Barbour, Belstaff, and the British Tradition of Getting Very Wet Outdoors
Waxed cotton was never about looking good. It was about keeping a fisherman dry off the coast of South Shields and a motorcyclist upright on a wet A-road. The garments that emerged from that practical logic have outlived the industries that made them.
John Barbour was a Scot who set up shop in South Shields in 1894, selling oilskins to the sailors, fishermen and dockworkers of the North East. The company still trades from the same town, still family-owned, and still produces its waxed jackets in a factory in Simonside. The material itself predates Barbour by decades. Sailors had long treated sailcloth with fish oils and grease to shed water, and by the nineteenth century a Manchester firm called British Millerain was refining paraffin-based waxes for cotton. Barbour took that industrial cloth and made it wearable on land.
The two jackets most people picture came later. The International, introduced in 1936, was built for motorcyclists: a belted waist, a slanted map pocket on the chest, and a design that Steve McQueen wore riding for the American team at the 1964 International Six Days Trial in East Germany. The Beaufort arrived in 1983, drawn up by Dame Margaret Barbour after she saw a French shooting jacket and wanted something with a game pocket and more room across the shoulders. Barbour holds three royal warrants, granted by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales, which tells you where the jacket sits in the British class imagination.
Belstaff followed a different road. Founded in 1924 in Stoke-on-Trent by Eli Belovitch and his son-in-law Harry Grosberg, the firm aimed squarely at motorcyclists and adventurers. Its Trialmaster, launched in 1948, had a four-pocket front and a waxed finish designed to survive mud and speed. McQueen wore Belstaff too, which has since become part of the brand's marketing shorthand, though the jacket earned its reputation on trial courses long before Hollywood arrived.
Gloverall belongs to a stranger lineage. The company was founded in 1951 by Harold and Freda Morris, who had been selling army surplus in London. The duffel coat they made their name on came directly from British naval issue, the toggle-and-rope fastening designed to be worked with cold or gloved hands. When the surplus ran out, Gloverall simply started manufacturing its own. The garment moved from the deck of a destroyer to the backs of art students and academics without changing its shape at all.
What unites these firms is that none of them set out to make heritage. They made equipment. The waxed cotton, the toggles, the game pockets all solved specific problems for people who worked or rode outdoors in a climate that is reliably grey and wet. The romance came afterward, layered on by everyone who bought the jackets for reasons that had nothing to do with fishing or motorcycles.
This is worth dwelling on because the word heritage now means different things in different places. In America it tends to mean rugged individualism, the Filson and Red Wing story of the frontier. In Japan it means reverence and reconstruction, the careful reproduction of a garment down to its stitch count. The British version is more offhand. The clothes were made to be used, ruined, re-waxed and handed down, and the culture around them assumes a certain shabbiness is not just acceptable but correct. A pristine Barbour looks slightly wrong.
Why buy pre-loved
A waxed Barbour or Belstaff is arguably better with age. The wax cracks and settles into the seams, the collar corduroy softens, and the jacket takes on a patina that no factory can fake and that British owners have always prized. These garments were built to be re-waxed for decades, so a jacket from the 1980s can still be reproofed and worn hard. Buying one used means inheriting that history rather than starting from a stiff, over-clean beginning. It is also how these coats were always meant to circulate, quietly passed on.