When I left art school with my sort of degree I wanted to be a fashion illustrator and I couldn't get a job. because I wasn't commercially trained at the art school. So I went to work in a dress shop. And I suppose I was about nineteen or twenty and I sold clothes. And that lasted for some time. I was still in Oxford. Then it was decided I wasn't going to succeed. So I was sent to a very expensive beauty culture school in Sloane Street in London and I took a Diploma in Beauty Culture and was fully qualified. And I look a job for two years in the West End in a very big hair dressers. Then I decided I must go back to fashion because it was fashion I was interested in.
I lived in all sorts of bed sitters at the time. I certainly don't remember how much I was paid at those jobs. It was too long ago. None of my friends or family were any where near me. I was in London and they were in Oxford. I went to Woolens(?) which doesn't exist any more. It was the most elegant store in Knightsbridge It was absolutely amazing and they had very splendid fashion shows there. They would have collections there which I used to help with. And I had a friend that I'd been at art school with who'd got a job at Covent Garden making head dresses. And after I'd been at Woolans for quite a long time she suddenly contacted me and said' There's a job going in the West End, in the theatre. It's for a firm called Alex Shanks Stage Costumes Ltd and it's in Garrick Street.'
Well, Covent Garden had two companies, one that goes away and one that stays at home and they wanted to duplicate the whole of Swan Lake for the company that were going away and they wanted them copied. So would I be interested? So I gave in my notice, foolishly and I went to see Alex Shanks who incidentally was quite a famous producer as well as a costumier. And he was just going away. And I got the job of sitting in an empty office with a dress stand. And the entire production of Swan Lake, the costumes and head dresses and jewellery were brought in to me and I sat for three weeks to a month they were all in there and copied them all in detail so that they could be remade in Alex Shank's work room for the second company. While I was there a very famous woman designer Beatrice Dawson was there one day and she saw some of my drawings. And she suggested that I move on to television. Television had just started colour. Colour had only been going two or three years. So I took my portfolio and I was interviewed at Television Centre at Wood Lane, a vast place, by a panel and I was offered the job of costume designer. And so I went.
To start with I had to have a trail round the department which was a very big department, very big. There was the Wardrobe Area where all the rails of clothes for different productions were kept. And there were stock rooms and there was a filming area where you put your things on ready to go filming. And the offices were very big. And I had a week or two trailing round there. Then I went to Lime Grove Studios for three weeks on a course teaching me how to use colour on television, which was still quite new. And I don't know how many weeks I was a sort of trainee. Then I was given my first show which frightened me when I got it. It was Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques and there was some filming attached to it, local outside filming. And the production assistant said to me 'Oh, it's a piece of cake.' But doing your first show and being in your first studio you work until 10o'clock at night. The recording finished at 10o'clock. It was once a week only. And that was my introduction.
Now, of course, it's very difficult for me to say what came next. But for a long time I did modern series and things like that. And then they gave me Little Women. There are names nobody would know now because it was so long ago. An actress called Angela Down, who was quite popular The mother was a woman called Stephanie Bidmead, who died quite young. And Martin Jarvis was in it. He's quite a well known name. There was a lot of costume and a lot of designing. It was my first really big design programme. And I went away on location We went to Dorset. Now taking costumes, period costumes in particular, away filming you had to have your wits about you in case you leave anything behind. You can't knock on a door and ask for a bonnet. And we were away for one or two weeks. And that was my first big period production
To cut a long story short, I was there for twenty five years And I did some enormous things. There was a programme called Churchill's People, very heavy and very intellectual and I did every other episode. And the first one started in AD43 and it covered the centuries. That was quite an experience. Of course, you got some costumes that you weren't designing. There were enormous areas where you'd go to hire costumes. Costumiers were all over the place. and you had your favourites. And you had to acquire the help of a lot of dressmakers and jewellers.
Time passed and I went on. I did things that I've forgotten that I did. The last thing that people might remember was called The Duchess of Duke Street which was a long period serial with somebody called Jemma Jones playing the lead. And I enjoyed that enormously. I had fun things to do. I did The Goodies which was immensely popular and we had a wonderful time. We used to go away on location a lot and Bill and Tim and Graham were marvellous people. We used to have great fun. We all got to know each other very well. So I did light entertainment and everything. All sorts of things.
Then somewhere at the end of that I got married and for some reason then I changed my mind and I then became the drama script assessor at the costume department. And all drama serials and play departments sent me their scripts that they wanted to do and I had to assess what that was going to cost them, how many staff were needed and how much it would cost for assistants and how many designers were needed. I did that for two years and then I took early retirement.
There were a lot of assistants in the department and most of the assistants were female and your programme warranted whether you would need assistants. Sometimes you'd have one or two or three. And their ambition, of course, was to become a designer. Probably many of them thought they were a darn sight better than you were. And when you were doing a programme you used to have to estimate how many dressers you would need. There were armies of people who were dressers who you had on your production. Every star was allocated a dresser and you had to say when you were going filming how many dressers you would need with you. You would obviously only be given the minimum. I did a series called 'The Spies' which ran for a long time. We filmed in Malta for a month and I was only allowed one male assistant and I did the women myself.
I had a pretty good general knowledge although strangely enough Oxford Art School, college it really was, was an extraordinary place. For a place like Oxford you would think it would be better. I did all sorts of things like architecture and pottery while I was there, because I was there for six years. They were pretty good. But the woman that was in charge of the costume area, it was fashion really that I was into at that time, was an absolute fuddy-duddy of a woman and my tuition in what I finally landed up in was very poor. So my ability must have been there naturally because I got no training from that particular woman who was in charge of us and I think a lot of outside experience in working in shops like Woolens helped me in some ways. But of course I went to the British Museum but mostly I did my research through books and went to libraries so my general knowledge of historical costume was pretty good. I didn't have too much trouble with research except, of course, when I did something like Churchill's People which went back to AD 43 when it was a matter of here say what you were doing. Some things took more research than others. My favourite always was Victorian and Edwardian particularly. I didn't care for the 20s much. So that I could design without too much research when I was doing that period I would say that the majority of thing that I did were round about that time. ‘Kean' was set back in 17 something so I did a fair amount of research on that but that came mostly from books. There weren't many places that you could get a lot of information from. You had to hunt the libraries.
You had a month's annual leave, as it was called. Anyway, if you were ultra successful, I had one or two things that were called special awards And I got one for my work and it was to travel with. And you had to say what you wanted. You were given a month's time off. This was for merit, for long service and for what you'd done. And the powers that be, you had to go and be interviewed, I think it was decided that I'd get three weeks, and we decided to tour cathedral cities and they approved of that. So we got that and you got a sum of money and three weeks off. And I got one or two special awards for service to the BBC. They were money. I think that's all I've got to say about that.
I have enjoyed my working life enormously, both in the theatre I knew I'd arrived. When I was at Woolens, which was a wonderful shop. But it was a shop, no matter how glamorous. As soon as I got to Alex Shanks Stage Costumes I felt I had arrived. I had wasted a lot of time between art school and getting there, working in shops and things, and I suddenly thought 'this is it.' and settled in very quickly and felt very at home. When we were at Alex Shanks we used to do a lot of work with Covent Garden and we used to go there quite a lot and that was making their costumes, that wasn't designing, I would sketch what they wanted made. We went to a lot of theatres. My boss was a producer of musical shows and he used to do a big show at Blackpool every season and we used to go up there with him to put that on and to various theatres to put plays on and I always felt quite relaxed. And I did in television once I'd done my first show. You worried, of course you worried. I was a terrible worrier. But it was good. It was all good. I enjoyed it all. I look back upon it with great fondness and I made life-long friends there, some dear people.
