Crowning Glory
By CYRIL RAY LET us, then, consider the bowler hat. Among the nations, it is a symbol of the island race. True, there have been. Americans who have sported it (and called it a durby)-1a-di-da East- erners and dandies such as Jimmy Walker and Dean Acheson, I think : I ought• to have consulted Profes- sor Brogan to make sure—but they have stood out from the mass of their fellow-citizens almost as would Mr. Selwyn Lloyd here, or the Lord Mayor of London, if • they took to pale-blue turbans or feathered head-dresses. Few but an Englishman would wear a bowler hat to sit on a Riviera promenade, as the late James Agate used to do, gazing out to the blue horizon, under the hot Mediterranean sun.
Here, within the island itself, the bowler hat has its social connotations, and they vary subtly. Dunns, the hatters, who have fifty shops and more in London alone, ranging from Acton to Wool- wich, taking in both Piccadilly and the Elephant and Castle, tell me that whereas the bowler hat was what they describe as 'the business hat' in the 1930s, it was then ousted to a great extent by ' the black Homburg (or `Anthony Eden'), and that it is only in the last couple of years that the bowler hat has made its come-back. At Lock's, on the other hand, in St. James's Street, a direc- tor said that they had noticed no such fluctua- tions : `at our end of the trade, a man has to have a bowler hat; always has; and that's that.'
I am not entirely convinced. How did the soft black Homburg, with a bound, turned-up edge, come to be called an 'Anthony Eden'? By reason of the fact that the Foreign Secretary of the time set a fashion that was followed, until it became too widespread, by a number of people—civil servants and diplomatists—who would otherwise have worn bowler hats. As recently as May Day, 1951, mine was the only bowler hat worn by spec- tator or participant on Moscow's Red Square (it is my only claim to a footnote in the history books): the entire contingent from the British Embassy that was present to see the late Mr. Stalin take the salute was Anthony-Edened, though in Whitehall Morrison sat in Eden's place.
No, I think that even 'at our end of the trade' . there must have been a period when the sales of the formal Homburg rose, followed by a slight decline as the bowler hat came into its own again; and came into its own even at Lock's seventy shillings (four of which is tax : they used to be thirty-two before the war) for what they still endearingly call a `Coke' hat, after that kins- man of Coke of Norfolk, Mr. William Coke, for whom a Mr. Bowler made the first 'Billy Coke,' or billycock. Or bowler.. (It is another old- fashioned shop, not far away, that invoices its grey toppers- as 'drab shells.') At Dunns, the price of bowler hats ranges from twenty-five shillings to sixty shillings apiece. What 1 find disappointing is that, although more. black bowler hats are worn now than a few years ago, there has been so little emulation of that personable and pre- sentable young man I used to see, ten years or so ago, when I lived in Piccadilly, making his way to his club, now sporting a pearl-grey billy- cock, and now a fawn.
If that is disappointing, it is something else that I find puzzling, and that neither Lock's nor Dunns can throw any light upon. Immediately after the war, as the more modish young men gave up their wartime commissions in the Brigade or the rifle regiments, to pursue peace- time commissions from the sale of objets d'art or marine insurance policies, they took to all the sartorial splendours of their grandfathers : narrow trousers and lapelled waistcoats, velvet coat- collars and turned-back cuffs—all crowned with hairy bowler hats with curly brims. In no time at all, thanks to high wages, a similar desire to cut a dash and a number of other social and psychological causes that I have never shaken my ageing pow over, and never will, the male youth of street-market and by-pass factory took to the same sort, of rig—and came to be labelled 'Teddy-boys' and worse, as their better-bred and similarly tailored exemplars quietly modified themselves into being neo-Elizabethans, cuffiess and unvelveted. But—and here is the puzzle I speak of—what the. Teddy-boy of the factory and the barrow never took from the Teddy-gent of Lloyd's and the Stock Exchange, though he copied almost everything else, was the bowler hat.
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