Hot under the collar

In a laundry in Bournemouth, an aged piece of machinery has spun back into action thanks to Downton Abbey and the Edwardian stiff collar’s phoenix-like resurgence. Matthew Dennison discovers the secrets of starching

- Matthew Dennison

TWENTY years ago, like a retired pony ridden only sporadically by visiting grandchildren, a veteran piece of machinery in a Bournemouth laundry was pressed into action for a few hours once a week. Today, that machine operates full time. At least 80 years old, mechanically straightforward and sturdy, it consists at heart of a spinning barrel. The layman would struggle to identify it, but this is the wonder tool that, in Britain’s largest surviving domestic laundry, Barker Laundry, irons and polishes up to 2,000 stiff collars a week. How it experienced such a dramatic revival in fortunes is a story of imagination, the internet and heritage TV drama.

For years, the business Matthew Barker had bought from his father offered, to a dwindling number of customers, a laundry service for detachable collars—those worn with dinner jackets or tailcoats, by barristers and Eton schoolboys. It was an esoteric aspect of the otherwise brisk trade carried out by a company offering an old-fashioned, collect and-clean service to some 4,000 households across central and south-eastern England and the capital. Correctly, Mr Barker identified this historical survival—a throwback to prewar clothing manufacture, when shirts and collars were separate items, laundered individually and attached with studs—as likely to engage the interest of his website browsers.