Julie Summers - Dressed For War: The Story of Audrey Withers, Vogue Editor Extraordinaire from the Blitz to the Swinging Sixties

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For Diane,

who has been with me every step of the way

PROLOGUE

LONDON , ONE NEW BOND STREET , TOP FLOOR ,

VOGUE EDITORIAL OFFICE ,

THURSDAY 19 SEPTEMBER 1940, 11.15 A . M .

The editors office had three desks: one for the editor, one for her assistant and the third for her secretary. The large windows along the south wall, hung with thick blackout curtains, overlooked the shattered roofs of the Burlington Arcade. On the wall behind the editors desk were the layouts for the November, December and January issues of British Vogue , clipped to battens the November pages fully populated, December almost complete, January with gaps for editorial and fashion. The room was full this morning as the managing editor, Audrey Withers, was in the middle of her editorial conference with the fashion and features editors, the art director and the managing director of Cond Nast Publications, Harry Yoxall.

The October issue was ready to go to the printers in Watford and would be appearing on the news stands the following week. Today their focus was on finalising Novembers contents. Cecil Beaton was writing a topical article called Time of War about living in London under enemy attack. Audrey had asked him to concentrate on how life went on despite the constant menace of bombing and how danger brought a new perspective to life. It would feature photographs of Mrs Churchill in the drawing room of 10 Downing Street and Lady Warrender and Lady George Cholmondeley in uniform working for the Polish Armed Forces Comforts Fund.

Audrey had planned the feature to be reassuring at a time of uncertainty and upheaval. She wanted her readers to see the great and the good going about life as normally as possible and be comforted by a drawing of Lady Diana Cooper reading aloud on a terrace in the autumn sunshine or Mme de Janz working on a Persian bedcover during an air raid. New York had sent a feature on Mrs Lydigs fastidious taste, extravagance and passion which had been legendary in New York society before the First World War. Entitled She had 150 pairs of shoes, the lavishly illustrated article would be followed by a piece by a subalterns wife about how to dress in wartime a nice juxtaposition, Audrey had suggested.

The fashion pages focused on what to wear in the town and country: wool coats for the town and tweed suits for the country with hats, gloves and sensible shoes to match. As they were about to move on to advice for warm and woolly undergarments, the alarm went up and a loud voice commanded, Evacuate the building immediately! Evacuate immediately! Firefighters on the roof had spotted an unexploded bomb in the ruins of Burlington Arcade.

Audrey looked at Harry Yoxall and they both pushed back their chairs and stood up. Take your papers and leave quickly but safely, he said, as he reached for his attach case. Audreys mind was racing as she stuffed the papers she had been working through into a folder. What else might she need? Taking a moment to look around her, she spotted her coat and slung it over her shoulder as she edged past her desk and headed for the door.

Harry was staring out of the window to the street below to see if he could spot the bomb, but he could not. He shook his head and followed Audrey to the stairwell. The seven of them clattered down five flights of stairs, picking up workers from the other floors on their way down. Their pace slowed to a walk as the stairwell filled up with bank clerks and tellers from the ground and first floors. At last, they reached the door where an anxious air-raid warden was ushering them away from the building and down towards Piccadilly: Walk! Dont run! Dont panic! Move on! Get away from the building! MOVE ON !

Clutching her folder of papers, her shoulder hunched to keep her coat from slipping off, Audrey walked purposefully at the head of her little party of evacuees. Down Old Bond Street they marched and out onto Piccadilly, past the Royal Academy of Arts and on towards Piccadilly Circus. As they were level with the entrance to Fortnum & Mason, a news photographer stepped out in front of Audrey and snapped a picture of the phalanx of Vogue staff striding down the centre of the street. Harry led them to his office in Fetter Lane, on the other side of the City of London, and they continued their conference as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

To Audreys amusement, the picture was featured in the Daily Sketch the following day with the caption: Overdraft Preserved. This bank staff walk happily down the road, never losing their customers overdrafts, to new premises. Cause? Time-Bomb! The picture appeared again as a centre-page spread to demonstrate civilian morale. It was two days before Audrey and her team could return to the editorial office and she had learned a valuable lesson. They had been unable to complete their work on the November issue as they had only managed to take with them what they could carry in their arms. From now on, she told them, each department had to have a suitcase to hand into which vital material could be shovelled at a moments notice and carried away in the teeth of time-bombs or other dangers.

Five days later, Audrey was officially promoted to the post of editor of British Vogue , a role she had been fulfilling in all but name since March. Within weeks, she was at the behest of government ministers in every department, from the Treasury to the Ministry of Information, the Board of Trade and the War Office. They consulted her, as the editor of the most influential womens magazine in the country, whose readers were people of prominence and status. If Vogue readers could be persuaded to change the way they dressed, what they ate or how they worked, then the rest of the female population would follow. Over the course of the Second World War, Audrey Withers came to be recognised as one of the most powerful women in London.

Tall, slim and usually dressed in grey or navy, Audrey looked every bit the blue-stocking editor history has judged her to be. She had a reputation as a woman who never raised her voice but made her views known by quiet insistence. She did not stand out in a crowd, yet she reigned supreme at Vogue for twenty years. Beneath the monochrome exterior and the prematurely grey hair was a woman of great ambition and drive. She could be impetuous and passionate but at her core lay a great warmth, kindness and human understanding. She treated everyone with respect and was innately modest.

There is no doubt that Audrey Withers was a great intellect and a formidably capable editor, but she was so much more. She was an early adopter of new ideas in art, literature and technology, learning to use a computer at the age of eighty. She was politically active all her life, voting Labour until she joined the SDLP in her late seventies. She cared deeply about her work and even more so about the role of women at a time when they were still expected to stop work once they were married and had children. She was a co-founder of the Womens Press Club during the war and was a passionate advocate for womens rights. She believed in equality for women at work and fought hard for this in the post-war years when a grateful government wanted nothing more than for women to go back to the hearth and kitchen sink. Her management style was ahead of its time, giving inexperienced women opportunities, helping employees to overcome health and emotional problems by awarding them extra time off, and moving people sideways if she spotted they were being bullied or otherwise unhappy in their post.