Margaret Murray and Jane Koster

THE ODHAMS SERIES

During WWII, and for some years afterwards, Margaret Murray and Jane Koster wrote a series of knitting books, which were published by Odhams.  There were, I believe, 8 in the series.

My Ravelry bookshelf

These are a fascinating window into those years. There is little mention of war, but there are notes at the back on how to take apart old and shapeless garments to produce new 'smart' clothing.  There are also 'blouse fronts' - shirts without a back for wearing under a suit.  The description says that these are for when you are in a hurry, or don't want to spend the time knitting a whole shirt - the reality must have been that sometimes you only had enough yarn for half a blouse.  There must have been plenty of embarrassing occasions over the years when a woman couldn't take off her jacket despite the heat because she was wearing only the front of a blouse.

I have had two of these books for some years - purchased at a 1940s reconstruction weekend, and found two more in our local Oxfam bookshop last week. I've now added another two bought on line, but the final two will have to wait until I can find them at a price that I'm prepared to pay.

There are common themes:

• Shirts or blouses for women; 
• pullovers and cardigans for women in two sizes: normal, and 'mature';
• pullovers, 'tank tops' and cardigans for men; 
• underwear for both sexes; 
• childrens garments including underwear and warm pullovers;
• baby garments;
• scarves and gloves;
• other garments - mostly for women: hats, dresses, skirts, etc.;
• household items: doilies, runners, etc.

Yarn was much finer than today, making it difficult to get yarn to knit up some of these garments, however, because of the very much smaller size of people in those days the sizing of the womens' garments has a normal size of about 34 inch bust. 'Mature' would have been 38 ish, relatively small by today's standards.

All illustrations have bracing comments under them.  These seem to be designed to encourage the knitter (female, of course) that the garment would be very acceptable to the wearer.  I don't imagine that people had a lot of choice.  Yarn was rationed too, and many garments must have been made up from older worn garments unpicked and re-knitted.

Over the next few blog posts I'm going to look at some of these themes, and consider what changes you need to make to be able to knit some of these garments today.