Name/Title
Sussex Police female officer's uniform summer dress 1984Entry/Object ID
2415Description
Mid blue coloured polyester/wool uniform summer dress, with concealed front zip fastening, press stud, white collar piping, epaulettes and Sussex Police shield coat of arms badges attached to the lapels. Adjacent to each lapel is a thin pen pocket. The epaulettes have chromed metal letters and numbers "W" over "254". There are concealed hip pockets each side. Marked inside on label "Edgerton Burnetts Ltd size 14L - 92CMS" and on care label "Terylene ICI 55% polyester with wool worsted"Use
For female officers to use in summer as an alternative to a blouse, wool skirt and tights.Context
Like their male colleagues Sussex Police female police officers were expected to wear the same uniform all year round, with the exception that tunics were not compulsory in the summer and so called "shirt sleeve order" was permitted. That still meant that female officers had to wear woollen skirts and tights, as trousers were not introduced as a standard option until the 1990s, and only gradually replaced the use of the skirt throughout the decade. Lightweight summer trousers for either sex were not introduced until the mid 1990s.
These lightweight summer dresses were adopted in may 1973 to provide a comfortable summer alternative. They were however withdrawn in 1987 and female officers had to revert back to a wool skirt all year around.
This particular dress was issued to WPC BW254 Alison Wolfe in June 1984 and shows her warrant number at that time. She subsequently married in 1989 and was given the new warrant number DH60, to match her change of name to Harrison. In 1984, the "B" prefix was used to identify a female officer and was omitted from uniform numbers. By 1989, the "B" had been changed to a "D", which was displayed on uniforms.
Prior to the introduction of these dresses, Sussex Constabulary had been using a dark blue dress for summer wear from 1968. These earlier dresses had four pockets and exposed buttons to the front. Like the dress pictured they were initially intended to be worn with white gloves, though this was probably impractical for most duties.
Dresses like the one pictured had a mixed response from female officers. Some liked them as an alternative to normal uniform in the summer, but others complained that they were so different from normal uniform that when being worn officers were mistaken for nurses and not recognised as being police.
Incidentally, Sussex Police did at one stage experiment with a summer safari type shirt for male officers but it is not thought that this was ever adopted as a standard uniform, though an open necked white summer shirt was introduced in June 1995 (Patrol June 1995).