Boot hooks were used as dressing aides and helped people pull their boots onto their feet. They were used throughout Victorian and Edwardian times, as the fashionable whalebone corset inhibited full bending movement.

These boot hooks dating to around 1850 have steel shafts and a creamy coloured bone handle that is cylindrical, turned and decorated with circles. The irony is that the bone is quite probably skeletal whalebone.

©SCRAN/East Lothians Museum Service Boot hooks