If anyone from Hartnell were to read The Gown, they might reasonably protest that they don’t recognize any of my characters: not Mr. Hartnell, not Mam’selle or Miss Duley or Miss Holliday, and certainly not Ann or Miriam. In this I hope I may be forgiven, not only for conjuring their characters from the ether, but also in attaching real names to largely fictional creations. Only one person, within the walls of Hartnell, is true to life: Betty from the sewing workroom.
Betty Foster, née Pearce, was one of four seamstresses who worked on the wedding gown, and it was only by the purest stroke of good fortune that I met her at all. For months I had attempted, with diminishing success, to get in touch with anyone who had worked at Hartnell in the 1940s, and although many decades had passed I was hopeful that I might yet find someone who could tell me about life in the workrooms.
I had tried, and failed, to gain access to Sir Norman Hartnell’s personal papers and archive, which are held privately. I had contacted the curators at the Royal Collection, with the hopes that they would be able to put me in touch with one or more of the women who had once worked at Hartnell, but they were unable to help me.
With those doors firmly closed, I consoled myself with a trip to London to see the wedding gown itself, which was on display at Buckingham Palace as part of the Fashioning a Reign exhibition. I also wandered around Bruton Street and Bruton Place （though I was never brave enough to knock on the door and ask to go inside）， and I searched online and in person at every library and museum with holdings related to Norman Hartnell and the royal wedding of 1947.
I was gathering ever more information, but it still felt incomplete, for I was never able to find more than the barest scraps of information about the women who sewed and embroidered the wedding gown. A few photographs, some maddeningly vague details in Hartnell’s published memoirs—that was all. With barely more than a year until the first draft of my book was due, I was still bumping up against closed doors.
I wasn’t willing to give up, however, so I asked myself: if I can’t speak to those who worked for Hartnell, or read their stories, or even unearth basic details such as the shape of an ordinary day in the workrooms, can I speak to someone who does similar work today? And that’s how I ended up at Hand & Lock, London’s oldest and most prestigious bespoke hand embroidery atelier, on another trip to England in early 2017. I wanted to know how it felt to sit in front of an embroidery frame for hours on end, to take those first stitches on an immaculate piece of silk, to feel my eyes blur and my neck ache after hours of concentration on that same piece of silk and the motifs I had been tasked with creating.
The day I spent at Hand & Lock happened to coincide with the visit of a documentary film crew, part of the team who were working on A Very Royal Wedding, and as I chatted with their producers I mentioned how difficult it had been to research my book, and how much I would have loved to speak to someone who had worked at Hartnell at the time. To my astonishment, they offered to put me in touch with Betty Foster.
The next day I went to meet Mrs. Foster, and I listened to her stories of life at Hartnell, and the memories she shared with me made all the difference to how I approached the story I was writing. She opened a window into the heart and soul of Hartnell, and I am deeply grateful for her insights. It was she who told me how Miss Holliday kindly allowed all the women in the sewing workrooms to add a stitch to the gown, and thereby say they had worked on the princess’s finery; and it was Mrs. Foster who described the royal ladies’ visit to the workrooms and the unpracticed curtsies she and her friends offered their guests. She told me about the workroom interiors, Mr. Hartnell’s kindness, and Mam’selle’s impenetrable accent, as well as dozens of other details that brought my story to life. With Mrs. Foster’s permission, I later added her to The Gown as a character, and so it is Betty herself who accompanies Miriam to the palace on the wedding day.
Here I need to make one last confession: on the wedding day itself, Mrs. Foster actually was outside, just by the gates of Buckingham Palace, having been given a special ticket to stand in a roped-off area with many of her friends from Hartnell. It was with her permission that I instead put her inside the palace on November 20, 1947, and let her look out along the Mall, with Miriam at her side, as the carriages with the royal party left for Westminster Abbey that morning. I feel she deserved no less.
As with my other novels, in The Gown I have attempted to describe the past—not the far-distant past, but a vanished and largely unfamiliar world all the same—with authenticity and accuracy. I accept that I have made mistakes, and that those errors are my fault and responsibility alone. Yet I hope, in the end, that you will read this story in the spirit in which it was written, which is one of respect, reverence, and above all profound gratitude for those whose sacrificed and lost so much during those terrible years of war.