Frank McNally: The bare-faced truth about beards

On the only occasion I ever tried to grow a beard – it was many years ago now – the results were not encouraging. I was 22 at the time, and cursed with cherubic features. In a then recent incident, a Dublin barman had refused to serve me – an event all the more humiliating because I’d only ordered a Coke.

So the beard was an attempt at forced maturation, and it began well enough. There was a week or two when, in soft lighting, I was shaping up to look like Bob Dylan on the cover of New Morning. But alas, my whiskers never achieved critical mass.

There was an infrastructural deficit too.

The moustache and jaw hair didn’t quite meet. They were like the Red and Green Luas lines – each serviceable enough on its own, but when considered together, suggestive of bad planning.

So I shaved it all off, and have never tried again since, not even for “Movember” – the month when those curious on the subject are socially licensed to see what they look like with facial hair, under the guise of raising funds for men’s cancer charities.

It’s a good cause, certainly, and I’m happy to contribute. But any desire to know how my middle-aged beard might look (it would surely be a bit more luxuriant, if only because these days I often have to shave my ears and nostrils too) is outweighed by performance anxiety.

The arborescent spectaculars that Gordon D'arcy and Roy Keane have produced in public are very intimidating to the rest of us. And I know my female friends would reassure me that beard size doesn’t matter – it’s what you do with it that counts. But I don’t want to risk comparison.

As it is, my feelings of inadequacy in this area put me in awkward company. It turns out that Movember has it critics, including some very po-faced ones, who argue that it’s offensive to various groups of men – ranging from those who can’t grow beards at all, for natural reasons, to those who do, but only with cultural or religious significance.

Wielding shears against the fad for charity hair growing, the left-wing New Statesmen magazine complained that it "reinforces the 'othering' or 'foreigners' by the generally clean-shaven white majority". It also reminded readers that, tut-tut, Movember has "imperial connotations".

This last bit is superficially true, although whether the late-19th-century fashion for facial hair was anything more than a coincidence with the heyday of colonialism is hardly proven.

In fact, in general, it’s hard to see much logic in the political history of beards, at least in the western world.

US presidents make an interesting study group. The first 15 were beardless. Then, somehow, from Lincoln onwards, it became de rigeur for US politicians to have at least a moustache. It remained so for half a century, until Woodrow Wilson restored the fashion for full facial exposure in 1913.

The invention of safety razors a few years before was an obvious influence on the return to prior norms. But in this part of the world, interestingly, 1916 played a pivotal role. For 20 years before that, moustaches were not just fashionable among army officers, they were compulsory. Then the first World War, and gas masks, ended all that.

On the very day the order was made lifting the compulsion – October 8th, 1916 – a certain Gen Neville Macready (who would become the last British commander in Ireland) went out and got rid of the whiskers to which he had been, as he wrote, “for many years condemned”.

But five years later, the great anti-imperialist who took over from him, Michael Collins, was still experimenting. His short-lived moustache phase wasn’t a success, I’m relieved to see from pictures. When his unimpressed older brother advised him to get rid of it, he did.

Since then, western politicians have tended to avoid all facial hair, for various reasons. Yes, the later 20th-century had famous moustachioed leaders, including Hitler and Stalin. But as well as being exceptions to the rule, those probably helped reinforce it. Along with Fidel Castro, they must be a big part of the reason that, in the US, facial hair and a career in politics are now all-but incompatible.

Which may be just as well for Barack Obama. According to a recent interview, his “yes we can” attitude does not extend to beard growth. He tried once, but with results very similar to mine. So at least we have that much in common, and now I don’t feel quite so inadequate.

@FrankmcnallyIT