Swaine Began With Whips and Ended Up Arming Steed and Bond

In September 1938 Neville Chamberlain went to Munich carrying an umbrella. He carried it again to Rome in January 1939, and by that July Life magazine was calling it the umbrella of appeasement. The umbrella came from Thomas Brigg and Sons of St James's Street, and the firm that owns that name today still sells umbrellas a few streets away.

That firm now trades as Swaine London. Over the past two centuries it has absorbed a whip maker, an umbrella maker and a hatter, and its own list of screen credits, updated this year with the new Peaky Blinders film, runs from a 1929 silent picture to 2026. It is one of the stranger heritage stories in British menswear, and most of it happened within a short walk of Piccadilly.

A whip maker on Piccadilly

The company says it was founded in 1750. Wikipedia's history of Swaine Adeney Brigg is more careful. The 1750 date cannot be documented, and the earliest evidence dates from around 1760, when a saddler named John Ross set up a whip factory in Marylebone Street. A fire took those premises in July 1769, and by about 1770 Ross was trading at 238 Piccadilly.

In 1798 Ross sold the business to another whip maker, James Swaine. The first Royal Warrant, for carriage riding whips, came from George III. Whips were the whole business for a long time, because London still moved by horse. Swaine's own history page says whip making stayed the main focus until 1825, and that the firm served Queen Victoria, who bought a Malacca walking cane in 1845.

That was the year James Adeney became a partner. From 1848 the firm traded as Swaine and Adeney, and it moved up and down the same street, to No. 224 Piccadilly around 1822 and to No. 185, next to Fortnum and Mason, in 1835. When the railways cut demand for coaching whips, it turned to polo equipment, then to luggage for motor cars, then to handbags and document cases.

The umbrella makers of St James's

Brigg had a different start. According to Wikipedia's history of Thomas Brigg and Sons, Charles Brigg was a plumassier, a maker of ornamental feathers, recorded in 1809 at 3 Little Warwick Street. His son Thomas Edward opened a shop at 23 St James's Street in 1828. The firm says it was founded in 1836, and a London map from that year labels No. 23 as Brigg, umbrella, cane and whip maker.

The business grew quickly. Brigg became umbrella maker to Queen Victoria in December 1884, opened a Paris showroom on the avenue de l'Opéra in 1899, and won the Grand Prix for umbrellas at the Franco British Exhibition in London in 1908. In 1936 it released the Centenary umbrella to mark its supposed hundredth year. Two years later one of its umbrellas was in Munich.

On February 9, 1943, the two companies merged as Swaine, Adeney, Brigg and Sons. Brigg gave up its St James's Street shop but kept its workshop in Newbury Street in the City.

Steed's umbrella and Bond's case

Television found the firm in 1961. Wikipedia credits Swaine Adeney Brigg with a custom whangee umbrella for The Avengers that hid a sword in its shaft. The John Steed entry agrees that the umbrella, with its whangee handle, came from the firm, and notes that Steed seldom drew the sword. He preferred to hook and strike people with the umbrella itself. Swaine's site also lists a Herbert Johnson Churchill bowler for Steed, though the Steed entry says that in the first, cash strapped season Patrick Macnee brought his own bowler and umbrella.

Film found it earlier and kept coming back. Wikipedia records that the firm made James Bond's briefcase for From Russia with Love in 1963, and Swaine's own Icons of Cinema list puts its original Bond attaché case in Dr. No in 1962 and Goldfinger in 1964 as well. The same list has Brigg umbrellas in Singin' in the Rain in 1952, in The Thomas Crown Affair with Steve McQueen in 1968, and in all three Kingsman films, where Colin Firth's polished chestnut umbrella does the work that Steed's once did.

The hats came with Herbert Johnson, a New Bond Street hatter founded in 1889 and bought by the group in 1996. Swaine's list credits Herbert Johnson with the poet hat in Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981 and in three later Indiana Jones films, with Tom Baker's wide brimmed hats in Doctor Who, and with the caps in Peaky Blinders, including this year's film, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man.

Fifty one credits, by our count

We counted every production on Swaine's Icons of Cinema page as it stood on October 31, 2026. Each film or series is counted once per product type, so The Thomas Crown Affair, which used both a Brigg umbrella and Herbert Johnson hats, appears twice. That gives 51 entries across 50 titles.

By decade, our count runs 1 in the 1920s, 3 in the 1950s, 12 in the 1960s, 6 in the 1970s, 13 in the 1980s, 3 in the 1990s, 2 in the 2000s, 6 in the 2010s and 5 so far in the 2020s. Two things stand out. Hats make up nearly two thirds of the list, which says more about Herbert Johnson than about the original whip business. And the busiest decades were the 1960s and the 1980s, the decades of Bond and Steed, and of Indiana Jones and Poirot.

Changing hands

The company has been passed around more than its products suggest. Wikipedia records a 20 percent stake sold to the Japanese company Fukuske in 1989, a buyout of the Adeney and Brigg families by the Merchant Navy pension fund's Ensign Trust in 1990, a sale to Harris Watson Holdings in 2003 and another to Roger Gawn in 2009. During the pandemic it was sold to the French group Chargeurs, and since 2022 it has traded as Swaine London. The same entry notes that it no longer holds a Royal Warrant.

The shops have stayed close to home. After Piccadilly came Old Bond Street, then 54 St James's Street from 1998, the Piccadilly Arcade, the Burlington Arcade in 2022, and a flagship at 127 New Bond Street in March 2023. The workshop has moved too, from Newbury Street to Great Chesterford in Essex in 1965, and to Sawston in Cambridgeshire around 2022.

Buying into it

A Swaine umbrella or attaché case is not a casual purchase, and the point of one is that it lasts. If you are in London, the walk from New Bond Street down to St James's takes in most of the firm's old addresses, along with Truefitt and Hill and the tailors in our Savile Row guide. Pair it with a coat built for the same weather, like the trench coat or the Barbour wax jacket, and you will look like you belong on the list.