TELEVISION WARDROBE AT ALEXANDRA PALACE

Promotion from Make-up girl to Assistant Wardrobe Manager in 1938 was an uncomfortable move for me. Jeanne "Johnny" Bradnock should have had the job. She too had come from films and had been a little longer than I in the department. I recognised that she was more efficient and had a wide experience of stage and stage-craft, having been a ballet dancer. She was a very pleasant person, popular with colleagues, artists and anyone she had to deal with. But - although her marriage had been broken up, (by a relative), she hadn't sought a divorce.

At that time the BBC, like the Civil Service and the Teaching profession, didn't employ married women. I never knew how strictly this rule applied. Out boss, Mary Allen, had been creating the department of Make-up and Wardrobe from its beginning at Alexandra Palace. She was married, but at some stage she divorced her husband. Her theatre experience was a valuable asset for the BBC. She was enthusiastic about the new medium and had a flair for finding new answers to the new problems in make-up and costume, co-operating with and learning from the engineering side. Producers appreciated her wide knowledge of costume and her cheerful approach.

I wondered why she had chosen to promote me, with my limited experience of the entertainment scene and my general difference. I was conscientious and able to learn quickly in the department without showing personal ambition. I later decided that my restraint suited her better than out going, popular personalities. Miss Allen was friendly towards all her staff and always pleasant to me, but I never felt at ease with her and I thought tact the better part of valour. I wanted to keep an interesting job with a fair salary, (how much I don't remember, though I began in make-up at £6 a week), for the Slump had affected our family.

I did speak out one. We all ate in the canteen at A.P. and I usually sat with Producers' secretaries, picking up a lot about their bosses' working methods. Miss Allen suggested that now I was promoted I ought to sit with seniors - like herself and the administration staff. I brooded silently with annoyance and next day told her I'd rather scrub floors than be snobbish towards friends. She quickly withdrew her suggestion and told me to behave as I usually did. Secretaries were under-appreciated then. They were as intelligent as their seniors, working hard as assistants, organisers and memories for their Producers. In general I don't recall a great deal of "class distinguishing", but there wasn't much socialising between production staff and engineering staff.

There were several ways of making the awkward journey to Alexandra Palace when I moved from Hampstead to Chelsea after the war, by buses or by underground, then walking up the hill from Wood Green station, if I missed the single-decker that stopped at the Palace. The least tiresome way was to go to Broadcasting House and join the coach that ran at stated time to Alexandra Palace. Working hours are now hazy in memory - in Make-up there was a rota of alternate days from 10am to the end of evening transmission - about 10.30pm. In the Wardrobe I think I worked something like officer hours, but prepared to stay until evening transmission ended, with days off for the Saturday or Sunday I was on duty.

Miss Allen shared her little officer - was it about 6 x 10ft? (But it did have a window) - off the wardrobe room, with her secretary, Jean Stevenson, and me. There was Miss Allen's desk and a spare chair for Producers when they discussed their television programmes, Stevie's typing table, my smaller table and a television monitor. The Wardrobe room was a fair size, with a passage used as a costume store, leading to toilets, announcers' dressing rooms and a room for performers with a bath in it. An actor returning to this dressing room nearly passed out when he found a seal relaxing in the bath. Beyond were the make-up rooms. Mrs Robb, the Wardrobe Mistress, who had come from films, had a tiny office, also sited off the Wardrobe main room, which had a door opening on the main corridor and stairs to the ground floor and canteen.

The Wardrobe room was furnished with a large table, an electric sewing machine where the seamstress, Mrs Hearnshaw, was ready to run up anything from curtains needed for a set to items asked for at the last minute, and replacements in the grey cotton material used when the cathode-ray tubes were tiresome about colours, especially red, or patterns. Mrs Hearnshaw sometimes made skirts and tops for the announcers in safe material, perhaps attractive furnishing materials. But day and evening dresses worn by Jasmine Bligh and Elizabeth Cowell were usually bought economically off-the-peg. For special occasions, fashion designers like Doris and Anna Zinkeisen, were asked to design special clothes which I think Mrs Hearnshaw stitched. She was given a young assistant and another sewing machine. I think both seamstresses had been dressmakers in the locality, but they adapted very quickly and enthusiastically to television's needs and the hectic atmosphere.

Usually dramas might require costumes to be made in the Wardrobe department because they weren't available for hire - R.U.R. and The Insect Play for example. The Art Director, Peter Bax, designed them and the seamstresses made them up. Television couldn't afford to have costumes made specially by costumiers, but sometimes we were lucky and hired those made for theatre or films and afterwards put into stock - at an increased hiring charge.

Four dressers completed the Wardrobe staff. Name of the last quarter I worked with; Miss Maitland, Miss Thorp, Mr Horton and Mr Connor. All of them had learned their demanding hob as dressers in the theatre, but I doubt if they had had to deal with so may quick changes in such cramped conditions as those of television studios. I've no recollection of their first names, for we were punctilious about formal addressing.

Small hide-outs, booths the size of cupboards, were constructed in the ubiquitous grey cloth and placed out of vision among cables, lamps, mobile cameras, props and small sets. There was a mirror and a shelf for make-up and just enough space for a dresser to help the artist with a change of costume - and of course a curtain to preserve the modesty so respected then.

It was often a very complicated business. Among the most harassing changes I remember were those in a play about Christopher Wren, ageing from youth to old age when his face had to be covered with boils. William Devlin had two minutes to rush down the corridor from Studio B to Studio A, where he sat while make-up emphasised wrinkles and stuck on prepared 'boils' and a dresser wrapped him in dressing-gown and shawl. There was no lack of excitement in the days of live transmission, but instead of panic some sort of vibrancy was added to the action. Once Gwen Catley as Cinderella sang out of vision behind a screen while being helped to change her dress.

Space in the Wardrobe department was used to the last centimetre. Two rows of shelves on the high walls held labelled cardboard boxes containing an extraordinary assortment of articles - feather boas and artificial flowers, trimmings for period hats, charwomen's blouses and skirts, men's caps and felt hats, "white shirts", tinted cream to avoid glare by the tubes in the cameras, and all kinds of wearables often donated by staff. Beneath the shelves, against the walls, were clothes rails where hired costumes were hung on their arrival from the costumiers. In a corner stood "Tilly", the tailor's dummy used to model materials being tested before the cameras under lighting conditions, saving a human model from being frizzled.

There was floor space round the table for chairs for the dressers, when they sat to make-do-and-mend or have infrequent rests. As part of the team they contributed ideas to discussions. Their experiences often helped me out. One day a Producer rushed in to ask for a Chinese head-dress for the programme rehearsing for afternoon transmission. I hadn't a clue from his verbal description. But Mr Horton know what they were like and together we concocted one using Ping-Pong balls painted gold and hung on springy wires as the main decoration, to the Producer's delight. On another occasion Mr Horton solved an emergency by going to Wood Green to buy a woman's two-way stretch for a male dancer who'd not brought a jockstrap.

Mrs Robb and the dressers provided encouragement and assurance to nervous artists as well as attending to their costumes. Mrs Robb was excellent at coping with temperamental members in a cast. A brilliant actress from Dublin, new to television, resorted to a bottle for Dutch courage. Fortunately it was gin, so Mrs Robb kept secretly diluting it with water, persuading her to eat, and her performance didn't falter.

Work went on at different stages with preparations for more than one production - starting by reading scripts of plays some weeks ahead and doing necessary research. The Producer had probably discussed his requirements with Miss Allen. In the meantime, the cast of another programme would have to be contacted at a rehearsal in some church hall in central London, or the upper room in a pub, to tell them where to go for fittings - with many reminders by telephone. Delivery of costumes was made one or two days before the date of the programme, with it's rehearsal, the dress rehearsal, before the cameras. There was a monitor in a corner of the studio for make-up and costumes to be followed, moving from camera to camera, reacting to the tubes. "Cam", D R Campbell, Television Lighting Engineer, was at hand to advise us about problems we hadn't anticipated.

At the first stage of dressing a production, Miss Allen would take me through the list of the Producer's requirements and we would study illustrations of period clothes in the few books we had. The question of reference books revealed the unfriendly attitude of sound radio at Broadcasting House to the upstart television. We could borrow the few costume books available in the Broadcasting House Library for a limited time, but none could be bought for our own use. I remember arguing on the 'phone for a particularly useful book to be given to us and meeting the inevitable refusal. I decided I would just have to go on renewing the loan, but the Chief Librarian read my thoughts over the line and said tartily that continuos lending couldn't be allowed.

Miss Allen suggested which costumier I should inspect for appropriate costumes that came within the spending allowance of the play. I spent a lot of my time going down to central London - by public transport or the BBC coach if it was available - walking round the costumiers which fortunately wee quite close to each other. The BBC only sanctioned taxis when a large package had to be carried.

Among the costumiers I remember were, Nathans, Samuels, Bermans and more expensively, Simmons, Morris Angels and Moss Bross. We even had a furrier who provided luxury fur coats, the wages of sin of Edgar Wallace heroines. I found Nathans the most agreeable to deal with. Their hiring fees were reasonable. They had a good selection of period clothes - even if the periods weren't clearly defined. The Middle Ages looked similar for several centuries, and dresses with close-fitting bodices and farthingales or panniers with lots of trimmings covered many years after the Tudors. Best of all, the two assistants Miss Florrie and Mr Gillan, did their best to almost match our requirements and make small adjustments. They taught me a lot and I even learned the names of pieces of armour from Mr Gillan.

But plays with Roman characters were the worst. Only elderly actors managed their togas effectively. Lower ranks wearing tunics rushed around as if in their shapeless night-shirts.

It was a relief when, in 1938, a Producer took Julius Caesar in modern dress - straight from the Granville Theatre, Fulham - where it was drawing attraction to a dangerous resemblance between a historic dictator and the one who had us all on edge, Hitler.

Among my perks were good seats at theatres whose plays were to be transmitted form the theatre or reproduced in A.P. studios. I had to see that the clothes worn were suitable for our cameras and if any changes ought to be made. There was a trying experience with a play called the "Cardinals' Candlesticks", with six Cardinals in red cassocks. We could do nothing about it when the cameras in use varied the shades from almost white to nearly black as they moved from one shot to another, which must have been confusing for viewers. Mrs Hearnshaw ran up a set of cassocks in the grey cloth for priests in the future.

Then this matter of modesty - if a solo artist wore a dress with a plunging neckline, we had to modify it with artificial flowers, spoiling a superbly cut dress, to the singer's annoyance. Acrobatic acts were popular, the performers dressed for action in bras and pants, named bikinis after the war. When the afternoon programme ended, Mr Cock rang the Wardrobe department to say that navels were showing and must be got rid of at the evening performance. What could we do without restricting the girls' movements? We stuck stretchy plaster over the depression colouring it to match the skin. On the screen that night it looked like a bruise - as if they'd been kicked in the stomach.

D H Munro introduced the Saddlers Wells and other ballet companies to viewers - and to the staff. They brought their own costumes and used the dressing rooms across the corridor from the studios. I enjoyed the lively companies of young dancers; Robert Helpman and Margot Fonteyn, who were becoming well known in the theatre, and I slipped in to the studios as often as possible to watch dancers who became world famous. Generally Wardrobe was too busy to watch rehearsals as continuously on the monitor as the make-up staff did, so they looked out for any problems with costumes.

A make-up girl usually accompanied Outside Broadcasts if they were transmitting some event where close-ups, or entertaining scenes were part of transmission, and she would attend to changes of costumes. I only remember one occasion when I looked for costumes for O.B's. A boat race was introduced by a flash-back to an early race, with crews dressed in sports clothes and straw boaters of the period.

There were types of entertainment brought from London's West End. New to most viewers were the sophisticated cabarets form restaurants and night clubs, with Douglas Byng and the two Hermiones - Gingold and Baddeley. Portions of popular revues, with contributions from Noel Coward and others now forgotten, needed little attention from Wardrobe. Nor did the fashion displays presented by Mrs Mary Adams, Talks Producer, with society girls acting as models, or mannequins as we called them. James Laver from the Victoria and Albert Museum, entertainingly supplied an informative backing to fashion, with his talk about clothes and their relation to behaviour in history.

Music Hall programmes were popular for there were still performers surviving from their heyday at the turn of the century, and they could borrow from our stock in the cardboard boxes. But George Robey always brought his own clothes, make-up and dresser.

For three months while Miss Allen was on sick leave, I was in charge of the Wardrobe department, rather enjoying the responsibility but playing it cool. There were problems and crises, inevitable in the early days. Stephen Thomas produced short programmes of Sea Shanties, with the singers in 18th century costume, which for some reason didn't reach A.P. until the day of transmission. There was almost a panic, but it was worse when I discovered their 'tarred' hats weren't there. Shops and costumiers were closed by this time, so we had to try and make them. The stiffest material we had was buckram and we set to cutting crowns and brims and stitching them together. The paint shop sprayed them with paint and they were dried in the boiler room. The result was headgear with wavy brims. Stephen Thomas was very good about it, letting the sailors sing hatless.

During my three months I had to attend Monday's Production Meeting, when Gerald Cock discussed the week's output of programmes. I sat silent, impressed by Mr Cock's emphasis on sincerity in the work that went out. A suggestion by someone from O.B's that they should repeat the previous year's touching little tribute a the Cenotaph, when an unknown woman placed a tiny posy after all the important people had laid their wreaths, was scornfully denounced as phoney by Mr Cock. He was also dismissive about a dance by a progressive group illustrating the movement of 'dust'.

At the end of my time in charge I got an unexpected sign of appreciation from him - "Just a personal note to thank you for the excellent work you have done in Miss Allen's absence. I may seem to you that we are unappreciative, but we know what has been going on". This pleased me as much as the extra cash I was paid - value - I've forgotten!

Unfortunately my two diaries for the months before I resigned in February 1947 are full of empty pages, so I have no record of our return to Alexandra Palace in June 1946. It must have been about the end of that year that a Russian group from Soviet television, too small to be a delegation, visited Alexandra Palace to see how English television was progressing. Two or three men accompanied by a small woman listened to my account of the Wardrobe department. The best looking man was charming and spoke English well. Seeing our friendly exchange, the silent woman shepherded the man away. Was she the watchdog of the KGB making sure her party didn't get too friendly? It was an informal visit with none of our administration staff present, but for me an exciting close-up of people from a mysterious country. I don't remember anyone writing about it, or mentioning it.

Isabel Winthrop