AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH FASHION Michael Southgate Interviewed by Linda Sandino C1046/08 IMPORTANT Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB United Kingdom +44 [0]20 7412 7404 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators NATIONAL LIFE STORY COLLECTION INTERVIEW SUMMARY SHEET Title Page Ref. No.: C1046/08/01-10 Playback No.: F14866-73, F14960-1 Collection title: Oral History of British Fashion Interviewee’s surname: Southgate Title: Mr Interviewee’s forenames: Michael John Sex: Male Occupation: Designer, Managing Director Date of birth: 20.06.1930 Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: Family Grocer Date(s) of recording: 16.03.04, 17.03.04, 18.03.04, 30.03.04 Location of interview: Friends’ London flat (interviewee’s home is in New York) Name of interviewer: Linda Sandino Type of recorder: Marantz CP430 Total no. of tapes: 10 Type of tape: D60 Mono or stereo: Stereo Speed: N/A Noise reduction: Dolby B Original or copy: Original Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: Tapes 6 side B, Tape 7 sides A and B and Tape 8 side A closed for 30 years Interviewer’s comments: Michael Southgate Page 1 C1046/08 Tape 1 Side A (part 1) Tape 1 Side A (track 1) …name and your date and place of birth. Okay. My full name is Michael John Southgate. I was born in Ipswich, in Norwich Road, over the family grocer shop, and my father was a family grocer. And I was born in, June the twentieth, 1930. Not the best time to be born. My father’s parents were both country grocers. They had shops in and around Suffolk and I think when my father came out of the First World War, and by that time he’d married my mother, they decided to set him up in business in Ipswich, which was the main town. Didn’t turn out to be a very good idea, because it was in a working class area and it was at the time of tremendous unemployment, it was the slump and in those days people were allowed to run up bills, you know, put it on the bill, put it on the bill – everybody hoping they were gonna get a job next week and of course weeks went to months, months went to years in many cases. And my father didn’t in fact get declared bankrupt, but they lost the business simply because the debts were so enormous, you know people just didn’t have any money. And I think there was a post office as well, adjoined to the shop, which kept the whole thing floating. Anyway, they got out. And so I don’t remember any of that, because I was literally born there and I think by the time I was a year old, or certainly by two, they’d bought a semi-detached house in the suburbs and we moved there. And that’s where I was brought up. Had a hideous education because just as I was about to go to school, the war broke out. I think I was – my two brothers, I had two brothers; one was ten years older than me, one was twelve. I didn’t know them very well either, because by the time I was old enough they were at boarding school, and then as they came out of boarding school I went to school and then as I came out of school they were in the air force and the army, because they got into the Second World War. So we really didn’t ever know each other. But it was, the schooling I remember so vividly because I think the teachers that I had, had also taught my father because they’d all been brought back to teach because the younger ones had all gone to the war. I can remember a couple, called the Miss Malletts who were completely Edwardian. I mean they looked like Queen Mary. They had high collars and little dangly earrings and they lived together. And we used to get taught the Bible and an awful lot of stress was put on to handwriting. I think some of them were very good at handwriting. And history, and nature – I think we had a lot of nature walks and plant dissecting [laughing] but nothing that was really any good to you at all. So we somehow Michael Southgate Page 2 C1046/08 Tape 1 Side A (part 1) got through all that and then when I went to boarding school things did get a bit better, but even that was very austere and the teachers were very old. And then we used to do a lot of ‘digging for victory’. We used to go out and spend hours in the garden, then we’d have hours off because the air raids were going over - and you think in Suffolk it was very rural, but in actual fact, it was the path from the Continent coming to London. So we used to get the Doodlebugs going over and the bombers going over at night and then if they had any bombs left that they hadn’t dropped on London, they used to get rid of them before they went home and we used to get quite a lot in Suffolk [laughing] so we did know quite a lot about the war. And at the end of where we were living there was a large farm and that became an anti-aircraft base. And the noise of the guns going off was much more frightening than the bombs in actual fact, as a child, because they really felt like they were in the same room with you. But it was an interesting time to grow up and of course we didn’t know that we were, we rather liked the fact that we used to have weeks when the schools were closed because they couldn’t open ‘em because of the bombs. Didn’t get much of an education and lots of digging and, yes, it was funny. We used to go mushrooming at seven o’clock in the morning and of course all the fields had great reels of barbed wire unravelled so that planes couldn’t land, was the idea, and the mushrooms used to grow very well inside, inside these spirals of barbed wire because the cows couldn’t stand on them and break them. So I used to, because I was quite small, I used to get popped in the barbed wire and used to crawl up the middle picking mushrooms [laughs]. I was thinking about that when we were getting ready to do this and I thought, goodness, I hadn’t thought about that for years. And who would be with you when you were picking mushrooms? Other children, you know from the school and yes, we used to go out and bring them home to the housekeeper and that was rather a good thing to supplement the diet with, because it was pretty… lots of tapioca pudding and semolina and all that stuff in those days. Not much meat. What did you feel about going to boarding school? I didn’t like it at first, I mean I was seven and I think I screamed for about two days with about three other boys. We were put together to scream our hearts out and after that we Michael Southgate Page 3 C1046/08 Tape 1 Side A (part 1) couldn’t scream any more, you just got over it. And then after that, never a problem. And later in life I found it was a tremendous advantage. I mean I remember going into the air force, because National Service was still going on at that time. I couldn’t believe that there were eighteen year old boys crying because they’d left home and then they had to send their laun… for some reason there was a lot of laundry sending home, we used to send it back to our mothers or something. And they couldn’t tie a parcel up or didn’t really know how to write a letter or any of the things, and I was running around sort of helping everybody with that stuff ‘cos it was just quite normal to, if you’d been doing it for years. So no, in the long run, it was a good idea. But it was an awful school because we just didn’t have enough authority and our biggest quest was to get out at night, which we weren’t supposed to do, and go to the cinema. Crazy about the cinema. It was, in the forties, the early forties, it was the only glamorous thing really. And I became completely besotted with it, and not just me, there were like three or four of us, but one of them, John Dalzell – and he and I stayed friends all our lives, he died a few years ago – but we were always getting into terrible hot water for going to the cinema. In Ipswich? In Woodbridge. It was, we were out in the country and it had a corrugated iron roof so when it rained you couldn’t hear the soundtrack [laughing].