The Dubarry boots bite the dust

Three days ago my Dubarry boots died. They are being shipped in a golden sarcophagus to Tombstone, Arizona, to be buried on Boot Hill with all ceremony. 

No, I'm only kidding about the shipment. They ae actually resting in my landfill bin. I thought of salvaging the softer light tan leather for other uses, but I decided that it wasn't worth the effort. After fifteen years' service, it was just too shabby. These boots, after all, had seen a lot of use, and had been no stranger to mud and water. They were stylish country wear, made for wet pastures, clay pigeon shoots, and out-of-town pubs. If clean they were perfectly presentable on city streets too, at least in the winter. Posh wellies, if you like; fashionable and desirable, but not slinky.

I first became aware of them when visiting Tunbridge Wells in June 2011. There was a country clothing and footwear shop near the Pantiles, and the staff inside were wearing these boots. They looked very nice. I was impressed. But they were very expensive and I held back from buying. I promised myself, however, that one day I would treat myself to a pair. Then I saw them on the feet of a lady - clearly a well-off grandmother, out with her grandchildren - at Studland on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset. This was later in September 2011. I was hooked. I would somehow find the money for them. 

So on 6th October 2011, I walked into Aston Bourne (a country clothing and footwear shop in the Brighton Lanes - the place where I later bought my navy blue Barbour jacket in July 2021) and placed an order for a pair of Dubarry's 'Galway' boots, the ones I wanted. I paid £332. That included some boot cream, so I'm guessing the boots themselves must have cost £329. That was a lot back in 2011. They came in on 14th October 2011. I abandoned what I was doing on that day, collected them, and brought them home.

Once home, and out of their packaging, I had no buyer's regret. They looked great.

I soon put them through their paces, in a variety of outdoor locations. They had to cope with wet weather and various kinds of mire. I felt I could tread anywhere with them, in any weather. For instance, during 2012: flooded footpaths, damp and slippery autumn leaves, harbourside shingle.

In the summer of 2013, I wore them on a long tramp in the Scottish Border Country, following the old railway trackbed between the former Saughtree and Riccarton Junction stations, a fairly demanding route which was waterlogged in places and fraught with belligerent sheep bent on barring my progress. 

There wasn't much left to see at Riccarton Junction. One old platform face was pretty much it. Whereas there had been plenty to see at Saughtree station. The current owner had put in a lot of restoration work. There was nobody about, so I could have a good look. 

There was only a short length of track, but I thought it was all very impressive. I contemplated the scene on arrival, and then I had a second chance after walking to Riccarton Junction and back. Once again, these were pictures taken on my little Leica D-Lux 4, which I'm still using today in 2026, with 131,000 shots under its belt.

This was a long walk to take in posh wellies. My feet got tired and painful, and I was limping by the time I'd trekked back to Fiona, my Volvo car at the time. Further: the boots, being waterproof, were not the thing to wear in even mildly warm weather. They had induced a heat rash on both ankles that took a couple of days to fade. In fact my ankles looked red and angry when I took the boots off back at Fiona, and even a refreshing gin and tonic at the nearest pub failed to cure my discomfort. I was just about OK to drive back to the caravan site. It was clear that while the boots were very comfortable for an hour's walk, and possibly for two hours in cool weather, they were no substitute for proper walking boots (like my Alt-Bergs) for longer outings.

Thereafter, I reserved them for shorter walks only. But they continued to do sterling wet-weather service in various challenging locations, such as on this occasion at Ebernoe in Sussex in 2015.

Back home, they cleaned up fine.

And they stayed looking good. I was glad I'd bought them. (I had long recovered from the initial financial hit)

I acquired a Barbour jacket in 2021. That and the Dubarry boots were natural partners.

Dubarry did classically-feminine fashion boots too, as in this shop poster I saw in Cheltenham later in 2021. 

I wonder what the rough-sleeping person dressed in grey thought of the poster? He was an odd sight to see in a place like Cheltenham.

Even in 2024 (my Dubarry boots were thirteen years old by then) I could slosh through the New Forest, semi-flooded after weeks of rain, and my feet would stay warm and dry.

Admittedly, it took more than a day to get them completely dry after such a soaking. But I could help the process along by hanging them up in my caravan, which I could heat up very nicely.  

That's my old caravan, of course, not the newer one I bought last January. 

When I set forth on one of the Chailey Commons in Sussex three days ago, I wore my Dubarry boots. I enjoyed an exhilarating tramp along paths on the edge of Red House Common that I'd not walked along before, in the kind of half-hazy autumn sunshine I most like. As the photos below illustrate. It was so easy to get atmospheric shots of things autumnal - and my best shots yet of the famous Chailey Windmill. 

The marvellous light got very golden: sunset was fast approaching. Look how it lit me and the Windmill up.

I'd been walking for an hour, and the boots felt fine. But it was time to head back to Sophie, and then home. The shadows were getting long!

And then the boots didn't feel quite right. They were still comfortable on my feet, but walking was harder in them. Yet they looked all right if I glanced down. Hmm. That odd feeling grew and grew.

Back at the car park, I realised what had happened to both boots: the soles were gaping!

Well, they were just about OK for driving, if I took care. Back home, I had a closer look.

It was no good. I'd wondered whether applying some kind of rubber solution might bind them together again. But it looked as if the rubber soles had aged to a point where they would start peeling away in other places too. Their time was up. In any case, even if a repair were attempted, I clearly couldn't rely on them any longer to be completely waterproof. 

I wasn't sentimental about it. They'd had a long run. Fifteen years. But now it was bin time.

Will I replace them? Short answer: no. Not that they cost such a huge amount nowadays. Dubarry still sell the exact same 'Galway' boots for £379 online, coincidentally exactly what I recently paid for my Citizen Promaster Tough watch, the one with the yellow strap in the windmill shot above. £379 is half what I would have expected. Perhaps production has been stepped up, with volume reducing the asking price. And very likely they are now made abroad, just as Barbour jackets are now made abroad. But to me £379 remains quite a lot. And I need other kinds of footwear more urgently. 

So if venturing out into the snow and ice this winter, it'll have to be in my heavy-duty green wellies, or my Alt-Berg walking boots. 

It does feel like a phase in my life is over: the Dubarry Era. Oh well.

If you would like to give me feedback on this post, or make an enquiry, please email me from my Blog Profile.

Sixpences, farthings, half-crowns, ten bob notes, and what to do with old tins

I inherited a collection of old biscuit, toffee and chocolate tins from Mum and Dad back in 2009, some of which must have been pretty old, dating from the 1990s and before. 

Mum used a couple to put her sewing stuff in, and I have retained them and use them exactly as she did. She used others to put her cake-icing equipment in, but I don't share her fascination with that kind of thing, and have cleared it all out to make space in my kitchen cupboards for items such as my set of woks.

These tins were once commonplace items in every home, and were added to each year at Christmastime. I suspect every home had an assorted collection just like Mum and Dad's, used for storing everything from cotton reels to old nails. These tins were generally very attractive, especially Chinese-themed tins for loose tea, which I remember were around when I was a child. Gradually, however, one became awash with them, and the least useful of them tended to get thrown out, particularly when it was time to refurbish the kitchen, or move house, as Mum and Dad did several times over the decades.

So the residue left in my hall cupboard wasn't large. Even so, I wanted to thin it out, to create more room for storing additional tins of baked beans, plum tomatoes and sardines. I'm not (yet) a serious Prepper, but there was no harm in putting together at least a few extra items for emergency use. Coincidentally, I'd seen biscuit tins on sale in Waitrose in the form of a sixpence, and had on impulse bought two of them, one for myself and one for my friend Valerie. Here they are.

That's a pretty good replica of a sixpence from 1960, though huge compared to the small coin itself.

I don't know who glances at my blog. I imagine it appeals only to oldies like me, but I may be quite wrong. So some readers may be too young to recall the switch in February 1971 from the old coinage to decimal coinage. Pre-1971, the pound was divided into twenty shillings. Each shilling was divided into twelve pennies. Each penny was divided into two halfpennies, and before 1960 - I can just about remember it - each penny was also divided into four farthings. I loved all those little coins. But I didn't collect them because they had some value back in the 1950s and early 1960s, and a child whose pocket money was only a shilling a week couldn't afford to set up a coin collection! 

But by 1968, when the first of the new decimal coins was announced - the 10p piece, equivalent to the old florin, the two-shilling coin that was worth one-tenth of a pound - I could begin to amass a coin collection from the money that came into my hands. As I'm sure many did. I still have it, preserved in proper albums that I invested in. And in 2020, during Covid, I photographed that collection as one of the projects I invented to pass the time, as we were all housebound during the lockdowns.

Pre-1971, it was always fascinating to examine what was in one's purse. There would be shiny, freshly-minted coins of course, but many would be decades old, some even from Victorian times, although those would be very worn. The basic designs remained the same for a long time, but there would be gradual changes. The monarch's head on the other side of the coin would alter, for instance. And there would be some rarities to look out for, such as the pennies made not at the Royal Mint but at Heaton or King's Norton. There was a sporting chance of finding one or two of those - thrilling for a youngster. Naturally, very worn coins - however interesting - weren't worth more than face value, but value wasn't the point. One wanted a representative array of British coins, as complete as possible, in the best condition possible, and properly displayed in albums. It wasn't for sale. It was for keeping, like having a personal slice of history. And in 2026, fifty-five years on from 1971, I am so glad that I bothered. 

So here's a rundown of what the old coinage was like. My own photographs. Taken, incidentally, with my cherished little Leica D-Lux 4, still going strong. 

First, the little bronze farthing. 960 of them in one pound. My favourite coin, with the little wren on the front. I think I used one in earnest only once, in 1958 I think, when I was six. By then it wasn't worth anything on its own, but a halfpenny plus a farthing could still buy some sweets.

Next the bronze halfpenny (pronounced 'hay-penny'). 480 of them in one pound. 24 of them to a shilling. Latterly it featured Sir Francis Drake's ship, the Golden Hind.

Next, the bronze penny. 240 of them in one pound. 12 of them to a shilling. This always had a seated Britannia on the front, imperiously and confidently ruling the waves, and no doubt stooping to conquer, something we don't seem to do nowadays. Sometimes there would be a lighthouse in the scene. Very occasionally, an 'H' (for Heaton) or a 'KN' (for King's Norton) next to the date at the bottom.

Old pennies were often well worn, but still usable as currency because they were unmistakable. They were big coins and you couldn't possibly confuse them with anything else.

Now the threepence, pronounced 'thruppence' and generally called the 'thruppenny bit', at least in my time. 80 of them in one pound. Four of them to a shilling. Originally this was a small silver coin, rather like a sixpence. Here is one.  

But then it underwent a complete design change, becoming a multi-sided yellowish coin, very distinctive indeed, and another favourite of mine. It featured an attractive clump of flowers at first, but latterly a portcullis.

Next up, the silver sixpence, also known as a 'tanner', the coin copied for that Waitrose tin I bought (you see, I am keeping up a tenuous connection with the opening paragraphs of this post). 40 of them in one pound. Two in every shilling. This was the coin people tended to save up in large jars, partly because a lot of sixpences looked good that way. It was a cute little coin, oddly small for its value. When I was a child, in the infants anyway, you could stuff yourself silly with sixpence to spend. Not that I got as much for pocket money at first. But then ten shillings - 20 sixpences - bought a week's groceries in the 1950s. 

Note that I haven't yet mentioned fourpenny coins. 60 of those in one pound. These disappeared a very, very long time ago, except those coined for Maundy Money - special coins given to selected oldies by the monarch, on Maundy Thursday I believe. Fourpenny coins were once called 'groats'. I've an idea the old-fashioned phrase 'I'll give you a fourpenny one', i.e. 'punch you on the jaw', had some connection with this coin. Or possibly not. 

There were two sixpences in one silver shilling, the next coin. Also known as a 'bob'. There were 20 shillings in one pound. In its day this was big money for a kid. A visiting uncle or aunt was most likely to give a youngster like me sixpence as a present, and not usually a shilling. (These were the days when visiting relations commonly gave children small amounts of money to spend on sweets or funfair rides, and we lived in Barry then, with exotic Barry Island visible from our house, rather a longish walk there and back, but only a short train or bus ride away) One shilling was my standard pocket money until I was ten. There were two kinds of shilling: English and Scottish. 

The silver two-shilling coin, or 'florin', was actually rather an oddity, as it didn't fit neatly into the historic pounds/shillings/pence scheme that had obtained since at least mediaeval times. It was a more recent invention. There were ten in one pound, and so when decimalisation came in 1971 it could be used alongside the new 10p coin. They were completely interchangeable. In the heyday of coin-operated machines, such as cigarette machines in pubs, this saved a lot of expensive conversion work. 

The silver half-crown, of which there were eight in the pound, was also an oddity because the crown was never in circulation as an everyday coin. It was in practice the largest coin one ever used. It could buy a lot of small items, and for much of its life was a princely amount of pocket money. I liked it. It was a large coin. I used to hear that it was the standard coin put into church collections, and that after decimalisation, when the half-crown was withdrawn and 10p became its substitute, there was consternation in the Church of England because church collections had shrunk by 20 per cent.  

The huge and heavy silver crown was never in one's purse. I think it was legal tender, but nobody used it as such. There were four in one pound. It was issued on special occasions as a commemorative coin, in some kind of box. Here are a few that came my way as presents.

Even in 1971, it wasn't feasible to put together a large collection of current banknotes. They were just worth too much. But I managed to preserve an old ten-shilling note, or ten-bob note. Two of them in every pound. If you have a copy of The Beatles' Abbey Road LP (or album), you may recall that in the track Mean Mr Mustard, the old gentleman (described at one point as a 'dirty old man') 'keeps a ten-bob note up his nose'. Well, this is what he was stuffing up there. 

Pushing the boat out, and denying myself important money for clothes and shoes, I saved some pound notes too. The old-style pound note had a long run, but was replaced by a smaller but more colourful version in 1978, and then by a coin. Here are the older and newer versions of the former banknote. 

I still regret the disappearance of the old coins. They had character. They were a tangible link with history, and not fragile and fiddly to handle like stamps, another thing that kids used to collect. Granted, the arithmetic needed to work with the old coinage was awkward. From that point of view, I was relieved when we went decimal. But looking back, we lost something important. Something cultural. It was one of those social glues. When Tommy Steele sang about 'Half a sixpence' you knew what he meant. 

But it would all have passed into oblivion in any event. Inflation would have done for all the old coins in the long run. In 2026, if we still had the old coinage, even the half-crown (12.5p in decimal terms) would buy nothing on its own. I suppose the old ten bob note (50p) would remain useful for very small items. Only the pound note would still have some worth.

The old money hasn't entirely gone. I was astonished to discover that certain things are still priced in 'guineas', which was £1 1s 0d - twenty-one shillings. It's a thing done with costly things bought or sold at a premium - such as when buying or selling a racehorse, or when collecting the winnings if your old nag wins a race. Or an article you might buy or bid for at an exclusive gallery or auction house. I suppose a guinea is still a legally recognised amount of money, and not just a faintly snobbish gimmick. 

I still have the government's pamphlet that explains the coming of decimalisation and the changes that it would bring.

Look at the illustrative prices! (Click on the pictures to see them better) And consider the societal changes since.

You could buy a mint set of the first coins. I did.

There was an outcry that as one 'new penny' was worth 2.4 times one 'old penny', all prices would be rounded up to the detriment of those on small budgets. So they minted the 'new half penny'. It was soon worthless, as unprecedented inflation bit deep during the 1970s. I took to saving those half-pence pieces for future use as counters for card games. I still have them!

Of all the new decimal coins, the half new penny was the one I liked most. It wasn't truly decimal. It was an improvisation, doomed to quick obsolescence, but meanwhile as odd and quirky as the old half-crown. All power to it. It disrupted the neat, carefully worked-out system, and added some individuality to the new, rather uninspiring coinage. No wonder I retain a soft spot for it.

Another thing that didn't go the way the government envisaged was how we referred to the 'new penny'. Nobody used that phrase. Nobody referred to 'new pence'. Its symbol was 'p'. So it quickly became known as the 'pee'. You'd talk about 'one pee' or 'eleven and a half pee' or 'thirty-three pee' or 'two pounds and fifty pee' - or just 'two pound fifty'. I imagine this was all unexpected and eyebrow-raising to stuffy people on expert committees, who'd had high hopes for the new coinage.  

After 'D-Day' my temporary interest in coins quickly waned, and now I don't care much. Indeed, I hardly ever use coins. Or even banknotes. But I'm still pleased that I have a good, though non-valuable, collection of old coins and banknotes. However, I haven't added to it. I'm not a serious collector.

After a massive excursion into numismatics, let's get back to tins!

So I had two 'sixpence' tins. They both contained yummy shortbread biscuits. As intended, I gave one tin to Valerie as a present, plus the contents of my own tin. I already knew what I wanted to do with my own (now empty) tin. I was going to use it as a household ornament. Where could I put it? I decided to fix it to a wall in my lounge. It would enhance a set of framed pictures near the lounge door. But there would have to be anther tin, to balance the effect. So I chose a heart-shaped Roses chocolates tin. 

This was the lounge wall before I commenced. 

Note the Black & Decker drill bottom left: this was a hard brick supporting wall, and a powerful drill fitted with a masonry bit was needed. Unlike Dad, I'm no do-it-yourself-er, but I can manage to drill a hole, tap in a rawlplug, and insert a screw to hang a picture on. Only this time I'd be hanging a tin. I first punched a hole in the back of each tin, and enlarged it to a suitable diameter.

Then it was drill, baby, drill. Careful measurements and positioning paid off. The back of each tin went on the wall exactly as I'd hoped. Then I pushed on the lid of each tin.

As you can see, it was one of those after-breakfast jobs that stretched on into the morning, so that I was still in my night attire as lunchtime approached. I took my time. There was no reason to rush and mess things up. 

The 'sixpence' tin looked really good.

But I was particularly pleased about the heart-shaped Roses chocolates tin. 

Mum had liked these tins: they were very much associated with her. In a way, that tin was now a little object of commemoration for Mum. Dad had his framed Jubilee Medal in the hall; this was Mum's medal.

Afterwards I wondered where I'd got the idea for sticking these tins on the lounge wall, with plans to do the same for other tins. I hadn't seen it done anywhere else - or at least I'd never noticed it done. But surely it wasn't an original idea. It doesn't matter. It's still, in my view, an interesting way to use old tins that would otherwise stay in a cupboard or just get junked.

If you would like to give me feedback on this post, or make an enquiry, please email me from my Blog Profile.