Hats & History

While the shape of the world was being discussed and voted on in London, the shape of British bowlers got an earnest going-over.

In the Times's letters column Lieut. Colonel P. Youngman Carter of d'Arcy House, Tolleshunt d'Arcy, near Maldon, Essex, announced a horrifying discovery (in an old wardrobe): a bowler hat whose brim turned down. Wrote he: "The hat possesses a classic (or dome-of-St. Paul's) crown, five inches high but unwaisted, but the brim, which is a full two and a half inches wide, is perfectly flat save for an inverted gutter at the extreme edge.... I am wondering if it is an example of individual taste. . . ."

In a long editorial the Times thundered that it must have been the work of some mad hatter in a bygone age.

Later, one Frederick Willis, an Edwardian survivor who accredited himself as "an old silk-hatter familiar with all the Great Hats of a great age," set the record straight: "The specimen ... is of the period of 1907 to 1914. The inverted pipe curl (not gutter, as stated) was conceived, not by a madman . . . but by a master born out of his time, like Picasso. He visualized a market of individualists, and his vision was inspired by deep study of 18th-Century social history. Unfortunately the vanguard of standardized man was already overrunning England, the last stronghold of the individualist, and his creation . . . was, alas, only transitory. By some mischance not readily accounted for, this type of hat was overlooked by Mr. Churchill, and I have always felt that neglect from such a connoisseur was a blow that no hat could survive. ..."

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