burton mon amour

GONE FOR A BURTON  blog by from musings bob bibby'

Go for a burton' is a reference to the suits made by Montague Burton, who supplied the majority of the demobilization suits that British servicemen were given on leaving service after WWII. (Note: Monty is also a contender as the source of the Full Monty). Any serviceman who was absent could have been said to have 'gone for a burton'. This does seem the less likely of the two explanations, as it doesn't quite match the meaning of the phrase. 'Gone for a burton' was used to mean dead, not merely absent, and Montague Burton didn't supply shrouds, as far as I know. Before the Second World War Burtons alone clothed 25 % of the male population in Britain

original demob suit

At the end of the Second World War, all servicemen returning home were issued with a set of civilian clothing, including a three piece suit. Many of the suits were made by the Leeds firm of Burtons. This was founded at the start of the 20th century by a Lithuanian Russian migrant Jew, Montague Burton (1885-1952), who initially established shops selling bespoke and ready-to-wear suits in Sheffield and Mansfield. As the business expanded Leeds became the manufacturing centre for the company. Montague Burton was knighted for services to industry in 1931, going on to endow chairs at several universities, including Leeds.
original sixties suit

During the Second World War Burton's firm made a quarter of all British military uniforms. After the war Burtons continued as a successful business selling men's suits and clothing

Little did Meshe Osinsky know when he landed in Britain in 1900, aged fifteen with £100 in his pocket, that he would one day be responsible for kitting me out in my first suit. Moshe was a Lithuanian Jew from the Kaunas province, where now, thanks to first Russian and then German pogroms in the Second World War, there are hardly any Jews still living, whereas, when Moshe left, Jews made up 35% of the population. Moshe started his life in Britain, like many new migrants, selling trinkets door-to-door but he always had an intention to go into business and in 1904 he opened his first shop in Chesterfield. In 1905 he started buying ready-made suits to sell from his shop at a 30% mark-up and rapidly expanded his business to open other shops in Mansfield and Sheffield. After his marriage in 1909 he began to call himself Morris Burton and soon after moved the business to Leeds, the heart of Jewish textiles and tailoring, where he became successively Maurice Burton and then the much more impressive Montague Maurice Burton.

The number of Burton’s shops increased annually and his business was helped enormously by winning contracts to supply uniforms during the First World War. By 1919 there were forty shops, growing over the next ten years to over four hundred and becoming a recognisable feature of the High Street in most British towns and cities. A common feature of these shops was that they were frequently sited on the corner of two streets, giving opportunity for window displays on both streets; they also often had billiard halls or dancing schools in their upper premises, cleverly attracting new customers subliminally. Montague Burton’s aim was to provide cheap but decent clothing for ordinary menfolk, his catchphrase being “A five guinea suit for fifty-five shillings”.

In 1921 he began to develop his own factory at Hudson Road Mills in Leeds which, at its height, would employ 10,000 people turning out over 300,000 suits a week. Burton was unusual for his times in being a very enlightened employer, providing his employees with a pre-Welfare State health and pension scheme, the largest works canteen in the world, plus free dental, ophthalmic and chiropody services. He was knighted in 1931 for services to industrial relations and endowed Chairs in Industrial Relations at the universities of Cardiff, Leeds and Cambridge. A keen internationalist he also established Chairs in International Relations at Oxford, LSE and Edinburgh. When he died in 1952, Burton’s was the world’s largest multiple tailor.

I was eighteen when I purchased that first suit, a natty three-button dark grey number with nipped-in waist and trousers with turn-ups, almost certainly bought so that I could stun the university tutors who, though they did not know it then, were about to interview this exceptionally brilliant scholar with the man-about-town dress sense. I don’t believe I wore it more than a few times – at those university interviews at Cambridge and Durham, probably at my grandmother’s funeral and maybe at one or two weddings. Suits were things that people who worked in banks had to wear, those people who did not go to university but opted instead for the safe home circuit of work, Old Boys Club and masonic lodge and who would later get their revenge on those lucky few of us who wore jeans and sweatshirts by screwing up the banking system some three decades or so later.

I bought that suit from Burton the Tailor, off the peg but, because I was then of regulation size, it fitted me fine. I didn’t realise then that Burton’s were a few years later to be kitting out the triumphant England football team who won the 1966 World Cup (though I probably looked more like Nobby Stiles than the immaculate Bobby Moore) or that earlier Burton’s had been responsible for making uniforms for the troops during the Second World War and for the imaginative manufacture of demob suits for soldiers returning to civilian life after the war ended. Almost certainly my dad purchased one such suit in 1946. I was also completely unaware that I had literally “gone for a burton”. I knew the phrase, of course. How could I not, growing up as I and countless other post-war children did on the exploits of W.E. Johns’s Biggles and the derring-do of RAF pilots filling the pages of the Hotspur, the Victor and the Tiger? “Gone for a burton” meant kicked the bucket, bit the dust, gone belly-up, pushing up the daisies, in other words died. Most commonly this was used about pilots who did not return from missions.

Now there are various stories about where the phrase “gone for a burton” originated. There are some obscure claims linking it to two nautical terms – a burton being apparently a small tackle, formed by two blocks or pulleys, employed to tighten the shrouds of the top-masts, while a-burton is a means for stowing cargo from side to side on a ship. No one, as far as I can tell, however, has managed to explain why going for burton in either of the above senses could possibly refer to someone dying.

A one-time popular explanation linked the phrase to a pre-war advert for Burton’s beer in which a place at table was left vacant and the missing person was said to have “gone for a Burton”, i.e. gone to the pub for a drink rather than suffering another meal of cold pie and mash. Burton-on-Trent was the capital of brewing for many, many years, until British brewing was destroyed by its takeover by international companies such as Coors. Men like William Bass, Samuel Allsopp and William Worthington using the local water to brew strong beer that they could ship along the River Trent to Hull and thence to Danzig and St Petersberg on the Baltic coast. Later they developed India Pale Ale specifically for those Brits running the East India Company in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. Burton Ale was originally brewed by Allsopp’s and later, after takeover, by Ind Coope but sadly, good as the above story is, there are no records of the aforesaid advert, so it is probably no more than an urban myth.

So we’re left with the most likely explanation, linking the phrase “gone for a burton” to Montague Burton’s chainstores. The demob suits, made by Burton’s, with which soldiers were kitted out on returning to civilian life have been put forward as having a possible connection but this is unlikely since the phrase was used mostly during the war, not after it. I’ve already mentioned the fact that Burton’s shops frequently had billiard halls or dance halls in the upper parts of their premises and during the war many of these were requisitioned so that RAF conscripts might take examinations such as Morse aptitude tests therein. Someone who failed such a test might, therefore, be said to have “gone for a burton” and this was later used ironically by RAF pilots about any of their number that failed to return from a mission.

Curiously enough the phrase “the full Monty” is now universally accepted as originating from Burton’s tailors, for workers at his Hudson Road factory have confirmed that it referred to a three-piece suit made and sold by Burton the Tailor. Old Meshe Osinsky would probably have known of these two slang usages and their links to his business empire, though I can find no reference to his having ever acknowledged this. And I should have known, when I went to select my first suit from his corner store in my home town, that I was not “going for a burton” nor was I seeking to purchase “the full Monty”. The latter was strictly for bankers and the former is what those self-same bankers, if they had any moral rectitude, should have done when they drove the world’s economies to their knees.