Figure 1.--Here dad is giving his very serious son some cricket lessons. Judgeing from their home in the background, they are a well-to-do family. Mom has dressed the boy in a smock to make sure he does not get his clothes dirty while playing. He looks to be about 7-years old. The photograph is undated, but looks to us like the 1910s.

Smocks sem to have been less commnly worn by English children than adults, especially boys. We know farmrs wore smocks in the 19th century. This seems to have been the farmers and nt their wives. We are less sure about children in the 19th century. We have been unable to find images of rural children children wearing smocks like their fathers. Perhaps they ds, but we have been unable to find any evidence of it. And we hae have very few images from the early-19th century. The images that we do have are painted portraits in whi ch the children are wearing their best clothing. And like the smocks that farmers worem, the smocks children wore were to protect their clothing. Even after the development of photography, we still do not see English children wearing smocks,but this may be due to the limited size of our mid-19th century archive. We note that some English children did wear smocks in the late-19th and early-20th century. We do not have extensive information but as described elsewhere on this page, it was usually pre-school or younger primary school children up to about 8years of age. This was the age at which boys began at preparatory schools, often boarding schools. As far as we can tell, smocks were more commonly used for a child's paly clothes to protect his or her clothes. We believe that this was not uncommon in the late 19th and early 20th century, although there seem to have been class connotations. The images we hve found show children from comfortable middle-class or upper class families. We do not see working-class children wearing smocks. English children may have beern dressed in smocks to play in the back garden on a nice summer day. [HBC note: The English say back "garden" instead of back "yard". An English frriend was most hurt when I called her lovely garden a "back yard".] A mother might dress all her children in identival smocks if the boys were not yet ready for voarding school (about 8 years old). They may have also been taken to the park to play, although I am less certain of that. We believe that using smocks as play wear was more common for affluent, than working class families. It seems to have had rather a continental look to it. A good example of this would be the Llewellyn-Davies boys of Peter Pan fame in the 1890s and Chritopher Milne of Christoopher Robin fame.

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Created: 1:55 AM 7/12/2014
Last updated: 1:55 AM 7/12/2014