Wellies Rain Boots | A Brief History of Wellies |

How a humble rubber boot become a design classic and a status symbol

The other day in New York, I was in Abercrombie & Fitch on Fifth Avenue. I know, incongruous, but there we are. I was paying for a "muscle-fit" shirt for my son and heir when my eye was caught by two of the pretty young sales associates: both of these trendy young women, in cut-off Daisy Duke-style denim shorts, were wearing Hunter wellies, the sort of waterproof footwear you might find at the end of the Queen's legs, were you a guest at her country house in Sandringham.

If you are under 30, Hunters will mean one thing: festivals, summers of love, mud and music. Hunter has embraced this new generation warmly, but for anyone over 40 the Hunter welly implies something more posh.

The Wellington boot has always had a snobbish side. After all, it owes its name to the Duke and, as Adam Edwards records in A Short History Of The Wellington Boot, when the Duke died: "A million men and women lined the route to watch the 12-ton funeral carriage followed by the Duke's riderless horse. In the stirrups of the horse's saddle, placed the reverse way round, were a pair of the Duke's handmade Hoby Wellington boots." These were not the boots favoured by Abercrombie, but a close-cut soft calfskin boot.

A few years later, an American entrepreneur called Henry Lee Norris started the North British Rubber Company in Scotland, with four employees making rubber wellies. To say these were without frills would be to ascribe too many qualities to them: left and right boots were made on the same last.

With the advent of WWI and the mud of the trenches, Wellingtons were put onto millions of feet; and, by the second half of the century, black wellies were the ubiquitous footwear of agricultural labourers in the UK. And it was North British that came up with the idea of making a green welly: aimed at gamekeepers and landowners; one of the models was called the Hunter, characterised by the strap-and-buckle fitting. The luxury boot had been born. At first it was greeted cautiously, but once adopted by the Queen, her husband and the keepers at Sandringham, it became the footwear of choice for the rural elite.

Since then, the rise of the rubber boot has only gained momentum, segueing into the festival circuit and onto the catwalk - by the early Nineties even Chanel was doing them.

But the reference remains the Hunter boot: it is the Rolex Submariner, the Levi's 501, of waterproof footwear; and today's Balmoral boot is a technical tour de force, with a Vibram sole and a spec list that reads like the brochure for an off-road vehicle. Hunter’s launched Balmoral leather collection - just the thing to wear while out hunting. Or, for that matter, shopping. 

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