I first wore a beret for a fancy dress competition at my infant school summer fete in June 1975. My mother had entered me in the ‘topical’ category and tapped into the media furore around the nationwide referendum a week earlier over whether or not the UK should join what would become the EU – an issue that has managed to remain topical.
My costume consisted of said beret (borrowed) paired with a stripy top, an extravagant moustache drawn on with charcoal from a burned cork and a string of onions hung around my neck. And I was pushing a bicycle. This was to ape the so-called ‘Onion Johnnies’, the itinerant Breton onion-sellers who had been widespread in the 1950s and 60s and, by the mid-70s, could still be seen occasionally, cycling from door to door around southern England, peddling their supposedly superior culinary wares. In case anyone missed what this costume alluded to I had a sheet of paper taped to my T-shirt as a caption: ‘Wot iz zizz Common Market?’
I mention this antique memory because I have been reflecting lately on my relationship with berets over exactly half a century since. This reflection was prompted by two more recent experiences. Firstly, I went to the UK’s biggest jazz festival, Love Supreme at Glynde in Sussex, in July. There were 20,000 people there – but I realised after two days that I had not seen a single other person wearing a beret. That’s right – only one beret (mine) at a jazz festival.
Then, in August, I spent two weeks roaming around the south of France, from Marseilles to Carcassonne, in cafes, bars, restaurants, hotels, markets and all – and again I did not see a single beret, apart from my own. That’s right – only one beret in France (and that on the head of an Englishman). Sacré bleu!
Gavin Mortimer recently noted how cultural and demographic shifts have had a devastating effect on French bistros comparable with the collapse of the British pub scene. But if French men are no longer wearing berets, then perhaps the cultural malaise there is even worse than Mortimer realised.
After that inaugural 1975 attempt at wearing a beret, it would be another decade or so before I acquired my own. This was purchased for ten francs at a flea market in Paris in the mid-1980s and I would wear it regularly in the following years. I was convinced that this addition gave me a certain cachet: intellectual, bohemian, cool. The role models for this were the beatniks and jazz men I admired – Allen Ginsberg, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk. Those beatniks, so much better turned out than the hippies who followed them, had plundered much of their look from France. While discussing his boyhood combat toy obsession in his recent memoir Homework, Geoff Dyer wrote: ‘Action Man’s range had spread to the uniforms of other armies: British, Russian and Australian infantrymen, and French resistance fighter in black beret and polo neck (only the revolver and shoulder holster preventing his being mistaken for a beat poet).’
Quite. But as well as a generic beatnik as a style influence, there was also always, inescapably, the spectre of the beret of… Che Guevara. Now we know him as an arrogant murderous extremist homophobe, but then he was the star of 10,000 student bedroom walls – even if, as with me, one’s first awareness of him had been via the parody that was Wolfie Smith in the 1970s sitcom Citizen Smith. And it was apparent that when I wore my beret others were more reminded of Smith than Guevara. I particularly recall one bloke shouting ‘Freedom for Tooting!’ (one of Wolfie’s catchphrases) when I boarded a 38 bus wearing one in 1993.
There was a character from 1970s sitcom-land who would have a grave effect on the beret-wearer’s bid to be taken seriously: Frank Spencer, the hapless hero of Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em
There was though another character from 1970s sitcom-land who would have an even more grave effect on the beret-wearer’s bid to be taken seriously: Frank Spencer. The hapless hero of Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em was not someone with whom one would wish to be compared – but compared with him I was. ‘Ooh Betty,’ I would hear from wags noticing my headwear as I passed – another catchphrase.
As well as the beret there was another reason people seemed to see me in Frank Spencer and Frank Spencer in me, even many decades after he had ceased to be current: clumsiness. We were both very, very clumsy. Once, during my days working at the Sun, after a particularly bad incident involving a large newsdesk coffee round taking an unintended tumble, my colleagues started greeting me by whistling the theme tune to Some Mothers.
Despite gathering evidence that others didn’t think I looked as fetching in a beret as I thought myself, I persevered. I once even – in a moment of madness – tried out a red one. This may have been an attempt to evoke the provocative Captain Sensible from the Damned – or perhaps I was thinking I was giving off Para regiment hardman vibes. But of course all anyone else could think of was the very decidedly feminine subject of Prince’s ‘Raspberry Beret’.
Despite quickly dropping red, a classic black beret has remained in my mind enduringly chic. Over the decades I have worn – and worn out – several. My current iteration is a real beauty in the Basque style, with their more extravagant ballooning fold. Think Robert Jordan, the brave but taciturn guerilla hero of Ernst Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls – not Frank Spencer or Wolfie Smith.
In a footnote to my opening anecdote – I went on to win the topical category in that 1975 fancy dress competition. This triumph was contemporaneously recorded in our local newspaper, the Kent and Sussex Courier (Tunbridge Wells edition). There is a smudgy photo of me and the other category winners, in a cutting my mother still keeps.
With hindsight, that first triumphant attempt at a beret was also the high point, never repeated. But after 50 years of contrary beret wearing, I have no intention of giving up now. No, I shall soldier on alone, the last beret wearer in Europe.
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