111. Masters and Consorts visit to the Hatters, 5 February 2024

Clive Grimley, Master Glover, kindly arranged for a group of current Masters and Consorts to visit Lock & Co, Hatters, on St James’s Street.

From the outside the shop front looked as if it were located on Diagon Alley, and the inside was no disappointment, with a charming tinkly chiming antique grandfather clock, flights of stairs that creaked (or was that our knees?) and an attic room crammed with fabrics and feathers.

 We were greeted with champagne (of course!) and by Master Feltmaker Simon Wilkinson and Past Master Nigel Lock Macdonald. 

Simon was sporting a pink topper with a yellow band, the symbol of a charity funding brain tumour research: https://braintumourresearch.org/.  Why not wear a hat on Wear a Hat Day (28 March) and donate to this worthy cause?  (Hats worn for this can be more subtle!)

Nigel is a seventh-generation descendant of the Lock family, and has been Chairman of the company for nearly 40 years. His wife Maggie was also present, wearing a discreet felt hat as she often does at Livery/Consort events.

Nigel gave us a whistle-stop history of his company, founded in 1676 – the oldest hatting business in the world, the oldest retail shop in London, and the 34^th oldest family-owned business in the world.  The area round St James’s Palace was developed in the early 1660s as a speculative venture by Henry Jermyn, the First Earl of St Albans – one that paid off handsomely as, following the Great Plague of 1665 and then the Great Fire of London in 1666, hundreds of wealthy people moved out to the “West End” of London.  This area then became the “go to” location for gentleman’s clubs and shops.  Early customers at Lock’s included the great Whig families of Marlborough, Bedford, Devonshire and Walpole.  Slightly more recently, regular customers included Nelson, Churchill and Charlie Chaplin, and doubtless gangsters (see photo below).

Hats were important as a status symbol, for when the City of London grew too large for everyone to know everybody else it was important to know who the top dogs were and where people fitted into society.  Initially, hats were worn over wigs, but a tax on wig powder stopped the fashion of wearing wigs.  Some hats were very tall, or had a large brim which could be pinned up in a variety of ways, or stiffened.  The Industrial Revolution not only heralded manufactured hats but also brought hat-wearing to a wider group of people.  The first top hat was worn in 1797 and caused quite a stir; when Prince Albert adopted it as his chosen headwear in 1850 that style became very popular but unfortunately had the effect of killing the homeworking hat trade in the north-west which still made felted hats by hand.

The bowler hat was designed in response to a request from Edward Coke, who managed the estate at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, for protective headgear for his gamekeepers in case of altercation with poachers.  Lock’s commissioned a prototype from William Bowler in Southwark, and when Edward Coke came to examine it he jumped on it to see if it would collapse.  It didn’t, so he ordered many of them.  Lock’s still refer to this design of hat as a Coke hat.  It became the most popular hat in the world, with even cowboys wearing this design, rather than the traditional cowboy hat.  (Think Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy!)

Ladies’ hats were initially less important than the way the hair was worn, but became more fashionable from the late 1700s.  The French Revolution had the effect of diminishing the more exuberant hats of this time, but then flamboyant hats, rather than hair, became more fashionable, particularly once ostrich feathers from South Africa became available.

Queen Victoria adopted a simpler form of dress so hats became less ostentatious for a while, until towards the end of her reign when hats grew steadily larger and more ornately decorated, only to be halted by the First World War. The 1920s were quite minimalist, with shorter, bobbed hair for ladies, and cloche hats were the height of fashion.  Although hats then became larger again, hat wearing by ladies reduced significantly – although the wearing of men’s hats was at its peak.

Enough of hat history – our large group divided into three and we were shown round the compact premises.  Downstairs contained many designs of men’s hats – fedoras, fezzes, panamas – and also a fearsome “conformateur” which measured the circumference of a person’s crown, pricking out the shape on paper.  Exhibited were shapes of the heads of various historical figures and celebrities. 

At the top of the shop was the workshop for ladies’ hats, with various magnificent constructions in progress, and shelves stacked with boxes of feathers, fabrics, flowers and various frilly bits.  Surprisingly, Lock’s had only been making ladies’ hats since 1993.  We learnt that a milliner makes ladies’ hats, a hatter men’s.

The first floor, though, proved to be great fun – a display of ladies’ hats which we could try on!!  These amazing creations made us feel a million dollars.  Alas, none of the ladies made a purchase, but some Masters left with a new hat.

It was a great evening learning about a completely different profession thanks to the Livery.