Globe-Trotter Original

A Globe-Trotter case is lighter than it looks and harder than it should be. Its body is vulcanised fibreboard: fourteen layers of paper, cotton and wood pulp bonded together, saturated and pressed to thickness, a material that dents rather than splits. The company once proved the point by having a one-tonne elephant stand on a case at the Hamburg zoo. The corners are capped in leather, the edges riveted and finished with a steel lip, two leather straps run round the body, and inside is a paper-backed cloth lining.

The firm began in Dresden in 1897, a trunk works founded by an English businessman, David Nelken, and in 1901 patented both its use of fibreboard and the way it moulds the material into shape. It moved to Britain, in 1901 or in 1932 depending on the source, and has stayed.

By its own account the cases have travelled further than most: to the Antarctic with Captain Scott, to the Treasury with Winston Churchill, on the honeymoon of the future Queen Elizabeth II in 1947, and to the base camp of Everest with Edmund Hillary. The claims are the maker's, but they explain the case's place in British travel. It is an object that suggests its owner has been somewhere, and has not needed to buy a new suitcase since.

Each case is still made by hand in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, by a staff of about seventy. The fibreboard is fixed around a beech frame made by the company's own carpenter, the trims go on by hand, and the rivets are set on foot-pedal riveting machines. The company counts 98 separate processes and a little over ten days for every case. The Original line is the case in its plain form: fibreboard in a handful of colours, with or without wheels.