Hosetops and puttees

It’s not possible to talk about Singapore without mentioning the climate. It doesn’t take long to describe it – it’s very hot and very humid, with occasional brief torrential downpours that make the pavements steam with vapour when the sun comes out again.
For a Northern European, the steamy heat is scarcely bearable. In colonial days it was recognised that, for career diplomats or businessmen, a long posting to Singapore would shorten your life. The right to a “long leave” (six months for example) back home every few years was built into many contracts – in fact the then Governor, Sir Shenton Thomas, was on long leave in England during much of the crucial period when Singapore’s defences should have been built up during 1940.
A climate like that demands careful thought about what you’re going to wear. Which is why, through many years, Europeans, with long experience of Empire and service in the tropics, have ignored the dress developed over centuries by local people and deliberately and consistently worn entirely inappropriate clothing.
Standard military dress consisted of olive green shorts and tunic, worn with a webbing belt and a beret. (We were issued with a floppy hat in olive green. Troops up country in Malaya often wore them, but we never did)
After dark, to protect from insects, we wore long trousers in the same starched olive green material, and the sleeves of the tunic could be – but rarely were -- rolled down and buttoned at the wrist. Under the tunic (and under civilian shirts) we always wore a vest to soak up the sweat.
In the daytime, in offices and working areas away from the public most of us, apart from officers, went naked above the waist. This was called “Bare buff order.” (Officers didn’t do such things. Even today, whether or not a man goes naked above the waist in public in hot weather is a social class issue.)
Footwear varied. With ordinary working gear we could wear black shoes rather than boots, but only if we bought them ourselves. With shoes went long khaki socks with garter flashes in the Regimental colours. The alternative was to wear issue Army boots with regulation grey socks, which we wore rolled down to the boot tops only when we were in bare buff. That basic gear – bare buff, shorts, boots and rolled down socks – was standard for everyone who did any sort of manual work out of sight of the civilian world outside.
For parade occasions when we were on view to the public – at Church Parade for example -- we wore, with our shorts and tunics, our best Army boots with those diabolical twins, hosetops and puttees.
The best way to explain these is to describe the process of putting them on.
First, there was a pair of standard Army woollen socks – thick grey jobs that came up above the ankle. Then came the hosetops. These were Regimental blue kneelength thick woollen stockings with no feet in them. You pulled them up so they folded over just below the knee, and finished at the top of the boots and socks. They were held up with elastic garters embellished with Regimental garter flashes.
The boots themselves were next – standard issue leather ankle boots with metal studs and hard toecaps, all polished to a mirror finish.
Finally, you wound on your puttees.
Over the years the Army has worn its puttees (the word obviously came from India) in various ways. Our puttees were lengths of coarse khaki material perhaps a yard long and four inches wide, ending in a thinner, ribbon like section that was used for fastening. The Signals method was to wind them round the ankle so as to overlap the top of the boot, not extending up the calf, as was the practice in earlier years, but simply covering the untidy looking junction between the bottom of the hosetops, and the top of the socks and boots. If all of that sounds crazily difficult, what made it really impossible was the existence of lots of little rules about exactly how you wore all this stuff – the depth to which the hosetop turned over below the knee, the tiny but exact degree of overlap of each succeeding wind of the puttee, the precise finishing point of the fully wound puttee, the way you dealt with the end of the ribbon that held the puttee on. Get it right and it looked tight and neat. Wrong, and at the first forward step the top of your boot escaped from under the puttee, and the puttee itself started to unwind. Nothing made you feel more inadequate – and this happened to me more than once – than the realisation that one of your puttees was adrift and trailing behind as you marched.
In thirty two degrees of heat, and humidity that made mildew grow before your eyes, it was madness to make us encase our feet and lower legs in thick wool and leather. And just to make sure we didn’t miss the craziness of it, we were given antiseptic foot powder and treated to lectures on how to prevent our feet from rotting away. The saving grace was that as soon as we got back to camp we took everything off, showered and went around the barrack room area in a pair of flip flops and a towel.