How the moustache won an empire
The British Empire was the greatest and most diverse the world has ever seen.
At its height, it was seven times the size of the Roman Empire, its Navy ruled the oceans and a quarter of the earth was painted red on the map.
Military victories, trade expansion and a talent for bureaucracy all played a part - but so did the humble moustache.
As Britain's influence stretched across the globe, the moustaches worn by our fighting men and leaders flourished, but by the time of the postcolonial humiliation of Suez in 1956, the prime minister of the day, Anthony Eden, sported an apologetic, hardly noticeable growth.
The rise and fall of the Empire was reflected in the waxing - literally, sometimes - and waning of the hair on generations of stiff upper lips.
The impetus for the fashion came from two sources. It began during the Napoleonic Wars of 1799 to 1815 when some British officers began to emulate fighting Frenchmen, whose moustaches were said to be "appurtenances of terror".
At about the same time, Britons, who by then formed the dominant caste in India, adopted the customs of the country, smoking hookahs, drinking a locally distilled spirit called arrack, wearing pyjamas and growing moustaches.
By the 1830s this sort of behaviour was condemned as "going native" and the British were discouraged from adopting such ways.
But some Indian habits remained - the British continued to eat curry, kedgeree and mulligatawny soup.
And the moustache became imperative because it was seen as a potent symbol of virility. As one contemporary noted, Indians looked upon "the bare faces of the English with amazement and contempt", regarding as na-mard (unmanly) countenances emasculated by the razor.
British soldiers, in particular, could not afford to appear less masculine and aggressive than their Indian comrades in the Army.
They had to assert the supremacy of the imperial race.
So began what became known as "the moustache movement".
It scored an early victory in 1831 when the 16th Lancers hailed with delight an order permitting them to wear moustaches. But the battle for this war-like appendage was far from won.
In 1843, for example, political officer James Abbott's 'large mustachios' raised eyebrows, despite his gallant feats on the north-west frontier.
Such hirsute accessories - condemned by some as being worn by "the vulgar clever" - still seemed to many a foreign affectation, the kind of thing expected only of French coxcombs.
And when Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General of India, disparaged "capillary decorations" in 1849 they fell like leaves in October.
But they soon sprouted again, especially when newspapers campaigned for them. In 1854, moustaches were made compulsory for European troops of the East India Company's Bombay army and they were enthusiastically adopted elsewhere.
The Royal Durban Rangers at once ceased to shave their upper lips, for instance, and the Durban Mercury complimented them on their improved appearance.
Moustaches were religiously cultivated and subjected to severe discipline, enforced by Queen's Regulations which by the 1860s had made them obligatory.
They were brushed and pomaded. The follicles were fertilised with patent unguents such as Ayre's Formula, Elliott's Tonic Lotion and Oldridge's Balm of Columbia. The topiary luxuriance was trained with iron curling tongs.
During and after the Crimean War, barbers advertised different patterns such as the Raglan and the Cardigan, the latter "a remarkable affair, alternately billowing out and narrowing".
Moustaches were clipped and trimmed until they curved like sabres and bristled like bayonets. Their ends were waxed and given a soldierly erection.
They became the talisman of militant imperialists such as Alfred Milner, who served in Egypt and South Africa in the late-19th century; Frederick Lugard, a governor of Hong Kong and Nigeria; Lieutenant-Colonel D.M.C.T.
Lumsden who served in India at the turn of the 20th century; and the great explorer of Africa Sir Richard Burton (who challenged a fellow Oxford undergraduate to a duel for laughing at his moustache, which matured into the most prodigious walrus of the age).
As a martinet in the Pacific, George McGhee Murdoch paraded his determination to dominate by "the deliberate, waxed bristle of his sergeant-major's moustache".
In Kenya, the famous lion hunter Colonel J. H. Patterson groomed his moustache into "two imperious curls" to symbolise his courage. Imitating warriors, civilians too stiffened their upper lips: Karl Marx's collaborator, Friedrich Engels, mocked Anglo-Irish aristocrats with "enormous moustaches under colossal Roman noses".
By the 1890s, the moustache was the mark of every successful dandy. As far away as Hong Kong, it was said to be social death for a man to forget to curl the ends of his moustache.
At home, Edwardian gentlemen rebuked servants who aped the "fancy hairdressing" of their betters.
Nothing could be permitted to devalue these military insignia, which reached their peak in the fulsome display of Lord Kitchener and gained iconic status in the famous Great War recruiting poster in which a steely-eyed Kitchener proclaimed: 'Your country needs you.'
So the moustache became the emblem of Empire. But as the British Empire faltered under the hammer blows of war, depression and nationalist resistance, the moustache too beat a retreat.
The British commanding officer who surrendered to the Japanese at Singapore, General Percival, had a miserable apology of a moustache.
General Sir Gerald Templer, the Chief of the Imperial Staff at the time of Suez in 1956, had a late-imperial moustache that was "so thin as to be barely perceptible".
Sir Anthony Eden's was somewhat similar but, to make matters worse, it was said to have "curled inside out" in an embarrassingly effete manner.
One young Tory MP said that "Eden had to prove he had a real moustache" - a metaphor for proving his courage. The Prime Minister's wife, Clarissa, did her best to help.
Moments before her husband's broadcast on November 3, 1956, the eve of the invasion of Suez, she saw on a television monitor that his moustache was almost invisible and quickly blackened it with her mascara. By then, the moustache was vanishing as fast as the Empire.
True, it had ceased to be compulsory in the Army as early as 1916, when King's Regulations had permitted shaving the upper lip.
Allegedly that change took place to accommodate the Prince of Wales, whose growth was less than manly.
But it seems that Lieutenant-General Sir Nevil Macready made the order because he intensely disliked his own moustache, "a bristly affair resembling the small brushes with which kitchen maids and others clean saucepans".
Be this as it may, the moustache was outmoded by the 1950s.
It had become a joke thanks to Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx and an international symbol of villainy thanks to Hitler's toothbrush and "the huge laughing cockroaches" under Stalin's nose - the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam paid with his life for coining this image. In Britain, it was seen primarily as the badge of Colonel Blimp.
In one P.G. Wodehouse novel of 1954, Bertie Wooster tries cultivating one to give himself a dashing air. It is stigmatised by Jeeves, that infallible arbiter of fashion, as a "dark stain like mulligatawny soup".
The last British Prime Minister to sport a moustache in office was Harold Macmillan. It was an indication of his desire, not fulfilled, to preserve the Empire.
And it had survived terrible vicissitudes - as he emerged from the wreckage of a war-time plane crash in Algiers, his moustache was "burning with a bright blue flame".
But this did not stop contemporary comics from giving a satirical account of 'the twilight of the British Empire' while mercilessly mocking Macmillan's 'ludicrous moustache'.
Fashions change and the moustache has recently made a comeback as a symbol of male homosexual virility - a bitter irony for what was once the worldwide symbol of an empire that dominated the globe.
Piers Brendon's book 'The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire' is published by Jonathan Cape.
11-10-2007 om 00:00
geschreven door Guy
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