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Wellington Facts

• The First Duke of Wellington designed the original Wellington Boot after his victory at Waterloo. He asked his shoemaker Hoby of St James to modify his Hessian boot into a plain boot with no decorative stitching in black leather with side seams, one-inch stacked straight heels, square or slightly rounded toes, and leather pull-on straps. It was worn under trousers.
  
  
• The first policeman the ‘Peelers’ wore Wellington boots. Each Peeler patrolled his beat at a pace of two-and-a-half miles per hour. He walked on average twenty miles in all weather conditions seven days a week.
  
  
• American Henry Lee Norris produced the first rubber Wellington boot in Scotland in 1856. He chose to manufacture his boots in Scotland rather than the States because he believed that the endless Caledonian rain would mean more customers for his boots.
  
  
• The Wellington Boot helped find the man responsible for perpetuating the hoax of the Piltdown Man – the apparent discovery in Sussex in 1908 of the missing link between man and ape. The mysterious ‘gentleman in black’ who was supposed to have arranged the fake bones was seen wearing Wellington Boots.
  
  
• The Wellington Boot was responsible for the final discovery of the Marie Celeste. The ghost ship's last captain loaded her with a cargo of rubber Wellingtons and then deliberately ran the vessel onto a reef in Haiti forgetting that its cargo of boots would prevent the ship from sinking.

Great Wellington Boot Wearers

• Monty Python's Flying Circus's ‘Gumbies’ who dressed in rolled-up trousers and knotted handkerchiefs, wore ‘gumboots’ (hence the name).
  
  
• A television production company put Paddington Bear in red wellies because the standard model Paddington was unable to stand up without them.
  
  
• Other famous wearers include the dandy Beau Brummel who polished his boots with champagne, Winnie the Pooh's chum Christopher Robin, Lady Diana Spencer when being courted by Prince of Wales in Scotland, model Kate Moss, Actresses Gwyneth Paltrow, Keira Knightley and soul singer Joss Stone.

Wellington Boot Fame

• ‘I didn't get where I am today by going on and on about gumboots’ (CJ in ‘The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin’)
• ‘Give it some Welly’. (Football chant to Stephen Gerrard)
• ‘Because of the Welly, the scraps were saved,
  Because of the scraps, the pigs were saved,
  Because of the pigs, the rations were saved,
  Because of the rations, the ships were saved,
  Because of the ships, the island was saved,
  Because of the island, the Empire was saved,
  And all because of the housewife's Welly’
  (A World War 11 advertising ditty.)
• Lloyd George, Prime Minister of the government in the second half of the war, described General Douglas Haig, commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force, as ‘brilliant to the top of his Army boots’. Those boots were leather Wellingtons.
• ‘The Green Welly brigade’ (The term used to describe the Countryside Alliance pro hunting demonstrators.)

The Wellington Boot at War

• The leather Wellington boot was the uniform of both sides in the American Civil War. After the war the Wild West’s greatest heroes such as Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickock are always wore leather Wellington boots, the basis for the modern cowboy boot.
• In the Crimean War (1853-1856) the Light Brigade wore Wellingtons to charge on the 25 October 1854
• The 1917 edition of ‘Blighty’, the magazine produced by and for the men at The Front, refers to the game of ‘Gum Boots and Craters’. The game played by the troops in the trenches involved throwing a Wellington into a set of designated shell holes. It was the precursors to the English Garden Fete game of ‘Welly-Wanging’.
• The leather Wellington was the basis for the German jackboot. All the Axis forces wore the jackboot including Joseph Stalin. The dictator, who was the son of a bootmaker, commissioned a shoemaker in Tsaritsyn in 1918 to construct a pair of black leather Wellingtons to his specification.
• The advice given in case of a nuclear holocaust in the 1950s government information booklet ‘Protection Against Nuclear Attack’, reads ‘if you have to go outside put on a hat or headscarf, coat done up to the neck, gloves and stout shoes or Wellington Boots.’

The Wellington Boot in Fashion

• In the winter of 1850-51 American Reformer Amelia Bloomer wrote advocated women wear a sensible coat-like frock worn over trousers (bloomers) that would be tucked into soft leather Wellington boots.
• Playwright Oscar Wilde's in an article on ‘woman's dress’ in 1888 advocated the wearing of Wellington boots ‘to give (women) more freedom.’
• New York millionaire Nathan Schwab had ordered a bespoke set of Wellington boots for his dachshund in 1900.
• Princess Anne, at the height of her royal fame, commissioned the Hunter boot company to make her a pair of bespoke black Hunters (the only person the company ever permitted to do so).
• After Lady Diana Spencer was photographed in 1980 a pair of green Hunters boots sales of the boot took off and saved the company. Two years later The Sloane Ranger Handbook reported: ‘London Sloanes sprout green wellies in wet weather like a plague of frogs.’
• In 1965 Mary Quant launched the wet-look vinyl boot based on the leather Wellington boot. The following year As Swinging London took hold Nancy Sinatra realeased the single ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’.
• In 1994 Chanel retailed a black pair of Wellington boots with a pair of interlocking ‘C’s on the vamp at £250. The following year Gucci produced a pair with its distinctive snaffle logo.