--- title: "The Harrington Jacket Was a Golf Jacket Until a Soap Opera Renamed It" url: https://quietmenace.com/style/baracuta-g9-harrington-jacket/ author: Quiet Menace Editors section: Style published: 2026-10-29 updated: 2026-10-29 topics: Outerwear, Menswear History, Heritage Brands, Film --- # The Harrington Jacket Was a Golf Jacket Until a Soap Opera Renamed It > Two Manchester raincoat makers built it in 1937 for nine holes in bad weather. A shopkeeper in Richmond gave it the name everyone uses now. In the summer of 1965 a young London retailer named John Simons found an empty shop on Hill Rise in Richmond, in the southwest of the city, and opened it as The Ivy Shop. He stocked it with the American Ivy League clothes he loved, and with a short cotton zip jacket made in Manchester. To sell it, he climbed into his own shop window and wrote a card for the one on display, calling it the Rodney Harrington style. Rodney Harrington was a character on Peyton Place, an American prime time soap that ABC had started airing in September 1964. Ryan O'Neal played him, and he wore that jacket on screen. The card worked. The jacket's maker was Baracuta, and the model was the G9. Most people now just call it the Harrington. ## Nine holes in the rain Baracuta belonged to two brothers, John and Isaac Miller. According to the company, the Millers had been making rainwear in Britain since 1912, and in 1937 they founded Baracuta in Manchester. Their problem was simple. A full-length raincoat got in the way of a golf swing. So they designed a short jacket that kept the weather off and let the arms move. The name explains the brief. As [Baracuta's own history](https://www.baracuta.com/pages/about) tells it, the G stands for golf and the 9 for the nine holes of a course. The details are all about the game. The ribbed cuffs and hem keep wind out at the wrists and waist. The slanted pockets were sized to hold two golf balls. The two-button collar, which the company calls a dog-ear collar, can be fastened up against the neck or left open. The cleverest part is on the back. The G9 has an umbrella yoke, a loose panel across the shoulders that lets rain run off and leaves a built-in vent beneath it, so a golfer working up a sweat doesn't steam inside his jacket. It was practical engineering for a wet country, and it is still the easiest way to spot a real one from across a room. The Millers weren't the only Lancashire firm with the idea. The [Wikipedia entry on the Harrington jacket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrington_jacket) notes that Grenfell, the Burnley company formerly called Haythornthwaite and Sons, also claims to have made a near-identical jacket around the same time. Baracuta's version is the one that got famous. ## A clan chief's tartan The brothers wanted something inside the jacket that nobody else had. In 1938, both Baracuta and InsideHook say, they asked Lord Lovat, chief of the Clan Fraser of Lovat, for permission to use his family tartan as a lining, and he agreed. That was Simon Fraser, the 15th Lord Lovat, a man who would go on to lead the 1st Special Service Brigade ashore at Sword Beach on D-Day in 1944. The red Fraser check has been sewn into the G9 ever since. It turned a plain beige golf jacket into something with a secret, and the copies that followed often borrowed a tartan or a check of their own. Anyone who has owned a [Barbour wax jacket](https://quietmenace.com/style/barbour-wax-jacket-history/) knows the pull of a British outdoor coat with a good lining. The G9 got there first, in cotton instead of wax. ![A close view of red, white and black plaid fabric](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1610093627955-8448751a8950?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop) *A red tartan of the kind that lines a G9. This is a generic plaid, not the Fraser sett itself. Photo by Ekaterina Grosheva on Unsplash* ## How Hollywood found it In the 1950s the Millers began exporting the jacket to the United States, where it caught on first with golfers. Film followed. Elvis Presley wore a G9 in King Creole, the 1958 Michael Curtiz picture in which he plays Danny Fisher, a young singer in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Baracuta and InsideHook both put Steve McQueen in one in The Thomas Crown Affair, Norman Jewison's 1968 Boston heist film. Baracuta also lists Frank Sinatra wearing it in Assault on a Queen, the 1966 caper about robbing the Queen Mary with a salvaged U-boat. Peyton Place gave it a name. The show ran on ABC from September 1964 to June 1969, more than 500 episodes, and O'Neal's Rodney Harrington was in nearly all of them. The company says he wore the G9 in almost every episode. Simons, who stocked Baracuta in Richmond, did the rest with a card and a pen. An account published by [Ivy Style](https://www.ivy-style.com/the-gospel-according-to-saint-john.html) adds that a Baracuta employee, a jazz drummer named John Beddingfield, took a liking to Simons and his partners and set aside slightly flawed export stock for them at low prices, which helped get the shop going. Baracuta eventually adopted the name for itself. Simons is still in the trade. His shop on Chiltern Street in Marylebone, run today by his son Paul, still puts a Harrington in the window. ## Mods, skinheads and everyone after British youth culture took the jacket even more seriously than Hollywood did. The mods, young Londoners of the late 1950s who spent their wages on clothes, were the first subculture to adopt the G9 and its sibling, the G4, according to Baracuta. A short cotton jacket with a neat collar suited a crowd that cared about the line of a trouser. ![Three vintage style scooters parked on a stone paved surface in Manchester](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1787667793611-778355b103cc?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop) *Vintage style scooters parked in Manchester, the city where the G9 was born. Photo by Olha Vilkhova on Unsplash* Around 1966 the mod scene split, and the harder, working-class wing that loved ska, rocksteady and early reggae became known as skinheads by about 1968. They kept the Harrington. It sat in the skinhead uniform alongside fitted blazers, bomber jackets and denim jackets, the same family as the [MA-1 flight jacket](https://quietmenace.com/style/ma-1-bomber-jacket-history/). In the 1990s the Britpop bands brought it back again for a new generation. Baracuta itself changed hands along the way. The Italian group WP Lavori in Corso bought the brand in 2012, the company says, and the G9 is still in production with the Fraser lining inside. ## How to wear one now Wear it the way the mods did, which means a little neater than you think. A G9 should end at the waist, where the ribbed hem grips, and the shoulders should sit on your own. Simons once told a young customer who wanted his Baracutas a size too big that the fit was wrong. Size for what goes underneath, which is usually a [plain white T-shirt](https://quietmenace.com/style/white-t-shirt-history/) or an oxford shirt, not a thick sweater. Stone and navy are the classic colors, with olive and black close behind. Pair it with straight jeans or chinos and [penny loafers](https://quietmenace.com/style/penny-loafer-bass-weejuns-history/) for the Ivy version, or boots and turned-up denim for the skinhead one. It plays the same role in a wardrobe as a [chore coat](https://quietmenace.com/style/chore-coat-french-work-jacket/) or a [varsity jacket](https://quietmenace.com/style/varsity-jacket-history/), a light jacket you can throw on without thinking, only with a collar that closes when the weather turns. More jackets with a past live on our [outerwear hub](https://quietmenace.com/topics/outerwear/), in [Menswear History](https://quietmenace.com/topics/menswear-history/) and across the [Style section](https://quietmenace.com/style/). Next time you see one, look for the yoke on the back. Then check the lining. If it's red Fraser tartan, you're almost certainly looking at the original. --- Filed under: [Outerwear](https://quietmenace.com/topics/outerwear/), [Menswear History](https://quietmenace.com/topics/menswear-history/), [Heritage Brands](https://quietmenace.com/topics/heritage-brands/), [Film](https://quietmenace.com/topics/film/) Hero image: Photo by Cord Allman on Unsplash (Unsplash License)