British Court Dress

From Dress and Insignia worn at Court,
The book can be downloaded from the web, http://www.archive.org/details/dressinsigniawor00greauoft
Also Sarge Booker has uploaded many of the illustration from the book onto his own web page.
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Regards
WF

Thanks very much for down loading this WF. A very interesting glimpse of an almost vanished past.

The date of publication (1921) is also interesting. While nearly all the types of dress described were eventually to return for court occasions until 1939, this cannot have been apparent in 1921 - after four years of brutal, unglamerous war and "wearing suspended for the duration" orders. Presumably there was an semi-concious "lets get back to normal" impulse at work.

I know it's not court dress but even today the governors of the 14 remaining British colonies (known as "overseas territories" in politically correct speech) continue to wear a special uniform on ceremonial occasions.

True but a few years ago the Daily Telegraph ran an article advising that uniforms for governors would no longer be paid for by the British government but would have to be purchased by the territories concerned. Since post-Hong Kong these are all small and mostly poor, few if any took up the challenge.

In New Zealand (and I think Australia) governors general continued to wear the modified court dress illustrated in WF's book, until in the late 1960s distinguished locals began to be appointed to this role instead of upper class appointees from London. Locally bred GGs were sensitive about ridicule from their countrymen if they appeared in exotic splendour and the cocked hats and silver braided tailcoats ceased to be worn almost immediately. Nowadays lounge suits are about as colourful as they get.

One isolated exception to the above trend is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. A very few British ambassadors still present their credentials to local heads of state (usually monarchs) wearing the diplomatic version of court dress.