Our Story · Est. 1892
From a keeper's cottage in the Forest of Bowland
One hundred and thirty years of coats built for weather that doesn't ask permission.
Arthur Pembroke was a gamekeeper's son who grew tired of watching good men get soaked through in bad oilskins. So he made something better — and it has been raining on the Lancashire fells ever since.
The Beginning
It started with a coat that failed
In the winter of 1892, the estate men above Slaidburn were issued oilskins that cracked in the cold and let the fell rain straight through. Arthur Pembroke, then a young keeper on the same ground, had spent enough soaked mornings to know the problem intimately.
He began reproofing and rebuilding the worst of them in the cottage at night — waxing the cotton heavier, cutting the shoulders for a working man's reach, storm-flapping every seam the weather could find. By the following season the keepers were asking for his coats by name.
He never left the valley. Neither have we.
A coat should be older than the man who wears it, and younger than the one who inherits it.
— Arthur Pembroke, 1901
The Making
Slow cloth, in a hurried world
We still cut our coats within a few miles of where Arthur cut his first. The waxed cotton is proofed to a weight most makers gave up on decades ago — heavier in the hand, warmer against the wind, and honest about what it's for.
Tweed is woven to our own setts; the leather is English bridle hide that takes years to properly earn its patina. Nothing here is designed to be replaced next autumn. It is designed to be handed down.
The Promise
Send it back. We'll bring it home.
A waxed coat is not finished the day you buy it — it's finished the day it's worn out, and we don't intend to let that happen. Every Arthur Pembroke coat can be returned to us to be reproofed, patched and mended, however many seasons it has behind it.
Some of the coats that come back to the valley are older than the people who wear them. That is rather the point.
What We Hold To
Three things, since 1892
i.
Made to Last
If it won't outlast the season, we won't make it. Everything is built for years of hard, wet, muddy use — and the years after those.
ii.
Made in the Valley
We've cut our coats in the same corner of Lancashire for over a century. The landscape isn't our marketing — it's our workshop.
iii.
Mended, Not Replaced
We'd rather reproof your old coat than sell you a new one. A thing worth making is a thing worth repairing.
