We can all agree that growing a moustache for charity is a good idea. But is it worth keeping afterwards? Harry Pearson looks to the past to find the answers. ‘There is no love without a moustache!’ declares Jeanne, the narrator of Guy de Maupassant’s short story The Moustache .
Not everyone is quite so enamoured with what the 10th Earl and 1st Marquess of Dalhousie, Victorian governor-general of India, called ‘capillary decorations’. Much as it separates the mouth from the nose, so the moustache divides society. For every person who shares the flirtatious French lady’s cooing sentiments, there are others who suffer a more refined version of pogonophobia (the fear of beards) — Reginald Jeeves, for example.
When the valet catches sight of Bertie Wooster’s newly cultivated ‘delicate wisp of vegetation’ in Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit , he regards it with the cold and disapproving glare of a ‘fastidious luncher’ discovering a caterpillar in his salad. Despite Wooster’s protests that he will not allow his manservant to ‘edit my face as well as my costume’, Jeeves prevails and the ’tache goes the way of previous Wooster fashion faux pas , such as the Tyrolean hat. Throughout history, the popularity of the decorated top lip has mimicked the moustache of the Duke of Dunstable in P.
G. Wodehouse’s novel Uncle Fred in the Springtime , rising and falling ‘like seaweed on an ebb-tide’. The Pharaohs favoured them, the Romans repudiated them and the C.
