The credit crunch is seeing Britain enter a new era of thrift and austerity. Emma Pinch finds out what it was like in the 1940s

SEWING machines are flying out of the shops. Flower beds are being dug up in favour of vegetable patches.

It all has a familiar ring to it for Dorothy Matthews, from Eastham, who was a style- conscious teenager when Make Do and Mend culture had its first incarnation.

And the message from down the decades is – making do doesn’t spell misery.

Far from it. “We had fun,” says Dorothy Matthews, now 83.

Since the start of the credit crunch, craft products and seeds have seen a surge in sales.

John Lewis, despite suffering from a sharp fall in overall revenue, reports that it has sold 18% more sewing machines and 40% more buttons than a year ago. Dress pattern sales have shot up by 12%.

In November, at the Paris fashion shows, Dame Vivienne Westwood championed clothes created from off-cuts. “There is status in wearing favourites over and over again until they grow old or fall apart,” she wrote. “Make necklaces out of safety pins, shawls from blankets, tablecloths, curtains or towels.”

Delia Smith has even dusted down her 1970s classic, Frugal Food, and had it reissued.

Leading the charge for making do and mending in the 40s was the Women’s Institute.

“The WI, which was then based in countryside villages, championed the Make Do and Mend culture,” says WI archivist Anne Stamper. “It set up preserving centres to make jam and preserve vegetables for people in the city.” The WI was so dedicated to the cause, it produced a magazine called Thrift Crafts, showing women exactly how to improvise with what. For sore throats and colds, it provides a recipe substituting lemons for spring onions, boiled in cider and served hot.

Puddings were always served with meals, served as stodgy as possible to make up for lack of meat and bulked up with any carbohydrate in plentiful supply.

A recipe for cocoa pudding, in May, 1942, makes it with bread crumbs and a “grated medium-sized raw potato, moistened with milk.” Thrifty tips go from how to repair Wellington boots with old tractor tyres, to keeping winter suits looking smart by cleaning them with oil of eucalyptus and then ironing it.

“It describes how fuel could be stretched by soaking coal in a soda and water solution, so it burns less brightly. There’s no sense at all that women were put upon, or being deprived, the tone is very much about being creative and doing one’s duty.”

Dorothy Matthews, a member of Eastham WI, remembers the hours spent in her friends’ bedrooms happily altering and customising any scraps of fabric they could get their hands on. Her family had moved from Bolton to the capital in search of better employment prospects, and she’d left school at 14 to become an errand girl on her bicycle. In 1942, she was 16, watching buzz bombs drop from under the safety of bridges in Hampton-on-Thames, Middlesex. Though there was danger all around, her teenage mind was occupied by thoughts of a more mundane matter – how to look good on a Saturday night.

For the hop at the parish church, she’d paint on stockings with gravy browning. “You had to have a friend to do it for you,” she says. “Gravy browning wasn’t thick like gravy granules now, you just mixed it with water to make a liquid. But you didn’t do it too often because it could be a bit sticky if you weren’t careful.”

Just like now, there was kudos in being seen in new clothes.

Girls then simply had to be show a little more ingenuity than heading to the nearest Primark.

At 18, Dorothy started working at the Admiralty research laboratory. She and her friends, Hilda and Audrey, earned frowns from spending long breaks in the cloakroom altering their hair styles.

Her job, though, was tracing engineering drawings of ships and guns onto thick starched linen. The girls scooped up scraps of waste to use at home.

“We would soak it for quite a long time and, if we were lucky, none of the ink had gone into it,” she says. “What we got was a nice, thin handkerchief cotton that we could fold in half, cut a head and arm holes in, and sometimes draw strings to make puff sleeves. We called them shimmy shirts. It was all about having new things. That was the important thing.”

Striped pillow ticking wasn’t rationed, so they turned those into clothes, too.

“If we were lucky, we got pink and white ticking, which we could make into a gathered skirt, with the stripes running down the length. They were very pretty. We thought we were the bee’s knees in those.”

With the men away at war, the girls raided their wardrobes.

Trilbies were remodelled and the widest part of men’s trousers – before the War, very wide-legged styles were in – could be turned into skirts.

“We added panels of fabric from men’s jackets, so you’d have tweed and plain, to add interest.”

A winter coat was sewn up the front and turned into a dress. “It started out grey and, when I got fed up with that, my mother dyed it black,” she remembers. “I felt very smart.” She and her two best friends, Hilda and Audrey, were a glamorous trio who would swap clothes and bleach each others’ hair. They went out with US airmen. “We were called the Three Graces. Or, if we misbehaved, the Three Disgraces. We were forever in the cloakroom altering our hair. The manager frowned at us a lot. I was always in love.”

Jewellery could also be fashioned from ordinary house-hold items.

“We made necklaces out of cellophane. We’d fold a strip until it was a bit stiffer, then put a stitch in it to make it into zigzags, and a hook and eye to put it round your neck. From a distance, it looked quite silvery.”

Buttons were transformed into earrings. “Before the war, there were some really pretty ones. Some were flowers and some were abstract designs.”

When she got married in 1946, aged 2,0 to an RAF man, she wore a long clover-coloured dress. White was out because it had to be something she could wear afterwards.

“Customising clothes was fun. You were always in each other’s bedroom twitching this and that, to make yourself look a bit different. It was like the quilting bees in America – you get a group of girls together, especially like Hilda and me, you have fun. In some ways it was more rewarding than shopping because you were creative.

“I never, ever felt deprived.”

emma.pinch