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The mill chimney of the former Hat Works looms over the urban mess of Stockport as you enter the town by train. The words Hat Museum drip vertically down the chimney, for this 1830s former cotton mill has, since 2000, been the world’s only museum dedicated to hats. While the absence of similarly themed museums may not be altogether surprising, many a cynical parent, me included, has emerged from the premises with a new appreciation of the rich history of headwear and its manufacture. And a gloomy appreciation of what Stockport has lost with the demise of hatting (along with textiles and engineering).

In Stockport, you are at one of the former centres of the hat universe. Between the 1830s and 1930s, hat-making and its support industries (blockmaking, trimmings, leatherware) employed thousands of people in the town and the surrounding region. In this neck of the woods, the postwar removal of hats from the heads of the masses was doomsday.

This demise of headwear was an economic and social disaster for Stockport. Hat-making had been established in north Cheshire and southeast Lancashire since the fifteenth century, and people had always worn hats… until, suddenly, they didn’t. The sartorial revolution that ditched headwear is a fashion upheaval matched only by the switch from the cumbersome corsets, crinolines, and bustles of female Edwardian dress to the slinky, liberating attire of the 1920s, or the colourful explosion of fashion in the 1960s.

Pass the hat

Until the 1950s, going outdoors without a hat was as unthinkable as leaving your shoes behind. They were functional, protecting the head from sun, rain, wind, and industrial grime. They conveniently hid unwashed locks. They also proclaimed status – it was flat caps for the working man, bowler hats for the managerial class, and homburgs and tweed cap for the upper classes (top hats for the latter a generation earlier). These hats defined men as clearly as their accents.

In parallel, women enjoyed a broad range of hat styles, including the brimless pillbox – beloved by my grandmothers and great aunts – fascinators, endless variations on the bonnet, wide-brimmed sun hats, and many more, including the simple headscarf – another favourite of said female relatives when they were nipping to the local shop for bread and cigarettes. (I think this is why the headscarves of Queen Elizabeth and Princess Anne, caught on location at Balmoral, always reminded me of my grans and great-aunts.)

Hats also played a huge role in defining national stereotypes – if the British symbol was the bowler hat, the Texans had the stetson, the Mexicans the sombrero, the Australians the Akubra, the French the beret, the Russians the ushanka, the Scots the Tam o’Shanter, etc., etc.

So, why did we stop wearing them? Look at a 1920s or 30s street scene, and you’ll see a sea of heads covered by hats. By the later 1950s, there is a 50/50 hatted/hatless split, and by the 1970s, the hats have almost disappeared from everyday attire, with the exception of older city gents in their bowlers. Women remained more faithful to the ancient traditions of head fashion, but men were happy to be hatless.

There are several reasons for the decline. One of the most obvious is the rise of hairstyles. From 50s’ Teddy Boys onwards, men messed about with their hair in unprecedented ways. Previous centuries had seen shifting fashions of variously long and short hair, along with side helpings of facial hair and periwigs. But now hair became a fashion statement, and it could no longer be hidden beneath a hat. Brylcreem quiffs for early rock & rollers, short styles for Mods, longer hair for Rockers, mop-tops for Beatles fans, forests of the stuff for Hippies, spiky madness for Punks, huge gloops of gel and hairspray as the world lurched into the 80s… The hair-fixation hasn’t calmed down yet, and the general resurgence of generational headwear is yet to arrive.

But there are other theories explaining the loss of hats. The so-called Kennedy Effect proposes that US President John F. Kennedy made going hatless fashionable, cementing a trend that was already underway when he took office.

Fashion houses such as Mary Quant and Biba in the ‘60s focused on clothes, further sidelining hats. Many people were also using private cars or travelling on heated public transport, all of which undermined the need for a hat. It’s even possible that the years of mandatory military headwear in the Second World War became a grim memory for servicemen, making them happy to ditch hats once they were out of uniform.

As with most “what happened?” questions, the demise of the hat was probably a combination of all these factors.

Hat trick

It was not just humans who defined themselves by their headwear. Folklore has some notable hat-wearers, and I can’t resist bringing them into the story. For example, it’s hard to think of the Irish Leprechaun without his headware. In early illustrations, this is sometimes a cocked hat (the type associated with the Duke of Wellington), but many other types of headwear are illustrated. The image of a tiny man with hat and 18th-century clothes was fixed in the early 19th century; but the modern archetype of the shamrock-green Leprechaun in the battered top hat is largely a creation of the second half of the 20th century, when the venerable fairy was co-opted into gaudy, boozy St Patrick’s Day regalia in the USA.

The Leprechaun’s close cousin, the Fir Darrig, wore a red cap or red sugarloaf hat. According to W.B. Yeats,

The Far Darrig (fear dearg), which means the Red Man, for he wears a red cap and coat, busies himself with practical joking, especially gruesome joking. This he does and nothing else.

Redcap is the Fir Darrig’s evil twin, described by the great Katherine Briggs as follows:

One of the most malignant of old Border goblins, Redcap lived in old ruined Peel towers and castles where wicked deeds had been done, and delighted to re-dye his red cap in human blood.

The German/Dutch kaboutermann or kabouter is another malign, pointy-red-hatted member of the gnome tribe. He lives on ships, but only appears when the vessel is about to sink. At the more benign end of the scale, the inexplicably popular stone, ceramic, and plastic garden gnome with his long beard and red hat has a close cousin in the Yule spirit Tomte (or Nisse) from Scandinavia, who conquers the world via Ikea and Jysk stores every Christmas. From the same tribe, Germany has the Pumucki, Finland has Tomtuu, and Spain has the Duende, who also exists in Portugal and Latin-American countries. ‘Small humanoid, red hat’ is the abiding theme.

The Czech Vodník is more akin to the Leprechaun in his colour choice, green, which has been the colour associated with the fairy kingdom for many centuries. Vodník means “water creature”, and a green hat is part of their attire. They live in rivers, make a noise like a Marsh frog (brek-ek-ek), and routinely drown people, storing their souls in porcelain cups. They also smoke pipes, which hardly seems appropriate for their aquatic lifestyle.

Vodník By Josef Lada, 1947

The German Alp (from the same root as English ‘elf’) is equally macabre. The source of its magic is its hat, the Tarnkappe, which enables it to become invisible and shapeshift. This is not a cheerful garden gnome but a malevolent demon that causes nightmares and sleep paralysis. It is closely related to the Mara of Scandinavia and is the root of the German word for nightmare, Alptraum (literally “elf dream”).

Like the general human populace pre-WWII, none of these folkloric characters would dream of leaving the house without its distinctive headwear. I mean, Gandalf never looks quite right without his hat, does he?

Doffing the cap

Aquatic, frog-throated goblins with a lust for drowning and shapeshifting nightmare demons have moved us so far from the Stockport Hat Works that it’s hard to believe they could coexist in the same article… But the point is that hats are not just randomly chosen items to wedge onto the cranium. Each type has a social or practical purpose. A hat defines its wearer.

With every head craving headwear, hats were big business. The London-based Lock & Co Hatters, founded in 1676, claims to be not just the oldest extant hat shop in Britain, but the oldest shop in London. These were the hatters who first sold the bowler, originally designed for gamekeepers on a Norfolk estate and known as the coke hat. It was designed by Thomas and William Bowler, and the Locke & Co patron who ordered it was Edward Coke (the younger brother of the 2nd Earl of Leicester), which explains both the hat’s names. This headwear later became an emblem of comedy through Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, and then the iconic headpiece of the male London commuter belt.

Flat caps, as mentioned earlier, were once on the head of every working man and male child in Britain. Today, the similar tweed cap is largely associated with the aristocracy and the country-wear set. It was popularised by Edward VIII when he was still Prince of Wales, creating the toffs’ casual country look.

Another hat that shifted social rank was the pork pie hat, once the preserve of London gentlemen, later associated with gangsters, and reintroduced to Britain through Jamaican street culture and ska music in the ‘60s.

Edward VII made the Homburg fashionable with the upper classes. The headwear was originally worn by hunters in Germany, and it was the first style to replace the top hat at a presidential inauguration when Dwight D. Eisenhower wore one in 1953.

The other presidential hat is the Panama, made in Ecuador, which received its new name when President Theodore Roosevelt was photographed wearing one while visiting the Panama Canal in 1906. The headpiece had previously been known as the toquilla (after the palm-like plant used to weave it), the jipijapa (after a hat-making town), or the Montecristi (another hat-making town).

The deerstalker is one of the most immediately identifiable hats, synonymous with Sherlock Holmes. However, Conan Doyle’s iconic detective is never described by the author as wearing one. It was Sidney Paget, who illustrated the original stories for The Strand Magazine, who first drew Holmes with the famous hat in the 1891 story, The Boscombe Valley Mystery, and then in 1892’s The Adventure of Silver Blaze, demonstrating how a hat can come to define a character.

The top hat, originally known as the stovepipe, evolved in the late 18th century from tricorn and bicorn hats. It was made from beaver-felt, and by the 19th century, it had become the standard formal headwear for upper- and middle-class gentlemen throughout Europe and North America.

Good turnout for the 1850 “Spot the Isambard Kingdom Brunel” competition…

As a final example, the mortarboard or academic cap originated among academics in the 12th-century Catholic Church as the biretta (and the weird and wonderful history of Christian church headware is worth a separate article). The biretta evolved into a hard, four-cornered hat worn by church-affiliated scholars and professors as a sign of their academic status. By the 15th century, the mortarboard was part of the academic dress at Oxford and Cambridge universities, and it reappears on graduation days up and down the land and on the heads of Bash Street Kids’ teachers’ heads in The Beano.

Mad for hatters

In its heyday, Luton, Bedfordshire, was home to over 500 hat manufacturers, producing an estimated 70 million hats a year in the 1930s. Likewise, bringing the plot back to Stockport, in the late 19th century, the town’s 30 hat factories were exporting more than six million hats a year, and producing an estimated 5,000 felt hats per week.

John Tenniel’s Mad Hatter from Lewis Carroll's 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

As with all high-production factories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, workers in the hat industry faced health hazards. Hatters often suffered from neurological disorders due to mercury poisoning in poorly ventilated workshops. The mercury was used to treat animal furs in the process of creating felt, and the symptoms of poisoning included shaking, irritability, depression, and psychosis – hence the term “mad as a hatter” and the stereotypically bonkers "Mad Hatter" in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

Like a downbeat version of Wonderland, Stockport is a town of stark contrasts. Nineteenth century palatial buildings and hat-museum-emblazoned chimneys are lost in a maze of grim streets, boarded-up shops, characterless business and retail cathedrals, and endless trains hoping for better things in Manchester to the west and the peakland hills to the east. This is what a town looks like when its society-defining industry has died.

There are lots of Stockports out there, struggling to rediscover something meaningful post-hatting, post-spinning and weaving, post-manufacturing, post-mining, post-ship-building, post-steel-making, post-relevance. I was born in one – Grimsby, currently post-fishing and post-Brexit, and I raise my non-existent hat to them all.

Is that a boiling kettle I hear?

Buy me a nice cup of tea

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Sources

https://www.countrylife.co.uk/luxury/curious-questions-when-and-why-did-we-stop-wearing-hats-and-is-it-time-to-start-again-266025

https://hatbox.com/hat-history.cfm

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_Works

https://www.eternalgoddess.co.uk/posts/20th-century-fashion-a-timeline

Katherine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies, 1976