When is a tricorn not a tricorn?

Why, when it’s a bicorn, of course, silly.

I have just stumbled upon a rather wonderful page in a battle re-enactment blog. A genuinely puzzled inquirer from a French and Indian unit  begs for enlightenment: could his tricorn hat, a staple of his F&I dress, possibly be masquerading as a bicorn in disguise?

All the heavyweights wade straight in with some solid military historical advice. The most typical form of the bicorn is from the Napoleonic Era, through to the nineteenth century, they advise. For  the French and Indian period, say around 1755, a tricorn is the only option and totally correct.

My favourite contributor to the above debate is someone who volunteers their best guess: that a bicorn is one of those Viking hats with horns coming out of them.

He is dispatched with the no-nonsense musket-crack of the moderator: “There is nothing more dangerous”, she warns her earnest followers, “than a resourceful idiot.”

For the sake of Mr Bicorne-is-a-Viking-hat I shall not disclose my sources. For all I know, the great pirates of the Northern seas did indeed call their hats bicorns. After all, they called their meetings ‘Things’. Anything is possible.

The grist of the matter is this: tricorns have three corners. During the 18th century they transmogrified, allowing a corner to degenerate into a curve. Before anyone knew it, the upstart bicorn was born: a two-cornered innovation which would reach ever more theatrical heights in a bid to show, in hat form, who was in charge.

A three year old with a superiority complex sent me off on this trek across the re-enactment cyberverse, a lamb amongst wolves. Because my three-year old nephew, Big Al, has taken a new set of measures to ensure those older and wiser listen to him on a regular basis.

Today everyone arrived at the house bright and early. Shrewsday Mansions was hopping with people right after dog walking time, because Al’s house has not got an operative bathroom. Instead, it has a plaster hellhole which eats money.

While it is enjoying its repast of thousands of pounds, the children repair to ours to use our ridiculous jacuzzi bath. They sit in it and delight in pouring in too much bubble bath, so that the bubbles rise up and revolt, beginning in a most sinister fashion to make their way out of the bathroom and down the landing.

Once heartily amused and moderately clean, everyone gets out and dressed and repaired to the garden to a little light den-making.

Al heads straight for the small plastic red Mercedes which haunts our back garden. It gives him kudos, so he stays there.

Then it is deemed fit that the dressing up box should come out. Five children don dresses and hats and trousers: and Al demands loudly to be allowed to join in. A princess dresses him expertly. He sports cowboy chaps and a fringed Indian top: but atop it all, he wears Felix’s pirate hat as you have never seen it worn before.

It is ‘fore and aft’: worn front to back, parallel with the three-year old nose held high for maximum effect. He looks like a small blonde diminutive Horatio Hornblower, and even the cowboy outfit does not detract from the indisputable air of authority which has arrived along with the hat. Al looks at it and sees that it gets results: and therefore it is good.

Attempts at describing what he has on his head are futile. A fore-and-aft hat? A Hornblower hat? A Nelson special?

No: it appears Al sports a Bicorn.

He is in good company. Both Nelson and Napoleon assumed bicorns as they conquered their corners of the world. They wore them side to side, not back to back.

But by the turn of the nineteenth century, rendered modish by the first Duke of Wellington, everyone wanted one. It donned a new name: the chapeau bras, or arm hat, because it could be collapsed flat and held underneath the arm inside. It also became known as the opera hat.

Somewhere in among the pomp and circumstance of the nineteenth century, the bicorn became a sign that its wearer was very important. And trims became the thing: Wellington’s minimalist chapeau evolved into a great preening bird of a hat. In his wedding photographs with Victoria Albert’s has great white feathers to mark the day.

We still see them sometimes, outrageous throwbacks to a past full of theatre. Here in Britain  they might be Lord Mayors of municipalities, or modern-day knights. I dare say  that the impending Royal nuptials will include not a few in the congregation at Westminster Abbey.

Somewhere in his three-year-old psyche, Big Al knew this hat meant power, and it signified authority.

And the coming days, full of age-old ceremony, are not about to disabuse him of the idea.