Anthony Eden hat

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Gatow Airport on 15 July 1945 to attend the Potsdam Conference

An "Anthony Eden" hat, or simply an "Anthony Eden", was a type of headgear popularised in Britain in the mid-20th century by politician

Prime Minister
from 1955 to 1957.

The hat became so associated with him that it was commonly known in the UK as the "Anthony Eden" (or, in London's

Second World War, of civil servants as a "bowler hat" brigade.[3]

The trilby and the homburg

Winston Churchill giving his "V" sign during World War II on Downing Street, London wearing a black homburg hat

The homburg had initially been popularised in Britain by King

Rene Cutforth
recalled in the 1970s that:

one of things that strikes me most about the Thirties scene when I think about it now is the trilby hat, the universal headgear of the middle classes ... Sometime early in the century, it must have been a wild gesture of freedom and informality ... By the Thirties it had certainly become degenerate ... It was a hat which had lost all aspiration: it had become a mingy hat ... .[5]

In such circumstances Eden's adherence to the homburg seemed fresh and dashing. He is one of only two British Prime Ministers to have had an item of clothing named after him, the other being the Duke of Wellington (his boot).[6]

Eden's style

Eden became, at 38, the youngest Foreign Secretary since

Tolstoy's Count Vronsky [a glamorous character in the novel Anna Karenina] were alighting at the platform".[10]

In addition to the homburg, Eden was associated with the mid-1930s fashion for wearing a white linen

lounge suit,[1]: 376  while the poet and novelist Robert Graves likened Eden's moustache to those of film stars Ronald Colman, William Powell and Clark Gable: "the new moustache was small, short and carefully cut, sometimes slightly curved over the lip at either end, sometimes making a thin straight line".[1]: 376  When Eden visited New York City in 1938 he was "deluged with fan mail from teenage college girls to elderly matrons", while women reporters and society editors "gushed about his classic features, his long dark eyelashes, his limpid eyes, his clear skin, his wavy hair, his charm and magnetism".[11] In another American city, a display of homburgs in a shop window was adorned with the sign "Welcome to Anthony Eden".[11] In Amsterdam the hat became known as the "Lord Eden".[1]

"Heads like his"

The journalist

Lord Runciman on his arrival by train at Wilson station for talks with the Czechoslovak government.[14] In 1939, writing to a former classmate during a European tour, the future United States President John F. Kennedy remarked that he had not been doing much work, "but have been sporting around in my morning coat, my 'Anthony Eden' black homburg and white gardenia".[15]

The "glamour boys"

There were those who believed, like Muggeridge, that Eden's rapid rise through the political hierarchy owed as much to image as to substance.[16]: 461–462  In the period between his resignation and his return to the government on the outbreak of war in 1939, Eden and his acolytes, who, broadly speaking, favoured a tougher stance against Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, were often referred to as "the glamour boys".[17][18] Harold Nicolson, a member of this group who found Eden's approach ineffectual, observed that Eden was missing "every boat with exquisite elegance".[19]

Some contemporary observers thought they detected a "prima donna" streak in Eden's attitude and appearance.

R. A. Butler, alluding to Eden's parentage and highly strung nature, is said to have remarked, "that's Anthony – half mad baronet, half beautiful woman".[29][30]

The writer and critic A. N. Wilson, who observed in 2008 that Eden was "easily the best-looking individual, of either sex, to occupy [the] office [of Prime Minister] in the twentieth century", noted also that he was "the only male Prime Minister known to have varnished his fingernails".[31] However, there is little objective evidence that Eden was unduly vain about his clothes; he merely dressed well. As for his homburg, which Deedes noted that he wore at an angle,[32] his official biographer Sir Robert Rhodes James, wrote that "to him it was just a hat".[33]

The hat as a trademark

External image
image icon Going it alone: Vicky cartoon, 12 April 1954, at Gettyimages.co.uk.
John Dulles is depicted as a bull in a china shop, while Eden (identified by his hat) looks on.

Even so, the image stuck. The hat became a "trademark" in the public mind, assisting instant recognition, and was one of the most recognisable features of contemporaneous political cartoons.

Knight of the Garter in 1954) visited the Lancashire hat-making town of Atherton.[34] At various points of the Suez Crisis the following year, cartoons depicted him in the same hat for which he had become known twenty years earlier. In one by Vicky for the New Statesman, a behatted but otherwise barely clothed Eden was shown in the biblical Garden of Eden being tempted with an apple by a young Frenchwoman, presumably Marianne, in the guise of Eve.[35] (The allusion was to French pressure for joint action to reverse the unilateral nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Egyptian President Nasser
.)

"Hush! here comes Anthony"

In 1951, two days after Eden's re-appointment as Foreign Secretary, Vicky had, in similar vein, employed the imagery of

overthrown in 1952) and the ancient Queen Cleopatra, as the embodiment of the Egyptian state, were shown to have torn up the treaty of 1936 which provided for Britain's military presence in the Suez Canal zone.[36] The caption, "Hush! here comes Anthony", was taken from Shakespeare.[37] (This cartoon was a reference to Egypt's denunciation of the treaty on 9 October 1951, thus posing an early problem for Winston Churchill's incoming government.[16]
)

Hatless

Journalist and social historian Anne de Courcy has written of Chamberlain that "he did not smoke a pipe, nor, as Anthony Eden did, always wear the same distinctive hat, though cartoonists made the most of his ever-present umbrella".[38] (On Guy Fawkes Night 1938 the future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, then a rebellious Conservative MP, burned an image of Chamberlain with rolled umbrella, which he topped with his own homburg.[6]) In fact, as photographs from the late 1930s onwards show, Eden frequently wore no hat at all. This was a habit that he shared with few other public men at the time. It was one of several aspects of modernity noted by John Betjeman in his poem on the death in 1936 of King George V, who, like Edward VII before him, had worn a homburg for shooting:[39]

At the new suburb stretched beyond the runway
... a young man [King Edward VIII] lands hatless from the air".[40]

The Anthony Eden in popular culture

The Anthony Eden hat was essentially an accessory of the 1930s and 1940s, although, in the mid-1950s, the homburg came to be associated with the melancholic image of comedian

communist historian Eric Hobsbawm put it, "Suez and the coming of rock-and-roll divide twentieth century British history".[44]

"Who wears an Anthony Eden hat today?"

In the 1960s, when hats for men were becoming unfashionable, former diplomat Geoffrey McDermott asked, with evident disdain, "who wears an Anthony Eden hat today? Only

Kosygin. And, of course, all those Carleton-Browne[45] characters at the F[oreign] O[ffice]".[46] Memories did linger, however. In 2006, the son of a Wolverhampton ironmonger recalled a very wet evening on which Enoch Powell, the local Member of Parliament throughout the 1950s and 60s, required a new washer for a tap: "his moustache quivered with urgency and water streamed from the broad rim of his black Homburg hat."[47]

Another well-known wearer of an "Anthony Eden" was

Mrs Pike [his lover] says it makes me look like Eden".[48]

In 1969 the

Princess Marina". This was written by Ray Davies
(b. 1944), who was only twelve when Eden resigned as Prime Minister, and contained the lines:

He's bought a hat like Anthony Eden's
Because it makes him feel like a Lord[49]

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

On 10 September 2001,

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?[50]

Notes

  1. ^
    ISBN 978-1-85754-664-4
    .
  2. BBC 1
    TV, 23 September 2010
  3. Yes, Minister
    showed a long line of bowler hatted civil servants lining up to board an aircraft for a diplomatic mission to the Middle East, long after such hats (or any hats) would have been worn in reality ("The Moral Dimension", 1982).
  4. ^ See, for example, Hannah Pakula (1995) An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick. Keith Middlemas refers to Edward VII's "cultivat[ing] a meticulous interest in questions of fashion.... During his reign he gave the seal of approval to the Norfolk jacket, the Tyrolean hat and the grey felt hat [i.e., the homburg]" (Edward VII, 1975).
  5. ISBN 978-0-7153-7123-7
    .
  6. ^
    ISBN 978-1-4090-5932-5
    .
  7. Lord Cranborne
    's country estate in Dorset, she was struck by his tweed pinstriped trousers.
  8. Peter Catterall
    , 2003)
  9. ^ For example, Cecil Beaton, Diary, October 1956 (quoted in Hugo Vickers (1994) Loving Garbo)
  10. ISBN 978-1-4464-7695-6
    .
  11. ^
    ASIN B0000CJ4ZO
    .
  12. ISBN 978-0-00-211804-0
    .
  13. ^ Sir Henry Channon, diary, 14 June 1938
  14. ISBN 978-1-84737-008-2
    .
  15. ISBN 978-0-7139-9803-0
    .
  16. ^
    ISBN 978-0-340-69139-7
    .
  17. ^ Sir Henry Channon, diary, 1 & 3 November 1938.
  18. ISBN 978-0-297-85194-3
    .
  19. ISBN 978-0-224-06218-3
    .
  20. ISBN 978-0-340-50853-4
    .
  21. ^ His snobbery was such that he had professed himself unable to imagine "anything more middle class" than the contents of a greenhouse on King George V's estate at Sandringham. Diary entry following a visit to Sandringham in 1923: see David Faber (2005) Speaking for England
  22. ^ Lindsay, David Alexander Edward (2 November 1938), Journal
  23. ISBN 978-0-297-78955-0
    .
  24. ISBN 978-0-00-733774-3
    .
  25. AIDS in 1985: see, for example, Gyles Brandreth
    , diary, 21 January 1979 (The Diary of a Lifetime, 2009).
  26. ^ Dear Bill (BBC TV, 1994)
  27. ^ Suez: A Very British Crisis (BBC TV, 16 October 2006)
  28. ^ Quoted in The Times, 10 October 2009
  29. ^ Quoted in Patrick Cosgrave (1981) R. A. Butler; Wikiquote. There has been speculation over the years that, in fact, Eden may have owed his looks to George Wyndham, a politician and aesthete whom he was considered by some to closely resemble, and with whom his mother was rumoured to have had an affair: see, e.g., John Charmely (1989) Chamberlain and the Lost Peace. Eden's most recent biographer notes that Eden could have inherited his temper and aesthetic sensibilities from either Wyndham or Sir William Eden: D.R. Thorpe (2003) Eden.
  30. ^ However, Butler had a habit of making such observations, once asking historian Richard Thorpe, "How was Harold Macmillan when you met him? Was he the Duke's son-in-law or the crofter's great-grandson?": D. R. Thorpe (2010) Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan
  31. ^ A. N. Wilson (2008) Our Times 1953–2008. Wilson, who does not give his source for the information about Eden's nails, observed several years earlier, with reference to the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, that "there is always something a little disconcerting about politicians such as the late Anthony Eden who are too flashily attractive" (The Daily Telegraph, 18 February 2001).
  32. ISBN 978-1-4050-4085-3
    .
  33. ^ Robert Rhodes James (1986) Anthony Eden. There was, for example, a contrast between Eden's almost accidental glamour and that of Neville Chamberlain's father, Joseph (1836–1914), who, as the journalist and broadcaster Andrew Marr has written, "adored a crowd and marketed himself for a mass audience. His [Chamberlain's] dandyish black velvet coat, soon adorned with an orchid, his scarlet necktie, and above all his monocle, became as well known as Churchill's hat and cigar, Harold Wilson's pipe or Margaret Thatcher's handbag would be": Marr (2009) The Making of Modern Britain.
  34. ISBN 978-0-297-85193-6
    .
  35. ^ See Hugh Thomas, The Suez Affair (Pelican edition, 1970)
  36. ^ 29 October 1951: see D. R. Thorpe (2003) Eden
  37. ^ Shakespeare, William (1607), "I.ii", Antony and Cleopatra
  38. R. V. Jones
    (1978) Most Secret War.
  39. ISBN 978-0-374-10198-5
    .
  40. ^ "The Death of King George V" (1936)
  41. ^ See A. N. Wilson (2008) Our Times
  42. ^ The Happiest Days of Your Life, Act II
  43. ^ Clarissa, Lady Eden, quoted by Cecil Beaton: Vickers (1994) Loving Garbo
  44. ISBN 978-0-14-100409-9
    .
  45. ^ Carlton-Browne of the F.O. was a comedy film of 1958 starring Terry-Thomas.
  46. ISBN 9780090962501
    .
  47. ^ David Thomas in The Oldie, December 2006; The Oldie Annual 2008
  48. ^ In another well observed scene in Dad's Army, Wilson, in his homburg, is seen alongside Mainwaring in his bowler and Private Pike (Ian Lavender), with his penchant for American gangsters, in a trilby ("High Finance", 1975).
  49. ^ In 1967 "Homburg" was the title of Procol Harum's follow up record to their worldwide hit "A Whiter Shade of Pale", though this did not allude to Eden.
  50. ^ Vasagar, Jeevan (6 March 2003). "Congratulations, you've just won £1m. But we don't want to give you that, do we? Three in court accused of using coded coughs to win TV show". The Guardian.

External links

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