100 years ago

The Coroner had given an unusual object lesson at a South Shields inquest on the body of a two-year-old child, John Matthews, who had set fire to his flannelette shirt while playing with matches, and died two hours afterwards.

Inviting the jury, witnesses and reporters into a back room of the court-house, the Coroner (Mr John Graham) gave a demonstration of the difference between ordinary flannelette and non-flammable flannelette. He took first a strip from the shirt which the child had worn, put the prongs of a toasting fork through it, and then applied a match.

The material blazed like a piece of tissue paper. He tried a piece of new flannelette with the same result, and then placed strips of the ordinary flannelette and the non-flammable material on separate prongs, and showed that whilst the former burned rapidly there was difficulty in igniting the other at all, and in keeping it burning when it was alight.

 

50 years ago

“Madame, take your husband’s grey check tweed suit, make it fit, and wear it.” That is what Hardy Amies had said at his recent couture show in London. Add a neat matching trilby and wear it pitched forward to be “with it” this autumn.

If you were not brave enough for this, it was simple to change the trousers for a flared or box pleated skirt – and that was all right by Amies. Apart from this, the news from Amies and Creed, the first of the London designers to kick off this week of fashion shows, was that skirts stayed the same length (just below the knee), the waist was usually where it should be (but could move an inch or two either way), skirts were pleated, bunched or flared, and jackets were slightly masculine.

The look occasionally harked back to the 1920s and 1930s – but more often was just plain, understated elegance.

 

25 years ago

We mourned this week the passing of a place that had never existed. Darrowby, fictional home of James Herriot’s phenomenally successful tales of a vet’s life, was no more.

The television series he spawned, All Creatures Great and Small, was said to have been killed off by its own success. Herriot, nom de plume of Thirsk vet Alf Wight, had finally run out of material after being swamped by the public’s desire for more stories of eccentric Yorkshire dalesmen.

The series currently being filmed for transmission in the autumn looked set to be the last to flicker across millions of television screens across the world. Then Darrowby, the Drover’s Arms, Skeldale House, Tricky-Woo, Mrs Pumphrey, the irascible Siegfried, the lovelorn Tristan and all the weird and wonderful breed of farmers would disappear for ever.