Buttons… buttons…

As I was reading the blog by my old friend, Andrew Simpson  (just about my oldest friend ) and as so often happens when I read his stories and memoirs – or his historical pieces, I was reminded of my own childhood. Andrew was remembering his dad’s collection of odds and ends and buttons, things not thrown away “because they might come in useful“! My mum had a button tin – she made all our clothes, including dad’s shirts and pyjamas, and I guess often she would buy a card of buttons for something and there would be too many buttons to use on the shirt, or skirt, or dress or whatever. These would not be thrown away but kept, maybe in the button tin, but certainly in the sewing box. Buttons… buttons…

Mum’s button tin was a coronation tin, made to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II – and I still have it. I’m sure there are many many people of my generation who still have their mum’s button tin! There were many old buttons in the tin, because when clothes wore out, or were altered, then the old buttons were carefully cut off and saved. With bought clothes there was often a couple of spare buttons on a little ribbon sewn into the side seam – in case you lost a button, of course! My sister and I used to play with the buttons – not actual games, but we’d sort them out, put them in order of size, or shape, or colour, or our favourites.

I’m not harking back to the so called “good old days” – life was just very different then, and I don’t suppose children these days would find any fun at all in a tin of buttons. Some people really do think past times were better – “Oh we didn’t do that in our day! We did such and such and so on, and our childhood was much better than these new-fangled things!” Past times were just different times, and when children now grow up, today will be the past time. We had less chance and opportunity when I was a child, we had fewer of everything – I have always loved reading, and the books we had at home must have been read many times over, even though we were fortunate enough to have a library near us which we visited regularly. We had fewer toys but we played with them in different ways – which maybe made us inventive and creative – but toys these days also teach children different skills through play.

I’ve rather wandered away from buttons… I think I still have Mum’s button tin somewhere, I must get it out and entertain myself with them, sorting and arranging!

My featured image is of me and my sister in our party frocks and boleros. They were the same except mine was white with a thin sparkly red thread running through, and Andy’s was white with a blue thread. I had a red velvet bolero and she had a blue one  except she must have taken hers off in the photo. The red and blue shiny buttons were like little knobbly beads with a hole in the back to push the cotton thread through.

Here’s a link to Andrew’s blog:

https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2025/09/ancient-buttons-and-that-definition-of.html