BY PHILIP WALLING
‘I think you should try wearing shoes with stiffer soles so that you don’t have to bend your toes too much’ was the advice from my doctor when I consulted him about my painful big toe joint.
I remember the Misses Moffat, ancient sisters (or so they seemed at the time) who lived in Corner House, and whose grandfather had once been the brewer or the miller, I’m not sure which, and who habitually wore clogs fastened by a clasp rather than laces and shod with metal caulkers. The village had once supported two clog-makers, long gone, but a few country people still wore clogs. I remember the boy I shared a desk with at Lorton School describing ‘Miss Moffat’s buddy clogs’ clattering on the cobbles outside her house. He was 6 or 7 at the time and although he couldn’t pronounce ‘bloody’, he had picked up his father’s dismissive description of something he thought outdated and backward. Wearing clogs was the mark of the peasant. So those who didn’t want to be thought peasants would not wear them. They might not have heard the expression clogs to clogs in three generations, but many of the people I was brought up amongst were too proud to admit they had started out in clogs. Even though the clattering of clogs was once commonplace in every part of the land, especially in industrial towns where they were the best and cheapest footwear for any working man and woman.
Quite a few of the older farmers still wore clogs. George Mackereth, I remember, never wore anything else. They were made of kip leather, imported from India, heavily oiled thick buffalo hide. They laced tightly above the ankle and had pronounced turned-up toes so you rocked on them, and long, sewn-in tongues which made them waterproof almost to the tops and they insulated your feet from the ground. They were also cheap to mend, which George did himself, nailing fresh iron caulkers to the wooden soles and heels, hammering in the nails against a little iron last over which he would fit an upturned clog.
It was exciting to me that clogs had been worn by country people going back into antiquity in most European countries and had only recently given way to leather and then rubber-soled footwear. There must have been something valuable here that we had abandoned, as my schoolfellow’s father thought, in the name of ‘progress’. That we had accepted that we ought to do obeisance to the shiny and new which must, of its essence, be better than the old and the out of date.
There were still a few cloggers left in the 1970s. Old men left high and dry by the march of progress. They had been bypassed, first by factory-made footwear and then by cheap globally produced stuff that didn’t need mending. In the main they were the least enterprising of their trade, who had stuck it out without trimming their sails to the prevailing wind. They simply carried on until they died or retired, hunched over benches in dark shops, hammering tacks and stretching leather all day long. But just as candle makers at the dawn of the electrical age could see no future for their wares, so cloggers appeared doomed to oblivion. Nobody wanted to wear clogs any more. But what happened to candles has, rather later, happened to clogs. From being necessaries for those of modest means they are desirable and fashionable for the middle classes. Those candle makers who stuck it out and adapted are now doing good business, even though logic would have told you that candles were now unnecessary. But there is some eternal truth in lighting a candle. Just as books have not been killed off by electronic devices, those few cloggers who stuck it out found that their products had become luxury items. And if they sold them well, their business would far transcend their artisan grandfather’s barely making a living from clogging.
One of these hangovers from an older, honester world was one R Brew who had a shop in Roper Street in Whitehaven. He was the last of the cloggers who shod the Whitehaven pitmen. His nod to modern advertising was a display of two racks of finished clogs graduated in size and colour in his shop window. Inside, nothing had changed since his grandfather’s day. Black sooty walls festooned at ceiling height with ancient dusty cobwebs. Racks of wooden clog soles, leather uppers, iron caulkers arranged in sizes, boxes of brass tacks and iron nails, long leather laces hanging like rats’ tails from nails driven into the ends of the racks. The public part of the shop was just big enough for a couple of customers to stand between the door and the low counter. If you wanted to try on a pair of clogs there was a little chair in the corner to sit on, but most of Mr Brew’s customers knew their size and didn’t need to try them on. He didn’t measure his customers’ feet. If there was any doubt they tried the clogs on.
The man himself peered through wire-rimmed jam-jar bottom spectacles in the gloomy light that struggled in through the shop window – the only light in the room. He had spent all his working life like this, straddling a little low bench, perched like a jockey, with a leather apron, black ‘duck-nebbed’ clogs with iron caulkers, and a blue cotton jacket which in Cumberland was called a kytle.
I was the only customer in the shop. He lifted his head as I went in and peered at me with huge eyes magnified by his thick glasses. He turned back to hammering in the mouthful of brass tacks that were sticking out from his lips like whiskers on an old dog and didn’t try to speak until he had knocked the last tack into the banding that held the upper to the sole.
‘Aye?’
‘You’ve got a marvellous selection of clogs … erm …’
‘Aye. That’s what Ah do, mek an’ sell clogs. Do you want a pair?’
‘I would like some clogs but I’ve no idea what type to buy. I’ve got this bad big toe joint and I thought a rigid sole might help because you don’t have to flex the joint when you walk in clogs.’
‘Ah mek clogs, not surgical boots!’ he replied rather sharply. ‘Hev a leuk on that rack and see if anything teks yer fancy. You’ll want size 9.’
‘I’m normally a size 8. How do you know what size I am?’
‘You gaa up a size in clogs.’
‘But how do you know my size without measuring me?’
‘Lang experience, marra. It’s in the blood.’
I sat on his little chair in the corner and tried on a pair of traditional black farmers’ clogs in kip leather that laced up above the ankle, with a sewn-in full watertight tongue and iron caulkers. He was surprised that I had chosen such uncompromising footwear.
‘Ah thowt you’d ‘ave gone for a pair of them low red ‘uns.’
‘I want them to work in, not as a fashion item,’ I replied, a little hurt that he had misjudged me and thought me incapable of outside physical work.
‘What line o’work are ye in then?’
‘Farming.’
He peered at me a little more closely this time but didn’t say anything apart from ‘Ohh?’ unsure whether to believe me or not, and to inform me how much the clogs were. I have forgotten the price, but it wasn’t much – less than a pair of boots – and I remember him handing the surprisingly heavy clogs to me across the counter, with a spare pair of laces stuffed inside one of them. He was a slight figure when he stood up, with thinnish arms and sallow skin. But then he would hardly have seen the sun for forty years, with only a day and a half off a week. He still did the traditional shopkeeper’s thing of closing for half a day – on Thursdays I seem to recall – but being open on Saturdays.
Although I saw it as excitingly romantic to be the beneficiary of countless centuries of clog-making in Whitehaven, making footwear from local materials produced within twenty miles of his shop and whose construction hadn’t changed for millennia, I also recognised the self-denial that he must have learned, almost as a child, that kept him doing the thing he’d been broken into as his lifetime’s purpose. That he sat day after day like the tailor of Gloucester in his little dingy shop turning out clogs day after day, week after week, until he died was nothing short of heroic.
Philip Walling has written the Sunday Times bestseller Counting Sheep and Till the Cows Come Home.