TAILORED BY UMBRO – THE STORY OF AN ENGLISH SPORTSWEAR BRAND
FIRST PUBLISHED: Four Four Two, May 2009
By Chris Hunt
A close inspection of the England team’s earliest football shirt, worn for the first-ever international match in 1872, would reveal a discreet double diamond woven into the very fabric of the jersey. It’s not the famous Umbro diamond, as that would not come into being for just over another half a century, but it is an eerie foreshadowing of a logo that would come to dominate the world of British sportswear.
Umbro was the creation of Harold Humphreys who, with his brother Wallace, founded Humphreys Brothers Ltd in 1924, a small sportswear company based in Wilmslow on the fringes of Manchester. Lifting the ‘UM’ from Humphreys and the ‘BRO’ from Brothers, the company began trading as Umbro, and in time this simple brand name became synonymous with the production of “garments of distinction” for the sports market, especially in football.
Humphrey Brothers Ltd grew from humble origins but just a month shy of its tenth anniversary both FA Cup finalists were wearing stylish new Umbro outfits. By 1952 the company began to manufacture the England football strip for the first time, while six years later, when Brazil lifted the Jules Rimet trophy wearing shirts made in Wilmslow, the company could finally lay claim to being a truly global brand. With the next three World Cup winners also wearing Umbro, it all seemed such a long way from those early days in Wilmslow.
Harold Charles Humphreys was born on January 31, 1902, in Mobberley, Cheshire, just four miles from the factory where he would start to grow his sportswear empire while in his early twenties. The son of 34-year-old journeyman decorator James Humphrey and his 29-year-old second wife, Staffordshire-born Minnie Annie Steele, Harold would later recall his mother as “a hard woman”, yet she instilled in him many of the qualities that enabled him to make a