"Oh, wellies, they are wonderful, wellies they are swell... they keep out the water, and keep in the smell."
Billy Connolly, British comedian
The name for the ubiquitous rubber boot derives from the British Duke of Wellington, who had his boot maker design a calfskin version of the hitherto popular Hessian boot. The "Wellington," as it became known, was both comfortable and hard-wearing.
However, the earliest recognizable "welly boots" were actually produced in France by a company set up by the American entrepreneur, Hiram Hutchinson (1808-1869). He had bought a patent from Charles Goodyear, who had invented the process of vulcanization in 1843; this enabled rubber to retain its elastic and waterproofing qualities even in extreme temperatures. Hutchinson had identified a huge market in France where most of the population worked on the land with only wooden clogs for protection from the wet and the mud.
Henry Lee Norris, another U.S. entrepreneur, had also bought a patent from Goodyear and set up the North British Rubber Company in Edinburgh in 1856, bringing his skilled workers with him from the United States. This would later evolve into the current Hunter Boot company but originally produced mainly rubber goods other than boots. It took the appallingly muddy conditions of the World War I trenches to change that, when nearly two million pairs of boots were purchased by the British Army.
