The Gown(112)

But back to my lunch and the brainstorming session, because I still needed a hook for my story—even more so once I’d discounted the possibility of telling it from the point of view of the bride or anyone in her inner circle. And that’s when two words popped into my head: the gown.

A few seconds later, we were admiring pictures of the royal wedding on my phone, and I had the central question on which my story would turn: who made Princess Elizabeth’s wedding gown? I knew it had been designed by Norman Hartnell; what I wanted to know, rather, was who constructed it. Who were the women who created the dazzling embroidery that embellished the gown, and what were their stories?

As a writer and a historian, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of sacrificing historical authenticity for dramatic tension, and that’s why my first four books have as their protagonists entirely fictional characters. While the same is true of The Gown—Ann, Miriam, and Heather are entirely products of my imagination—its cast also includes a number of real-life figures, among them people who were known to have worked at Hartnell, but whose personal stories were never recorded and are now all but impossible to accurately recount.

This uncomfortable truth dawned on me not long after I began work on The Gown: I would have to fictionalize the stories of real people, as well as insert fictional characters into a setting populated by known and recognizable figures. I would also have to take some liberties with minor aspects of recorded history, if only to make the story I was telling more comprehensible.

Germaine Davide, for instance, the formidable Frenchwoman employed by Hartnell as his chief fitter and known to everyone in the workrooms as Mam’selle, was mentioned by name in any number of sources, among them Hartnell’s memoirs, but she wrote no memoir herself and gave no interviews, and details of her personal life, at a remove of more than half a century, are now impossible to unearth. The same is true of Edith Duley, who was known to have been a senior figure in the embroidery workrooms: I came across her name in several newspaper articles, and I believe she is the woman described as the “head of embroidery” in a photograph that appeared in a Picture Post article in the autumn of 1947, but that is all. In his memoir Silver and Gold, Hartnell also mentions a woman named Flora Ballard, but she proved even more elusive, and so for the purposes of narrative clarity I elected to streamline the number of women in supervisory roles in the workroom. To that end, Miss Duley is not only a composite of several people, but also a fictional character in every respect apart from her name and the barest details of her physical appearance.

Even more daunting, for me, was the mystery of the embroiderers themselves. Dozens of articles were written about the creation of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding gown—nearly every British magazine and newspaper ran one or more in the latter half of 1947—but no one, it seems, thought to interview a single embroiderer.

If anyone from Hartnell were to read The Gown, they might reasonably protest that they don’t recognize any of my characters: not Mr. Hartnell, not Mam’selle or Miss Duley or Miss Holliday, and certainly not Ann or Miriam. In this I hope I may be forgiven, not only for conjuring their characters from the ether, but also in attaching real names to largely fictional creations. Only one person, within the walls of Hartnell, is true to life: Betty from the sewing workroom.

Betty Foster, née Pearce, was one of four seamstresses who worked on the wedding gown, and it was only by the purest stroke of good fortune that I met her at all. For months I had attempted, with diminishing success, to get in touch with anyone who had worked at Hartnell in the 1940s, and although many decades had passed I was hopeful that I might yet find someone who could tell me about life in the workrooms.

I had tried, and failed, to gain access to Sir Norman Hartnell’s personal papers and archive, which are held privately. I had contacted the curators at the Royal Collection, with the hopes that they would be able to put me in touch with one or more of the women who had once worked at Hartnell, but they were unable to help me.

With those doors firmly closed, I consoled myself with a trip to London to see the wedding gown itself, which was on display at Buckingham Palace as part of the Fashioning a Reign exhibition. I also wandered around Bruton Street and Bruton Place (though I was never brave enough to knock on the door and ask to go inside), and I searched online and in person at every library and museum with holdings related to Norman Hartnell and the royal wedding of 1947.

I was gathering ever more information, but it still felt incomplete, for I was never able to find more than the barest scraps of information about the women who sewed and embroidered the wedding gown. A few photographs, some maddeningly vague details in Hartnell’s published memoirs—that was all. With barely more than a year until the first draft of my book was due, I was still bumping up against closed doors.

I wasn’t willing to give up, however, so I asked myself: if I can’t speak to those who worked for Hartnell, or read their stories, or even unearth basic details such as the shape of an ordinary day in the workrooms, can I speak to someone who does similar work today? And that’s how I ended up at Hand & Lock, London’s oldest and most prestigious bespoke hand embroidery atelier, on another trip to England in early 2017. I wanted to know how it felt to sit in front of an embroidery frame for hours on end, to take those first stitches on an immaculate piece of silk, to feel my eyes blur and my neck ache after hours of concentration on that same piece of silk and the motifs I had been tasked with creating.