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The history of the raincoat |
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| This picture come from Hancock's 'Personal Narrative', detailed below. |
Thomas Hancock deserves to be acknowledged as one of the great Victorians. Born (in 1786) into world already feeling the burn of industrialisation, he left the countryside - Wiltshire, and cabinet-making - for London and the making of self - the forging of fortune and reputation in the furnace of capitalism.
He was one of a small number of entrepreneurs who encountered 'rubber' in the form in which it was known in the industrial world of the early 19th Century and developed the toolchest of industrial techniques which would realize the transformative potential of this extraordinary substance.
Information on Hancock is available from the following sources:
His own memoire:
Personal Narrative of the Origin and Progress of the Caoutchouc or India-Rubber Manufacture in England. First published 1857 in London. Now available eg in a volume published by the American Chemical Society in 1939 (A Centennial Volume of the Writings of Charles Goodyear and Thomas Hancock). Hancock's memoire is now in process of being published as an e-text on this site.
An Encyclopeadia Britannica article. On-line only on a free-trial basis.
A web memoire by the Plastics Historical Society, describing how the site of Hancock's house in Hackney/Stoke Newington was tracked down via the web, his surviving relatives and local records. The Society installed a commemorative plaque on the block of flats, Banstead Court, built in 1945 where Marlborough Cottage on Green Lanes once stood.
An authoritative Web presentation by John Loadman: Bouncing Balls - Everything you ever wanted to know about rubber. The page on Hancock is here. (John Loadman figures both as the author of Bouncing-Balls and, from his position on the management committee of the Plastics History Society, as the driving force behind the project to erect the Banstead Court commemorative plaque mentioned above.) (Personal communication)
The Victoria County History of Middlesex confirms his living in Stoke Newington at one point (1865).
The Dictionary of National Biography has an article on Hancock. (Available on-line for a fee.)
| Hancock was involved in a good deal of litigation to do with who discovered what and his memoire is in part directed at setting the record straight - as he saw it. It was written decades after judgements had been passed on the central disputes (though the Gospels of course were written hundreds of years after the death of their central figure) so, exciting as it is, it may not be reliable. |
References to Hancock crop up in other places, but I don't know of any other authoritative source.
