I am in two minds about moustaches. The matter does not trouble me unduly nor keep me awake at night and it is truly not a matter of world-shattering importance. I merely cannot decide whether to approve the clean-shaven look or to prefer the hairy upper lip. Of course the expression “clean-shaven” is itself a value-judgement and so the argument may already be unfairly biased against the ‘tache. Let me be as impartial as possible.
One of the problems is the occasional rabid exhibitionism of the moustached. I see on the telly those World Moustache Competitions wherein some Indian appears with a hideous 5-foot growth of which he is inordinately proud. And who can forget Tory MP and bounder Sir Gerald Nabarro, handle-barred, booming and bumptious? He gave handle-bar moustaches a bad name, yet I know a gifted golfer and general good egg with just such a fine ‘tache and I always enjoyed comedian “Professor” Jimmy Edwards, similarly adorned.
It would be wrong of us to treat moustaches as comic in any way. Of the 20 male prime ministers of Britain since 1901, as serious a bunch as you would wish, 9 were moustachioed and 11 clean-shaven. Balfour and Bonar Law had luxuriant growth of the walrus variety, Campbell-Bannerman, Lloyd George, Macdonald and Chamberlain were conventionally hairy, Attlee’s was rather a feeble, austere effort and MacMillan’s wore a decidedly moth-eaten aspect. Much the best was Anthony Eden’s, well groomed and dapper, indeed when I first saw Eden in 1956 I thought him the most handsome and distinguished man I had ever clapped eyes upon – pity about his sadly disastrous Suez premiership.
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| ANTHONY EDEN |
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| ARTHUR BALFOUR |
In the modern era British premiers have tended to be clean-shaven, but John Major had a tantalisingly empty upper lip, which to my mind cried out to be occupied by a hirsute rug, but it was not to be – probably Central Office advised against. The great orator, Enoch Powell had a thin moustache through which he was able to sneer and declaim in his learned, logical, memorable, and sometimes unhinged, way. Oddly, almost all Britain’s wartime commanders sported those trim Army moustaches, Alanbrooke, Alexander, Montgomery, Wavell, Maitland Wilson and Auchinleck. Did this give them an unfair advantage?
I will ignore Latino moustaches as an ineradicable part of the local scene, but certainly outside the UK moustaches hold a place, sometimes of honour, sometimes of shame. In the shame corner one would nominate Adolf Hitler of the notorious toothbrush, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Joseph Stalin while in the honour corner one recognises Charles de Gaulle, Chaim Weizmann and Albert Einstein. Somewhere in between stands baffled, earnest Greek premier George Papandreou and hero/villain General Franco. The Russians have a sinister line in the murderous moustachioed, though horrible Beria and dubious Khrushchev and Brezhnev were clean-shaven. In the United States the luscious mo’s of Teddy Roosevelt and Howard Taft must have sated the electorate - since Woodrow Wilson all US Presidents have been clean-shaven.
Touching upon the US takes us to Hollywood. I ignore the here-today-gone tomorrow moustachioed (“mustache “in the local lingo) like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, who will be clean-shaven in a few months. I want to honour the pencil-moustached heart throbs like Clark Gable and Errol Flynn, supplemented by pros like William Powell and David Niven and more recent stars like Tom Selleck. Gable and Flynn set the hearts of a whole generation a-flutter and I ascribe this mainly to the aphrodisiac influence of those manly moustaches.
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| CLARK GABLE |
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| ERROL FLYNN |
The truth is that to wear or not to wear a moustache is essentially a matter of transient fashion. It may take 2 weeks to grow a recognisable moustache, time enough to enter the in-crowd. My own experience is that wives do not much care for prickly ‘taches especially in passionate clinches. There is also a prejudice against a moustache which harbours hay-fever mucus in its upper storeys and yesterdays’ soup in its lower ones. There are elaborate china cups which provide a resting place for the moustache when tea or soup is to be drunk, but I confess to being a messy eater and these articles were of limited assistance to me.
My grandfatherly advice to any young man is to grow a moustache and see how it suits you and do not hesitate to take the razor to it at the first sign of trouble. Above all, never compliment your lady-friend on her moustache; the loss of her sense of humour will be instantaneous…..
SMD
4.10,11
Text copyright Sidney Donald 2011
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