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From: mtepper@panix.com (Michele Tepper)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Etymology of 'Bowler Hat'
Date: 17 Apr 1996 01:49:03 -0400

This is more from the wonderful book I bought this afternoon, _The Man In the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography_, by Fred Miller Robinson (ISBN 0-8078-2073-3)

The first bowler hat was designed by the hatters James and George Lock of St. James Street in London in 1850 for their client William Coke II, later the Earl of Leicester.

"The Locks sent their deisng across the Thames to the hatmakers THomas and William Bowler, who had a factory in Southwark and were Lock's chief suppliers. William Bowler produced the prototype, which bears his family's conveneiently descriptive name to this day, although Lock's has always insisted on calling it a 'Coke' hat. 'On the south side of the river, the thing was naturally called a Bowler, because Mr. Bowler had made it. In St James's Street it was equally naturally called a Coke, since Mr Coke had bespoken it.' No doubt the commercial rather than the aristocratic appellation won out because of the hat's bowl shape.

"Calling it a 'Coke' may have been a mistake, since it has long been confused with the 'billycock' hat. Indeed Frank Whitbourne titled his chapter on the bowler [in a book on the history of Lock's] 'Disposes of a Controversy' in order to clear up what had become, and what even after Whitbourne's disposal (in 1971) has continued to be, a confusion in terms. In a book as recent as Sarah Levitt's _Victorians Unbuttoned_ (1986), it is said that the bowler was nicknamed billycock *because* it was commissioned by William Coke, a mistake repeated in reference books like _The Dictionary of Eponyms_ (1985), which lumps the bowler and the billycock together as a hat requested of a hatter named Beaulieu by 'Billy' Coke. According to Whitbourne, a controversy over the bowler's origins and name arose on the centenary of the bowler in 1950, with arguments in newspapers and on radio and television. Whitbourn resolves the controversy by clearly distinguishing between the Coke hat and the billycock. The latter was the name for two kinds of hats: a cocked hat worn by upper-class sporting gangs called 'bullies' (hence bully-cock) and a hard Cornish miner's hat, confined to local use, manufactured by a hatmaker named William Cock for the protection of men working underground." (16-17)

I'm not sure I buy the billycock etymology -- I'd have to look it up -- but the bowler etymology is an interesting one. If anyone's feeling particularly inspired, Whitbourne's book is called _Mr Lock of St James's Street_ and was published by Heinemann in London in 1971. No ISBN provided.

Michele "you could bowl me over" Tepper