Have I Got Hats For You.... matrons and others

 

THE INTERESTING CASE OF THE MATRON HAT

Last week’s post combining Agatha Christie and Conservative hats was unsurprisingly popular, provoking much discussion in the comments.

Before moving on: I recommend all the comments, but have to feature this one, from blogfriend and fashion expert Daniel Milford Cottam:

It's worth looking at the Margaret Thatcher striped hat scandal (such as it was) in the early 1970s to show how little it took to throw Tories into conniptions, just because said hat was just the tiniest bit too eye catching. This is the hat in question BTW. A gift to 70s cartoonists....

https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/politician-margaret-thatcher-secretary-of-state-for-news-photo/575454443

The photo is from Getty Images, which means I can’t feature it here without paying, but I do advise all readers to go and take a look, and see what a real Conservative hat looks like.

And now: moving on to MATRON HATS, as mentioned briefly in the Christie post.

I first came across matron hats in the Margery Sharp book The Nutmeg Tree, where the wonderful Julia – a rackety and charming person – is trying to look respectable for her daughter’s potential in-laws. She purchases a Matron’s Model Hat, and the Christie post shows the hat I chose for her (top right in that post).

In a comment on an O Douglas book, blogfriend Marty reported a mention of Matron Hats, details later. So this is a Clothes in Books perfect storm, and I was off down the rabbit-hole.

My listing of and searching for ‘matron’s hats’ reminds me of the business of the bridge coats (first post on them here, but there are many more). In both cases:  an item that was wholly understood in its time, but a slippery matter, and hard to pin down or find a proper definition or picture. I have not been able to find any picture which shows a hat with the words ‘matron’s hat’ underneath. There’s your challenge, helpful readers. (Searches always hindered, of course, by pics of Hattie Jacques in a nurse's bonnet in Carry On films)

This is the nearest I got – from the Ladies Home Journal, July 1917. And this is a home-made hat, not an advert for a manufactured one.

But once you start looking for matron's hats, they do turn up all over the place in the fiction of the mid-20^th century.

So this was Marty’s find, from the work of O Douglas, in a letter from one character to another:

She is large and stout with the roundest, kindest blue eyes, and she wears “matrons’ hats”—high and trimmed, you’ve seen them advertised?—sitting right on the top of her head. (I always wondered who wore those things till I met Mrs. Heggie.)

That was in The Day of Small Things. Then in Taken by the Hand some kindly people are introduced:

They were both a little more than middle-aged, stout, comfortable-looking women, obviously well-to-do, with Persian-lamb coats, expensive handbags, and hats of the type known as “matrons” set high on their heads.

In Winifred Peck’s Bewildering Cares, the vicar’s wife goes shopping for a hat:

I discarded a matron’s hat, with a high ruche of black velvet (15s. 6d.), a turquoise blue saucer, and a grey soup-plate.

One of Patricia Wentworth’s nicest and saddest older ladies, in Spotlight, wishes she hadn’t risen in the world so much:

She hadn’t wanted the fur turban. She would have liked a nice neat matron’s hat in one of those light felts like she used to get when they had their business in Clapham, before Albert made all that money. The turban made her head ache.

There are specific ‘matron’s turbans’ in fact – much mentioned in a book of millinery hat patterns by Jane Lowen from 1925. (one of the suggested materials is the duvetyn mentioned in a recent Ellery Queen book/post). The matron’s turbans are sometimes laid out to contrast with ‘harem turbans’, which seems to be rather a Manichean choice.

harem or matron? you decide

But, I think it’s clear from these quotes that a matron’s hat doesn’t have to be dowdy, so although Julia probably was looking for frumpy, a matron’s hat could be expensive and attractive. We can sometimes have the idea these days that hats were utilitarian practical coverups, and perhaps some were. 

matrons at the seaside 1931

But I have  looked at endless photos, and read so much fiction of the mid 20^th Century, and I believe for many women it was a real outlet, an area where they suited themselves and chose something interesting. And yes, that's the women above. Their choices were important and careful, and they could let themselves go, even if they were a matron.

I am putting forward a theory that the defining characteristic of a matron’s hat was that it covered a lot of the head and hair – so it was not a saucer or soup-plate as mentioned above, not perched on the side of the head, or what we would now call a fascinator (though that meant something else then – see one of the first informative posts on the blog)  But, within that limitation, it could be highly decorated and even frivolous.

[Compare with a bonnet: in a post on Agatha Christie we said that  a bonnet is a hat with strings or ribbons under the chin, one that frames the face and covers the ears. Most certainly not a high-fashion hat on the 1930s, but the bonnets of the Victorian era were very much decorated, and this was mentioned in many books]

In the pictures here I have tried to give as many possible versions as  possible.

In a post on  The Case is Closed by Patricia Wentworth I said

I cannot recommend highly enough this page of hat patterns I found  – see the hats that people used to make for themselves in the Olden Days, and then go out in the street in: this is just a few of them.

Fashion expert Laurene Hampstead, in a 1945 book on colour and line, has this stern comment:

There are hats that make the young girl seem middleaged and that add years to the apparent age of the woman who has reached middle life. Yet these are the hats that have been designed for the matron. There are other hats that seem ridiculously young and naive on all but the freshest young face and figure, but which many middle-aged women wear in the mistaken hope that they will give a youthful appearance.

But I prefer Drucella Lowrie, who, in a 1952 book on restyling your hats, says:

Many designers will tell you that there is no such thing as  a ‘matron hat’ – that women, all women, should wear what they like, that any basic style can still be becoming to an older face when worn at the right angle, and that any colour can be appropriate.

I’m going to go with the idea that women enjoyed their hats and had fun with them, and did not pay too much attention to the judge-y experts.

If you find a good matron’s hat – bring it on in the comments.

Top picture – shopping for hats in 1942 from the Imperial War Museum’s wonderful collection of Home Front pictures.

Crochet hats from the free vintage knitting pattern site.

Other pictures mostly from my collection, and with thanks to JS and CP who both gave me books about hats...