All posts tagged: 1930s

Anchor’s Aweigh: Windy Lindy 2011

Saturday night was Windy Lindy 2011, the big event of Wellington’s annual swing calender. The theme this year was ‘Anything Goes’, as in the Cole Porter musical, where anything (and everything) goes on on the SS American. It’s the fourth year I’ve attended Windy Lindy, and every year I’ve shown you my costume, from my saucy Dorothy Gale costume for ‘Pin Ups and Poster Boys’, to my human chicken costume for ‘Freaks’, to last year’s glamourous satin number for ‘Puttin on the Ritz‘. Unfortunately, every year my costume planning seems to happen more and more last minute.  Eek! This year I didn’t really thing about it at all until the night before.  Double eek! But with some help from the Army Surplus store, my long time obsession with collecting images of nautically inspired fashions, a mad pattern draping and sewing spree, a jacket I made almost a decade ago, and a few random accessories in my dress up box, I pulled together a rather cute outfit (if I do say so myself). I made a …

Friday reads: I Capture the Castle

Writing Friday Reviews is hard work, and sometime I run out of things to review.  Besides, they can’t be that interesting for those of you who don’t live in NZ and can’t visit the stores I blog about. So, I’m going to break things up by doing book reviews/recommendations/musings on Friday.  Not the usual book reviews, but reviews of old, historical, and often quite obscure books. This weeks book isn’t so obscure: it made a list of the 100 most beloved English books, but it is historical, and is well worth reading. I Capture the Castle is (as I like to say in my brightest schoolmarm voice) “a bittersweet coming of age tale about a young woman discovering the joys and pitfalls of love and life.” Please don’t hold that against it! It’s also a beautifully detailed snapshot of English rural life in the 1930’s, and of the peculiar lines that were drawn between the classes in an age when social status was all about your family, and when even the upper class could be …

Family wedding photos

Here are some random family wedding photos from Mr D’s maternal side.  Sadly, we don’t even know exactly who some of the brides and grooms are, or when the wedding was. This is probably the oldest.  They are a rather sad looking group aren’t they?  And we aren’t even sure it is a wedding photo – only the small bouquet carried by the seated woman and the posy in the standing woman’s belt hint at that.  The photo does reveal one dirty little family secret though.  See those trees in the background.  Yep.  Eucalyptus.  Some of Mr D’s ancestors came from Australia.  *wink* This photo is much more ‘bridal’, but the bride looks just as unhappy!  Poor thing!  Don’t you just love her huge sleeves though?  And the little boy lying awkwardly at the front of the group? I think that the man in the light suit is the same man as in the first photo (those ears rather give it away!) and the boy sitting in front of him may be the same boy …