Make Do and Mend

Make Do and Mend is the wartime principle of adapting, repairing, substituting, and reusing scarce goods. In Pamela Wheeler Fellows’s account, it is not an abstract slogan but a material practice that reorganizes daily life: parachute silk becomes clothing, worn stockings are imitated with cosmetics, lipstick is remade from scraps, old earnings are reserved for a future home, and even a baby’s pram is commandeered to carry ration-scarce food. The rule sustains households and war work, while also exposing the unequal burdens placed on women and the continuing power of money and access.

Meaning and Wartime Conditions

Make Do and Mend emerges within a world in which clothing coupons are ungenerous and fabric is difficult to obtain. The restriction is not merely a reduction in choice; it makes the repeated wearing of the same outfits a persistent challenge for anyone concerned with appearance. Limited parachute silk offers a possible source of material, but its construction makes it awkward to use: parachutes are cut on the cross, and the resulting bias produces a curve that is difficult to control. The scarcity of material therefore demands technical ingenuity as well as patience.

The principle also operates across the wider economy of wartime shortage. Food is governed by coupons, money, and a points system that rises when goods are scarce and falls when they are plentiful. In the rural setting, local vegetables, milk, and eggs provide some protection, while suburban gardens are turned into vegetable plots through the Dig for Victory campaign. Yet the system is unequal: generous catering allowances enable the hotel to feed customers without their using coupons, and the Black Market allows people with money or connections to acquire petrol, food, clothing coupons, or the goods themselves. Make Do and Mend is thus both a common national discipline and a reminder that not everyone begins with the same resources.

Clothing and the Reworking of Materials

Pamela Wheeler Fellows’s Mother gives the rule a particularly inventive form. Always described as bandbox smart, she uses her sewing and designing skills to respond to the shortage of fabric. From the difficult parachute silk she creates a blouse pattern requiring very little material, then gives the resulting garments the practical name “fronts.” The design transforms limitation into a new kind of clothing: it preserves the appearance of a blouse while economizing on the substance needed to make one.

The same pressure shapes ordinary dress at work. When Pamela is called up to a Birmingham factory, she wears thick trousers and as many layers as possible against the bitter cold, while a knotted headscarf keeps her hair away from dangerous machinery. Later, on the farm, her Father supplies the flat brogue shoes required for agricultural work; she wears them with dungarees, a cotton shirt, and a headscarf. These outfits are functional adaptations to factory and farm, but the account also notices their visual character, showing how wartime utility does not entirely displace self-presentation.

Cosmetics as Improvisation and Defiance

Stocking shortages turn appearance itself into a repair problem. Gloria and Pamela stain their legs brown with liquid leg makeup, choosing new cosmetics rather than the Government’s suggested gravy browning. They then take turns drawing black “seam” lines up the backs of one another’s legs with an eye pencil. The lines are wobbly and unconvincing, but the effort recreates the visual convention of stockings when the material article cannot be obtained. Bare legs in an office are considered scandalous, so the improvised seam does social work as well as cosmetic work.

Lipstick is treated in the same spirit of reconstruction. When supplies run low, the remnants of several used lipsticks are scraped from their containers into an eggcup placed in a pan of water. The mixture is gently heated, and the resulting liquid is poured back into a container. The new lipstick has poor coverage, a greasy texture, and an unpredictable colour produced by the mixture of shades, but it remains usable. The procedure turns waste into a replacement and makes beauty part of the war effort’s domestic chemistry.

The practice also carries a political charge that the narrator recognizes only retrospectively. Wartime red lips and glamorous makeup oppose the appearance demanded by Adolf Hitler’s racial ideal, which rejects makeup, lipstick, nail varnish, dyed or permed hair, high heels, and dieting. The improvised cosmetics therefore do more than preserve femininity under rationing: they become an everyday refusal of the “well-scrubbed Brunhilda-look.” The paradox is that a shortage economy produces not the disappearance of glamour but a resourceful, visibly asserted version of it.

Labour, Gender, and the Cost of Adaptation

Make Do and Mend extends beyond objects into the organization of women’s labour. Pamela’s factory work places her in an exclusively male unit making parts for aeroplanes after her predecessor has been called into the army. She produces the same output in the same timescale as the man she replaces, yet receives only a woman’s rate and no piecework payment. Hot swarf enters her eyes and burns them, sometimes requiring hospital treatment, while male colleagues resent her presence. Her response is to become militant and support possible union involvement, making clear that adaptation to wartime need does not mean accepting institutional inequality.

Her factory employment ends after she becomes a married woman. The employers suggest that her hours are incompatible with the domestic requirements attached to her new role as a wife, and they are also relieved to lose an increasingly militant employee. The arrangement suits both sides because Pamela hates the job, but the episode exposes the gendered rule beneath the wartime one: women may be mobilized when labour is needed and redirected toward domesticity when marriage is treated as their primary obligation.

The British Women’s Land Army offers another form of wartime substitution, with women drafted in to replace men called up to fight. Pamela works in khaki dungarees, uses an outside privy, washes at a cold-water pump, and works long hours in every kind of weather. Older men and the farmer teach the women the necessary agricultural skills, while two working horses pull tractors and carts, avoiding petrol-consuming machinery. She plants, hoes, and harvests, discovering that she loves the work. By the end of the summer she is tanned, supple, and fit, but pregnancy forces her retirement, after which her sister-in-law Megan takes over the farm job.

Food, Drink, and Household Resourcefulness

At the hotel, shortage requires rationing even when the business can feed customers relatively well. Fresh fish reaches the hotel twice a week through an arrangement involving the Birmingham Fish Market, ice, the Midland Red Bus Station, and the Clent bus, whose driver carries the cold parcel across the road to the bar. The restaurant’s ham and egg, steak and chips, and fish and chips are popular, and the quality of its fish and chips creates an advantage because customers receive good food without waiting in the long queues found elsewhere.

Alcohol is harder to obtain, so Pamela imposes a private rationing system behind the bar. Knowing that one bottle of whisky must last the week, she denies it to anyone except the most loyal and regular customers. The practice shows Make Do and Mend operating as controlled allocation rather than simple repair: a limited stock is stretched by deciding who may receive it and when. The mirrored decoration of the bar later exposes her attempt to hide the bottle while serving a regular customer, turning resource management into a small comic risk.

Her Mother applies the same principle more generously to food. Although the hotel’s customers can eat without spending their coupons, many friends and customers suffer from shortages, so Mother sends them home with butter, bacon, steak, or eggs. The act converts a commercial advantage into informal redistribution, even as the existence of the Black Market demonstrates that money can still buy considerable freedom. Make Do and Mend therefore coexists with mutual aid and privilege: some people repair and substitute because they must, while others can obtain what scarcity denies to the less fortunate.

Consequences and Significance

After the family leaves the hotel, the loss of catering coupons places them on the same basic rations as the rest of the population, and they are always hungry. The weekly Friday serving of fish and chips becomes an exceptional culinary pleasure. The change clarifies what the hotel had previously concealed: food access depended not only on national rationing but also on institutional position, income, and the ability to serve meals within an approved system.

The most grotesque household application of the principle arrives with a ham transported in the new baby’s pram. The pram, intended for the child, is commandeered by the Grandmother to bring food home during a period when rationing has removed familiar treats. Once inside, the ham’s strong smell makes the family fear that neighbours will report them. They hide it in the cellerette, but the odour passes through closed doors, so concealment cannot solve the problem. The family’s only practical solution is to “eat the evidence” as quickly as possible. A month of ham at morning, noon, and night ends in complete disgust, and Mother is never tempted to acquire another.

This ending captures the rule’s central tension. Resourcefulness can secure what ordinary life has lost, but the recovered object may bring danger, inconvenience, or excess rather than uncomplicated pleasure. Make Do and Mend is consequently a history of materials under pressure and of people learning to improvise around systems they cannot control. Its ingenuity keeps clothing, cosmetics, work, hospitality, and family life functioning, while its recurring compromises reveal how wartime survival relied heavily on women’s unpaid skill, underpaid labour, domestic management, and willingness to turn scarcity into something usable.