Make Do and Mend movement

The Make Do and Mend movement appears in Pamela Wheeler Fellows’s account not as an abstract slogan but as a series of material improvisations: salvaged lipstick, imitation stocking seams, garments designed around scraps of fabric, and food stretched—or, in one memorable case, eaten until it became unbearable. Scarcity altered appearance, work, and domestic life, but it did not affect everyone equally. The ingenuity celebrated in these episodes coexists with differences in money, access, and the labor expected of women.

A practical response to scarcity

The government encouraged people to make do and mend while clothing coupons limited the possibility of replacing worn clothes or varying a wardrobe. For Pamela Wheeler Fellows and her mother, keeping presentable was not a matter of abandoning fashion but of finding other means to sustain it. Their solutions were small-scale and hands-on: using what remained, adapting what could be obtained, and turning household skills into substitutes for unavailable goods.

The movement’s practical reach extended beyond clothing. Food and drink were rationed or difficult to obtain, and Pamela sometimes imposed her own limits behind the bar, where one bottle of whisky had to last the week. She reserved it for loyal regular customers. That decision shows thrift as an everyday allocation problem: scarcity meant deciding not only how to use a resource, but who would receive it. In the family’s later life outside the hotel, rationing became more intimate still. The new pram acquired for Pamela’s baby was commandeered by her mother to bring food home, and a ham obtained in wartime scarcity became impossible to give away. The family ate it morning, noon, and night until they could no longer bear the sight or taste of ham.

Clothes, cosmetics, and the work of reinvention

Stockings were difficult to obtain, so Pamela and Gloria stained their legs brown with liquid leg makeup and drew imitation seams up the backs of one another’s legs with a black eye pencil. Their wobbly lines were a homemade answer to an appearance convention that made bare legs in the office scandalous. The episode captures both the ingenuity and the effort involved: a shortage of clothing did not remove the pressure to look properly dressed; it transferred work onto the women trying to meet that standard.

They also remade lipstick from the stubs left in used containers. The scraps were scraped into an eggcup, warmed in a pan of water, and poured back into a lipstick container. The result was sometimes greasy, uneven in coverage, and an odd mixture of colours, but it made remaining cosmetics usable again. Pamela later sets the British taste for red lips and glamorous makeup against Adolf Hitler’s rejection of cosmetics, nail varnish, dyed or permed hair, high heels, and dieting among women of his preferred racial ideal. In retrospect, personal grooming becomes more than a matter of appearance: keeping up a chosen style could also stand in contrast to the appearance imposed by an authoritarian ideal.

Clothing was subject to the same inventive redesign. Pamela’s mother, who was known for being smartly dressed and had sewing and design skills, worked with scarce fabric, including limited supplies of parachute silk. Because parachutes were cut on the bias, their curved fabric was difficult to handle. She nevertheless devised a blouse pattern requiring little material and made a series of fronts in different fabrics. These garments had no backs; ribbons held the front in place. They expanded her wardrobe economically, though their construction left an obvious vulnerability if someone managed to pull the jacket from her shoulders. The joke in that practical drawback makes the ingenuity vivid without concealing its limits.

Pamela shared her mother’s interest in dressing well and wore smart two-piece suits after leaving school uniform. Leather shortages brought flat shoes into shops, a style she disliked, but cork-soled wedges offered an acceptable alternative. Their combination of style and comfort suited hours standing behind a bar. Her treasured green snakeskin court shoes, with very high heels, were reserved for special occasions rather than work; she would later destroy them on a date that went badly. Scarcity and adaptation did not erase personal taste. They shaped the choices through which taste could still be expressed.

Unequal access and household resourcefulness

The memoir makes clear that thrift was not a substitute for access. Pamela’s family lived in a rural setting with local vegetables, milk, and eggs, and the hotel’s generous catering allowances meant that its customers could eat without spending their own coupons. People with money could also eat out, while those without it could not share that advantage; a black market offered goods and coupons to people with the right knowledge and resources. Against that disparity, Pamela’s mother sent friends and customers home with butter, bacon, steak, or eggs when food shortages were hurting them. Resourcefulness here included sharing, but the ability to give depended on the household’s particular circumstances.

The same contrast appears in the restaurant’s fish supply. A twice-weekly order from Birmingham Fish Market was packed in ice, taken to the Midland Red bus station, and carried on the Clent bus to the stop opposite the hotel. The driver brought the parcel across the road to the front bar, from which it went straight into the kitchen’s long refrigerator. Fresh fish, good fish and chips, and the absence of a queue were made possible by a carefully arranged supply route, not simply by a household substitution. The detail distinguishes making do from having the means and connections to secure something better.

Work, care, and the limits of adaptation

Wartime adaptation also meant adjusting bodies and routines to labor. In a factory job making aeroplane parts, Pamela wore thick trousers and as many layers as she could manage against the cold, and tied her hair in a knotted headscarf to keep it clear of machinery. The work was dirty, dangerous, and performed in an otherwise male unit. She produced the same output as the man she replaced, who had been called into the army, but received only a woman’s rate of pay. Hot metal swarf burned her eyes badly enough that she sometimes went to hospital; resentment among her male colleagues and her own anger over unequal pay made her increasingly militant. Improvisation helped her endure the conditions but did not correct the unequal terms on which she worked.

Her factory employment ended after she married. The employers suggested that the hours would not suit the domestic requirements of her new role as a wife; they were also glad to be rid of an increasingly militant worker, and she was glad to leave a job she hated. She had saved her earnings toward a home for herself and John Fellows, though she did not know that the savings would eventually be spent on a car when he returned. The episode places thrift within a life shaped by both aspiration and decisions made under wartime conditions.

Pamela next joined the Women's Land Army, whose women replaced men called up to fight. In dungarees, a cotton shirt, flat brogues, and a headscarf, she worked long hours planting, hoeing, and harvesting in all weather. The farm’s older men and farmer taught the women their work; two horses pulled tractors and carts, avoiding the need for petrol-consuming machinery. Pamela loved the work and finished the summer tanned and fit, but advancing pregnancy forced her retirement, after which Megan took over her farm job. Preparing for the baby brought another set of material adaptations: a green ration book entitled Pamela to a full pint of milk, first choice of fruit, and double eggs; wraparound maternity tops and a swagger-cut winter coat accommodated her changing body, while family hand-me-downs and knitting supplied the cot bedding and baby clothes. These details broaden the movement’s significance in the memoir: making things last and finding workable substitutes belonged to clothing and consumption, but also to the practical labor of sustaining a household through war.