Readers' Letters

SIR: Raymond Briggs (Notes From the Sofa, November issue) would have us believe that the elegant trilby has largely vanished and those that yet remain have become collectors’ items. He asks the reader when he has last seen one. Well, he may be pleased to hear that I saw four on my hatstand only a few minutes ago. I wear each from time to time, alternating them with a couple of flat caps, to protect my skull from the antipodean sun.

I was fascinated by Raymond’s assertion that flat caps (cloth caps, locally termed, for reasons unknown, as ‘cheese cutters’ or more fondly as ‘pommie stetsons’) were working-class male attire, while the trilby was for middle class men and Homburgs and bowlers reserved for public school old boys. Nowadays of course, those of every class seem to wear hideous baseball caps, which are particularly favoured by those addicted to denim. Ken Aldous, Christchurch, New Zealand.

SIR: I write in reference to ‘Hat Tricks’ (Readers’ Letters, December issue) and its subject matter of outdoor (and indoor) hats. I happen to be reading Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday at the moment, in thePJ Kava na g h-selected AG K Chesterton Anthology. It seems that when the tale was written, in 1908 – even before my time – it was considered to be quite eccentric for a man to be seen outside hatless. He writes of the main protagonist, Gabriel Syme: ‘He came from a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else.’

It appears today that the eccentricity of the former uncle has caught on, but fortunately not the latter. Laurence Whitfield, Starzach-sulzau, Germany.