I can remember the sight of the fella like it was yesterday. I was in Fleet Street in the early 1980s, which was where I had recently started work in what was then known to us at the time as ‘The Print’ – the newspaper industry to everyone else.

As I approached a zebra crossing, I saw a youngish bloke, maybe a year or two older than me standing there in a nice Prince of Wales check two piece suit, crisp white shirt, nicely knotted black tie with a pair of well-polished shoes on his feet. And it was those shoes that interested me most.

‘Sorry mate’ I said nodding towards them ‘where they from?’ He smiled ‘Bass Weejun mate. Best place to get them is from John Simons in Covent Garden.’ So began my pilgrimage…

The shoe had first appeared in 1936 and originates, not from Middle America as I had imagined, but from Norway. If you corrupt the word Norwegian, you get ‘Weejun’

Geddit?

Based on a style of fisherman’s shoe picked up on by travellers to that Scandinavian country, they were soon being copied and adapted for the US market when brought back to the States. 

George Henry Bass had founded his company G.H. Bass in1876 in Maine and they were soon at the forefront of selling this new style and so the world was introduced to the Bass Weejun.

Soon everyone from Ivy League scholars to film star James Dean to a young John Fitzgerald Kennedy to the coolest jazz cat of them all, namely Miles Davis was wearing them.  They looked great, either dressed up with a suit or dressed down with chinos and a letterman sweater. The girls were soon wearing the boy’s sizes and they looked great in them too.

The origin of wearing them without socks is said to come from students being late for classes and slipping them on, without socks to get in school quicker. Whatever the truth that look became an early fashion statement. This was closely followed by choosing to insert a US penny in the cut out on the saddle of the shoe. Why? Who knows? That is lost in the midst of time, but maybe it just looked good?

As mentioned previously the jazz cats were into the Weejun and through that, the early modernists here in the UK were picking up the vibe, and they have been a staple in the wardrobe of the knowing ever since.

They are no longer made in Maine, with the majority now coming from El Salvador, but no matter, they are still very much in demand.

G.H.Bass recently opened a store in Beak Street, London, which is very close to Carnaby Street and a whole multitude of different styles and colour ways can be seen there and on-line.

For me though, the first smell of the leather as you entered John Simon’s shop on Russell Street way back when remains with me all these years later. Their shoe display was on your right as you came through the door and I was soon like a kid in a sweet shop trying to decide which pair to buy.

Beef Roll, Tassel or Penny. Decisions, decisions…

And you know what? I’m still debating that today…

The Mumper of SE5