Sam Leith Sam Leith

Why Doc Martens are the only footwear you need

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Sam Leith has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Doc Martens are one of those quintessentially British things that, like the royal family and lorries queuing on the M20, turn out actually to be Germany’s doing. The ancestor of what became the ‘Air Wair’ sole was designed in 1945 by a German army doctor with a sore foot. Amid the postwar hurly-burly, he ‘salvaged’ a cobbler’s last from a shop in Munich and knocked himself up an air-cushioned shoe to relieve his discomfort. Pleased with the success of his invention, he and a pal went into business producing bouncing soles.

The delicate question of what Dr Maerten did in the war, and whether he salvaged his shoe-making kit in the same way Hermann Goering ‘salvaged’ Rembrandts, is not easily resolved by a Google search, but no doubt had he been a raving Nazi we’d have heard about it by now. Just to be on the safe side, though, his name was Anglicised when in 1959 the Northamptonshire bootmakers Griggs bought a licence to produce those bouncing soles in the UK. They slapped a stout leather upper and some fetching yellow stitching on the product, and on April Fool’s Day 1960 the bovver boot was born.

It’s very pleasing to read that half a century later, the company has reported pre-tax profits of more than £100 million and is eyeing an IPO no less greedily than any Silicon Roundabout unicorn. Good on them. The DM is for everyone. At various times it has been the signature footwear of popstars, skinheads, hippy girls in floral skirts, and my one-time colleague the City editor of the Daily Telegraph.

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