World Wide Words -- 18 Jun 11

Tue Jun 14 09:28:47 UTC 2011

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 741          Saturday 18 June 2011
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Author/editor: Michael Quinion      US advisory editor: Julane Marx
Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org               ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Article: Get Ahead, Get a Hat.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOLIDAY BREAK  I am taking a break until 9 July. Until then, I'm 
reprinting each week revised versions of some pieces that first 
appeared in my book Gallimaufry.

2. Article: Get Ahead, Get a Hat
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Because of declining sales, in 1965 the British Hat Council felt it 
necessary to create an advertising slogan, "get ahead, get a hat". 
Earlier generations would have found the advice otiose, since only 
the meanest members of society went about without one. Photographs 
from the early to middle twentieth century immediately strike us 
because of all the hats, whether it's a sea of flat caps at a 
football match, a horde of be-bowlered city clerks crossing London 
Bridge on their way to work, a group of heavily-hatted women 
enjoying a walk in the park, or any man in an old black-and-white 
film, whose head is invariably topped off with a Homburg, trilby, 
fedora, or other style.

The soft hat called a Homburg came from the exclusive German spa 
town of Bad Homburg near Frankfurt, often frequented by royalty in 
late Victorian times. The hat became fashionable in London because 
the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) regularly visited the town 
from 1882 onwards, liked the style of the local hat and brought it 
home with him (in 1893, advertisers in American newspapers were 
calling it "the latest fad", though they spelt it "Homberg"). The 
name was also early on confusingly given to a woman's hat of rather 
different style that was also known as the Brighton hat:

    The woman who started the fashion of the Brighton or 
    Homburg hat has much to answer for. She has robbed 
    thousands of Englishwomen of their character - so far as 
    character is represented by headgear. Had Dame Nature 
    foreseen the Homburg hat craze she would not doubt have 
    been accommodating enough to construct all women's faces 
    after the same pattern with the oblong mask, classic 
    features, and shapely head required for the severity of 
    such a style of headgear.
    [Manchester Times, 5 Jun. 1891.]

The male style could be variously black, grey or and brown. In the 
1930s the black hat became known as the Anthony Eden, or the Eden 
hat, after the then British Foreign Secretary, who commonly wore 
one.

The other two of the three classic styles of men's headwear of the 
period were popularised by actresses. The fedora, later to be the 
classic topping of the Italian-American mobster, was named after 
the title and main character in a famous play by the French 
playwright Victorien Sardou, first performed in 1882 with Sarah 
Bernhardt as the hat-wearing Russian princess Fédora Romanov. The 
name of the trilby comes from a play adapted by the American Paul 
Potter from a book by George du Maurier. The latter had been an 
immense hit when it came out in 1894:

    We are beset by a veritable epidemic of Trilby fads. 
    Trilby bonnets and gowns and shoes, Trilby accents of 
    speech and Trilby poses of person. Trilby tableaux, teas 
    and dances. Trilby ice cream and Trilby sermons, Trilby 
    clubs and reading classes and prize examinations, Trilby 
    nomenclature for everybody and everything.
    [New York Tribune, Mar. 1895. A Trilby ice cream was 
    so called because it was moulded into the shape of the 
    hat.]

The play was brought to London in November 1895 by the impresario 
Beerbohm Tree and was a huge success, ensuring that the hat worn by 
the bare-footed, chain-smoking, 20-year-old leading lady Dorothea 
Baird would become part of the British trilby craze. Her picture, 
wearing that hat, appeared on postcards, in advertisements, on 
chocolate boxes, and in newspapers.

Women's hats of the period also had names with literary links. The 
Dolly Varden was large, with one side bent down, "abundantly 
trimmed with flowers" as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. The 
name came from the coquettish character in Charles Dickens's 
Barnaby Rudge, though her hat, as described by Dickens, was more 
modest:

    ... a little straw hat trimmed with cherry-coloured 
    ribbons, and worn the merely trifle on one side - just 
    enough in short to make it the wickedest and most 
    provoking head-dress that ever malicious milliner 
    devised.

The sale of William Frith's portrait of Dolly Varden at the auction 
of Dickens's effects in June 1870, shortly after the author's 
death, stimulated a fashion in the UK and the US for the 
eighteenth-century costume it portrayed, particularly among younger 
and middle-class women. Such was Dolly's popularity that her name 
was soon applied to a parasol, a racehorse, two American species of 
fish, a mine in Nevada and a cake, as well as the hat. To judge 
from these comments, however, the fashion was not universally 
popular in America:

    The maids of Athens, and the matrons too, do not take 
    to Dolly Vardens worth a cent.
    [Athens Messenger (Ohio), 16 May 1872.]

    Was ever any new costume more criticized than the new 
    "Dolly Varden"?
    [Harper's Weekly, May 1872.]

Another a little later was the merry widow, an ornate and wide-
brimmed hat whose style and name derived from the hat worn by Lily 
Elsie in the London premiere of Franz Lehar's operetta in June 
1907. The show made Ms Elsie a star and the focus of a craze, just 
as happened with Dorothea Baird a decade earlier. Her picture - 
wearing that hat - appeared very widely in advertisements and 
picture postcards. The style was as common in the US as in Britain, 
resulting in this puzzled comment:

    There you will see women wearing "Merry Widow" hats 
    who are not widows but spinsters, or married women whose 
    husbands are very much alive, and the hats in many cases 
    are as large as three feet in diameter.
    [America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental 
    Diplomat, by Wu Tingfang, 1914.]

He was right about their size. Some American examples became so 
large, in fact, that a picture postcard of the time featured a 
wearer staring sadly at a sign:

    Ladies with Merry Widow Hats Take Freight Elevator.

Another style, popularized by the Prince of Wales in 1896, was the 
boater, a straw hat with a flat crown and brim, so named because it 
became the usual informal wear when messing about in boats, but now 
remembered by many people mostly as part of the official costume of 
their local butcher, not least Corporal "They don't like it up 'em" 
Jones of the BBC television series Dad's Army.

The formal men's hat of the nineteenth century was the top hat, an 
updated version of a hat of earlier centuries that had been faced 
with beaver fur, though by the 1830s silk ones had become standard. 
Tall and round, with the brim curling at the sides, it's familiar 
still in very formal wear and from costume dramas. Colloquially in 
Britain it was a topper; in the US a plug-hat, perhaps because the 
head fitted it like a plug in a pipe. An older version was called 
the bell-topper, beltopper, or belltopper because it had a bell-
shaped crown.

    Gentlepeople, whether in town or country, dress almost 
    exactly as they do in England, except that the beltopper 
    hat is comparatively seldom seen.
    [New Zealand After Fifty Years, by Edward Wakefield, 
    1889.]

Another slangy British term for the taller varieties of top hat was 
chimney-pot hat (stove-pipe hat in the US):

    His first half-hour is occupied in trying to decide 
    whether to wear his light suit with a cane and drab 
    billycock, or his black tails with a chimney-pot hat and 
    his new umbrella.
    [Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, by Jerome K Jerome, 
    1886.]

The wide-awake was a soft felt hat with a broad brim and a low 
crown, said to have been jocularly named because it had no nap. 
It's mentioned in Robert Baden-Powell's 1908 book Scouting for Boys 
and also here:

    And lastly there was the wagoner himself, a lad, say, 
    of eighteen summers, a fine, strong, healthy-looking 
    young fellow, well clad, and wearing on his head a 
    'raddidoo' or wide-awake hat, with perhaps a peacock's 
    feather or some other embellishment at the side.
    [The British Workman Past and Present, by The Reverend 
    M C F Morris, 1928. "Raddidoo" defeats me completely, as 
    it did the author, who remarked it was "used in the East 
    Riding for the ordinary wide-awake hat commonly worn by 
    the farm lads. The origin of this curious word I have 
    never been able to discover".]

The billycock was a hard, round hat. Etymologically, it has been a 
matter of contention, with many references saying firmly that it's 
from the name of William Coke of Norfolk, who commissioned its 
manufacture (so billy-coke or billy-cock, though his family name 
was actually pronounced "cook"). Not so. The name is actually from 
a style of the early eighteenth century called a bully-cock. The 
original bullies were upper-class sporting gangs of the period, who 
became a terror on the streets and gave their name to intimidating 
the vulnerable. (There's another level of word-historical curiosity 
here, since bully is from Dutch "boele", a lover, and was at first 
a term of endearment applied to either sex. Later it became a way 
to address a male friend, hence the name for the group.) A bully-
cock was a bully's hat whose brim was cockedor turned up. This is a 
description of an Oxford "smart" of the early eighteenth century: 

    When he walks the streets he is easily distinguished 
    by a stiff silk gown, which rustles in the wind, as he 
    struts along; a flaxen tie-wig; a broad bully-cock'd hat, 
    or a square cap of about twice the usual size; white 
    stockings; thin Spanish leather shoes; his cloaths lined 
    with tawdry silk, and his shirt ruffled down the bosom as 
    well as at the wrists.
    [Quoted in Heraldic Anomalies: or Rank Confusion in 
    our Orders of Precedence, by Edward Nares, 1823. A 
    "square cap", or "square", is the academic headgear later 
    referred to slangily as a mortarboard.]

William Coke was responsible for a very similar hat to the 
billycock, which is part of the reason for the confusion. But his 
was what we now call the bowler. The hatters Lock of London created 
it for him in 1850 to protect the heads of his gamekeepers when 
chasing poachers. It was made from felt rendered hard with shellac. 
Mr Coke reputedly tested the prototype by jumping on it, an abuse 
it survived undented. It ought to be called a Coke hat, which 
indeed it was for a while, or perhaps a Lock hat. But Messrs Lock 
had it manufactured by the firm of Thomas and William Bowler and 
their name has stuck to it, no doubt because a hat with a crown 
like a bowl ought to be called a bowler. In the US, the usual name 
was and is derby, after the Epsom Derby (though pronounced 
differently), partly because of its riding associations, but mainly 
because the hat had by the latter part of the century become 
standard wear for the Londoners for whom Derby Day was a de facto 
public holiday.

A cocked hat was any kind that had the brim permanently turned up. 
These had been in fashion in the eighteenth century, especially the 
three-cornered hat worn both by civilians and by army and navy 
officers. In the nineteenth century, only after it had gone out of 
fashion in favour of the beaver hat, this came to be called a 
tricorn or tricorne hat. Towards the end of the eighteenth century 
a type cocked only at front and back became common. By analogy, 
modern fashion historians call this a bicorne, though likewise the 
term doesn't seem to have been used by its wearers. Naval officers 
kept the bicorne, though around the time of Nelson they turned it 
ninety degrees to point front and back instead of side to side.

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