The social status of Harrow’s residents was clearly defined by the position of their homes on the gradient that led up from Wealdstone, past Harrow town centre and on to the leafy heights of Harrow-on-the-Hill, where the well-heeled lived above the persistent urban smogs of 1950s London. Gordon and Dora’s sub-post office and small general store at 31 Station Road was virtually at the bottom of the hill.
Station Road was a main thoroughfare, flanked with terraces of three-bedroom Edwardian houses. Some of the ground floors had been converted into shops, including tobacconists, funeral parlours and bakeries. Number 31 was a modest but adequate home. The Swires lived above the shop in three bedrooms, a sitting room/diner, a kitchen and a small bathroom. After a year Gordon took over another post office and grocery business in nearby Stanmore, while Dora continued to run Station Road.
Vivienne, the bombastic sixteen-year-old schoolgirl from Glossop, was temporarily cowed by her new surroundings, and she felt insecure. She enrolled at the local grammar school but found it difficult to integrate, a fact that she put down to her broad Northern accent. After leaving school she attended a silversmithing and jewellery-making course at Harrow Art School, but she left abruptly after one term, took a secretarial course at Pitman’s and began to earn her own living as a typist for a local firm, having seen an advertisement on a tube train. Her favourite pastime was still dancing, and she attended many local dances. At one of them in late 1961 she met a young man called Derek John Westwood, two years her senior. Vivienne was instantly smitten by the handsome Westwood, who was confident, ardent and shared her love of rock ’n’ roll: ‘When I met Derek he was very lively and ever such a good dancer,’ she said later. His family lived on Belvedere Way in Kenton, the next suburb, and his father was a checker in a factory. Derek was working as a toolshop apprentice in the local Hoover factory, supplementing his wages with casual work as a manager at bingo halls and hotels. He longed, however, to be an airline pilot, and not long after meeting Vivienne he secured a job as a steward for British European Airways. His prospects looking up, Derek proposed marriage. Vivienne, who had left her typing job and was now working as a primary school teacher in Willesden, North London, accepted, although she later said: ‘I didn’t want to marry him actually, but he was such a sweet guy and I couldn’t give it up.’
Though the young couple planned to marry in a register office, Dora forcefully insisted that they have a white wedding, in a church. Vivienne made her own dress, which was not unusual in those days, and the wedding took place on 21 July 1962 at St John the Baptist, Greenhill, a large Edwardian stone church half a mile up the hill from the Swires’ home. The couple were married by Reverend J.R. Maxwell Johnstone, and honeymooned in North Devon. Vivienne and Derek moved into 86 Station Road, three hundred yards from the Swires’ sub-post office. On 3 September 1963 a son, Benjamin Arthur Westwood, was born at Edgware General Hospital in Hendon.
To contribute to the household expenses, Vivienne took a menial job chopping up rolls of print with a guillotine at the nearby Kodak factory (‘I was the fastest chopper in the factory,’ she later boasted). Despite Derek’s kindness and great love for his new wife, she was bored. She felt that her life was frustratingly circumscribed, and she watched with envy as her younger brother Gordon moved into a new and exciting circle at Harrow Art School. It was through him that she was to meet the man who would entice her away from working-class family conformity for ever.
1965–1971
‘I was a coin and he showed me the other side.’
Vivienne Westwood on Malcolm McLaren
Vivienne never fell under the spell of the sixties, whose politics, music and clothes were not to be a significant influence on her. But her life did change during that decade. She met Malcolm McLaren, who, in tune with the times, channelled her latent creativity into fashion, a medium in which the pair could showcase his political and artistic posturings and her campaigning zeal. Manipulated by him, Vivienne evolved from a cussing, church-going housewife into a subversive seamstress of agitprop clothing.
It was within her brother Gordon’s circle of friends that Vivienne met Malcolm Robert Andrew Edwards (né McLaren) in 1965 at the Railway Hotel, Harrow and Wealdstone, where Derek was now managing the club and she served as hatcheck girl in the evenings. McLaren was amused by her waspish asides to her husband. The dyspeptic child of a broken home, he liked to witness marital discord, and may have speculated that her aggression was for his benefit.
Malcolm Edwards (as he was known until 1971) was born on 22 January 1946 in the family home in Carysfort Road, Stoke Newington, a working-class district of North-East London. His parents were Emily (née Isaacs), the daughter of lower-middle-class Jewish diamond-cutters, and Peter McLaren, a working-class Scot who had served as a sapper with the Royal Engineers during the war and then became a motor-fitter. Emily considered that she had married beneath her. They had two sons, Stuart and, two and a half years later, Malcolm. When Malcolm was eighteen months old, Peter abandoned the family. He eventually married five times.
Emily then married Mike Edwards, a tailor (who, probably to disguise his origins, had changed his name from Levi), and decided to call herself Eve. Eve Edwards was a good-time girl and a flirt, boasting a sexual intimacy with the millionaire tycoon Sir Charles Clore. McLaren loathed his stepfather and felt betrayed by his mother, who was permanently absent, by day helping to run the small family clothing factory, Eve Edwards Ltd, and by night out with her lovers. Her sons were brought up by their grandmother, Rose Isaacs, who lived next door.
Rose Isaacs was born in 1887. Wanting to become an actress, she had taken elocution lessons which made her sound pretentious and affected. She was separated from her husband and, frustrated by her circumscribed life, lived out her fantasies through her grandson Malcolm, with whom she shared a bed until he was ten years old: ‘She created her own world and I lived in it and was protected by it,’ he remembered in 1996. ‘She allowed me to do anything; anything, in her eyes, that was not boring. Her motto was, if you were bad you were good, and if you were good you were boring.’
Favouring Malcolm at the expense of his brother Stuart, Rose established a pattern that he was to repeat as a father and stepfather. He was encouraged to defy authority, particularly that of his teachers – egged on by his grandmother, he lasted only one day at the William Patten School in Stoke Newington. After a short spell with a private tutor, he attended a fee-paying Jewish school called Avigdor in nearby Lordship Lane. His final schooling was provided by the Orange Hill Grammar School in Burnt Oak, where he passed an unremarkable three O-levels in 1961. Spoilt by Grandmother Rose and ignored by his parents, McLaren developed a jaundiced view of family life. He became a troublemaker, attracted to any philosophy that incited anarchy and excused belligerence.
Following in Stuart’s desert-booted footsteps, McLaren became a mod, a youth style which by 1958 had ousted the teddy boys’ insular little Englandism. The mods were dazzled by sharp Italian tailoring and American casuals, such as windcheaters, check or intasia knitted shirts, and short, close-fitting, single-breasted, small-lapelled jackets. Mod tailoring recalled the sexual tightness of Italian Renaissance court dress: the short jacket, codpiece and hose. The sixties version revealed every flex of muscle. The boxy, waistless ‘bum-freezer’ jacket with narrow, notched lapels fell from unpadded shoulders. It was single-breasted and three-button (only the centre one being fastened), and ventless, or virtually so. A series of flapless ‘ticket’ and secret pockets were inserted into its plain dark cloth. The jacket was worn with American import denim jeans or slacks that were tight against the thigh and narrowed to a sixteen-inch hem. Trousers hung on the hips rather than being suspended under the armpits with braces, and the zip relegated the buttoned fly to the fashion scrapheap. A white drip-dry or woollen shirt, desert boots and short socks and short, tidy hair completed the look. The effect was hard, clean and modern.
By the autumn of 1964 McLaren, a puny, aggressive flâneur, had run away from home and found work with a vintner in the West End of London. The previous year he had taken evening classes at St Martin’s College of Art, and in 1964 he entered Harrow Art