We’re going to have a closer look today at two articles that appeared in early issues of Picture Post. Picture Post was a weekly photojournalism magazine that was launched in Britain in 1938. Its pages contained a huge breath of articles and reportage, which covered topics from word politics to science and nature to fashion and entertainment. Due to the timing of its launch, and the fact that its founder and editor was the Jewish journalist Stefan Lorant, the first issues contain frequent criticism and condemnation of Nazi Germany. This political content was balanced with pieces on ‘lighter’ topics.

In November 1938 and May 1939, Picture Post ran two pieces on ‘Glamour Girls’. Together, these pieces give an insight into the position of young female stage performers in London at the end of the interwar period. By the end of the 1930s, ‘glamour girl’ was the name for the young women who danced on the stage as part of troupes – they were more commonly referred to as ‘chorus girls’ in the earlier part of the interwar period. The adoption of the term ‘glamour girl’ is symptomatic of the continued Americanization of British popular culture throughout the 1920s and 1930s – indeed, one of the Picture Post articles follows an American dance troupe in London.

The row of young, thin, white chorus girls who are all dressed alike and dance in perfect unison was a very recognizable feature of modern urban entertainment during the interwar period. The phenomenon has most famously been critiqued by Siegfried Kracauer in his essay ‘The Mass Ornament’ which originally appeared as a series of articles in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1927. Kracauer, too, centres his analysis around an American troupe, the Tiller Girls – but British chorus girl troupes quickly sprang up to emulate the American original. Chorus girls appear in myriad British films of this period, from Friday the Thirteenth (1933) to The Show Goes On (1937).

But what of the glamour girl in news reportage? The first Picture Post article under consideration was published in the issue of 22 October 1938 and is entitled ‘A Glamour Girl’s Day’. This piece purports to give insight into the day-to-day life of a group of American dancers who were performing at the Dorchester hotel at that time. Why the show’s impresario, Mr Chester Hale, did not recruit British girls when he had to put on ‘the snappiest cabaret show’ possible, is not made clear. Chester Hale himself appears to have been an American; and it’s implied that American girls are better qualified for ‘snappy’ shows.

The piece both observes the dancers as a foreign species and reassures the readers that they are completely harmless; and it also does not neglect to draw attention to the girls’ physical features. The captions to some of the photos give a good indication of the article’s overall tone:

Hard-working, ambitious, well-educated, carefully chaperoned is the first-class glamour girl of to-day. Wanda Cochran has studied philosophy and public-speaking. Is studying now at the R.A.D.A. (…) Doris Call, a blue-eyed blonde from Virginia, is also studying at the R.A.D.A. She has six sisters, two brothers.

The piece makes much of the fact that the girls are very young – some of them are reported to be only 16. A few have brought their mothers and siblings with them for company; according to one of the mothers, she thinks dancing in a cabaret is much safer for a girl than going to high school (in America). The article runs the reader through a typical day for the troupe during their run at the Dorchester, and repeatedly stresses that the girls engage in wholesome activities such as learning about London and British history; educating their siblings; and improving their dancing and singing skills. It is also emphasised that they usually go home after they finish their shows at 1am – they very much do not go to nightclubs with young men.

Slipped in between the descriptions of the girls’ physiques (average weight 8 st 8 lbs; average height 5 ft 6 in) is the following:

Mr Hale gets a lump sum per week from the Dorchester. Out of that he pays the girls and their fares, and provides the dresses (…) the dresses have run him into a good many hundred pounds. The girls pay their own living expenses. Most of them stay in flats with various accompanying members of their family.

As the dancers have to pay for their own accommodation in central London, as well as their food and regular clothes and expenses, one suspects that they did not actually have any money left over to save. It is also not specified whether the fares for the ‘various accompanying members of their family’ were covered by the Dorchester. What the young women get out of the experience is the ‘glamour’ of their costumes, and the opportunity to learn more about British history and British culture; which covers up a precarious employment position that required them to temporarily relocate; work late hours; and forego traditional schooling.

The conditions of employment also receive attention in the second Picture Post article, printed on 6 May 1939 under the title ‘The Making of a Glamour Girl.’ Although this piece appeared only 6 months after the previous article, the tone differs markedly. The status of the glamour girl appears to have rapidly deteriorated; no longer does the article attempt to stress the career aspirations of glamour girls. Instead, the piece confidently states that ‘Few of them [glamour girls] have any stage ambitions, the majority realise their limitations and are content to be just glamorous.’

Indeed, the low requirements for the role are presented as a selling point:

To be a good Glamour Girl, a girl must possess four qualities. She must have good looks and a figure to match, she must be able to walk gracefully in time to music, she must know how to wear clothes, and she must be tall. No girl who has these attributes need starve or spend her days tapping on a typewriter, stage managers will only be too eager for her services.

The role of the glamour girl (now capitalized) is no longer presented as one that requires hard physical work or any skill, but instead is reduced purely to physical requirements. It is presented as an ideal job for a ‘fun’ girl who wants to make easy money; the jobs are alleged to pay at least £5 a week. The implication that this is a good wage is belied by the statement also included in the article, that many glamour girls work as fashion models and mannequins during the day. The apparent need to work two jobs, alongside the short ‘shelf life’ of the glamour girl (the article estimates the average girl’s stage career to last 3 or 4 years) do not signal this as a financially sound or stable career path. Through these articles, girls and young women were not encouraged to consider long-term benefits of education or jobs that could be done at any age, but instead were directed to consider a job in which one had to work relatively few hours and wear nice clothes, as desirable.

Of course, it would be amiss to imply that these articles were primarily aimed at aspiring glamour girls; both articles were clearly (also) an excuse to print photographs of slender young women in revealing outfits. The 1939 article is accompanied by a dozen photographs, nine of which show the performers in bathing suits or other similarly revealing performance outfits. The 1938 article mostly shows the girls dressed in everyday clothes, but allows the reader a glimpse ‘backstage’ with photos of the girls putting on make-up and putting on their shoes. Both articles present the reader with a fantasy of young, happy, untroubled dancers and only hint at the financial precarity these roles perpetuated.