Figure 1.--Here we see an unidentified English family on a beach outing in Somerset (southwestern England) during 1928. The girls and younger boy wear protective rompers. Their older brother wears white long pants. The rompers are clearly being worm as a protective garment with regular clothes undeneath. Mamy of the romper images we have found so far are beach scenes like this.

We begin to see English children wearing rompers after World War I in the 1920s. The fact that we have found relatively few examples, however, suggest that they were not very common. They might have appeared earlier, but we do not note them any earlier in the photographic record than the 20s. We have only found images which show boys wearing the rather shapeless baggy rompers. The little boy here is a good example (figure 1). At first they commonly came nearly to the knees, but gradually got shorter. We have found shorter-cut rompers being worn by the end of the decade, by both boys and girls. The boys tended to be younger chaps, pre-school ages are early primary ages to about 8-9 years of ages. Much older girls wore rompers than boys. They seem to have been viewed as beachwear to protect clothing on the beach while playing in the sand or paddling in shallow water. Some older girls may have swam in them, we are not entirely sure about that. Many seem to have been done in a heavy material, perhaps water repelent.