Here is my Great Aunt Maude c1925 inviting us through the gateway of a house, where she was probably lodging. I have the original, which is very small and printed on quite thin photographic paper. It was most likely taken by a friend, using Maude’s own camera. She would also have developed it herself, as she was a keen amateur.
Maude was born in 1893 and is probably in her early to mid-thirties here. She was unmarried, and working, so could afford to dress in the fashions of the time. By now women were cutting their hair short and wearing clothes which hid their feminine curves. The garçon look was very typical at this time; in stark contrast to the long hair and S shaped silhouette before the war. Waists were dropped and hemlines rose to just below the knee. Flat chests and narrow hips completed the shape. Maude is also wearing bar strap shoes which were popular throughout much of the 1920s.
I remembered this photograph when Alan posted the one below a few weeks ago on his own blog, News from Nowhere, so when he chose it as this week’s Sepia Saturday prompt, I plucked my own snap of Maude, quite literally, from the shoebox.
They make a nice pairing. Alan’s is the girl at No 24, but as Maude is standing slightly to one side I have no idea of the door number. Both images have similarly spiked fencing and brickwork, although no 24 appears to have a rather nice tiled front path and a shallow step. Both images are damaged slightly as no 24 has a a ghost image of the fence and gateway to the right, overlaying no 22, and Maude’s has a thumbprint, in all likelihood her own, on the left.
The girl at no 24 is also much younger than Maude and the photo itself could belong in a slightly earlier time, before 1920, (when bar strap shoes first appeared) and when higher waists and sashes were popular.
Both ladies have charming smiles and seem to be equally proud of their houses and their fashion sense.
Just fifty or so years after Alan’s picture, I too became the girl at no 24, when I moved with my parents and brother to what would be the family home for many years to come. Sadly all our photos of that house are of the interior and garden, and even the street outside, but not the front door, and certainly none of me posing in front of the door. Great Aunt Maude once again, has come to the rescue.