June Swann (1929-2025): a personal appreciation by Pat Poppy

 

I first met June Swann in the early 1970s when I was a young and new member of the Costume Society. June was already the doyen of shoe historians having been at the Northampton Museum since 1950. The museum published her first Shoe and Leather bibliography in 1956, and by 1969 she was publishing her work on shoes concealed in buildings. She was chairman of the Costume Society from 1980 to 1987, and continued to take a close interest in the Society after she stood down. I remember the Society needing to make alterations to its constitution, these were put to an AGM, June stood up and insisted that each change was challenged – it was a very long AGM. She was still writing and giving papers well into her eighties. I attended the MEDATS (Medieval Dress and Textile Society) conference: Below the Knee in 2013, where she gave a talk Fourteenth and Fifteenth century poulaines, questioning whether the non-archaeologically sourced poulaines were nineteenth century, as the construction seemed different to the archaeological examples. I saw her again at the Costume Society Conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2017, and the following year the Society produced a festschrift for her ninetieth birthday. I worked on the bibliography for the festschrift, June sent me her list, I just checked everything over. She was a petite and very feisty lady, and she will be much missed.