You thought I was talking about the bowler, didn’t you? Which is, of course, the name by which the hat became widely known over the years. But at Lock’s they called it a coke and they still do to this day (and they are the best hatters in the world - just ask the Post Office).
It all started in 1849 with a customer called William Coke. He was a member of a rich landowning family in Norfolk who commissioned Lock’s to design a new style of hat for his gamekeepers - something strong enough to protect them while they were out and about in the wilds of East Anglia keeping his game. Among the many hazards he wanted to protect them from were low-hanging branches and ruthless poachers. The hatters put their heads together and came up with the design we recognise today. Before they put it into full production, they needed the thumbs-up from the customer himself. At this stage, most of us might have been content to examine the prototype hat and perhaps give it a stiff rap with the knuckles to test its suitability for the job. Mr Coke, it seems, was rather more thorough. Having given the hat the once-over, he exited the shop and placed the hat on the pavement outside. Then he jumped on it. Several times. I don’t know what weight the scales at Berry Bros would have recorded for the country gentleman, but I think we can safely assume that he’d enjoyed his fair share of hearty dinners over the years, plus the odd glass of port with his stilton. As his bulky frame descended towards the hat, the unfortunate staff might have been forgiven for harbouring mild anxiety as to how the test might turn out. Had things gone wrong at this stage, this might have been the parallel story of how the flat cap was invented. Happily, as it turned out, any anxieties they may have had were unfounded. The hat survived the impact of the aristo and sat there, gloriously unscathed in all its black rotundity. Mr Coke was satisfied and gave the go-ahead for production to begin, and within a few weeks the gamekeepers of his family seat, Holkham Hall in Norfolk, were all equipped with their new headgear. There’s a photo of some of them, taken a good while later, which shows them seated on a huge pile of hay, tucking into their lunch with bowler-hatted relish. They’re all looking towards the camera in a vaguely menacing fashion, as if daring the poachers of the world to come to Norfolk and have a go if they think they’re hard enough.
At Lock’s there’s a tradition that new hat designs are called after the original customer who commissioned them, which is why even to this day the hat is known as a coke. It’s known as a bowler to the rest of us because once the prototype had been given the thumbs-up by the great man himself, production of the hats was farmed out by Lock’s to a firm south of the river, Southwark to be precise, run by Thomas and William Bowler.
Those of you with an appreciation of fine music may be aware that Madness have often been proud wearers of headgear, and most of us have sported a bowler at one time or another. The feel of a real bowler is a tremendous thing, denser and heavier than you’d imagine if you’ve only ever come across one of those plastic Laurel and Hardy jobs from a fancy dress shop that only seem to come in size small. If that is the case, I suggest you get down to Lock’s whenever you can and have a feel of the real thing. Marvellous. I still have vague memories of hordes of bowler-hatted gents streaming out of Liverpool Street station swinging their rolled-up brollies, like a pinstriped army, and it was as an ironic reference to this that I first took to wearing one in about 1982, on the cover of our album
Complete Madness
.
I expect you’re thinking that back then, at the heady height of my musical fame, I was living a shallow and incredibly decadent show-biz life and that rather than stepping out to buy the hat myself, I despatched one of my style consultants to do the deed for me. Well, if that was the impression beginning to form in your mind, then you would be way off the mark. Like generations of London men before me, I simply decided I wanted a bowler and headed off to the shops to buy one.
It would be jolly convenient at this stage in proceedings if I could report that I bought the hat at one of Beau’s old Piccadilly haunts or, failing that, that I stumbled across it during a nostalgic fumble through the second-hand stock of Alfred Kemp’s in Camden. If only life unfolded with such pleasing symmetry. The fact is, I did neither of those. I picked mine up just round the corner from Lock’s at another old hatters which is also still going strong today. Which brings me back to Jermyn Street, where Beau still stands sentry over his former domain.
Bates, at 21a Jermyn Street, may not have a history quite as long as Lock’s, but it’s hardly a Johnny-come-lately. It opened for business in 1902, the year Edward VII came to the throne, Norwich City Football Club was formed and Theodore Roosevelt became the first US president to ride in a car. None of which facts are directly relevant to the story other than that you can bet your bottom dollar all of them - the king, the president and the fans and footballers of Norwich - wore hats, because every man did back then.
I had been advised that Bates was the place to go to buy a bowler, but had not been warned about what the purchase might entail. I realised it wouldn’t be quite as straightforward as I had anticipated when, having announced the purpose of my visit, I was approached by the manager who was wielding a circular metal device which looked like either an instrument of torture or an inverted piano and gloried in the name of a ‘conformature’.
It soon became clear that rather than simply taking a hat from the shelf and trying it on for size, the selection of a suitable bowler can only take place once the contours of one’s cranium have been accurately mapped, as the hats are so solid and the head comes in many shapes. After the conformature was secured to my skull - and strangely dashing it looked too - a series of pins were carefully adjusted to gauge its exact dimensions. At this point, I half expected him to plug it in and send a current coursing through my temples. Fortunately, I avoided this shocking fate and he simply lifted the strange contraption off my head and placed it on the counter. Only after this ritual has been completed can a bowler be selected and tried on for size. It fit like a glove, if you know what I mean. I paid my money and made my escape.
That bowler was my first purchase of an item of traditional English headgear (I have subsequently bought others but I don’t have a coke habit) and my only foray into the world of that traditional London hatter. So you can imagine how surprised and pleased I am when I return - a quarter of a century later - to have a look around the old place, only to discover how little has changed during the intervening years. Bates is still a treasure trove of hats in all shapes and sizes. Alongside the bowler, I see other endangered species, like the fez, deerstalker and top hat still flourishing in the rarefied atmosphere. Like exotic survivors from a more elegant age, they are living out their happy, sheltered existences and waiting for a kind-hearted and sartorially adventurous customer to pluck them from the shelf and release them into the wild.
It isn’t only the merchandise which is familiar at Bates. As I’m shown around the premises by the current owner, Timothy Boucher, I immediately spot an old friend, the diabolic conformature. Resisting the pull to feel the weight of it on my head once again, I move away and spot another familiar face across the shop floor - a member of the Bates family I’d been introduced to on my previous visit all those years ago. His name, I remember, is Binks, and I am pleased to see that he hasn’t changed, or indeed aged, in all that time. In fact, he hasn’t even moved in all that time. Hardly surprising, I suppose, since Binks is dead and has been for more than 80 years. Not only dead but stuffed as well, and displayed in a glass case attached to the wall above the till: a stationary tribute to the taxidermist’s art. I should add at this point that Binks is not an unfortunate shop assistant cut down in the service of hatting, but a cat.
According to Mr Boucher, Binks first ventured on to the premises in the 1920s - in the halcyon age when every London man worth his salt wore a hat from breakfast through till bedtime, and sometimes beyond. Whether Binks came in quest of a mouse or some headgear is unclear, but he was immediately adopted by the shop staff and has been a part of the furniture here ever since - metaphorically at first, but now quite literally. From the lofty vantage point of his glass case on the wall, he surveys his former domain with haughty insouciance, a silk top hat tipped at a suitably raffish angle on his head, and a cigarette lodged in his mouth to complete this tableau of feline contentment. He looks like the cat who got the cream, or in his case, the Player’s Navy Cut. And because he cannot move from his perch, he remains blissfully ignorant of the fact that beyond the doors of Bates the Hatters is an utterly changed world where all the old certainties have disappeared, a world where the deerstalker and bowler have given way to the baseball cap or - worse still - the simple, unadorned head of the human male, in all its unconformatured nakedness.
Saying goodbye to Bates, I’m back on Jermyn Street, and there’s one last place I want to visit before I head for home. A turn to the right carries me past the fragrant pong of the fancy cheese shop where the Queen buys her mature Cheddar and on towards another old friend that Beau would have recognised at once.
Did I mention that Beau was famous for washing every day - another habit we have in common, although it’s unusual for me to allocate three hours to the process? It’s said that he was so scrupulous in his ablutions that he never had the need to use scent or cologne to cover his traces. Beau may have been a stranger to BO, but the same boast could not be made by most of the other Regency bucks in eighteenth-century London, most of whom must have stunk like skunks. Unless, that is, they had an account at Floris & Co., 89 Jermyn Street.
Remarkably, this wonderfully fragrant survivor is still run today by descendants of the man who started the whole thing in 1730. That was the year when Juan Floris, a native of Menorca, arrived in London to seek his fortune. He began as a barber, but soon realised there was a market for selling the scents he squirted on his freshly cropped clients before they left the premises. Within a few years of buying his shop on Jermyn Street, he had a client list to die for, and had earned the first of many royal warrants as the king’s favoured ‘smooth-pointed comb-maker’. (History does not record who supplied the king’s rough-pointed combs, but whoever they were, they’ve long since bitten the dust.) They used to make all their fragrances in the basement of number 89, a tradition which only ended in the 1960s, when production was moved to a larger site outside London. You can still catch a glimpse of the basement through the blue grille on the pavement in front of the shop, but these days the interesting stuff is all above ground.
Pausing only to glance up at the rather impressive plasterwork of the royal warrant, which perches on a lintel above the front window of the shop, I step inside. The hustle and bustle of Piccadilly quickly recedes and I feel as though I’ve entered a world which I thought had vanished centuries ago, a world where banknotes are ironed and coins washed before they’re returned to the customer on a mahogany change-tray (a tradition that’s recently been phased out at my local Lidl). This sense of connection with the past is no doubt enhanced on my visit by the fact that the man who greets me as I step through the door is Juan Floris’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson (that’s seven greats, if you weren’t counting).
As John Bodenham shows me round this wonderful time capsule of a place - all mirrors, mahogany and musk - I can almost imagine myself back in the eighteenth century. Flush from a reckless wager at White’s, I’d park up the sedan chair outside (no traffic cameras in those days, although I do notice a suspicious-looking chap with an easel) and nip in to pick up a fresh bottle of my favourite pong before setting off for a debauched night of carousing in the company of my dandified cronies. And even if Beau himself was unlikely to appear round the corner to greet me, at least the mirrored display cabinets that line the walls are the very ones he might have peered into two centuries ago as he checked to see that his cravat was still as shipshape and elegant as it was when he put it on that morning before an audience of admiring fashionistas.
Sadly, this fragrant flight of fancy is abruptly halted when John explains that the mahogany cabinets which grace the shop today aren’t original, as I’ve assumed. Worse still, they’ve been acquired second-hand - hardly fitting fittings, I suggest, for a shop with such grand associations. But it turns out that I am wrong on that score. They may not be original, but these display cases still have a pretty distinguished pedigree: before they graced the Floris HQ, they’d been used to show off precious objects at the celebrated Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. In 1851, after the show was over, they were snapped up by Floris and installed in the shop. If they’d been good enough for Queen Victoria, I decide, they are good enough for me. I withdraw my complaint and move quickly on towards a room at the back of the shop, where I’ve spotted a white-coated lady seated at a table covered in a glittering array of glass bottles. What, I wonder, is a chemist doing here?
The vision in white - Sheila is her name - is Floris’s resident perfumier. If you don’t fancy any of the many tried-and-tested scents on sale in the front of the shop, you can, for a price, step into Sheila’s fragrance factory and work with her to create one of your very own. The bottles on the table contain some of the 4,000 different scents she mixes and matches to create her unique blends, their labels announcing such exotic ingredients as tonka bean and galbanum oil. It takes several months of consultations and experimentation to finalise a bespoke scent, so, fighting the urge to carve my own niche in the pantheon of perfumiers, I decide to opt for something prêt-a-snorter instead and head back out front to make my selection.
The Floris order books are a veritable compendium of famous names, and a quick flick through the pages reveal that I am just the latest in a long line of sophisticated fashion icons to come calling. Besides the great Beau himself, who regularly stopped in for a chat, the list of clients includes more royals than even the most rabid revolutionary would want to shake a stick at, some redoubtable women (Eva Peron and Florence Nightingale to name but two) and a couple of legendary writers - Oscar Wilde and James Bond creator Ian Fleming. Oscar’s favourite scent was a concoction called Malmaison, named after the Malmaison carnation, apparently the buttonhole of choice for elegant Victorians. Fleming’s choice, named after the street number of the Floris shop itself, was No. 89, a taste he shared with his own fictional hero. When he wasn’t saving the world, the great Bond took baths in water fragranced with Floris Lime Bath Essence - a pleasing example of early product placement for which I hope the author was appropriately rewarded. (Note to editor: please don’t cut this bit, we’ll split any kickbacks 50-50.)