Landships II

Hi,

Try "GOOGLE" images or something like that and put it the things you want (year, female/male, ......), I think could help

DJ

Rectalgia wrote:

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The fashion specialists might offer some insights. Here's one

http://www.fashion-era.com/edwardian_photos.htm

Hmmm ... the link "how to date a photograph here" might be useful, haven't checked.

Steve

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 That's the material I was looking for.  Thanks.

For civilian figures your best bet would be going on the model railway sites. I do know that the German firm Preisir do lots of figures in various scales. For 1:72 take a look at thier1925 set flight crew and passengers ref 72510. They are made from "hard plastic" and the detail is excellent

I was thinking dapol railway workmen... a few would work for the crowd and the additional caps can be used for conversions..

http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/Review.aspx?id=1161

Prieser did a 1900 set of civilians in typical dress including cyclists in 1/87 perhaps these would work as background figure using false perspective...

Cheers

Master Box makes a number of 1/35 figures including civilian ones so I wondered in what they had would work.  I believe yes for at least some of them.

James H wrote:

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Also, slightly earlier photos show the bowler (derby) being worn by manual workers - a great many navvies digging canals and laying railway lines seem to have done so in a suit and bowler hat. Perhaps headgear had been more formally divided along class lines by 1914.

I just wonder if the Preiser figures are a shade too modern for a Presentation Tank ceremony. I appreciate that the Edwardian Era ended officially in 1910, but the fashions seem to have hung on, especially in poorer areas, and the Roaring Twenties were quite some way in the future.

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The suit was the standard form of dress for men in the latter half of the nineteenth century and on through to the 60s, when social norms changed as more daring young people rejected their parents' ways.

The suit was not specifically a sign of smartness in the way we see it now - it was the ordinary, everyday clothing of the working man, and, in nicer cloth and cut, the casualwear of wealthier gentlemen - for whom morning dress with thigh-length frock coat was their formal attire.

The wearing of the suit as we know it, originally known as the lounge suit and later as the business suit (after Americans adopted it for office wear), grew in the later years of the 19th century, until it was commonplace by the early 20th. Bowlers do seem to have been quite popular amongst working men, perhaps because they looked smarter than a flat cap and showed a link to those of higher status, but a good-quality bowler, properly shellacked, would have given the bonce some protection, rather like the modern-day hard hat; remember, the bowler was originally devised as a riding hat, to look stylish whilst being strong enough to protect the head.

As for headgear being divided along class lines by 1914? Well, for gentlemen the formal attire would be a topper, perhaps a straw boater for leisure (by a riverside, naturally), whilst the flat cap and bowler would be worn by working men - the bowler, perhaps, for the better-heeled working class, foremen and the like? I would expect professional men to wear something like a bowler or homburg, probably.

We nowadays tend to associate the bowler with city types, with pinstripe suit, umbrella and briefcase, but I think this will be a style which probably only came in about the thirties at a guess.

Morning dress was still worn by men as formal attire until the early thirties - menswear did not change so radically as womenswear in the twenties. We should also bear in mind the generation gap, as older people would tend to retain a more conservative appearance, falling some years behind the changing fashions of the 1900s-1920s. (see Downton Abbey, the excellent Maggie Smith as the Dowager Lady Grantham, and compare her high-necked floor-length gowns and indoor hat-wearing with the attire of the Grantham daughters)

If hairstyles are of interest to anyone, I understand that the bob first became a fashion as early as 1913, although it would not truly become popular until the early 20s. Nonetheless, some women would have bobbed hair (a longer sort of bob, not much above the shoulder) during and just after the war.