An archive, not a shop. Prowse & Hargood ceased trading and the company behind it was dissolved. This site restores the house's own published writing about its shirts, cloth and craft. Nothing here is for sale, no order can be placed, and no prices, ordering routes or contact details are reproduced. More about this restoration.
Cufflinks
A house that made double-cuff shirts had to sell cufflinks, and Prowse & Hargood carried a compact, deliberately unfussy collection across five catalogue pages — classic shapes in traditional materials, meant to be bought once and worn with everything.
Why the shirts required them
The Tewkesbury range was offered in double cuff. A double cuff — also called a French cuff — has square or round edges that turn back on themselves, and closes with two buttonholes rather than a button, so a fastening has to pass through all four thicknesses. That fastening is the cufflink. It is not an accessory in the ordinary sense; without one the shirt does not close.
The collection
Twenty designs ran across the five pages, organised more by shape than by material:
- The Classic shapes — New Classic Square, New Classic Oval, New Classic Circle and Classic Rectangle. The plainest things in the collection and the ones that go with everything.
- Mother-of-pearl — the iridescent inner shell lining of oysters and mussels, the traditional dress-shirt material, cool and slightly variable so that no two faces are identical.
- Onyx — flat black, the most formal option, and the conventional partner to a white shirt in the evening.
- Haematite — an iron-grey mineral with a metallic lustre, a quieter alternative to polished steel.
- Crystal — Crystal Offset Midnight, Purple and Red, plus a Crystal Midnight; faceted stones set slightly off-centre in the face.
- Cat's Eye — Cats Eyes Midnight, Cats Eye Blue and Cats Eye Pink, cabochon stones with a single band of reflected light across the dome.
- Patterned faces — Square Red, Square Blue, Square Purple, Black Stripe, Toggle Gingham, Pink Herringbone and Multi Check, several of which echoed the shirting patterns in the ranges.
That last group is the most characteristic. A gingham or herringbone cufflink face is a small joke about the shirt it fastens, and it is the kind of thing a house that names its checks after villages would do.
Wearing them
Push the two edges of the cuff together so that the buttonholes align — the cuff is meant to be "kissed" closed, edge to edge, rather than overlapped like a button cuff — and pass the link through all four holes with the decorative face outward. The cuff should sit just past the wrist bone and show about a centimetre below a jacket sleeve.
Formality runs roughly as you would expect: onyx and mother-of-pearl for evening and the most formal daytime occasions, plain classics for business, and the patterned and coloured faces for everything else. Nothing in this collection was designed to be noticed from across a room, which is the correct ambition for a cufflink.
Care
Take them out before the shirt goes in the wash — a cufflink left in a machine will chip its own face and can tear the cuff it is in. Keep the stone-faced links apart from each other rather than loose in a bowl; mother-of-pearl is a soft material and scratches against harder stones. A dry cloth is enough for the faces, and the fittings need nothing at all.
Elsewhere
The double cuff, the placket and the other construction terms used here are defined in the glossary. The shirts that take them are on the Tewkesbury and bespoke pages, and the rest of the accessory offer is on the accessories page. For the materials themselves — nacre, onyx, haematite — the Natural History Museum is a reliable general reference on mineral and shell structure.