(no subject)

[llywela]

I really love these photos.

These are some of my great-aunts, my grandmother’s older sisters, who were young women in the 1920s - Alma, Doris, Thelma and Phyllis (pictured twice, who died young of TB meningitis).

They were ordinary girls, the daughters of a dock labourer who raised 12 children to adulthood. They’d each of them left school by the age of 14 and went out to work, because the family needed the money. The jobs they found weren’t easy - they worked in factories and builder’s yards. They had a difficult life.

But somewhere amid the poverty and overcrowding, they got themselves dressed up and found the money to have these photos taken, and they look so beautiful and glamorous in their 1920s fashions. Good for them!

Comments

[solosundance.livejournal.com]

Lovely photos, and love the hairstyles! I have a similar 'flapper' portrait of one of my great-aunts with that same 'Yours' signature. And as you say, given what life probably offered, good for them!

[llywela13.livejournal.com]

Yeah, what I like about the photos is how they strike at the class divide. We think of 1920s glamour as being the realm of the wealthy, not something that could also belong to the poor - but these girls were not wealthy, they came from a large labouring family, yet they managed to find a bit of 1920s glamour to brighten their lives!

[thisbluespirit]

Aw, they really are fabulous photos!