Sepia Saturday #314: The Freckled Fannings

The Fannings
This family is almost certainly from Newtown in Waterford city, and Mr Fanning may have had something to do with a Butter Store. I'd say from the clothes, etc. that this is quite early for a Poole photo? (1884 is our earliest Poole glass plate.)

It's a great shot of parents, children, and puppy all en famille, and their freckliness (officially recognised medical term) is fascinating...

Date: 1880s??

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The freckled Fanning family is featured in this week's photo. After thinking about them, it's difficult to put memories of the Farkle Family from the famous American TV show, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, out of your mind. Unfortunately, there are few photos of the Farkle family extant, as a Google search yielded only this awful photo apparently taken from a TV screen.

The gist of the joke was that the Farkle children, all red-haired and freckled, didn't resemble their father, Frank Farkle, at all. However, the next door neighbor, Fred Berfel, was red-haired and freckled which fact seemed to be lost on Mr. Farkle for whom alliteration was everything. I always loved the twins, Simon and Gar Farkle - one black and one white, and their siblings Sparkle Farkle and Flicker Farkle. The fun was fast and furious in that family! Here's a clip - ignore the excessively silly intro - a first-rate Farkle frolic follows. 

Seriously, I studied the photo of the Fannings carefully to see how much latent humor I could detect in their facial expressions. I concluded that the father and two sons on the right side had laughed or smiled in the near past. The other family members looked pained or agitated. Mom is holding a very gay parasol, but she looks anything but happy. When I thought about her wearing that tight bodice with all the buttons, I could sympathize with her. 

Clothing designers of those days used the profusion of buttons to make the garments conform to the body shape. Underneath the buttoned top, women wore stiff corsets and often the dresses actually had "bones" sewn into the bodices.  Ugh. 

At least by that time, buttons weren't considered sinful. At various times in history, from what I read, buttons were considered a moral temptation; after all, they are easily undone (for some). A more conservative choice for garment closures was laces. Hmmm...I don't see it. A lace, it seems to me, is extremely easy to undo and takes little manual dexterity. In fact, I think laces became associated with sexy clothing, not modest clothing, somewhere along the line of fashion evolution. There are plenty of laced bodices on the covers of romantic novels, those novels we call "bodice rippers". And wouldn't you know it, those laces are almost always undone. 

Clearly, where there's a will there's a way. Buttons haven't posed much of a problem for this pair. 

The seemingly innocuous little button has played a few important roles in history. At one time, buttons were used to carry secret messages; some had small compasses built into them. The photo below is of a WW2 British RAF Escape Button Compass. There's a tiny working compass that unscrew from the front.

www.collectarea.com

In 2011, a Barbadian woman who claimed to be a clothing designer was caught at a Canadian airport after more than a $1 million in cocaine was found inside the thousands of buttons for garments she was importing. 

In the book, "Napoleons' Buttons", the authors speculate that the tin buttons on Napoleon's army's uniforms may have been instrumental in their ultimate defeat. From the website, Napoleon's Buttons: 

 "In December of 1812, Napoleon's army consisting of 600,000 men was marching toward Russia. His Forces up until this time had been unmatched and undefeated. One reason for the downfall of the unstoppable French army was army uniforms themselves. All of the army's clothing, spanning from the highest general to the most lowly private, had tin buttons sewn on to their uniforms. When exposed to the bitter cold, as Napoleons army encountered in Russia, tin disintegrates into a fine powder. Was the army, as their buttons and uniforms fell apart, so weakened by the cold that it could not function? Were men using their hands to hold together their garments instead of carrying vital supplies? Could the disintegration of something as small as a tin button led to the downfall of one of the greatest armies throughout history? (Le Couteur & Burreson 1-19)"

I read on and on about buttons and one thing led to another as I cruised up and down the net. Strange little facts popped up - like why buttons are sewn on men's jacket sleeves? Obviously, they serve no practical purpose or do they? I read the answer and immediately posed the questions to my smarty-pants husband. "I bet you don't know why they sew button's on men's coat jacket sleeves." He paused for two seconds and said, "To discourage men from wiping their noses on their sleeves." I sighed. A little later he told me that he learned about the sleeve/nose wiping from his time as an officer and a gentleman.

From Vintage News, I found this fascinating photo of a Victorian exercise machine. How about the buttons on the woman's exercise costume.

I'm buttoning up my post for today by adding the only sepia family group picture I have of my paternal grandparents which resembles the prompt. My grandmother's gown features leg o'mutton sleeves which were fashionable in the 1890's and no doubt there are buttons on the bodice, but sadly, the photo is so bad that details are hard to see. 

And there's one final bit of my family story that hearkens back not to the Freckled Fannings but to the fictitious, funny Farkle family. My grandfather William died in 1902 and some years later my grandmother, by then in her 40's, married the boy next door. Bertie Massey was in his early twenties. Not exactly the Farkle family and Bertie was no Fred Berfel, but I bet there were a few raised eyebrows in that community. 

  

Around 1890 - my grandmother Lucy Armstrong Killeen and my grandfather William Killeen and children:
Percy, George, Hilda, Netta, Lornie, Pearl. My father was not yet on the scene.