Twiggy

This week I'm looking into the background of Twiggy, the model who rose to fame in the 1960s and who has returned to the public gaze in a series of TV advertisements.

Figures released recently show that the high street chain Marks and Spencer have enjoyed a dramatic start to 2006, with sales growing rapidly throughout the first three months of the year whilst competitors have struggled. City analysts have attributed the turnaround in the company's fortunes to a striking marketing campaign that featured Twiggy, who was one of the original supermodels of the 1960s and is now enjoying a resurgence of her own, thanks in part to the new profile she's received as a result of the TV exposure. We've taken a glimpse into her family background to see whether this is a typical story of rags to, well, the rag trade.

Who is Twiggy related to?

Twiggy was born Lesley Hornby in the London borough of Willesden in 1949, the daughter of William Norman Hornby, a master builder, and his wife Nellie Lydia. The couple had married sixteen years earlier in 1933 at the Willesden register office; William worked as a carpenter and joiner, whilst Nellie Lydia nee Reeman had been employed as a factory worker for a local printing firm. At the time of the marriage, William's father, William Marbeck Hornby, was earning a living as a grocer, but this was quite a change from his earlier career, and further investigation reveals that the family had originated not in north west London but the north west of England - Bolton, to be precise. William Norman Hornby was born in 1909 in Bolton, and at the time his father was a journeyman iron moulder. His wife, Annie Garvey, was a comber in a local cotton mill - a standard profession for thousands of women in the industrial north west throughout most of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, until the economic slump of the 1920s put many mills out of business forcing people to move elsewhere to find work. When she married William Marbeck Hornby in 1907, her father James Garvey was already dead and in the 1901 census she was living with thirteen other girls aged between 13 and 24 in a boarding house in Clarence Street, Bolton. Most were employed as room hands in cotton mills, others as cotton winders.

Although William Marbeck Hornby's family also lived in Bolton, they were involved in the other main industrial source of employment in the area - the ironworks. William Marbeck Hornby's father Peter was listed as a licensed victualler when his son married Annie in 1907, but for most of his working life he found employment in an jron foundry. Indeed, father and son worked together in the same profession at the time of the 1901 census, with Peter working as a turner and fitter, whilst William was a moulder. Peter's wife Harriet Ann Marbeck - the source of William's unusual middle name - also worked, bringing additional revenue into the household as a dressmaker. They had married in their early twenties in 1880 at the Methodist chapel, Little Bolton, and the certificate reveals more about Peter Hornby's family background. His father, Peter Hornby, had originally been an agricultural labourer and when Peter junior was born in 1860, he lived with his wife in Egerton, Turton, before eventually making his way like thousands of others into the emerging industrial towns. A lot has been written about the harsh conditions in the mills and factories, particularly relating to child labour; yet this is exactly what happened to members of Twiggy's family. At the time of the 1871 census, Harriet Ann Marbeck was living at home with her parents in Little Bolton aged only 8; but her older brother, born twelve months before her, was already working in a brass factory as a half-timer, which meant half his day was spent studying, and the remainder slaving over hot machinery for money. People today decry the fashion industry for taking models at a young age and exploiting them, but the reality of child labour in the 1860s was a world apart from the 1960s when Twiggy was making her debut on the catwalk.