Pockets may seem a humble part of dress but, as a repository for personal belongings, our ancestors’ pockets can be very enlightening, revealing much about them. In the Middle Ages, pouches carrying important items were suspended from girdles and belts, but during the 16th century pockets were introduced into men’s trunk hose and, afterwards, into breeches. During the later 1600s and 1700s breeches and coats both featured pockets, fashionable coat pockets chiefly ornamental: however they might be functional; for instance, the physician’s coat pockets contained his stethoscope and pills. Pockets increasingly served a practical role, carrying the tools of the wearer’s trade, from the jobbing carpenter’s saw or decorator’s paintbrush, to the barber’s scissors. The pocket contents of female tradeswomen also reflected their occupation, as did the internal hanging ‘poacher’s pockets’ of labourers’ and artisans’ smocks. In the 1800s the machine-made pockets of working jackets and coats could carry implements, as well as the wearer’s lunch for the day, and capacious pockets characterised the bib-and-brace overalls worn by later farm and workshop workers.

Georgian and early Victorian gentlemen’s pockets were usually positioned on the outside of garments and were consequently vulnerable to pickpockets, until pockets later became less visible, sewn into garments. Historically ladies’ pockets were hidden – tied with strings around the waist beneath the gown and accessed via slits in the sides of the skirt. Before handbags became commonplace in the early 20th century, few women had a secure place in which to store private possessions and pockets were important for the safe-keeping of money and intimate items such as handkerchiefs, letters, romantic tokens and small, aptly-named pocket books. By the late-1800s, many more young women worked outside the home than previously, as office clerks, telephone operators and shop assistants and emulated men by wearing a business-like watch and chain, the watch secreted in a neat purpose-designed pocket.

If ancestors were the tragic victims of accidents, murder or suicide, the inquest reports published in contemporary newspapers itemise the contents of their pockets at their death. Male records include coins, keys, seals, snuff-boxes, watches and combs, while women often carried jewellery, caps, scent bottles, thimbles, needle-cases and mirrors, many pockets also containing snacks: fruit, nuts and sweets – all evidence that provides fascinating glimpses of the material culture and even the personal sensibilities of past generations.