Nothing could have stood in greater contrast to those draining, dispiriting, and miserable postwar years than the glittering and bejeweled spectacle of a royal wedding. The great celebrations of VE Day and VJ Day were over and the hard work of rebuilding the world had begun, but Britain’s economy remained in a calamitous state after years of ruinously expensive warfare. Not only did austerity measures such as rationing remain in place, but in a number of respects they also became even more stringent. For many people, life seemed to be getting worse, not better.
That is the world I set out to explore when I began work on The Gown. What would it have been like to live through those lean, hard years? And what did the royal wedding mean to the people of the time—was it indeed “a flash of color on the hard road [they had] to travel,” as Winston Churchill famously said? Or was it a bitter and unwelcome reminder of how little they had and how much they had lost?
From the start, I didn’t want to tell my story from the point of view of Princess Elizabeth or anyone in her inner circle. Not because I feel the princess—Queen Elizabeth II as we now know her—is in any way uninteresting, but rather because I believe her true character is a mystery to anyone beyond her close family and friends. The queen has never given an interview and never will, her thoughts and opinions on most subjects are largely opaque, and the woman we think we know is, I believe, largely a projection of our individual feelings and beliefs. Here I want to be clear: I am fascinated by the queen and her family, but no amount of research will ever allow me to know them; and if I cannot truly know and understand them, I feel it is better to remain at a distance.
But back to my lunch and the brainstorming session, because I still needed a hook for my story—even more so once I’d discounted the possibility of telling it from the point of view of the bride or anyone in her inner circle. And that’s when two words popped into my head: the gown.
A few seconds later, we were admiring pictures of the royal wedding on my phone, and I had the central question on which my story would turn: who made Princess Elizabeth’s wedding gown? I knew it had been designed by Norman Hartnell; what I wanted to know, rather, was who constructed it. Who were the women who created the dazzling embroidery that embellished the gown, and what were their stories?
As a writer and a historian, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of sacrificing historical authenticity for dramatic tension, and that’s why my first four books have as their protagonists entirely fictional characters. While the same is true of The Gown—Ann, Miriam, and Heather are entirely products of my imagination—its cast also includes a number of real-life figures, among them people who were known to have worked at Hartnell, but whose personal stories were never recorded and are now all but impossible to accurately recount.
This uncomfortable truth dawned on me not long after I began work on The Gown: I would have to fictionalize the stories of real people, as well as insert fictional characters into a setting populated by known and recognizable figures. I would also have to take some liberties with minor aspects of recorded history, if only to make the story I was telling more comprehensible.
Germaine Davide, for instance, the formidable Frenchwoman employed by Hartnell as his chief fitter and known to everyone in the workrooms as Mam’selle, was mentioned by name in any number of sources, among them Hartnell’s memoirs, but she wrote no memoir herself and gave no interviews, and details of her personal life, at a remove of more than half a century, are now impossible to unearth. The same is true of Edith Duley, who was known to have been a senior figure in the embroidery workrooms: I came across her name in several newspaper articles, and I believe she is the woman described as the “head of embroidery” in a photograph that appeared in a Picture Post article in the autumn of 1947, but that is all. In his memoir Silver and Gold, Hartnell also mentions a woman named Flora Ballard, but she proved even more elusive, and so for the purposes of narrative clarity I elected to streamline the number of women in supervisory roles in the workroom. To that end, Miss Duley is not only a composite of several people, but also a fictional character in every respect apart from her name and the barest details of her physical appearance.
Even more daunting, for me, was the mystery of the embroiderers themselves. Dozens of articles were written about the creation of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding gown—nearly every British magazine and newspaper ran one or more in the latter half of 1947—but no one, it seems, thought to interview a single embroiderer.