clipper | Tusting

At Christmas in 2012, Sally McEwan gave her artist husband, David, one of our Clipper bags in dark brown miret bridle leather, which he had made some pretty hefty hints about wanting. This photo is of David with the Clipper after his Christmas dinner…

David had a pretty hefty trip ahead of him to take commissions for paintings in Florida, the Falkland Islands and even further, on to the edge of Antarctica, the island of South Georgia. David sent us some stunning photos of his Clipper, which had been christened ‘Terence’ in the various locations, so we cheekily asked him to write us a guest blog of his journey. This is what he wrote:

The Travels of Terence Tusting

I’m an Artist, well, no, actually I’m a painter, Artists wander around clutching their foreheads looking pale and posey waiting for their inspirational muse to strike; I just get on with the job. Getting on with the job means that wherever I am I need to be able to work at the drop of a pencil (which I do quite often, being giftedly clumsy) so I do need to carry lots of ‘stuff’ around with me… So I need a bag, more than that, I need a bag from which I can recover one of twenty types of pencil, pens, graphite sticks, brushes, sketch pads – a special bag then, with lots of painter friendly compartments.

I’d been a good boy last year, in fact, I must have been a very good boy because Father Christmas brought me a big Tusting Clipper Bag with pockets, sleeves and room for everything I could possibly need – including Kindle.

Because I was going off on a long foreign trip I practised packing and finding those things that have to be handed over at airports with sophisticated and cosmopolitan ease. Well, we’ve all been behind people who wait until they are standing at a cash point before looking through bags filled with receipts, knitting patterns, pill boxes and emergency tea bags for a card which they’d left at home anyway. As I would be travelling through several airports, sea ports and time zones, I needed to find all manner of documents quickly and considering that my family believe that I need a posse of carers to get me from my front door to the kitchen, they were worried.

I travelled and showed to a variety of officials documents, passports and bits of plastic, and each time I dipped my hand into one of a number of pockets and compartments, they were there. It wasn’t magic, it was professional design. So Terence kept me company at Show Jumping venues, Polo Matches and gallery openings and kept safe brochures, sketches, books and business cards, sandwiches and beer, cameras and Kindles. I dropped it, I stood on it, I dragged it, I threw it and I breathed in the wonderful smell of leather (in a good way) and flew from Barcelona to Miami and back. Then on to Gatwick, and R.A.F. Brize Norton, zoomed down to The Falklands and then sailed off through wild seas beyond the Antarctic Confluence to draw and photograph South Georgia, ships and icebergs.

Throughout it all, Terence Tusting was there like a silent assistant with just the right thing at just the right time.

Our love affair with the satchel is one of those interesting fashion moments where something vintage, that never really disappeared, gets a revival that turns out to be bigger than the original trend ever was in the first place. Those of us old enough to remember their little school satchel may think they know where the trend began, but in reality, the style goes back much further than that. Remnants and images of flap-over bags have been found amongst Roman remains and it is said that this style of bag became hugely popular in the seventeenth century. In more modern times, the Indiana Jones films have been credited with influencing the satchel revival.

So, what is a satchel?

With such a long heritage, it is natural that the style should have many interpretations, but all satchels tend to share a flap-over closure and a long shoulder strap of some sort. They are soft-form bags, with no wooden stiffening as found in old suitcases or box briefcases.

Always leather?

Well, the Roman ones seem to have been and although Indiana Jones carried a simple canvas satchel with no leather on it at all, our traditional old school satchels were always made from economical split leather.

Bovine leather starts off very thick and some of the back of the leather is usually shaved off to make the leather thinner, lighter, softer and more useable in leather goods. The bit that gets shaved off the back is the ‘split’ and, clearly, no longer has any grain on it. If the shaved-off split is thick enough, it can be coated with colour and used in its own right as a substitute to expensive grain-on leather. Thus, in an early triumph of recycling, those little school bags were made from a waste product! Many of the simple satchels available today stick to this tradition of using coated splits, or ‘satchel leather’, giving an un-lined bag made from this familiar, typically quite stiff, material.

Fashion or function?

Definitely both! The great thing about satchels is that they are generally hugely practical – what could be better than a great looking bag that is on-trend and yet doesn’t require a serious compromise in terms of usability? From cute little micro satchels to man-size messengers, the satchel comes in all sizes, so there is definitely something for everyone.

A passing fad or in for the long haul?

Twenty-odd centuries could hardly be described as a passing fad, and that would be because satchels fundamentally work as a design. Our own Clipper Bag, one of our very first products, has always – and continues to be – one of our best-selling styles. It is clear that we have an enduring love affair with the satchel and we think it is definitely here to stay for a good while yet.