Anderson 1936 catalogue

[ThistleDown]

Thanks, OC Richard!

It's nice to see a few pictures of men wearing evening ghillie brogues with buckles, as well as the close up of them. Do any of your other catalogues depict this style of shoe? I ask because this is how I have my ghillie brogues set up, but with short laces...

My father wore patent ghillies (although he called them 'evening shoes') with silver buckles and long, long tassels from the lace ends (which he tied strictly centred on his shin six inches up). In the thirties. I still have his buckles, but the evening shoes are, I regret, long gone. In the mid-forties -- or perhaps earlier -- he had 'strappies', as he called them. Patent leather, but with an arch strap and interchangeable buckles: the deco ones he wore in the thirties and a much more ornate silver pair he inherited and which my brother now has. My father was a well-dressed, precise man.

I've thought several times of having dress ghillies made in fine leather, and using his deco buckles once more. Bling.

We are only discussing my generation and my father's, but they include the thirties, the era of the catalogue OCR has so delightfully given us. Tradition is a slow evolution of acceptance and adoption.

The naming of our bits and pieces, however, is a fairly recent thing. A day sporran was generally leather although sometimes fur. Only very, very recently have we separated "Day" into leather, hunting, fur, full-face, etc., and more recently still into things called RobRoys and the like.

By the way, in another post someone asked about "plate". In the Commonwealth "sterling silver" is an alloy of 92.5 percent silver and 7.5 percent other metal -- usually copper. "Plate" is a structure of base metal -- usually brass, but possible copper or other -- with a thin electro-plating of silver. Antique dealers today often differentiate the valuable from the less valuable by referring to the former as Sterling Silver and the latter as Silver Plate. If you go off to your local shop to sell the family silver you may expect a fine return commensurate with its weight because it can simply be melted and refined; to sell the family plate you must expect a somewhat lesser return because its only real value is its design.