by Dorothy Feaver
Some of the thrills of the English seaside holiday are captured in this gem of a film about Blackpool in 1957.
As crumbling piers have given way to luxury ‘marine’ redevelopments, so have concerns for this pattern of decline dissipated into something that prettifies and condescends. The recent Credit Crunch trend for holidays-at-home has retained a scurf of the gentler stuff, like candy floss, buckets and spades and knotted handkerchiefs, which add up to a Bodenesque backdrop for politicians’ staycations.
Summer 2009 and can you imagine a politician or pWAG being photographed in a Kiss-me-quick hat?
The Kiss-me-quick hat serves as a goofy punctuation mark on unprepossessing circumstances. It offers protection from the drizzle while nodding between bawdy and tawdry (smutty cut-outs, telescopes fixed on sunbathers). As such, it is helmet of choice for the platoon of holiday-makers who jolly well make the best of things. And it flies the flag for the kind of fish’n'chip fun that was superseded by the ‘shiny barbarism’ of sexy American commodities in the late 1950s. (This is Richard Hoggart’s description of the invasion of television, juke boxes, milkshakes etc.)
But hang on to that Mini Milk. This print from the mid-nineteenth century – by Currier and Ives, then America’s leading publishers of ‘Cheap and Popular Prints’ – shows that the Kiss-me-quick spirit also thrived across the pond. Here the hat plays a pivotal role in the joke, although it is an inversion of its English counterpart. Whereas the English one says ‘get some of this!’ the American scene uses the hat for more prudish purposes: ‘Look away now!’
