FEATHERING THE NEST
Demand for feathers grew during the 19th and 20th century, but at a terrible price for birds across the globe
People have interacted with birds in many different ways over the centuries. We have admired them and been inspired by their songs, their appearance and their ability to fly. We have even worshipped them. But we have also hunted birds, imprisoned them and eaten them. Our ancestors used their beautiful feathers to try to make themselves look beautiful, too, but feathers have also had many other functions.
Historically, feathers were an extremely important commodity. Even in prehistoric times, they were used to provide the flights for arrows. These feathers were known as fletches and the person who attached them was a fletcher, hence the common British surname. Feathers give an arrow stability in flight – without them it can spiral out of control.
In the Middle Ages our poorer ancestors slept on the ground or on a mattress filled with straw or leaves. However, those who were better off had a feather mattress and feather pillows too. Birds such as ducks, geese and chickens provided the stuffing required, but it takes a lot of feathers to fill a mattress so they were expensive.
Arguably the most important role of feathers was to make pens. The large, rigid wing feathers of birds such as geese and swans were used in quills that were dipped into an inkpot when required. To make a quill, some if not all of the fluffy part of the feather was stripped away leaving the shaft exposed. The tip of the shaft was cut in a particular fashion, before being hardened by heating until it was ready to use.
In addition feathers have been important elements of fashion, worn by people for thousands of years in one form or another. They were also symbols of status: high-ranking military personnel displayed them on headgear to demonstrate their authority, and a man with a large, showy feather in his hat in the 17th century proclaimed his wealth.
Native attraction
For a long time most of the feathers used in British clothing came from birds found in this country. Those with brightly coloured plumage such as the pheasant,
Our ancestors used birds’ feathers to make themselves look beautiful, too
kingfisher and jay were especially popular and were hunted for the purpose, but dowdy feathers from commoner species were also dyed. However, exotic birds from abroad gradually became available: the brightly coloured feathers of peacocks and parrots, the elegant white plumes of the egret, and by the 18th century the large, fluffy feathers of the ostrich. At first these expensive items were affordable only to the wealthy. Describing the high-society ladies who attended George III’s Grand Fête in Windsor in 1805, a reporter commented that “ostrich feathers to the number of eight or nine were universally worn and diamonds in profusion”.
Height of fashion
By the middle of the 19th century, feathers were used in a remarkable array of clothing and fashion accessories, mainly by women in the upper and middle classes; and as the century progressed, they became still more popular. The showiest, most expensive plumes were worn by the wealthiest ladies, but even women of modest means might sport a hat with a simple feather arrangement. As well as being one of the world’s major cities in the fashion industry, along with Paris and New York, London was the hub for feather-trading and vast quantities were sent there every year. Some milliners designed hats featuring not only feathers but parts of dead birds, too: heads, wings, sometimes whole stuffed bodies.
Even a few dull, white duck feathers could be made to look beautiful if they were dyed, and this would transform a plain hat into something more eye-catching and stylish. But they weren’t just added to headgear. The large, fluffy feathers of the ostrich were used to make scarf-like boas worn around the neck, and to decorate the fans and parasols that were commonly carried as an accessory. Small, bright feathers were worn in brooches.
The great crested grebe is a beautiful British waterbird with a remarkably dense and soft layer of small, downy feathers next to its skin. The chest, belly and flanks of the bird are covered with it, so grebes were killed in huge
numbers for their plumage. So-called ‘grebe cloth’ or ‘grebe fur’ was turned into muffs and the trimmings to hoods or sleeves known as tippets. This was such a popular use for the material that the species was also known as the ‘satin grebe’ or ‘tippet grebe’. A similar product could be obtained from swans and was known as ‘swan down’; it was used for powder puffs, and as a trim for clothing.
Some feathers had very specific uses. Black ostrich feathers were used to adorn the hearse, horses and coffins at Victorian funerals – in 1876, a full set was reported to cost as much as £300. White and red goose feathers were employed by the military as indicators of certain ranks, and the ceremonial dress of the Most Noble Order of the Garter still includes a black velvet cap adorned with white ostrich feathers and black heron plumes.
There were two main methods by which the plumage industry obtained feathers. The first was to hunt and kill wild birds, skin them and ship them back to London. The second was to harvest them in some way. Exotic birds such as egrets, parrots, birds of paradise and hummingbirds were killed, as were birds where the skin itself was required such as grebes. In some instances feathers could be a by-product of the food industry. Most duck, goose and chicken feathers were obtained in this way.
For some birds, feathers could be gathered in the wild. In the mid-19th century local people on the shores of the Black Sea conducted a prosperous trade in feathers simply by collecting the enormous numbers that were shed by the many wild swans that lived there. Similarly the myriads of small feathers that eider ducks used to make their warm nests could simply be collected by local people in Scandinavia and northern England. These feathers were used to stuff duvets known as eiderdowns.
Ostrich feathers originally came from wild birds, but they began to be farmed in South Africa in the 19th century. Reared birds were kept in herds and plucked regularly to provide the plumes required. They were graded according to quality before being exported. Once they reached London, the feathers were typically displayed at the Cutler Street Warehouse in the City of London where many prestige imports were housed. This allowed potential buyers to view what was on offer before the feathers were sold by brokers, usually at auction. Vast quantities were imported; various estimates have been made concerning the value of the trade, but an article in The Spectator in 1920 valued the imports of ostrich feathers into London in 1913 at about £3 million. It was big business. Those who prepared feathers for use by the fashion industry were called ‘feather manufacturers’. These companies employed a range of workers, and a lot of ostrich feather businesses were based in London’s East End. Preparing feathers for sale was called ‘dressing’, and it involved a variety of processes. Feathers might be trimmed to an appropriate size, or the fluffy parts of them enlarged by adding ‘extensions’ from other feathers – a process known as ‘willowing’. Some feathers were dyed, while off-white feathers were bleached to make them gleaming white. Many were steamed to make them curl attractively, while others were assembled into flower-like arrangements or even made into fake bird shapes to adorn hats. Whole families, including children, might work on feathers, but it was generally a role for women rather than men. Work was very poorly paid and unregulated, and many workers were based at home. Hours could be lengthy, and some workers were clearly exploited and suffered from exhaustion; others developed chest complaints because of the dust generated from working with so many feathers, or side effects from handling chemicals used in dyeing – many Victorian green dyes contained arsenic.
Cruel trade
Unfortunately the trade in wild bird feathers was based on cruelty. Quite apart from the wanton destruction of living creatures just to satisfy fashion, adult birds were often taken while rearing chicks, and their young were left to die in the nest. Other adult birds had their most valuable feathers stripped off them while still alive, and were then abandoned in a mutilated state to die.
In the UK the demand for some native birds was so high that they were virtually exterminated. Kingfishers disappeared
from the Thames, for example, and the numbers of great crested grebes plummeted to dangerously low levels. In the 1870s the editor of natural history journal The Zoologist described regularly seeing many “large barrels full” of grebe skins at Leadenhall Market in the City of London. Two influential women founded charities in the late 1880s to protest against the slaughter of wild birds to feed fashion. The first was the Plumage League run by Emily Williamson, and the second, known as The Fur, Fin and Feather Folk, was organised by Eliza Phillips. These groups merged in 1891 as the Society for the Protection of Birds, which acquired the approval of the monarch in 1904, becoming the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
The original membership was mainly educated middleor upper-class women, and although men soon began to join, the cost of the annual subscription (5s in 1904) made the society unattractive to people from poorer backgrounds. It was only in the second half of the 20th century that conservation charities began to attract members from a more complete range of social classes. Early campaigns helped to rescue the grebe from the brink of extinction, but the society’s biggest triumph came when sustained pressure forced the Government to introduce the Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Act in 1921, banning feathers from wild birds being brought into the country. Feathers had already reached their apex of popularity in the Edwardian era, as photographs of women from the period show. But the outbreak of the First World War introduced a period of national austerity in which showy clothing was not considered fitting, while heavy duties were imposed on luxury items such as feathers to discourage non-essential trade – fashion was far from a national priority. Clothing became more basic and more functional, and the plumage industry collapsed almost overnight. There was a minor reawakening of popularity for the feather in fashion in the 1920s, but people’s consciences had been pricked by the charities’ campaigns and the effects of the war, and the interest was not enough to restore the industry to anything like its former standing.