sailors' dress

sailors' dress. The earliest reference to any sort of uniform dress for seamen appears to date from a few years after the Roman invasion of Britain (55 bc) with an order that the sails of longboats in the Roman fleet were to be dyed blue to match the colour of the sea and that their crew were to wear clothing of the same colour to lessen the chances of the boats being seen by an enemy. Over 2,000 years later, the prevailing colour of all sea uniforms is still blue.

Of the general cut of the clothing worn, one of the earliest descriptions is that given by Geoffrey Chaucer of his ‘shipman’ in the Canterbury Tales, who was dressed ‘all in a gowne of falding to the knee’. This gives a date of about 1380 for this knee-length gown, possibly the forerunner of the English seaman's petticoat-trousers, which remained an article of his standard dress until the beginning of the 19th century. There was a good functional reason for the longevity of this odd piece of maritime clothing in the protection it offered to the trousers of men working aloft on the yards of square-rigged ships, and also when rowing in the boats of the fleet, where the petticoat protected against rain and spray. As time passed the ‘shipman's’ gown became a canvas frock tucked into breeches or trousers to form a blouse.

In general, the tendency to provide seamen with some sort of uniform clothing started in the fighting navies many years later. Thus, when men were hurriedly raised in England in 1587–8 to man the ships that fought against the Spanish Armada, they were all given a blue coat by Elizabeth I, but the blue coat did not appear in merchant ships, and then only in a few ships, until nearly a century later. James I, who followed Elizabeth on the throne, was less generous to his seamen, writing to the Lord High Admiral that ‘it is not intended to clothe the men to make them handsome to run away’.

The elaborately illustrated title pages and cartouches with which the early chartmakers decorated sea atlases provide much evidence about the contemporary dress of seamen. Those of the late 16th and early 17th centuries are virtually unanimous in showing seamen wearing very baggy breeches with woollen stockings, a thigh-length blouse or coat, and a tall, hairy hat, though one or two of the Dutch sea atlases show some of their seamen wearing long baggy trousers under an ankle-length coat. The salvage of the Mary Rose has also added to our knowledge of clothing and habits of seamen of that time, so that we know now that English seamen also wore leather or canvas and probably a sleeveless leather jerkin. A 17th-century journal kept by one of the English buccaneers cruising in the Pacific Ocean records sighting another ship, and ‘we knew her to be English because the seamen wore breeches’. The only other ships in the Pacific at that time would be those of Spain, which argues that the fashion for breeches as a rig for seamen had not yet spread to that country.

These clothes did not differ very greatly from those worn on land, except for the coat or jerkin in place of the doublet. Certainly there was nothing that could be described as any sort of general uniform which differentiated the seaman from the landsman. However, from the 16th century onwards, exploration by sea increased the length of voyages, so there was a tendency for the dress of ships' crews to be similar in cut and colour. This was because they were dressed from the slop chest. Slops—the name comes from an Old English word sloppe, meaning breeches—originally referred only to the baggy trousers worn by seamen. Later it developed into a sort of unofficial uniform when the original clothing, in which men joined their ships, wore out. If only for economic reasons, the clothes tended to be all of the same pattern and colour. Slops were first officially issued in the Royal Navy in 1623 and were sold by pursers, who were allowed one shilling in the pound commission, and who opened their slop chests before the mast on certain days. Samuel Pepys refers to the business as one ‘wherein the seaman is much abused by the purser’, as he continued to be until an official naval uniform for seamen was introduced in the navy in the mid-19th century. However, they were not a uniform, but replacement clothing for any articles worn out, and seamen were not forced to buy them if they could cobble together anything else which was serviceable.

In fact most seamen did make their own clothes on board, for few could afford the slop chest, and make and mend was set aside for this. Worn-out canvas sails provided the basic cloth for home-made clothing, and a liberal application of tar made the canvas weather resistant. Almost all seamen of all nations made themselves canvas hats with a brim and coated them with tar to make a waterproof headgear known as a tarpaulin, later shortened to ‘tar’ which became a synonym for a sailor. Canvas blouses and trousers were also treated with tar to become the more or less standard heavy-weather clothing, from which came the other synonym of ‘tarry-breeks’ for a sailor. The tarpaulin hat and the tarred canvas blouse and trousers were the forerunners of the oilskin coat and sou'wester hat. Introduced in the 19th century, these were made of a very fine canvas impregnated with an oil-based preparation to give it a glossy surface which made it completely waterproof. This type of oilskin suffered from the defect that exposure to salt water eventually made it sticky and destroyed the waterproofing, and it has long since been replaced by more suitable material.

Until uniforms were officially introduced in the mid-19th century most sailors only owned the suit they were wearing when they first came on board, and they slept in the same clothes. This shortage of clothing was frequently responsible for the diseases which ravaged so many crews during the 16th–18th centuries. However, during the 18th century and the early part of the 19th they wore long clothes when going ashore. Following the earlier fashion of baggy breeches and trousers, and spanning the last years of the petticoat-trousers, there was a period when striped waistcoats, shirts, and trousers, either red and white or blue and white, became a feature of the seaman's dress, as did straw hats. They originated in the main European navies and to some extent were copied by seamen in the merchant marine. Introduced in the last decade of the 18th century, this type of clothing lasted until about 1820, when solid colours came back into favour. However, the straw hat lasted a great deal longer and was worn by many seamen until the beginning of the 20th century, particularly in warmer climates.

Full uniforms were not introduced into navies until about the mid-18th century for officers and in 1857 for ratings. From around that time, particularly in the large shipping lines, up to the First World War (1914–18) officers and sometimes ratings in the British merchant service were dressed in the liveries of their shipping companies. However, during the war the master of a railway steamer rammed and sank a German submarine. Unfortunately for him he was later captured, and recognized, by the Germans, who shot him because at the time he had sunk the submarine he was not in uniform but a civilian wearing his company's livery. To prevent this happening again in wartime, by ensuring that the merchant service became one of the armed services, ‘an Order in Council was promulgated in 1918 to prescribe a standard merchant service uniform’ ( R. Hope , A New History of British Shipping (1990), 355)
, and in 1922 the British merchant marine became known as the merchant navy. Jarrett, D. , British Naval Dress (1960).