Anthony Eden hat

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Anthony Eden in the mid 1930s

An “Anthony Eden" hat, or simply an “Anthony Eden”, was a silk-brimmed, black felt Homburg of the kind favoured in the 1930s by Anthony Eden, later 1st Earl of Avon (1897-1977). Eden was a Cabinet Minister in the British National Government, holding the offices of Lord Privy Seal 1934-5 and Foreign Secretary 1935-8. He was later Dominions Secretary 1939-40, War Secretary 1940, Foreign Secretary 1940-5 and 1951-5 and Prime Minister 1955-7.

The “Anthony Eden” (rarely “Eden”) was not marketed as such and the name was purely informal, but the use of the term was widespread, entering dictionaries and phase books: for example, it was still listed in the 17th edition of Brewer in 2005. It came into particular vogue among civil servants and diplomats in Whitehall and, to that extent, rather belied the stereotypical view, that lasted until well after the Second World War, of civil servants as a “bowler hat” brigade.

[edit] Eden's style

Eden became, at 38, the youngest Foreign Secretary since Pitt the Younger in the late 18th century. As a relatively youthful politician among mostly much older men, he appeared fashionably dressed, even flamboyant. In 1936 the American magazine Time referred to his "pin-stripe trousers, modish short jacket and swank black felt hat", worn during a diplomatic mission to the League of Nations in Geneva.^[1] Many remarked too on Eden's “film star” appeal, even as late as the 1950s ^[2] when, as Prime Minister, he retained his youthful good looks.^[3] His biographer D. R. Thorpe commented on a photograph of Eden, arriving in Russia by train in hat and fur-lined coat in 1935, that "it seemed to some as if Tolstoy's Count Vronsky [a glamorous character in the novel Anna Karenina] were alighting at the platform".^[4]

[edit] The "glamour boys"

The journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who was not an admirer of Eden, recalled that, among other qualities, "an elegant appearance and an earnest disposition ... equipped him for dazzling advancement ... An astrakhan collar became him. What came to be known as an Anthony Eden hat grew on heads like his".^[5]

Certainly there were those who believed that Eden's rapid rise through the political hierarachy owed as much to image as to substance.^[6] In the period between his resignation from Neville Chamberlain's Cabinet in 1938 and his return on the outbreak of war in 1939, Eden and his acolytes, who, broadly speaking, favoured a tougher stance against Hitler and Mussolini, were often referred to as “the glamour boys”.^[7] Some contemporary observers detected a "prima donna" streak in Eden's appearance; for example, the ageing Earl of Crawford and Balcarres (1871-1940) thought him "vain as a peacock and all the mannerisms of a petit maître [in the sense of a dandy or fop]".^[8] Less prosaically, W F Deedes, a Minister in Eden's Government, remarked half a century later that, in the modern vernacular, Eden would have been called a "smoothie".^[9] 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,^[10] his official biographer Sir Robert Rhodes James, wrote that “to him it was just a hat”.^[11]

[edit] The hat as a trademark

Eden's hat depicted by Vicky during the Suez Crisis of 1956 (cover of Hugh Thomas, The Suez Affair, Pelican edition 1970)

Even so, the image stuck. The hat became a "trademark" in the public mind, assisting instant recognition. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, cartoons often depicted Eden 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.^[12] (The allusion was to French pressure for joint action to reverse the unilateral nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Egyptian President Nasser.)

[edit] "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 Antony and Cleopatra to represent Eden approaching the Egyptian throne in suit and hat. King Farouk (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 ^[13]. The caption, "Hush! here comes Anthony", was taken from Shakespeare ^[14]. (This cartoon was a reference to Egypt's denounciation of the treaty on 9 October 1951, thus posing an early problem for Winston Churchill's incoming Government.^[15])

[edit] Hatless

Journalist and social historian Anne de Courcy has written of Chamberlain that "he did not smoke a pipe, nor, like Anthony Eden did, always wear the same distinctive hat, though cartoonists made the most of his ever-present umbrella".^[16] 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 some other public men of his generation. 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^[17]:

At the new suburb stretched beyond the runway

... a young man [King Edward VIII] lands hatless from the air".^[18]

[edit] The Anthony Eden in popular culture

"Who wears an Anthony Eden hat today?": Wilfred Brambell (right) as Albert Steptoe in Steptoe & Son (BBC TV, 1964-73)

The Anthony Eden hat was essentially an accessory of the 1930s and 40s. The Suez débâcle, followed by Eden's departure from public life in 1957 due to ill health, tended to hasten the drawing of a line that might have seemed inevitable before long in the era of "Angry Young Men", rock 'n' roll and Vespa motor scooters which, according to his wife Clarissa ^[19], kept Eden awake at night. As the left-wing historian Eric Hobsbawm put it, "Suez and the coming of rock-and-roll divide twentieth century British history".^[20]

[edit] "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 Mr Steptoe, Mr Enoch Powell and, rather curiously, [Russian leader] Mr Kosygin. And, of course, all those Carleton-Browne^[21] characters at the F[oreign] O[ffice]".^[22] (As if to corroborate McDermott, the son of a Wolverhampton ironmonger recalled in 2006 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".^[23])

Memories did linger, however. Another well-known wearer of an “Anthony Eden” was Sergeant Arthur Wilson (played by John le Mesurier) in Dad's Army (1968-77), the BBC TV comedy series about the wartime Home Guard, which Eden established in 1940. In one episode, Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe), who, as manager of a bank, wore a bowler, told Wilson that his hair was too long. Wilson replied that "Mrs Pike [his lover] says it makes me look like Eden".

A further example was the song, "She's Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina", written in 1969 by Ray Davies (b.1944), who was only twelve when Eden resigned as Prime Minister. This was recorded by the Kinks on the album Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) and contained the lines:

He's bought a hat like Anthony Eden's

Because it makes him feel like a Lord.

[edit] Notes