The power of a pocket

In 1951, Winston Churchill, then leader of the opposition and aged 77, scored a humiliating Commons victory over the new chancellor of the exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell. Not for nothing did Aneurin Bevan call Gaitskell ‘a desiccated calculating machine’. His dry Wykehamist tone made his financial statements seem interminable, and this one soon had the House restless. Churchill made a diversion. He began to search his pockets. First the two side-pockets of his trousers. Then the two at the back. The top jacket pocket followed. The House gradually lost interest in Gaitskell and followed Churchill’s investigations as he moved to the inner and the side-pockets of his coat and then his six waistcoat pockets. Exasperated beyond endurance, Gaitskell threw down his brief and asked acidly, ‘Can I be of any assistance?’ Innocently surprised, the old man looked up and said, ‘I was only looking for a jujube.’ The House dissolved in laughter, and Gaitskell was lost.

Now the point of the story is that if Churchill had been a woman, he could not have staged this performance. For women have no pockets. Why? The question takes us into the murkier depths of the sex war as well as the arcana of sartorial history. In the 19th century the skills of the Savile Row tailors devised a male suit that has remained standard for over 100 years, giving its owner 17 pockets in which to distribute all his keys, watch, notecase, money, matches, hanky etc without seriously altering his shape. If he had a good figure — wide shoulders, narrow hip — the suit preserved it while keeping all his knick-knacks within reach. It is typical of the perception of Thomas Carlyle (whose own rustic suitings were concealed beneath an elongated overcoat) that he noted the centrality of the suit, and especially of trousers, in his 1838 tract Sartor Resartus.