Although this has been a week of seismic political change, one thing, at least, remains the same. It is almost 130 years now since Britain’s last bearded prime minister, Lord Salisbury, vacated the stage. Ever since, with the exception of three women and a smattering of moustaches, the highest office has been dominated by clean-shaven men. And since Sir Keir Starmer seems unlikely to grow an unexpected summer beard, pogonophiles may have to wait a long time before Salisbury has a true successor in Downing Street.
Are aspiring politicians missing a trick, though? That is the implication of a study released this week by academics in Poland and Italy who have found that men with beards are more likely to settle down and “invest in others” than those of us without. Such men’s commitment to their beards, the academics explained, is a sign of their “disciplined nature”. You can trust a hairy man. But a smooth man? Never.
To those of us who associate beards with hippies and hipsters — not to mention Starmer’s hirsute predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn — all this may sound a little implausible. But throughout history, beards have long been seen as eminently desirable. Statues of ancient Middle Eastern kings typically showed them heavily bearded, symbolising their power and virility. Pharaohs, too, were usually depicted with beards. Even the pioneering female pharaoh Hatshepsut, who ruled from about 1479 to 1458 BC, wore a metal false beard attached with a gilded chin strap.
So the centuries passed — and then, quite unexpectedly, beards fell from fashion. The trendsetter seems to have been Alexander the Great, who is always pictured as impeccably clean-shaven, but the reason is a mystery. It is often said that the Macedonian warlord ordered his men to shave so their opponents couldn’t grab their beards in battle, but this seems far-fetched. Far more likely, surely, is that he simply wanted to look young.
In Alexander’s footsteps followed the Romans, for whom a closely shaved face was a mark of seriousness and sobriety that distinguished them from the decadent Greeks and assorted hairy barbarians. Since the Romans loved to turn everything into a religious ritual, it is not surprising that a man’s first shave joined the list.
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This deposito barbae, when men offered their first facial clippings to the gods, was an important marker of manhood. Predictably, the shameless Nero insisted on putting his shavings into a “casket of gold studded with pearls of great price”. But a generation later facial hair made a comeback, thanks to Hadrian, the first emperor to wear a beard. Once again, the explanation remains mysterious. Some Roman historians claimed Hadrian wanted to hide his unsightly facial scars. But it is equally likely that as a fan of Greek culture, he simply wanted to emulate his favourite philosophers.
So the pattern has recurred, centuries of extravagant facial hair giving way to long stretches of clean-shaven puritanism and vice versa. Many medieval doctors believed that beards were vital in the production of semen, since both reflected a man’s “vital heat”. Even the scholar and abbess Hildegard of Bingen, an unlikely expert on both beards and semen, agreed that it was a question of warmth. A very fertile man, she explained, had very hot breath, which “moistens the flesh where the beard grows so that much hair can grow there”. By contrast, “a person who does not have much hair in his beard is cold and quite infertile”.
There were more mundane reasons, though, to wear a beard. In an age before personal razors, it was impossible, or at least highly dangerous, to shave yourself, while visiting a barber cost money. Having studied hundreds of Tudor and Stuart portraits, the historian William Fisher calculates that men with beards outnumbered those without by ten to one. And many of those beards were far more interesting than facial hair today, from Charles I’s Van Dyke beard to the “swallowtail”, with its eye-catching double prongs.
The Georgian era was a bad time for beardies: an age of politeness, in which most men wanted to look smooth and polished. But a century later, as always, the style swung back again. The turning point was the Crimean War in the 1850s, when British soldiers were too weary, dirty and cold — and too short on straight razors and soap — to shave. “Crimean beards”, as they were known, soon became fashionable even among civilians and within a decade almost every serious male public figure sported a colossal beard.
Soon, doctors began to argue that beards were good for you. “The beard is a positive good,” insisted Alexander Rowland in the catchily titled The Human Hair, Popularly and Physiologically Considered, since it offered “warmth and protection to the throat”. Other benefits were more unexpected. A beard, the readers of St James’s Magazine learnt in 1861, “preserves the teeth a long time from rotting, and strengthens the gums”.
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So what went wrong for beards? Some historians blame the British Army, which instructed soldiers in the First World War to wear moustaches but not beards. It was not until March this year that soldiers and officers were once again permitted to grow a “full set beard”.
Others blame changing fashions among the medical establishment, where facial hair came to be seen as distressingly unhygienic. Some experts claimed that clean-shaven men suffered fewer colds, while in 1907 a French scientist reported that the lips of a woman kissed by a man with facial hair showed traces of “tuberculosis and diphtheria bacteria as well as food particles and a hair from a spider’s leg”. But was that because the man was moustachioed, or because he was French?
In truth, there is no doubt who was to blame for the beard’s eclipse. The American inventor King Camp Gillette spent six years working on the design for his pioneering safety razor. But from its launch in 1903 it paid handsome dividends and to this day his surname remains one of the most recognisable brands on Earth.
The surprising thing is that Gillette was a utopian socialist who dreamt of the day when capitalism, along with beards, would be a thing of the past. But capitalism remains alive and well. And beards? They’ll be back, one day. Such is the lesson of history.
