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Tailored for Mature Women

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Tailored for mature women?

What, you using fishing line in the basting to see if you can hook us? Are you even now looking for the bones of ancestors to reinforce the stays you’re hoping to put back in our blouses? Stay was never a smart command anyway, although it might make a reasonable request from a partner more into respect than careful constructions of acceptable appearances.

Tailored for mature women?

Honey, you think a tuck and dart could possibly contain us? We will bust your seams, strip your stitches and move on. They were never sewn with us in mind, those bits of disconnected thread, and it shows. We are too much, too many, too big for you to handle. Love handles? You should be so lucky.

Tailored for mature women. Ha. Women over 50 know what’s worth worrying about, and what’s worth fighting for. Your cute little swaying tops with floral arrays charmingly arranged to accentuate our bosoms and keep eyes off our hips are so many fire extinguishers sent to a flood. You honestly think most men have spent our careers looking anywhere besides our breasts? We’ve had 30 years of professional experience that says otherwise; just where are these marketing surveys about our flesh being conducted, boys?

Send us bespoke blazers in faux-equity-repelling prints. Fashion us a transparent blouse that makes others see how we feel. Trousers where the rubbing fabric sounds warnings. How about shoes that do the dancing for us, backwards, high heels optional. If we want to wear them we will, and if we don’t, we won’t.

That’s just one of many ways we expect to decide what happens to our own bodies, all you tailors out there making your stitches smaller and more binding.

Tailored for mature women, my ass.

More Ice, Sir?

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Jack gets over the line in time, for a change – –

My cousin Donald is the family historian and posted this today – So I had an ancestor who survived the sinking of the Titanic!

This post is for my Beck cousins in the main, and anyone who is interested in the sinking of the Titanic and the Battle of Jutland.

My great great grandfather was William Beck or Back, born in Musselburgh in 1843. He was one of eight, and was the second youngest with a younger brother Andrew who was born in 1845. The family appears to have changed the spelling to Beck in the 1860’s. Thus William was married in 1864 under the name of Back to Janet Sutherland but from the census of 1871 onwards he used Beck as his name.

William and Andrew appear to have been close as they both trained as House Painters in Edinburgh before converting to Ship’s Painters. They are resident together in Dumbarton in the 1871 census where I believe they worked in the Denny shipyard. They both took painting contracts in the Hampshire shipyards and one of William’s daughters married on the Isle of Wight, whilst I now know that both of Andrew’s daughters, Janet and Mary Beck, lived in Southhampton.

Janet Sutherland Beck (named in honour of her aunt) was born in Musselburgh in 1869 whilst Mary Beck was born in Dumbarton in 1871. Janet married Southampton man, Henry William Candy in Southhampton in 1887, and they had ten children before he died in 1915. She re-married Charles West in 1919 and died in Hampshire in 1929. Mary married Frederick Griffiths in 1891and had five children.

The eldest daughter of Henry Candy and Janet Sutherland Beck was Henrietta Janette Candy. She married Albert Charles Edward Self in May 1912, just a month or so after the sinking of the RMS Titanic. Albert Charles Edward Self was a stoker or ‘fireman’ on the Titanic.

Details of A C E Self are found here https://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/…/edward-self.html

Who knew that each Titanic survivor has his or her own web-page!

The eldest son of Henry Candy and Janet Sutherland Beck was Andrew William Charles Candy. He joined the Royal Navy in 1911. from 1912 to 1918 he was a stoker on HMS King George V which was a super dreadnought and flag ship of the first battle squadron at the Battle of Jutland in 1916 (which was not heavily engaged in the battle it has to be said).

I’ve got photos of Janet Sutherland Beck and her second husband Charles West. I’ve also got a photo of Albert Self. I think I can see Charles and Janet, and other English relatives in a photograph of my great grandparents John and Georgina Beck, taken in Hampshire in the early 1920s. Always wondered who they were.

I believe I am named after John Beck of Hampshire although I’ve always been known as Jack.