Page 33 - Sample pages "Kim: A Biography of M.G. Founder Cecil Kimber" by Jon Pressnell

they wore cocktail pyjamas. That might have been OK in London, but evidently Oxford was a bit more backward,” says Betty’s daughter Sara Delamont.
This exuberant way of dressing may well have caused raised eyebrows. Cocktail pyjamas, comprising a blouse or jacket and loose-fitting trousers, started to become popular in the 1920s, most notably on the French Riviera, where pyjamas worn as a swimsuit cover-up began to be worn away from the beach – and started to use more decorative fabrics. Initially considered shocking, by the start of the 1930s they were more widely accepted, but still had a whiff of bold unconventionality about them. ‘A woman may and does wear pyjamas to quite formal dinners in her own house, to other people’s dinners in town and country if you know them well and the more iconoclastic members of the female sex even wear them to the theatre,’ noted Vogue in 1931.
These pyjamas most probably weren’t an extravagant item for the sisters, who may well have run them up themselves. “Both of
A young Muriel Dewar with
her daughter Pauline, who was generally known as Bobbie.
them were able to sew, and often used to get hold of old material,” recalled Bobbie’s husband, John Walkinton, when the author interviewed him in 2017. The duo remained a warm memory for Walkinton. “When they got together, they’d make Kimber’s life hell. They set about him. He loved it. He lapped it up. They were a couple of devils, once they got going. They brightened up our lives. They were always up for a bit of fun.”
As mentioned above, an affair did not begin straightaway, but Kimber evidently soon began to figure in the life of the Dewar- Hamilton household, as Bobbie’s recollections testify. ‘When I was 12 years old I met a girl of the same age at a party. We looked at each other up and down, and she said “You’re a tomboy!” “You’re another!” I said, and that was my first contact with Cecil Kimber’s family – his elder daughter. The year was 1932...Over the next few years, I continued to meet the family from time to time – at home, where Kim ran steam trains all round his younger daughter’s nursery4, and particularly at the ice rink in Oxford, where Kim was a very competent skater in spite of his pronounced limp. And [he was] no mean squash player5 and dancer, either.’
Bobbie appreciated the effort Kimber put into making activities fun. ‘As Kim was a great friend of the adults in my family I saw a good deal of him when I was the only youngster around. He always took such trouble with me, like writing a set of rhyming clues to lead to a birthday bicycle, and thinking up a surprise evening picnic on a beautiful summer evening, on the way to a military tattoo.’
Clearly Bobbie Dewar fell under the spell of her future step-father. ‘Kim had such a personality, and was so kind to me, that I literally worshipped the ground he walked on,’ she writes. ‘Many people one met in Oxford worked at M.G., in fact my uncle did, and they all seemed to feel part of a family with Kim as the head.’
4 As readers will have noticed, stories vary about this famous train set.
5 This is unlikely to be correct. If tennis and golf were found ‘too difficult’ (see Chapter 1), then it is hard to see how Kimber would have been able to cope with such an intense high-speed ball game as squash.
207 Chapter Nine: Technical Advances but a Marriage in Retreat
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