Heraldic Haberdashery
By CYRIL RAY WHEN the boyos raided the camp of No. 1 Training Battalion, the Royal Mechanical and Electrical Engineers, at Blandford the other day, and seized and gagged, among others, the civilian telephone operator, they bound his hands with a REME tie ('blue, gold and red,' reported the Daily Express—ready, as always, with the picturesque and, on this occasion, the accurate detail). It is a new use for a regimental tie and I hope that the civilian telephone operator had a claim to it : there must be a particularly wound- ing form of social ostracism for those who have their wrists bound with ties they are not en- titled to.
The story moved me to look in at two or three of the club-colour specialists, such as the little tie-and-scarf shop in the middle-western reaches of Bloomsbury that deals in nothing else ('No, sir, I'm afraid I can't give you any information at all. Club colours and school ties are too big a subject to be dealt with in a newspaper article'); and the one off Leicester Square, between the rubber- goods shop and what I suppose I'd better call the specialist bookstall, where there are 2,000 different striped ties in stock, according to the notice in the window, not including crested pat- terns, or the eighty clan tartans, or the old-school braces, or the long woollen scarves, including that of the College of Distributive Trades, or the car-badges, blazer-pockets, plated and crested tie-retainers, and cuff-links emblazoned with almost any badge you can think of, from that of the Grenadiers to that of Rotary. And as I arrived, working my way westward, at the old- established specialists in Jermyn Street, a telephone order was being placed for a leather tobacco-pouch striped in the colours of the Royal Army Dental Corps. Here, they told me, are 30,000 ties in stock, in the colours, or bearing the crests, of more than 2,000 clubs, from the Old Etonian black and blue —the only club tie that can be worn, everybody save members of the Harrow Association agrees, with formal wedding garments—to the gipsy black, red and gold of I Zingari, the sunburst of the MCC, a particularly unfortunate Old Wel- lingtonian bow-tie, with diverse diagonals, and not excluding the black, gold and purple of the London School of Economics, or the allusively crested cravats of various task forces that have pooped off those nuclear things on Christmas Island and points east. Next to the envelope, in the '0' drawer, that contains ties of the Garage Equipment Veterans, whatever they are, is the shimmering sort of shot-silk 'salmon and cucum- ber' of the Garrick Club.
Now that stripes have so proliferated that many clubs choose to supersede them with crests, minute reproductions of yacht-club burgees, full coats of arms and other devices—a type of tie of which the pretty little Oxford crowns on Oxford blue of Vincent's Club must be the prototype; it is thirty years old and more—you may buy a tie, elsewhere if not in Jermyn Street, with your make of motor-car trademarked upon it, the initials of the big-business house or broadcasting organisation you work for, or your golf handicap. In New York, they tell me, you may wear a tie that indicates the particular plushy restaurant at which you keep your expense account.
Some reasonably novel arrangement of stripes and colours—or an arrangement not too widely duplicated—can be specially devised and woven, against a firm order for a dozen, for about a guinea a tie. It is a tempting proposition for many a small village cricket club; and there are drink- ing clubs that have gone in for whimsy-hearty devices involving bottles and glasses and the like, for crested ties can also be specially designed, at about the same price, if the shop can be sure of selling an eventual couple of hundred. The par- ticular shop in SW1 where I could, if I chose, buy my own school, college, university, football- club, regimental, divisional, corps, army and army-group ties (I usually settle for plain red) has just executed for a firm of brewers an order for a trademark tie that is to be sent to bartenders all over the world. 'Some of the fellows that wear them might even be black,' said the man in the shop, 'but I don't suppose it matters : nobodY here's going to wear it.' Their very latest creation is a tie for members of the Royal College Of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Unboggle your imaginations : it's heraldic.
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