This Little Britain

by Harry Bingham

  HARRIETTE WILSON of GEORGE ‘BEAU’ BRUMMELL

  In July 1791, the Prince of Wales came to Eton College. He wore:

  A bottle green and claret-coloured striped silk coat and breeches and silver tissue waistcoat, very richly embroidered in silver and stones, and coloured silks in curious devices and bouquets of flowers. The coat and waistcoat embroidered down the seams and spangled all over the body. The coat cuffs the same as the waistcoat. The breeches likewise covered in spangles. Diamond buttons to the coat, waistcoat and breeches, which, with his brilliant diamond epaulette and sword, made the whole dress form a most magnificent appearance.

  Magnificent indeed, but tasteful? The outfit sounds like a pearly king outfit, only with diamonds for sequins. Or perhaps the right comparison would be with some modern-day rap artist: all bling and Rolexes.

  It wasn’t that the prince was some mere victim of royal fashions, meekly donning whatever court etiquette thrust his way. On the contrary. He loved his clothes. When he was made colonel-in-chief of his own regiment, the 10th Regiment of Light Dragoons, ‘The Prince of Wales’s Own’, he took the opportunity to design not only his own uniform, but those of every man under him. He chose extravagantly braided, frogged and epauletted jackets and a fur pelisse or cloak, all adorned with lashings of white silk and silver facings. In case the effect wasn’t splendid enough, the ensemble was topped off by a ‘Tarleton’—a helmet that threw together a leopardskin turban, a peaked leather cap, a silver clasp and a Roman-style crest of real fur. One single outfit alone could easily cost £300, or £20,000 in today’s money.

  Excessive as these fashions were, they represented only the latest effusion in a long line of male ostentation. Indeed, the only real challenge to such excess came from the two great revolutionary societies of the age, France and America. In both places, a new, pared-down, consciously democratic style had emerged, based (curiously enough) on the look of an English country gentleman: riding boots, close-fitting breeches, buff waistcoat, blue coat. To wear such things in any fashion-conscious spot in Britain was to make a deliberately political gesture, and one hardly likely to be endorsed by the extravagant heir to the British crown.

  Yet Britain had its revolutionaries too, and one in particular: George Bryan (later ‘Beau’) Brummell. Brummell had been at Eton in 1791. He’d secured a junior commission in the 10th Light Dragoons in 1794, where he had come to be on intimate terms with the prince himself. When the prince got married the following year, Brummell was one of his three best men.* Brummell’s army career was short-lived, however: he left the regiment in 1798, and shortly thereafter took a house in a fashionable area of London. And then, he dressed. He dressed in his own particular style, in his own inimitable way. And almost everything he did overturned convention, challenged the foppishness that had ruled from the royal court down.

  For one thing, he washed. All over, every day. He came to avoid perfume altogether. He shaved himself. Meticulously, using tweezers to pluck any stray offending hairs. In an age of no plumbing but plentiful manservants, all this was strange enough, but it was his style of dressing which really seized the imagination of the young, rich and fashionable. Brummell’s dress code was revolutionary in its simplicity. He wore white shirts, white neckcloths, a white or pale waistcoat, tight-fitting pale-coloured breeches or pantaloons, and black riding boots. Topping off the ensemble was a coat in dark blue, cut high at the front, and forming tails at the back. That was it. White, black and dark blue. No bottle-green, no claret-red, no primrose-yellow. No silver facings, no gilt frogging, no emeralds or diamonds, no swags and festoons of braiding.

  The style relied on perfection in detail. That white linen had to be scrupulously white to pass muster. That was why Brummell insisted on ‘country washing’: town-dried linen risked being speckled with coal smoke. Even so, linen needed frequent changes to maintain the look and keeping it simple didn’t mean cheap. As one German visitor to London complained:

  An elegant then requires per week, twenty shirts, twenty-four pocket handkerchiefs, nine or ten pairs of ‘summer trousers’, thirty neck handkerchiefs…a dozen waistcoats and stockings à discretion. I see your housewifely soul aghast. But such a dandy cannot get on without dressing three or four times a day…

  Brummell himself probably exceeded these basic requirements. A neckcloth had to be tied absolutely right to be acceptable. The line of the cloth against the neck, the tie of the knot, the fall of the ends—all had to be perfect. If one attempt failed, it was no use having another go with the same cloth, as creases would reveal the short cut. As Brummell became ever more widely known, it became a fashionable pastime to come and watch him dress—so fashionable, indeed, that the portly prince himself was often to be found in Brummell’s rooms at Chesterfield Street, watching the ritual and mixing with others in the first rank of London society. With an audience, the theatricality of the performance increased. Robinson, Brummell’s valet, used to leave his master’s room with an armful of rejected neckcloths, saying sadly to the inquisitive, ‘These, sir? These are our failures.’

  If the style was limited in palette, it was remorselessly classical in cut. If the classical statuary of Greece and Rome revealed perfection in the male body, the purpose of Brummell’s tailoring was to bring out that perfection in clothes: revealing what was best to reveal, disguising or flattering what was imperfect. Coats were padded, stitched, cut and sewn to produce the perfect form, always suggesting the musculature that lay beneath. Collars came to be cut separately from the coat and sewn on, so that the fabric of the collar would sit in line with the wearer’s neck muscles. Lapels thrust out from the chest like imitation pectorals. Shoulders were carefully but subtly padded. The cut-away bottom of the coat emphasized a narrow, athletic waist.

  Nor did such subtle flattery stop at the crotch. On the contrary, pantaloons or britches were worn almost painfully tight. Corset-style stitching at the back kept the fabric taut in one dimension. Braces (an innovation of Brummell’s) and stirrup straps beneath the feet kept the fabric taut in the other. The effect, of course, was to emphasize a gentleman’s equipment (and no doubt his socks too, if the equipment was lacking). The modern pair of trousers is a direct descendant of those pantaloons.

  Brummell wasn’t a particularly wealthy man, given the circles he moved in. His fortune—about £2.5 million in modern terms—was soon supplemented by gambling. When the gambling winnings turned into losses, and perhaps as his syphilis started to act on his mind, his place in the first flight of society began to slip. He allowed petty quarrels with the prince to escalate out of control. The coup de grâce came when the prince came to one of Brummell’s parties without acknowledging his host. Brummell called loudly to the prince’s companion, Lord Alvanley, ‘Alvanley, who’s your fat friend?’ The prince never forgave him. When, finally, Brummell became unable to pay his gambling debts, one of his creditors went to his club and told everyone there that Brummell had behaved in an ungentlemanlike manner. The message was clear: pay up, fight a duel or leave the country. Brummell left for France, never to return. He died ill, poor and half mad with syphilis in 1840.

  But his style is with us still. In the capital city of the world’s most influential nation, Brummell’s London-made fashions set the tone for Europe and beyond. His severely restricted colour palette still sets the global standard today. His neckcloths evolved into collars and tie. The waistcoat gradually faded away. Pantaloons became trousers. The emphasis on tailoring not ornament, classical form not romantic showiness, has remained unaltered. The style of the modern business suit is Brummell’s style, brought quietly up to date. For all that men’s fashions have relaxed and expanded over the last few decades, it’s still unthinkable that the predominant style in the boardroom, parliament or a night at the opera should be anything other than a subtle variant on Brummell’s tailored monochrome—so much so that we have quite got used to the extraordinary sight of Japanese businessmen and African politicians walking around in British national dress.


  It’s not just the business suit in which you can see his mark. James Dean’s Rebel without a Cause seems as far from Regency London as you can get. But is it? Dean’s character wore clothes in Brummell’s own colours: blue jeans, crisp white T-shirt, black leather jacket. The look was, as Brummell’s was, almost military in its spareness. It depended, as Brummell’s did, on spotless whites and precisely the right cut for trousers and jacket. It called attention to the male physique—broad shoulders, tight waist, flat stomach. The fact is that Brummell so deeply influenced our concept of male costume that even when we think we escape it, we often turn back to it by a different route.*

  And he did more than that. He created a certain masculine ideal which remains with us still. James Bond is Brummell’s version of a hero: drily witty, sophisticated to the point of snobbery, impeccably tailored, unruffled. This masculine ideal has become worldwide in its scope, to such a degree that it’s easy to mistakenly see it as nothing more than a universal archetype. There is something universal in the model, of course, but the precise twist is notably British all the same. Contrast Bond with, for example, the Bruce Willis character in Die Hard. The latter is carefully, deliberately anti-Bond. He’s dirty, sweaty, rejecting refinement in speech or manners. What’s more, Willis’s hero is counterpointed by the effetely sophisticated, European baddie, played by Briton Alan Rickman. In effect, the film relates how the all-American Joe Six-pack fights and defeats the ghost of Beau Brummell. For all that Willis won that particular fight, Brummell’s ghost lives energetically on.

  * After his wedding night, the prince boasted to Brummell and others that, on first seeing him naked, his new wife had exclaimed, ‘Mon Dieu, qu’il est gros!’ But was it appropriate to boast? The phrase might mean one of two very different things: ‘My God it’s big!’ or ‘My God, he’s fat!’

  * It was also a Briton who invented haute couture for women. The Briton was a Lincolnshire man, Charles Worth, who set up shop in Paris in 1858. Worth’s innovation was to create collections of designs, from which wealthy customers could make their choice. Before that, every dress had been made to the customer’s own specification. Worth and his sons are also credited with the invention of the catwalk show. For all that, the centre of women’s fashion has always been Paris, never London.

  CONCLUSION

  AGE AND LIBERTY

  There are many ways to tell a story. One biographer of Bill Gates might, for instance, want to write a biography slanted towards the more geeky, technical aspects of Gates’s career; another might emphasize things financial; another might want to tell a corporate story, about the rise and rise of Microsoft; another still might be most interested in Gates’s philanthropy, and want to leave aside any detailed account of where his billions came from. It would be hard to argue with any of these approaches. On the contrary, each, in its own terms, makes eminent good sense. Yet it would be almost impossible to imagine any halfway sensible biography of the great man which didn’t at least make it plain (i) that Bill Gates was the world’s richest man; (ii) that, in Windows, he’d built the world’s most widely used operating system; (iii) that his company was one of the largest in the world; and (iv) that his charitable giving was greater than anyone else’s ever. In short, any half-sensible biography would give due prominence to those things that make Gates special, those things that most justify the biography’s very existence.

  When it comes to biographies of individual human beings, this ordinary common sense is followed to the letter. When it comes to biographies of nations, however, good sense seems to fly out of the window. Perhaps because national populations are going to be interested in their own stories come what may, historians (and not just historians of Britain) don’t spend much time looking sideways—asking what makes country X different from country Y, what individuates this particular national story from any other. Although there are some tremendous narrative histories which follow a basically traditional pattern, it’s easy for we amateurs to grow dizzy after a certain point. Read a narrative history of medieval England, then quickly read one about medieval France, and most readers will admit to a certain seasickness. The sensation is of a carnival ride in which kings, popes, barons, plots, wars, mistresses, heresies, castles, crusades, uprisings, charters, plagues, murders, sieges, alliances and perfidies pass in a giddy whirl before our eyes. Century merges with century; country with country. The only antidote for this giddiness is perspective: what are the broad themes of change? What makes a country’s particular national history distinctive?

  In Britain’s case, the answers to that latter question are unusually abundant. If one were asked to pick out the most salient single feature in human history since the birth of Christ, it would be hard to avoid picking out industrialization, first of the West, and increasingly now of the rest of the world too. Just below industrialization in importance, any number of historical developments clamour for attention. (I’m talking about the positives here, though there are plenty of negative ones too, notably the increasing destructiveness of weaponry and its international spread, a development that Britain has played a very full part in promoting.) These developments are partial, in the sense that many countries are still too little touched by modernity in its current Western democratic sense, but a partial change is still one heck of a lot better than no darn change at all. A non-exhaustive list of such tidal movements of history would surely include the following:

  The shift from low productivity, subsistence agriculture to a high-productivity, capitalist one.

  The rise of representative democracy.

  Government by the rule of law.

  The birth and development of science.

  The rise and rise of technology.

  The health transition, by which the average human lifespan has doubled or trebled.

  Further below these matters in importance, but still hardly inconsequential, one might want to mention, among other things, the following:

  The development of secure property rights.

  The development of modern public finance.

  The globalization of trade and investment.

  The slow march of freedom of speech to its current position at the front rank of human rights.

  The gradual (and incomplete) abolition of torture and other non-reason-based methods of trial as a means of determining guilt or innocence.

  The gradual (and incomplete) abolition of slavery.

  The enormous reduction in homicide and other serious crime.

  The construction of effective governmental programmes for the relief of poverty and other forms of hardship.

  The British Empire and all that went with it.

  The birth of mass migration and the creation of the Western offshoot countries (the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand).

  The development and spread of a genuine global tongue.

  The reduction of warfare between the Great Powers.

  The diversion of young male testosterone into sporting rather than military or other violent activities.

  I hope it will not have completely escaped the reader’s attention that Britain played more than its share in every one of these developments, and in many cases its role was unquestionably the leading one. It seems to me that these facts are important enough to deserve mention in any biography of Britain, and yet they are also, typically, downplayed. Such things as the Industrial Revolution, empire and the slave trade will get their page space, of course—but what about the health transition? The scientific revolution? The reduction in homicide? The development of a free press and the associated commitment to freedom of speech and thought? The early English development of property rights? The common law’s unique emphasis on the abolition of torture and the corresponding rise in reason-based methods of trial? The transfer of social protection from being a local, religious duty to a national, state one? These things are often mentioned only glancingly, if they’re mentioned at all. Even with such major landmarks as Magna Carta, the discussion often alludes only t
o the charter’s significance in Britain’s constitutional history, as though the event were of purely local, domestic importance, when really it is better understood as marking the birth of one of the most important political developments anywhere, ever. Part of the point of Little Britain is to call attention to the obvious, to relocate our own particular history in the broader sweep of world affairs, to remind ourselves of things we once half knew but have somehow contrived to bury.

  To argue like this is to step instantly into the minefield of contemporary political divisions. Left-wingers are prone to see such arguments as covertly imperialist, intolerant, possibly even racist; hiding a refusal to regret the undoubted brutality inflicted by past Britons on other, less fortunate, peoples. Right-wingers, on the other hand, are likely to see these arguments as biffing those lefties where it hurts; flying the patriotic and—yes, perhaps even imperial—flag with pride. It’s not that I do or don’t agree with these positions, it’s that I genuinely don’t understand either of them. Why should a left-winger want to avoid honouring the abolition of torture? Or the huge and recent expansion in the human lifespan? Or the government’s role in providing poverty relief? If the left doesn’t want to honour such things—and that means in part by taking their history seriously—then what on earth does it wish to honour? My bafflement is equally acute when it comes to that sotto voce right-wing delight. That Britons should want to take pride in their past is understandable, but why should such pride have anything to do with contemporary political divisions? And the notion that celebrating, say, representative democracy should somehow let Britain off the hook for those other, less pretty sides to its history (slavery and all the other forms of colonial violence) is just plain nuts. Democracy was good; slavery was bad; the same country promoted both. Why should this be so hard either to say or to comprehend?