I didn't realise Thomas Pink had anything to do with pinks! Interesting. Thos Pink shirts are still around, right?
Oh yes, Thos. Pink, shirt makers, is still going strong. In fact, now that I’m in Britain, I’m inclined to switch from Brooks Bros. to their stock. In my original post, I attributed the hunting pink to either Thomas or Joseph -- it didn’t sound quite right to me that Thos. Pink the shirtmakers was one and the same as the pink coat. And so I speculated that it might have been a different Pink. As it turns out, no wonder I wasn’t sure: no one knows. The attribution of ‘pink’ coat as the same for the scarlet hunting livery to a tailor by the name of Pink is largely apocryphal.
As early as 1857, Trollope is using pink to commonly mean the scarlet coat: In
Barchester Towers, he writes “He…could not be persuaded to take his pink coat out of the press, or his hunters out of the stable” (Chapt xii).
There are many citation of the tailor-name theory, such as this from Charles Mureau and David Sandford Evans,
The Pink Coat, or The Why's and Wherefore's of Fox Hunting: “The reason for the ``Pink'' coat is that a tailor by the name of Pink was the original designer and maker.”
Nonetheless, the OED does not cite the tailor’s name as an origin of the term. Roger Longrigg in
The History of Foxhunting (Derrydale, 1975) specifically challenges the theory: “Red was known sometimes as red, usually as scarlet, and very occasionally as pink. Cook, in 1826, is one of the first to refer to pink; he does so once or twice as a change from scarlet; this is true of `Nimrod' into the 1840s, Surtees into the 1860s, Sidney into the 1870s. Scarlet remained the normal word into the last quarter of the century. The origin of `pink' is obscure enough; its elevation into shibboleth is baffling. There was no leading tailor of the name -- to dispose of a frequent explanation -- in London or any hunting centre.”
I suspect that its “elevation into shibboleth” is just that, and the term pink in this instance is a classic example of linguistic shibboleth. (Don’t try and tell me -- as some have argued on UK-Yankee, that Britain is not a peculiarly class-conscious society!)
Finally, my own tailor, Ben Silver, writes “[Pink coats are] not pink, but scarlet. Originally all English hunting rights belonged to the King; and those taking part therefore wore the King’s livery – which was scarlet. The tradition has lived on in riding coats everywhere though reasons for the term "pink" are not clear.”
Personally, as I am not a master of a hunt, my jacket is not pink, but black. It’s a funny little mystery, then, why scarlet coats are called pinks.
