The Lawrence

The courier has just collected every Lawrence. Twelve weeks became twenty-three, and I'm grateful to every owner who waited. Tomorrow I fly to Italy, so the first jackets will land about the same time I do.

Every jacket is now whole. The buttons are stitched by hand, so there's no knot of thread behind them on the inside of the lapel. Quality checks start tomorrow.

Collected every jacket from Bolton today, my third five-hour round trip in two weeks. I'd started to wonder whether keyhole buttonholes were worth the anxiety. Next to an old prototype with standard buttonholes, they are.

Both London factories have turned me down. The buttonhole is the last thing done to a finished jacket, and nobody wants the risk. So I walked into the factory in Bolton today and said, "This is it guys, you're my last hope." Smooth, Mark. They have three Reece 101s, and they said yes.

I rang Meredith this week to check in, only to find he's just turned 85 and retired. He was going to cut every keyhole buttonhole on his Reece 101, and the technician who has serviced that machine for 40 years has retired too. I've got three leads, two in London and one in Bolton, and a bag of sample cuffs.

Last week went on laying out every pattern piece for all fifty jackets on the gabardine, at about two metres a jacket. A pair of XXL epaulettes is squeezed in among XL pieces, and two Small collars sit beside a Large back. Each jacket is 72 pieces, and the cutting has started.

The replacement lining has arrived and it's with Harvey Quilting. The tailors start next week.

I drove to Harvey Quilting this morning to film the lining going through the machine. Wool quilted straight onto woven cotton works its way through the weave, so it has to be sandwiched between two layers of membrane. Only one went in. That's 25 metres of lining gone and, realistically, four weeks added to delivery.

The printed lining comes from Poland and has never taken more than five days. This time it crossed Poland and the Netherlands in a day and reached Dartford that evening. And there it stayed. Twenty-one days later it's out of customs, but our slot with the quilters has gone.

I've caught up with eight Lawrence owners on Zoom about sizing, and two have switched sizes. There's cloth for fifty jackets and no more, so if a size is wrong I can't make another. Better to check twice.

Each jacket takes five fabrics, two interfacings, two sizes of Corozo button and a whole raft of other bits. The gabardine is already here, and the wool, the rib, the buttons and the thread were ordered last week. Everything comes to me first so I can go through it with a fine-tooth comb before it goes anywhere near the tailors.

At 9.24 this evening, order number 50 came in. That's 34 hours, 24 minutes and 16 seconds after early access opened, and four years after I started. I don't quite know what to say.

The Lawrence goes on sale on Saturday 29 April at 11am. There's enough gabardine for fifty jackets, so there will be fifty. Five hundred laser-etched Corozo buttons arrived from a local button maker in under three weeks.

Collected the final sample from Agnes in Leicester today. Seven prototypes, four years after the first sketch. It's ready.

The mill that weaves our gabardine has stopped taking orders, and the black is out of stock. I've spent close to two years on this cloth. Back on the phone.

Drove to Shipley this morning to collect 50 metres of British wool wadding from Genady at Kofibres. Next stop Harvey Quilting, where Tony and Neil will combine it with the printed lining. Meanwhile, Agnes in Leicester is stitching up the size samples.

Picked up the latest prototype today. The back now tapers in to follow the curve of the lower back, the body is an inch longer and the sleeves are half an inch longer. The bad news: the sew-in interfacing has already come away from the collar and pocket flaps. The hunt is on for an organic fusible.

The finished lining artwork landed in my inbox today, nearly two years after Tom and I first spoke. It's one map of Great Britain through the seasons, 1.5 metres wide and 2.5 metres long, from the Old Man of Storr to Stonehenge. Each jacket takes up to two metres of it, so no two linings will ever be the same.

Tom has had an idea that changes the whole lining. Instead of the illustrations floating on their own, he'll draw the outline of Britain in a bold line, the contours in a finer one, and set everything on the map. More work, but I think it's the right call.

Today I met Tony at Harvey Quilting in Nottingham. He has the machines to combine the printed organic cotton with British wool into one quilted lining, and Neil, who quilts alongside him, has 42 years in the trade. In the UK most factories specialise, so the Lawrence is going to be made by a lot of different hands.

Went through the latest draft of the lining with Tom today. On the list to add: George Brough on one of his bikes, the Eden Project, the Minack Theatre and the little church at Mwnt. Some of the figures are almost faceless, so they need work too.

The pattern is digital and the tech pack is finished. Today I'm with Oscar, a tailor here in Nottingham, to get it into cloth and onto a body.

The Lawrence is getting a quilted lining, insulated with British wool. It means another version, but I'd rather get it right than get it out. The laser-etched Corozo buttons have arrived, and I've found a production partner here in the UK.

There's only so much you can fix over Zoom. So I've driven to Norfolk and booked a hotel for two nights to work with my pattern cutter in person. Tomorrow we go through the toile, line by line.

Tom has sent the first pencil sketches for the lining. The idea is a journey through the seasons, told through a motorbike build: autumn for gathering parts, winter for assembly, spring for the final touches and summer for riding. Winter brings pine forests, Skye, castle ruins and whisky.

Every one of the size samples is an inch too small across the chest. An inch doesn't sound like much, but fixing it means redrawing the armhole, shoulders, sleeves, back and front. And having seen a photo of myself in one, I don't like the back either. Today I signed with a new pattern cutter to start again from scratch. October pre-orders aren't going to happen.

The samples are back. Small, Large and XL in black, and four Mediums in white, each with different buttons: black, tortoiseshell and brown wood. Next job, dyeing the white ones to see what colour this jacket wants to be. Pre-orders are pencilled in for October.

I've been wearing the moleskin prototypes for three months and I've learnt one thing. Moleskin is a fur magnet. Every photo has needed hours of editing to get rid of the dust and Charlie's hair. So it's back to the drawing board, and the new lead is a heavyweight organic cotton gabardine from a small mill just south of Paris. Gabardine is what officers' trench coats were made from in the First World War, so my great grandfather would have known it well.

The Lawrence is the first jacket I've brought to the production house here in Bahrain. Today I signed off the second prototype and the grading from Small to XL. They're also making four Mediums in white so I can test buttons and colour before I commit to anything.

Before Tom draws anything final, I need to know how his ink work survives being printed on cotton. So I've made a test sheet, 1 by 1.5 metres, divided into boxes with artwork at different sizes. Off to the printers.

I've sent Tom the first brief for the lining. A chapter called The Road from T.E. Lawrence's The Mint, about riding his Brough Superior, and a map of every place Lawrence mentions in it. It's a starting point, not a plan.

I want the inside of this jacket to tell a story about Britain. I sent a message to Thomas Moore at Last Maps after seeing one of his maps reposted on Instagram, and he replied the same day: "totally stoked… our brands hold so much common ground." We're talking properly next week.

I've walked past the same photograph my whole life. My great grandfather, William Warman, in his 1902 pattern service dress, just before he shipped out to France and, eventually, Gallipoli. Today my tailor here in Bahrain fitted the first version of a jacket inspired by it. No pattern, just my sketch and a tape measure. It's rough, but the bones are there.