KEY POINTS:
It became an essential tool in the humour of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy. It was worn by the gang of thugs in the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange.
Ladies and gentlemen, please raise your hats to the 200th anniversary of the creator of the bowler hat,
the icon of England.
On January 25, 1808, William Bowler was born, and a hat that was the first to cross the boundaries of social division was nigh.
The bowler hat was designed in 1850 to give the horse-mounted game wardens patrolling the estate of Sir Thomas Coke, the 2nd Earl of Leicester, protection from poachers' sticks and low-hanging branches of trees.
It needed to be firm to protect the head properly and its design, by the brothers James and George Lock of Mr Lock, No 6 St James St, London, led to it being called the iron hat.
The Lock brothers' design was sent to the renowned hat makers of the day, Thomas & William Bowler of Southwark, London, who produced the prototype. Today, 200 years after Bowler's birth, James Lock & Co, in London's fashionable St James still sells bowler hats.
Some items transcend history but the bowler hat made it. Before the bowler, the gentry wore top hats, the working man a flat cloth cap.
Hats were made in England in three principal centres, London, Luton and Stockport. Even today, Luton retains its links with the hat industry - its football team is still known as The Hatters.
The craze for bowler hats spread far from the lands of the Earl of Leicester and the heads of his game wardens, Until the 1970s, a sea of bowlers could be seen each morning, emerging from the railway station and bobbing steadily across London Bridge to the City of London. No self-respecting city worker would dream of going to work without wearing one.
In 1959, the Cambridge University, Harlequins and England second row rugby forward R.W.D. (David) Marques stepped off the plane in northern Australia on his first Lions tour to Australia and New Zealand carrying a rolled-up black umbrella and wearing a bowler hat at a jaunty angle.
In the last years of the 19th century, the bowler hat could be seen on the heads of the wealthy owners, the gentry and even the workers in just about every British colony. For that was the secret of the bowler. It wasn't just for the upper class; even the humble workers selling wet fish in the London markets and the shipyard workers, wore bowlers. At race meetings, a sea of them dominated the setting.
Charlie Chaplin helped popularise it in his films, Laurel and Hardy likewise. But even when the old-style, silent black-and-white films died out, bowlers lived on.
The nightclub singer in the film Cabaret played by Liza Minnelli wore one, complete with fetish clothes.
Captain Mainwaring, the pompous Home Guard officer of the TV series Dad's Army, wore a bowler when in his daytime attire as manager of the local bank.
The suave, elegant John Steed in the TV series The Avengers wore one, as did John Cleese in a TV sketch that sent up the social classes of the English, looking down his nose at a working-class man in a flat cap, played by Ronnie Corbett.
So why did they die out? Fashions changed. People became tired of wearing hats. Similarly, hats went out of fashion for women and clothing became far more casual. If you spied a bowler hat today in the City you would have done exceedingly well.
But for more than 100 years, no self-respecting person would have been seen without his bowler hat.
