In praise of the moustache
Jack McLean
The scene is a small bungalow in a remote and isolated area of the Malay Federated States sometime in the late 1920s. It is dinner at eight. ‘You needn’t have bothered to dress on my account, you know’, said Cooper. ‘I didn’t. I always dress for dinner,’ Mr Warburton said. ‘Even when you’re alone?’. ‘Especially when I’m alone,’ replied Mr Warburton, with a frigid stare.
This is from a short story by Somerset Maugham and indeed echoed what happened in many anxiously upper-middle-class households of the day. The niceties had to be observed if civilisation were to continue. Thus it is with myself and shaving.
Some years back when I was rather gravely ill (I had been diagnosed as having cancer which fortunately, considering, turned out to be a virulent form of pneumonia), I still, shakily it is true, shaved every morning. I scraped the chin each day and felt, well, better for it. Apart from the upper lip. There I preserved the bristling hair. The moustachios. If for women the hair on their head is a crowning glory, for a man the mouser is an admittedly a more feeble attempt at such a display.
There was a time, late Victorian and Edwardian, when no man calling himself one was without that adornment beneath his neb. When I was a child I used to see the old men outside Edith Cottage in Cathcart, clad in their waistcoats and gold Alberts and fobs and especially wearing great moustaches, often curled and waxed. These were veterans of the Great War and were much-prized specimens in the neighbourhood. Some younger men, veterans indeed of the second world war, had moustaches too, piddling affairs, pencil thin, jaunty and rakish enough, but lacking the gravitas and majesty of the older chaps magnificences.
Even back then, in the early 1950s, moustaches were not all that common. They were the proclivity of older ex-servicemen, former fighter pilots down on their luck, or commissionaires outside grand hotel doors, or infamous spivs. Or sometimes film stars. I don’t know about you but somehow Clark Gable and Errol Flynn didn’t look like themselves until they grew moustaches. As for David Niven? There is a splendid Wodehouse novel in which Bertie Wooster tries to grow a moustache much to the dismay of Jeeves. Bertie cites the Hollywood star’s upper lip. Jeeves is untouched and states that though David Niven’s appearance is enhanced by his hirsute adornment, ‘you are not Mr Niven, sir’. Needless to say, Bertie eventually shaves himself clean.
I note that, today, no young men have moustaches, though few seem to shave every day at all. It is not fashionable to have a moustache.
Beards yes, moustaches no. (There are even people, such as Muslims, who have beards and no moustaches which strikes me as getting everything wrong and suggests that Islam as a religion is somehow lacking in, at least aesthetic, sense).
My two brothers, who are by now seen as elderly, both have moustaches. (Actually the younger one sports a Fernando Rey French Connection beard as well but this is his rather successful attempt at disguising his jowels). And I too have a moustache, a good one I might add, and I have not shaved the spot since I was 19. I grew it at a time when moustaches were very unfashionable indeed, sort of regarded as pantomime props. I grew it because I suffered from a persistent cold sore on my upper lip and couldn’t shave there. I became the butt of all and derision surrounded me for months. Until suddenly the Beatles came out with their new album, ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, much awaited for some six months, and heralded the world with all four of them displaying moustaches. Overnight I was the toast of Notting Hill (where I was living at the time). Immediately all young fellows took to growing mousers.
Now of course the first few weeks of moustache growing means far more and worse of derision: it means hilarity from all. ‘Is that a football team? Eleven a side?’ or ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting long trousers next?’
and other such sallies. But me, I already had the grown, indeed grown-up, version. I was a celebrity. Young girls in mini-skirts fingered my moustache, if nothing else really, lingeringly. Out of that experience only one thing lingers in fact: my moustache.
There are those who wonder why I have a well-trimmed moustache. I did not always trim it. Actually I once had a moustache which would have put Lord Kitchener and Kaiser Bill to shame. Here I will reveal why I have neatly trimmed mustachios.
A good many years ago I was awarded a post-diploma at Edinburgh College of Art where I was a student. I was then given a studio at the college’s premises at Inverleith and I shared it with a young woman, also a post-diplomate. She was young and very, very, beautiful, with lovely sensuous lips which she painted, somewhat unfashionably at the time, a vivid shade of carmine, and I fell in love at the first sight of her. The girl was also, besides being beautiful, profoundly deaf, which is why she wore such very red lipstick because it helped other deaf people to read her lips. I did not know this at the time and was therefore much non-plussed when she wrote me a note after I had tried in vain to talk to her. ‘I cannot read your lips’, the note said, ‘because your moustache, splendid as it is, means I cannot read your lips at all’. That night I borrowed my landlady’s nail scissors and trimmed the growth to a, well, David Niven style moustache. Which I have maintained ever since.
Now when I have told this tale, then and since, many people have commended me for my gracious sensibility, for my decency and concern for others. That is all my arse really. But she was, I can assure you, blind to my allure, and very deaf indeed to my plighting of the troth. Ironically she married not long after we had first met, an agricultural accountant. With a beard. I hope she still has her husband. But I still have my moustache.
This is a self-portrait of the author, also known as the Urban Voltaire, with the obligatory moustache (and cigarette)
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