Phyllis Dalton Page 1 BECTU History Project Interview no: 467 Interviewee: Phyllis Dalton Interviewer: Rodney Giesler Duration: 01:33:42 & 00:25:48 (total 01:59:30) COPYRIGHT: No use may be made of any interview material without the permission of the BECTU History Project (http://www.historyproject.org.uk/). Copyright of interview material is vested in the BECTU History Project (formerly the ACTT History Project) and the right to publish some excerpts may not be allowed. CITATION: Women’s Work in British Film and Television, Phyllis Dalton, http://bufvc.ac.uk/bectu/oral- histories/bectu-oh [date accessed] By accessing this transcript, I confirm that I am a student or staff member at a UK Higher Education Institution or member of the BUFVC and agree that this material will be used solely for educational, research, scholarly and non-commercial purposes only. 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Phyllis Dalton Page 2 This is an interview with Phyllis Dalton, the costume designer, recorded by Rodney Giesler on the eleventh of February 2000 for the BECTU oral history archive in whom copyright of this recording is vested. The file number for this recording is 467. Phyllis, can I start by asking you, when were you born? When? When, yes. Sixteenth of October 1925, in Chiswick actually. My parents lived somewhere near. What did your parents do? My father worked for GWR in the great days of GWR. [laughter] God’s Wonderful Railway. Absolutely, yes, yes. And can you tell me a bit about your childhood and how you came to be interested in the kind of… Well, it was… we certainly weren’t well off with somebody working on the railway, and my mother worked in the local bank during the war, and I have a brother who’s eight years younger than me, and I went to the local council school, then I went to… I did go to a private school for a bit in Uxbridge, because I failed the Eleven Plus, I was one of those, so she sent me to a private school in Uxbridge for a couple of years. And from there I went to Ealing Art College, which was a technical college then. I expect they call themselves a university now. What specifically did you study there, was it costume design? Phyllis Dalton Page 3 Yes, yes. But there weren’t the chances that people have now, there weren’t really the specific courses then, I mean this was wartime. It was just something that I knew I wanted to do, I always had. You were interested in clothes as a child? I was a child that was always drawing clothes and always… I remember my aunts being very amused because I was always telling them what to wear, I mean really quite young, like eight or nine. And you could tell styles of clothing and date them could you, fairly early on? Probably, yes. Yes, because I was also intensely interested in the history as well, so yes, I think I probably could. Clothing was part of the historical story and the way people dressed and everything. Yes, very much. I think the sort of social side of history was what I was interested in. What people… how they dressed and what they used and how they lived more than the dates probably. That was always there. And then from art school I went to… one of the mistresses at Ealing found me a job in a workroom which was in Soho at the time, a lady called Matilda Etches. She had quite a small workroom, but she was making clothes for people like Margot Fonteyn and Pamela May and Mary Ellis and… These were everyday clothes or more for their professional… Some everyday but more theatre clothes, yes. She did ballet, she did all sorts of things. So I stayed there as a sort of humble workroom attendant for – assistant – for I suppose about a year. Cutting and sewing and so on? Yes, doing a bit of everything. I mean I think I was quite lucky really. And also being wartime materials were so short and she was always short of money, but not very practical. So she’d send us in a taxi to the other side of London [laughter], you know, to Phyllis Dalton Page 4 buy up old sheets and things like that. And it was quite fun making do in those days. There was the most wonderful shop in Dean Street called Mrs Beck, that was all buttons, anyone if it was there now they’d go mad for them, but they were all the sort of decorative things you could use for all sorts of purposes. And then… How did you get by when you made something for Margot Fonteyn? I mean presumably it wasn’t an old bed sheet that you made up into a… No, I mean there were materials, there were materials and coupons and things and, oh yes, one of the main things there, while I was there we made things for Olivier’s Henry V. Ivy St Helier’s and, oh, what’s her name? Oh… this is what’s going to happen, getting actresses’ names. The Queen, Renee Asherson? Renee Asherson, that’s right. [telephone ringing] Yes, we made their costumes. So that was quite fun. Elaborate ones, the medieval headdresses and everything. [both speaking together] Absolutely, yes. And I remember the weight of it, because one of the dresses was made of Moygashel linen, I don’t know if you know what it is, but it’s jolly heavy. All that yardage, I think she could hardly stand up in it. And I remember during that time was my first visit to a film studio ever and I think we went to Denholm one day and I thought the wardrobe mistress was terribly hard-hearted because she wouldn’t change somebody’s shoes. I sort of learnt later you’ve got to be a bit tough sometimes. Now you were only with these two actresses? For Henry V, yes, yes. Phyllis Dalton Page 5 Because the thing, when one talks about the costume designer, certainly as a mere male, one tends to think of it in terms of dresses and female clothing, but of course as a costume designer you’d be… I’ve always done it all, yes. All those uniforms, the whole lot? Absolutely. Yes, I think we’re rather different from the American style anyway, because I think over there sometimes a big designer like Edith Head was would probably only do the principals, or just the women, the ones that really showed. And I think it showed on the screen, there are gaps. You know, there’s too much difference between how the stars look and how the rest do. You often saw it on the credits: Miss So-and-So’s costumes by So-and-So, didn’t you? Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Anyhow, your first brush with the film industry, going to Denholm, what did that do to you? Well, I thought it was lovely. And one used to see Maggie Furse, who was working with Roger Furse on Henry V, used to come in, obviously, and I had no idea in those days that I could be doing that job one day, I hadn’t got that far really. Just knew I liked clothes. So how long was it before you actually got into the film industry? Well, then the next bit was I had a friend in the workroom who was southern Irish and Rachel said one day, ‘Let’s join the Wrens’. And I said, ‘Oh, okay’, you know, like one does, thinking it won’t happen. But it did, we both joined up and we never saw each other the whole couple of years we were in the Wrens [laughter] because she became a hall porter at Yeovilton and I went to Bletchley, which you know about, it’s all been on the box lately. Phyllis Dalton Page 6 The coding… The coding place, yes. And lived at places like Woburn Abbey and things like that. So I had a couple of years in the Wrens. Now while I was in the Wrens - this is where, I don’t know, I think everyone needs the luck or some turn of destiny or something – while I was in the Wrens my aunt, who was my godmother, sent me a copy of Vogue and there was a Vogue competition in it, sort of fashion journalism. I think they still do it sometimes.