The Trench Coat Has Three Claimants and One Muddy Birthday

On December 19, 1914, readers of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News turned to an advertisement from Thresher and Glenny, a firm of military tailors. It offered officers a double-breasted waterproof coat with a collar that turned up and fastened at the neck, shoulder straps, a belt and straps at the cuffs. It cost six guineas. And it had a name nobody had printed before. The tailors called it the trench coat.

That, at least, is the earliest appearance in print found by the University of Kent's Munitions of the Mind blog, which studies wartime advertising. The coat itself has a longer and more argued pedigree. Two of the most famous names in British clothing both claim to have invented it, and the soldiers who wore it in France did not much care who had.

Two rainproof houses

The first claimant is the older one. Aquascutum began in 1851 when John Emary, a tailor, opened a menswear shop at 46 Regent Street in London. In 1853 he patented a waterproof wool and renamed the business after it. Aquascutum is Latin for water shield. According to Wikipedia's history of the brand, officers' coats in the Crimean War were made from the fabric, which is the root of the house's claim to the trench coat.

The second is Burberry. Thomas Burberry, a former draper's apprentice, opened his own shop in Basingstoke in 1856 at the age of 21. In 1879 he introduced gabardine, a cloth waterproofed before it was woven, which kept the rain out and still let the wearer breathe. Burberry opened in the Haymarket in London in 1891, and in 1901, according to Wikipedia's trench coat entry, submitted a design for an officer's raincoat to the War Office.

By then the word Burberry had become generic. Most officers called any waterproof a Burberry, whoever had made it, a point the Kent blog makes. Burberry outfitted Roald Amundsen on his expedition to the South Pole in 1911 and Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic expedition of 1914, and in 1924 George Mallory wore a Burberry gabardine jacket on his attempt on Everest. If a cloth could survive those trips, it could survive Flanders.

The war that named it

The British Expeditionary Force landed in France on August 12, 1914, and began digging in on the Aisne on September 13. The heavy serge greatcoat was the wrong garment for what followed. In October 1914 an officer wrote to The Times that it rained every day and that the fields had become a sea of mud. Officers wanted something lighter that kept the water out.

The trench coat was never issued kit. It was an optional item that officers and Warrant Officers Class I bought for themselves, and Wikipedia notes that no other ranks were permitted to wear one. That made it a marker of rank as much as a raincoat. The tailors fought for that market hard. Thresher and Glenny's advertising grew more dramatic from 1915, and in October 1918 the firm claimed that more than 24,000 officers wore its coat. That figure came from an advertisement, so treat it as a boast and not a sales record.

Every strap has a job

The details that look decorative today were working parts. The coat was double-breasted, traditionally with ten front buttons, wide lapels and a storm flap. It had raglan sleeves, buttoned pockets, a self belt and strapped cuffs that closed against the wind. It was usually khaki and made from waterproofed gabardine. During the war it gained epaulettes and D-rings on the belt. The D-rings held map cases, swords and other gear, and Wikipedia is careful to call the story that they carried hand grenades a myth.

Here are the competing claims side by side, with the dates drawn from the sources above. The comparison is Quiet Menace's own.

Read that way, nobody is lying. Aquascutum has the oldest waterproof, Burberry has the cloth and the officer's design, and Thresher and Glenny has the word. The coat itself is what the war made of all three.

From the front to the films

Plenty of officers kept their coats when they came home, and the style moved into civilian wardrobes for men and women. By the 1920s Burberry was using its check, mainly as a lining for its trench coats. In the Second World War British officers wore trench coats again in bad weather, though shorter field jackets gradually took over at the front. For the shorter American flight jacket that came after, see our MA-1 bomber history.

Hollywood finished the job. Casablanca premiered in New York on November 26, 1942, with Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine in a trench coat, and the image has never worn off. Peter Sellers later played Inspector Clouseau in one for comedy. Aquascutum counts Winston Churchill, Cary Grant and Bogart among its clients. The coat became shorthand for a certain kind of man, the detective, the spy, the reporter in the rain.

Buying one now

A trench coat is a cold-weather outer layer that has to fit over something, so try it on over a jacket or a heavy knit. The classic length lands around the knee, and the shoulders should sit cleanly without pulling when you button it. Khaki is the original, and navy or black reads more city. Leave the epaulettes and the D-rings alone. They are the reason it is a trench coat and not a mac.

It belongs with the other British weatherproofs in a good wardrobe, alongside the Barbour wax jacket for the country and the Baracuta G9 Harrington for a dry spring. For more, see outerwear, menswear history and the Quiet Menace style section. The University of Kent's study of trench coat advertising is the best account of how the name took hold.

Three firms argue about who invented it, and the argument will never be settled. The men who wore it first were standing in a flooded ditch in France, and they named it after the ditch.