Burberry and the Bottom of the Earth

In 1856, a twenty one year old named Thomas Burberry opened a small outfitter's shop in Hampshire, England. There was nothing about that shop to suggest it would one day be tangled up with some of the most dangerous journeys human beings have ever attempted. It sold clothes to farmers and countrymen. Practical things, for practical people, in a part of England where the weather rarely cooperated.

But Burberry was paying attention to a problem nobody had properly solved. If you wanted to stay dry in the rain back then, you wore rubberized cotton, and rubberized cotton did not breathe. You'd stay dry on the outside and soaked through with your own sweat on the inside. Comfort and protection were opposites. You picked one.

Burberry didn't accept that. He spent years experimenting with how yarn was woven and treated, and eventually landed on something new. A fabric that was waterproof before it was ever stitched into a garment, tightly woven enough to block wind and rain, but still breathable. He called it gabardine. He patented it in 1888.

At the time, it probably looked like a good business decision. A better raincoat. What nobody could have predicted was where that fabric was about to go.

Where No One Had Ever Stood

By the early 1900s, there was one place left on earth that no human being had ever set foot. The South Pole. Getting there meant weeks of dragging sledges across an landscape with no landmarks, no shelter, and temperatures that could kill an exposed hand in minutes. Every expedition that had tried before had turned back, or worse.

The explorers who were serious about attempting it needed clothing and tents that could survive conditions nothing in ordinary life prepares you for. Word had gotten around about Burberry's fabric. It started showing up in expedition inventories, tailored into windproof outer layers, trousers, hoods, and tents that had to hold against wind that could flatten a person.

In 1911, a Norwegian explorer named Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole. First person in history to stand there. His tent and his outer clothing on that journey were Burberry gabardine.

A year later, in 1912, a British expedition led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott also reached the pole, also wearing Burberry gear. But Scott's team never made it home. Exhausted and out of supplies, they died on the return journey, just a short distance from a depot that could have saved them. Their bodies were found later that year, inside their Burberry tent.

Two expeditions, wearing the same fabric from the same small English company. One story ended in triumph. The other in tragedy. The fabric wasn't the difference. Everything else was.

The Man Who Failed and Became Legendary Anyway

Then there's Ernest Shackleton.

Shackleton wore Burberry gabardine across three separate expeditions to Antarctica. The most famous of them set out in 1914, with a goal that had never been achieved. Not reaching the pole, that had already been done. Shackleton wanted to cross the entire continent on foot.

He never did it. His ship, the Endurance, got trapped in pack ice in the Weddell Sea before he'd even reached land. For ten months the ice held the ship, groaning and cracking around it, until it finally crushed the hull completely and the Endurance sank.

By any normal measure, the expedition had failed before it began.

What happened next is the part people still tell more than a century later. Shackleton had twenty seven men, no ship, and no way to call for help, on the most remote and hostile landmass on the planet. He made camp on the drifting ice. He kept his crew fed, occupied, and calm for months while the ice carried them wherever it wanted. When the ice finally broke apart beneath them, he got everyone into lifeboats and reached the barren rock of Elephant Island.

Elephant Island wasn't a rescue. It was just slightly less certain death. So Shackleton picked five men, climbed into a twenty two foot lifeboat named the James Caird, and sailed eight hundred miles across some of the roughest ocean on earth to reach a whaling station on South Georgia Island, where he knew there might be help.

He made it. He came back for the rest of his crew.

Every single one of the twenty seven men who left on the Endurance came home alive.

What the Checkered Pattern Doesn't Tell You

Today, when people see the Burberry check, they think fashion house. Luxury tag. A pattern stitched into scarves and trench coats sold in glass fronted stores.

None of that is where the brand's real weight comes from. It comes from a fabric invented by a man trying to solve a raincoat problem in Hampshire, that ended up on the backs of the first people to ever stand at the South Pole, that was found wrapped around the frozen bodies of men who didn't make it home, and that helped keep twenty seven other men alive through one of the greatest survival stories ever recorded.

Somewhere between the ice of Antarctica and the shop windows of today, the story got quieter. The fabric that outlasted the coldest, most unforgiving place on earth is now mostly known for a plaid pattern on a scarf.

Worth remembering, next time you see it, what that pattern actually survived.