p. 6 “Every woman easired to own one. Watever your outlay, a plume would retain its value as an investment, as well as an adornment, kept wrapped in tissue in a box, clearned and re-curled once a year, then passed down to your daughter. Working girls saved up and clubbed together for a plume, taking it in turns to wear it on their best hat”.. In the early years of the trade, each feather had come from a wild bird, hunted down and killed in the Sahar Desert. But since ‘the Exlipse’ egg incubator was patented in 1864, ostrich farming in the arid Western Cape of southernmost Africa had taken off. Birds could not be raised in their hundreds and clipped or plucked every eight months or so, flooding the western market with so many plumes that it was hard to imagine there were enough heads left”
p.6-7 As demand for ‘plumiferous’ fashion accessories soared from the 1870s onwards, importers, brokers, auctioneers, wholesalers and feather handlers grew by the hundred. Most were concentrated around one tight area in the City of London, bordered by Aldersgate, London Wall, Bishopsgate and Old Street… the feathers would be shuttled through a cascade of treatments by Abraham Botibol’s workhands. They would be strung, dyed, washed, dyed again, dried, thrashed, trimmed, finished, parried, willowed, fashioned and curled. He might sell a single item to a millinery wholesale warehouse for 7 shillings, or direct to a customer for 30 shillings. Once attached to a ladies’ hat by a milliber and displayed in a Bond Street shop window, its value could be anything up to £5 (£500 in today’s money).
p. 37 Miss Maria Umphelby’s school for girls was filled with children who needed a substitute home or family. There were children of the British Empire, children of the Raj, orphaned children, girls somehow surplus to requirements when gentlemen fathers were widowed or remarried.Unlike the newer, more academic girls schools (North London Collegiate School, Cheltenham Ladies’ College), Hill House was run along an older, family0style model with no dormitories and many “siblings”. The 30 pupils, aged 6 to 16, all called Mrs Umphelby “Maimie”. She was the cloest to a monther most of them had.. a Revivalist Evangelical: a woman of 60 who infused her curriculum with the celebration of God’s glory. Countryside walks were done at the march while shouting out Revivalist hymns… it was hoped they would go on to become indomitable women, “a band of admirably trained daughters” who would “go forth over the wide world”. Missionary work – a home or abroad – was the unspoken subtext of their education.. Etta retuned to Blackheath aged 16 and was immediately sent abroad – to a finishing school in Lausanne… she remained impervious to the fashion manuals of the day, to the absurdly time-consuming ritual of the VIctorian ladies’ toilette and to those fashionable, constructing constumes. She returned at 18, proficient in French, to face an uncertain future.”
p. 52 “Particularly high prices were paid for the skins of unuaul birds, such as the King of Saxony bird-of-paradise, with its strange head wires, or Pesquet’s parrot, with its bright red chest feathers – both from the mountains of New Guinea… If a bird wasn’t, to a British lady, remotely familiar, then it had an otherworldly, innocent, storybook quality to it. It belonged to distant parts of the British Empire, which spooled like a nrightly coloured diorama through the Victorian mind. A bird-of-paradise, ascarlet tanager or tiny viridian hummingbird had no real back story. It wasn’t perceived as a specied with mating rituals, grooming habits, a distinctive call and hatchlings to feed. It was a commodity just liek any other – leather, ivory, tortoiseshell or ostrich feather.”
p. 84 George Frederick Watts – elderly and revered Royal Academician, considered by many to be the greatest artist of his day, produced a large, emotive oil known as The Shuddering Angel, dedicated ‘to all thos who love the beautiful and mourn over the senseless and cruel destruction of bird life and beauty”. Irridescent, lifeless plumage lies in a heap on a tombstone, over which an angel weeps, head in hands. The painting was exhibited in London’s New Callery in 1899 and caused an immediate sensation – warranting a leader in The Times.”
p. 147 “As the sun rose in the far distant Florida Everglades, a wearden on duty for the Audubon Society motored his little boat over still waters to confront a norotious egret hunter and his two sons. By the time he got near, the men were climbing back into their schooner, limp snowy egrets swinging from their hands. Guy Bradley shouted across the water that he was going to arrest them – and was shot at point blank range … Bradey’s murder made international headlines: America’s first martyr for the cause of bird protection. The same week … the playwright George Bernard Shaw took his seat at the Royal Opera House in Drury Lane for Puccini’s new opera, Madam Butterfly. He found himself behind a woman who was obscuring his view. “For this lady, who had very black hair, had stuck over her right ear the pitiable corpse of a large white bird, which looked exactly as if someone had killed it by stamping on its hreast, and then nailed it to the lady’s temple, which was presumably of sufficient solidity to hear th operation. I am not, I hope, a morbidly squeamish person but the spectacle sickened me.”
p. 148 To many eyes, such preposterous headgear undermined the thinking woman. It made her look unconsidered, even stupid. What price emancipation if she remained enslaved by fashion. .. I was curious about the future lives of these Edwardian women, helplessly in thrall to the surface of things, and was surprised to discover that many of Fabbircotti’s customers went on to do extraordinary, brave and adventurous things, spurred on by the First World War. Of course, they were facilitated by huge private incomes. But these were not mere featherheads. On Thursday 3 May 1906, Mrs Asquith – brilliant wit and socialite, second wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer – was drawn irresistibly into the boutique on South Molton Steet and spent £2 17s (around £280 in today’s money). Two months later, she was back again, buying millinery worth £4 4s (around £415). Tall, big boned, with a long determined face, Margot Asquith understood the power of a good hat. “Clothes are the first thing that catch the eye,” she was fond of saying. Having absolutely no compunction about wearing feathers, Margot was painted by society portraitist Philip de Laszlo with a large dead bird on her head. The painting was commissioned in 1909 to mark her powerful new role as the Prime Minister’s wife.”
p. 287 “Among the many who gained from the campaign for the vote, it was particularly satisfying to discover that that Alice Battershall’s daughter Louisa, a feather worker like her mother, was also to benefit. Thanks to determined suffragist Clementina Black and her investigative team at the Women’s Industrial Council, a government trade board was created in 1919 for the oxtrich, fancy feather and artificial flower industry. A minimum wage was set, working hours monitored and basic comforts introduced. And in 1927, A Botibol and Coomapny, “the biggest in the feather trade”, was thoroughly investigated for emplower abused. Abraham’s son, Cecil, was found guilty of underpaying 27 of his 50 female employees and of keeping no wage records. Forced to pay £234 in arrears and £17 in fines (around £40,000 in today’s money), he threw up his hands and admitted that he deserved “to lose on all points”.
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