If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (20 page)

19 – An Apology for Beards

Long hair is one of the sinful customs and fashions of the wicked men of the world.

Thomas Hall, 1630s

‘There’s more to life than hair, but it’s a good place to start,’ say the Aussie shampoo adverts, and it’s true that hair is a terrific indicator of status, wealth and aspirations to fashion. In fact, your hair provides you with a vast canvas for personal and political self-expression.

Hair speaks especially stridently in the area of religious beliefs. The twelfth-century monk who wrote
An Apology for Beards
argues that the ‘marvellous mystery’ of matted, greasy facial hair indicates ‘interior cleanness’ and ‘divine virtue’. But five hundred years later, the strictly Puritan writer William Prynne found long hair on men to be ‘graceless’, ‘whorish’, ‘ungodly’ and ‘horrid’.

Norman commentators seem to have alternated regularly between criticising dashing young knights who’d grown their hair too long and complaining that they’d cut it too short. A convincing explanation is the fear medieval people felt if other people looked like they were trying to escape from their allotted stations in life. Men whose job was fighting looked shamefully like women if they wore their hair long, while the same men
with short hair were trespassing on a look reserved for the tonsured clergy.

Throughout the medieval period, at least in Western Europe, there was a preference for blond hair which endures to this day. It can be seen in the names of the heroines of the French romances of the chivalric age: we have ‘Clarissant’ (clear), ‘Soredamor’ (golden) and ‘Lienor’ (bright). The thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman text
Ornatus Mulierum
has a positively modern ring in its promises to reveal an infallible method of turning white hair blond again. (Apply overnight a paste of ashes boiled for half a day in vinegar. Clearly it was a bleaching agent like ‘Sun-In’.) An Elizabethan recipe ‘to make hair as yellow as gold’ includes rhubarb and white wine among its ingredients.

Depilation was another modern-sounding beauty treatment sought by medieval women. All-over removal of body hair (‘in order that a woman might become very soft and smooth and without hairs from the head down’) might be achieved from a recipe made up of cucumber, almond milk and (worryingly) quicklime. Users were warned ‘that it is not to stay too long on the skin, because it causes intense heat’. Identical warnings are still found on hair removal creams today.

In the Tudor period, Henry VIII had particularly ‘political’ hair, and his frequent changes from the pageboy look to the crop and back again were slavishly copied by his courtiers. In 1520, he heard that Francis I had shaved his head after an injury, so he had his own hair cut very short in sympathy. On another occasion, anxious for a meeting with his ally, he promised not to shave until he and Francis were once again in each other’s company. But Katherine of Aragon, disliking her husband’s tickly chin, made him break his vow. A diplomatic incident nearly ensued, neatly averted by Francis’s mother, Louise of Savoy, who declared that the love the two kings bore one other was ‘not in the beards but in the hearts’.

Henry went through a daily routine of being shaved by his
barber, Penny, probably using a basin with a notch for the neck rather like those discovered in the wreck of the
Mary Rose
, which you can see in the museum at the Royal Naval Dockyard in Portsmouth today. The basin contained clove-scented water, and Penny also used knives, ivory combs and scissors to carry out his job. Because he was so close to the king, Penny had to keep himself scrupulously clean and healthy, and avoid ‘misguided women’.

Later on in life, though, with Katherine of Aragon well out of the way, Henry became a regular beard wearer, and he died wearing whiskers. When his coffin was opened in 1813 and his corpse examined, ‘some beard remained upon the chin’.

Like Henry VIII, his daughters Elizabeth and Mary and their stepmother Katherine Parr were uniformly ginger and proud (though Elizabeth in later life wore dyed wigs: her hair was described as ‘a light colour never made by nature’). Katherine Parr’s hair survives in exceptionally large quantities. Her body, buried at her third husband’s home of Sudeley Castle, was dug up numerous times in the eighteenth century by nosy antiquarians, who cut off various locks of hair and even pulled out a tooth as a souvenir.

Every Tudor person possessed their own comb because it would have been simply intolerable not to disentangle the inevitable parasites from their hair. In 1602, William Vaughan ascribed awesome powers to the humble comb, recommending that you should ‘comb your head softly and easily with an ivory comb, for nothing recreateth [provides recreation for] the memory more’. Samuel Pepys once got into trouble when he asked his maidservant for a little hairdressing help. He described going ‘after supper to have my head combed by Deb, which occasioned the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world; for my wife, coming up suddenly, did find me embracing the girl’. Later, the vengeful Mrs Pepys literally seized the iron while it was hot: ‘she came to my side of the bed and drew the curtain open, and
with the tongs red hot at the end made as if she did design to pinch me with them’.

The person who cut your hair, your barber, might also have performed more extreme services. The Company of Barber-Surgeons combined two professions concerned with knives. Both would offer home visits, whether it was a haircut or a major piece of surgery that was required. (Doctors were supposed to restrict themselves to the classier business of prescribing medicine, rather than getting splattered with blood as surgeons did.) Barbers and surgeons therefore had overlapping skills, even after their two professions began to diverge. The wig-maker Edmund Harrold of Manchester, who’d trained as a barber, was typical. Some days he would help women struggling to breastfeed by ‘cupping’ their breasts, placing a hot glass over the nipple. Other days he would go out in search of flaxen hair to buy for his wig-making business. A head of long and beautiful hair was a valuable resource for a woman. Even a well-born (but down-on-her-luck) Georgian courtier named Henrietta Howard investigated what she might get for selling hers to a wig-maker, and received an offer of eighteen guineas.

Just like bathing the body, washing the hair also went through a couple of centuries of extreme disfavour from 1550 onwards. Contemporary doctors greatly ‘misliked’ the ‘bathing of your head in cold water especially in winter’. This chimes in with Randle Holme’s description of the duties of a seventeenth-century barber. He was not to
wash
anyone’s head, but only to ‘rub the hair with a napkin to dry it from its sweatiness and filth’.

The age of the Whigs was also an age of wigs. The gentleman’s wig first made its appearance in London in the 1660s: Charles II had grown used to wearing one during his years of exile in fashionable France, and brought the look back with him on his Restoration to the English throne. Samuel Pepys was at first suspicious of the new trend, then tempted, and finally, four years later, he splashed out on a wig of his own. He did so, as he
wrote, because ‘the pains of keeping my hair clean is so great’. Wigs worn over a shaven head became the staple headgear of gentlemen: when James Boswell lost his, in 1789, he was devastated and rushed twenty-five miles to buy a replacement (‘I could not long remain an object of laughter’).

At first wigs were worn mainly by men, but women adopted them too. By 1751, ‘The Black, the Brown, the Fair and Carroty, appear now all in one livery; and you can no more judge of your Mistress’s natural complexion by the Colour of her Hair, than by her Ribbons.’ Even after the wig fell from favour, towards the end of the century, the natural hair was combed, curled, piled and powdered to artificial perfection. ‘Those who had to preserve a genteel appearance spent an hour each day under the hands of the hair-dresser,’ wrote Charles Knight about the 1800s, at the tail end of the age of big hair, and the Earl of Scarborough kept an astonishing ‘six French
fizeurs
, who have nothing else to do than dress his hair’. A duchess visiting London complained vociferously that the city was nothing but ‘knock, knock, knock, all day; and friz, friz, friz all night’. Time spent like this showed, however, that one was in the privileged position of having no business more pressing than preening.

Why did the wig finally lose favour in the early nineteenth century? A bold theoretician might link the decline of the wig to the decline of absolutism. Along with shoes in which it is impossible to walk and dresses in which it is impossible to sit, hair requiring hours of preparation is reserved for the aristocrat of limitless wealth. After many such people lost their lives at the guillotine in the French Revolution, those surviving lost their nerve.

Shorn hair has always gone with radical politics, as demonstrated by the eighteenth-century French revolutionaries, the English Roundheads of the previous century and 1970s skinheads. Those governing France after 1789 left off ‘their curls,
toupees
, and
queues
; some of them go about with cropped locks like English farmers without any powder’. After the revolution,
many unemployed French hairdressers and barbers came over to seek work in a jumpy Britain. Here, their whispering and their caressing of the heads of their clients in many a bedroom caused conservatives to wince. Were these Frenchies spreading dissent along with their powder and pomatum?

In these perilous times, when you submit your chin to a barber never talk about politics till you ascertain his principles on these matters. It is dangerous to put one’s throat in the mercy of a man armed with a razor, especially if he be a red-hot politician; which all shavers are, without exception.

As a result, the very profession of hairdressing came in for some striking criticism after 1789. ‘The art and mystery of barbery’ has sunk ‘exceedingly from that high estimation in which it was anciently held’, it was written in 1824. The virtuous, the high-minded and the patriotic simplified their own hairdressing routines, so much so that by 1830 a Bristol newspaper described the hairdresser as no ‘longer the important personage he used to be’. Smooth, simply dressed hair became the mark of gentility in the Victorian age.

But the menservants who worked in large and lavish households were still made to wear powder, and grand footmen looked like extras from
Cinderella
right up to the Second World War. They hated powder and its application:

They ducked their heads in water, rubbed soap in their hair to make a lather, and combed it stiffly through. Powder puffs came into action as they took turns to dust each other’s hair with either violet powder or ordinary flour. This dried to a firm paste.

That was Eric Horne, a former footman, writing in 1923. ‘I constantly had a cold in the head’, he went on, ‘through having to re-powder after going out with the carriage, one’s head is seldom dry.’ As well as giving them head colds, footmen thought that powdering discoloured their hair and made them prematurely bald.

Once the plumbed-in bath made its appearance in the purpose-built bathrooms of the late nineteenth century, new and better shampoos began to be invented, replacing the curious mixtures of cow fat and perfume, or eggs and lemons, which had been used previously. Like dentistry, the art of dressing the hair became the focus of scientific innovation as the Victorian age drew towards its close, and gradually moved out of the home and into the specialist studio.

The Marcel wave, popular in the 1920s, created a kind of corrugated-iron effect

It was Monsieur Marcel of France who invented the Marcel wave, or, as it was originally known, his ‘
ondulation
’ in his Paris salon. He used a pair of ordinary crimping tongs, and it was a German, Karl Nessler, who had the idea of making the
ondulation
permanent by electrically heating the tongs. So the ‘perm’ was born, and grew to maturity during the craze for short hair amongst the flappers of the 1920s. This step towards liberation was supported by Lady Astor, the first female Member of
Parliament. She once had this conversation with her butler: