches her daughter walk towards the back door and contemplates a difference in her: an imperceptible bounce in her step to most, but quite obvious from a mother’s keen observations of her child. She ponders as she restores the cork stopper to a jar of salt. “A fancy ball, in her honour! Well, isn’t Miss Chetwynd the lucky one!”

 

“You’d think so,” Edith replies. “But apparently it’s her parents’ idea to help her find a suitable husband. Being the independent woman that she is, Miss Lettice is none too happy about it.”

 

“But she’s going?”

 

“Yes, but only out of a sense of duty or obligation, I think. It’s a fancy dress too, and she is going as Cinderella.” Edith removes her purple rose and black feather decorated straw hat and shirks off her coat to reveal a rather simple but pretty plum coloured serge dress with a white lace collar.

 

“Well, thinking of Cinderella, look at you, my darling girl.” The older woman says with pride in her voice. “I recognise that lace. Wasn’t it off that old tea gown Mrs. Beech gave me for rags that I cut off for you, because you took a fancy to it?”

 

“It is, Mum!” Edith smiles as she hangs her coat and hat up on a couple of spare hooks by the back door.

 

“Another Petticoat Lane second-hand clothes stall, remodel you’re wearing, is it?”

 

“Not this time, Mum. I made this myself from scratch with a dress pattern from Fashion for All**,” Edith replies proudly, giving a little twirl that sends her calf length skirt flaring out prettily. “You taught me well. I wore it out for the first time on Sunday.”

 

Ada looks at her daughter’s face, noticing a slight cheekiness to her smile and a sparkle in her eyes as she idly spins with her mind elsewhere than Ada’s kitchen, and she begins to ponder the difference in her.

 

“What are you looking at, Mum?” Edith asks, stopping her turn and catching her mother’s particularly observant gaze.

 

Realising that she has been caught out staring harder than perhaps she should, Ada coughs and quickly covers up her contemplation with bluster. “Well, I’m looking at you, you ninny.” She glances away. “Who else would I be looking at, since you’re the only one parading around my kitchen like you were in one of those fashion magazines you like so much.” Ada’s pride swells as she returns to the task at hand on the table and begins shaping some dough into a loaf shape. “You look very pretty, Edith love. Your Dad and I are so proud of you, you know.”

 

“Thanks Mum. I know you are. Here. Why are you baking bread, Mum?” Edith asks her mother, slipping into her usual perch at the worn kitchen table on the old ladderback chair. “You always get bread from Mr. Rawlinson’s.”

 

“Oh! Well, now I’m only laundering three days a week, what with your Dad being a Line Manager now and all,” the older woman explains as she takes up her knife and scores the top of the freeform loaf with crosshatches. “I’ve got some extra time on my hands, and I’d thought I’d take up baking bread again.” She slaps Edith’s curious hands away as she gently starts to move the blue and white gingham cloth off the top of the large white porcelain bowl before her. “Shoo, my girl! Don’t touch that! It’s proving***!” She returns to scoring the loaf before her. “Harlesden wasn’t always the London suburb that it is today. My Mum, your Granny, used to bake bread for the workers on the farm she lived and worked on, one of the last in the district, and she taught me how to bake bread. I thought I’d bake some as a treat for your Dad and your Aunt Maude.”

 

“I am glad you’ve been able to give up some of your laundering, Mum.” Edith smiles over at Ada. “Now you can do some of the things you want to do for a change.”

 

“Oh, thinking of laundering, Mrs. Hounslow was over here yesterday, and she gave me one of her cast off ladies’ magazines. She’d seen a picture of your Miss Chetwynd looking lovely at Princess Mary’s Wedding**** so she circled it and thought to bring it over when she was bringing me a few extra delicates to wash for her.” She turns towards the great dark Welsh dresser that it seems the kitchen has been built around. “I’ve got it here somewhere.”

 

“Oh Mum!” Edith sighs. “I do wish you’d given nasty old Widow Hounslow up when you stopped some of your laundering.”

 

Ada turns back and brushes a stray strand of mousey brown hair fallen loose from her bun and guides it around the back of her ear. “I can’t do that, Edith! Her sixpences kept food…”

 

“I know. I know!” Edith stops her mother, raising her hands. “Her sixpences kept us fed many a day.” She looks up at Ada’s careworn face looking back at her, again a scrutiny in her features as she looks back at Edith. “But you have to admit, Mum, she asks a lot of you and has made you work for every sixpence she’s ever begrudgingly given you.”

 

“We should all work hard for the sixpences others pay us, my girl.”

 

“I know Mum, and I do.” she replies exasperatedly. “I just wish you didn’t have to work so hard for Mrs. Hounslow’s sixpences. You should have dropped old Widow Hounslow and kept that nice Mrs. Young. She was never late paying you.”

 

“Oh, now Mrs. Young’s daughter is out of nappies, she doesn’t need me laundering for her anymore, Edith love. I’m sure she only kept me on out of kindness. Anyway, I know your opinion about Mrs. Hounslow.”

 

“And we all know yours, Mum.” Edith starts drawing with her finger idly on the worn surface of the table.

 

“Alright my girl!” Ada says, flattening her palms before her on the table applying her weight to her locked arms as she leans forward and looks her daughter in the eye. “There’s a wriggling, tickling tummy fish in you, just desperate to get out.”

 

“A what, Mum?” the young girl laughs.

 

Shaking her head, Ada says, “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten wriggling, tickling tummy fish, Edith!” When her daughter returns a perplexed look of confusion, the older woman continues, “It’s what we used to call secrets when you were little. You know, wriggling fish trying to escape, just like wriggling secrets wanting to be told?” Looking at her daughter again with incredulity she adds, “I can’t believe you don’t remember wriggling, tickling tummy fish!”

 

“I vaguely do, Mum.” Edith admits, although more to please her mother than in truth.

 

“Well then?” Ada demands. “Spit it out! You’ve been dying to tell me something ever since you arrived.” She pulls herself upright again and rubs her lower back with a groan. “I can tell. There is something,” She contemplates her daughter again with her thumb and index finger of her right hand worrying her chin. “Something, different about you. Something, bonny and gay. You didn’t come all this way just to visit me when you were here two days ago. What’s happened?”

 

“Oh Mum!” Edith exclaims with a joyful giggle. “Such wonderful news! Frank Leadbetter has asked me to walk out with him!”

 

“Frank Leadbetter?” Ada queries with a questioning look.

 

“I’ve told you about Frank before, Mum. He’s Mr. Willison the Mayfair grocers’ delivery man.”

 

“Oh Edith, love!” Ada hurriedly wipes her hands on the red and white gingham tea towel hanging from the rail of the range to rid them of flour. She rushes over and envelops her daughter as she rises from the ladderback chair in an all-encompassing embrace of unbridled delight.

 

“He’s took me to see Wanetta Ward’s new moving picture, ‘After the Ball is Over’, at the Premier in East Ham***** last Sunday, and we agreed to go out again this Sunday. He’s taking me to Regent’s Park.”

 

“Oh, my darling girl, that’s such exciting news! What a wonderful wriggling, tickling tummy fish! No wonder you wanted to get it out! Now, go grab us some cups and bring over the biscuit tin. Your Dad will be home for lunch soon. He’ll be just as glad to hear this news as I am.” Ada sighs with delight, pleased to know the cause of the change in her daughter. “Now let me fill Brown Betty****** and then you must tell me everything: every little detail mind! Don’t leave anything out!”

 

*Petticoat Lane Market is a fashion and clothing market in Spitalfields, London. It consists of two adjacent street markets. Wentworth Street Market and Middlesex Street Market. Originally populated by Huguenots fleeing persecution in France, Spitalfields became a center for weaving, embroidery and dying. From 1882, a wave of Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in eastern Europe settled in the area and Spitalfields then became the true heart of the clothing manufacturing district of London. 'The Lane' was always renowned for the 'patter' and showmanship of the market traders. It was also known for being a haven for the unsavoury characters of London’s underworld and was rife with prostitutes during the late Victorian era. Unpopular with the authorities, as it was largely unregulated and in some sense illegal, as recently as the 1930s, police cars and fire engines were driven down ‘The Lane’, with alarm bells ringing, to disrupt the market.

 

**Fashion for All was one of the many women’s magazines that were published in the exuberant inter-war years which were aimed at young girls who were looking to better their chances of finding a husband through beauty and fashion. As most working-class girls could only imagine buying fashionable frocks from high street shops, there was a great appetite for dressmaking patterns so they could dress fashionably at a fraction of the cost, by making their own dresses using skills they learned at home.

 

***In cooking, proofing (also called proving) is a step in the preparation of yeast bread and other baked goods in which the dough is allowed to rest and rise a final time before baking. During this rest period, yeast ferments the dough and produces gases, thereby leavening the dough.

 

****Mary, Princess Royal and Countess of Harewood (1897 – 1965), was the only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary. She was the sister of Kings Edward VIII and George VI, and aunt of Queen Elizabeth II. She married Viscount Lascelles on the 28th of February 1922 in a ceremony held at Westminster Abbey. The bride was only 24 years old, whilst the groom was 39. There is much conjecture that the marriage was an unhappy one, but their children dispute this and say it was a very happy marriage based upon mutual respect. The wedding was filmed by Pathé News and was the first royal wedding to be featured in fashion magazines, including Vogue.

 

*****The Premier Super Cinema in East Ham was opened on the 12th of March, 1921, replacing the 800 seat capacity 1912 Premier Electric Theatre. The new cinema could seat 2,408 patrons. The Premier Super Cinema was taken over by Provincial Cinematograph Theatres who were taken over by Gaumont British in February 1929. It was renamed the Gaumont from 21st April 1952. The Gaumont was closed by the Rank Organisation on 6th April 1963. After that it became a bingo hall and remained so until 2005. Despite attempts to have it listed as a historic building due to its relatively intact 1921 interior, the Gaumont was demolished in 2009.

 

******A Brown Betty is a type of teapot, round and with a manganese brown glaze known as Rockingham glaze. In the Victorian era, when tea was at its peak of popularity, tea brewed in the Brown Betty was considered excellent. This was attributed to the design of the pot which allowed the tea leaves more freedom to swirl around as the water was poured into the pot, releasing more flavour with less bitterness.

 

This cluttered, yet cheerful domestic scene of baking is not all it seems to be at first glance, for it is made up of part of my 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures collection. Some pieces come from my own childhood. Other items I acquired as an adult through specialist online dealers and artists who specialise in 1:12 miniatures.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

The freeform loaf on the kitchen table, the white porcelain proofing bowl complete with rising dough, the butter wrapped in silver foil and the rolling pin – which is even half coated in flour – have been made in England by hand by former chef turned miniature artisan, Frances Knight. Her work is incredibly detailed and realistic, and she says that she draws her inspiration from her years as a chef and her imagination. The rather worn and beaten looking enamelled flour cannister in the typical domestic Art Deco design and kitchen colours of the 1920s, cream and green, has been aged on purpose. An artisan piece, it comes from Kathleen Knight’s Dolls’ House Shop in the United Kingdom, as does the glass jar of salt which is filled with real salt granules and stoppered with a real cork lid. The metal sieve comes from Doreen Jeffries’ Small Wonders Miniature Shop in the United Kingdom. The other crockery on the table comes from various online stockists of miniatures.

 

In the background you can see Ada’s dark Welsh dresser cluttered with household items. Like Ada’s table, the Windsor chair and the ladderback chair to the left of the photo, I have had the dresser since I was a child. The shelves of the dresser have different patterned crockery and silver pots on them which have come from different miniature stockists both in Australia and the United Kingdom. There are also some rather worn and beaten looking enamelled cannisters and a bread tin which are part of the set from which the flour cannister is from. There are also tins of various foods which would have been household staples in the 1920s when canning and preservation revolutionised domestic cookery. Amongst other foods on the dresser are a tin of Macfie’s Finest Black Treacle, two jars of P.C. Flett and Company jam, a tin of Heinz marinated apricots, and a jar of Marmite. All these items are 1:12 size artisan miniatures made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire, with great attention to detail paid to their labels and the shapes of their jars and cans.

 

Robert Andrew Macfie sugar refiner was the first person to use the term Golden Syrup in 1840, a product made by his factory, the Macfie sugar refinery, in Liverpool. He also produced black treacle.

 

P.C. Flett and Company was established in Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands by Peter Copeland Flett. He had inherited a small family owned ironmongers in Albert Street Kirkwall, which he inherited from his maternal family. He had a shed in the back of the shop where he made ginger ale, lemonade, jams and preserves from local produce. By the 1920s they had an office in Liverpool, and travelling representatives selling jams and preserves around Great Britain. I am not sure when the business ceased trading.

 

The American based Heinz food processing company, famous for its Baked Beans, 57 varieties of soups and tinned spaghetti opened a factory in Harlesden in 1919, providing a great deal of employment for the locals who were not already employed at McVitie and Price.

 

Marmite is a food spread made from yeast extract which although considered remarkably English, was in fact invented by German scientist Justus von Liebig although it was originally made in the United Kingdom. It is a by-product of beer brewing and is currently produced by British company Unilever. The product is notable as a vegan source of B vitamins, including supplemental vitamin B. Marmite is a sticky, dark brown paste with a distinctive, salty, powerful flavour. This distinctive taste is represented in the marketing slogan: "Love it or hate it." Such is its prominence in British popular culture that the product's name is often used as a metaphor for something that is an acquired taste or tends to polarise opinion.

 

The large kitchen range in the background is a 1:12 miniature replica of the coal fed Phoenix Kitchen Range. A mid-Victorian model, it has hinged opening doors, hanging bars above the stove and a little bass hot water tap (used in the days before plumbed hot water).

Bonne Maman

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today however we are northwest of Lettice’s flat, in the working-class London suburb of Harlesden where Edith, Lettice’s maid, is paying an unexpected call on her parents whilst her mistress is away enjoying the distractions of the London Season. Edith’s father, George, works at the McVitie and Price biscuit factory in Harlesden, and her mother, Ada, takes in laundry at home. They live in a small, two storey brick terrace house which opens out directly onto the street, and is far removed from the grandeur of Lettice’s flat, but has always been a cosy and welcoming home for Edith. Even before she walks through the glossy black painted front door, Edith can smell the familiar scent of a mixture of Lifebuoy Soap, Borax and Robin’s Starch, which means her mother is washing the laundry of others wealthier than she in the terrace’s kitchen at the rear of the house.

 

“Mum!” Edith calls out cheerily as she opens the unlocked front door and walks in. “Mum, it’s me!”

 

“Edith!” Ada gasps in delighted surprise, glancing up to the door leading from the hallway into the kitchen. “I wasn’t expecting you. What a lovely surprise!”

 

Ada rises from her chair at the worn kitchen table and embraces her daughter lovingly. Holding her at arm’s length, she admires her three-quarter length black coat and purple rose and black feather decorated straw hat. “Look at you, my darling girl.” The older woman self-consciously pushes loose strands of her mousey brown hair back behind her ears. Chuckling awkwardly, she remarks with a downwards glance. “You’re far too fancy for the likes of us now, Edith.”

 

“Don’t talk nonsense, Mum!” Edith dismisses her mother’s comment with a flap of her hand. "My coat came from a Petticoat Lane* second-hand clothes stall. I picked it up dead cheap and remodelled it myself.”

 

“Taking after your old Mum then?” Ada remarks with a hint of pride.

 

“You taught me everything I know about sewing, Mum, and I’ll always be grateful for that.”

 

The joyful smile suddenly fades from Ada’s face as it clouds in concern. “But it’s Tuesday today. You don’t have Tuesdays off. Is everything alright, love?”

 

“It’s fine, Mum.” Edith assures her mother, placing a calming hand on her mother’s shoulder with one hand as she places her basket on the crowded kitchen table with the other. “Miss Lettice has gone to stay with friends on the Isle of Wight for Cowes Week**, so I thought I’d pop in and visit since I have a bit of free time whilst she’s away.”

 

“Oh! That’s alright then!” the older woman sighs with relief, fanning herself as she lowers herself back into her seat.

 

Feeling the stuffiness in the room from the lighted range and the moisture from the steaming tubs of washing, Edith takes off her coat and hangs it on a hook by the back door. She then places her hat on one of the carved knobs of the ladderback chair drawn up to the table next to her mother’s usual seat.

 

“Oh don’t put it there, love.” Ada chides. “It might get damaged. Such a pretty hat should sit on the table where it’s safe.”

 

“It’s nothing special, Mum. This came from Petticoat Lane too, and it’s not new. I decorated the hat with bits and bobs I picked up from a Whitechapel haberdasher Miss Lettice’s char***, Mrs. Boothby, told me about.”

 

“Well, homemade or not, it’s too pretty to hang there.”

 

“It’s my hat, Mum, and I promise you, it’ll be fine there.

 

“Well, suit yourself, love. Anyway, your timing is perfect. I just filled Brown Betty****. Grab yourself a cup and bring over the biscuit tin. Your Dad will be home for lunch soon. He’ll be glad to see you.”

 

Edith walks over to the big, dark Welsh dresser that dominates one side of the tiny kitchen and picks up a pretty floral teacup and saucer from among the mismatched crockery on its shelves: one of her mother’s many market finds that helped to bring elegance and beauty to Edith’s childhood home. She looks fondly at the battered McVitie and Price’s tin. “How’s Dad?”

 

“Oh, things are looking up for him.” Ada says proudly as she flips open her large sewing basket and fossicks through it looking for a spool of brightly coloured blue cotton thread.

 

“Oh?” Edith queries.

 

“Yes, there’s talk of him being made a line manager. Isn’t that a turn up for the books?”

 

“Oh Mum! That’s wonderful news.” The younger woman enthuses as she puts the empty teacup, saucer and biscuit tin on the table and sits down next to her mother. “You might be finally able to pack all this in.” She waves her hand about the kitchen at the tubs of washing, drying laundry and pressed linens.

 

“Oh I don’t know about that, Edith. Anyway, I have built up a good reputation over the years.”

 

“Yes,” Edith remarks scornfully. “For charging too little for the excellent work you do.” She looks over, past her mother, to a neat pile of lace edged linens. “What’s that you’re doing now, Mum?”

 

“Oh it’s just some work for Mrs. Hounslow. She wants her new sheets and pillowcases monogrammed.”

 

“And how much are you, not being paid, for that, Mum?” Edith emphasises.

 

“Oh Edith! Mrs. Hounslow’s a widow.”

 

“I know, Mum. I’ve grown up hearing about how Mrs. Hounslow’s husband died a hero in the siege of Mafeking in the Boer War. But I’ve never heard of her scraping for a penny for a scrap to eat. And where are those pretty lace trimmed sheets from?”

 

“Bishop’s in the High Street.”

 

“See! No second-hand sheets for old Widow Hounslow!”

 

“Now I won’t have a bad word said about her, Edith.” Ada wags her finger admonishingly at her daughter before selecting a needle from the red cotton lined lid of her basket and threads it. “She’s helped pay for many a meal in this house with her sixpences and shillings over the years. You should be grateful to her.”

 

“Pshaw!” Edith raises her eyes to the ceiling above. “I wish you’d let me help out more, Mum. I live in, so I don’t have the expenses of lodgings, and Miss Lettice pays me well.”

 

“Now, I won’t hear of it, Edith.” Ada raises her palms to her daughter, still clutching the threaded needle between her right index finger and thumb. “You earned that money with hard work at Miss Chetwynd’s. You pay enough to help keep us as it is.”

 

“But Mum,” Edith pours tea into her mother’s and then her own teacup. “If Dad does get this better job at McVitie’s, and I paid you a bit more of my wage, you probably really could give up washing, sewing and mending for the likes of Mrs. Hounslow.”

 

“And then what would I do, Edith?” The older woman adds a dash of milk to her tea.

 

“Well, you might like to put your feet up for a bit or buy a few nice new things for around here. Get rid of our battered old breadbin and those cannisters.” She points to the offending worn white enamel green trimmed pieces on the dresser.

 

“Oh, so we’re not grand enough then, Miss Edith?” Ada says in mock offence as she looks down her nose at her daughter and she raises herself and sits a little more erectly in her seat. “I love my breadbin thank you very much. That was a wedding gift from your Aunt Maude.”

 

“You know that’s not what I mean,” Edith replies, shaking her head exasperatedly. Adding milk and sugar to her own tea she continues, “I just want you to have nice things, Mum: things like those I have at Miss Lettice’s.”

 

“I’m so pleased you like it there, love.” Ada places a careworn hand lovingly on top of her daughter’s.

 

“Oh Mum, it’s so much better than Mrs. Plaistow’s was. It’s so much smaller than their townhouse, and I don’t have to traipse up and down stairs all day. There’s a gas stove, so I don’t have to fetch coal in or blacklead grates. Even if there were, Miss Lettice has Mrs. Boothby do all the hard graft I used to have to do at the Plaistow’s.”

 

“And Miss Chetwynd? She’s still being good to you?”

 

“Yes Mum.” Edith takes a sip of her tea. “I still haven’t broken her of the habit of just waltzing into the kitchen whenever she feels like it, rather than ringing the bell.”

 

“And her, a lord’s daughter.” Ada tuts, shaking her head.

 

“Well, a Viscount’s daughter at any rate.”

 

“You think she’d know better.”

 

“I’m sure she’s different when she goes home to Wiltshire. It does sound like a very grand house.”

 

“So much grander than here, Edith.”

 

“Now don’t start again, Mum. You know I didn’t mean anything by what I said before. Anyway. I have a something for you, but I shan’t give it to you if you’re going to be contrary!” Edith teases.

 

“Contrary indeed!” Ada snorts derisively.

 

Edith takes a bulky parcel wrapped in cream butcher’s paper tied up with brightly coloured string from her basket and places it carefully on the table before her mother.

 

“Well what is it?” Ada asks in surprise.

 

“Why don’t you open it, Mum, and find out.” Edith replies playfully in return.

 

With trembling fingers Ada tugs at the knot in the string. Loosening it causes the protective layer of paper to fall noisily away to reveal a beautiful, glazed teapot in the shape of a cottage with a thatched roof with the chimney as the lid.

 

“Oh Edith, love!” gasps Ada. “It’s beautiful!”

 

“Since you won’t let me give you more money, I may as well buy you some nice things Mum!”

 

“Oh this must have cost a fortune!” Ada appraises the paintwork on the pot. “For shame, Edith! You shouldn’t have spent your money on me.”

 

“Nonsense Mum! I bought this at the Caledonian Markets***** where it was so reasonably priced as it was on its own and didn’t have the milk jug and sugar bowl to match. Do you like it?”

 

“Like it, Edith? Oh, I love it!” Ada hugs her daughter, batting her eyelids as she attempts to keep back the tears of appreciation and joy.

 

“Good! Then we can have tea out of this, rather than old Brown Betty!”

 

“What?” Ada cries. “Oh no, I can’t well do that! This teapot is far too nice to use everyday! There’s nothing wrong with Brown Betty. Brown Betty was your Great Grandma’s!” She runs her hand lovingly over the handle of the pot. “No, I’ll keep this pot for good. I’ll take it up to the parlour and we’ll use it on Christmas Day, when you and your brother are home.”

 

“Oh Mum!” Edith sighs, shaking her head in loving despair at her mother who beams with delight at her new present.

 

*Petticoat Lane Market is a fashion and clothing market in Spitalfields, London. It consists of two adjacent street markets. Wentworth Street Market and Middlesex Street Market. Originally populated by Huguenots fleeing persecution in France, Spitalfields became a center for weaving, embroidery and dying. From 1882, a wave of Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in eastern Europe settled in the area and Spitalfields then became the true heart of the clothing manufacturing district of London. 'The Lane' was always renowned for the 'patter' and showmanship of the market traders. It was also known for being a haven for the unsavoury characters of London’s underworld and was rife with prostitutes during the late Victorian era. Unpopular with the authorities, as it was largely unregulated and in some sense illegal, as recently as the 1930s, police cars and fire engines were driven down ‘The Lane’, with alarm bells ringing, to disrupt the market.

 

**Cowes Week is one of the longest-running regular regattas in the world, and a fixture of the London Season. With forty daily sailing races, up to one thousand boats, and eight thousand competitors ranging from Olympic and world-class professionals to weekend sailors, it is the largest sailing regatta of its kind in the world. Having started in 1826, the event is held in August each year on the Solent (the area of water between southern England and the Isle of Wight made tricky by strong double tides). It is focussed on the small town of Cowes on the Isle of Wight.

 

***A charwoman, chargirl, or char, jokingly charlady, is an old-fashioned occupational term, referring to a paid part-time worker who comes into a house or other building to clean it for a few hours of a day or week, as opposed to a maid, who usually lives as part of the household within the structure of domestic service. In the 1920s, chars usually did all the hard graft work that paid live-in domestics would no longer do as they looked for excuses to leave domestic service for better paying work in offices and factories.

 

****A Brown Betty is a type of teapot, round and with a manganese brown glaze known as Rockingham glaze. In the Victorian era, when tea was at its peak of popularity, tea brewed in the Brown Betty was considered excellent. This was attributed to the design of the pot which allowed the tea leaves more freedom to swirl around as the water was poured into the pot, releasing more flavour with less bitterness.

 

***** The original Caledonian Market, renown for antiques, buried treasure and junk, was situated in in a wide cobblestoned area just off the Caledonian Road in Islington in 1921 when this story is set. Opened in 1855 by Prince Albert, and originally called the Metropolitan Meat Markets, it was supplementary to the Smithfield Meat Market. Arranged in a rectangle, the market was dominated by a forty six metre central clock tower. By the early Twentieth Century, with the diminishing trade in live animals, a bric-a-brac market developed and flourished there until after the Second World War when it moved to Bermondsey, south of the Thames, where it flourishes today. The Islington site was developed in 1967 into the Market Estate and an open green space called Caledonian Park. All that remains of the original Caledonian Markets is the wonderful Victorian clock tower.

 

This cluttered, yet cheerful domestic scene is not all it seems to be at first glance, for it is made up of part of my 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures collection. Some pieces come from my own childhood. Other items I acquired as an adult through specialist online dealers and artists who specialise in 1:12 miniatures.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

The central focus of our story, sitting on Ada’s table, is the cottage ware teapot. Made by French ceramicist and miniature artisan Valerie Casson, it has been decorated authentically and matches in perfect detail its life-size Price Washington ‘Ye Olde Cottage Teapot’ counterparts. The top part of the thatched rood and central chimney form the lid, just like the real thing. Valerie Casson is renown for her meticulously crafted and painted miniature ceramics.

 

Surrounding the cottage ware teapot are non-matching teacups, saucers, a milk jug and sugar bowl, all of which have come from different miniature stockists both in Australia and the United Kingdom. The Brown Betty teapot in the foreground came from The Dolls House Shop in the United Kingdom.

 

Sitting atop a stack of neatly folded 1:12 size linens sits Ada’s wicker sewing basket. Sitting open it has needles stuck into the padded lid, whilst inside it are a tape measure, knitting needles, balls of wool, reels of cotton and a pair of shears. All the items and the basket, except for the shears, are hand made by Mrs. Denton of Muffin Lodge in the United Kingdom. The taupe knitting on the two long pins that serve as knitting needles is properly knitted and cast on. The shears with black handles in the basket open and close. Made of metal, they came from Doreen Jeffries’ Small Wonders Miniature Shop in the United Kingdom. The blue cotton reel and silver sewing scissors come from an E-Bay stockist of miniatures based in the United Kingdom.

 

Sitting on the table in the foreground is a McVitie and Price’s Small Petite Beurre Biscuits tin, containing a selection of different biscuits. The biscuits were made by hand of polymer clay by former chef turned miniature artisan, Frances Knight. Her work is incredibly detailed and realistic, and she says that she draws her inspiration from her years as a chef and her imagination. McVitie's (Originally McVitie and Price) is a British snack food brand owned by United Biscuits. The name derives from the original Scottish biscuit maker, McVitie and Price, Ltd., established in 1830 on Rose Street in Edinburgh, Scotland. The company moved to various sites in the city before completing the St. Andrews Biscuit Works factory on Robertson Avenue in the Gorgie district in 1888. The company also established one in Glasgow and two large manufacturing plants south of the border, in Heaton Chapel, Stockport, and Harlesden, London (where Edith’s father works). McVitie and Price's first major biscuit was the McVitie's Digestive, created in 1892 by a new young employee at the company named Alexander Grant, who later became the managing director of the company. The biscuit was given its name because it was thought that its high baking soda content served as an aid to food digestion. The McVitie's Chocolate Homewheat Digestive was created in 1925. Although not their core operation, McVitie's were commissioned in 1893 to create a wedding cake for the royal wedding between the Duke of York and Princess Mary, who subsequently became King George V and Queen Mary. This cake was over two metres high and cost one hundred and forty guineas. It was viewed by 14,000 and was a wonderful publicity for the company. They received many commissions for royal wedding cakes and christening cakes, including the wedding cake for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip and Prince William and Catherine Middleton. Under United Biscuits McVitie's holds a Royal Warrant from Queen Elizabeth II.

 

Also on Ada’s table in the foreground there are several packets of Edwardian cleaning and laundry brands that were in common use in the early Twentieth Century in every household, rich or poor. These are Sunlight Soap, Robin’s Starch, Jumbo Blue and Imp Washer Soap. All these packets were made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire.

 

Sunlight Soap was first introduced in 1884 by William Hesketh Lever (1st Viscount Leverhulme) and introduced to the market in 1904. It was produced at Port Sunlight in Wirrel, Merseyside, a model village built by Lever Brothers for the workers of their factories which produced the popular soap brands Lux, Lifebuoy and Sunlight.

 

Before the invention of aerosol spray starch, the product of choice in many homes of all classes was Robin starch. Robin Starch was a stiff white powder like cornflour to which water had to be added. When you made up the solution, it was gloopy, sticky with powdery lumps, just like wallpaper paste or grout. The garment was immersed evenly in that mixture and then it had to be smoothed out. All the stubborn starchy lumps had to be dissolved until they were eliminated – a metal spoon was good for bashing at the lumps to break them down. Robins Starch was produced by Reckitt and Sons who were a leading British manufacturer of household products, notably starch, black lead, laundry blue, and household polish. They also produced Jumbo Blue, which was a whitener added to a wash to help delay the yellowing effect of older cotton. Rekitt and Sons were based in Kingston upon Hull. Isaac Reckitt began business in Hull in 1840, and his business became a private company Isaac Reckitt and Sons in 1879, and a public company in 1888. The company expanded through the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. It merged with a major competitor in the starch market J. and J. Colman in 1938 to form Reckitt and Colman.

 

Imp Washer Soap was manufactured by T. H. Harris and Sons Limited, a soap manufacturers, tallow melters and bone boiler. Introduced after the Great War, Imp Washer Soap was a cheaper alternative to the more popular brands like Sunlight, Hudsons and Lifebuoy soaps. Imp Washer Soap was advertised as a free lathering and economical cleaner. T. H. Harris and Sons Limited also sold Mazo soap energiser which purported to improve the quality of cleaning power of existing soaps.

 

Edith’s black dyed straw hat with purple roses and black feathers was made by an unknown artisan. 1:12 size miniature hats made to such exacting standards of quality and realism are often far more expensive than real hats are. When you think that it would sit comfortably on the tip of your index finger, yet it could cost in excess of $150.00 or £100.00, it is an extravagance. American artists seem to have the monopoly on this skill and some of the hats that I have seen or acquired over the years are remarkable. This hat is part of a larger collection I bought from an American miniature collector Marilyn Bickel.

 

In the background you can see Ada’s dark Welsh dresser cluttered with household items. Like Ada’s table, the Windsor chair and the ladderback chair to the left of the photo, I have had the dresser since I was a child. The shelves of the dresser have different patterned crockery and silver pots on them which have come from different miniature stockists both in Australia and the United Kingdom. There are also some rather worn and beaten looking enamelled cannisters and a bread tin in the typical domestic Art Deco design and kitchen colours of the 1920s, cream and green. Aged on purpose, these artisan pieces I recently acquired from The Dolls’ House Shop in the United Kingdom. There are also tins of various foods which would have been household staples in the 1920s when canning and preservation revolutinised domestic cookery. Amongst other foods on the dresser are a tin of Macfie’s Finest Black Treacle, two jars of P.C. Flett and Company jam, a tin of Heinz marinated apricots, a jar of Marmite and some Oxo stock cubes. All these items are 1:12 size artisan miniatures made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire, with great attention to detail paid to their labels and the shapes of their jars and cans.

 

Robert Andrew Macfie sugar refiner was the first person to use the term term Golden Syrup in 1840, a product made by his factory, the Macfie sugar refinery, in Liverpool. He also produced black treacle.

 

P.C. Flett and Company was established in Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands by Peter Copeland Flett. He had inherited a small family owned ironmongers in Albert Street Kirkwall, which he inherited from his maternal family. He had a shed in the back of the shop where he made ginger ale, lemonade, jams and preserves from local produce. By the 1920s they had an office in Liverpool, and travelling representatives selling jams and preserves around Great Britain. I am not sure when the business ceased trading.

 

The American based Heinz food processing company, famous for its Baked Beans, 57 varieties of soups and tinend spaghetti opened a factory in Harlesden in 1919, providing a great deal of employment for the locals who were not already employed at McVitie and Price.

 

Marmite is a food spread made from yeast extract which although considered remarkably English, was in fact invented by German scientist Justus von Liebig although it was originally made in the United Kingdom. It is a by-product of beer brewing and is currently produced by British company Unilever. The product is notable as a vegan source of B vitamins, including supplemental vitamin B. Marmite is a sticky, dark brown paste with a distinctive, salty, powerful flavour. This distinctive taste is represented in the marketing slogan: "Love it or hate it." Such is its prominence in British popular culture that the product's name is often used as a metaphor for something that is an acquired taste or tends to polarise opinion.

 

Oxo is a brand of food products, including stock cubes, herbs and spices, dried gravy, and yeast extract. The original product was the beef stock cube, and the company now also markets chicken and other flavour cubes, including versions with Chinese and Indian spices. The cubes are broken up and used as flavouring in meals or gravy or dissolved into boiling water to produce a bouillon. Oxo produced their first cubes in 1910 and further increased Oxo's popularity.

 

The large kitchen range in the background is a 1:12 miniature replica of the coal fed Phoenix Kitchen Range. A mid-Victorian model, it has hinged opening doors, hanging bars above the stove and a little bass hot water tap (used in the days before plumbed hot water).

Scored via twitter for a great price, not used it yet as it takes 120 and I have no stocks of 120 film, plus the weather has been a bit crap this summer.

Free lensing

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today however we are northwest of Lettice’s flat, in the working-class London suburb of Harlesden where Edith, Lettice’s maid, is paying a call on her parents on her day off. Edith’s father, George, works at the McVitie and Price biscuit factory in Harlesden, and her mother, Ada, takes in laundry at home. They live in a small, two storey brick terrace house which opens out directly onto the street, and is far removed from the grandeur of Lettice’s flat, but has always been a cosy and welcoming home for Edith.

 

Edith is sitting at her usual perch on a tall ladderback chair drawn up to the round table, worn and scarred by years of heavy use, that dominates the cluttered, old fashioned kitchen, as Ada prepares a Christmas cake whilst her daughter regales her with tales from Cavendish Mews, her unusually liberated upper-class employer and her eccentric coterie of friends.

 

“And then he just swept me up, right where I stood,” Edith explains. “And spun me around in the most awkward waltz I think I’ve ever danced, Mum!”

 

“What? With the roses still in his arms?” Ada stops stirring the thick, shiny mixture in her large white mixing bowl as she looks at her daughter with incredulity.

 

“And the champagne!” Edith giggles, raising her hand to her mouth as she does.

 

“Well!” the older woman gasps. “I’d never expect such odd behaviour from a gentleman! You did say he’s a proper gentleman?” she queries as an afterthought.

 

“Oh yes, Mum!” Edith assures her. “Mr. Brunton is a proper gentleman: rather theatrical and prone to posturing, but a gentleman, nevertheless. He and Miss Lettice grew up together on neighbouring estates in Wiltshire. His father is a sir or lord or some such.”

 

“Well, that’s alright then.” Ada sighs and starts stirring the sticky mixture with her big metal spoon again. “Mind you, there are plenty who claim to be gentlemen with their smart clothes and silvery tongues who are nothing of the sort.” She pauses again withdrawing the spoon from her mixture and pointing it at her daughter, the mixture dripping off it back into the bowl as she wags it at Edith. “Don’t you ever let your head get turned by one of those toffs, Edith. Whether he’s a gentleman or not, he’s still just a man under it all, and well, we all know that men are always out to chase pretty girls.” She lowers her eyes as a blush flushes her face with embarrassment. “And once he gets what he wants, he’ll drop you like a hot potato fresh from the oven. No gentleman ever married a maid so far as I can tell, ‘cept in those romance books you read.”

 

“Oh Mum! You don’t have to worry about me being around Mr. Bruton.” Edith starts spinning the well worn enamel canister marked ‘flour’ distractedly. “He’s far more interested in the frocks he makes for debutantes and going out to dinner with Miss Lettice than to take an interest in me. I’m just the maid who serves drinks and dinner and hangs his coat.”

 

“But I do worry about you Edith. You’re still only a young girl. Working on your own for a flapper,” She utters the last word with some distaste. “And living under her roof, well, you could be exposed anything for all I know! Now, I do know Miss Chetwynd is good to you, and pays you well, and I’m glad of that. Nevertheless, those flappers seem eccentric and always full of odd ideas and up to mischief.”

 

“Oh, that’s just what you read in the newspapers, Mum. I think the columnists of those stories sensationalise the tales they tell to try and sell more copies.”

 

“Nevertheless, sensationalist or not, those writers have to base some things on truth, so it can’t all be porky pies*!”

 

“Well, you read the articles from The Tattler that I gave you, showing all the photos from Miss Lettice’s cocktail party for Mr. and Mrs. Channon, didn’t you Mum?” When Ada nods her head affirmatively, Edith continues. “Well, that was all true, so you know that whilst Miss Lettice and her friends might be a bit eccentric, she’s still a respectable lady, as well as a flapper.”

 

Ada frowns and shakes her head a little, giving her daughter a questioning look as she observes her sitting across the table from her. “Stop playing with my cannisters and make yourself useful, Edith. I need some more fruit in this Christmas cake batter. Will you cut me some orange and lemon slices, please?”

 

“Yes Mum.”

 

Edith obeys her mother and dutifully gets up from her seat, yet the way she rises appears different to Ada’s sharp observation to the way she used to stand up. It seems elegant, yet affected somehow, with sloping shoulders and a languid head. Every week she notices small changes in Edith: a broader vocabulary and a general improvement in the smartness of her appearance which she likes, yet also an independent boldness and a questioning manner that she thinks unseemly in a young girl, especially one in service. Ada quietly wonders whether her daughter’s current employer will spoil her for any other position Edith may wish to acquire in the future. Edith’s last position with Mrs. Plaistow in Pimlico might have been harder work for a lesser wage, but at least she didn’t come home on her day off with her head turned by the glamour of American moving picture stars and society ladies who have influence over their futures. Girls like Edith have few choices in life, and Ada hopes her daughter doesn’t forget it.

 

“Anyway, enough about me, Mum,” Edith stands at the chopping board next to her mother, takes up Ada’s kitchen knife and starts to slice thin slivers from an orange. “What news of Bert? Have you heard from him?”

 

“Yes, your brother sent a postcard from Melbourne. It’s just up on the mantle.” Ada motions to the shelf above the kitchen range. “Read it.”

 

“It’s hard to imagine Bert on the other side of the world.”

 

“I’m just glad he’s only working as a steward on a passenger liner now, rather than in the navy, and that we aren’t at war anymore.”

 

“Oh I’m glad of that too, Mum.” Edith falls silent as she thinks of her own lost love, Bert the postman, and then quickly blinks away the tears briming in her eyes that threaten to spill over.

 

Determined not to be caught crying, Edith turns and wipes her hands, sticky with orange juice, on the yellow tea towel hanging from the rail beneath the mantle before picking up a postcard featuring a painted photograph of the Federal Parliament House in Melbourne**. She turns it over and reads aloud, “Leaving Melbourne on the Demonsthenes*** on Wednesday. First class dining saloon.” Edith looks over at her mother and smiles. “First class dining saloon! That’s a step up for Bert, Mum!” she remarks before continuing to read aloud. “Sailing home via Capetown. Arrive London twenty third of December.”

 

“Yes, he’ll be back in time for Christmas!” Ada beams as she dips her finger into the mix in the bowl, removing it and tasting the Christmas cake batter. She considers the flavour for a moment before shaking some cinnamon from the red box in front of her into the bowl. “Your Dad and I are so happy! We’ll have our Christmas present.”

 

“And what’s that, Mum?” Edith replaces the postcard on the mantle before turning back to the chopping board where she continues to cut thin slivers of orange.

 

“Having you both home for Christmas, of course!” Ada replies happily.

 

“So, you can use the cottage ware teapot I bought you from the Caledonian Markets****, then Mum.” Edith remarks playfully.

 

“Oh, I don’t know about that, Edith.” the older woman defends as she empties a tin of preserved red cherries into her Christmas cake batter. “It’s much too good to use.”

 

“But you promised, Mum!” Edith whines.

 

“I most certainly did not, Edith!” Ada retorts scoffingly.

 

“Yes you did, Mum!” her daughter responds. “Right here in this very kitchen, the day I gave it to you!” Edith stops cutting the orange, puts down the knife and folds her arms akimbo. “You told me that you’d use it on Christmas Day when Bert and I were home.”

 

Ada stops mixing the batter, puts her hands on her ample hips and stares at her daughter. “Your memory is far too good for remembering incidental things, Edith!”

 

Edith smiles. “I know, Mum.” She picks up a few slices of orange an continues, “Oranges?”

 

*Porky pies is Cockney rhyming slang for lies.

 

**Located on Spring Street on the edge of the Hoddle Grid, Melbourne’s Parliament House’s grand colonnaded front dominates the vista up Bourke Street. Designed by British Army officer and Colonial Engineer, Commissioner of Public Works and politician in colonial Victoria, Major-General Hon. Charles Pasley, construction began in 1855, and the first stage was officially opened the following year, with various sections completed over the following decades; it has never been completed, and the planned dome is one of the most well known unbuilt features of Melbourne. Between 1901 and 1927, it served as the meeting place of the Parliament of Australia, during the period when Melbourne was the temporary national capital.

 

***The SS Demosthenes was a British steam ocean liner and refrigerated cargo ship which ran scheduled services between London and Australia via Cape Town. It stopped at ports including those in Sydney and Melbourne. She was launched in 1911 in Ireland for the Aberdeen Line and scrapped in 1931 in England. In the First World War she was an Allied troop ship.

 

**** The original Caledonian Market, renown for antiques, buried treasure and junk, was situated in in a wide cobblestoned area just off the Caledonian Road in Islington in 1921 when this story is set. Opened in 1855 by Prince Albert, and originally called the Metropolitan Meat Markets, it was supplementary to the Smithfield Meat Market. Arranged in a rectangle, the market was dominated by a forty six metre central clock tower. By the early Twentieth Century, with the diminishing trade in live animals, a bric-a-brac market developed and flourished there until after the Second World War when it moved to Bermondsey, south of the Thames, where it flourishes today. The Islington site was developed in 1967 into the Market Estate and an open green space called Caledonian Park. All that remains of the original Caledonian Markets is the wonderful Victorian clock tower.

 

This cluttered, yet cheerful domestic scene is not all it seems to be at first glance, for it is made up of part of my 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures collection. Some pieces come from my own childhood. Other items I acquired as an adult through specialist online dealers and artists who specialise in 1:12 miniatures.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

Ada’s kitchen table is covered with most of the ingredients needed to make a Christmas cake: red cherries, orange and lemon peel, raisins, flour, baking powder, brandy, cinnamon, eggs and sugar.

 

The bowl of Christmas cake batter, complete with red cherries, was made by hand of polymer clay by former chef turned miniature artisan, Frances Knight. Her work is incredibly detailed and realistic, and she says that she draws her inspiration from her years as a chef and her imagination.

 

On the chopping board and the table you will see two lemons and four oranges. The lemons and oranges are vintage 1:12 artisan pieces that have come from Kathleen Knight’s Dollhouse Shop in England. The attention to detail on these is amazing! You will see the stubs in the skin were the stalk once attached them to the tree, but even more amazing is that, if you look very closely, you will see the rough pitting that you find in the skins of real oranges and lemons! The orange and lemon slices on the chopping board come from Beautifully Handmade Miniatures in Kettering, England. The orange slices in particular are so small and so fine. They are cut from long canes like some boiled sweets are but are much smaller in size!

 

The kitchen knife on the chopping board with its inlaid handle and sharpened blade comes from English miniatures specialist Doreen Jeffries Small Wonders Miniature store.

 

The rather worn and beaten looking enamelled cannisters, which match the bread tin on the Welsh dresser in the background, are painted in the typical domestic Art Deco design and kitchen colours of the 1920s, cream and green. Aged on purpose, these artisan pieces also came from Kathleen Knight’s Dolls’ House Shop in the United Kingdom.

 

The tin of My Lady red cherries came from Shepherds Miniatures in the United Kingdom, as does the tin of Bird’s Golden Raising Powder (an old name for baking powder). Bird’s were best known for making custard and Bird’s Custard is still a common household name, although they produced other desserts beyond custard, including the blancmange. Bird’s Custard was first formulated and first cooked by Alfred Bird in 1837 at his chemist shop in Birmingham. He developed the recipe because his wife was allergic to eggs, the key ingredient used to thicken traditional custard. The Birds continued to serve real custard to dinner guests, until one evening when the egg-free custard was served instead, either by accident or design. The dessert was so well received by the other diners that Alfred Bird put the recipe into wider production. John Monkhouse (1862–1938) was a prosperous Methodist businessman who co-founded Monk and Glass, which made custard powder and jelly. Monk and Glass custard was made in Clerkenwell and sold in the home market, and exported to the Empire and to America. They acquired by its rival Bird’s Custard in the early Twentieth Century.

 

The Tate and Lyall sugar packet was acquired from Jonesy’s Miniatures in the United Kingdom. In 1859 Henry Tate went into partnership with John Wright, a sugar refiner based at Manesty Lane, Liverpool. Their partnership ended in 1869 and John’s two sons, Alfred and Edwin joined the business forming Henry Tate and Sons. A new refinery in Love Lane, Liverpool was opened in 1872. In 1921 Henry Tate and Sons and Abram Lyle and Sons merged, between them refining around fifty percent of the UK’s sugar. A tactical merger, this new company would then become a coherent force on the sugar market in anticipation of competition from foreign sugar returning to its pre-war strength. Tate and Lyle are perhaps best known for producing Lyle’s Golden Syrup and Lyle’s Golden Treacle.

 

The eggs in the bowl with the whisk are 1:12 artisan miniatures with amazing attention to detail which I have had since I acquired them as a teenager from a high street stockist.

 

The box of cinnamon was made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire.

 

In the background you can see Ada’s dark Welsh dresser cluttered with household items. Like Ada’s table and the Windsor chair, I have had the dresser since I was a child. The shelves of the dresser have different patterned crockery and silver pots on them which have come from different miniature stockists both in Australia and the United Kingdom and the worn Art Deco tea canister and bread box that match the canisters on the table. There are also tins of various foods which would have been household staples in the 1920s when canning and preservation revolutinised domestic cookery. Amongst other foods on the dresser are a box of Typhoo Tea, a box of Bisto Gravy, a jar of Marmite, a jar of Bovril and some Oxo stock cubes. All these items are 1:12 size artisan miniatures made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire, with great attention to detail paid to their labels and the shapes of their jars and cans.

 

In 1863, William Sumner published ‘A Popular Treatise on Tea’ as a by-product of the first trade missions to China from London. In 1870, William and his son John Sumner founded a pharmacy/grocery business in Birmingham. William's grandson, John Sumner Jr. (born in 1856), took over the running of the business in the 1900s. Following comments from his sister on the calming effects of tea fannings, in 1903, John Jr. decided to create a new tea that he could sell in his shop. He named in Typhoo Tea. The name Typhoo comes from the Chinese word for "doctor". Typhoo began making tea bags in 1967. In 1978, production was moved from Birmingham to Moreton on the Wirral peninsula of Cheshire. Typhoo Tea is still a household name in Britain to this day.

 

The first Bisto product, in 1908, was a meat-flavoured gravy powder, which rapidly became a bestseller in Britain. It was added to gravies to give a richer taste and aroma. Invented by Messrs Roberts and Patterson, it was named "Bisto" because it "Browns, Seasons and Thickens in One". Bisto Gravy is still a household name in Britain and Ireland today, and the brand is currently owned by Premier Foods.

 

Bovril is the trademarked name of a thick and salty meat extract paste similar to a yeast extract, developed in the 1870s by John Lawson Johnston. It is sold in a distinctive bulbous jar, and as cubes and granules. Bovril is owned and distributed by Unilever UK. Its appearance is similar to Marmite and Vegemite. Bovril can be made into a drink ("beef tea") by diluting with hot water or, less commonly, with milk. It can be used as a flavouring for soups, broth, stews or porridge, or as a spread, especially on toast in a similar fashion to Marmite and Vegemite

 

Marmite is a food spread made from yeast extract which although considered remarkably English, was in fact invented by German scientist Justus von Liebig although it was originally made in the United Kingdom. It is a by-product of beer brewing and is currently produced by British company Unilever. The product is notable as a vegan source of B vitamins, including supplemental vitamin B. Marmite is a sticky, dark brown paste with a distinctive, salty, powerful flavour. This distinctive taste is represented in the marketing slogan: "Love it or hate it." Such is its prominence in British popular culture that the product's name is often used as a metaphor for something that is an acquired taste or tends to polarise opinion.

 

Oxo is a brand of food products, including stock cubes, herbs and spices, dried gravy, and yeast extract. The original product was the beef stock cube, and the company now also markets chicken and other flavour cubes, including versions with Chinese and Indian spices. The cubes are broken up and used as flavouring in meals or gravy or dissolved into boiling water to produce a bouillon. Oxo produced their first cubes in 1910 and further increased Oxo's popularity.

 

The large kitchen range in the background is a 1:12 miniature replica of the coal fed Phoenix Kitchen Range. A mid-Victorian model, it has hinged opening doors, hanging bars above the stove and a little bass hot water tap (used in the days before plumbed hot water).

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today we are in the very modern and up-to-date 1920s kitchen of Lettice’s flat: Edith her maid’s preserve, where she is taking possession of her latest order from Willison’s Grocers, delivered by Mr. Willison’s boy, Frank Leadbeater.

 

“Tinned apricots, tinned pears,” Edith marks off the items written on her list that she telephoned through to Mr. Willison’s on Thursday morning. “Plum jam, Bovril.” She places a tick next to each with a crisp mark from her pencil, the sound of it scratching across the page’s surface. “Tinned cherries. Where are the tinned cherries, Frank?” Edith asks anxiously.

 

“They’re right here, Miss Edith,” he remarks, delving noisly into the box of groceries between the flour and Lyon’s tea, withdrawing a small tin of My Lady tinned cherries. “Just as you ordered.”

 

“Oh thank goodness!” Edith sighs, placing a hand on her chest, from which she releases the breath she has been holding.

 

“Everything is just as you ordered and selected and packed with extra care by yours truly!” Frank pats himself with his cycling cap on the chest as he puffs it out proudly through his rust coloured knitted vest.

 

“Oh, get on with you, Frank!” Edith scoffs with a mild chuckle, glancing up at his charming, if slightly gormless grin before continuing her inventory of items.

 

“It’s true Miss Edith!” he replies, holding his cap against his heart rather melodramatically. “I swear. I packed them up myself. As his most trusted member of staff, Mr. Willison lets me do things like that as well as the deliveries.”

 

“I thought you were the only person he employed, Frank.” Edith remarks without looking up from her list ticking.

 

“Yes,” the delivery boy coughs and blusters, colouring a little at the remark. “Yes well, it is true that I am his only employee, but Mrs. Willison does do the books and his daughter helps out on Saturdays. But I am his most trusted employee, and I’m working my way up the rungs.”

 

“What rungs, Frank? You’re the delivery boy. What is there beyond that? Mr. Willison isn’t going to hand his family business to his delivery boy to run.”

 

“Well no, not yet he isn’t, but I’m doing more and more around the shop when I’m not out on my delivery round, so I’m learning about things over time.”

 

“Things! What things?”

 

“Well, Mr, Willison let me help display goods in his front window the other day. Soon I will be able to add visual merchandiser to my list of skills.”

 

“You’ll add what?” Edith laughs, her hand flying to her mouth as she does to try and muffle it.

 

“Hey, it’s not funny Miss Edith!” Frank looks forlorn and crestfallen across at the chuckling maid. “Visual merchandising. It’s just a fancy term we use for window dressing.”

 

“Oh, do we now?” Edith cocks an eyebrow at him. “Very fancy indeed.”

 

“You may laugh now, my girl,” Frank wags a finger in a playful way at Edith. “But one day you’ll say that you knew me when.”

 

“When you have your own grocers?” Edith sounds doubtful as she speaks.

 

“Well, I could do. Others have. Why shouldn’t I?”

 

“Oh I don’t mind you having dreams, Frank.” she assures him. “Miss Lettice tells me the same.”

 

The delivery boy’s ears pick up and leaning a little bit closer to Edith he asks, “So what’s your dream then, Miss Edith, since mine is so laughable?”

 

“My dream?” she put her hand to her chest, taken aback that anyone should be so forward, least of all the man who delivers groceries from the local up-market grocers. “My dream is to…” Then she glances up at the kitchen clock ticking solemnly away on the eau-de-nil painted wall. “Shouldn’t you be out delivering groceries to your next customer, Frank?”

 

“Old Lady Basting’s cook can wait for her delivery a little while longer,” Frank asserts. “She never has a kind word for me anyway. It’s always ‘stop cluttering up the area with your bike, Frank’. Anyway, she’s terrible at paying her bills. I don’t know why Mr. Willison keeps her as a customer when she always waits for reminders before paying.”

 

“Well, a customer is a customer, Frank, even a late paying one. Quite a lot of cooks of titled families around here do the same. It’s almost like it’s expected that they don’t have to pay on time.”

 

“Expected?”

 

“You know: their right. Their right not to pay on time because that would be acknowledging that money makes business revolve.”

 

“Well it does, Miss Edith.”

 

“I know that Frank, and you know that, but families like Miss Lettice’s, they never like talking about money. It’s almost as if it’s dirty.”

 

“I imagine when you have so much money you never have to worry about it, why would you talk about it?”

 

“I suppose so Frank. Well, that’s it.” She smiles and puts down her notepad with a satisfied sigh. “That’s everything.”

 

“Course it is, Miss Edith. I told you I packed it myself, and Frank Leadbetter won’t ever let you down.”

 

“Well, since you’re whiling away some time, Frank, do you fancy a cup of tea then?” Edith asks with a shy smile.

 

“Oh, thank you!” Replies the young man. “Only if it isn’t too much trouble, mind you.”

 

“Oh it’s no trouble. I’m going to have one myself before I pack all this away,” she waves her hand expansively at the piles of groceries. “I can fetch two cups as easily as I can one.”

 

“I shan’t say no then, Miss Edith.” Frank agrees readily. “Cycling groceries around Mayfair, Belgravia and Pimlico is thirsty work.”

 

Edith goes to the dresser and fetches out two Delftware cups and saucers, the sugar bowl and milk jug which she arranges on the end of the table not covered in grocery items. She places the kettle on the stovetop and lights it with one of the matches from the red and white Webb Matches box that Frank has just brought. Then she scuttles across the black and white linoleum floor with the jug to the food safe where she fills it with a splash of milk, before bringing it back to the table.

 

“One of those Huntly and Palmers* chocolate dessert biscuits wouldn’t go astray with it.” Frank says reaching down to the elegantly decorated buttercup yellow and bluish grey tin.

 

“Ah-ah!” Edith slaps Frank’s hand away before he can remove the lid. “Those aren’t for you Frank, any more than they are me! I’ve got some leftover Family Assorted in the biscuit barrel. You can settle for one of them, if you deign, Mr. Leadbetter, Greengrocer to the best families in Mayfair.” She giggles girlishly and her smile towards him is returned with a beaming smile of his own.

 

“So, Miss Edith,” Frank asks with a cheeky smile as he leans over the box. “What is it you’re making me for my tea?”

 

“You, Frank Leadbetter?” she laughs in amazement. “You have quite some cheek today, don’t you?”

 

“Alright then, if it isn’t for me, what and who are these groceries for?”

 

“What and for whom, Frank.” Edith corrects him kindly.

 

“Is that what your dream is? To teach people how to speak properly, like that chap in Pygmalion** then? What’s his name?”

 

“Higgins, Henry Higgins.” Edith replies. “And no, I don’t. And stop fishing for information not freely given.” She gives his nose a playful squeeze as she crosses her arms akimbo and waits for the kettle to boil. “No, most of this is for a special dinner party Miss Lettice is throwing for friends from Buenos Aires who have come to see the wedding of Princess Mary to Viscount Lascelles***. They want summer pudding,” She tuts scornfully. “In the middle of winter!”

 

“Thus, all the tinned fruits.”

 

“Since I cannot move the seasons to those of the southern hemisphere, yes.”

 

Edith hears the kettle on the stove boiling and pours hot water into the white teapot sitting on the server shelf attached to the right of the stove. Placing the knitted cosy over its top, she moves it to the table. She looks Frank Leadbetter up and down as she does. He stands there, leaning against the deal kitchen table, dressed in dark trousers, a white shirt that could do with a decent pressing, his rust coloured knitted vest and a Brunswick green tie****. She looks at his face. He’s quite handsome really, now she looks at him, with fresh rosy cheeks, wind tousled sandy blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes.

 

“You know what Mrs. Boothby said to me, Frank?” Edith chuckles, picking up the pot and swirling the tea in it before pouring some into both cups.

 

“No!” Frank replies, accepting one cup. “What?”

 

“She thought that I was sweet on you, and that we might be stepping out together.”

 

“Really?”

 

“Yes really! That’s what she thought. She let it slip a month or so ago.”

 

Frank adds a heaped teaspoon full of sugar to his tea and stirs it thoughtfully. “Is that such a terrible idea?”

 

“What?” Edith asks.

 

“Us,” He indicates with a wagging finger between Edith and himself. “You and me, I mean, stepping out.”

 

“Well,” Edith feels a blush rising up her throat and flooding her cheeks. “No. Not at all, Frank. I was just saying that Mrs. Boothby thought we were, when we aren’t.” She looks away from Frank’s expectant face and spoons sugar into her own tea. “I hadn’t really given it much thought.”

 

“Ahh, but you have given it some consideration, then?”

 

Edith keeps quiet a moment and thinks with eyes downcast. “A little bit, in passing I suppose.”

 

“And what if we were, Edith?” Surprised by the sudden dropping of her title in a very familiar address, Edith glances back at Frank who looks at her in earnest. “Walking out together, I mean. Would that be agreeable to you?”

 

“Are you asking me to walk out with you, Frank Leadbetter?” Edith gasps.

 

“Well, yes, I suppose I am.” Frank chuckles awkwardly, his face colouring with his own blush of embarrassment. “Only if you’re agreeable to it of course.”

 

“Yes,” Edith smiles. “Yes, I’m agreeable to that, Frank.”

 

“You are?” Frank’s eyes widen in disbelief as his mouth slackens slightly.

 

“For a man so sure of his prospects, you seem surprised, Frank.”

 

“Oh well,” he stumbles. “Its not… I mean… I mean I am. I… I just didn’t think you… well… you know being here and all…”

 

“It’s aright Frank. I was only teasing.” replies Edith kindly. “You don’t need to explain.”

 

“And Miss Chetwynd doesn’t…”

 

“Oh no, Frank! As long as my work isn’t interfered with, Miss Lettice won’t mind. She’s a very kind and modern thinking mistress, Unlike Mrs. Plaistow.”

 

“I remember that was where I first set eyes on you, Edith, at her terrace in Pimlico.”

 

“Do you Frank?”

 

“I do.” Frank smiles proudly.

 

The two chuckle and shyly keep glancing at one another before looking away and burying themselves in their cups of tea awkwardly.

 

“Your day off is Wednesday, isn’t it?” Frank asks eventually.

 

“It is, Frank, how observant of you to notice,”

 

“Well, it pays to take note of things in my profession. You just never know when it might come in handy.” He taps the side of his nose knowingly.

 

“Only, I go and help my Mum on my day off.” Edith explains.

 

“Oh,” Frank says defeatedly, then thinks for a moment and adds. “Well, I work Wednesday anyway.”

 

“What days don’t you work, Frank?”

 

“Well, I don’t work Sundays. So, I’m free after church services are over.”

 

Edith laughs, “Well that works rather well then, as I have Sundays free until four.”

 

Frank joins Edith’s laughter. “Sunday it is then!”

 

The pair fall into an awkward silence again.

 

“So, where would you like to go, Edith?” asks Frank eventually, shattering the quiet punctuated only by the swinging pendulum of the wall clock.

 

“Well,” Edith replies after a few moments. “Miss Lettice’s client, Wanetta Ward is starring in a new moving picture called ‘After the Ball is Over’ at the Premier in East Ham*****. We could go and see that.”

 

“Sounds brilliant, Edith!”

 

Edith smiles shyly and blushes again, a sparkle shining in her eyes. “Yes, it does rather.”

 

* Huntley and Palmers is a British firm of biscuit makers originally based in Reading, Berkshire. The company created one of the world’s first global brands and ran what was once the world’s largest biscuit factory. Over the years, the company was also known as J. Huntley and Son and Huntley and Palmer. Huntley and Palmer were renown for their ‘superior reading biscuits’ which they promoted in different varieties for different occasions, including at breakfast time, and as a dessert biscuit.

 

**Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named after the Greek mythological figure. Written in 1912, it premiered at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on the 16th of October 1913 and was first presented in English on stage to the public in 1913. Its English-language premiere took place at Her Majesty's Theatre in the West End in April 1914 and starred Herbert Beerbohm Tree as phonetics professor Henry Higgins and Mrs Patrick Campbell as Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle. Shaw's play has been adapted numerous times, most notably as the 1938 film Pygmalion starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, the 1956 musical My Fair Lady and its 1964 film version starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn.

 

***Mary, Princess Royal and Countess of Harewood (1897 – 1965), was the only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary. She was the sister of Kings Edward VIII and George VI, and aunt of Queen Elizabeth II. She married Viscount Lascelles on the 28th of February 1922 in a ceremony held at Westminster Abbey. The bride was only 24 years old, whilst the groom was 39. There is much conjecture that the marriage was an unhappy one, but their children dispute this and say it was a very happy marriage based upon mutual respect. The wedding was filmed by Pathé News and was the first royal wedding to be featured in fashion magazines, including Vogue.

 

****In pre World War II times, it was unusual for even the most low paid male workers like delivery men to dress in a shirt, jacket, vest and tie. It represented respectability and the drive for upward mobility in a class conscious society. It is where the term “white collar job” comes from.

 

*****The Premier Super Cinema in East Ham was opened on the 12th of March, 1921, replacing the 800 seat capacity 1912 Premier Electric Theatre. The new cinema could seat 2,408 patrons. The Premier Super Cinema was taken over by Provincial Cinematograph Theatres who were taken over by Gaumont British in February 1929. It was renamed the Gaumont from 21st April 1952. The Gaumont was closed by the Rank Organisation on 6th April 1963. After that it became a bingo hall and remained so until 2005. Despite attempts to have it listed as a historic building due to its relatively intact 1921 interior, the Gaumont was demolished in 2009.

 

This domestic scene may not be all that it appears, for it is made up completely of items from my 1:12 miniatures collection.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

All of Edith’s groceries are 1:12 artisan miniatures with amazing attention to detail as regards the labels of different foods. Some are still household names today. So many of these tins of various foods would have been household staples in the 1920s when canning and preservation revolutinised domestic cookery. They come from various different suppliers including Shepherds Miniatures in the United Kingdom, Kathleen Knight’s Doll House in the United Kingdom, Beautifully Handmade Miniatures in Kettering and Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire. The cardboard box branded with the name Sunlight Soap and the paper shopping bag also come from Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire.

 

Bovril is the trademarked name of a thick and salty meat extract paste similar to a yeast extract, developed in the 1870s by John Lawson Johnston. It is sold in a distinctive bulbous jar, and as cubes and granules. Bovril is owned and distributed by Unilever UK. Its appearance is similar to Marmite and Vegemite. Bovril can be made into a drink ("beef tea") by diluting with hot water or, less commonly, with milk. It can be used as a flavouring for soups, broth, stews or porridge, or as a spread, especially on toast in a similar fashion to Marmite and Vegemite.

 

Bird’s were best known for making custard and Bird’s Custard is still a common household name, although they produced other desserts beyond custard, including the blancmange. They also made Bird’s Golden Raising Powder – their brand of baking powder. Bird’s Custard was first formulated and first cooked by Alfred Bird in 1837 at his chemist shop in Birmingham. He developed the recipe because his wife was allergic to eggs, the key ingredient used to thicken traditional custard. The Birds continued to serve real custard to dinner guests, until one evening when the egg-free custard was served instead, either by accident or design. The dessert was so well received by the other diners that Alfred Bird put the recipe into wider production. John Monkhouse (1862–1938) was a prosperous Methodist businessman who co-founded Monk and Glass, which made custard powder and jelly. Monk and Glass custard was made in Clerkenwell and sold in the home market, and exported to the Empire and to America. They acquired by its rival Bird’s Custard in the early Twentieth Century.

 

P.C. Flett and Company was established in Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands by Peter Copeland Flett. He had inherited a small family owned ironmongers in Albert Street Kirkwall, which he inherited from his maternal family. He had a shed in the back of the shop where he made ginger ale, lemonade, jams and preserves from local produce. By the 1920s they had an office in Liverpool, and travelling representatives selling jams and preserves around Great Britain. I am not sure when the business ceased trading.

 

S.P.C. is an Australian brand that still exists to this day. In 1917 a group of fruit growers in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley decided to form a cooperative which they named the Shepperton Fruit Preserving Company. The company began operations in February 1918, canning pears, peaches and nectarines under the brand name of S.P.C. On the 31st of January 1918 the manager of the Shepparton Fruit Preserving Company announced that canning would begin on the following Tuesday and that the operation would require one hundred and fifty girls or women and thirty men. In the wake of the Great War, it was hoped that “the launch of this new industry must revive drooping energies” and improve the economic circumstances of the region. The company began to pay annual bonuses to grower-shareholders by 1929, and the plant was updated and expanded. The success of S.P.C. was inextricably linked with the progress of the town and the wider Goulburn Valley region. In 1936 the company packed twelve million cans and was the largest fruit cannery in the British empire. Through the Second World War the company boomed. The product range was expanded to include additional fruits, jam, baked beans and tinned spaghetti and production reached more than forty-three million cans a year in the 1970s. From financial difficulties caused by the 1980s recession, SPC returned once more to profitability, merging with Ardmona and buying rival company Henry Jones IXL. S.P.C. was acquired by Coca Cola Amatil in 2005 and in 2019 sold to a private equity group known as Shepparton Partners Collective.

 

Peter Leech and Sons was a grocers that operated out of Lowther Street in Whitehaven from the 1880s. They had a large range of tinned goods that they sold including coffee, tea, tinned salmon and golden syrup. They were admired for their particularly attractive labelling. I do not know exactly when they ceased production, but I believe it may have happened just before the Second World War.

 

Sunlight Soap was first introduced in 1884. It was created by William Hesketh Lever (1st Viscount Leverhulme). It was produced at Port Sunlight in Wirrel, Merseyside, a model village built by Lever Brothers for the workers of their factories which produced the popular soap brands Lux, Lifebuoy and Sunlight.

 

Webb matches were manufactured by the match firm Bryant and May. Bryant and May was a British company created in the mid Nineteenth Century specifically to make matches. Their original Bryant and May Factory was located in Bow, London. They later opened other match factories in the United Kingdom and Australia, such as the Bryant and May Factory in Melbourne, and owned match factories in other parts of the world. Formed in 1843 by two Quakers, William Bryant and Francis May, Bryant and May survived as an independent company for over seventy years, but went through a series of mergers with other match companies and later with consumer products companies. The registered trade name Bryant amd May still exists and it is owned by the Swedish Match Company, as are many of the other registered trade names of the other, formerly independent, companies within the Bryant and May group.

  

Lyons Tea was first produced by J. Lyons and Co., a catering empire created and built by the Salmons and Glucksteins, a German-Jewish immigrant family based in London. Starting in 1904, J Lyons began selling packaged tea through its network of teashops. Soon after, they began selling their own brand Lyons Tea through retailers in the UK, Ireland and around the world. In 1918, Lyons purchased Hornimans and in 1921 they moved their tea factory to J. Lyons and Co., Greenford at that time, the largest tea factory in Europe. In 1962, J Lyons and Company (Ireland) became Lyons Irish Holdings. After a merger with Allied Breweries in 1978, Lyons Irish Holdings became part of Allied Lyons (later Allied Domecq) who then sold the company to Unilever in 1996. Today, Lyons Tea is produced in England. Lyons Tea was a major advertiser in the early decades of RTÉ Television, featuring the "Lyons minstrels" and coupon-based prize competitions.

 

The Dry Fork Milling Company, which produced Dry Fork Flour was based in Dry Fork Virginia. They were well known for producing cornmeal. They were still producing cornmeal and flour into the 1950s. Today, part of the old mill buildings are used as a reception centre.

 

Edith’s Windsor chair is a hand-turned 1:12 artisan miniature which came from America. Unfortunately, the artist did not carve their name under the seat, but it is definitely an unmarked artisan piece.

 

To the left of the sink is the food safe with a mop leaning against it. In the days before refrigeration, or when refrigeration was expensive, perishable foods such as meat, butter, milk and eggs were kept in a food safe. Winter was easier than summer to keep food fresh and butter coolers and shallow bowls of cold water were early ways to keep things like milk and butter cool. A food safe was a wooden cupboard with doors and sides open to the air apart from a covering of fine galvinised wire mesh. This allowed the air to circulate while keeping insects out. There was usually an upper and a lower compartment, normally lined with what was known as American cloth, a fabric with a glazed or varnished wipe-clean surface. Refrigerators, like washing machines were American inventions and were not commonplace in even wealthy upper-class households until well after the Second World War.

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today is Tuesday and we are in the kitchen of Lettice’s flat: Edith her maid’s preserve, except on Tuesdays, every third Thursday of the month and occasionally after a big party. That is when Mrs. Boothby, Lettice’s charwoman*, comes from her home in Poplar to do all the hard jobs. Edith is grateful that unlike her previous positions, she does not have to scrub the black and quite chequered kitchen linoleum, nor polish the parquetry floors, not do her most hated job, black lead the stovetop. Mrs. Boothby does them all without complaint, with reliability and to a very high standard. She is also very handy on cleaning and washing up duty with Edith after one of Lettice’s extravagant cocktail parties. There is only one drawback with Mrs. Boothby, and that is her morning ritual.

 

Setting out her things for baking, Edith hears the familiar sounds of Mrs. Boothby as she climbs the service stairs of Cavendish Mews: her footfall in her low heeled shoes that she proudly tells Edith came ‘practically new from Petticoat Lane’ and the fruity cough that comes from deep within her wiry little body.

 

“Morning dearie!” Mrs. Boothby calls cheerily as she comes through the servants’ entrance door into the kitchen.

 

“Morning Mrs. Boothby,” Edith replies as she gathers canisters from the dresser.

 

“Baking already dearie?” the older woman asks, eying the ingredients as they start to fill the deal kitchen table in the middle of the room. “I’m not late am I?”

 

“No, Mrs. Boothby,” Edith replies with a sigh as she spreads the items out sparsely and then turns to get a few thigs she doesn’t need for the baking to clutter the end of the table. “Just making an early start.”

 

“Well, just let me rest me weary bones a minute before you start, Edith love!” Mrs. Boothby bustles over to the corner of the table not yet occupied by clutter and drops her beaded bag territorially with a thud before moving the Windsor backed chair to the warm spot between the stove and the table. “I’m parched after me trip up from Poplar! Should’ve seen the traffic at Tottenham Court Road this mornin’! Quite bunged up it was! Now, I’ll just sit ‘ere and ‘ave a reviving cup of Rosie-Lee** and a fag before I get started.”

 

Edith, with her back to Mrs. Boothby, shudders almost imperceptibly. How she hates the older woman’s habit of smoking indoors. When she lived with her parents, neither smoked in the house. Her mother didn’t smoke at all: it would have been unladylike to do so, and her father only smoked a pipe when he went down to the local pub.

 

“Got the kettle on dearie?” Mrs. Boothby’s query breaks into Edith’s happy memories of her parents.

 

“Err… there’s tea in the pot, Mrs. Boothby,” she replies distractedly, indicating to the pot on the table covered with a pretty knitted cosy.

 

“Oh! Splendid!” Mrs. Boothby enthuses as she takes a Delftware cup and saucer off the dresser.

 

“Although it may be a bit stewed,” Edith adds as afterthought.

 

“Oh I don’t mind a good, strong Rosie-Lee. If I can stick a spoon up in it, all the betta! Got any of them nice ‘Untley and Palmer breakfast biscuits to go wiv me Rosie-Lee?”

 

Sighing because she knows it will hold up her baking, Edith can do little to refuse the old char as she has no doubt that the sprightly eyed woman has already spied the tin on the bench. Reaching over, she hands it to Mrs. Boothby’s welcoming hands.

 

“Ta!” she says. “Lovely.” She pours herself a cup of tea, sticks a biscuit between her teeth and then starts fossicking through her capacious beaded bag before withdrawing her cigarette papers, Swan Vestas and tin of Player’s Navy Cut. Rolling herself a cigarette she reaches over to the deal dresser and grabs the silver and cut glass ash tray Edith washed last night which she has yet to return to the drawing room where it is kept for guests who smoke. Lighting her cigarette with a satisfied sigh and one more of her fruity coughs, Mrs. Boothby settles back happily in the Windsor chair with her cigarette in one hand and the biscuit in the other.

 

Edith resigns herself, as she does every morning that the char comes in, to Mrs. Boothby’s morning ritual. And she tells herself, as she does every morning that the char comes in, that the sooner it begins, the sooner the ritual will be over, and then Mrs. Boothby will do all the unpleasant jobs she doesn’t have to do. Smelling the miasma of cigarette smoke and noticing the fine grey curls start to permeate the air, the maid crinkles up her nose in disgust. She casually goes over to the kitchen window and opens it.

 

“Lawd dearie!” Mrs. Boothby gasps. “Now don’t go openin’ that damn window! I’ll catch me death, so ‘elp me I will!”

 

Edith lowers the sash again, quietly and without complaint, knowing there is no arguing with Mrs. Boothby. She sighs again but thinks there will be plenty of time to air the kitchen after the char has gone into the drawing room to polish the floors.

 

Looking disconcertedly at Edith, the older woman remarks, “Are you sure you was born ‘ere in London and not in Scotland, dearie? Lawd I ain’t never met a girl so intent on cold London air! It’s un’ealthy it is! They’s fumes out there wot will kill you, y’know?”

 

*A charwoman, chargirl, or char, jokingly charlady, is an old-fashioned occupational term, referring to a paid part-time worker who comes into a house or other building to clean it for a few hours of a day or week, as opposed to a maid, who usually lives as part of the household within the structure of domestic service. In the 1920s, chars usually did all the hard graft work that paid live-in domestics would no longer do as they looked for excuses to leave domestic service for better paying work in offices and factories.

 

**Rosie-Lee is Cockney slang for tea, and it is one of the most well-known of all Cockney rhyming slang.

 

This year the FFF+ Group have decided to have a weekly challenge called “Snap Happy”. A different theme chosen by a member of the group each week, and the image is to be posted on the Monday of the week.

 

This week the theme, “up-close/macro” was chosen by Andrew, ajhaysom.

 

I thought another scene using some of my 1:12 miniature collection would be a perfect choice for macro photography, however I have deliberately chosen a photograph that contains the smallest miniature I have as the centre not only of my photo, but also my narrative: a single cigarette with a red burning tip. The cigarette is a tiny five millimetres long and just one millimetre wide! Made of paper, I have to be so careful that it doesn’t get lost when I use it!

 

Fun things to look for in this tableaux include:

 

The tea cosy, which fits snugly over a white porcelain teapot, has been hand knitted in fine lemon, blue and violet wool. It comes easily off and off and can be as easily put back on as a real tea cosy on a real teapot. It comes from a specialist miniatures stockist in England.

 

The Huntley and Palmer’s Breakfast Biscuit tin containing a replica selection of biscuits is also a 1:12 artisan piece. Huntley & Palmers is a British firm of biscuit makers originally based in Reading, Berkshire. The company created one of the world\'s first global brands and ran what was once the world\'s largest biscuit factory. Over the years, the company was also known as J. Huntley & Son and Huntley & Palmer. Huntley and Palmer were renown for their ‘superior reading biscuits’ which they promoted in different varieties for different occasions, including at breakfast time. The design on the tin is Edwardian, and was so popular that it carried on through the 1920s. Other biscuit varieties had similar patterned tins in different colour ranges to aid those who were unable to, or couldn’t, read!

 

Mrs. Boothby’s beaded handbag is also a 1:12 artisan miniature. Hand crocheted, it is interwoven with antique blue glass beads that are two millimetres in diameter. The beads of the handle are three millimetres in length.

 

Spilling from her bag are her Player’s Navy Cut cigarette tin and Swan Vesta matches, which are 1:12 miniatures hand made by Jonesy’s Miniatures in England. The ashtray is also an artisan piece, made of cut clear crystals set in a silver metal frame. The tray has black ash in it, and the 1:12 cigarette which rests on its lip (no it isn’t affixed there) came with it. Made by Nottingham based tobacconist manufacturer John Player and Sons, Player\'s Medium Navy Cut was the most popular by far of the three Navy Cut brands (there was also Mild and Gold Leaf, mild being today\'s rich flavour). Two thirds of all the cigarettes sold in Britain were Player\'s and two thirds of these were branded as Player\'s Medium Navy Cut. In January 1937, Player\'s sold nearly 3.5 million cigarettes (which included 1.34 million in London). Production continued to grow until at its peak in the late 1950s, Player\'s was employing 11,000 workers (compared to 5,000 in 1926) and producing 15 brands of pipe tobacco and 11 brands of cigarettes. Nowadays the brands "Player" and "John Player Special" are owned and commercialised by Imperial Brands (formerly the Imperial Tobacco Company). Swan Vestas is a brand name for a popular brand of \'strike-anywhere\' matches. Shorter than normal pocket matches they are particularly popular with smokers and have long used the tagline ‘the smoker\'s match’ although this has been replaced by the prefix ‘the original’ on the current packaging. Swan Vestas matches are manufactured under the House of Swan brand, which is also responsible for making other smoking accessories such as cigarette papers, flints and filter tips. The matches are manufactured by Swedish Match in Sweden using local, sustainably grown aspen. The Swan brand began in 1883 when the Collard & Kendall match company in Bootle on Merseyside near Liverpool introduced \'Swan wax matches\'. These were superseded by later versions including \'Swan White Pine Vestas\' from the Diamond Match Company. These were formed of a wooden splint soaked in wax. They were finally christened \'Swan Vestas\' in 1906 when Diamond merged with Bryant and May and the company enthusiastically promoted the Swan brand. By the 1930s \'Swan Vestas\' had become \'Britain\'s best-selling match\'.

 

The Deftware cup, saucer and milk jug are part of a 1:12 size miniature porcelain dinner set which sits on the dresser that can be seen just to the right of shot.

 

Edith’s Windsor chair is a hand-turned 1:12 artisan miniature which came from America. Unfortunately, the artist did not carve their name under the seat, but it is definitely an unmarked artisan piece.

 

In the background you can see a very modern and up-to-date 1920s gas stove. It would have been expensive to instal at the time, and it would have been the cook’s or maid’s pleasure to cook on and in. It would have included a thermostat for perfect cooking and without the need of coal, it was much cleaner to feed, use and clean. It is not unlike those made by the Roper Stove Company in the 1920s. The Roper Stove Company previously named the Florence-Wehrle Company among other names, was founded in 1883. Located in Newark, Ohio, the company was once the largest stove producer in the world. Today, the Roper Stove Company is a brand of Whirlpool.

A potential 52frames submission for week15 ‘In the Kitchen’. One of my first subject ideas for this week although I have since retaken it a few times as well as tried to tackle other kitchen objects.

Wickham Place is the London home of Lord and Lady Southgate, their children and staff. Located in fashionable Belgravia it is a fine Georgian terrace house.

 

Tonight we are below stairs in the Wickham Place kitchen. The Wickham Place kitchens are situated on the ground floor of Wickham Place, adjoining the Butler’s Pantry. It is dominated by big black leaded range, and next to it stands a heavy dark wood dresser that has been there for as long as anyone can remember. In the middle of the kitchen stands Cook’s preserve, the pine deal table on which she does most of her preparation for both the meals served to the family upstairs and those for the downstairs staff.

 

It's a busy and noisy place this evening with all spare hands being put to some use as Lord and Lady Southgate entertain the United States Ambassador to England, Mr. Whitelaw Reid*. As he is coming, Her Ladyship has invited a number of her fellow Americans who now live in London society like she does.

 

There is a frenetic energy about the room which scullery maid Agnes finds a little overwhelming as she tries to be useful to Mrs. Bradley and keep out from under the feet of the constant stream of liveried footmen coming through with dirty glasses for her to wash and empty bottles of champagne to be disposed of. In comparison, Mrs. Bradley the cook, has everything in hand as she orders Agnes, an additional kitchen maid she has hired for the night and the two housemaids Sara and Tilley about. Here we are before the range at the pine deal table where Mrs. Bradley has just finished removing some lightly fried hors d’oeuvres from her copper skillet with a slotted spatula, carefully placing them on a fine white porcelain plate.

 

“Well,” she says with a satisfied sigh over the clatter of pots and the patter of feet. “What do you think Agnes?”

 

“About what, Mrs. Bradley?” Agnes scurries over from the sink.

 

“About what! About what? About these, girl!” She indicates to the three plates before her.

 

The hors d’oeuvres for the reception are ready. Prawns on puff pastry decorated with caviar, potato petites adored with cherry tomatoes and cucumber slivers and by special request of Her Ladyship for the tastes of her American friends, crab, tomato, fresh herbs and mayonnaise on toast squares.

 

“Oh! Oh, they look wonderful Mrs. Bradley! I hope to make something as beautiful as these some day.”

 

“And you will, girl. You will.” the older woman assures her. “Now, have you done your bit for the hors d’oeuvres, Agnes?”

 

The cook has recently taught her scullery maid how to fashion pretty looking ornamental garnishes for platters. “Yes, Mrs. Bradley!” She carefully brings over from the safety of a sideboard in the corner of the kitchen a selection of sliced carrots and greenery which she artfully places on each plate.

 

“Very good Agnes!” Cook says approvingly. “Fit for a queen, or a gaggle of American Dollar Princesses in this case, my girl!”

 

“Are the canapés ready, Mrs. Bradley?” a slightly out of breath and red-faced Mr. Withers the butler asks as he hurries through the kitchen door from the corridor outside. “Viscount and Viscountess Astor** have finally arrived.”

 

“Hors d’oeuvres for the evening!” she says proudly. “With Agnes’ help, of course.”

 

“Very good Agnes,” Mr. Withers gives her one of his approving smiles. “Mrs. Bradley will make a first class cook of you yet.”

 

The scullery maid smiles shyly and blushes.

 

“Potato petites with cherry tomatoes and cucumber slivers, prawns on puff pastry with caviar,” Cook continues. “And crab, tomato, fresh herbs and mayonnaise on toast by special request of Her Ladyship for the Americans amongst them upstairs.”

 

The three liveried house footmen in their frock coats, britches and powdered wigs return and take one plate each, holding them safely aloft as he file out the door and upstairs to serve the guests mingling in Wickham Place’s main reception room.

 

“Well, don’t just stand there, girl!” Cook say to the mesmerised Agnes. “I need you chopping herbs to garnish the soup with whilst Florrie and I check on the roast fowls.”

 

“Yes, Mrs. Bradley.” Says Agnes, still smiling from the praise of Cook and Mr. Withers.

 

*Mr. Whitelaw Reid was an American politician, newspaper editor and writer. He was appointed the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St, James’ by Theodore Roosevelt in 1905. He served in this role, including during the William Howard Taft administration, until his death in 1912.

 

**Waldorf Astor, Second Viscount Astor and his wife Nancy Witcher Langhorne Astor, Viscountess Astor were American-born members of the British aristocracy and were also British politicians. Lady Astor although not the first woman elected to the British parliament, was the first woman elected to take her seat there. Both were members of parliament at different times for Plymouth.

 

The theme for the 27th of November “Looking Close… on Friday” is “savoury food”. This tableaux is made up of part of my 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures collection. Some pieces come from my own childhood like the ladderback chair to the left of the picture. Other items I acquired as an adult through specialist online dealers and artists who specialise in 1:12 miniatures.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableaux include:

 

The plates of finely made hors d‘oeuvres seen on Cook’s deal table, and the parsnip you can just see peeping out of the blue and white Cornishware bowl on the rfight are artisan miniatures from Beautifully Handmade Miniatures in Kettering in England, as are the onions hanging to the right of the range. He has a dizzying array of meals which is always growing, and all are made entirely or put together by hand, so each item is individual.

 

The kitchen knife and the meat cleaver with their inlaid handles and sharpened blades comes from English miniatures specialist Doreen Jeffries Small Wonders Miniature store.

 

The copper stock pot, the copper pan and the pots on the range in the background are all made of real copper and come from various miniature stockists in England and America.

 

To the right of the photo, containing parsnips is one of Cook’s Cornishware white and blue striped bowls. One of her Cornishware cannisters stands on the dresser in the background. Cornishware is a striped kitchenware brand trademarked to and manufactured by T.G. Green & Co Ltd. Originally introduced in the 1920s and manufactured in Church Gresley, Derbyshire, it was a huge success for the company and in the succeeding 30 years it was exported around the world. The company ceased production in June 2007 when the factory closed under the ownership of parent company, The Tableshop Group. The range was revived in 2009 after T.G. Green was bought by a trio of British investors.

 

The copper skillet on the edge of the chopping board, the stock pot and the kettle on the range are all 1:12 miniature that come from various stockists over the years.

 

The jar of herbs is also a 1:12 miniature, made of real glass with a real cork stopper in it.

 

The large kitchen range in the background is a 1:12 miniature replica of the coal fed Phoenix Kitchen Range. A mid-Victorian model, it has hinged opening doors, hanging bars above the stove and a little bass hot water tap (used in the days before plumbed hot water).

1930's One Drawer Enamel Top Table - been in the family for so long. It is in good shape, and

we hope to make it even better.

 

The legs are stable now, and we are wondering how best to refinish the old enamel top. We hope to leave the sides of the table top black.

 

This was Nannanny's table. I believe he made some good cornbread on this table - served with butter and sorghum syrup.

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

It is the day after Lettice’s exclusive buffet supper party for two of her Embassy Club coterie of bright young things who are getting married: Dickie Channon, eldest surviving son of the Marquess of Taunton, and Margot de Virre, only daughter of Lord Charles and Lady Lucie de Virre. The soirée in their honour was a glittering success and will go down as one of the events of the 1921 London Season according to the Tattler’s society pages correspondent who busily scribbled notes about all the great and good of the land who were present and what they were wearing, whilst a photographer from the London magazine captured the guests in all their glittering finery.

 

The day has been spent setting the Mayfair flat back to rights and Lettice’s maid, Edith, with the help of Mrs. Boothby, Lettice’s charwoman* and one of Mrs. Boothby’s friends, Jackie, have swept and polished, scrubbed and cleaned, whilst Gunter and Company’s** men have restored the furnishings to where they were before the drawing room was turned into a ballroom and the dining room into a buffet.

 

It's after midnight in the up-to-date modern kitchen and silence envelops the flat. Outside only the occasional drone of a taxi dropping late night revellers home, or the hiss of two fighting cats somewhere on the moonlight rooftops outside breaks the evening quiet. Edith has washed all the glasses, crockery and silverware from dinner and after such a busy day of work she should be tired and sleeping soundly like Lettice is, but instead she is still full of excitement from the previous evening as she sits at the deal kitchen table and thinks about all the beautiful people to whom she served drinks.

 

Her mistress looked beautiful in a powder blue silk georgette gown designed by her childhood friend Gerald Bruton who has his own dress shop in Grosvenor Street. Margot wore a stunning low waisted gown of silver satin. However, it was another guest at the party, Lady Diana Cooper *** who really caught Edith’s eye. With a neat, short chignon of waves and curls woven around a bandeau of diamonds, she wore a stunning blue gown of layer upon diaphanous layer of handkerchief point Lanvin blue silk taffeta which Edith knows from her mistress’ cast-off fashion magazines to be a ‘robe de style’**** with a full skirt supported by a wire hoop underneath the fabric. Pinned to the waist was a large pink satin rose with a slightly smaller one sewn to the right shoulder.

 

“Oh,” Edith sighs as she picks up a jam fancy biscuit from the Delftware plate in front of her and takes a bite. “How I should love to be reminded of that gown forever.”

 

As she munches on the biscuit and takes a sip of tea from her teacup, Edith suddenly has an idea. One of her pleasures in her spare time is to collect articles on the latest styles of clothes and hair from Lettice’s old magazines and paste them into scrapbooks. Her current scrapbook has a blank first page which she has kept for something special. Now she knows what that something special is.

 

Slipping quietly out into the drawing room of the flat, Edith fossicks carefully through the Chippendale gilded black japanned chinoiserie cabinet next to the fireplace and withdraws her mistress’ box of watercolours which she takes back to the kitchen. Going into her own little bedroom off the kitchen she withdraws a pack of coloured pencils from her chest of drawers and snatches up her scrapbook from its surface where it sits upright behind her sewing box, leaning against the floral papered wall. Returning to the kitchen she sets everything out on the table.

 

“Come on now girl,” Edith mutters encouragingly to herself as she takes up a grey lead pencil. “Let’s put that memory of yours to the test and see if we can’t get it out on paper.”

 

The pencil tip scratches across the paper as Edith’s hand moves deftly over the page. She starts to hum ‘After the Ball is Over’*****. Soon the figure of a woman emerges on the page with a short chignon dancing gaily with one arm out and another crossed over her chest. The room remains silent except for the tick of the clock, Edith’s soft humming and the sound of pencil against paper as the dress quickly takes form, with its cascades of layers billowing out over the model’s legs, the gown daringly showing her calves, just as Viscountess Norwich had when she danced with her handsome husband and other friends at the party.

 

“Not bad,” Edith says as she finishes her sketch. “Not bad at all. Now for some colour.”

 

She goes to the kitchen cupboard where she keeps the old Victorian jugs that Lettice uses for water when she is doing watercolour sketching and withdraws the smallest jug. Filling it with some water she goes back to her seat. She looks guiltily at her mistress’ watercolours resting atop the scrapbook.

 

“Well,” Edith reasons. “My schoolteachers all said I had artistic flair.” She sighs. “And if I were as lucky as Miss Lettice, I’d have had a tutor to teach me art, or maybe even have gone to the Slade School of Fine Art. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind me using her paints just this one time.”

 

She releases a sigh of pleasure as she mixes the vibrant robin’s egg blue shade of the gown and begins to paint her sketched figure. The colour lightens as she reaches the hem, matching the stockings on her model. Adding more colour to the pool of blue she then defines the shoes. Rinsing the brush in the jug she waits until the blue paint is dry before adding the rose madder of the silk rose on the shoulder and sleeve, and blonde hair to match her own shade to her figure. Making notes about Lettice’s party in the margins around the edge of her picture, Edith waits until the watercolour is dry. Taking up her colour pencils she adds detail, highlights of colour and shading to her sketch, totally oblivious of the time as the hands on the kitchen clock pass one o’clock, all the while humming happily away.

 

“There!” Edith remarks at last, satisfied with her creation. “Perhaps I could give Mr. Bruton a run for his money.” She chuckles to herself at the thought. “Now I shall have Lady Cooper’s gown forever.”

 

As she starts to pack up the watercolours, pencils, sketchbook and tea things she continues to hum ‘After the Ball is Over’, her body swaying to the tune as she imagines herself dancing at a party in the beautiful gown she had just created from memory on paper.

 

*A charwoman, chargirl, or char, jokingly charlady, is an old-fashioned occupational term, referring to a paid part-time worker who comes into a house or other building to clean it for a few hours of a day or week, as opposed to a maid, who usually lives as part of the household within the structure of domestic service. In the 1920s, chars usually did all the hard graft work that paid live-in domestics would no longer do as they looked for excuses to leave domestic service for better paying work in offices and factories.

 

**Gunter and Company were London caterers and ball furnishers with shops in Berkley Square, Sloane Street, Lowndes Street and New Bond Street. They began as Gunter’s Tea Shop at 7 and 8 Berley Square 1757 where it remained until 1956 as the business grew and opened different premises. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Gunter's became a fashionable light eatery in Mayfair, notable for its ices and sorbets. Gunter's was considered to be the wedding cake makers du jour and in 1889, made the bride cake for the marriage of Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Louise of Wales. Even after the tea shop finally closed, the catering business carried on until the mid 1970s.

 

***Born Lady Diana Manners, Diana Olivia Winifred Maud Cooper, Viscountess Norwich was an English aristocrat who was a famously glamorous social figure in London and Paris. As a young woman, she moved in a celebrated group of intellectuals known as the Coterie, most of whom were killed in the First World War. She married Duff Cooper in 1919. In her prime, she had the widespread reputation as the most beautiful young woman in England, and appeared in countless profiles, photographs and articles in newspapers and magazines. She was a film actress in the early 1920s and both she and her husband were very good friends with Edward VIII and were guests of his on a 1936 yacht cruise of the Adriatic which famously caused his affair with Wallis Simpson to become public knowledge.

 

****The ‘robe de style’ was introduced by French couturier Jeanne Lanvin around 1915. It consisted of a basque bodice with a broad neckline and an oval bouffant skirt supported by built in wire hoops. Reminiscent of the Spanish infanta-style dresses of the Seventeenth Century and the panniered robe à la française of the Eighteenth Century they were made of fabric in a solid colour, particularly a deep shade of robin’s egg blue which became known as Lanvin blue, and were ornamented with concentrated bursts of embroidery, ribbons or ornamental silk flowers.

 

*****’After the Ball is Over’ was a popular 1891 song written by Charles K. Harris.

 

Believe it or not Edith’s sketch and her scrapbook as well as all the items around them are perhaps not quite as they appear, for all of them are 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures from my miniatures collection.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

Edith’s scrapbook is a 1:12 size miniature made by the British miniature artisan Ken Blythe. Most of the books I own that he has made may be opened to reveal authentic printed interiors. In some cases, you can even read the words, depending upon the size of the print! I have quite a large representation of Ken Blythe’s work in my collection, but so little of his real artistry is seen because the books that he specialised in making are usually closed, sitting on shelves or closed on desks and table surfaces. Therefore, it is a pleasure to give you a glimpse inside this wonderful scrapbook from the 1920s which contains sketches, photographs and article clippings. Even the paper has been given the appearance of wrinkling as happens when glue is applied to cheap pulp paper. To give you an idea of the work that has gone into this scrapbook, it contains twelve double sided pages of scrapbook articles, pictures, sketches and photographs and measures forty millimetres in height and thirty millimetres in width and is only three millimetres thick. What might amaze you even more is that all Ken Blythe’s opening books are authentically replicated 1:12 scale miniatures of real volumes. To create something so authentic to the original in such detail and so clearly, really does make this a miniature artisan piece. Ken Blythe’s work is highly sought after by miniaturists around the world today and command high prices at auction for such tiny pieces, particularly now that he is no longer alive. I was fortunate enough to acquire pieces from Ken Blythe prior to his death about four years ago. His legacy will live on with me and in my photography which I hope will please his daughter. I hope that you enjoy this peek at just one of hundreds of his books that I own, and that it makes you smile with its sheer whimsy!

 

The watercolour paint set, brushes, and Limoges style jugs (two of a set of three) come from Melody Jane Dolls’ House. So too do the pencils, which are one millimetre wide and two centimetres long.

 

The Huntley and Palmer’s Family Circle Biscuits tin containing a replica selection of biscuits is also a 1:12 artisan piece. Huntley and Palmers is a British firm of biscuit makers originally based in Reading, Berkshire. The company created one of the world’s first global brands and ran what was once the world’s largest biscuit factory. Over the years, the company was also known as J. Huntley and Son and Huntley and Palmer. Huntley and Palmer were renown for their ‘superior reading biscuits’ which they promoted in different varieties for different occasions, including at breakfast time. The design on the tin originates from the 1920s, but continued much later due to its popularity. The biscuits on the plate are 1:12 scale artisan pieces. The jam fancy is made by Beautifully Handmade Miniatures in Kettering, whilst the chocolate chip biscuit has been made in England by hand from clay by former chef turned miniature artisan, Frances Knight. Her work is incredibly detailed and realistic, and she says that she draws her inspiration from her years as a chef and her imagination.

 

The tea cosy, which fits snugly over a white porcelain teapot, has been hand knitted in fine lemon, blue and violet wool. It comes easily off and off and can be as easily put back on as a real tea cosy on a real teapot. It comes from a specialist miniatures stockist in England.

 

The Deftware cup, saucer and milk jug are part of a 1:12 size miniature porcelain dinner set which I acquired from a private collection of 1:12 miniatures in Holland.

Wickham Place is the London home of Lord and Lady Southgate, their children and staff. Located in fashionable Belgravia it is a fine Georgian terrace house.

 

Today we are below stairs in the Wickham Place kitchen. The Wickham Place kitchens are situated on the ground floor of Wickham Place, adjoining the Butler’s Pantry. It is dominated by big black leaded range, and next to it stands a heavy dark wood dresser that has been there for as long as anyone can remember. In the middle of the kitchen stands Cook’s preserve, the pine deal table on which she does most of her preparation for both the meals served to the family upstairs and those for the downstairs staff.

 

It is Easter time, and Mrs. Bradley, fondly known as Cook by most of the Wickham Place family and staff, wants to make something festive for the Southgate children, both of whom have recently been feeling poorly with rather nasty colds. Now that they are back on their feet, albeit with a little less noise and vibrant energy as usual, she wants something to cheer them up. Mrs. Bradley’s scullery maid Agnes looks on.

 

“Well,” Mrs. Bradley says with a satisfied sigh as she finishes a sixth cupcake by adding a home-made marzipan pink rabbit atop the white cream cheese icing Agnes had been allowed to ice the cupcakes with. “What do you think Agnes?”

 

“Oh Mrs. Bradley!” Agnes gasps. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful!”

 

“Thank you, my girl!” she smiles proudly, admiring her handywork.

 

“I wish I’d had something like that at Easter when I was Master Piers and Miss Sarah’s age.” the scullery maid sighs.

 

“Well, I imagine your parents did their best for you.”

 

“I s’pose.” Agnes shrugs. “I just remember doing a lot of praying, atonement and fasting.”

 

“Your people are chapel, aren’t they?”

 

“Yes, Mrs. Bradley.”

 

“Ah, that accounts for it then.” Mrs. Bradley starts tidying up.

 

“Accounts for what, Mrs. Bradley?” Agnes follows the cook’s lead and starts clearing the table too, keeping a sharp eye on the mixing bowls of left over icing.

 

“Well, all the praying, atonement and fasting.” the Cook waves about a beater still coated in pink coloured icing sugar, which Agnes follows with a hungry look.

 

“I do remember the minister’s wife used to boil eggs for us and we’d decorate them at Sunday School.” Agnes pauses as a happy smile lights up her face momentarily.

 

“Oh yes?” Mrs. Bradley remarks. “Did you dye them different colours?”

 

“We did, Mrs. Bradley. We used to use cranberries, orange peel and lemon peel for dyes.”

 

“Were the scarlet ones your favourite?”

 

“Yes! They used to remind me of the red winter flannel petticoats I’d wear.” Agnes looks in astonishment at the older woman. “However did you know, Mrs. Bradley?”

 

“Contrary to popular belief, I wasn’t always a matronly cook, you know!” The older woman puts her hands on her shapely hips. “I liked red too when I was a girl. So bright in a world full of black.”

 

“Black, Mrs. Bradley?”

 

“Oh yes. The Queen, god rest her soul, was in mourning when I was a girl, and it seemed like the whole world went into mourning with her for years! And did you give the eggs you dyed to friends and family?*”

 

“I wanted to, Mrs. Bradley, because that’s what the minister taught us to do,” Agnes replies, the bright smile suddenly disappearing from her face as she lowers her eyes to the tabletop and busies herself self-consciously. “But Mum wouldn’t have a bar of it. I wanted to give them to my Granny, who used to bake us kids hot cross buns at Easter if she could afford get the fruit and peel to put into them,” She sighs. “But Mum said it was a wicked waste of fresh eggs to boil them just for decorating and giving away.”

 

“So what did you do with them then, if your mother wouldn’t let you give them to your grandmother?”

 

“I didn’t do anything with them, Mrs. Bradley. Mum would snatch them off me, and then she’d give me a clip around the ears and tell me to pray for my soul for being such a wicked and wasteful girl.”

 

“Ah, there’s that chapel atonement again.” Mrs. Bradley remarks bitterly, feeling sorry for her poor, mousey scullery maid. “And did you?”

 

“Did I ever, Mrs. Bradley! I’d never dare disobey my Mum!” She blushes at the mere thought of it. “I still wouldn’t! My Dad always called Mum a Tarter. As a kid growing up, I never knew what that meant, but now I do, and I think he was right.”

 

“Doesn’t sound like you had much fun as a child, Agnes.” Mrs. Bradley remarks.

 

“Oh it wasn’t all bad, Mrs. Bradley,” Agnes remarks with a false steeliness to her voice. “We didn’t have much: still don’t, but we got by.”

 

“Not enough money for pink, green and yellow marzipan rabbits like Master Piers and Miss Sarah, I’ll wager.” she remarks knowingly.

 

“Goodness no, Mrs. Bradley!” Agnes looks in shock at the cook at the mere suggestion of it, a blush of shame flushing her cheeks.

 

“Here then,” she slides a cupcake with a pink marzipan rabbit across the table towards Agnes. “Happy Easter, my girl.” The older woman smiles magnanimously.

 

Agnes looks at the cupcake and then beams another happy smile at the older woman. “Really, Mrs. Bradley?”

 

“Master Piers and Miss Sarah have plenty for their nursery tea. They won’t miss one cupcake.”

 

“Oh! Thank you, Mrs. Bradley! Happy Easter!”

 

*The exchanging of greetings and gifts was a common custom in Victorian times during the Easter festival. People used to visit their relatives and friends and exchanged sweets, gifts (often homemade), and greetings. The celebration of the Easter festival was a major part of the culture during the Victorian era.

 

In the custom of the Victorian era, I should like to wish my Twenty First Century Flickr friends and followers a very happy and restful Easter. I know it will be a difficult Easter this year for some, but I hope you all find a little piece of joy and happiness.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableaux include:

 

The divine little cupcakes, each with an Easter bunny on the top, has been made in England by hand from clay by former chef turned miniature artisan, Frances Knight. Her work is incredibly detailed and realistic, and she says that she draws her inspiration from her years as a chef and her imagination. Each cupcake is only five millimetres in diameter and eight millimetres in height!

 

The mixing bowl with the pink icing an whisk and the mixing bowl with cupcake dough, the jelly mould and jug of jelly are also made by Frances Knight.

 

The box of of Rowntree's Table Jelly is a 1:12 artisan miniature made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire. Founded by Henry Isaac Rowntree in Castlegate in York in 1862, Rowntree's developed strong associations with Quaker philanthropy. Throughout much of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, it was one of the big three confectionery manufacturers in the United Kingdom, alongside Cadbury and Fry, both also founded by Quakers. In 1981, Rowntree's received the Queen's Award for Enterprise for outstanding contribution to international trade. In 1988, when the company was acquired by Nestlé, it was the fourth-largest confectionery manufacturer in the world. The Rowntree brand continues to be used to market Nestlé's jelly sweet brands, such as Fruit Pastilles and Fruit Gums, and is still based in York

 

To the right of the tray of cupcakes, stands one of Cook's Cornishware cannisters. Cornishware is a striped kitchenware brand trademarked to and manufactured by T.G. Green & Co Ltd. Originally introduced in the 1920s and manufactured in Church Gresley, Derbyshire, it was a huge success for the company and in the succeeding 30 years it was exported around the world. The company ceased production in June 2007 when the factory closed under the ownership of parent company, The Tableshop Group. The range was revived in 2009 after T.G. Green was bought by a trio of British investors.

 

Next to the Cornishware cannister stands a miniature Blue Calico milk jug. Traditional dark blue Burleigh Calico made in Staffordshire, England by Burgess & Leigh since 1851. It was inspired by Nineteenth Century indigo fabrics. Blue Calico is still made today, and still uses the traditional print transfer process, which makes each piece unique.

 

The Art Nouveau silver cup in front of the tray of cupcakes is a dolls’ house miniature from Germany. Made in the first decade of the Twentieth Century it is a beautiful work of art as a stand alone item, and is remarkably heavy for its size.

 

The copper kettles on the range in the background are all made of real copper and come from various miniature stockists in England and America.

 

The floral teapot in the top right-hand corner of the picture I acquired from a specialist high street tea shop when I was a teenager. I have five of them and each one is a different shape and has a different design. I love them, and what I also love is that over time they have developed their own crazing in the glaze, which I think adds a nice touch of authenticity.

 

The large kitchen range in the background is a 1:12 miniature replica of the coal fed Phoenix Kitchen Range. A mid-Victorian model, it has hinged opening doors, hanging bars above the stove and a little bass hot water tap (used in the days before plumbed hot water).

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today it is Tuesday, and we are in the very modern and up-to-date 1920s kitchen of Lettice’s flat: Edith her maid’s preserve, which is usually a place of calm and organisation. However today, Edith is in a flap, rushing about the room between the stove and the deal kitchen table in the centre of the room, banging copper pots and porcelain serving dishes alike as she starts to serve the day’s luncheon of a roast chicken with boiled vegetables and gravy.

 

“Goodness dearie! What’s to do?*” Mrs. Boothby, Lettice’s charwoman** who comes on Tuesdays and every third Thursday to do the hard jobs, gasps as she slips into the kitchen via the door that leads from the flat’s entrance hall.

 

“Oh nothing!” Edith spits anxiously as she slams a heavy bottomed copper saucepan on the table’s surface and starts spooning some boiled vegetables into a pretty blue and white serving dish. “It’s just that Miss Lettice’s father is here.”

 

“Oh,” Mrs. Boothby’s eyebrows arch with curiosity over her sparking eyes. “Is that ooh that pompous old windbag is in the parlour?”

 

“Ssshhh!” Edith shushes the older Cockney woman. “He’ll hear you!” She indicates with her slotted ladle to the green baize door that leads from the kitchen to the flat’s dining room and the drawing room beyond it.

 

“I very much doubt that, dearie. “’E seems more than occupied wiv jabberin’ away to Miss Lettice.”

 

Edith’s face suddenly drains of the high colour her anxiety and the hot kitchen has given it. “He didn’t see you, did he Mrs. Boothby?”

 

The wiry thin Cockney woman bursts out laughing, which turns into one of her bouts of fruity coughing. “Goodness no, dearie!” she gasps. “I was just finishin’ polishin’ the bedroom floor and I glimpsed ‘im from a distance sittin’ in the parlour as I was comin’ across the entrance hall wiv me bucket.” She drops her aluminium bucket onto the black and white linoleum floor. “Nah! I knows better than ta show my face there when Miss Lettice ‘as guests.”

 

“Well,“ Edith mutters distractedly as she continues spooning greens from the pot into the tureen. “That’s a relief anyway.”

 

“Now, what’s all this then?” Mrs. Boothby asks with genuine concern. “It ain’t like you ta be upset by one of Miss Lettice’s visitors, dearie. It’s only ‘er old dad come ta pay a call.”

 

“Exactly!” Edith says, dropping the ladle back into the pot. She turns around and withdraws a roast chicken from the oven, golden brown and juicy, which she places on the wooden serving tray in the middle of the table. “Miss Lettice came in here at eleven, bold as brass. She knows I don’t like it when she fails to ring the call bell and comes in here.”

 

“And what did she want?”

 

“Well, she asked me what was for luncheon. I told her I was going to marinade her a nice bit of chicken with some vegetables. She then asked if it could be extended to a whole chicken with a few extra vegetables, as she had an unexpected visitor dropping in from Wiltshire.”

 

“Well, that’s where she comes from, so of course ‘er old dad is gonna come from there too.” Mrs. Boothby observes.

 

“Precisely!” Edith starts mixing some juices from the pan with some gravy salt and some herbs in a smaller copper pot. “When I asked her who was expected, she said breezily as you please, ‘oh just my father’.”

 

“Well,” Mrs. Boothby says, looking at the chicken on the serving dish, inhaling the wafts of delicious steam coming from it appreciatively. “Looks and smells alright ta me.”

 

“Alright! Alright!” Edith splutters as she stirs up the gravy. “I’ve never cooked for a viscount before!”

 

“Ooh’s a viscount?” Mrs. Boothby asks.

 

“He is!” Edith hisses back. “Miss Lettice’s father! He’s the Sixth Viscount Wrexham.”

 

“I thought you said your last position was in Pimlico.” Mrs. Boothby says, looking doubtfully at the maid.

 

“It was, but what has that to do with Lord Chetwynd being a viscount?” Edith pours the rich, thick steaming gravy into a blue and white porcelain gravy boat which matches the tureen and serving dishes.

 

“Well, they’s plenty of fancy titled folk in Pimlico. Didn’t ya serve some there?”

 

“I worked for a steel manufacturer and his wife, not a member of the aristocracy, Mrs. Boothby. I served other manufacturers, businessmen and MPs, but not a viscount.”

 

“Well, I shouldn’t worry too much ‘bout it, dearie. ‘E’ll eat ‘is tea just like manufacturers, businessmen, MPs and everyone else does; wiv ‘is mouth.”

 

“I’m not so sure about that Mrs. Boothby. He’s already asked Miss Lettice several times where the butler is when he wants a drink or anything else.”

 

“Nah! ‘E’s just potificatin’, like all them old lawds and laydees do, cos they got their own butlers and maids and what-not in they’s big ‘ouses at ‘ome.” The older woman comes around and wraps her careworn bony fingers around Edith’s shoulders, squeezing them in a comforting fashion. “Yer listen ta me, dearie. Yer cooked a fine tea ‘ere, just as good as any ‘Is Lawdship what would get back in Wiltshire from ‘is ‘oity-toity cook. ‘E should be grateful ta be getting’ such good food ta eat.”

 

Edith sighs and slumps a little.

 

“Nah! None of that my girl!” Mrs. Boothby continues, frowning at Edith. “Come on! Shoulders back! Show ‘Is Lawdship that youse as good as any servant. Do Miss Lettice proud. Eh?”

 

Edith looks up to Mrs. Boothby gratefully. “Thank you, Mrs. Boothby. You’re right.”

 

“Course I am, dearie. Nah, you go serve and I’ll start the washin’ up. Hhhmm?”

 

As Edith place the dishes and carving cutlery on her serving tray, ready to take into the dining room, she says, “I wonder why he’s come here for luncheon.”

 

“Ooh, dearie?”

 

“The Viscount Wrexham, of course Mrs. Boothby!”

 

“Oh ‘im. Well, I imagine ‘e’ll get a better meal ‘ere than at one of them clubs ‘e goes to in St. James.”

 

“But usually, when he visits London, he and Miss Lettice lunch at Claridge’s, or the Savoy. They’ll get a much finer lunch there than here.”

 

“Well, they’s no point in worryin’ yerself into more of a state ‘bout it, nah is there?”

 

“I suppose not.”

 

“What’s ‘appenin’ is appenin’, and there ain’t nuffin’ yer can do ‘bout it. Nah go serve them their tea before it gets cold.”

 

*The phrase “what’s to do?” in the 1920s and 1930s meant “what’s the matter?” or “what’s wrong?”.

 

**A charwoman, chargirl, or char, jokingly charlady, is an old-fashioned occupational term, referring to a paid part-time worker who comes into a house or other building to clean it for a few hours of a day or week, as opposed to a maid, who usually lives as part of the household within the structure of domestic service. In the 1920s, chars usually did all the hard graft work that paid live-in domestics would no longer do as they looked for excuses to leave domestic service for better paying work in offices and factories.

 

This busy domestic kitchen scene is a little different to what you might think, for it is made up entirely of 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures from my miniatures collection, some of which come from my own childhood.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableaux include:

 

On Edith’s deal table is a panoply of things as she readies luncheon for Lettice and her British peerage father. The mahogany stained serving tray, the roast chicken, tureen of vegetables and gravy boat of gravy all came from an English stockist of 1:12 artisan miniatures whom I found on E-Bay. They look almost good enough to eat. The carving cutlery, which is made with great attention to detail, comes from Warwick Miniatures in Ireland, who are well known for the quality and detail applied to their pieces.

 

To the right of the tray is a box of Queen’s Gravy Salt. Queen’s Gravy Salt is a British brand, and this box is an Edwardian design. Gravy Salt is a simple product it is solid gravy browning and is used to add colour and flavour to soups stews and gravy - and has been used by generations of cooks and caterers. It and the Oxo stock cubes are artisan miniatures from Beautifully Handmade Miniatures in Kettering in England. Oxo is a brand of food products, including stock cubes, herbs and spices, dried gravy, and yeast extract. The original product was the beef stock cube, and the company now also markets chicken and other flavour cubes, including versions with Chinese and Indian spices. The cubes are broken up and used as flavouring in meals or gravy or dissolved into boiling water to produce a bouillon. Oxo produced their first cubes in 1910 and further increased Oxo's popularity.

 

The glass jar of herbs with its wooden stopper of cork is also a 1:12 size miniature, as are the blue porcelain mixing bowl, wooden spoon and the copper pots on the table. The smaller of the two on the right I have had since I was a teenager, and it is remarkably heavy for its size!

 

Edith’s Windsor chair is a hand-turned 1:12 artisan miniature which came from America. Unfortunately, the artist did not carve their name under the seat, but it is definitely an unmarked artisan piece.

 

In the background you can see a very modern and up-to-date 1920s gas stove. It would have been expensive to instal at the time, and it would have been the cook’s or maid’s pleasure to cook on and in. It would have included a thermostat for perfect cooking and without the need of coal, it was much cleaner to feed, use and easier to clean. It is not unlike those made by the Roper Stove Company in the 1920s. The Roper Stove Company previously named the Florence-Wehrle Company among other names, was founded in 1883. Located in Newark, Ohio, the company was once the largest stove producer in the world. Today, the Roper Stove Company is a brand of Whirlpool.

 

On the bench in the background is a toaster: a very modern convenience for a household even in the early 1920s, but essential when there was no longer a kitchen range on which to toast the bread. Although toasters had been readily available since the turn of the century, they were not commonplace in British kitchens until well after the Great War in the late 1930s. Next to the toaster is a biscuit barrel painted in the style of English ceramic artist Clarice Cliff which is a hand painted 1:12 miniature made by Karen Ladybug Miniatures in England. It contains its own selection of miniature hand-made chocolate biscuits! Next to that stands a bread crock and various jars and preserves for toast.

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today we are in the very modern and up-to-date 1920s kitchen of Lettice’s flat: usually Edith her maid’s preserve. However, this afternoon it has been invaded since four o’clock by several of the catering staff of the nearby Harrods department store. Two of Lettice’s Embassy Club coterie of bright young things are getting married: Dickie Channon, eldest surviving son of the Marquess of Taunton, and Margot de Virre, only daughter of Lord Charles and Lady Lucie de Virre. Lettice is hosting an exclusive buffet supper party in their honour this evening, which is turning out to be one of the events of the 1921 London Season. Over the last few days the flat has been in upheaval as Edith and Lettice’s charwoman* Mrs. Boothby have been cleaning the flat thoroughly in preparation for the occasion. Earlier today with the help of a few hired men they moved some of the furnishings in Lettice’s drawing room into the spare bedroom to make space for the hired band and for the guests to dance and mingle. Lettice has fled her flat for the day to avoid all the upheaval and keep out of the way of her servants and hired staff. Harrods delivered the alcohol this morning, the florist delivered some amazing floral arrangements at midday and now the caterers from Harrods are filling Edith’s preserve with a cacophony of chatter and the clatter of food preparation.

 

Edith stands in a corner of her kitchen, dressed in her afternoon uniform of black silk moiré with her special lace collar, cuffs, lace trimmed apron and pleated headpiece kept for formal occasions. She carefully observes the three caterers wearing white aprons to protect their green Harrods uniforms as they busily work on different tasks around Edith’s central deal kitchen table. One artfully lays out a range of Macfarlane Lang Homestead cracker biscuits on one of the silver trays that Lettice has borrowed from her parents’ estate. The caterer carefully leaves space for several fluted glass bowls in which he has already scooped and garnished some brightly coloured salmon dip and French onion dip which he made upon arrival at Lettice’s flat. The second skilfully assembles vol-au-vents filled with spiced mushroom pâte and savoury petit fours of egg and lettuce, ham and tomato, lettuce tomato and cucumber and cured meats onto another of Lettice’s family silver trays. A second, smaller tray has a bowl of caviar and several petit fours topped with caviar and wedges of lemon ready to be served. The third caterer is busily assembling a tray of thin triangular sandwiches filled with egg mayonnaise, cucumber and lettuce, tomato and cheese, ham and tomato and ham and cucumber fillings. Their fingers dance across their work as they laugh and chatter lightly with one another, however their conversation does not extend to Edith whom they seem quite happy to ignore.

 

“My goodness,” Edith remarks at length. “How swiftly you work, gentlemen.”

 

“Time is of the essence.” one of the men deigns to reply. “There is no time to waste.”

 

“Oh,” Edith replies quietly retreating a little further from the table, feeling somewhat rebuked for interrupting the men.

 

“What time do your mistress’ guests arrive, girl?” snaps the head caterer as he completes another perfect petit four of egg and lettuce.

 

“Ahh,” Edith stammers nervously. “The invitation is for eight, err… I think.”

 

“Think? You think?” he splutters incredulously. “You aren’t here to think, girl! I asked you a question. Now answer it!”

 

“Sorry, sir,” Edith mumbles. “Yes, yes, eight o’clock, sir.”

 

“What was that girl?” he barks distractedly as he reaches for an empty vol-au-vent case. “Stop muttering would you!”

 

“Yes sir,” Edith replies, trying to add confidence to her voice as she raises her voice. “Eight o’clock sir.”

 

“And how many guests?” he demands in reply.

 

“About one hundred and twenty.” Edith responds.

 

“About? About?” The head caterer’s eyes widen and his face reddens like a beetroot as he retorts, “Catering is a precise business, girl! Even a stupid lump like you should know that! I didn’t ask for abouts, I want to know how many guests are coming, and I want an answer!”

 

Mustering all her courage and resolve Edith counters, “And I’ve answered it as best as I can for you, sir. I’m afraid that I’m not privy to my mistress’ exact number of guests. When I asked her, she told me around one hundred and twenty guests.”

 

“Useless, useless girl!” the head caterer carps as he returns to his task. “Very good gentlemen,” he continues more kindly as he addresses his companions whilst glancing up at the kitchen clock hanging on the wall. “We’re doing splendidly for time.”

 

“Did you ever doubt it, Walter?” the caterer filling sandwiches replies.

 

“Never!” Walter, the head caterer answers back, smiling proudly. “We are a well-oiled machine.” His smile vanishes as his gaze falls upon Edith and his lips purse in disapproval.

 

The youngest caterer, the one creating the sandwiches, looks over to his left and gives Edith a momentarily smile, which she returns, feeling a little relief that at least one of the three Harrods staff was a little kinder than the others.

 

Emboldened by his engagement with her, she addresses the youngest man. “Can I help in any way,” she asks timidly with a small smile.

 

“The best thing you can do,” Walter snaps, looking up and glaring at Edith. “Is to keep out of our way, you stupid girl, and speak only when spoken to!”

 

Edith feels tears of embarrassment and shame start to sting her eyes as she lowers her head. She reaches into the pocket of her dress and withdraws a small white handkerchief and discreetly dabs at her eyes.

 

“It’s alright Miss,” the younger man says kindly in reply to Edith’s offer. “It’s good of you to offer, but we all know what our allocated tasks are. We can manage fine.”

 

“I could do with a spot of refreshment to keep my gears greased,” remarks the caterer setting out the biscuits. Looking up from his work, he spies Edith standing quietly by the stove, her hands folded meekly before her. “You there girl!” he addresses her loftily, as if seeing her for the first time. “Do something useful girl and put on the kettle and make Mr. Rowntree,” He looks at Walter. “Mr. Brown,” He looks at the youngest caterer. “And myself a pot of tea! Now girl!”

 

“Yes sir,” Edith replies and catches herself just in time to stop herself from curtseying to the haughty caterer.

 

The young girl picks up the brightly polished kettle and walks across the room and over to the sink where she fills it. Walking back, she heaves the heavy vessel onto the shelf beside the stovetop and reaches out to move one of the large copper pots of consommé boiling on the stovetop to one of the rear burners.

 

“Stop!” Walter cries out, almost causing Edith to spill the boiling contents of the pot on herself as she jumps anxiously. “Don’t touch that!”

 

“But sir,” she answers. “The kettle is too heavy for me to lift over the pot. I shall burn myself if I try.”

 

“You can’t just go moving that consommé to another burner, you stupid, stupid girl!” blusters Walter angrily. “That is sitting at perfect simmering temperature. Burn yourself for all I care, but you are not to move that pot! Who the bloody hell do you think you are?”

 

“And ooh the bloody ‘ell do you fink you are?” comes a cockney voice from the diagonally opposite corner of the kitchen.

 

All eyes turn in surprise to the door leading from the service stairs into the kitchen, where Mrs. Boothby, Lettice’s charwoman*, stands. Arrayed in a long blue coat, she has a fox fur stole draped about her shoulders whilst on her head sits a pre-war toque of navy blue. Her rangy figure bristles with anger as her beaded blue bag and her umbrella in her hands and the single peacock feather aigrette sticking out of her toque tremble with the anger radiating from her. Raising her chin, she draws herself up to her full height as she glares with eyes aflame at the head caterer from Harrods.

 

“Who?” Walter splutters, as much startled as the others by the woman’s sudden appearance in the doorway.

 

“Nah! Nah!” Mrs. Boothby replies, shaking her head at him as she steps purposefully across the room. “I asked you a question,” She pokes the man sharply in the chest with a bony right index finger. “And I believe that a gentleman answers a lady’s question. Nah! I’ll ask you again, since it seems to me that youse maybe ‘ard of ‘earing. Oooh the bloody ‘ell are you, to be bullying this ‘ere young girl?” She pokes him again for good measure.

 

“I’m Walter Rountree, head cater of Harrod’s catering department.” he replies pompously, pulling himself up to his full height, looking down his nose imperiously at Mrs. Boothby. “Who are you, old woman, to come barging in here like this?”

 

The youngest caterer utters a snorting laugh which he quickly extinguishes as the Cockney woman’s beady eyes momentarily snap from Water’s face and glare at him.

 

“I,” Mrs. Boothby sneers with a set, square jaw. “Am Mrs. Boothby, ‘ousekeeper for the ‘Onourable Miss Lettice Chetwynd, Mr. Walter Rowntree of ‘Arrods catering!” She pokes him sharply again, and this time Water backs away slightly. “And I am responsible for this ‘ere girl’s well bein’. And,” she adds forcefully. “I don’t like the way you’re addressin’ ‘er!”

 

“I don’t think I rightly care, Mrs. Boothby.” he blusters in reply. “I know now who to blame for this girl’s inability to answer the simplest of questions.”

 

A tense silence falls across the room, with the other two caterers standing mid activity, poised with knife or spoon in hand and poor Edith cowering by the stove, all watching the stand off between the haughty head caterer and the old cockney woman. Only the ticking of the clock on the wall and the distant rumble of traffic through the ajar kitchen window breaks the silence.

 

“Well, Mr. Walter Rowntree of ‘Arrods catering,” Mrs. Boothby continues undaunted. “I think you will when Mr. Cowling, the ‘ead of catering learns ‘ow you bullied a young and defenceless girl, what I left ‘ere to oversee your work whilst I was out on business.” She pauses and then adds. “It is Mr. Cowling what sent you ‘ere, wan it?”

 

The other two caters gasp at the mention of their superior’s name, giving Mrs. Boothby the advantage that she needs to bolster her bravado.

 

Glancing momentarily at the other two men she proceeds, “And, I don’t think Mr. Cowling would be terribly pleased to ‘ear that the actions of you, Mr.?” She raises a black leather glove clad hand to the caterer arranging the biscuits and dips. “Err, Mr.?”

 

“Mr. Jones, Ma’am.”

 

“And you, Mr. err?” the old woman looks sharply at the young man standing over the sandwiches.

 

“Brown, Ma’am.”

 

Returning her gaze to Walter, Mrs. Boothby completes her sentence with names. “I don’t think Mr. Cowling would be terribly pleased to ‘ear that the actions of Mr. Jones, Mr. Brown, or you Mr. Walter Rowntree of ‘Arrods catering, were to blame for the sudden wivdrawl of the patronage of the ‘Onourable Miss Lettice Chetwynd, ‘er parents the Viscount and Countess of Wrexham, or the Marquess and Marchioness of Taunton, what’s son and future daughter-in-law tonight’s party is being ‘eld in ‘onour of, from the hestalishment of ‘Arrods Department Store, nah would ‘e?”

 

No-one responds to her at first.

 

“Well… no.” Walter finally replies, breaking the stunned silence enveloping the others in the room. “No, he wouldn’t.”

 

“Well then,” Mrs. Boothby smiles thinly. “I suggest that you apologise to Edith ‘ere right nah, and if youse does it nicely, I might just forget this whole sorry business and not tell my Mistress what disgraceful behaviour I’ve seen ‘ere today. Hhhmmm?”

 

Walter blanches as she smiles smugly at him before slowly turning back to Edith and the other two men, who still stand goggle eyed and white faced at he and Mrs. Boothby.

 

He clears his throat awkwardly. “Err… I’m sorry, Miss. I didn’t mean to be so abrupt.”

 

“Or rude and abnoxious,” Mrs. Boothby pipes up helpfully.

 

“Err, yes, or rude or obnoxious. I hope you will forgive me.”

 

Edith doesn’t reply, too stanned by what has just taken place in her kitchen.

 

Mrs. Boothby releases a long breath of satisfaction at Walter’s apology, resulting in one of her nasty fruity smokers’ coughs bursting forth, wracking her body.

 

“Oh Mrs. Boothby, are you alright?” Edith gasps, rushing over to the old woman. “Here, let me get you a glass of water.”

 

The old Cockney woman bats Edith’s attentions away with a waving hand as she regains her composure. “I’m alright, dearie,” she gasps breathlessly. “Nah, grab that box of champagne bottles what’s sittin’ up there and come wiv me. We best stock the cocktail cabinet before Miss Chetwynd gets ‘ome.”

 

“Yes Mrs. Boothby!” Edith replies, dropping a curtsey at the imposing woman’s instructions.

 

Edith picks up the box the Cockney woman indicated to and takes it towards the green baize door that leads into the flat’s dining room, and still dressed in her coat, fur and hat, complete with umbrella and beaded bag on her arm, Mrs. Boothby follows.

 

Turning back to the three men, Mrs. Boothby addresses the youngest as an afterthought. “’Ere Mr. Brown, put the kettle on would you and make us a cup of Rosie Lee** would you?”

 

“Yes ma’am.” he replies meekly.

 

“Ta!” Mrs. Boothby acknowledges before following Edith through the door.

 

Edith and Mrs. Boothby giggle as they scuttle across the dining room and out of any possible earshot of the three Harrods caterers.

 

“Oh, Mrs. Boothby,” Edith gasps as she puts the crate of champagne on the empty dining table. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

 

“Humph!” Mrs. Boothby sniffs, looking back to the door leading to the kitchen. “We may not all ‘ave the vote*** yet, but that don’t mean that little men like ‘im can treat us women like rubbish.”

 

“But, but how did you know his manager was Mr. Cowling, Mrs. Boothby?” Edith asks.

 

The old Cockney woman smiles broadly. “Easy! I read ‘is name this mornin’ on the docket on Miss Lettice’s desk when I was tidying.”

 

Both women chuckle as the start to sort out the bottles in the crate.

 

*A charwoman, chargirl, or char, jokingly charlady, is an old-fashioned occupational term, referring to a paid part-time worker who comes into a house or other building to clean it for a few hours of a day or week, as opposed to a maid, who usually lives as part of the household within the structure of domestic service. In the 1920s, chars usually did all the hard graft work that paid live-in domestics would no longer do as they looked for excuses to leave domestic service for better paying work in offices and factories.

 

**Rosie-Lee is Cockney slang for tea, and it is one of the most well-known of all Cockney rhyming slang.

 

***In 1921 when this story is set, not every woman in Britain had the right to vote. In 1918 the Representation of the People Act was passed which allowed women over the age of thirty who met a property qualification to vote. Although eight and a half million women met this criteria, it was only about two-thirds of the total population of women in Britain. It was not until the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 that women over twenty-one were able to vote and women finally achieved the same voting rights as men. This act increased the number of women eligible to vote to fifteen million.

 

This busy domestic kitchen scene is a little different to what you might think, for it is made up entirely of 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures from my miniatures collection.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

On Edith’s deal table delicious canapés are being prepared for the party. The plate of sandwiches, the silver tray of biscuits and the bowls of dips, most of the savoury petite fours on the silver tray closest to the camera and the two white bowls containing salmon dip and egg mayonnaise were made in England by hand from clay by former chef turned miniature artisan, Frances Knight. Her work is incredibly detailed and realistic, and she says that she draws her inspiration from her years as a chef and her imagination. The loaf of bread with the slices hanging off it is made by Polly’s Pantry Miniatures in America. The ripe red tomatoes in the Cornishware bowl are made by hand by Beautifully Handmade Miniatures in Kettering, whilst the sliced pieces of tomato on the chopping board come from The Dollhouse Suppliers in England, who specialise in hand made fruit and vegetables made from Fimo and dried air clay. The bowl of caviar was made by Karen Lady Bug Miniatures in England. The very real looking lettuce lying next to the bread I bought along with a few other vegetables, including the cucumber on the chopping board, from an auction house some years ago. The jars of herbs and lemon slices are also 1:12 miniatures, made of real glass with real cork stoppers in them which I also bought from an auction and have had for many years.

 

The tin of Macfarlane Lang’s Homestead Biscuits features a 1920s design on its lid. It was purchased from Shepherd’s Miniatures in England. Macfarlane Lang and Company began as Lang’s bakery in 1817, before becoming MacFarlane Lang in 1841. The first biscuit factory opened in 1886 and changed its name to MacFarlane Lang and Co. in the same year. The business then opened a factory in Fulham, London in 1903, and in 1904 became MacFarlane Lang & Co. Ltd. In 1948 it formed United Biscuits Ltd. along with McVitie and Price.

 

The tray that the caviar is sitting on and the champagne bucket sitting on the bench in the background are made by Warwick Miniatures in Ireland, who are well known for the quality and detail applied to their pieces.

 

The Harrod’s crate sitting next to the champagne bucket on the kitchen bench in the background I purchased from an EBay seller in the United Kingdom. It is full of bottles of Deutz and Geldermann and De Rochegré champagne. All are artisan miniatures and made of glass and some have real foil wrapped around their necks. They are made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire.

 

On the first shelf of dresser that can be seen just to the right of shot stands the Deftware kitchen tea set. Each piece features the traditional painting of a windmill.

 

To the left of the dresser, a spice cabinet with six marked drawers hangs from the wall. I have had that piece since I was around eight years old. Also hanging on the wall are three copper frypans with black metal handles which, along with the copper pots and kettle on the stove came from a specialist dollhouse supplier.

 

Edith’s Windsor chair, just visible beyond the heavily covered table, is a hand-turned 1:12 artisan miniature which came from America. Unfortunately, the artist did not carve their name under the seat, but it is definitely an unmarked artisan piece.

 

In the background you can see a very modern and up-to-date 1920s gas stove. It would have been expensive to instal at the time, and it would have been the cook’s or maid’s pleasure to cook on and in. It would have included a thermostat for perfect cooking and without the need of coal, it was much cleaner to feed, use and easier to clean. It is not unlike those made by the Roper Stove Company in the 1920s. The Roper Stove Company previously named the Florence-Wehrle Company among other names, was founded in 1883. Located in Newark, Ohio, the company was once the largest stove producer in the world. Today, the Roper Stove Company is a brand of Whirlpool.

Taken for the Jules Photo Challenge - Sept 2022

4. Where do you work on your computer?

 

My computer space has been a shared space for a while even before the pandemic. I had donated the desk to my son so he could get schoolwork done and then quickly lost out on spots when my wife and daughter got spots too. I set up on the kitchen table which was always meant to be temporary, but became a bit more permanent over the years. From cats to dinners (and art projects as under the cat) it can be a crowded space.

Our Daily Challenge - Repeat

365 Weekly Theme ~ Repetition

266:365

I saw something similar in a Real Simple a couple of years ago - perfect for today!

I've started catching up . . . . but off to bed - see the rest of you tomorrow x

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today it is Tuesday, and we are in the very modern and up-to-date 1920s kitchen of Lettice’s flat: Edith her maid’s preserve. Being Tuesday, Mrs. Boothby, Lettice’s charwoman* who comes on Tuesdays and every third Thursday to do the hard jobs is busy polishing the floors in Lettice’s bedroom, whilst Edith arranges tea things on the deal kitchen table in the middle of the room whilst she waits for the copper kettle on the stove to boil.

 

“Oh good!” Mrs. Boothby sighs as she slips into the kitchen via the door that leads from the flat’s entrance hall. “You’ve got the kettle on, dearie!” A fruity cough emanates from deep within her wiry little body as she deposits her polishing box beneath the sink and puts the dirty rags that require washing down the laundry chute. “Nah just I’ll just sit ‘ere for a few minutes and you can give me a reviving cup of Rosie-Lee** and I’ll ‘ave a fag before I get started on scrubbin’ the bathroom.”

 

“Oh no you don’t!” Edith says sharply as she places her own hand firmly over the opening of Mrs. Boothby’s blue beaded handbag before the old Cockney woman can grab her cigarette papers, Swan Vestas and tin of Player’s Navy Cut.

 

“What?” Mrs. Boothby looks up at Edith in surprise. “I’m only goin’ for me fags, dearie, not a pistol.”

 

“Miss Lettice has a guest and I’ve just made a Victoria sponge.” She indicates to the golden sponge cake with jam and cream oozing from its middle standing next to Lettice’s Art Deco tea service. “I don’t want it or the tea I’m making smelling of your foul cigarette smoke, Mrs. Boothby!”

 

“Me smoke ain’t foul!” the older woman snaps back.

 

“Yes, it is, Mrs. Boothby.”

 

How Edith hates the older woman’s habit of smoking indoors. When she lived with her parents, neither smoked in the house. Her mother didn’t smoke at all: it would have been unladylike to do so, and her father only smoked a pipe when he went down to the local pub.

 

“The stench comin’ from privy down the end of my rookery, now that’s foul, dearie.”

 

“It’s all relative Mrs. Boothby.” Edith says cheerily. “Now, I will make you a cup of tea since I’m boiling the kettle for Miss Lettice,”

 

“Oh, ta.” Mrs. Boothby says sarcastically.

 

“But if you want to smoke today,” Edith ignores her. “Please go and do so on the porch outside.”

 

Mrs. Boothby groans as she picks herself out of Edith’s comfortable Windsor chair. Grumbling quietly, but not so quietly that Edith can’t hear her muttering, the old woman fossicks through her capacious bag and snatches out a cigarette she had already rolled previously and her box of Swan Vesta matches. She mooches over to the kitchen door that leads to the tradesman’s stairs and lights her cigarette, folding her bony arms akimbo across her sagging chest.

 

“Thank you.” Edith says diplomatically, even though she doesn’t really want to thank the Cockney woman at all.

 

“So,” Mrs. Boothby blows a plume of blueish silver smoke out into the outer corridor. “An American, then.”

 

Edith knows Mrs. Boothby is fishing for gossip on Lettice’s guest, and she doesn’t like to gossip with the charwoman. Unlike her friend and fellow maid Hilda, Mrs. Boothby is not very discreet. “Mmn,” she says non-committally as she starts placing the tea things on a square silver tray, a new purchase by Lettice from Asprey’s.

 

“Oh come on, dearie,” Mrs. Boothby’s eyes roll as she speaks. “Don’t be prim and propa. Ooh is she then?”

 

“You know I don’t like to gossip, Mrs. Boothby.” Edith replies.

 

“Well, you’d be the only maid this side of St. James what don’t, dearie.”

 

“All I know is that Miss Lettice asked me to bake a Victoria sponge for her guest, and that’s what I’ve done.”

 

“Well ya know ‘er name anyroad, ‘cos ya let ‘er in. Ya can tell me that much at least.”

 

“Her name is Miss Ward.”

 

“Wanetta Ward,” Mrs. Boothby crows triumphantly. “I ‘eard Miss Lettice talkin’ to ‘er.”

 

“Well, if you’ve been listening at keyholes, Mrs. Boothby, I don’t suppose anything I told you would be news then.”

 

“Oh come on, dearie,” she cries. Knowing the chink in Edith’s armour she continues. “What’s she look like then?”

 

As soon as the words are out of Mrs. Boothby’s mouth, Edith’s eyes light up. She loves fashion and the glamourous people that Lettice mixes with. Not that Mrs. Boothby knows it, because she never goes into her room, but Edith has scrapbooks of cuttings of London’s rich and famous clipped from Lettice’s discarded newspapers and magazines in her drawers.

 

“Oh she’s very glamourous! Tall and statuesque.”

 

“Aah,” Mrs. Boothby says dismissively, but the cocked eyebrow that Edith can’t see gives away that her interest has been piqued.

 

“Her hair is a soft curly rich dark auburn set in girlish bob, and she has peaches and cream skin. She is wearing an orchid silk chiffon dress with a matching satin slip. It’s daringly short!” Edith gushes. “You can see the bottom of her calves even before sits down.”

 

“Well, she must be American for certain then, ta wear somethin’ so daring.” Mrs. Boothby coaxes carefully.

 

“She has a beautiful hat to match which is covered in silk flowers. She wouldn’t let me take it from her. Something about her luck? I didn’t really understand. She walks with a walking stick, just for show I think as she has a very elegant gait.”

 

“Oh. I wonder if she’s an actress on the stage?”

 

“Maybe. She certainly has the bearing of a person who commands attention.”

 

“Or maybe,” the charwoman continues, puffing out another cloud of smoke. “Maybe she’s one of them movin’ picture actresses, like what I’ve seen up at the Premier*** in East Ham.”

 

“Imagine!” Edith enthuses, her eyes sparking. “A real American moving picture star!” She looks to the green baize door that leads to the living areas of the flat.

 

“Yes, imagine.” Mrs. Boothby smiles wistfully as she takes a long drag on her cigarette.

 

“Oh, you are awful Mrs. Boothby!” Edith gasps, suddenly realising what she’s done. “You’ve made me gossip.”

 

“Oh, now don’t you worry your pretty ‘ead about it, dearie.” Mrs. Boothby soothes the young maid. “I’m only int’rested in ooh frequents the houses I clean for so I knows I’m in a respectable establishment. I won’t tell a soul. I promise!”

 

The charwoman smiles a yellow toothy grin that makes Edith regret her lack of discretion slightly.

 

“Per’aps she’s come ta be a film star in London. I read in the papers that they’s makin’ films ‘ere in London, over in ‘Oxton**** nah the war’s over!”

 

“Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that Mrs. Boothby.” she mutters, turning her back on the Cockney woman to hide the blush crossing her face after realising that she has been taken in by her.

 

Taking the kettle off the stove Edith fills the elegant gilded white porcelain pot and stirs it. She goes to the dresser and removes a pretty Delftware teacup and saucer and puts it on the table. She pours of little of the tea from Lettice’s pot into the cup, adds a splash of milk and some sugar. She refills Lettice’s pot.

 

“Tea, Mrs. Boothby.” Edith places the Delftware teacup and saucer into the Cockney woman’s empty right hand as it pokes out from beneath her left elbow.

 

“Oh, ta!” she replies gratefully. Lifting the cup to her lips she takes a sip, savouring the delicious hot beverage.

 

“I must take the tea in to Miss Lettice.” Edith says in as businesslike a fashion as she can manage.

 

“And yer want ta get annuva geezer at your beautiful star again.” Another fruity cough escapes her throat as she chuckles to herself. “Ain’t I right?” She taps her nose with her left hand, the glowing but of the cigarette nestled between her index and middle fingers. “I know a young girl’s heart. B’lieve it or not, I used ta be a young slip of a fing once too!”

 

“Just leave the cup in the sink before you clean the bathroom.” Edith blanches at being caught out as starstruck. “I will have these things to wash later.”

 

Edith smiles conspiratorially at Mrs. Boothby, picks up the tray of tea things, holds her head high and slips through the green baize door into the dining room of the flat to serve her mistress and her glamorous guest, American Wanetta Ward in the drawing room beyond.

 

*A charwoman, chargirl, or char, jokingly charlady, is an old-fashioned occupational term, referring to a paid part-time worker who comes into a house or other building to clean it for a few hours of a day or week, as opposed to a maid, who usually lives as part of the household within the structure of domestic service. In the 1920s, chars usually did all the hard graft work that paid live-in domestics would no longer do as they looked for excuses to leave domestic service for better paying work in offices and factories.

 

**Rosie-Lee is Cockney slang for tea, and it is one of the most well-known of all Cockney rhyming slang.

 

***The Premier Super Cinema in East Ham was opened on the 12th of March, 1921, replacing the 800 seat capacity 1912 Premier Electric Theatre. The new cinema could seat 2,408 patrons. The Premier Super Cinema was taken over by Provincial Cinematograph Theatres who were taken over by Gaumont British in February 1929. It was renamed the Gaumont from 21st April 1952. The Gaumont was closed by the Rank Organisation on 6th April 1963. After that it became a bingo hall and remained so until 2005. Despite attempts to have it listed as a historic building due to its relatively intact 1921 interior, the Gaumont was demolished in 2009.

 

****Islington Studios, often known as Gainsborough Studios, were a British film studio located on the south bank of the Regent's Canal, in Poole Street, Hoxton in Shoreditch, London which began operation in 1919. By 1920 they had a two stage studio. It is here that Alfred Hitchcock made his entrée into films.

 

This busy domestic kitchen scene is a little different to what you might think, for it is made up entirely of 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures from my miniatures collection, some of which come from my own childhood.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

Lettice’s tea set is a beautiful artisan set featuring a rather avant-garde Art Deco Royal Doulton design from the Edwardian era. It stands on a silver tray that is part of tea set that comes from Smallskale Miniatures in England. To see the whole set, please click on this link: www.flickr.com/photos/40262251@N03/51111056404/in/photost...

 

The Victoria sponge (named after Queen Victoria) is made by Polly’s Pantry Miniatures in America. The vase of flowers on the table is made of glass and it and the bouquet have been made by hand by Beautifully Handmade Miniatures in Kettering. The box of Lyon’s tea has been made by Jonesey’s Miniatures in England.

 

On the dresser that can be seen just to the right of shot stands a Cornishware cannister. Cornishware is a striped kitchenware brand trademarked to and manufactured by T.G. Green & Co Ltd. Originally introduced in the 1920s and manufactured in Church Gresley, Derbyshire, it was a huge success for the company and in the succeeding 30 years it was exported around the world. The company ceased production in June 2007 when the factory closed under the ownership of parent company, The Tableshop Group. The range was revived in 2009 after T.G. Green was bought by a trio of British investors.

 

Edith’s Windsor chair is a hand-turned 1:12 artisan miniature which came from America. Unfortunately, the artist did not carve their name under the seat, but it is definitely an unmarked artisan piece.

 

In the background you can see a very modern and up-to-date 1920s gas stove. It would have been expensive to instal at the time, and it would have been the cook’s or maid’s pleasure to cook on and in. It would have included a thermostat for perfect cooking and without the need of coal, it was much cleaner to feed, use and easier to clean. It is not unlike those made by the Roper Stove Company in the 1920s. The Roper Stove Company previously named the Florence-Wehrle Company among other names, was founded in 1883. Located in Newark, Ohio, the company was once the largest stove producer in the world. Today, the Roper Stove Company is a brand of Whirlpool.

Image originally taken on 18.Jul.2015 at the Black Country Living Museum, Dudley, and processed on 19.Nov.2017 in *Aurora HDR 2018* software.

Sorry I haven't put up a photo in so long! I don't know exactly why I am so busy! I don't seem to really be doing much of anything useful!

But, here is a bit of sunshine to brighten up my day, and maybe yours, too!

Xixi National Wetlands Park

Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China

 

Ezekiel 27:17

Judah and the land of Israel traded with you; they exchanged for your merchandise wheat of Minnith, meal, honey, oil, and balm.

 

Wickham Place is the London home of Lord and Lady Southgate, their children and staff. Located in fashionable Belgravia it is a fine Georgian terrace house.

 

Today we are below stairs in the Wickham Place kitchen. The Wickham Place kitchens are situated on the ground floor of Wickham Place, adjoining the Butler’s Pantry. It is dominated by big black leaded range, and next to it stands a heavy dark wood dresser that has been there for as long as anyone can remember. In the middle of the kitchen stands Cook’s preserve, the pine deal table on which she does most of her preparation for both the meals served to the family upstairs and those for the downstairs staff.

 

Tomorrow is Empire Day*, and Mrs. Bradley, fondly known as Cook by most of the Wickham Place family and staff, has been given instructions by Lady Southgate to come up with a suitably themed afternoon tea for the Southgate children, Piers and Sarah. The deal table is covered in ingredients to make something memorable for the occasion.

 

“Well,” Mrs. Bradley asks Agnes. “Have you finished with pouring out the jellies to set, Agnes?”

 

“Oh, yes Mrs. Bradley!” Agnes enthuses, indicating to the copper moulds filled with hot red water which is still steaming. “They’s all set!”

 

“’They are’, is what you mean to say my girl!” she corrects her.

 

“Oh, yes Mrs. Bradley. They are all set.”

 

“That’s better.” Mrs. Bradley replies, satisfied. “Well back to making that cupcake icing then, my girl! We have no time to waste today with Her Ladyship’s orders for this Empire Day afternoon tea!”

 

“Yes, Mrs Bradley.” Agnes moves around the end of the table and resumes beating the half-finished creamy icing.

 

“I’m only grateful that they,” Mrs. Bradley raises her wooden spoon coated in Victoria sponge cake mix and points it to the ceiling above her head. “Are at one of the King’s Levées for Empire Day tomorrow evening. Otherwise, I don’t know how we’d get all this done.”

 

“No, Mrs. Bradley.”

 

The older woman goes back to combining beaten eggs and vanilla into her big bowl of creamed butter and sugar. She looks at the brightly coloured jars of plum and apple and gooseberry jam in front of her as she does and a distant look drifts across her face. “Tell me Agnes,”

 

“What Mrs. Bradley?”

 

“Between all that praying, atonement and fasting of your dour chapel life, did you ever celebrate Empire Day?”

 

“Oh yes Mrs. Bradley!” Agnes smiles. “It was always a special day at school! I’d wear my best white pinny, what Mum would of,” She stops, her face falling slightly after catching sight of the cook’s stern glance at her linguistic faux pas. “Would have, bleached and starched. I’d get to wear a pretty ribbon in my hair.”

 

“And what did you do, at school I mean?”

 

“Well of course we’d all salute the flag in the morning when we stood in our class rows for assembly. Our headmaster would give us a speech about the fact that we were part of the biggest and best empire what… that, has ever been known in the world, and we’d all have to declare our loyalty to the King. Miss Laycock was the most musical teacher that we had at our school, and she’d dust off the old upright in the gymnasium we used for calisthenics, and we’d all sing songs like ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Jerusalem’, and then, if she was in the mood, we’d have dancing whilst she played tunes.”

 

“That all sounds rather jolly.” Mrs. Bradly remarks, folding scoops of flour through her beaten egg and creamed butter mixture.

 

“Oh, that wasn’t the best of it, Mrs. Bradley!” Agnes exclaims, momentarily resting her whipping arm.

 

“No, Agnes?”

 

“No! The best part was that in the afternoon we all got to leave school early, but not before we had a lovely big tea set out for us!”

 

“Now that does sound grand, Agnes.”

 

“It was Mrs. Bradley! There were cakes and slices, not as fine as what we made here, but still, very nice for what our families could all afford.”

 

“I didn’t think your mother would contribute to such a lavish display of food wastage, since she used to pinch your boiled Easter Eggs complaining of the extravagance and waste.”

 

“Who said she did, Mrs. Bradley?” Agnes scoffs. “Nah, my brothers and sisters liked Empire Day because we’d get food we never got at home. Mum and Dad couldn’t afford to give anything to the tea, but we were still allowed to eat some of the cakes and slices. If we were lucky, we might even get some fruit from one of the local orchards and we could take an apple or a pear away with us as an afternoon treat as we went to play on our afternoon off school.”

 

“I still say that it doesn’t sound like you had much fun as a child, Agnes, even with your grand Empire Day celebrations.” Mrs. Bradley remarks.

 

“It mightn’t have been a life like Master Piers and Miss Sarah, but broken biscuits and the occasional stolen fruit didn’t do us no harm, Mrs. Bradley,” Agnes remarks with a false steeliness to her voice. “Anyway, Mum might have been a Tarter, but Dad was a good man and loved us all. He wasn’t a drunk like some of my school chums’ dads was… were, and he never laid a hand on us, ‘less we deserved it of course, which we did sometimes.”

 

“I could well imagine.” Mrs. Bradley chuckled, pouring the Victoria sponge mix into two separate baking tins. Placing them in the hot oven of the range behind her, she turns back and remarks, “Now! Her ladyship wants ‘something suitably patriotic’, so how about I teach you how to make marzipan Union Jacks, Agnes!”

 

“Oh yes Mrs. Bradley!” Agnes claps with delight. “That would be wonderful!”

 

*The very first Empire Day took place on the 24th of May 1902, Queen Victoria’s birthday. Although not officially recognised as an annual event until 1916, many schools across the British Empire were celebrating it before then. Each Empire Day, millions of school children from all walks of life across the length and breadth of the British Empire would typically salute the Union Jack and sing patriotic songs like ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘God Save the King’ (later ‘God Save the Queen’). They would hear inspirational speeches and listen to tales of ‘daring do’ from across the Empire, stories that included such heroes as Clive of India, Wolfe of Québec and ‘Chinese Gordon’ of Khartoum. But of course the real highlight of the day for the children was that they were let of school early in order to take part in the thousands of marches, maypole dances, concerts and parties that celebrated the event. Empire Day remained an essential part of the calendar for more than 50 years, celebrated by countless millions of children and adults alike, an opportunity to demonstrate pride in being part of the British Empire. By the 1950s, the Empire was in decline and Britain’s relationship with the other countries that formed the Empire had also changed, as they began to celebrate their own identity. In 1958 Empire Day was re-badged as British Commonwealth Day, and still later in 1966 when it became known as Commonwealth Day. The date of Commonwealth Day was also changed to 10th June, the official birthday of Queen Elizabeth. The date was again changed in 1977 to the second Monday in March, when each year The Queen still sends a special message to the youth of the Empire via a radio broadcast to all the various countries of the Commonwealth.

 

This tableau is made up of part of my 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures collection. Some pieces come from my own childhood like the ladderback chair in the background. Other items I acquired as an adult through specialist online dealers and artists who specialise in 1:12 miniatures.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

Cook’s yellow stoneware mixing bowl and wooden spoon I have had since I was a teenager. I bought it from a high street doll house miniature specialist. Also from the same shop is the mixing bowl containing eggs and the whisk. You can even see the egg yolks in the bowl. All these items are 1:12 artisan miniatures with amazing attention to detail so they match the life size equivalent.

 

To the left of the bowl, stands one of Cook's Cornishware cannisters. Cornishware is a striped kitchenware brand trademarked to and manufactured by T.G. Green & Co Ltd. Originally introduced in the 1920s and manufactured in Church Gresley, Derbyshire, it was a huge success for the company and in the succeeding 30 years it was exported around the world. The company ceased production in June 2007 when the factory closed under the ownership of parent company, The Tableshop Group. The range was revived in 2009 after T.G. Green was bought by a trio of British investors.

 

The Art Nouveau silver cup in front of the bowl and cannister is a dolls’ house miniature from Germany. Made in the first decade of the Twentieth Century it is a beautiful work of art as a stand alone item, and is remarkably heavy for its size.

 

The two jars of P.C. Flett and Company jam are 1:12 artisan miniature made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire. One is plum jam and the other apple and gooseberry. P.C. Flett and Company was established in Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands by Peter Copeland Flett. He had inherited a small family owned ironmongers in Albert Street Kirkwall, which he inherited from his maternal family. He had a shed in the back of the shop where he made ginger ale, lemonade, jams and preserves from local produce. By the 1920s they had an office in Liverpool, and travelling representatives selling jams and preserves around Great Britain. I am not sure when the business ceased trading.

 

Behind Cook’s mixing bowl and the Cornishware cannister stands a bag of Dry Fork Four. The Dry Fork Milling Company was based in Dry Fork Virginia. They were well known for producing cornmeal. They were still producing cornmeal and flour into the 1950s. Today, part of the old mill buildings are used as a reception centre.

 

The box of Rowntree's Table Jelly is a 1:12 artisan miniature made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire. Founded by Henry Isaac Rowntree in Castlegate in York in 1862, Rowntree's developed strong associations with Quaker philanthropy. Throughout much of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, it was one of the big three confectionery manufacturers in the United Kingdom, alongside Cadbury and Fry, both also founded by Quakers. In 1981, Rowntree's received the Queen's Award for Enterprise for outstanding contribution to international trade. In 1988, when the company was acquired by Nestlé, it was the fourth-largest confectionery manufacturer in the world. The Rowntree brand continues to be used to market Nestlé's jelly sweet brands, such as Fruit Pastilles and Fruit Gums, and is still based in York.

 

The mixing bowl at the end of the table with the white cream icing and whisk, the jelly mould and jug of jelly have been made in England by hand by former chef turned miniature artisan, Frances Knight. Her work is incredibly detailed and realistic, and she says that she draws her inspiration from her years as a chef and her imagination.

 

In the foreground of the photo stands a miniature Blue Calico milk jug. Traditional dark blue Burleigh Calico made in Staffordshire, England by Burgess & Leigh since 1851. It was inspired by Nineteenth Century indigo fabrics. Blue Calico is still made today, and still uses the traditional print transfer process, which makes each piece unique.

 

The copper kettles on the range and the copperware in the dresser in the background are all made of real copper and come from various miniature stockists in England and America.

 

The large kitchen range in the background is a 1:12 miniature replica of the coal fed Phoenix Kitchen Range. A mid-Victorian model, it has hinged opening doors, hanging bars above the stove and a little bass hot water tap (used in the days before plumbed hot water).

minolta xg-1

Papaver nudicaule - ‘Champagne Bubbles’

 

Fading fast :(

 

I cut the stem from the plant and brought it into my studio for some final shots as the flower fades.

 

www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.mic...

to help me tell my story

but I'm still having trouble

making heads or tails of it

 

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

It’s Saturday just after midday and we are behind the green baize door that leads from the dining room into the servant’s part of Lettice’s flat. We are in Edith’s preserve, the very modern and up-to-date 1920s kitchen. Edith hears the gentle squeak of the hinges of the green baize door. She looks up from her pride and joy, the gas stove, where she is about to withdraw the boiling kettle to make herself a cup of tea and sees her mistress in the kitchen. Much to Edith’s consternation, her mistress has the most annoying habit of neglecting to use the electric servants’ bells installed by the builders, and visits Edith in what she considers, her kitchen. Frowning, the maid thinks to herself, “Anyone would think she was a shop girl rather than the daughter of a peer!”

 

“Oh Edith! Edith!” gasps Lettice dramatically. “Greek tragedy!”

 

“Whatever is it, Miss?” Edith asks, still frowning as she doubts it is all as bad as her mistress suggests.

 

“Edith, I’ve just had a call from Mrs. Hatchett.”

 

“Yes Miss?” Edith answers, having no idea who Mrs. Hatchett is, or what this Mrs. Hatchett means to Lettice.

 

“Well. She is coming here today, at four, to talk about me redecorating her house. Do we have any fresh cake ready?”

 

“Well, no Miss: only half a Dundee cake. Will that do?”

 

“Oh no Edith! Not for Mrs. Hatchett. We need something… fresh.” Lettice ponders. “Well, could you just pop around the corner to Harrods and buy a cake? I’ll get you some extra money for it.”

 

“No, Miss!” Edith scoffs.

 

Lettice looks up at her maid with wide eyes. “Why ever not Edith?”

 

“It’s Saturday, Miss! Harrods won’t be open.”

 

“Oh,” Lettice frowns and thinks again.

 

“And don’t suggest the local grocer’s,” Edith pipes up quickly as if reading her mistress’ mind. “Mr. Willson is closed too!”

 

“Blast!” Lettice mutters and starts to gnaw at her painted thumbnail as she leans against Edith’s deal kitchen table.

 

“But I can whip up my Mum’s old ‘pantry chocolate cake’, Miss. I have all the ingredients right here. It’s lovely and moist but looks a bit plain. However, if I dust it with a bit of confectioners’ sugar, it looks very nice.”

 

“Oh! Oh, would you Edith? That sounds simply spiffing!” Lettice gasps in delight. She throws her arms around Edith’s neck, much to the other woman’s consternation, and beams one of her winning smiles. “Oh you are a brick!”

 

Lettice flutters out of the kitchen the way she came, much to Edith’s relief.

 

“Spiffing! Humph!” Edith mutters with a snort. She busies herself taking out a copper pot and then fetching flour and sugar canisters, butter, milk and eggs from the food safe, a jar of Golden Shred orange marmalade, salt and some Cadbury’s Original dark chocolate from the pantry. With everything laid out on her kitchen table, Edith’s memory of how to bake her mother’s cake comes to the front of her mind.

 

“First of all, beat two eggs,” she tells herself.

 

This year the FFF+ Group have decided to have a weekly challenge called “Snap Happy”. A different theme chosen by a member of the group each week, and the image is to be posted on the Monday of the week.

 

This week the theme, “egg” was chosen by Lisa, red stilletto.

 

Eggs are a vital part of cake baking. Goodness knows how they made cakes during the war without them! Edith’s well set out ingredient selection, which does indeed make up the genuine ingredients list for the recipe for “Pantry Chocolate Cake” (a lovely moist and rich chocolate cake from my Great Grandmother’s cooks’ recipe book of ‘fail safe recipes’), is a little different to what you might think, for it is made up entirely of 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures from my miniatures collection, some of which come from my own childhood.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableaux include:

 

The eggs, including the those broken in the bowl are all 1:12 artisan miniatures with amazing attention to detail.

 

On Edith’s deal table is a Cornishware white and blue striped bowl which holds the eggs and also one of her Cornishware cannisters. Cornishware is a striped kitchenware brand trademarked to and manufactured by T.G. Green & Co Ltd. Originally introduced in the 1920s and manufactured in Church Gresley, Derbyshire, it was a huge success for the company and in the succeeding 30 years it was exported around the world. The company ceased production in June 2007 when the factory closed under the ownership of parent company, The Tableshop Group. The range was revived in 2009 after T.G. Green was bought by a trio of British investors.

 

The tall Deftware jug containing milk and the plate with a block of butter on it are part of a 1:12 size miniature porcelain dinner set which sits on the dresser just out of shot to the right of the table. The block of butter comes from a small silver set that I have had since I was given it as part of a seventh birthday present, and it belongs beneath a butter dish. Fellow Flickr photographer and miniature enthusiast ursula.valtiner and I both have the same silver set with the same yellow block of butter in the butter dish!

 

Next to the Cornishware sugar canister and the copper pot is a jar of Golden Shred Orange Marmalade. Golden Shred orange marmalade still exists today and is a common household brand both in Britain and Australia. It is produced by Robertson’s. Robertson\'s Golden Shred recipe perfected since 1874 is a clear and tangy orange marmalade, which according to their modern day jars is “perfect for Paddington’s marmalade sandwiches”. Robertson\'s marmalade dates back to 1874 when Mrs. Robertson started making marmalade in the family grocery shop in Paisley, Scotland.

 

In front of the bowl of eggs, the whisk and butter is a wrapped block of Cadbury’s Original dark chocolate. Cadbury, like Robertson’s, is a household name known around the world. Established in 1824 in Birmingham by Quaker John Cadbury, they began by selling tea, coffee and drinking chocolate. John Cadbury developed the business with his brother Benjamin, followed by his sons Richard and George. George developed the Bourneville estate, a model village designed to give the company\'s workers improved living conditions. Dairy Milk chocolate, introduced in 1905, used a higher proportion of milk within the recipe compared with rival products. By 1914, the chocolate was the company\'s best-selling product. Cadbury, alongside Rowntree’s and Fry’s, were the big three British confectionery manufacturers throughout much of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Cadbury was granted its first Royal Warrant from Queen Victoria in 1854. It has been a holder of a Royal Warrant from Queen Elizabeth II in 1955. Cadbury merged with Schweppes in 1969 and was then purchased by Kraft Foods in 2010.

 

Edith’s Windsor chair is a hand-turned 1:12 artisan miniature which came from America. Unfortunately, the artist did not carve their name under the seat, but it is definitely an unmarked artisan piece.

 

In the background you can see a very modern and up-to-date 1920s gas stove. It would have been expensive to instal at the time, and it would have been the cook’s or maid’s pleasure to cook on and in. It would have included a thermostat for perfect cooking and without the need of coal, it was much cleaner to feed, use and clean. It is not unlike those made by the Roper Stove Company in the 1920s. The Roper Stove Company previously named the Florence-Wehrle Company among other names, was founded in 1883. Located in Newark, Ohio, the company was once the largest stove producer in the world. Today, the Roper Stove Company is a brand of Whirlpool.

 

On the bench in the background is a toaster: a very modern convenience for a household even in the early 1920s, but essential when there was no longer a kitchen range on which to toast the bread. Although toasters had been readily available since the turn of the century, they were not commonplace in British kitchens until well after the Great War in the late 1930s. Next to the toaster is a biscuit barrel painted in the style of English ceramic artist Clarice Cliff which is a hand painted 1:12 miniature made by Karen Ladybug Miniatures in England. It contains its own selection of miniature hand-made chocolate biscuits! Next to that stands a bread crock.

resurrectionfern.typepad.com/resurrection_fern/2010/09/sl...

November 8, 2019 - Thank God I just received my Solar Filter for my Nikon D810 and Tamron 150-600mm lens from Seymour Solar! Looking forward to safely photographing the transit of Mercury over the Sun on Monday Morning, November 11, 2019 between sunrise at 10:00 AM!

Wickham Place is the London home of Lord and Lady Southgate, their children and staff. Located in fashionable Belgravia it is a fine Georgian terrace house.

 

Today we are below stairs in the Wickham Place kitchen which is usually a place of happiness and harmony, but today Mrs. Bradley, known by most downstairs staff as Cook, is in a foul mood as she bangs her copper pots about on the kitchen range with a violence not often seen.

 

In the corridor outside the kitchen, Mr. Withers the Butler catches a couple of the Wickham Place housemaids skulking about doing nothing.

 

“What are you doing standing about here, cluttering the area?” he demands of them.

 

“We’re on a break, Mr. Withers, sir.” replies Sara unapologetically.

 

“Then why aren’t you in the servant’s hall, girl?” he asks sharply.

 

“Can’t get there, sir.” Sara replies with a shrug of her shoulders.

 

“Don’t be insolent girl!” Mr. Withers snaps. “What rubbish! Of course you can! It’s just on the other side of the kitchen.”

 

“I’m not game to go in there. Are you Tilly?” Sara asks her fellow housemaid.

 

“Not me, Sara!” she replies, shaking her head and putting up both her hands defensively.

 

It’s then that Mr. Withers hears for the first time the crash of metal against metal as pots and pans are bashed about with what appears to be some vehemence. Occasionally over the clattering noise, he thinks he hears the sob of a girl.

 

“Cook’s in a foul mood,” Tilly continues. “And we’ll not go in there, sir. Not for love, nor money!”

 

Sara nods in agreement.

 

“We’ll soon see about this.” Mr. Withers replies as he steels himself and marches through the kitchen door.

 

Cook is standing with her back to the room as she stirs something violently in a pot on the great black kitchen range, banging her wooden spoon angrily on its lip. Sitting as far from Cook as she can, Agnes the scullery maid is weeping over some big Seville oranges as she cuts them into thin slivers with a knife.

 

“Agnes.” Mr. Withers says when he sees her tears. “Whatever is wrong?”

 

“Oh,” she sobs. “Mrs. Bradley’s in a foul mood, and she set me to juicing and slicing oranges, and the juice is stinging my hands.” She holds out her careworn hands, the juice covering them and seeping into the cracks in the skin on her palms and fingers.

 

“Got time to gab have you, you ungrateful good-for-nothing?” Mrs. Bradly spins around with her hands on her hips, her ordinarily cheerful face as black as thunder as she glares at Agnes.

 

“Oh! Oh, I only meant…” but the words catch in her throat as Cook’s eyebrows arch ever so slightly higher over her angry eyes. “No, Mrs. Bradley.” She busies herself, head down, continuing to slice the oranges into thin slivers.

 

“Now! Now! What’s this Mrs. Bradley?” Mr. Withers asks. “This isn’t like you: upsetting a poor girl and banging the pots so loudly the Master and Mistress can hear you upstairs.”

 

“And a good thing too if Her High-and-Mightiness does hear me!”

 

“Mrs. Bradley!” Mr. Withers looks shocked.

 

“Well, here I am happily preparing the six course French dinner for His Lordship’s guests this evening when she summons me. ‘Just a small change, Cook’, she says all sweetness and light. ‘You’ll have to change the main course. Lord What’s-His-Face doesn’t eat red meat, but I’m sure you’ll come up with a suitable alternative in its place at such short notice. That will be all.’ And she dismisses me with a wave of her lily-white hand!”

 

“Well, you’re resourceful, Mrs. Bradley.”

 

“Have you looked at the time, Mr. Withers? His Lordship’s guests will be here in two hours, and I’ve been cooking bœuf à la Bourguignonne all afternoon!” She turns and opens the oven door and pulls out something from within its confines. “So we’ll be eating like kings for servant’s dinner shortly, and tonight they will be having chicken a l’orange instead!” She slams a partially cooked chicken on a tray on the deal table. “If I’d wanted to be a short-order cook, Mr. Withers, I’d have worked at the Café Royal! I’ve a right mind to hand in my notice!” She snatches up the jug of orange juice from in front of her, sloshing some on the table in her anger, and starts pouring it over the chicken.

 

“You aren’t going to though, are you Mrs. Bradley?” Mr. Withers asks with a worried look on his pale face.

 

“No, Mr. Withers. I’ve got too much respect for His Lordship than to walk out,” she assures him. “But her!” She raises her wooden spoon to the ceiling above her and shakes it.

 

“Shall I put the orange silvers on the chicken now, Mrs. Bradley?” Agnes asks meekly.

 

“Of course girl! I didn’t put it there for you to stare at! Get on with it, quick sticks, or His Lordship will be served a half cooked, inedible chicken, and you’ll be to blame!”

 

“Yes Mrs. Bradley!”

 

The Wickham Place kitchens are situated on the ground floor of Wickham Place, adjoining the Butler’s Pantry. It is dominated by big black leaded range, and next to it stands a heavy dark wood dresser that has been there for as long as anyone can remember. There is a white enamelled sink to one side with deep cupboards to house the necessary cleaning agents the scullery maid needs to keep the kitchen clean for the cook. In the middle of the kitchen stands Cook’s preserve, the pine deal table on which she does most of her preparation for both the meals served to the family upstairs and those for the downstairs staff.

 

This year the FFF+ Group have decided to have a weekly challenge called “Snap Happy”. A different theme chosen by a member of the group each week, and the image is to be posted on the Monday of the week.

 

This week the theme, “fruit” was chosen by Gary, Gazman_AU. This tableaux is made up of part of my 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures collection. Some pieces come from my own childhood like the ladderback chair in the background. Other items I acquired as an adult through specialist online dealers and artists who specialise in 1:12 miniatures.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableaux include:

 

On Cook’s deal table, the Seville oranges, the orange slices, and the roast chicken all 1:12 artisan miniatures with amazing attention to detail. All three come from Beautifully Handmade Miniatures in Kettering, England. The orange slices are so small and so fine. They are cut from long canes like some boiled sweets are but are much smaller in size!

 

Also, from Beautifully Handmade Miniatures in Kettering is the jug of orange juice which is also a 1:12 artisan miniature. The jug is made of very fine glass, and is half filled with glossy resin that looks exactly like orange juice.

 

Opposite the jug of orange juice is a Cornishware white and blue cannister. Cornishware is a striped kitchenware brand trademarked to and manufactured by T.G. Green & Co Ltd. Originally introduced in the 1920s and manufactured in Church Gresley, Derbyshire, it was a huge success for the company and in the succeeding 30 years it was exported around the world. The company ceased production in June 2007 when the factory closed under the ownership of parent company, The Tableshop Group. The range was revived in 2009 after T.G. Green was bought by a trio of British investors.

 

Behind the roast chicken is a jar of Gale’s Honey and a jar of Golden Shred Orange Marmalade. Gale’s Honey has been in existence as a brand in England since the early 1900s, and it still exists to this day. Golden Shred orange marmalade too still exists today and is a common household brand both in Britain and Australia. It is produced by Robertson’s. Robertson\'s Golden Shred recipe perfected since 1874 is a clear and tangy orange marmalade, which according to their modern day jars is “perfect for Paddington’s marmalade sandwiches”. Robertson\'s marmalade dates back to 1874 when Mrs. Robertson started making marmalade in the family grocery shop in Paisley, Scotland.

 

The sink in the background is littered with interesting items. On the left stands an old fashioned draining board which could be removed so that the space could then be used for other purposes. It is stacked with copper pots and a blue pottery mixing bowl. Near the taps is a box of Sunlight soap and a can of Vim, both cleaning essentials in any Edwardian household. Vim scouring powder was created by William Hesketh Lever (1st Viscount Leverhulme) and introduced to the market in 1904. It was produced at Port Sunlight in Wirrel, Merseyside, a model village built by Lever Brothers for the workers of their factories which produced the popular soap brands Lux, Lifebuoy and Sunlight. Sunlight Soap was first introduced in 1884.

 

The ladderback chair I have had since I was around eight years old.

 

To the left of the sink is the food safe with a birchwood broom leaning against it. In the days before refrigeration, or when refrigeration was expensive, perishable foods such as meat, butter, milk and eggs were kept in a food safe. Winter was easier than summer to keep food fresh and butter coolers and shallow bowls of cold water were early ways to keep things like milk and butter cool. A food safe was a wooden cupboard with doors and sides open to the air apart from a covering of fine galvinised wire mesh. This allowed the air to circulate while keeping insects out. There was usually an upper and a lower compartment, normally lined with what was known as American cloth, a fabric with a glazed or varnished wipe-clean surface. Refrigerators, like washing machines were American inventions and were not commonplace in even wealthy upper-class households until well after the Second World War.

i shoot a roll of black and white

It is so dull outside, and has been for days, that I wanted a bit of colour to brighten things up. I dug into the archives to an August image of a couple of Zinnias, one orange, the other pink, in a small red vase on the kitchen table. A short-lived beam of sunlight found its was through the canopy on the tree outside the window, and lit up the flowers in the red vase (nicely out of focus). The colours all worked together nicely in this unintentional still life. As for the shallow depth-of-field, this is a consequence of having spotted this composition while walking in from the garden and having the camera set up hand-held shooting in a relatively low light level. No time for a tripod. Get it while it lasts. - JW

 

Date Taken: 2021-08-14

 

(c) Copyright 2021 JW Vraets

 

Tech Details:

 

Taken using a hand-held Nikon D800 fitted with an AF-S Nikkor 24-120mm VR 1:4.0 lense set to 70mm, ISO2500 (Auto ISO), Matrix metering Daylight WB, Shutter Priority Mode, f/4.0, 1/320 sec. PP in free Open Source RAWTherapee from Nikon RAW/NEF source file: set final image size to be 9000px high, crop the image to cut a bit of the top and left side so that the flowers are better centred left-right, use Tone Curve 2 in Parametric mode to slightly brighten the lights and darken the darks, very slightly boost Contrast in L-A-B mode, slightly boost Vibrance, apply noise reduction, sharpen (edges only), save. PP in free Open Source GIMP: load the image as 2 layers, top layer for flower adjustment and bottom layer for background adjustments, add a non-destructive dodge-burn layer above the top/flower layer and use a large soft-edged paintbrush to apply white paint to the flower petal areas for the orange Zinnia and reduce opacity to get a nice level of rightness to the pink petals, create new working layer from visible result, add a black/transparent layer mask to the new working layer and on that mask use a large soft-edged brush loaded with white paint to paint in the pink Zinnia only only and then sharpen only the pink Zinnia (to avoid sharpening noise in the background), create new working layer from visible result, save, scale image to 6000 px high, sharpen, save, add fine black-and-white frame, add bar and text on left, save, scale image to 3000 px high for posting online, sharpen very slightly, save.

A bit of a tradition at our home is to have a cup of tea and a lovely McVitie's Digestive Biscuit ... nice!!

 

7 Days of Shooting Week #26 Tradition or Traditional Black and White Wednesday ....

 

Thanks to everyone who views this photo, adds a note, leaves a comment and of course BIG thanks to anyone who chooses to favourite my photo .... thanks to you all.

In an abandoned Farmhouse...

Working hard to hold my stamps.

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Lettice has spent the evening at one of London’s most exclusive and glamorous nightclubs, the Embassy Club on Bond Street: dining with friends the Honourable Gerald Bruton, Celia Beauchamp, Peter Bradley, Marguerite de Virre and Lettice’s older brother and heir to the pater’s title, lands and fortune, Leslie Chetwynd. After dinner, they danced into the wee hours of the morning to the wonderful music of Bert Ambrose and his Orchestra.

 

Letting herself in through the front door with her latch key, Lettice still tiptoes about like she did when she was younger and sneaking home to her parents’ Sloane Square terrace. She deposits her cape, gloves, compact and bandeau on one of her tub chairs in the drawing room before slipping quietly through the green baize door into the servant’s part of her flat. Now in lisle clad feet only, there is no need to tiptoe past Edith’s room, but old habits die hard as she trips lighly across the black and white cheque linoleum floor. However, once in the kitchen, Lettice throws on the lights and makes a clattering noise as she goes looking about for a milk pan, a teacup, saucer, plate, the Huntley and Palmer’s Empire Assorted, and her decadent nightcap, the Bournville Cocoa.

 

“Can I be of any help, Miss?” Edith yawns as she steps bleary eyed into the kitchen in her dressing gown with her hair in Kirby grips.

 

“Oh, I shouldn’t think so Edith,” Lettice replies nonchalantly, gasping with delight as she finds the milk bottle in the food safe in the corner of the kitchen. “Nanny Webster always said that making cocoa was an art.” Giggling she continues. “Wouldn’t pampered Marguerite and Celia die if they saw me trying to make my own cocoa!”

 

“Have you ever made cocoa before, Miss?” Edith asks, watching her mistress with her arms akimbo.

 

“Well… not exactly, Edith, but it can’t be that hard.” Lettice replies as she looks in a rather perplexed fashion at the pan, the canister of cocoa and the milk.

 

“Well, I’m up now Miss, so shall I make it for you?”

 

“Oh! Oh, would you Edith?” Lettice gasps in delight. Turning around she throws her arms around Edith’s neck, much to the other woman’s consternation, and beams one of her winning smiles. “Oh you are a brick! There’s nothing quite like a hot cocoa after a night out dancing to help settle one down.”

 

“And whilst I make it, you can tell me what you and your friends got up to tonight, Miss.”

 

Edith busies herself pouring the milk into the pan and setting it on the stove whilst Lettice sinks into the ladderback chair, the only chair, in the small kitchen.

 

“Well, darling Marguerite almost got to dance with the Prince of Wales tonight… almost,” Lettice begins as she nibbles delicately on a Huntley and Palmer’s Bourbon biscuit.

 

This year the FFF+ Group have decided to have a weekly challenge called “Snap Happy”. A different theme chosen by a member of the group each week, and the image is to be posted on the Monday of the week.

 

This week the theme, “drinks” was chosen by Di, PhotosbyDi.

 

As adults, when we think of drinks, alcohol often comes to mind first. However, when it’s bedtime, Lettice is right, a cup of rich chocolaty Bourneville cocoa is a decadent nightcap. Lettice’s well set out ingredient selection is a little different to what you might think, for it is made up entirely of 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures from my miniatures collection, some of which come from my own childhood.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableaux include:

 

The canister of Bournville Cocoa, which is a 1:12 artisan miniature from Small Wonders suppliers in England. Bournville is a brand of dark chocolate produced by Cadbury. It is named after the model village of the same name in Birmingham, England and was first sold in 1908. Bournville Cocoa was one of the products sold by Cadbury. The label on the canister is a transitional one used after the First World War and shared both the old fashioned Edwardian letter B and more modern 1920s lettering for the remainder of the name. The red of the lettering is pre-war whilst the orange and white a post-war change.

 

The Huntley and Palmer’s biscuit tin and Bourbon biscuits are also 1:12 artisan pieces. Huntley & Palmers is a British firm of biscuit makers originally based in Reading, Berkshire. The company created one of the world\'s first global brands and ran what was once the world\'s largest biscuit factory. Over the years, the company was also known as J. Huntley & Son and Huntley & Palmer. The Huntley and Palmer’s Empire Assorted tin featuring Boudicca upon it was first used during the Great War to stimulate nationalist fervour both in the trenches and on the home front. The design was so popular that it carried on through the 1920s.

 

Lettice’s cup, saucer and plate are from a beautiful artisan tea set featuring a rather avant-garde Art Deco Royal Doulton design from the Edwardian era.

 

The milk bottle, copper milk pan and spoon are also 1:12 size miniatures. The copper pan is made of real copper and is very heavy for its size!

 

The sink in the background has some interesting items on it. On the left hand draining board stands a box of Sunlight soap and a can of Vim, both cleaning essentials in any 1920s household. Vim scouring powder was created by William Hesketh Lever (1st Viscount Leverhulme) and introduced to the market in 1904. It was produced at Port Sunlight in Wirrel, Merseyside, a model village built by Lever Brothers for the workers of their factories which produced the popular soap brands Lux, Lifebuoy and Sunlight. Sunlight Soap was first introduced in 1884.

 

To the left of the sink is the food safe with a mop leaning against it. In the days before refrigeration, or when refrigeration was expensive, perishable foods such as meat, butter, milk and eggs were kept in a food safe. Winter was easier than summer to keep food fresh and butter coolers and shallow bowls of cold water were early ways to keep things like milk and butter cool. A food safe was a wooden cupboard with doors and sides open to the air apart from a covering of fine galvinised wire mesh. This allowed the air to circulate while keeping insects out. There was usually an upper and a lower compartment, normally lined with what was known as American cloth, a fabric with a glazed or varnished wipe-clean surface. Refrigerators, like washing machines were American inventions and were not commonplace in even wealthy upper-class households until well after the Second World War.

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today however we are northwest of Lettice’s flat, in the working-class London suburb of Harlesden where Edith, Lettice’s maid, and her best friend and fellow maid-of-all-work, Hilda are visiting Edith’s beloved parent for a few hours on their Wednesday afternoon off before going on to catch a late afternoon showing of ‘The Scarlet Woman’* at the nearby Willesden Hippodrome**. Like Edith, Hilda works as a live-in maid and resides just around the corner from Cavendish Mews, in nearby Hill Street. She works for Lettice’s married friends, Margot and Dickie Channon. However, Edith and Hilda met one another at their previous employer, Mrs. Plaistow’s, Pimlico townhouse where the two shared a cold and uncomfortable attic bedroom. In spite of the fact that they are both working for different people now, the girls remain the very best of friends, and catch up frequently. Edith’s father, George, works at the McVitie and Price biscuit factory in Harlesden as a Line Manager, and her mother, Ada, takes in laundry at home. They live in a small, two storey brick terrace house which opens out directly onto the street, and is far removed from the grandeur of Lettice’s Mayfair flat, but has always been a cosy and welcoming home for Edith and her younger brother Bert, as well as any number of their friends, including Hilda.

 

We find ourselves in the heart of the Watsford’s family home, Ada’s cosy kitchen at the back of the terrace. Ada is holding court, standing at her worn round kitchen table as she gives Hilda another impromptu lesson in Christmas baking as she rolls out some pale sweet shortcrust pastry with her trusty old wooden rolling pin which had belonged to her mother before her. Her daughter and Hilda sit at the table on tall ladderback chairs to either side of her, watching Ada as she takes up a flour dusted fluted metal biscuit cutter and sinks it with ease into the rolled out pastry, cutting out a dainty pastry case. Removing the cutter and leaving it lightly sitting atop the rolled out, but as of yet uncut pastry, she picks up the casing gently in her floured fingers and places it in the final empty space in her patty pan***.

 

“And there you have it, Hilda,” Ada says with a satisfied sigh. “The perfect pastry casing for a perfect fruit mince pie!”

 

“The perfect fruit mince pie will be the one I can eat right now.” George mutters from behind his newspaper as he sits by the hearth in the comfort of his Windsor chair.

 

“You aren’t having a one of these fruit mince pies until Christmas Day, George!” Ada quips. “And that’s a fact.”

 

“Oh Mrs. W.!” Hilda gasps. “You make it all look so simple!”

 

“After you’ve made a few batches, it will be as easy for you as it is for me, Hilda love.” Ada assures the young maid.

 

“Do you really think so, Mrs. W.?” Hilda asks with wide eyes.

 

“Course I do, Hilda love.” Ada goes on.

 

“It’s true, Hilda,” Edith adds from her chair. “The more you practice, the better you’ll get, just like Mum. I was the same as you once.”

 

“You’ve never been hopeless at cooking, Edith.” Hilda mutters disparagingly.

 

“You aren’t hopeless at cooking either, Hilda!” Edith exclaims, standing up and reaching across the table, clasping her best friend’s hand and giving it a reassuring squeeze. “You’ve improved so much with a bit of help from me, some instruction from Mum,” She nods at her mother and smiles gratefully. “And practice.” Letting go of her friend’s hand, she resumes her seat. “No, I meant I was nervous like you are now.” She sighs as she sees Hilda’s face crumple up, betraying how nervous she really is. “But once I had baked a few different things, made a few mistakes in the process, and learned from them, I became much more comfortable.”

 

“We all have to make mistakes, Hilda love.” Ada remarks. “Like Edith says, you have to make mistakes so you can learn from them.”

 

George snorts loudly and chuckles behind his copy of the Daily Express.

 

“And what are you chortling about, George Watsford?” Ada asks, casting an askance glance at her husband.

 

“Nothing Ada love,” he replies, still chuckling from behind the newspaper sheets which he ruffles noisily to try and cover his amusement. “Just something Rupert Bear**** is up to.”

 

“Oh no you aren’t Dad!” Edith giggles. “You’re well past page seven*****.”

 

“George?” Ada queries warily whilst Hilda glances anxiously between Ada’s clouding face and the open Daily Express broadsheet behind which George hides.

 

Finally the paper lowers and George’s beaming face, red with holding in his laughter appears. Glancing out at his wife, his daughter and her best friend, he admits, “Well, I was actually thinking about your biggest baking disaster, Ada love.”

 

“Oh, not that story again, Dad!” Edith groans. “We all know the story of how before you and Mum were married, but were stepping out together, at the Easter Sunday Picnic organised by the Vicar of All Souls******, everyone got a hot cross bun because Mum was being a good Christian soul and handed them out, except for you because she’d given them to everyone else.”

 

Ada blushes with embarrassment as she is reminded of a piece of her own history that she would rather her daughter didn’t know about.

 

“It’s true Mr. W.,” Hilda remarks, leaning on the top worn rung of the back of the ladderback chair she is sitting in as she looks at Edith’s father. “Even I’ve heard it from Edith.”

 

“Oh, that wasn’t the story I was thinking of!” George chuckles, before openly laughing aloud, his noisy guffaws filling the tiny Harlesden terrace house kitchen.

 

“George!” Ada says warningly in a low voice. “What are you going to tell our daughter and her friend? Am I going to like it?”

 

“Oh!” George wipes tears of mirth from his cheeks. “I doubt it, Ada love, but I think it’s worth taking the rap******* to retell it.” He bursts into a new barrage of wheezing laughter that make him breathless.

 

“Well come on then, Dad!” Edith exclaims. “Tell us!”

 

“Don’t encourage your dad, Edith love!” Ada chides her daughter mildly. Turning her attention back to her red-faced husband she adds, “He doesn’t need any help from anyone in that department.” She eyeballs him.

 

“When your mum and I were courting, Edith love,” George finally begins after taking a gulp of tea from his dainty floral Colclough******** teacup, one of Ada’s porcelain treasures found at a flea market*********. “She thought to curry favour she’d best make a nice teacake for my mum, since she was hoping to to become her future daughter-in-law by marrying me.”

 

“I keep telling you George,” Ada protests. “It was only because of my Mum’s blue and white Delftware cannisters. I didn’t do it on purpose.”

 

“What didn’t you do on purpose, Mum?” Edith asks excitedly.

 

“Never you mind, Edith love!” Ada answers quickly.

 

“What happened, Mr. W.?” Hilda giggles, her eyes agog as she hangs on the older man’s every word.

 

“So, she made a lovely apple teacake. Well,” George adds as an afterthought. “It looked lovely.”

 

“What do you mean, looked lovely?” Edith asks. “Didn’t it taste nice? We’ve had Mum’s apple teacake plenty of times over the years and it is always scrumptious.”

 

“Well,” George laughs, again wiping the tears of joviality from the corners of his eyes and his deep set wrinkles around them. “This one certainly wasn’t! You see, Edith love, your Mum had put in a cup of salt, rather than a cup of sugar into the batter! You should have seen Granny Watsford’s face when she ate her first mouthful! Her mouth nearly imploded whilst her eyes practically burst from their sockets! It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen!”

 

George breaks into uncontrollable laughter, which is soon joined by that of his daughter and her friend as they all laugh loudly at the story.

 

“I told you, George,” Ada defends herself, blushing red as she looks at the trio laughing around her, before breaking into a good natured chuckle of her own as she remembers her then future mother-in-law’s alarmed face as she sat ramrod stiff in her old Victorian button back********** upholstered chair, one of two now in Ada and George’s front parlour, and chewed slowly on the cake, before swallowing it awkwardly. “All Mum’s cannisters were all the same size and unmarked. It’s why I make sure that I keep our sugar in that tin cannister, and I keep the salt in a glass jar.”

 

“Oh Mum!” Edith laughs, wiping her own eyes which now stream with jovial tears. “That’s awful.”

 

“What was worse was that your Granny ate the whole mouthful and swallowed it, of politeness and deference to your Mum, Edith love.” George goes on. “She liked her you see, and she didn’t want to offend her! Once she’d finished her mouthful, she just quietly put her plate aside, arose, and excused herself with as much dignity as she could muster, asking your Mum to join her in the scullery with a hoarse voice.”

 

“Did you all try the cake too, Mr. W.?” Hilda asks.

 

“Heavens no, Hilda love! We’d all figured out from my Mum’s reaction that there was something very, very wrong with the cake. None of us were game to try it!”

 

“Shouldn’t you be heading back to work after tea, George?” Ada asks, folding her arms akimbo and looking meaningfully at her husband. “I’m sure I can hear the Christmas biscuits selection calling you.”

 

“Oh! Oh alright, Ada love.” George gasps as he recovers his breath from all his laughter. “Looks like I’m being banished, girls, so I’ll say my goodbyes to you both.” He puts his newspaper aside, gets up from his seat and walks over to the pegs by the door leading from the kitchen to the scullery, where his coat, hat and scarf hang.

 

“Be grateful I let you back into the house after your shift, George Wastford!” Ada mutters, but the glint in her eye and the gentle upturn in the corners of her mouth betray the fact that she isn’t really cross with her husband for sharing her story.

 

“You wouldn’t do that to me, Ada love.” George remarks, wrapping his knitted scarf tightly around his neck before shucking on his coat.

 

“Tell too many tales like that about me, and you might push your luck.” Ada replies, cocking her eyebrow, but smiling at ger husband.

 

“Alright, bye love!” George dons his tweed flat cap and walks across the flagstones to kiss his wife. After giving her a chaste, yet loving kiss, he turns to Edith and Hilda at the table. “Bye girls.” He waves and turns away.

 

“Bye Mr. W.!” Hilda says brightly.

 

“Bye Dad!” Edith calls after the retreating figure of her father as he disappears into the scullery and walks out the back door and into the terrace’s rear garden.

 

“What crust!” Ada scoffs as she hears him close the back door. “And thinking of crusts,” She turns her attention back to Edith and Hilda. “We should get on with baking these fruit mince pies before it’s time for you girls to go. We need to give them time to cook and cool.”

 

Edith and Hilda sit in their seats, smirking, their eyes bright with amusement as Ada mixes the large white bowl of fruit mince before her. “Alright, up here, Hilda love!” she says in a commanding voice, taking control of the situation, and regaining her dignity after George’s tale. “You’ll never learn unless you practice, and if you make a mistake, like I did with the apple tea cake I made that day for old Mrs. Watsford, you’ll learn from it.”

 

“Yes Mrs. W.!”

 

Hilda gets up from her seat and stands alongside Ada in front of the pan.

 

“Now, take up the spoons,” Ada directs. “And use one to scoop up some fruit mince and the other to push the mince off the spoon into the pastry tart case. Not too much, mind, Hilda love,” she cautions. “When the fruit mince is hot, it will bubble and expand and we don’t want it overflowing from the cases whilst cooking in the oven.”

 

“No Mrs. W.!”

 

“Just fill the case up three quarters of the way.” Edith adds helpfully.

 

“Good girl, Edith love.” Ada says. “That’s it! Just so.”

 

Hilda takes up a heaped spoon of fruit mince.

 

“No, that’s too much, Hilda, love.” Ada remarks gently. “Shake a bit off back into the bowl.” She and Edith watch as Hilda does as she is told. “That’s better.” Ada nods. “Then fill the case three quarters up.”

 

They watch as Hilda gingerly moves the spoon low over one of the twelve empty sweet shortcrust pastry cases in the patty pan and pushes the mixture off it with the other spoon. The fruit mince falls into the bottom of the casing with a soft, satisfying splat, the mixture of sultanas, currants, raisins, glacé cherries, apple, orange rind, apple, sugar, spices, water and brandy oozing thickly as it settles into place.

 

“Good girl, Hilda love!” Ada says encouragingly, grasping the young girl’s shoulders and squeezing them. “That’s the ticket***********! Once you’ve filled this batch, we’ll pop them into the oven and we’ll make a second batch whilst they cook and then cool. You can cut out the casings and fill them.”

 

“Yes Mrs. W.” Hilda says proudly with a smile as she takes her spoons back to the gleaming, dark and glossy fruit mince in the white mixing bowl and scoops up some more.

 

“Good girl, Hilda love!” Ada says again. “That’s a more manageable amount of fruit mince.”

 

“Thanks awfully, Mrs. W.!” Hilda says with a smile as her face blanches at Ada’s praise.

 

Then, changing topic Ada asks. “So, are you going back to the Scottish Highlands or wherever for Christmas this year, Hilda love?”

 

“Oh Lady Lancraven’s house is in Shropshire, not the Scottish Highlands, Mrs. W.” Hilda replies as she begins to fill a second pastry casing.

 

“Well, wherever it is, are you going, Hilda love?”

 

“No, I’m not this year, Mrs. W., which means I won’t get to see my sister, which is a bit disappointing. But I’m going to spend Christmas Day with Mum at her house in Southall************ at least, so that will be nice.”

 

“What?” Edith pipes up. “No Lady Lancraven’s, this year?”

 

“That will be disappointing for your Mum and your sister, Hilda love.” Ada says consolingly. “You told us you all enjoyed being together so much, last Christmas.”

 

“Why aren’t you going this year, Hilda?” Edith persists.

 

“Well, the Channons have had a bit of a falling out with Mr. Channon’s parents, the Marquis and Marchioness of Taunton, just as of late.” Hilda explains.

 

“This is the first I’ve heard of it.” Edith replies.

 

“I should hope it would be, Edith love!” Ada chides her daughter, wagging a finger at her. “You know that gossiping unnecessarily about your employers will only lead to trouble.” She shakes her head. “There’s nothing worse than a gossiping maid, no matter how good her work is.”

 

“So, what happened?” Edith asks Hilda, ignoring her mother’s protestations.

 

“It’s all over the fact that Mrs. Channon still isn’t with child,” Hilda goes on, lowering her voice as if Margot and Dickie might overhear all the way over in Mayfair. “The Marquis and Marchioness are so anxious that Mr. and Mrs. Channon have a baby to carry on the family name, since Mr. Channon will be the next Marquis, and they have been married a few years.”

 

“Not everyone who wants a family is blessed with one, Hilda love.” Ada says softly.

 

“I know that Mrs. W.” Hilda replies. “It’s not me who needs convincing, but the snooty Marquiss and Marchioness. They want to send poor Mrs. Channon to a clinic of some kind in Switzerland or Germany, somewhere in the mountains, so she can be analysed and examined.”

 

“Prodded and poked, more like!” Edith opines.

 

“I think that’s what caused the fiercest argument between Mr. Channon and the Marquis. I heard Mr. Channon in the study, yelling down the telephone at the Marquis, and saying that he and Mrs. Channon wouldn’t spend Christmas with them at Lady Lancraven’s. Poor Mrs. Channon has been drinking so much lately to calm her nerves as whenever the Marchioness visits or telephones, which is often, she always asks her why she isn’t with child yet. The Marquiss has basically cut off Mr. Channon’s allowance until they produce a baby, and a boy at that, which added extra pressure to them both.”

 

“No wonder Mrs. Channon is drinking then.” Edith remarks.

 

“Oh dear! Poor Mr. and Mrs. Channon. How horrible for them! But if Mr. Channon has had his allowance cut off, how are the household bills being covered, and how are you getting paid, Hilda love?” Ada asks.

 

“You are getting paid, aren’t you Hilda?” Edith pipes up in concern.

 

“Luckily, my wages are paid me by Lord de Virre, Mrs. Channon’s dad,” Hilda explains. “And luckily for Mr. and Mrs. Channon, he has come to their aid too. He’s ever such a nice man, unlike the mean old Marquiss and Marchioness.”

 

“What’s he done?” Edith asks. “Lord de Virre, that is?”

 

“He’s arranging something called a provision for them.” Hilda says a little uncertainly.

 

“A provision?” Ada asks. “Whatever is that, Hilda love?”

 

“I’m not sure exactly, but I think it has something to do with him paying them an allowance instead of the Marquis and Marchioness, at least for now, as Mrs. Channon says that she will cover the household costs from her dad’s provision, so it must involve money in some way.”

 

“Well, that’s a relief!” Edith says. “At least you won’t be put in a position where you have to lie to the wine merchant, like that time when they owed him so much money for champagne and they pretended that they weren’t home, and you had to go along with it and put him off until Mrs. Channon had pawned some of her furs to get him the money.”

 

“That’s a terrible position to put you in, Hilda love!” Ada exclaims.

 

“Well, Mrs. Channon isn’t exactly the best at keeping a household budget at the best of times, Mrs. W., so it’s not the first time that’s happened.”

 

“I don’t know!” Ada shakes her head. “They have more money than we’ll ever have, yet I manage to balance my budget, and did when Edith and Bert were children, and with the costs of everything inflating during the war too!”

 

“Well anyway, that’s why I’m not going to Lady Lancraven’s this year, Mrs. W. It will be nice to spend it with my Mum at least, although I’ll miss seeing Emily. We both will. But we’ll make the best of it.”

 

“Course you will, Hilda love.” Ada wraps a consoling arm around her daughter’s best friend, and pulls her towards her rangy frame.

 

“Where are Mr. and Mrs. Channon going to spend their Christmas then?” Edith asks from her seat at the table.

 

“They are going to spend it with Lord and Lady de Virre in Hans Crescent here in London. Then they are going to go to their Cornish country house outside of Penzance for a few weeks after New Year’s Eve in London. Apparently, Mr. and Mrs. Carter are holding a lavish New Year’s Eve fancy dress ball in their Park Lane************* mansion before sailing off on the Mauretania************** to New York to spend the beginning of 1926.”

 

“Well, maybe we can spend a bit more time together over Christmas, Hilda, since neither your employers, nor mine, are going to be around to worry about.” Edith suggests.

 

“That would be nice, Edith. I’d like that.” Hilda smiles gratefully. “Anyway, that’s why I want the fruit mince pies you see, Mr. W., to take to Mum’s on Christmas Day. We don’t have much money between us – certainly not enough to afford the fare that the servants at lady Lancraven’s get – but we can at least have a lovely treat of some fruit mince pies after whatever we cobble together for Christmas tea for the two of us.”

 

“Then we best press on, Hilda love.” Ada says with a smile. “Or else you’ll have none for Christmas.”

 

“Yes Mrs. W.!” Hilda agrees enthusiastically.

 

*The Scarlet Woman is a 1924 silent comedy film directed by Terence Greenidge based on a scenario by British writer Evelyn Waugh. It is a satirical ecclesiastical melodrama about a Catholic plot to bring England back to the Catholic Church, which involves a scheme to convert the Prince of Wales and murder Protestants. The film, which Waugh also acted in, features Elsa Lanchester as a drug-addicted actress and was shot in locations including Oxford and Hampstead.

 

**The Willesden Empire Hippodrome Theatre was confusingly located in Harlesden, although it was not too far from Willesden Junction Railway Station in this west London inner city district. It was opened by Walter Gibbons as a music hall/variety theatre in September 1907. In 1908, the name was shortened to Willesden Hippodrome Theatre. Designed by noted theatre architect Frank Matcham, seating was provided for 864 in the orchestra stalls and pit, 517 in the circle and 602 in the gallery. It had a forty feet wide proscenium, a thirty feet deep stage and eight dressing rooms. It was taken over by Sydney Bernstein’s Granada Theatres Ltd. chain from the third of September 1927 and after some reconstruction was re-opened on the twelfth of September 1927 with a programme policy of cine/variety. From March 1928 it was managed by the Denman/Gaumont group, but was not successful and went back to live theatre use from 28th January 1929. It was closed in May 1930, and was taken over by Associated British Cinemas in August 1930. Now running films only, it operated as a cinema until September 1938. It then re-opened as a music hall/variety theatre, with films shown on Sundays, when live performances were prohibited. The Willesden Hippodrome Theatre was destroyed by German bombs in August/September 1940. The remains of the building stood on the High Street for many years, becoming an unofficial playground for local children, who trespassed onto the property. The remains were demolished in 1957.

 

***A patty pan is a baking pan with a grid of connected, individual cups or moulds used for baking individual portions of batter. It is also known as a muffin tin or cupcake pan and can be used for making muffins, cupcakes, pies or other small baked goods like savory egg cups or mini quiches. It was called a patty pan because it was originally used in the Eighteenth Century to make small meat-filled pastries known as pattys or pastys (today’s equivalent for pasties).

 

****The character Rupert Bear first appeared in the Daily Express on November the 8th, 1920, originally named Little Lost Bear. The character was created by illustrator Mary Tourtel, and Alfred Bestall took over the illustrations in 1935. The cartoon series continues to be published in the Daily Express. The character is also associated with the newspaper through the annual Rupert Annual, which has been published every year since 1936. Rupert has become such a British National Treasure that he has even had his own stamps before. Rupert Bear is part of children's culture in the United Kingdom, and there are four television shows based on the character.

 

*****Rupert Bear first appeared in the Daily Express on page seven, a place he then retained for many years, sob that readers became accustomed to finding him there.

 

******The parish of All Souls, Harlesden, was formed in 1875 from Willesden, Acton, St John's, Kensal Green, and Hammersmith. Mission services had been held by the curate of St Mary's, Willesden, at Harlesden institute from 1858. The parish church at Station Road, Harlesden, was built and consecrated in 1879. The town centre church is a remarkable brick octagon designed by E.J. Tarver. Originally there was a nave which was extended in 1890 but demolished in 1970.

 

*******The phrase "to take the rap" originates from the Eighteenth Century use of "rap" to mean a blow or punishment, and its Nineteenth Century slang use for a prison sentence. Therefore, "taking the rap" evolved to mean accepting a punishment or blame for something, be it a criminal charge or something far less serious in nature.

 

********Colclough Bone China was founded in Staffordshire in 1890 by Herbert J. Colclough, the former mayor of Stoke-on-Trent. Herbert loved porcelain and loved the ordinary working man. One of his desires was to bring fine bone china, a preserve of the upper and middle classes, to the working man. He felt that it would give them aspirations and dignity to eat off fine bone china. Colclough Bone China received a Royal Warrant from King George V in 1913. Colclough went on to innovate the production of fine bone china for the mass market in the 1920s and 1930s. They produced the backstamp brands Royal Vale and Royal Stanley. Colclough Bone China merged with Booth’s Pottery and later acquired Ridgeway China. Eventually they amalgamated with Royal Doulton in the 1970s.

 

*********A flea market is a type of market where vendors sell a variety of goods, typically second hand, handmade, or antique items. These markets are often outdoors, but can also be held indoors, and may operate on a weekly, seasonal, or annual basis. Shoppers can find everything from clothing and furniture to collectibles and curios at bargain prices.

 

**********Button back upholstered furniture contains buttons embedded in the back of the sofa or chair, which are pulled tightly against the leather creating a shallow dimple effect. This is sometimes known as button tufting.

 

***********The exact origin of "that's the ticket" is debated, but it likely comes from a few different places. It may have started as an allusion to a winning lottery ticket or a specific label for something that was perfect. Alternatively, it could be a corruption of the French phrase "c'est l'etiquette," meaning "that's the proper way" or "that's the label". In the 1820s, there was a related phrase, "that's the ticket for soup," which referred to a card that a beggar could use to receive immediate relief at a soup kitchen, and may also be where this phrase is derived from.

 

************Southall was a working-class suburb of London in the 1920s, characterised by its industrialisation and the influx of workers for manual labour jobs in the area's factories. Many factories were built in Southall, which led to significant population growth and its development into an urban area with a working-class demographic. By the end of the Nineteenth Century, Southall became a highly industrialized district with numerous factories. The Otto Monsted Margarine Works, one of the largest in Europe, was a key part of this industrial base. Workers, including a large number of Welsh and Irish steel workers escaping the harsh economic conditions of their origins, moved to Southall in the 1920s to find employment in the available heavy industry jobs.

 

*************Park Lane is a dual carriageway road in the City of Westminster in Central London. It is part of the London Inner Ring Road and runs from Hyde Park Corner in the south to Marble Arch in the north. It separates Hyde Park to the west from Mayfair to the east. The road was originally a simple country lane on the boundary of Hyde Park, separated by a brick wall. Aristocratic properties appeared during the late 18th century, including Breadalbane House, Somerset House, and Londonderry House. The road grew in popularity during the 19th century after improvements to Hyde Park Corner and more affordable views of the park, which attracted the nouveau riche to the street and led to it becoming one of the most fashionable roads to live on in London. Notable residents included the 1st Duke of Westminster's residence at Grosvenor House, the Dukes of Somerset at Somerset House, and the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli at No. 93. Other historic properties include Dorchester House, Brook House and Dudley House. In the 20th century, Park Lane became well known for its luxury hotels, particularly The Dorchester, completed in 1931, which became closely associated with eminent writers and international film stars. Flats and shops began appearing on the road, including penthouse flats. Several buildings suffered damage during World War II, yet the road still attracted significant development, including the Park Lane Hotel and the London Hilton on Park Lane, and several sports car garages. A number of properties on the road today are owned by some of the wealthiest businessmen from the Middle East and Asia.

 

**************Built by Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson for the Cunard Line, the RMS Mauretania was launched in 1906 and began its first voyage in November 1907. It was designed with a new steam turbine engine and was the world's largest ship until 1910. The ship's impressive speed allowed it to capture the eastbound Blue Riband record in 1907 and the westbound record in 1909. It held both records for two decades, cementing its reputation for speed and elegance. he liner was also celebrated for its luxurious interiors, which featured elaborate designs with numerous types of wood, marble, and tapestries. It was nicknamed the "Grand Old Lady of the Atlantic". During World War I, the British Admiralty commissioned the Mauretania for military service. It was converted to a hospital ship and troopship and was equipped with guns, even sporting dazzle camouflage at one point. After the war, the Mauretania was returned to Cunard and resumed its passenger service. It was converted to burn oil and continued to operate for many years. n 1934, after the merger of Cunard and White Star, the liner was retired from service. It made its final voyage and was towed to Rosyth, Scotland, where it was scrapped in 1935.

 

This cluttered, yet cheerful domestic scene is not all it seems to be at first glance, for it is made up of part of my 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures collection. Some pieces come from my own childhood. Other items I acquired as an adult through specialist online dealers and artists who specialise in 1:12 miniatures.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

Ada’s kitchen table is covered with things in preparation for her Christmas fruit mince pies.

 

The wooden board the table with the floured rolling pin, the rolled out pastry and the biscuit cutter are artisan miniature pieces made by an unknown artist, which I acquired through Kathleen Knight’s Doll’s House Shop in the United Kingdom. The patty pan of casings also comes from there, as does the teapot shaped floral spoon rest and enamel ended spoon sitting in front of the board. The battered flour cannister, painted in the typical domestic Art Deco design and kitchen colours of the 1920s, cream and green, also comes from Kathleen Knight’s Doll’s House Shop. The bowl of very realistic looking fruit mince comes from former chef turned miniature artisan, Frances Knight. Her work is incredibly detailed and realistic, and she says that she draws her inspiration from her years as a chef and her imagination.

 

In the foreground on the table are non-matching teacups, saucers and sugar bowl, all of which have come from different miniature stockists both in Australia and the United Kingdom. The Brown Betty teapot came from The Dolls House Shop in the United Kingdom.

 

Edith’s handbag, handmade from soft leather, is part of a larger collection of hats and bags that I bought from an American miniature collector Marilyn Bickel, including Ada’s tan soft leather handbag seen resting against her basket at the right of the picture.

 

Edith’s black dyed straw hat with purple roses and black feathers was made by an unknown artisan. 1:12 size miniature hats made to such exacting standards of quality and realism are often far more expensive than real hats are. When you think that it would sit comfortably on the tip of your index finger, yet it could cost in excess of $150.00 or £100.00, it is an extravagance. American artists seem to have the monopoly on this skill and some of the hats that I have seen or acquired over the years are remarkable. This hat is part of a larger collection I bought from an American miniature collector Marilyn Bickel.

 

In the background you can see Ada’s dark Welsh dresser cluttered with household items. Like Ada’s table and the ladderback chair, I have had the dresser since I was a child. The shelves of the dresser have different patterned crockery which have come from different miniature stockists both in Australia and the United Kingdom. The rather worn and beaten looking enamelled cannisters and bread bin are painted in the typical domestic Art Deco design and kitchen colours of the 1920s, cream and green. Aged on purpose, these artisan pieces also came from Kathleen Knight’s Dolls’ House Shop. There are also tins of various foods which would have been household staples in the 1920s when canning and preservation revolutionised domestic cookery. Amongst other foods on the dresser are a jar of Marmite, a box of Bisto Gravy Powder, an Oxo stock cube and a box of Ty-Phoo Tea which were made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire.

 

Marmite is a food spread made from yeast extract which although considered remarkably English, was in fact invented by German scientist Justus von Liebig although it was originally made in the United Kingdom. It is a by-product of beer brewing and is currently produced by British company Unilever. The product is notable as a vegan source of B vitamins, including supplemental vitamin B. Marmite is a sticky, dark brown paste with a distinctive, salty, powerful flavour. This distinctive taste is represented in the marketing slogan: "Love it or hate it." Such is its prominence in British popular culture that the product's name is often used as a metaphor for something that is an acquired taste or tends to polarise opinion.

 

The first Bisto product, in 1908, was a meat-flavoured gravy powder, which rapidly became a bestseller in Britain. It was added to gravies to give a richer taste and aroma. Invented by Messrs Roberts and Patterson, it was named "Bisto" because it "Browns, Seasons and Thickens in One". Bisto Gravy is still a household name in Britain and Ireland today, and the brand is currently owned by Premier Foods.

 

Oxo is a brand of food products, including stock cubes, herbs and spices, dried gravy, and yeast extract. The original product was the beef stock cube, and the company now also markets chicken and other flavour cubes, including versions with Chinese and Indian spices. The cubes are broken up and used as flavouring in meals or gravy or dissolved into boiling water to produce a bouillon. Oxo produced their first cubes in 1910 and further increased Oxo's popularity.

 

In 1863, William Sumner published A Popular Treatise on Tea as a by-product of the first trade missions to China from London. In 1870, William and his son John Sumner founded a pharmacy/grocery business in Birmingham. William's grandson, John Sumner Jr. (born in 1856), took over the running of the business in the 1900s. Following comments from his sister on the calming effects of tea fannings, in 1903, John Jr. decided to create a new tea that he could sell in his shop. He set his own criteria for the new brand. The name had to be distinctive and unlike others, it had to be a name that would trip off the tongue and it had to be one that would be protected by registration. The name Typhoo comes from the Mandarin Chinese word for “doctor”. Typhoo began making tea bags in 1967. In 1978, production was moved from Birmingham to Moreton on the Wirral Peninsula, in Merseyside. The Moreton site is also the location of Burton's Foods and Manor Bakeries factories. Typhoo has been owned since July 2021 by British private-equity firm Zetland Capital. It was previously owned by Apeejay Surrendra Group of India.

 

The large kitchen range in the background is a 1:12 miniature replica of the coal fed Phoenix Kitchen Range. A mid-Victorian model, it has hinged opening doors, hanging bars above the stove and a little bass hot water tap (used in the days before plumbed hot water).

120 film

scanned negative

Mamiya RB67

Day one of the curfew/confinement here in France. My wife has taken over the living room an I work out of the kitchen.

 

As I can't show you new work, I might as well show you what I use for post prod. My only PC is the one on the right: a Lenovo ThinkPad W541. It runs Linux and all post is done in darktable and Gimp.

 

On the left is my work-laptop, issued by my employer. The picture has been taken with a Google Pixel 3a

 

It's going to be two VERY long weeks....

Apparently I was in a domestic mood... I made some chocolate chip and cinnamon and sugar cupcakes.

Papaver nudicaule - ‘Champagne Bubbles’

 

Fading fast :(

 

I cut the stem from the plant and brought it into my studio for some final shots as the flower fades.

 

www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.mic...

Star wars day