I recently purchased a pair of trendy gum boots online in a fetching rust colour. To get the correct size I followed the prompts and scanned a QR code to my phone. The instructions then asked me to photograph both feet next to a sheet of A4 paper. At this point I scoured the room for any secret cameras as I was sure this was a wind up but no, it had accurately worked out my size. When the boots duly arrived they were the perfect fit.

It got me thinking about the shoe buying business back in the sixties. The whole experience was an outing with your mother. It was never your father as he had bought a pair of perfectly good brogues back in the early fifties that he took to a man to get re-soled and heeled every couple of years. The same man who cut keys and engraved trophies. To this day I have never seen a training institute that offers courses in cobblering, locksmithery and calligraphy on rounded metal surfaces. I wonder if knife sharpening is post graduate ?

So you found yourself sitting with your foot on a slanting stool with a helpful assistant sitting astride the other end. She would cup your ball (of your foot !) and place it into a contraption somewhere between a vice and a slide rule then strap you down. This is known as a Brannock Device, invented, patented and manufactured in 1925 by Charles F Brannock. He was head of the Brannock Device Company until his death at the age of 89 in 1992.

I wonder what he must have been like as a boy at dinner parties. “Get out from under the table Charles and stop touching peoples feet !”

After a complex sum involving calculus and trigonometry, the attendant disappeared behind a narrow curtain leading to a library of stacked boxes only to re-appear sometime later, breathless with a solitary shoe. Socked foot still resting on the bestoke stool, she produced an obscenely long shoe horn, probably fashioned from ancient unicorn antler and proceeded to jemmy your little tootsies into the gleaming black leather receptacle.

Once safely laced up, your mother was invited to squeeze the space between big toe and the end of the shoe commonly referred to as “room to grow.” After further toe-crushing by the assistant, the shop manager and anyone else in the vicinity, you were instructed to walk about like a club-footed car park attendant. Then you had to view the shoe in a slanting mirror, an angle only cockroaches and rodents would ever experience.

Then and only then will the other shoe appear to be shoe horned, bound and toe squeezed before you are allowed to clomp around the shop like a show pony while feeling like a Clydesdale with rickets.

After your mother agrees to the sale, you have to endure a thirty minute lecture on correct leather maintenance and a staggering array of cleaning products appears. Mother can no longer resist and the light is now fading. Reluctantly she buys a spray can of something that will hide in that cupboard under the sink, unused for the rest of the decade.

Then arm and arm we would stroll home much in the fashion of the iconic poster.

In my teenage years in the seventies I was allowed to buy my own footwear. Neither stylish, gallus or financially buoyant to buy Doc Martens, I would settle for the Woolworths brand baseball boot.

They were cheap, easily replaceable and as I was not looking to enhance my height, perfect under a flared loon pant. And good for a bop along to one of my favourite bands.

For all those aroused foot fetish fellows out there (like Charles) may I recommend Colin Jackson’s:
https://onceuponatimeinthe70s.com/2023/10/15/these-boots-were-made-for/

(Post by John Allan of Bridgetown, Western Australia – April 2025)