
For a guy who has never explored anything but his fridge, I have a strange fascination with British adventure wear. You know the stuff – waxed hunting coats, mountaineering anoraks, belted storm parkas. They’re the kind of things that inspire designers such as Nigel Cabourn and Daiki Suzuki, and form the bedrock on which a lot of traditional outerwear is built.
One of the greatest names in this field is Grenfell, a label given to a specific kind of tightly woven, cotton gabardine. It actually started as a bespoke fabric for Sir Wilfred Grenfell, a medical missionary who famously worked in some of the bleakest and most inhospitable parts of Canada’s Newfoundland and Labrador coast. Walter Haythornthwaite, who ran the mill T. Haythornthwaite & Sons, developed it after attending one of Sir Grenfell’s lectures. Lightweight and water resistant, it was originally designed to protect Sir Grenfell from the harsh Newfoundland environment, but was later marketed to the general public under the Grenfell name (with his permission, of course).
Throughout the 20th century, Grenfell cloth has been worn by sportsmen, adventurers, and pioneers. Malcolm Campbell used it for a racing suit when he broke records at Daytona Beach and Bonneville; Wilfred Grenfell used it for a cagoule when he pulled sleds to see patients; and David Attenborough used it for a walker jacket when he studied Rwandan gorillas. The cloth has even been used to keep mountaineers warm. F.S. Smythe slept in a Grenfell tent in 1933 when a snow blizzard drew him to his knees on Mount Everest. Pitched at 27,000 feet, the tent set a record at the time for being the highest point of man-made habitation.
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