A Man And His Shoes

Lately I've been collecting a pocket-sized English magazine called Men Only, which I'll write about in more detail later. The name is still used by a soft porn title, but that publication has nothing in common with the periodical which ran from the 1930's through to its takeover in the late 60's.

Men Only gives a fascinating insight into social mores of the day, not least of which concern clothing. I've reproduced some of the adverts which ran in M.O., but here I record in full an article that I found of some interest, called 'A Man And His Shoes'.

Stories concerning so-called 'classics' tend to be reproduced again and again, making it hard to separate fact from fiction. One such legend surrounds the Desert Boot, that ubiquitous piece of soft suede footwear said to have its origin in Nathan Clark's observation of what Monty's 8th Army 'Desert Rats' were buying in the bazaars of Egypt. Clark went on to form the Clarks shoe company and the rest is history.

Though I've often read that story, I've never come across either attribution or corroboration. Equally, I've never seen any archive photographs of soldiers from the eastern theatres wearing said shoes; they appear to have hard leather boots on in every shot I've seen.

For those reasons, I was fascinated to read this piece by Peter Bingham in the January 1948 issue of Men Only. I know nothing more about Bingham than his name. Men Only weren't big on accreditation. They often didn't even bother with a contents list. In it he makes explicit reference to the shoe stalls of Port Said making suede boots up for the soldiers. Alas, there were no pictures accompanying the original piece, but I've included here some archive Clarks advertisements.

SOME men never outgrow a schoolboy craze for model trains. Others prefer to collect first editions, theatre programmes, birds’ eggs, butterflies, stamps, sea-shells, even wives.

My friend, however, collects shoes. He is, as you may guess, a bachelor. Wherever he goes, there also, well polished, well treed, numbered, labelled, and wrapped in layers of tissue-paper, go a contingent of shoes—a whole trunkful. It is more than a hobby with him, more than a craze. He lavishes upon them the care and pride other men bestow on their bow-ties, their suits, their guns: and women bestow on children or lapdogs, They are emotionally part of him. Without at least some of them constantly in the offing he is cantankerous, short-tempered, never at ease.

Of course, the idea of Charles entering a shop, any shop, and buying a pair at random is not to be entertained. His shoes are made for him by a skilled craftsman of St. James’s. St. James’s we know as the world of men, the inviolate and close preserve of the well appointed, the nicely groomed, the quietly but exquisitely dressed, the last domain of the autocrat of distinction. There slumber the clubs to whose inner sanctums no woman has ever penetrated, where the only sound that discreetly disturbs a primaeval peace is the subdued, rhythmic murmur of post-prandial respiration and the rustle of The Times as it slides gently from inert hands to a deep-carpeted floor. Even the snoring is discriminate.

But in St. James’s are also to be found the most exclusive of everything, barring woman, that can please the heart and minister to the needs of man. There you may find walking-sticks that come nicely to the most critical hand, sporting guns that will be worth double their price a hundred years from now (tailored to your requirements for £250 a pair),  fishing-rods on which the most fastidious of fish might well be proud to be hooked, and in St. James’s, too, the gourmet may make the acquaintance of the subtlest shell-fish in the world

The proprietors of one shop we know have been hatting fathers and sons, sons and fathers, for three centuries. So you will not be surprised that it is these purlieus that my friend goes for his shoes. They are marshalled in rows on the floor of a special room kept for them alone—some sixty pairs in all. This is not as extravagant as it might seem, for a new pair is bought at least every year and the same pair is never worn two days running, so that some are many, many years old. There are shoes for all occasions: riding boots; plain black shoes for town wear, brogues for the country, half-brogues for semi-casual occasions, and suede shoes for the informal moment. Every kind of leather is displayed, and carefully preserved by trees moulded to the original lasts. Truly no mean array.

No minion ever applies brush or cloth to Charles’s beloved shoes. He polishes two pairs himself nearly every evening, working through them in strict rotation. He finds it a wonderful relaxation, an ambrosia sweeter than nectar and almost as effective as Scotch. When he gets the sack from the Foreign Office, he’s going to be a boots and write slim volumes on leather as a sideline.

There are different treatments, of course, for different styles of shoe: dark tan for military shoes, paler shades for less formal creations, plain liquid cream for others. The polish must be worked well into the leather, allowed to stand and ooze into the pores, and then the hard, supple surface shine gradually boned up, finishing off with a soft cloth.

Some of Charles’s shoes have been round the world with him. There is one pair which is as a child to him — a pair of half-brogues, one of twenty pairs made in Switzerland for a Maharaja, each in a different style. This noble princelet presented all but five pairs to the Army and Navy Stores in Bombay with instructions that they should be sold only to British officers and not to Indians, the proceeds to go to NAAFI. The uppers are smooth and supple and exquisitely stitched: the soles as hard as iron.

Suede shoes, however, are Charles’s abiding passion. The desire for these came upon him one night in the Red Sea going out to the Far East in 1944. At Port Said a whole crowd of chaps embarked who had just spent two years in Iraq. They were shod to a man in vintage bootees of a delicate fawn-ginger colour made pale by the blazing sun. This was too much for Charles, and it was all he could do to keep his hands off them. Whenever a pair descended a companion-way or advanced at the shuffle along the deck, Charles’s gaze followed them, his eyes caressing them covetously.

The moment everyone disembarked at Colombo, off he went the Petta, ordering five pairs of suéde boots in different shops. As he had progressed down the street, each wily, brown-skinned proprietor seemed to have more beautiful shades of suéde to offer, and thicker, scrunchier crépe for the bottoms.

Charles was fascinated too by their workshops. A generation’s trimmings, and bits of old shoes, old lasts, threads, waxes, and nails covered the earthen floor. The head man squatted in the midst of this indescribable pile of debris, shaping, peeling, thinning leather, occasionally aiming a well-directed stream of scarlet betel juice through the door at some friend in the street. The rest of the family variously sewed the uppers and trimmed off the final product.

The price was twenty chips (about thirty bob), although thirty was originally asked. If the poor man didn’t produce the goods in three days—he always worked three weeks behind schedule—five chips were knocked off for every day overdue. They were invariably ready that afternoon. . . . One of these shoemakers created a new fashion by making the uppers out of bush hats which everyone had been issued with but had never worn.

Charles still has many of these delightful Eastern bootees, and wears them negligently with white socks for afternoon tea. He says it gives just that travelled touch, because no one west of Cairo can make Suéde shoes like them. Deep bottle green, light ginger, chestnut brown . . .

But, oh, delight of delights, the palest, sandy, faded fawn.

Copyright 1948. Peter Bingham. Reproduced from Men Only magazine, January 1948.