ACCORDING TO BOOTMAKING LORE,
IN 1813 A CORDWAINER NAMED
GEORGE HOBY WAS OUTFITTING
THE DUKE OF KENT WITH SOME
NEW KICKS WHEN WORD FILTERED
THROUGH OF NAPOLEON’S DEFEAT
AT VITTORIA, SPAIN.
..........................................
Hoby, the shoemaker of choice for the battle’s
victor, evidently thought some of the credit
belonged to him. “If Lord Wellington had had
any other bootmaker than myself,” he’s said
to have informed the Duke, “he never would
have had his great and constant successes; for
my boots and prayers bring his lordship out of
all his difficulties.”
A grandiose statement, perhaps, but Hoby’s
brag might not actually have been all that
overblown. After all, Hoby had designed a
new kind of boot for Wellington’s cavalry, and
their hardiness made them perfect for wearing
into battle. Before their invention, much of
Europe’s footwear was made from wood. The
Dutch had their klomps; the Lithuanians
their klumpės; the French their sabots (a sho e
which, also according to bootmaking lore,
disgruntled factory workers took to hurling
into their machinery as a means of jamming
production – hence the word saboteur). Hoby’s
contribution was in taking the hardier Hessian
boot worn by German mercenaries and
altering it to his client’s taste. Lose the tassels,
Wellington instructed Hoby, lower the heel,
extend the boot to mid-calf, and fashion the
thing from calfskin leather. The result? Wellies.Suited to horse riding yet sufficiently
stylish for strutting down the thoroughfares
of London, Wellington’s bootsake soon
became the favoured footwear of England’s
fashionistas, from its aristocracy to its
dandies. Celebrity endorsement by Wellington
couldn’t have hurt popularity, either. By the
1830s, association between Wellington the
man and Wellington the boot was so strong in
the public imagination that caricatures were
circulating of him as a boot with a head.For all its mass appeal, it took some
technological breakthrough for the boot
to obtain its wet-weather status. In 1852,
industrialist Hiram Hutchinson met with
Charles Goodyear, who had just invented
the vulcanisation process that made rubber- also known as ‘gum rubber’ – stronger and
waterproof. As Goodyear had his eyes on the
automobile industry, Hutchinson bought the
patent for manufacturing rubber footwear and
set up shop in France. At around the same time,
on the chillier side of the Channel, American
Henry Lee Norris established the North
British Rubber Company in Edinburgh. Why
Edinburgh? He’d heard the place was damp.
If the two world wars were periods of
immense suffering and devastation for
millions, they were times of boon for the
North British Rubber Company, which
the British War Office contracted on each
occasion to make a boot suitable for the
horrors of trench warfare. The main goal: to
stem cases of trench foot, caused by exposure
to the damp. Like so many inventions, what
began as a wartime innovation soon found its
way into civilian life. By the mid-20th century,
rubber boot production had been so finely
honed that Wellingtons had shifted from
battle wear to children’s wear. Even their
toys got in on the action.In his initial ensemble, Paddington Bear was
consigned to traipsing around the puddled
streets of London barefoot. However, the
plush toy’s soft form presented a practical
problem. Shirley Clarkson – a toy designer,
and the mother of famed revhead Jeremy- found that the first prototypes kept
toppling over. She came up with a fitting
solution, and placed the toy in a tiny pair of
stabilising gumboots. The look caught on,
and Dunlop Rubber became Paddington’s
official bootmaker, until it was unable to
meet demand. At this point Clarkson took up
responsibility for the craze she had started,
and began manufacturing the tiny boots
herself. George Hoby, one can assume, would
also think himself worthy of some credit. •
the gumboot
THE WATERPROOF BOOT HAS A CURIOUS HISTORY, FROM STOPPING NAPOLEON
IN HIS TRACKS TO GIVING A CERTAIN MARMALADE-LOVING BEAR A LEG UP.Writer Taz Liffman Illustrator Timothy Rodgers037 SMITH JOURNAL