London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
Right, that’s some billing.
The Best London Calling Podcast Ever
We think so anyway. See what you think.
Yesterday we did that most British of institutions: the queue.
The fine art of queuing.
Couldn’t be more British, could it?
In every respect.
Except for the word itself.
Queue.
That’s French.
If I were British, I’d feel a little sheepish about that.
“We’re British. We queue. How very French of us.”
At least in name.
And it gets better.
Because the French word queue means “tail.”
And once upon a time that tail wasn’t a line of patient Britons at all.
It was the tail of a wig.
A powdered wig.
Which means two of the most gloriously British institutions you can think of – queuing and powdered wigs – turn out to be French at the root.
That’s awkward.
And irresistible.
Because once you start tugging on that tail, out comes one of the most wonderfully absurd stories in London history.
And British history.
Because British history is full of this sort of thing.
Borrowings.
Thefts.
Acquisitions.
Loot, if you like.
As any speaker of Hindi will tell you, the Brits are the world’s greatest looters.
They even looted the word loot.
Appropriated it.
“We’ll have that word, thank you very much.”
And now here they are again.
Pinching queue from the French.
Which is wonderfully British, really.
Taking a French word for “tail” and turning it into the British national pastime.
And fastening it to one of the oddest, most theatrical, most extravagantly ridiculous fashions London ever saw.
The powdered wig.
And here’s the starter fact.
The crown jewel.
During the reign of George III, the British Army was using something like 6,500 tons of flour a year for hair powder.
The British Army.
Not Britain.
The Army.
Six thousand five hundred tons.
To powder wigs.
Think about that.
That’s enough flour to bake about 8.3 million loaves of bread.
Eight point three million.
Enough loaves, piled high enough, to fill St Paul’s Cathedral.
And not to feed the poor.
To dust the rich.
There it is.
Eighteenth-century Britain in miniature.
Empire.
Hierarchy.
Absurdity.
Bread for nobody.
Powder for somebody.
A foodstuff turned into status.
A harvest turned into hairstyle.
Wheat leaving the field, not to become bread, but to become whiteness, hauteur, magnificence, absurdity.
A loaf that never became a loaf.
A loaf that went to a ball.
A loaf that sat in the House of Lords.
A loaf that heard a case in the Court of King’s Bench.
A loaf that took snuff, played whist, flirted behind a fan and looked down its powdered nose at everybody else.
That’s the world of the wig.
And London wore it magnificently.
For about two centuries, London was a city of borrowed heads.
Dead hair.
That’s what a wig is when you strip away the grandeur.
Dead hair.
Sometimes horsehair.
Sometimes goat hair.
Often human hair.
Somebody else’s hair.
Bought, sold, imported, curled, dressed, powdered, scented, pinned and carried about town as though it were civilisation itself.
London was topped with other people.
And like so many strange fashions, it begins with disease.
Syphilis.
The great European unmentionable.
One of its many cheerful side-effects was hair loss.
Bald patches.
Premature baldness.
Not ideal if you were trying to project majesty, virility or divine right.
Not ideal if your job description was: look glorious at all times.
Enter Louis XIII of France.
He started going bald young and took to wearing wigs.
Then along came Louis XIV.
The Sun King.
Now there’s a title that asks quite a lot of the head.
You can’t really call yourself the Sun King and then shuffle into the Hall of Mirrors looking like a man who has mislaid half his hair.
So Louis XIV turned wigs into a European blaze.
Versailles looked at hair and thought: more.
More curl.
More height.
More theatre.
More expenditure.
More powdered grandeur.
Louis had dozens of wigmakers in his employ.
A royal department devoted to hair that wasn’t his.
And because everybody copied Versailles, wigs spread across Europe like a fashionable epidemic.
Including England.
Especially after Charles II came back in 1660.
Restored to the throne after his years in France, Charles brought back French tastes, French tailoring, French manners, French mistresses and French wigs.
Restoration London took one look and said yes please.
And so began the great age of the periwig.
The very word comes from the French perruque.
Periwig.
Perruque.
There’s another French tail sneaking in.
These wigs were big.
Curly.
Expensive.
Tumbling cataracts of hair.
A declaration of status.
The bigger the wig, the bigger the man.
Or at least, the bigger the bill.
A wig said: I matter.
A wig said: I have arrived.
A wig said: my head requires scaffolding.
A wig said: do not confuse me with a person who dresses himself.
And London, naturally, industrialised it.
Wigmakers flourished.
Hair merchants flourished.
Powder-makers flourished.
Perfume sellers flourished.
Comb-makers flourished.
Everyone around the head did well.
Human hair was the premium product.
Poor women sold theirs.
Prisoners’ hair could find its way into the trade.
Hair was bought by weight.
Hair was sorted, cleaned, curled, stitched, dressed.
And sometimes stolen.
Imagine it.
You’re walking through London and some nimble-fingered rascal slips behind you, snips off your ponytail and vanishes into an alley.
There’s a whole shadow economy behind those immaculate Georgian curls.
A duchess gliding into the opera in hair that six months earlier belonged to a milkmaid from Islington.
That’s London.
Recycling before recycling.
And then the powder.
Ah, the powder.
The famous white.
Mostly starch.
And mountains of it.
Not a sprinkle.
Not a puff.
Not a discreet dusting.
Mountains.
Six thousand five hundred tons a year.
It sounds like dockland cargo.
It sounds like sacks and carts and warehouses and ledgers.
It sounds like something that ought to be feeding people.
But no.
It’s destined for heads.
Heads in court.
Heads at court.
Heads at the theatre.
Heads in sedan chairs.
Heads bowing.
Heads nodding.
Heads flirting.
Heads judging.
Heads legislating.
Heads dining.
Heads gambling.
Heads gossiping.
Heads powdered with bread that never was.
Scented if you could afford it.
Lavender.
Orange blossom.
Rose.
Sometimes tinted blue.
Sometimes violet.
Sometimes pink.
Powder gave the wig that ghostly magnificence.
It made the head look powdered with age and authority.
It turned a man into a monument to himself.
It also helped disguise dirt, grease and smell.
Because wigs were wont to pong.
Think about it.
Fat.
Heat.
Sweat.
Dust.
Candle smoke.
Time.
A sort of eighteenth-century hair casserole.
Or, if you prefer, an ecosystem.
Animal-fat pomades worked into the hair to hold the shape.
Powder shaken over the top.
London grime settling into it.
Sweat working through it.
Smoke clinging to it.
A Georgian wig was less a fashion accessory than a living habitat.
You didn’t just wear it.
You maintained it.
You powdered it.
You perfumed it.
You sent it out to be dressed.
You put it on a stand.
You worried about it.
You spent on it.
You lived under it.
And other things may have lived under it too.
Which brings us to one of the great wig stories.
Mice.
Mice nesting in wigs.
Birds too.
Not just jokes.
There are contemporary reports of elaborate hairstyles being so vast, so heavily dressed, so seldom dismantled, that vermin moved in.
Mice.
And, allegedly, birds as well.
Imagine that.
A mouse making itself at home behind your left ear.
A sparrow setting up shop over your right.
A whole tiny menagerie thriving in the upper reaches of your social ambition.
And if that wasn’t hazard enough, there was fire.
Always fire.
Candles everywhere.
Candelabras.
Wall sconces.
Chandeliers.
And there you are, your head dressed in powder and pomade, leaning in for a better look at the cards or the gossip or the flirtation.
One careless tilt.
One tiny lick of flame.
And your social standing quite literally goes up in smoke.
A wig could make you look magnificent.
It could also make you a torch.
And if all that sounds absurd, it gets better.
Women wore ships in their hair.
Actual ships.
Model frigates.
Masts.
Sails.
Pennants.
Hair as naval patriotism.
Hair as theatre.
Hair as floating propaganda.
Hair as empire.
You didn’t so much dress your hair as launch it.
And London, of course, loved a spectacle.
A city that has never been entirely sure where public life ends and theatre begins.
So why not turn your head into a maritime event?
Imagine sitting behind one of those in the theatre.
You didn’t just watch the play.
You inhaled the audience.
And the social comedy of it.
“Madam, would you mind removing your frigate?”
Or:
“Madam, your battleship appears to be blocking Act Two.”
Or:
“Madam, I came to see Garrick, not the Channel Fleet.”
The theatre mattered because wigs and hair were performance.
You didn’t merely wear one.
You inhabited it.
You became taller.
More important.
More imposing.
Like strapping status to your skull.
And men were just as ridiculous.
Let’s not pretend this was only women.
Men wore wigs as social armour.
Political armour.
Professional armour.
Court wigs.
Bag wigs.
Bob wigs.
Campaign wigs.
Wigs for status.
Wigs for the world’s most elaborate game of “do you know who I am?”
The full-bottomed wig was the Rolls-Royce of the business.
A great cascade of curls tumbling down both sides of the head and over the shoulders.
It made the wearer look as though his scalp had staged an opera.
And the cost could be staggering.
Powder.
Dressing.
Pomade.
Storage.
Care.
Repair.
All so your head could say, before you opened your mouth, “I am not like other men.”
That’s the real story.
Wigs were not just fashion.
They were rank.
They were theatre.
They were power.
They were social architecture.
A powdered wig was a portable class system.
A wearable hierarchy.
A roof extension for the ego.
And London understood that perfectly.
Nowhere more so than in the law.
Here the story comes home.
To the Inner Temple.
To the Middle Temple.
To Lincoln’s Inn.
To Gray’s Inn.
Walk through them today and you’re still walking in the long afterlife of the wig.
Barristers still wear them.
Judges too.
Though in rather more disciplined form.
No towering cascades.
No scented clouds of powder.
No frigates.
Just horsehair seriousness.
And I can say this with some authority.
Because I am, for the record, the proud owner of both a barrister’s wig and a judge’s wig.
They come out on my Inns of Court walk.
And they are, without question, the greatest selfie moment in the London Walks universe.
Nothing beats seeing a grown adult in an alley off Chancery Lane trying on a judge’s wig and grinning like a six-year-old.
It never fails.
People become instantly delighted.
Something about the wig short-circuits adulthood.
Put one on and you’re serious and ridiculous at the same time.
Which is, frankly, the perfect definition of the English legal system.
The wigs, fittingly enough, come from Ede & Ravenscroft.
Their front door is right there on Chancery Lane.
I’ve been known to take my walkers in there for a little chat with the staff about their wares.
They’ve been in the ceremonial plumage business since 1689.
Coronations.
Judges.
Barristers.
Peers.
Horsehair.
If Britain has a costume department, it’s Ede & Ravenscroft.
And why did the wig survive there?
Because the law adores continuity.
A wig says this is not about me.
It’s about the office.
The institution.
The chain of precedent.
It strips away personality and adds authority.
It also makes you look considerably harder to argue with.
And then comes the turn.
Because all that powder, all that flour, all those millions of loaves sacrificed to vanity, eventually became too much.
In 1795, William Pitt the Younger introduced a tax on hair powder.
One guinea a year.
That helped finish it off.
Fashion moved on.
Natural hair came back.
The French Revolution didn’t help either.
Powdered heads had become politically complicated.
In France, some aristocratic heads were coming off altogether.
A powdered head began to look less like elegance and more like evidence for the prosecution.
So wigs declined.
But the law held the line.
The law always does.
And that’s why, in London, this ridiculous story is not entirely dead.
It’s still there.
In the Inns.
In the courts.
In Chancery Lane.
And all of it loops us back to that little French word.
Queue.
Tail.
The tail of a wig.
The meaning drifted.
Widened.
And eventually became what it is now: a line of people, one behind another.
Patiently.
Stoically.
Britishly.
A queue.
So every time you stand patiently in one, you are, in a strange way, paying homage to a wig.
A French wig.
A powdered wig.
A wig that may once have consumed flour that might otherwise have become bread.
History is full of these absurd little loops.
Tug one thread and out comes the whole thing.
French tails.
British queues.
Hindi loot.
Syphilis.
Versailles.
Charles II.
Restoration London.
Georgian dandies.
Hair thieves.
Milkmaids from Islington.
Flour mountains.
St Paul’s filled with imaginary loaves.
Animal fat pomades.
Scented starch.
Mice in wigs.
Birds in wigs.
Hair on fire.
Ships in hair.
Theatre-goers trapped behind frigates.
Judges in horsehair.
Ede & Ravenscroft on Chancery Lane.
And London wearing all of it.
Magnificently.
Absurdly.
For centuries.
The best London Calling podcast ever?
Yeah, by our lights. And here you are, you’ve just got to the front of the queue. You can decide for yourself.
See you tomorrow.