Hot stuff

Full disclosure, however: I own a total of five, maybe six boiler suits in various states of disrepair.

In case you were wondering, ‘boiler suit’ is a relatively early description of the garment, an all-in-one with full-length sleeves and legs, no gap between jacket and trousers and no loose jacket tails. It was originally designed to protect those poor souls who had to crawl around the innards of a steam locomotive after climbing into the fire box or a narrow access panel.

Relatively tight fitting with an absence of protruding fasteners, the idea was that the boiler suit would aid access and egress through narrow hatches, so that unlike Winnie the Pooh when visiting his friend Rabbit, you wouldn’t get stuck on the way out.

Oh, and don’t forget the ruler pocket down the leg, though in all my years of spannering, I’ve never once seen anyone with a ruler down the pocket of a boiler suit. The only time I did, I flounced around pretending to be a proper engineer until I crouched over a wheel and the steel rule poked me sharply and painfully in the bum.

One source suggests the first use of the term boiler suit was in 1928 in The Sunday Express, though the suit had been around since steam power was invented and before that if you count military use.

Defining these all-in-ones, however, is tricky. They’re slippery things to pin down be they suits of the: Boiler; Jump; Pilots’; Drivers’; the Sidcot, and the Siren kind; or the tight-fitting movie catsuits worn by Marianne Faithfull in Girl On A Motorcycle, Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman, or Diana Rigg in The Avengers – steady on there!

My sister-in-law, who once sported an eye-poppingly sexy jump suit to a party, confessed that it was not only uncomfortable and awkward to wear, but also made going to the loo a virtual impossibility.

Vogue’s Fashion Encyclopedia tells us that ‘the jumpsuit is a slim-fitting, one-piece garment that covers the arms and legs.’ It was originally created in 1919 as a no-nonsense garment for parachutists, but by the 1930s, fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli was creating softer, shapelier jump suits for women. World War Two, however, bought boiler suits back to the fore with the Howard Miller/Norman Rockwell image of Rosie the Riveter, the muscled poster girl for American women working in shipyards and aircraft factories. Similarly, the Russian social-realist images of super women in WWII propaganda posters, many of them clad in baggy boiler suits.

Winston Churchill bought his own spin to the boiler suit with his ‘siren’ suit, so called because it was a simple zip-up coverall to pull over your pyjamas if the air-raid siren summoned you to a shelter in the middle of the night. Typically, Churchill found them far too convenient to restrict to mere emergency nightwear when the Luftwaffe was overhead. He had them run up in suiting material and velvet of various hues by London tailors (I once saw a red velvet Churchill siren suit displayed in the front window of Turnbull & Asser), and wore them during the day at Chartwell to meetings with high-level world leaders.

He looked ridiculous, like a giant cigar-smoking baby in a romper suit. There’s a great photo where Churchill is showing off his prototype onesie to Dwight Eisenhower, and the American supreme allied commander and later US President is trying to choke back his laughter.

Then there are spin offs, the RAF Sidcot flying suit invented in 1917 by Sidney Cotton, an Australian pioneer aviator and used in the First World War, developed further for WWII, then later equipped with all manner of zip and knee pockets for modern military pilots. (Question: how do you know there’s a pilot in the room? Answer: they’ll tell you soon enough.)

Driver’s overalls were first used in the 1950s, perhaps the best known being the white or blue Dunlop overalls made by Les Leston seen in reproduction form at historic race events such as the Goodwood Revival. With fire an ever present risk in motorsport, drivers such as Jackie Stewart pushed for more flame protection from their suits (there’s an extraordinary picture of him in 1968 clad in what looks like a giant one piece oven glove). These days Formula 1’s quilted, layered driver suits are fire-resistant walking billboards, though no one has ever told me if the embroidered advertisers’ patches are as fireproof as the suits.

Meanwhile, back at the boiler suit, my brother William is a font of information. His career in applications engineering at an industrial engine manufacturer has yielded all manner of fireproof, high-vis, quilted and single-skin boiler suits. Environmental and safety requirements dictate their use, he tell me. They all have their good points, and Will seems to have a boiler suit for every occasion, weather and eventuality.

To my mind, though, my Tranemo reigns supreme. If I could actually bring myself to wear the bloody thing, it would be better still.