The men of the Loyal Regiment stationed at Singapore, or at least eighty per cent. of them, have ceased to shave the upper lip, in response to a wish expressed by their commanding officer, Lt.-Col. M. Elrington. Indeed the regiment is concentrating on a Pleasant little competition to discover who can grow the best hirsute decoration just below the nose. It is stated that some already have grown moustache after the fashion of Hitler, only a little kinder, though the chances are that they are really following Charlie Chaplin whose style Hitler quite definitely stole—amongst a lot of other things. Now this novel departure of the Loyal Regiment may mean much or nothing, Fut probably the former, for it is clearly a revival of the struggle which the English have carried on against the beard and the moustache from the earliest of times. Prior to the Norman conquest, save for aged men, hair on the face had gone completely out of fashion, and in the Bayeux tapestry Harold end his fighting men have their chins reaped. While Norman shipwrights are shown with a good rich foliage, facial hair was so rare that William the forefather of the Percys was known in his lifetime, and remembered after his death as William Asgernuns, or "Oht les gernuns" ie. "William with the moustache" the epithet being revived by one of his descendants in the name "Algernon."
Through the centuries the struggle between the razor and the beard and moustache raged with fluctuating fortunes. In the times of the Puritans men wasted hours perfuming or starching them, dusting them with orris powder, curling them with irons or quills, until Stubbs exclaims "It is a world to consider how their mowchatowes must be preserved or laid out from one cheek to another and turned up like two horns towards the forehead." With the reign of Queen Anne moustache and whiskers were no more to be seen and England entered upon a smooth-faced era. That King George III should have been left unshaven during his madness was a circumstance of his misery that wrung the hearts of all loyal folk.
But the struggle still went on. Before Waterloo guardsmen complained that the officers of lesser regiments imitated their fashion of the moustache. By the time of Waterloo most young cavalry officer sported hair on the upper lip. Then the Horse Artillery fell for it, and by the fifties the whole army had forsaken the razor. For a mere civilian to grow a moustache was reckoned an unseemly piece of swagger. Clive Newton was shamed into being clean shaven by repeated questions as to whether he was going into the Guards, and when, in 1840, Mr. George Frederick Muntz appeared in Parliament with a full beard there were those who felt that this tall Radical had taken his own strange method of insulting English parliamentary institutions. Then,. following the Crimean War, when returning officers appeared in Piccadilly with their beards grown in the trenches and their cigars they set the fashion of a moustache with long drooping whiskers known as the "Piccadilly weepers," and as the Volunteer system grew every man became a soldier and assumed a soldier's licence. That might be said to be the height of the whisker craze.
Nevertheless hairy faces were still regarded as the sign of the military man and when David Livingstone, the intrepid explorer appeared at a Mansion House meeting 1857, a newspaper recorded that.he came wearing a moustache, "braving the prejudices of his countrymen and thus evincing a courage only inferior to that exhibited b; him amongst the savages of Central Afric: From that time on the upper classes showed a disposition to appear clean shaven, though the army grudgingly recognized a rule which ordered the moustache to be worn Even that fell into abeyance, but at any rate so far as the Loyal Regiment is concerned the commanding officer while apparently not invoking a rule, but merely expressing a wish, has called the old practice back into existence. What aesthetic reason he has for his decision has not been made public, but he is probably out for greater efficiency by saving time. If it takes ten seconds to shave the upper lip, and the practice is discontinued, a regiment in a year might save over a thousand regimental hours, though what it could do with them is something "no feller can understand,"
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.