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Travel: A museum for mad hatters

Stockport preserves the history of ‘the most compelling piece of clothing you can wear’
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Photos courtesy Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council

Few of us remember a time when no self-respecting male would venture out without a hat on his head. Yes, hats were everything — sartorially speaking — until after the First World War, when — or so the theory goes — the introduction of the private automobile lessened the need to keep the head warm.

Through the 1930s, and well into the ’40s, men’s hats enjoyed a reprieve — think Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra, even Harrison Ford in the subsequent Indiana Jones movies — in their soft fedoras with pinched crown and lowered brim.

In the inner city in London, businessmen were still wearing the round-crown black bowler in the 1970s (accompanied by a well-furled umbrella).

Happily, the long-lost craft of men’s hat making is being reprised, or at least explained, at one of the hundreds of thousands of small, mostly under-funded, and often eccentric museums around the world. The Hat Works Museum is located in Stockport, a blue-collar town just outside Manchester in northwestern England.

Manchester and the wider Lancashire region is where the Industrial Revolution began. And from the late 17 th century until 1997, when the last hat-making factory, called Christy’s, closed its doors, Stockport was hat-making central for the United Kingdom.

Hat Works is housed in a seven-storey cotton mill built in 1828 of cast-iron columns and roof trusses, and brick vaults and ceiling cavities filled with sand. With its still-standing 200-foot tapered chimney, the Wellington Mill structure dominates part of the 800-year-old town of Stockport.

In Stockport, men’s hats remain an iconic item. So it was understandable, even justifiable, that museum docent Keith Dansey began our Hat Works tour with a spirited defence of the historic head covering:

“From the moment that you put something on your head, people looked at you in a different light,” he said. “Whether your hat was outlandish… or the height of good taste, it was the most compelling piece of clothing you could wear.”

At the peak of the modern hat-making era that extended from 1860 to the 1930s, 4,500 people where employed at various Stockport factories. Men’s hats by the millions were dispatched “to every corner of the Empire,” Dansey said.

In the bowels of the mill, the atmosphere is dark, dusty and, well, 19 th century-ish. Machinery introduced to hat making around the turn of the last century is everywhere — massive, complicated contraptions that sift and clean fur, then shape, shrink, stiffen and dry the head-wear, and finally bend and trim the brims.

Fifteen separate machines, much of it steam-driven, were used for the 15 hat-making steps. Museum staff will start up the machinery that rattles, rings, whirls, clunks or nicely hums — just as it did a century ago.

Many of the machines, like the lathes with leather driving-belts that still function perfectly, came from the William Plant and Company plant in Manchester, which closed in 1976. And there are artifacts and tools like the wooden hat blocks around which hats were molded. Also an old-world office, with desk diary and pack of cigarettes, left in the same “orderly chaos” it appeared on the day it was closed.

But what really surprises is the central artifact of men’s hat-making process — the giant “hoods” made from the fur of rabbits, and later of beaver from Canada. Initially looking like a dunce cap designed for Goliath, the hoods were shrunk — in waist-height steaming and bubbling vats — to one-third their size, suitable for your average head.

The beauty of the Hat Works museum is that the industry is not romanticized. The earlier centuries of fur-assembly and hat making — an occupation that drew mostly poor labourers and farmers — were harsh. “It was piece work — a rough world,” Dansey said.

The expression “mad as a hatter” and character “the Mad Hatter,” from Alice in Wonderland , arose from the fact that the mercury nitrate used to bind or meld the hairs of a rabbit in the hat-making process resulted in kidney and brain damage (a kind of trembling was known as “hatter’s shakes”), and eventually dementia.

Author Lewis Carroll would also have known the expression “mad as a March hare.” From the 16 th century on, wild hares or rabbits were bred in the colder parts of the UK for their thick, warm fur to be used in the making of men’s hats.

And while most hat-makers were men, “hundreds of women of a certain age,” said Dansey, added the silk lining to the hats, and then sewed on the label. Interestingly, the label read, for example, “Christy’s – London,” rather than “Christy’s ­ Stockport.” Such were the realities of the fashion world — then, if not today.

The museum includes the back kitchen of a terraced house in which a “hatter” typically lived. And upstairs is a sprawling exhibit of hundreds of hats, mostly from the 20 th century and mostly British. There are men’s top hats and trilbies, homburgs and bowlers. Also women’s hats in a myriad configurations.

But the most attractive hats, in my mind, remain the soft and shapely fedora in brown or grey. And best of all, in the Hat Works haberdashery-gift shop, you can buy one for yourself or a friend — someone who understands that a great hat is “the most compelling piece of clothing” you can wear.

For more, visit www.hatworks.org.uk. For Manchester, Stockport and the wider region, go to www.enjoyenglandsnorthcountry.com.