Reports

BECKS SKINNER - ‘’Mrs Davidson’s Wedding Dress’’ 13th May

We were pleased this week to welcome Rebecca Skinner again. She has entertained us before and this time was describing her research concerning Mrs Davidson’s Wedding Dress - on display at the Beacon Museum. She had asked the museum to arrange a residency for her to research clothing of Mrs Davidson’s period and with a research grant was able to learn a great deal about how clothes were made and the impact on society they made. She has been making replica dresses, including the undergarments with her hand driven sewing machine and had a lot of anecdotes she has recovered from archives of the time.

Mrs Davidson’s was 28 when she married on 18th April 1911. Her dress showed she had a 26” waist. As standardised sizes didn’t appear until the First World War just having a ‘wedding dress’ shows she was not from a poor background. The 1911 census tells us that she lived in Egremont with her father and her brother - a mining engineer and Ann Brown a 15 year old servant. She went on to have 3 boys and died on 10th April 1976

Rebecca had made replica clothes of the period including the corset protectors, petticoats etc. and has given talks on the period using her creations as a focus. She had a lot of information about the conditions at the time; she explained that 1 in 10 babies died before reaching one year old and 1 in 5 before reaching five. She suggested thinking ‘Downton Abbey’ to put Mrs Davidson’s life in context and everyone in the hall enjoyed thinking of how different life must have been for her compared to ours.