By PIERS BRENDON

Last updated at 14:48 11 October 2007

The British Empire was the greatest

and most diverse the world has

ever seen.

At its height, it was seven

times the size of the Roman Empire,

its Navy ruled the oceans and a

quarter of the earth was painted red

on the map.

Military victories, trade expansion and a talent

for bureaucracy all played a part - but so did the

humble moustache.

As Britain's influence stretched across the globe,

the moustaches worn by our fighting men and

leaders flourished, but by the time of the postcolonial

humiliation of Suez in 1956, the prime minister of the day, Anthony Eden, sported an apologetic, hardly noticeable growth.

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The rise and fall of the Empire was reflected in

the waxing - literally, sometimes - and waning of

the hair on generations of stiff upper lips.

The

impetus for the fashion came from two sources. It

began during the Napoleonic Wars of 1799 to 1815

when some British officers began to emulate fighting

Frenchmen, whose moustaches were said to

be "appurtenances of terror".

At about the same

time, Britons, who by then formed the dominant

caste in India, adopted the customs of the country,

smoking hookahs, drinking a locally distilled

spirit called arrack, wearing pyjamas and growing

moustaches.

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By the 1830s this sort of behaviour was

condemned as "going native" and the British were

discouraged from adopting such ways.

But some Indian habits remained - the British continued

to eat curry, kedgeree and mulligatawny soup.

And the moustache became imperative because it was seen as a potent symbol of virility. As one contemporary noted, Indians

looked upon "the bare faces of the English

with amazement and contempt",

regarding as na-mard (unmanly) countenances

emasculated by the razor.

British soldiers, in particular, could not

afford to appear less masculine and

aggressive than their Indian comrades

in the Army.

They had to assert the

supremacy of the imperial race.

So began what became known as "the

moustache movement".

It scored an

early victory in 1831 when the 16th

Lancers hailed with delight an order

permitting them to wear moustaches.

But the battle for this war-like

appendage was far from won.

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In 1843, for example, political officer

James Abbott's 'large mustachios'

raised eyebrows, despite his gallant

feats on the north-west frontier.

Such hirsute accessories - condemned by

some as being worn by "the vulgar

clever" - still seemed to many a foreign

affectation, the kind of thing expected

only of French coxcombs.

And when Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General

of India, disparaged "capillary decorations"

in 1849 they fell like leaves in

October.

But they soon sprouted again, especially

when newspapers campaigned for

them. In 1854, moustaches were made

compulsory for European troops of the

East India Company's Bombay army

and they were enthusiastically adopted

elsewhere.

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The Royal Durban Rangers at once

ceased to shave their upper lips, for

instance, and the Durban Mercury complimented

them on their improved

appearance.

Moustaches were religiously cultivated

and subjected to severe discipline,

enforced by Queen's Regulations

which by the 1860s had made them

obligatory.

They were brushed and pomaded. The

follicles were fertilised with patent

unguents such as Ayre's Formula,

Elliott's Tonic Lotion and Oldridge's

Balm of Columbia. The topiary luxuriance

was trained with iron curling

tongs.

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During and after the Crimean War,

barbers advertised different patterns

such as the Raglan and the Cardigan,

the latter "a remarkable affair, alternately

billowing out and narrowing".

Moustaches were clipped

and trimmed until they curved

like sabres and bristled like

bayonets. Their ends were

waxed and given a soldierly

erection.

They became the talisman of militant

imperialists such as Alfred Milner, who

served in Egypt and South Africa in the

late-19th century; Frederick Lugard, a

governor of Hong Kong and Nigeria;

Lieutenant-Colonel D.M.C.T.

Lumsden

who served in India at the turn of the

20th century; and the great explorer of

Africa Sir Richard Burton (who challenged

a fellow Oxford undergraduate

to a duel for laughing at his moustache,

which matured into the most prodigious

walrus of the age).

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As a martinet in the Pacific, George

McGhee Murdoch paraded his determination

to dominate by "the deliberate,

waxed bristle of his sergeant-major's

moustache".

In Kenya, the famous lion

hunter Colonel J. H. Patterson groomed

his moustache into "two imperious

curls" to symbolise his courage.

Imitating warriors, civilians too stiffened

their upper lips: Karl Marx's collaborator,

Friedrich Engels, mocked

Anglo-Irish aristocrats with "enormous

moustaches under colossal Roman

noses".

By the 1890s, the moustache was

the mark of every successful dandy.

As far away as Hong Kong, it was said

to be social death for a man to forget to

curl the ends of his moustache.

At home, Edwardian gentlemen rebuked

servants who aped the "fancy hairdressing"

of their betters.

Nothing could be permitted to

devalue these military insignia, which

reached their peak in the fulsome display

of Lord Kitchener and gained

iconic status in the famous Great War

recruiting poster in which a steely-eyed

Kitchener proclaimed: 'Your country

needs you.'

So the moustache became the

emblem of Empire. But as the British

Empire faltered under the hammer

blows of war, depression and nationalist

resistance, the moustache too beat

a retreat.

The British commanding officer who

surrendered to the Japanese at Singapore,

General Percival, had a miserable

apology of a moustache.

General Sir

Gerald Templer, the Chief of the Imperial

Staff at the time of Suez in 1956, had

a late-imperial moustache that was "so

thin as to be barely perceptible".

Sir Anthony Eden's was somewhat

similar but, to make matters

worse, it was said to have

"curled inside out" in an embarrassingly

effete manner.

One young Tory MP said that "Eden

had to prove he had a real moustache"

- a metaphor for proving his courage.

The Prime Minister's wife, Clarissa, did

her best to help.

Moments before her

husband's broadcast on November 3,

1956, the eve of the invasion of Suez, she

saw on a television monitor that his

moustache was almost invisible and

quickly blackened it with her mascara.

By then, the moustache was vanishing

as fast as the Empire.

True, it had

ceased to be compulsory in the Army as

early as 1916, when King's Regulations

had permitted shaving the upper lip.

Allegedly that change took place to

accommodate the Prince of Wales,

whose growth was less than manly.

But it seems that Lieutenant-General Sir

Nevil Macready made the order because

he intensely disliked his own moustache,

"a bristly affair resembling the

small brushes with which kitchen maids

and others clean saucepans".

Be this as it may, the moustache was

outmoded by the 1950s.

It had become a

joke thanks to Charlie Chaplin and

Groucho Marx and an international

symbol of villainy thanks to Hitler's

toothbrush and "the huge laughing

cockroaches" under Stalin's nose - the

Russian poet Osip Mandelstam paid

with his life for coining this image.

In Britain, it was seen primarily as the

badge of Colonel Blimp.

In one P.G.

Wodehouse novel of 1954, Bertie

Wooster tries cultivating one to give

himself a dashing air. It is stigmatised

by Jeeves, that infallible arbiter of fashion,

as a "dark stain like mulligatawny

soup".

The last British Prime Minister to

sport a moustache in office was Harold

Macmillan. It was an indication of his

desire, not fulfilled, to preserve the

Empire.

And it had survived terrible

vicissitudes - as he emerged from the

wreckage of a war-time plane crash in

Algiers, his moustache was "burning

with a bright blue flame".

But this did not stop contemporary

comics from giving a satirical account of

'the twilight of the British Empire' while

mercilessly mocking Macmillan's 'ludicrous

moustache'.

Fashions change and the moustache

has recently made a comeback as a

symbol of male homosexual virility - a

bitter irony for what was once the

worldwide symbol of an empire that

dominated the globe.

■ Piers Brendon's book The

Decline And Fall Of The British Empire

is published by Jonathan Cape on

October 18.