Tales of the Gypsy Dressmaker - Thelma Madine

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remember thinking I’d like to do kids’ clothes myself. I’d just had a baby and was looking at it from the point of view of what I’d like to dress her in, as a customer. ‘If I can’t find the right thing,’ I thought, ‘then there must be loads of other mums out there who feel the same.’

      More than anything else, though, I just wanted to dress Hayley the way I liked. I thought about it a lot, and then it just came to me: I’ll start up my own children’s clothes business. And so I went about setting up a shop, Madine Miniatures. At the time I was married to Kenny, my three older kids’ dad. Kenny already had a successful glass firm, so we were well-off enough for me to give it a go. And things were not that great with me and Kenny by then, so starting the business was also a good way of taking my mind off our troubles at home. My mum had also just been made redundant from the GEC factory, where she had worked as one of her three jobs for twenty-five years. So she put all her redundancy money in to get the business started.

      Soon it was up and running and I threw myself into the task of finding out when all the clothing fairs were on. I’d travel the country with my mum, looking for the best stuff we could find.

      The first shop I opened was in Ormskirk, just north of Liverpool. But as there was already a kids’ clothing boutique there the reps would give them priority stock and wouldn’t sell to any competitors. But this meant that I was being left with the not-very-good stuff, which I certainly didn’t want. What I wanted to sell were special children’s outfits, the kind that gave me butterflies in my stomach when I looked at them.

      I remember talking to one rep and asking if I could order this particular dress. ‘Sorry, you can’t have that,’ he said, in that nose-in-the-air kind of way, explaining that so-and-so from the other shop had bought it. I looked at him and thought, ‘You cheeky get! One of these days, you’ll be dying for me to stock your clothes!’

      ‘Don’t worry, love,’ my mum used to say, ‘you’ll think of something. We’ll just make sure you’re the biggest and the best.’ The thing is, the man was the rep for all these lovely Italian, German and Dutch designs that you couldn’t get over here. ‘OK,’ I thought, ‘I’ll just go to Italy, Germany and Holland to buy this stuff myself.’ And that’s exactly what I did – I brought ranges of kids’ clothing to Liverpool that nobody had ever seen or even heard of before.

      I had a big opening day for that first shop, and everything felt good. Because we’d made sure that Madine Miniatures was stocked with quite unusual kids’ clothes and unique designs, it really took off, and before long we had six shops all over Liverpool. Madine Miniatures was getting a great reputation and our Communion dresses were the most sought-after in the city.

      Communion dresses are a very big deal in Liverpool, with it being such a big Catholic community. Even today a big part of my business is designing Communion dresses. And there are three milestones in a gypsy girl’s life – her christening, her First Communion and, of course, her wedding.

      I first started doing Communion dresses after noticing that all the ones I’d see at European suppliers were the same. And the one thing that a mum doesn’t want is her daughter’s Communion dress looking the same as the next girl’s. I’d look at them and think: ‘They’re all straight up and down. They don’t move. Where’s all the bloody fabric?’ And then I thought: ‘I’d make the skirt bigger and I wouldn’t have that there; I would put buttons down here …’ I was not very impressed by what I was looking at – but actually what I was really looking at was a giant gap in the market.

      So I decided that the best thing to do was to make the dresses myself. Even though I couldn’t sew that well, I knew exactly what I wanted. My mum had learned how to sew at a night class when me and my brother Tom were kids. She would sit up all night making me new dresses, determined that I would always be the best-dressed little girl at school. Also, my Aunty Mary was a tailoress, so I thought, ‘I have all the ideas in my head, all I have to do is to draw them out and Mum and Aunty Mary can make them.’ I used to watch my mum and Aunty Mary sewing and then have a go myself. I wasn’t very good at it at first, but I wouldn’t give up until I got it perfect.

      Soon the dresses were going down really well. Everyone wanted them, and after a while we were getting so many orders that we had to think about getting someone else in to help. Thank God we found Audrey. Now, Audrey was a little bit older but that was good because she was old school. She knew exactly what she was doing.

      In fact, Audrey was so by the book that, come five p.m. every day, she’d have her coat on and she’d be off. Out the door by one second past, was Audrey. She was strictly a nine-to-fiver, but I have to give it to her, when she was there she didn’t stop for a minute. But as more orders came in we needed to put more time in, which made me determined to improve as a seamstress. Audrey taught me a lot – far more than the college I had started attending did. The more I learned, the more I could finish the dresses myself. We also took on a younger girl, Christine, to do the cutting. So, business was picking up, we were all working from a room above the shop in Ormskirk and everything was good.

      Every time we put a new Communion dress in the shop, people would come in and admire it. ‘Oh, isn’t that lovely,’ they’d say. ‘I’m quite good at this,’ I thought, so I just focused on making my ideas for these Communion dresses come to life. I suppose, looking back, I’ve always been the kind of person who sets her mind to things, thinking, ‘Right, I’m just going to do it.’ I can’t do anything half-heartedly.

      After I came up with a few dress design ideas, I started really going for it. I always thought that the dresses could be bigger, because no one else was doing ones like that, so I looked through all my history books and wedding magazines for ideas – because, essentially, they were little wedding dresses. I’d have them with these big, Victorian-style leg-o’-mutton sleeves and then maybe add a little cape. And I always liked to put a large bow or flower on them to finish them off. That way they really made a statement.

      People loved them and, as more and more requests came in for them, we started having to limit each school to ten differently designed Communion dresses. The way it worked was this: every season I’d create ten different designs, and the first mum from each school to put a deposit down on the design she liked best was the only one who could have that dress, and so on. It meant that ten little girls in the same school might be wearing our dresses come Communion Day, but there would never be two wearing the same one.

      Even so, there was often pandemonium over who got these dresses, with real rivalry breaking out between the mums at each school. I remember that there were women literally fighting in the shop in County Road. Honest to God, they were actually punching each other.

      Another time I did this dress – I think I was into Elizabeth I at the time – with the ruff collar and the really tight, tiny waist with a V-shaped bodice all covered in pearls. I made the skirt in satin panels, which were differently decorated. Everyone who saw it was like, ‘Oh My God, it’s amazing. It’s fantastic. I don’t care how much it is. I’ve got to have that dress.’ There was a big hullabaloo over who was going to get that too.

      The thing is, it was all good for business and I was able to start building up a team. I took on another three girls, and then Pauline started working in the County Road shop. Pauline had been a customer originally, but as time went on she began to pop in every day to have a chat and see the new dresses that had come in. She became such a part of the furniture that one day, when I was run off my feet, I asked her to muck in and help me out there and then. I was well aware that Pauline knew that shop – and the stock it carried – inside out.

      It was one of the best moves I ever made. Pauline is the best saleswoman you could ever wish for. We have worked together on and off ever since. Pauline whipped our customers up into a right frenzy about the Communion dresses. ‘Oh, you should see the new designs coming in,’ she’d say. ‘They’re gorgeous. You’ll be amazed when you see them.’ All the women, desperate that their kid would look the best of the lot, would be like, ‘Oh, put my name down for one, put my name down.’ None of these dresses ever reached the shop – because before they could get there Pauline had sold every single one.

      So,

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