If Walls Could Talk

by Lucy Worsley

  Depilation was another modern-sounding beauty treatment sought by medieval women. All-over removal of body hair (‘in order that a woman might become very soft and smooth and without hairs from the head down’) might be achieved from a recipe made up of cucumber, almond milk and (worryingly) quicklime. Users were warned ‘that it is not to stay too long on the skin, because it causes intense heat’. Identical warnings are still found on hair removal creams today.

  In the Tudor period, Henry VIII had particularly ‘political’ hair, and his frequent changes from the pageboy look to the crop and back again were slavishly copied by his courtiers. In 1520, he heard that Francis I had shaved his head after an injury, so he had his own hair cut very short in sympathy. On another occasion, anxious for a meeting with his ally, he promised not to shave until he and Francis were once again in each other’s company. But Katherine of Aragon, disliking her husband’s tickly chin, made him break his vow. A diplomatic incident nearly ensued, neatly averted by Francis’s mother, Louise of Savoy, who declared that the love the two kings bore one other was ‘not in the beards but in the hearts’.

  Henry went through a daily routine of being shaved by his barber, Penny, probably using a basin with a notch for the neck rather like those discovered in the wreck of the Mary Rose, which you can see in the museum at the Royal Naval Dockyard in Portsmouth today. The basin contained clove-scented water, and Penny also used knives, ivory combs and scissors to carry out his job. Because he was so close to the king, Penny had to keep himself scrupulously clean and healthy, and avoid ‘misguided women’.

  Later on in life, though, with Katherine of Aragon well out of the way, Henry became a regular beard wearer, and he died wearing whiskers. When his coffin was opened in 1813 and his corpse examined, ‘some beard remained upon the chin’.

  Like Henry VIII, his daughters Elizabeth and Mary and their stepmother Katherine Parr were uniformly ginger and proud (though Elizabeth in later life wore dyed wigs: her hair was described as ‘a light colour never made by nature’). Katherine Parr’s hair survives in exceptionally large quantities. Her body, buried at her third husband’s home of Sudeley Castle, was dug up numerous times in the eighteenth century by nosy antiquarians, who cut off various locks of hair and even pulled out a tooth as a souvenir.

  Every Tudor person possessed their own comb because it would have been simply intolerable not to disentangle the inevitable parasites from their hair. In 1602, William Vaughan ascribed awesome powers to the humble comb, recommending that you should ‘comb your head softly and easily with an ivory comb, for nothing recreateth [provides recreation for] the memory more’. Samuel Pepys once got into trouble when he asked his maidservant for a little hairdressing help. He described going ‘after supper to have my head combed by Deb, which occasioned the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world; for my wife, coming up suddenly, did find me embracing the girl’. Later, the vengeful Mrs Pepys literally seized the iron while it was hot: ‘she came to my side of the bed and drew the curtain open, and with the tongs red hot at the end made as if she did design to pinch me with them’.

  The person who cut your hair, your barber, might also have performed more extreme services. The Company of Barber-Surgeons combined two professions concerned with knives. Both would offer home visits, whether it was a haircut or a major piece of surgery that was required. (Doctors were supposed to restrict themselves to the classier business of prescribing medicine, rather than getting splattered with blood as surgeons did.) Barbers and surgeons therefore had overlapping skills, even after their two professions began to diverge. The wig-maker Edmund Harrold of Manchester, who’d trained as a barber, was typical. Some days he would help women struggling to breastfeed by ‘cupping’ their breasts, placing a hot glass over the nipple. Other days he would go out in search of flaxen hair to buy for his wig-making business. A head of long and beautiful hair was a valuable resource for a woman. Even a well-born (but down-on-her-luck) Georgian courtier named Henrietta Howard investigated what she might get for selling hers to a wig-maker, and received an offer of eighteen guineas.

  Just like bathing the body, washing the hair also went through a couple of centuries of extreme disfavour from 1550 onwards. Contemporary doctors greatly ‘misliked’ the ‘bathing of your head in cold water especially in winter’. This chimes in with Randle Holme’s description of the duties of a seventeenth-century barber. He was not to wash anyone’s head, but only to ‘rub the hair with a napkin to dry it from its sweatiness and filth’.

  The age of the Whigs was also an age of wigs. The gentleman’s wig first made its appearance in London in the 1660s: Charles II had grown used to wearing one during his years of exile in fashionable France, and brought the look back with him on his Restoration to the English throne. Samuel Pepys was at first suspicious of the new trend, then tempted, and finally, four years later, he splashed out on a wig of his own. He did so, as he wrote, because ‘the pains of keeping my hair clean is so great’. Wigs worn over a shaven head became the staple headgear of gentlemen: when James Boswell lost his, in 1789, he was devastated and rushed twenty-five miles to buy a replacement (‘I could not long remain an object of laughter’).

  At first wigs were worn mainly by men, but women adopted them too. By 1751, ‘The Black, the Brown, the Fair and Carroty, appear now all in one livery; and you can no more judge of your Mistress’s natural complexion by the Colour of her Hair, than by her Ribbons.’ Even after the wig fell from favour, towards the end of the century, the natural hair was combed, curled, piled and powdered to artificial perfection. ‘Those who had to preserve a genteel appearance spent an hour each day under the hands of the hairdresser,’ wrote Charles Knight about the 1800s, at the tail end of the age of big hair, and the Earl of Scarborough kept an astonishing ‘six French fizeurs, who have nothing else to do than dress his hair’. A duchess visiting London complained vociferously that the city was nothing but ‘knock, knock, knock, all day; and friz, friz, friz all night’. Time spent like this showed, however, that one was in the privileged position of having no business more pressing than preening.

  Why did the wig finally lose favour in the early nineteenth century? A bold theoretician might link the decline of the wig to the decline of absolutism. Along with shoes in which it is impossible to walk and dresses in which it is impossible to sit, hair requiring hours of preparation is reserved for the aristocrat of limitless wealth. After many such people lost their lives at the guillotine in the French Revolution, those surviving lost their nerve.

  Shorn hair has always gone with radical politics, as demonstrated by the eighteenth-century French revolutionaries, the English Roundheads of the previous century and 1970s skinheads. Those governing France after 1789 left off ‘their curls, toupees, and queues; some of them go about with cropped locks like English farmers without any powder’. After the revolution, many unemployed French hairdressers and barbers came over to seek work in a jumpy Britain. Here, their whispering and their caressing of the heads of their clients in many a bedroom caused conservatives to wince. Were these Frenchies spreading dissent along with their powder and pomatum?

  In these perilous times, when you submit your chin to a barber never talk about politics till you ascertain his principles on these matters. It is dangerous to put one’s throat in the mercy of a man armed with a razor, especially if he be a red-hot politician; which all shavers are, without exception.

  As a result, the very profession of hairdressing came in for some striking criticism after 1789. ‘The art and mystery of barbery’ has sunk ‘exceedingly from that high estimation in which it was anciently held’, it was written in 1824. The virtuous, the high-minded and the patriotic simplified their own hairdressing routines, so much so that by 1830 a Bristol newspaper described the hairdresser as no ‘longer the important personage he used to be’. Smooth, simply dressed hair became the mark of gentility in the Victorian age.

  But the menservants who worked in large and lavish households were still
made to wear powder, and grand footmen looked like extras from Cinderella right up to the Second World War. They hated powder and its application:

  They ducked their heads in water, rubbed soap in their hair to make a lather, and combed it stiffly through. Powder puffs came into action as they took turns to dust each other’s hair with either violet powder or ordinary flour. This dried to a firm paste.

  That was Eric Horne, a former footman, writing in 1923. ‘I constantly had a cold in the head’, he went on, ‘through having to re-powder after going out with the carriage, one’s head is seldom dry.’ As well as giving them head colds, footmen thought that powdering discoloured their hair and made them prematurely bald.

  Once the plumbed-in bath made its appearance in the purpose-built bathrooms of the late nineteenth century, new and better shampoos began to be invented, replacing the curious mixtures of cow fat and perfume, or eggs and lemons, which had been used previously. Like dentistry, the art of dressing the hair became the focus of scientific innovation as the Victorian age drew towards its close, and gradually moved out of the home and into the specialist studio.

  The Marcel wave, popular in the 1920s, created a kind of corrugated-iron effect

  It was Monsieur Marcel of France who invented the Marcel wave, or, as it was originally known, his ‘ondulation’ in his Paris salon. He used a pair of ordinary crimping tongs, and it was a German, Karl Nessler, who had the idea of making the ondulation permanent by electrically heating the tongs. So the ‘perm’ was born, and grew to maturity during the craze for short hair amongst the flappers of the 1920s. This step towards liberation was supported by Lady Astor, the first female Member of Parliament. She once had this conversation with her butler:

  One of the housemaids asked if she could have her hair bobbed…

  ‘Why should she want her hair bobbed’, her ladyship demanded.

  ‘I understand it’s the fashion, my lady’.

  ‘Tell her she must keep it as it is, I don’t want fashionable maids’.

  ‘Very well,’ said Mr Lee, ‘but I think I should inform you that if you adopt this intransigent attitude you will shortly be lucky to get housemaids with any hair at all’.

  Lady Astor dissolved into laughter, and told him that the maids could do anything they wanted with their hair.

  Grooming was made easier for men, too, when the cut-throat razor became obsolete. The American King C. Gillette patented the first safety razor with a disposable blade in 1901, and the invention of the electric razor in the 1920s made the then popular pencil-thin moustache and clean cheeks and chin much easier and cheaper to achieve.

  Despite the rise of the hair salon, home hairdressing has not entirely disappeared. In my 1970s childhood we were visited by a hairdresser who came to our house and cut our hair as we sat in state upon the kitchen stepladder. That seems like a time long gone, but a fascinating barometer of the recent recession was provided by the increasing sales of hair dye as people cancelled their expensive salon appointments.

  Hard times send people back to the bathroom to do their own hair.

  20 – War Paint

  I now observed how the women began to paint themselves, formerly a most ignominious thing and only used by prostitutes.

  John Evelyn, 1654

  John Evelyn was charting a change from sobriety to revelry as the serious years of the English Civil War gradually gave way to a more hedonistic and courtly Restoration age. But make-up, long associated with prostitutes, had also been used by royalty and courtiers, actresses and actors. It has always been employed by anyone who needs to play a part before the eyes of the world.

  The Tudors literally didn’t know what they looked like. They had no glass mirrors, only the cloudy view provided by polished steel or water. (The royal peacock, Henry VIII, had several of these metal ‘glasses to look in’.) In such an age, it’s not surprising that an exact likeness was low on the list of the requirements of portraiture. Instead, a portrait presented the patron’s abstract idea of what the sitter should look like: usually richly dressed, stately, well-born; but often strangely inhuman, like a cipher not a person.

  Grand ladies had their skins daily painted lead-white by their maids to make them look more like the stiff, splendid, stately symbols of lineage and power seen in contemporary portraits. Jacobean fashions required lengthy doings ‘with their looking glasses, pinning, unpinning, setting, unsetting, forming and conforming, painting blew veins and cheeks’. Paleness was sought because only the labourer was burned by the sun.

  The seventeenth century saw the rise of rouge, the rosy cheek and reddened lip. But now the arguments began. The Puritans insisted that sexy and more naturalistic make-up was nothing short of sinful. Paint and perfume represented vanity and self-absorption, and covered up an impure soul. One particularly strident Puritan complained that cosmetics were ‘putrifaction’, and that a painted woman was nothing more than ‘a dunghill covered with white & red’. On 7 June 1650, Parliament even proposed ‘an Act against the Vice of Painting and wearing black Patches and immodest Dresses of Women’ (it never actually reached the statute book).

  When Charles II returned from French exile in 1660, he brought with him a daring French fondness for rouge. (His unfortunate queen, Catherine of Braganza, was observed with make-up running down her sweating face during a stifling banquet in 1662.) But red cheeks were still not widely accepted as respectable or even desirable, and ladies’ man Samuel Pepys preferred his prey pale: he found one female acquaintance ‘very pretty, but paints red on her face, which makes me hate her’.

  Beauty spots, or black stick-on patches, were originally used to cover pimples or smallpox scars. But the rules for their shaping and positioning soon developed into quite a sophisticated system of meaning. In the reign of Queen Anne, Whig ladies wore them on one cheek and Tories on the other. According to The Spectator in 1711, one ‘Rozalinda, a famous Whig Partizan’, had the misfortune to possess a natural and ‘beautiful Mole on the Tory Part of her Forehead; which being very conspicuous, has occasioned many mistakes’ about her political allegiance. In the twentieth century, Thomas Harris’s fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, delighting in esoteric knowledge, could still read the language of beauty spots: he was delighted when his beloved FBI agent Clarice Starling acquired a gunpowder scar on her cheek just in the position symbolising ‘courage’.

  The positioning of this lady’s face patches proclaims her Whiggish political tendencies

  It’s easy to forget just how pustular and pock-marked seventeenth-century skin must have been, with sores and pusfilled spots seen on nearly every face, not just upon the faces of adolescents as today. There were no antibiotics to prevent an infected pustule from possibly becoming a long-lasting and dangerous wound. James Woodforde, an Oxford undergraduate, writing in 1751, described how he was given great pain by a boil on his bottom. It was bad enough to give him a fever, until luckily it ‘discharged itself in the night excessively’.

  Lepers and syphilitics, whose conditions showed upon their skins, were thought to be suffering from moral as well as physical decay, so no wonder there was a strong urge to cover up evidence of imperfection. Skin preparations were largely made and applied at home, from asses’ milk to make ‘a woman look gay and fresh, as if she were but fifteen years old’, to bean-flower water, ‘which taketh away the spots of the face’. Not all of them were benign: the ingredients for Eliza Smith’s Georgian recipe for pimple cream included brimstone, while Johann Jacob Wecker suggested a fingernail preparation containing arsenic and ‘Dogs-turd’.

  As well as covering up imperfection, though, make-up heightens femininity, and therefore complements masculinity, so it did become accepted by the men who would otherwise regret their wives looking like prostitutes. ‘Alas! The crimsoning blush of modesty will be always more attractive, than the sparkle of confident intelligence,’ regretted one particularly enlightened male in 1798. ‘Too much’ make-up, though, has in all periods always signalled sexual availa
bility. In 1953, Barbara Pym describes a female character in her novel Jane and Prudence with eyelids ‘startlingly and embarrassingly green, glistening with some greasy preparation’. ‘Was this what one had to do nowadays when one was unmarried?’ the narrator wonders. ‘What hard work it must be.’

  Make-up for men too grew more important in the eighteenth century. Indeed, the new social stereotype of ‘the fop’ was ‘more dejected at a pimple, than if it were a cancer’. He and his over-groomed friends might use a conical mask to protect their lungs from the powder blown over their wigs and coats ‘abundantly’, while their gloves were ‘essenc’d’ and their handkerchiefs ‘perfum’d’. Then it was ‘time to launch, and down he comes, scented like a perfumers shop, and looks like a vessel with all her rigging under sail without ballast’.

  Effeminacy was an accusation frequently flung about in the eighteenth century. While sodomy remained a crime punishable by death, though, men wearing make-up were much more in the mainstream of society than the puritanical, moralistic Victorians would allow them to be. It was the influential Beau Brummell in late eighteenth-century Bath who advocated the scrupulously clean but absolutely unpainted and unperfumed body for men, and this more ‘manly’ ideal persisted throughout the next two centuries.

  Female make-up began finally to lose some of its association with prostitution in the twentieth century. Red lips were (and remain) desirable but dangerous, associated with independence and subversion. The suffragettes, revelling in their newfound sense of feminine freedom, adored shop-bought, very red lipstick, so much more enjoyably risqué than beauty products made at home. The Daily Mirror Beauty Book of 1910 gives a recipe for lip rouge to be made by the timid or thrifty in their own kitchens: boric acid, carmine, paraffin and ‘Otto of Rose, sufficient to perfume’ are all required. As the suffragette movement gained force and credibility, even the staid and respectable ladies’ magazines began to contain discreet adverts for ready-made make-up.