ABSTRACT
In 1982, the biographer of the novelist Dornford Yates described how Yates would have appeared in the London Underground in around 1910: ‘his morning coat without fault, his boots varnished and in the forenoon his spats fell neatly over his uppers. Spats, you will not need to be told, were not worn after luncheon’ (Smithers 4). Sadly, I did need to be told. I was also unsure what spats were, but I recognized the word, from a Bertie Wooster story: ‘It would have taken a man of stronger fibre than I am to resist the pair of Old Etonian spats which had smiled up at me from inside the window’ (‘Claude and Eustace’ 550).
