The English Gentleman Who Made Umbrella Use Acceptable for Men and Changed British Fashion Forever

There is a man who deserves considerably more credit than he gets, and his name is Jonas Hanway. He was a successful London merchant and philanthropist in the 18th century who did genuinely important charity work, founding the Marine Society and campaigning against child poverty. None of that is why I am writing about him. I am writing about him because in 1750, Jonas Hanway started carrying an umbrella through the streets of London, and people lost their minds about it. Not metaphorically. People threw rubbish at him. They shouted insults. Hackney coachmen, who stood to lose business if pedestrians could shelter themselves from rain without hiring a cab, were particularly aggressive. The whole city communicated in various ways that what he was doing was not acceptable. He kept doing it anyway, for 30 years, until he died in 1786. By the time he died, men in London were calling their umbrellas “Hanways” in his honor.

Why Men Using Umbrellas Was Controversial

The umbrella is ancient. People in Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and China used them as status symbols and sunshades going back thousands of years. The word parasol, from the Italian for “guard the sun,” tells you what the original function was.

The French were the first Europeans to waterproof them for rain protection, coating parasols with wax in the 17th century. French men and women both used them. In England, however, the umbrella was strictly a feminine accessory. Women used them. Men did not. Men who used umbrellas in England were derided as effeminate, and specifically as French, which in 18th-century England was almost an equivalent insult. Being “mincing” and “French” was the specific accusation. A real English man got wet, or he hired a hackney coach.

The hackney coachmen, incidentally, had a direct financial interest in keeping this social norm intact. If a man could stay dry with a portable device, he might not need to pay for a ride. This made them particularly hostile to umbrella-carrying men and Hanway in particular.

Jonas Hanway, Who He Was

Hanway was born in Portsmouth in 1712 and had an adventurous early career. He apprenticed to a merchant in Portugal, then partnered with a textile trader in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1743 he traveled overland from Russia to Persia on a trade mission, surviving a series of genuinely harrowing experiences including shipwrecks and political hostility. When he returned to England in 1750, he was 38 years old, well-traveled, and had seen different parts of the world using portable rain protection without apparent social consequence.

He had also, during his travels, encountered Chinese parasols imported along the Silk Road. He came back to London with an umbrella, and he started using it. The first time he appeared publicly with it in the streets of London, bystanders mocked him. He continued. Coachmen heckled him. He continued. A contemporary account describes him being pelted with rubbish on at least one occasion. He continued, carrying his umbrella through the rain for the remaining 36 years of his life.

The specific social mechanics of this are interesting. Hanway was not a marginal figure or an eccentric. He was a successful, respected merchant and a well-known philanthropist. He had status. The fact that even he faced sustained ridicule tells you how strong the norm against men carrying umbrellas actually was. It also tells you something about what it takes to change a norm: not a marginal figure quietly doing something different, but a respected person doing it publicly and refusing to stop.

The Slow Change

Change came, but slowly. A footman named John Macdonald wrote in his memoirs about carrying a fine silk umbrella he had brought from Spain around 1770. Boys shouted “Frenchman, why don’t you get a coach?” at him in the street. He carried it anyway. Within three months, he reported, he could use it without anyone commenting.

That three-month timeline is specific and interesting. It suggests that once enough people normalized a behavior, the social enforcement against it collapsed fairly quickly. The tipping point was not people being convinced through argument. It was people repeatedly seeing the behavior without disaster occurring until it stopped registering as remarkable.

By the 1780s, umbrella use among London men had become common enough that the word “Hanway” entered informal use as a synonym for the object. This is one of the more unusual ways to achieve immortality: be so persistently identified with a behavior that your name becomes the word for it.