Summer with the Selvedge Archives: Grasping at Straws
Alasdair Peebles' Collection of Seafaring Styles for Children
Written for Selvedge Issue 47, Sporting
The two young Princes, George and Johnnie, stand on a shingle beach looking out to sea from under the shading brims of their straw summer hats. It’s the year 1910 and they are gazing at the incongruous spectacle of the Russian Tsar taking a bathe in the English channel. The scene comes from Stephen Poliakoff’s elegiac drama The Lost Prince which portrays a society at its zenith, enjoying the carefree prelude of a few short years before being eclipsed by war. The Princes’ elegant straw hats condense a leisured existence of seaside promenades, picnics, tennis and boating parties.
The style is the ‘sailor,’ which was based closely on the white ‘sennet’ hats issued to naval ratings in the second half of the 19th century. The term sennet refers to the plaited fibres of the palm leaf from which these hats were originally made and indeed these pale straws were mostly worn in warmer latitudes; otherwise a black canvas hat was issued to the sailors “according to the nature of the climate in which they may be serving”. Both the black and the white sailors straws were trimmed around the crown with ribbons bearing the name of the ship in gold and these ‘tally’s’ are faithfully copied in the ‘regulation sailor straws’ retailed for children from the 1880s up until the end of the First World War.
The ribbons could foster in their young wearers a purely fictitious sense of enlistment in the royal navy; thus, in LP Hartley’s novel The Shrimp and the Anemone, nine year old Eustace reflects upon the allegiance that he might owe to ‘his’ ship:
“It was too bad of Hilda to leave his hat lying in a pool… Now the ribbon was wet and the “table” of Indomitable, a ship which he obscurely felt he might be called upon at any moment to join, stood out more boldly than the rest.”
Still from Stephen Poliakoffs The lost Prince, BBC.
It was not only the children of royalty and the privileged who wore these maritime inspired straw hats during the twilight years of the 19th Century and the dawn of the 20th. The middle classes, girls as well as boys, adopted them too and they were as ubiquitous and international as the sailor suits they complemented.
“The fashionable straw hat is the sailor shape with crown higher and brim somewhat narrower than last year. Made of split straw, mackinaws and sennets.” Tailor & Cutter, July 1894.
In the 1880’s another style of straw hat became tremendously popular, the boater. Despite its name, the idea that this enduring style developed from the sailors hat is now contested. If there is a kinship, then it is with the narrower-brimmed black tarpaulin hat rather than the white sennet. Straw hats of a similar shape to the boater had in fact been worn by boys and working men since the 1860s. But the rigid horizontal brim and straight sided crown that we recognise as distinctive features of the boater only appear in the 1880s with the introduction of a French hat blocking machine. This fact alone suggests that the boater may have had its origins in France.
By the 1890s the boater had attained popularity across the entire social spectrum – it has been lauded as one of the first truly ‘democratic’ hats. It is only in the 20th century that its association with the uniform of certain public schools and with a ‘bucolic’ collegiate life (memorably portrayed in Brideshead Revisited) has caused it to be laden with class connotations.
Still from Brideshead Revisited, ITV Rex Freatures.
In its heyday it was a truly unisex style – boy’s and girls versions were often indistinguishable. Today the straw boater is perhaps more widely worn by girls, as an item of summer school uniform.
Whether it is a boater or an urbane panama, the romance of the straw hat is inseparable from the material from which it is fashioned. Straw can be made from paper, palm leaf, rice and rye, but in England it is wheat straw that has traditionally been used in the hat trade. From the 18th Century onwards the domestic manufacture of straw hats has been concentrated in the south-east Midlands, in particular in the town of Luton which became so synonymous with the trade that in the late 19th century it came to be known as Strawopolis. Traditional straw boaters are still being made in Luton by the firm Olneys & Co and new styles of straws for children have entered mainstream fashion in recent years in the shape of chirpy, diminutive straw trilbys and cowboy hats.
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Further Information:
Selvedge Issue 47, Sporting is available in print and as a digital download.
A tote bag featuring the cover image for this magazine can be purchased in the Selvedge Goods shop.
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Image Credits:
Lead:
Top row from left to right: Girl's straw boater made by London hat maker H Cooper Smith, circa 1900-1920, Boy's boater in 'rustic' plait made by Thomas Moore & Co expressly for Oundle School, circa 1920-30, Child's 'regulation sailor hat', with HMS Bedford ribbon and button on the crown, circa 1900-1915.
Bottom row from left to right: Child’s straw hat with striped ribbon. The moulded starfish indicates it was seaside wear, circa 1915-1925, Speckled straw hat, with a high crown trimmed with blue ribbon, circa 1900-1915, Boy’s round straw hat trimmed with cream ribbon and embroidered ‘button’ on crown, circa 1900-1920
All further images as credited in captions.