Fox Brothers have produced woollen and worsted fabric in Wellington in Somerset since 1772. From the late 1800s and in the 1900s, production became increasingly focused on fabrics for the British military.
During the First World War, Fox Brothers supplied over 8,000 miles of cloth to the British and Allied governments, including the largest single order for textiles placed during the war: 852 miles of cloth supplied to the Ministry of Defence to make ‘puttees’. They used 10,000 tons or 900 trucks of wool to complete this order. Spiral leg puttees were used by the military as a part of the regular soldier uniform.
Children, the “Puttee Brigade“, outside the Fox Bros. board room, with makeshift puttee carts to take the puttees home “to the hundred plus mums and aunts outworkers” to stitch tapes to….then return to mill before dispatch
Source: Captain Scott by Ralph Fiennes
As for Scott, he ‘would fifty times sooner stay in the hut seeing how a pair of Foxs spiral puttees suited him than come out and look at the ponies legs or a dogs feet.’
This is a clip from the BBC series WW1 At Home: “A growing collection of stories that show how WW1 affected the people and places of the UK and Ireland. The BBC has partnered with Imperial War Museums and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Images below are from the puttee exhibit at Coldharbour Mill
