English

by Ben Fogle

  Kate Moss wasn’t just responsible for helping to save the wax jacket. She gave the Wellington boot a boost, too.

  Owning a pair of wellies is a British institution. No good Englishman or -woman is complete without a good pair of gumboots.

  The legacy of the Wellington boot began in 1817, when the Duke of Wellington requested that the famous London shoemaker George Hoby of St James design something that could be worn in battle but that could also be used for evening wear – certainly a highly practical request. He wanted the design modeled on his military Hessian boots.

  Hessian boots, named after German mercenaries who fought alongside the British in the American War of Independence (1775–83), were made of soft, highly polished calfskin. They were knee-high, with a low heel and semi-pointed toe suitable for stirrups and were decorated with a tassel cut into the front. Standard-issue footwear for light cavalry regiments, especially hussars, they became widely worn by civilians too.

  These first boots, the Duke’s namesake style made by Hoby, were made of soft calfskin leather, cut close to the calf, and were designed as a fashion item. The heels were stacked around an inch and the tassel removed. The boot was appropriately hard-wearing for riding, yet smart enough for informal evening wear. The boot was dubbed ‘the Wellington’ and the name stuck.

  In 1856 the North British Rubber Company, later to become known as Hunter Boot Ltd, was founded. Using the newly patented vulcanization process for rubber, the company manufactured rubber boots and overshoes, alongside waterproof clothing, tyres and other durable rubber products.

  In 1916, after the outbreak of the First World War, the company was commissioned by the War Office to produce sturdy rubber boots as standard winter kit to protect soldiers from ‘trench foot’, a medical condition caused by prolonged exposure to damp in the flooded trenches. The mills operated around the clock to produce the immense quantities of boots required: 1,185,036 pairs were made to meet the British Army’s demands.

  During the Second World War, Hunter Boot Ltd was again requested to supply vast quantities of Wellington and thigh boots. By the end of the war, the Wellington had become popular among men, women and children for wet weather wear. The boot had developed to become far roomier with a thick sole and rounded toe. Also, with the rationing of that time, labourers began to use them for daily work. The Original Green Wellington, now known as the Original Boot, was introduced by Hunter in 1956.

  The year 2005 is recognized as the year that the Hunter brand exploded in popularity, coinciding with their expansion overseas to America. The year also marked the 50-year celebration of the iconic Original Boot. Hunter celebrated by introducing seven new colours. Kate Moss famously wore a pair to Glastonbury that year.

  A global flagship store on Regent Street, collection catwalks at London Fashion Week and collaborations with names like Jimmy Choo don’t provoke particularly powerful images of tramping through mud and wading through water with a pair of wellies. Town has very clearly met Country, however. Hunter acknowledge their heritage with a great amount of pride and consistency in design.

  From boots back to jackets. Like Barbour and Burberry, Belstaff is a heritage brand symbolic of rugged allure with a history of adventure, exploration, aviation and motorsport which has taken it onto catwalks around the world. Started in the mid-1920s, it became beloved of the riders of motorized bicycles and the bikers haven’t looked elsewhere for jackets ever since. The reason for their popularity? Harry Grosberg, the company founder, had researched and developed a material that was windproof, rainproof and resistant to heavy friction. Shown off by two male style icons – Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia and Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, the Belstaff jacket is now commonly seen on celebs such as Angelina Jolie, Hilary Swank, Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp. The Stoke-on-Trent manufacturer produced 40,000 of the Black Prince jackets a year during the Second World War. The jackets disappeared in the 1990s, but a change of ownership and employing talent from other iconic English brands has seen Belstaff back-motoring.

  In 1571, during the reign of Elizabeth I, Parliament legislated to support the wool industry by encouraging the use of wool in products. All men of the age of six had to wear a woollen ‘bonnet’ during religious ceremonies. ‘Persons of degree’ were excluded from this requirement but anyone else not complying was fined three farthings, a huge amount of money for the working class.

  The law remained for the best part of three decades and by the time it was repealed, the cloth cap (or Tudor bonnet) had become a symbol of respectability, of people prepared to obey the law and of course of the successful upper middle class. In short it became a symbol of aspiration.

  The Tudor bonnet was so popular that it is still used in various forms for PhD graduation ceremonies from universities across the country (and abroad – another sign of global influence).

  Men were still wearing the cloth cap by the beginning of the twentieth century and it was here that it started to span the complex English class system: it became popular with golfers.

  Yet cloth caps were also a symbol of the working class in the iconic photographs of the construction of the Queen Mary at John Brown and Co. shipbuilders in Clydebank. The government had invested in shipbuilding during the Great Depression and every head of those hardworking shipwrights can be seen in a cloth cap.

  Nowadays, the cloth cap looks as natural on the head of Prince Charles and David Beckham as it does on Andy Capp and Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses – it’s like the Land Rover in its ability to adapt to all social classes.

  Another English staple is the cardigan. Cupboard count: five. My wife calls them my ‘grandpa’ cardigans and the garment has undeniably developed a reputation as representing the slightly older generation.

  We can thank James Thomas Brudenell, the Seventh Earl of Cardigan, for the iconic garment, but he was no old fogey. Indeed, he is the villain in many of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels. Described as a pompous bully and a military incompetent, he was mistakenly ordered into action with the Light Brigade to charge the Russian guns during the Crimean War. The battle turned him into a national hero and it immortalized the woollen ‘cardigan’ he wore in battle.

  Soon after his return to England, rumours began to circulate that he had in fact fled the battlefield, that he was a coward and a cad.

  No one will ever know what really happened, but the battle of Balaclava was immortalized in Tennyson’s poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, and Lord Cardigan left us this strange woollen garment.

  Perhaps the most iconic item of clothing associated with England is the bowler hat. Loved by Sir Winston Churchill and fictional characters like Mr Banks in Mary Poppins, Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, Laurel and Hardy, and John Steed from the Avengers, the Bowler hat became synonymous with businessmen in the City of London during the mid-twentieth century.

  The hat originated in London in 1849 when the city’s most famous and oldest hatters, Lock & Co. of St James’s, were asked by politician Edward Coke to come up with a hat that would both protect his head while he was riding and not fall off. Lock & Co. asked the hat-making brothers William and Thomas Bowler to design something for them.

  The brothers delivered a hat that had shellac (a natural resin) on the top for protection and didn’t reach as high as the top hat. It fitted snugly around the temples, making it sit firmer on the head as well.

  Coke was very happy with the hat, paid 12 shillings for it and created a global market for the London hat makers. Bowlers were adopted throughout Great Britain, Europe and North America, and even became part of the national dress of Peru. Lock & Co. are still going and estimate they sell 4–5,000 bowlers a year at £300 each.

  The bowler hat of course goes hand-in-hand with the brolly.

  I will admit here that I hate umbrellas. In fact, I loathe the things. I’m not sure what it is but they have always rubbed me up the wrong way. When I went onto the BBC’s Orwellian comedy show Room 101, in which guests can banish their most
hated aspects of society, I nominated the umbrella.

  To be honest I find them slightly terrifying, mainly because so few people adhere to umbrella ‘etiquette’: they march down the street, completely unaware of the metal points that protrude from the corners.

  Perhaps it is just me, but most people who use umbrellas seem to be shorter than me, which means I navigate a forest of spikes at face level, threatening to take my eye out. I have been known to suggest an umbrella ‘driving licence’, whereby people are taught how to use umbrellas correctly and safely while in crowds.

  No one is sure of the origin of the umbrella. It is likely that it evolved from a basic shelter of leaves carried by primitive man. The rain umbrella – the one we English were more likely to need – was introduced by a merchant called Jonas Hanway in the 18th century. He’d seen umbrellas (Latin ‘little shade’) being used to protect ladies from the sun during a business trip to Persia. When he got back to grey and wet London, he had a shade constructed of animal ribs and stretched fabric which he used as a shield against the rain. For thirty years he was alternately shunned and ridiculed by society. Bystanders stood in shock at the social faux pas of walking with what at the time was seen as a symbol of weakness. The umbrella was ‘un-English’, it went against our stiff upper lip. We just braved the rain. People jeered the weak Hanway.

  Taxi drivers, Hansom cab owners and sedan-chair carriers all hated him, fearing his invention would take away their business; there are reports of him being pelted with rubbish by 18th-century cabbies to add injury to the insults. Hanway persisted even when a Hansom cab driver tried to run him over. According to reports, Hanway gave him a ‘good thrashing’ with his hefty little shade. It seems that the umbrella has always been used as a bit of a weapon.

  Twenty years after Hanway’s death, the Duke of Wellington was carrying an umbrella, and it has since become one of the essential accessories of the traditional ‘gentleman’.

  The development of the umbrella was quick; Wellington’s version had a rapier sword masked in the handle, ready for any impromptu street duels. By the middle of the nineteenth century the trademark ‘U’-shaped handle was added, and the materials used were getting lighter by the decade.

  It seems I am not alone in my dislike of umbrellas, though. Joseph Kennedy, the American Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, loathed any mention of umbrellas.

  His son, the future President John F. Kennedy, is said to have inherited his father’s hatred of them.

  According to historians, it was this ‘umbrella phobia’ that prompted Louis Steven Witt to take an umbrella to Dealey Plaza on 22 November 1963, with the intention of mocking the President as his car passed. No one knows if President Kennedy saw the umbrella. If he did, it would have been the last thing he ever noticed because, just as his car passed, he was shot dead.

  The ‘Umbrella Man’ has triggered countless conspiracy theorists convinced that the umbrella was part of the assassination plot, used to signal his death. In 1978, Louis Steven Witt revealed himself as ‘Umbrella Man’, explaining to the House Select Committee investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy that: ‘In a coffee-break conversation, someone mentioned that the Kennedys loathed umbrellas and all they represented.’

  ‘You were opening the umbrella to use it as a symbol to catch the President’s eye?’ asked his inquisitor.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Perhaps this was the beginning of the end. The umbrella has become something of a pariah in recent years. While a staple of the gathering queues at Wimbledon, they have, like the bowler hat in James Bond films, become devious weapons.

  One was infamously used as a real weapon in 1978, when the Bulgarian government killed the dissident journalist Georgi Markov by jabbing him with a ricin-tipped specimen on Waterloo Bridge.

  And I still loathe umbrellas.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE SILLY SEASON

  ‘What do you call an Englishman in the knockout stages of the World Cup? The referee.’

  My mother always wanted me to be a cricketer. There have been two cricketing highlights in my life. The first was when I accidentally managed to get into an English expat team playing an international match against Costa Rica; and the second was the time I played in a match in the middle of the Solent amidst ocean-going container ships and yachts.

  On the latter occasion, dressed in my finest starched cricket whites, fold marks still visible from the sporting shop shelf from which I had bought them the day before, I made my way to the ferry for the short journey across the Solent to the Isle of Wight.

  Cowes was already a hubbub of activity as sailors readied their yachts for a day’s sailing. I was here for a very different sport. Down in the marina I joined a modest crowd boarding a flotilla of yachts, ribs, tenders, canoes and every other assortment of tiny ocean-going craft imaginable. As the vessels filled they set off in a small armada for the middle of the Solent.

  Here, bang in the centre of one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, several dozen craft bearing hundreds of people bobbed around in the calm waters. There was no sight of land for many miles, just a busy expanse of water littered with boats. It was certainly an unusual beginning for a cricket match.

  The date and time of this bizarre spectacle are dictated by the tide. For 364 days each year Bramble Bank lurks beneath the surface of the sea, halfway between the northern coast of the Isle of Wight and the mainland, a navigational hazard for any unwary skipper. Hundreds of ships have run aground here, most notably the Queen Elizabeth II in 2008 on her final visit to Southampton before retiring.

  Each September, when the tide reaches its lowest ebb, there is one day when the water rolls back to reveal a thin stretch of golden sand in the middle of the maritime version of the M25. And in that short window, this sliver of land, roughly 200 yards long, becomes the world’s oddest cricket pitch as a match is played in front of hundreds of fans. This is the annual Brambles cricket match. This is extreme cricket.

  While some believe that it was prisoners from Parkhurst who were the first to play cricket on the bank, encouraged to do so by a governor who thought that escape would be impossible, the exact provenance is thought to be via a boatbuilder called Uffa Fox. A friend of the Duke of Edinburgh, Fox arranged a cricket match between ‘his’ team and one from the Holmwood Hotel in Cowes. It became an annual event until Fox’s death in 1972, before being resurrected by another sailor named Tom Richardson.

  In 1983 Richardson was sailing back from Cowes with two friends, Tony Lovell and Chris Freer, when they saw four boats aground on Bramble Bank. ‘We agreed it would be fun to play cricket on the bank again, and so the following year we challenged the Island Sailing Club.’ Matches have been played every year since, some soggier than others. And in the case of Brambles, I don’t mean the rainy kind of soggy. In 2008 a particularly high tide meant the waves never sank below the players’ knees, but the game went ahead anyway.

  Today the match is held between Island Sailing Club and Hamble Sailing Club. There are no rules and no real winner. Scoring is arbitrary. One year the Island team was fined 200 runs for not turning up in whites.

  No risk of that for me, I thought, as we floated on top of the still waterlogged cricket strip. It really was an extraordinary sight to behold as dozens of boats circled on the spot, waiting for low water. Soon bubbles could be seen on the surface of the water surface and, like something from the scriptures, the waves began to part, revealing a tiny patch of damp sand. ‘Sand! Sand!’ came the war cry.

  Vessels jostled into position as the strip began to grow, and before long spectators and players were cascading into the shallow water. Stumps were inserted, tables, parasols and deckchairs appeared. It was still early morning as Budgie Stratton from the Victory pub set up the Brambles Bar on one corner of the sandbank.

  The game would best be described as organized chaos, as both sides took turns to bat amidst a very close crowd of increasingly inebriated spectators. The first ball fr
om the opposition was hit clean into the air, one brave fielder from my team diving head-first towards the shallow waters at the edge of the sandbar, narrowly missing the ball and a passing oil tanker. It was a truly surreal experience as tankers and container ships honked their horns in approval as they sailed just a few yards beyond our game of cricket.

  As I took to the wicket, bat in hand, the tide had already begun to turn. I rolled up my white trousers and focused on the ball. I thought back to all those cricket lessons with Viv Richards at Lord’s cricket ground. Now was the moment to make my mother proud as the bowler raced in my direction and the ball hit the saturated sand.

  It bounced and hurtled towards me. I focused on the ball as it swerved towards my bat. Wood struck leather and the ball flew heroically through the air towards the open water beyond. The crowd erupted as one luckless fielder was forced to swim for the ball. The tide was coming in fast and feet had now disappeared beneath a brownish film of water as the sand was reclaimed by the tide.

  ‘The tide’s coming in, clear the bank,’ came the holler, and as quickly as it had appeared, the sandbank disappeared beneath the waves once more as dozens of people gathered up stumps and deckchairs and tables and dived back onto the armada of tiny vessels that had been anchored like ponies to the edge of the sandbank.

  By the time the last of the players was back onto the boats he was up to his waist, as the umpire announced that Island Sailing Club were the winners and we all headed back to Cowes for tea and trophies.

  The Brambles cricket match is English sporting eccentricity at its most ridiculous. One of this year’s competitors summed it up rather nicely, I thought, as ‘Quintessentially English madness on a beautiful summer’s evening.’