Hardy fellows, them.
When viewing the old waterfowling pics, one is struck by the rather simple clothing, for what many times looks like downright cold days. The fowlers are just wearing a single-layer jacket over a sweater, light cap, no waders, and often with no gloves.
There are woodcuts of early 19th century gents, preparing to trust themselves to a shell of a punt boat, on rough salt water, who are attired rather nattily, as for an afternoon stroll in the park. A wool Norfolk jacket might be the outer garment, at most.
Later at the end of the century, there are oilcloth coats and sou'westers seen in American photos, but there are still a lot of duckhunters dressed in what appear to be duds more suitable for an early fall upland hunt, than hypothermic environments.
Apparently all that walking about everywhere, in every weather, that the majority of the population at large -- and all the rural folks -- were compelled to do, must have elevated their hardihood to a degree which we've forgotten.
Tho, I have memories of wearing single-layer canvas hunting coats, fannel shirts, WW2 wool pants, and leather boots or leaky canvas waders, I still marvel at the hardihood with which humans have borne cold climates. Sitting in my multiple layers of wool, insulation, wonder fabric, and chest-high 5MM neoprene, and toasty warm in a light sleet storm -- is hardly the equivalant of doing the same thing ALA dressed as the gents in those old pics.
I guess that getting up at 5AM to tend to thirty head of milkers in a January unheated barn, and spending the day pretty much away from indoor heat tended to pump up those old internal furnances. At any rate, the old boys surely showed some panache' in their dress, chilly as it may look, that is hard to equal when the hunter is covered with three inches of synthetic insulation.
On the other hand, I've never felt much for style when crawling over a muddy sand bar, trying to keep some 18" scrub willows between me and a shot. Horizontal & wet hunting is, I guess, a bit in the spirit of yesteryear. A double, a pocket of shells, and a half dozen dekes on running water where cometh fowle -- and I have at least a kinship of spirit to some simpler times.
Ave, olde fellows. May you hunt forever in that pictorial Valhalla.
