Dugdale Bros & Co

Hard-wearing English worsted

Dugdale Bros & Co has traded cloth out of Huddersfield since 1896, when Henry Percy and Frederick Herbert Dugdale set up as merchants in the centre of Britain's fine worsted industry. The firm is still there, and still independent: the last independently owned cloth merchant in the historic home of the worsted and woollen trade.

The house keeps the work close. Cloth carrying the Dugdale name is made and finished within ten miles of the Huddersfield office by local specialist firms. The worsteds were finding export markets by the 1910s, and a Mayfair showroom followed in 2000, but the making itself has never left Yorkshire.

This is English worsted in the proper sense: heavier in hand than the Italian equivalent, with a dry finish the cutter can trust. It presses cleanly and holds a shoulder. Give it a few years and it wears in rather than wearing out.

We hold Dugdale in the cloth library rather than the named range, so the current bunches are best seen at a fitting. Ask for them when the brief is a working suit: the one you reach for on the days the diary looks hostile.