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Catch on and a century later in the 1750s Thomas Nugent
on his Grand Tour wrote from Germany of the feather
duvet as something very novel, a new discovery:
"
There is one thing very particular to them, that they
do not cover themselves with bed-clothes, but lay one
feather-bed over, and another under. This is comfortable
enough in winter, but how they can bear their feather-
beds over them in summer, as is generally practiced,
I cannot conceive."
It was to be another 200 years before
Sir Terence Conran
would revolutionise bed time for Britain. Conran recalls:
"People do credit me with bringing the duvet to Britain. I had
been in Sweden in the 1950s and was given a duvet to sleep
under. I probably had a girl with me and I thought this was all
part of the mood of the time – liberated sex and easy living.
It was wonderful that when you came to make your bed, it was
just a couple of shakes."
From his new Habitat shop on Chelsea’s King's Road in
the continental quilt
colonised British bedrooms
advertised as ‘10-second beds’ with risqué slogans like
“sleep with a Swede”. Duvets would reduce the
complexity of making the bed but not, of course, the
energy consumed in changing the cover. If you sew
buttons to the corners of your quilt and button holes to
the corners of your covers life improves immeasurably.
The simplicity of most modern beds - just one mattress,
just one covering - takes us back to the simplicity of the
Saxons. Will we go back further? Give the
Green-this-
carbon-miles-that
lobby a few more years and they might
yet have us back in shallow pits and covered with leaves.
The Continental Quilt Arrives
Jean-Paul Sartre said that hell is other people but
if it were a job then for me running a close second
to working in a wedding dress shop with Cilla
Black and Vanessa Feltz comes chambermaid in
a large hotel. One Victorian household manual,
clearly aimed at houses with servants, advises
the following bed set up: an iron bedstead, a thick
brown sheet over the metal springs followed by
a horsehair mattress, a feather mattress, an under
blanket, an under sheet, a bottom sheet, a top
sheet, three or four blankets and an eiderdown.
If you didn’t suffocate in the night the manual
instructs that the mattresses be turned each
morning and the pillow cases changed twice a
day! Two world wars put paid to the social system
in which domestic service was just about it in
terms of employment for women and as the 20
th
century passed beds became much simpler.
Emancipation from the drudgery of bed-making
finally came in the 1970s, when the
“continental
quilt”
arrived from Scandinavia. It was a journey
that had taken 300 years.
Sir Paul Rycourt, son of a Huguenot and born at
Aylesford in Kent in 1629 was a diplomat and
historian. Rycaut tried to introduce the German
duvet -the "federbetten"- to his friends back home
sending them bags of down with the instructions
to make quilts with
"high and in large panes, or
otherwise it will not be warme’.
But they didn’t