Two Books

Two Books I read on holiday and I enjoyed both of them.  I am a big fan of biographies/autobiographies of woman.  I love reading about the lives of other women.    

The first one is by Esme Young - the judge from the The Great British Sewing Bee.  She's had an interesting life and was quite a girl in her younger days (quite fearless) and started a fashion brand called Swanky Modes.  She still teaches pattern cutting at Central St Martins College as well as appearing on The Sewing Bee and has made many outfits for adverts and films (including Bridget Jones's bunny outfit)

The second book is called The Mill Girls and I enjoyed it so much.  It is the life stories of four women who worked in the Lancashire Cotton Mills.  They went to work when they were 14 and did very long days in poor conditions (they used to breath in the cotton fibres).  It was so noisy that they had to use sign language to talk to each other.  Most of them married young (about 18) but went back to the mills after they had their children.  The work was hard and tough but the main thing that came through was that it was the comradeship of the other women that got them through.  They thought they had jobs for life but in the 1950's the jobs started to go.