Challenged at the top level
Sarah Burton
BALD: FROM HAIRLESS HEROES TO COMIC COMBOVERS by Kevin Baldwin Bloomsbury, £9.99, pp. 229, ISBN 0747569509 ✆ £7.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Coming as I do from a long line of hairless wonders, baldness has fascinated me since childhood. One of my earliest memories is of my father harvesting and boiling nettles to produce a concoction which he then spread on his pate in the hope of checking the premature departure of his hair. What was more memorable was the following morning when, despite repeated shampooing, he appeared at the breakfast table with a bright green head. Memorable too, no doubt, to the 600 boys to whom he was headmaster and who he would shortly have to face in assembly.
My father subsequently abandoned any attempt to interfere with nature’s plans for his hair, and this book would cheer his decision. It charts the history of attitudes to baldness; lists famous Mr Sheens (including the bald bard of Avon); enumerates ‘cures’ (bat’s milk, frog extract, mole blood); considers possible causes (eating fish, thinking too much, improper breathing); and assesses the problems of wigs and weaves. Bald should gladden the heart of any cue-ball, listing 40 advantages of alopecia (Take two bottles into the shower? Take none!) as opposed to only ten disadvantages. Above all, Bald celebrates the head which is innocent of hair.
A cruel critic of the combover (less a hairdo, more a hairdon’t), Baldwin is at his merciless best in his analysis of a snappily entitled publication by Eric Oakley: A Method of Disguising Your Male Baldness Using Your Own Hair from the Sides (1975). Having described his method in detail, Oakley reassures his readers by presenting some frequently asked questions and his answers. ‘Q: What happens as the hair at the sides continues to recede? A: Simply lower your parting and you will never run out of hair.’ ‘Q: What happens when I go swim ming? A: This is one activity where you simply cannot maintain your top hair disguise.’ And so on.
Although Bald is very funny in places, it does have a serious aspect. ‘A study of baldness is a study of human nature,’ Baldwin asserts. ‘Shallowness and vanity — and the foolishness they induce — are in evidence everywhere.’ Various times and cultures have attributed different qualities to baldness: shaving women’s heads has traditionally been used to humiliate them, from the adulterous wife in Ancient Greece to the collaborator in postwar France; but in some African tribes a woman’s shaved head is considered very beautiful. The male shaved head has been perceived in different periods as a sign of weakness (Samson), of aggression (soldiers and skinheads), of virility (baldness is related to the production of testosterone) and of chastity (as in a monk’s tonsure).
The author confesses to being a baldilocks himself (his name is indeed Baldwin, and he lives, of course, in Barnet) and so is ideally qualified to write on this fascinating subject, which he does with both erudition and wit. This is one for your favourite slaphead’s Christmas stocking.
Sarah Burton’s Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb is published by Penguin, £8.99.
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