Most weeks a small parcel arrives at Barker’s discreet Winton laundry.

“We can tell which one it’s from by the name of the equerry or palace on it,” says company chief, Matthew Barker.

Inside will be that week’s selection of stiff-collars which have graced the necks of Princes Charles, Philip or Andrew at the formal events they have had to attend.

Not that the royals get extra-special treatment. Because every one of 80,000 collars they receive each year gets the royal treatment, which consists of a jaw-dropping 60 separate processes to be completed before they are lovingly parcelled up and sent back again. All for the princely sum of £4.22.

Judges, toastmasters ‘they’re a huge part of our client base’, military brass, Eton schoolboys, London theatres, Downton Abbey; ‘Our collars are in almost every scene’. 

Then there’s Hercule Poirot; ‘We looked after David Suchet for years’, the Sherlock Holmes movies, Titanic... Playboy Bunnies? “We probably do,” says Matthew although he doesn’t know. 
They have clients in America, clients in Australia, clients in the Caribbean.

Given that for most chaps the stiff-collar went out with the Second World War, this is some feat. 

“If you go back to the turn of the last century there was no such thing in the early 1900s as a collared shirt, all shirts were granddad shirts,” says Matthew.

Men would save on laundry by wearing the same shirt for a whole week but maintain respectability by changing their collar twice a day. “There were 30,000 domestic laundries providing a washing service and collars were part of their staple diet,” says Matthew.

The whiff factor, the lack of servants and the invention of shirts with attached collars put paid to this, so much so that Barkers is one of only five laundries of its type in the south of England. As far as Matthew is aware, it’s the only one doing the collars.

It was after the Esher and Royal Windsor Laundry sadly closed down that he seized his chance. Employee Alice Allen had started work there when she was 17 and – 70 years on: “There was nothing she didn’t know about the process.”

For three years the company paid for Alice and her partner to holiday for a week in a Bournemouth hotel and, for a few hours each day, she’d come to the laundry and teach the tricks of the trade.
They do tag collars for judges, round collars for Eton; “We’re their back-up service,” and hundreds of waistcoats for toastmasters. 

Like the collars, waistcoats arrive soft and pliable – like the collars they are soon made as stiff as a board.
Despite them being such an important part of his business, however, Matthew admits he’s not particularly fond of the collars.

“I wear them three or four times a year and they do look fantastic but I can’t stand them,” he smiles. 
 

www.barkergroup.info