Duffle Coats in Chippenham

As a teenager, before I moved on to donkey jackets, I had a duffle-coat. Everyone did. They were big thick winter coats with hoods and toggles sewn on with rope, not worn very much these days. In their present form they were developed in the mid-19th century from Polish frock coats, and much used in the navy, and later the army. Their prevalence in the 1950s and 1960s seems to have derived from army surplus after the war. Serious-looking young men on protest marches used to wear them.

Duffle coats in action: Imber protest rally, 1961

               Duffel is a town in Belgium, near Antwerp, which from the late middle ages specialised in a heavy woollen cloth used for blankets. It may have been brought to England and manufactured here in the Elizabethan period, although it only seems to have taken off as a fabric for coats in the 1850s. So Robert Sadler of Chippenham was something of a trendsetter.

               I know about Mr Sadler because I am currently editing the VCH history of Chippenham parish, to which we have all contributed. Rosalind worked on the parish charities and discovered that in his will dated 1838 Robert Sadler left money so that the interest could be spent on providing ‘drab cloaks of the type known as Duffel to poor elderly women of the parish of Chippenham’. The distribution was to take place on 17 October each year, no doubt with the prospect of the winter setting in, but also because it was his birthday. It is pleasant to think of the senior Victorian ladies of Chippenham tottering round the town, warm and cosy thanks to Mr Sadler’s birthday present, and looking just like Paddington Bear.

~ John Chandler - 25 Apr 23