PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
Cap - the crowning glory of man
Revel Barker, journalist: "Andy Capp was created in the North for the Mirror by Reg Smythe, from Hartlepool. He told me this story, which, he says, inspired the cartoon that quickly started to run, and still runs, around the world)... He was at Hartlepool football ground with his dad when it started to rain. The man next to young Reg took off his flat cap and put it under his raincoat. Puzzled, Reg pulled at the man's sleeve and said: 'Mister... It's started to rain... And you've taken your cap OFF...?'
The chap looked at Reg as if the boy was stupid. 'You don't think," he said, 'that I'm going to sit in the house all night in a wet cap!"'Some part of what appears below was read on Radio 4
Once, you knew a man by what he wore on his head. A hat was like a flag is to a ship: it denoted an origin, a home port. Nobody - as Sir Neville Cardus said - would have dreamed of going out without a hat when he was a lad. Now, few go out with a hat. And modern males are as anonymous as chips without vinegar.
If people wear a cap at all it is usually one of those American baseball things with big nebs and something - often NY - written on the front. That is not a man’s hat. That is a sportsman’s hat, or a child’s hat, with a bit of elastic to hold it on and a big gap at the back. A gentleman would not be seen in a cap like that. Not unless he played rounders for a living.
A man’s hat can be a threat or a comfort. Pull down the brim of a trilby and you are Mafia. Push the brim up at the front and you are a clown. Pull the hat sideways on the head and you are a tap dancer. Fling it in the air and you are a celebrant. Stamp it underfoot and you are a golfer. Unsuccessful at that. The brown trilby worn on racecourses is an abomination before the Lord. It denotes arrogance and conceit. I was reviled by a brown trilby at a Grand National and if I ever come across the man beneath it again, I shall be happy to kick him from here to there and damn the consequences.
On Liverpool docks I seem to recall that they were afraid of a billycock. Or more particularly, a man in a billycock, it being a bowler. A bowler represented authority, and this particular bowler had an eye beneath it which peered around corners. When the dockers brewed up illicitly in their cans, the hat leapt from its hiding place and a foot beneath it kicked the cans to kingdom come.
All my uncles wore bowlers on Saturday nights. It was the required headgear while eating black puddings from a cart in the town centre. It was accompanied by the winged white collar, trousers worn above the ankles, and the moustache. This is the outfit that saw Britain through the twenties and thirties and in not too bad a shape at that. Mind you, if you look at fading old pictures of people in town centres, you see a lot of awful caps, too - enormous things like helicopter platforms or embryo space ships. I will gloss over that discrepancy if it’s all the same with you.
When the cap and bowler people went into the Forces to save their country they had a proper respect for hats and knew that the regulation beret had to be one inch above the eyebrows and parallel to the ground. Given those proper dimensions you could be a hero with an easy conscience. Those who wore berets slopped over the side of the head like errant sponges ended up peeling potatoes in base camps. They were poor beings indeed and not fit to die in the front line for King and bowler.
I do not know what happened to hats. They seemed to disappear with the suits after the war. Everyone went casual. Jeans were all. And the gentlemen hatters found themselves observing doors that rarely opened. I mourn the passing of the hat. It is symbolic of something better than a mere cover for thinning hair.
Which is why I was delighted when I went to buy a cap and found that the Voice of the chain of shops that provided it had a proper respect for headgear.
Now in the buying of a cap there are serious things to observe: Is it comfortable? Does it sit well over the ears? Is the neb attached to the cloth beneath so that neither precedes the other? There has to be a smooth conjunction., no separateness.
And now for meaning. Above all, meaning. A cloth cap is assumed in folk mythology to represent working class, but it also denotes upper class affecting casualness. So it is undoubtedly classless, and there lies its strength. A toff can be a bit of a chap as well without, as it were, losing face. (Why, I saw a cap, in Yorkshire, that had a piece of cloth to let down as protection for the neck - a superb piece of one-upmanship, though my cap adviser warned me against it, probably on grounds that it represented upishness.) Baronets in cloth caps can never be mistaken for your average toiling masses because their faces are not doleful enough. Also, there is something about the way they set the brims so that they have to put the head back slightly while in locomotion and peer from under them. It is a mild imitation of the way military police wear their nebbed hats - these soldiers walk so that their heads are necessarily held backwards at an angle of 45 degrees to the ground. It is considered stylish. It is also foolish. The wrong kind of jolt and they have broken necks to attend to.
I would not trust a man who wore a hat like that.
It is not often you find definitions such as I have described above. But I kept a swing ticket from one of my caps and I am much impressed by the strength of feeling expressed there. It has a picture of two Union flags and employs the headlines: Crafted with pride.
"Congratulations "- said the swing ticket - "You are now the proud owner of a Greenwood’s County Cap." (Note the assumption that you are proud. How could you be otherwise? Note the capital letters of County Cap.) "Your cap" (it continues) has been crafted with pride in the UK to the highest standard. The County Cap was conceived for the needs of the Yorkshire working man (not any old working man, you notice - a Yorkshire one), who expects his cap to stand up to all adverse conditions; therefore, to protect you from the elements your cap has been Teflon coated."
You might consider this a reasonable point to say: Enjoy your cap, then, and goodbye.
But our correspondent continues unabated -
"The Greenwood County Cap has been rigorously tested on the Yorkshire Moors in all the erratic weather conditions we face today. This testing has proved that your cap is as tough as the Yorkshire Miners and Sheffield Steel Workers who have been wearing it for decades. Therefore it is an essential part of your survival kit for everyday life.
"We are always endeavouring to improve the quality of Greenwood’s County Caps by integrating the technical advances in cap construction and protection. Only we have introduced a Teflon coating and S. M. L. & XL sizes by developing a unique stretch property, thus updating our county cap, making it water resistant and bringing it in line with the 21st Century... Your Greenwood’s County Cap has a lifetime guarantee which, as you know, in this age of disposable consumerism, is not easily come by."
So there it is. I take off my cap to the Messrs Greenwood, of Guiseley, Leeds, Yorkshire, est. 1860, for this inspiring instruction and for the privilege of wearing their creation.
I walk with confidence into the future, my headgear carefully set, the neb parallel to the pavement.
As I walk by, people say, "My word, isn’t that a Greenwood’s County Cap, tested in adverse weather conditions on the Yorkshire moors? There, indeed, walks a sporting gentleman and man of discernment"
Well, I hope they do. To be absolutely honest, though, I doubt it..
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
3 March, 2007