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Subversive Performances, Masculine Pleasures
Thus clothing and gesture together produced a rakish mirage, subtly critical of the
status quo and engineered to impress cronies or attract the opposite sex.
Echoing this strategy, the wearing of West End styles by female participants in
the Mare Street parade was not in itself subversive. On the contrary, fashionable
display and a concern with appearances were skills expected of young, respectable
unmarried women in the 1890s. It was the deliberate choosing and mixing of
colors and styles, and their massed display by promenaders more usually associated
with the factory floor or the street market that constituted a challenge to
accepted models. At their most extreme such practices blurred into criminality as
a report in The Times of July 1914, quoted by Stephen Humphries in his oral
history of working-class childhood, attested:
At Marylebone yesterday Nellie Sheenan, 17, pattern matcher, was charged on remand
for stealing a pair of shoes. She belonged to a gang of about twenty girls who went about
the West End . . . taking advantage of the first opportunity to steal anything they could
get hold of. One feature of the gang was that they dressed alike in check skirts and blue
coats and all came from the neighbourhood of Harrow Road. 46
Similarly Montague Williams noted of the clothing of match factory girls that
“dress is a very important consideration with these young women. They have
fashion of their own, they delight in a quantity of color, and they can no more live
without their large hats and huge feathers than ’Arry can live without his bell
bottomed trousers.” 47 What is striking here is the complementarity between male
and female modes of presentation. As suburban masculine style can be read as
evidence of a domestic fashionability, a conscious distancing from the homosocial
separatism of the metropolitan office or club, so working-class subcultural style
could be said to have engineered a celebration of romantic friendship in the public
sphere of the street. However, this was a celebration that often developed into a
more disruptive lampooning of the rituals of courtship. Local historian W.J.
Fishman places more emphasis on the violence inherent in the sexually provocative
display of local fashionable taste, rather than the surface romance of its
variegated image:
The devil found work for idle hands long the Bow Road on Sundays. This was the
infamous monkey parade when gangs of young lads, aged between 15 and 20, marched
up and down the main highway between Grove Road and Bow Church molesting passers
by, especially young women on their way to Sunday service. Early spring brought the
lads out in force and their pranks were enumerated in court; such as “pushing respectable
people off the pavement.” Some of them had lamp black on their hands which they placed
on young girls’ faces, while others whitened their hands and clapped girls on their
backs. 48
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