umberella-ella-ella

Just as it stopped raining, I decided to write about umbrellas. Or umberella-ella-ella, as Rihanna sings.

Then it started raining again. So I feel vindicated.

[1958]

A little while ago, we went to the Saul Leiter exhibition in Milton Keynes (it’s still on), and it was full of umbrellas in the snow and rain, often a red one as a focal point seen through steam or or condensation or raindrops in incredibly atmospheric and subtle photos. I really love Saul Leiter’s work.

[2024]

Not long after, I jumped on a steamed-up red London bus going down Woburn Place to escape the pouring rain, and thought I’d try a Saul Leiter-style photo. By chance I passed someone with a red umbrella, but it reminded me just how hard it is to capture ‘the decisive moment’, as Henri Cartier-Bresson described it, something he and Saul Leiter did so brilliantly.

[ ‘Street Scene in Windy and Rainy Weather’ (1846), CW Eckersberg]

I am not a great umbrella-user. I can see the point of them, but really they are so strange and silly, cumbersome, unwieldy, annoying, and take up too much space. This wonderful painting, which I saw in SMK in Copenhagen, is a fine illustration of some of the issues with umbrellas and other umbrella users. Dickens recognised that umbrellas can be ‘elaborately undignified’, as John Carey wrote in The Violent Effigy, as well as comic and phallic. Plus, they trap and pinch fingers, blow inside out, blow away, their spokes break, their mechanisms break*, and the telescope action often fails. I dislike having to work out what to do with a rolled-up, sodden umbrella. (As Dickens also said, it’s like dealing with wet lettuces.)

* but this can be turned into a positive: Fred Vincy in Middlemarch “…at six years old thought [Mary} the nicest girl in the world, making her his wife with a brass ring which he had cut from an umbrella.”

[JH Fisher shop, Hanbury Street, photo in the Fashion City exhibition, with umbrellas looking like plucked poultry hanging in a butcher’s shop]

For these reasons, and because I mostly cycle or walk now in what is a windy city, I value hats and hoods and helmets, and not something which drips everywhere when you get inside and needs storing separately. But umbrellas are still a source of excellent images, amusement, and anecdotes.

[‘The Bus Stop’ (1955), LS Lowry]

Such as the one told by a former student at Hull University. Philip Larkin was waiting in the pouring rain at a bus stop in Hull in 1955 when he noticed a young student moving soggily in his direction. "Don't think you are coming under my umbrella," he sniffed. The opposite of The Hollies and their umbrella love story in four lines, “Bus stop, wet day, she's there, I say/"Please, share my umbrella"/Bus stop, bus goes, she stays, love grows/Under my umbrella”. And they should know, as a band which had its origins in wet, rainy Manchester.

[Manchester crowd during a visit by the Queen, 1954]

Ah yes, the wet North West.

[rainmates at Ascot races, 1966]

When I was growing up, if the women I knew (eg my Mum) weren’t permanently carrying an umbrella, they always had in their handbag a rainmate, a kind of clear plastic bag to be tied over the hair and under the chin. My very first job was in a hairdresser’s which sold an awful lot of rainmates at the till to protect the carefully constructed, firmly sprayed, bouffant shampoo-and-sets that would have been destroyed by even a few drops of rain as customers exited the salon in Stockport. (I was thirteen, hated washing people’s hair over a basin, quite liked handing curlers to the hairdresser, loved the lilac and blue rinses, but was ‘let go’ for reading magazines in the basement when sent to get the towels out of the drier. I wonder if I brought it on myself…).

One major problem with brollies is of course that they are so easily lost, mislaid, and left behind precisely because they are are large and/or wet. This is London Transport’s lost property in May 1929 showing all the umbrellas which were lost in April 1929.

We may laugh at how attached people still were to the idea of the umbrella if not to their actual umbrellas, but this is what the Lost Propery Office looks like today. (Tbf, lost phones now outnumber lost umbrellas.)

The umbrella obsession is not just a British thing. The French also have fine parapluies.

[‘Paris Street, Rainy Day’ (1887), Gustave Caillebotte]

This is a favourite painting by the often under-rated Caillebotte (much put-upon by Monet for money, and with the patience of a saint, according to this book).

I’m also very keen on Jacques Tati as M. Hulot, here in Playtime (1967) with his trademark raincoat, umbrella and pipe, which all create an instantly recognisable silhouette.

And, of course, the title sequence of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964). Perfect umbrella choreography.

More careful umbrella choreography, now in grey, black and white, also makes this scene in Foreign Correspondent (1940) a classic. By using a sequence of clever twitching movements, Hitchcock indicates the route taken by an assassin as he escapes through a crowd whose mass of black umbrellas creates a “protective shield” as this interesting BFI article on ‘the umbrellas of cinema’ says (although I feel some of the interpretations are questionable).

[Hugh Grant at his campest in the ‘Paddington 2’ (2017) finale]

Finally, I do love the theatricality of umbrellas and the way they are perfect camp musical/comedy props, not that I go twirling and swirling and dancing over the Pot and Pem as Gene Kelly might have done. If ever I need a fillip on a wet day, I just rewatch Hugh Grant tap-dancing with a pink umbrella.

[photo by Robert Whiatker, 1964)]

Or remind myself how well the Beatles turned plain umbrellas into perfect props for cool-but-daft poses inside a dry studio.

Happy Sunday!