Crombie
The Aberdeen wool house whose cloth clothed British officers — and whose name the dictionary borrowed.
Aberdeen, 1805. A cloth
that became a word.
John Crombie founded a woollen mill at Cothal Mills, near Aberdeen, in 1805. Believing his cloth among the finest in Britain, he built a trade that by the 1840s reached drapers in London and Paris. In the 1850s Crombie cloth was honoured at the great exhibitions — by Queen Victoria in London and Napoleon III in Paris.
For more than 120 years the house wove at the famous Grandholm Mill in Aberdeen. In the First World War, close to a tenth of the overcoats worn by British officers — the coats they called the British Warm — were cut from Crombie cloth. The name grew so bound to a certain overcoat that ‘Crombie’ entered the Oxford English Dictionary.
The marks of the house.
- 01Crombie cloth A dense, finely milled wool — the material tailors reached for to dress officers and noblemen.
- 02The British Warm The short, structured melton officer’s overcoat of the Great War, woven in Crombie cloth.
- 03The Crombie coat The three-quarter, fly-fronted overcoat — often with a velvet collar — that carries the name in everyday speech.
- 04A dictionary name One of the very few clothing houses whose name became a common noun in the OED.
“When a coat becomes a word, the cloth has already made its case.”— Anemoia Vestiaire, on Crombie
Fine wool, milled to last.
Crombie is, at heart, a cloth house — so the most useful reading sits in our tailoring note, where the weight and finish that make an overcoat behave are set out in full.
We assess each Crombie piece on the cloth, the cut and the honest condition — and we describe precisely what the garment and its markings show.
We make no claim of certification or exact dating beyond what the piece itself carries.
Full measurements and condition are on each product page. Where maker labelling is present, we record it as found.Why vintage Crombie
holds.
Crombie cloth was woven to outlast its wearer, and the classic covert and British-Warm coats are cut to a template that never dated. Well-kept examples carry heavier, denser wool than most new coats — and they have already lasted.
Vintage is often the way to own the house at its most characterful, condition described plainly.