Cleric Hat!

[Aedh]

I can't live without my headgear. But--shoot me if I'm wrong--in the film there is NO example of a Cleric wearing any type of "cover" with the uniform. I can't believe that so much care from a Government would go into designing those cool uniform coats, and NO lid to complement it.

So. If there were to be a piece of headgear to go with the Cleric Coat ... what do you think it would be or look like?

I'm thinking of a sort of "overseas cap" like this one ...

[Witcher Wolf]

I'd go for a military style cap, with the peak at the front. Ya know like a Baseball Cap.

[Aedh]

To make it easier to visualise ... our hero would look something like this. Only of course you don't wear your headgear indoors ... DO you Cleric?

[Prestan]

how bout a gunslinger fedora, like the one Vampire Hunter D wears?
now that'd be tasty

[reveria]

I always lose any kind of hat... and with the comat and everything... guess that's why there aren't any.

[aikidoal]

I like hats and all. In fact my friends keep trying to find one that I can't pull off.

But a cleric hat...ick.

[peacemaker]

i agree. Clerics don't get hats. However, maybe other clothing items. I really haven't thought about it though.

[Prestan]

peacemaker said:

i agree. Clerics don't get hats. However, maybe other clothing items. I really haven't thought about it though.

ya, how bout a cape?

[aikidoal]

I like capes, but they might be too much in combination with the existing coat. Actually, when you mentioned it I immediately pictured some alternative universe Victorian-era Cleric.

[Aedh]

Working title: "Guardians of England ..."

Queen Victoria, devastated by the death of Albert, the Prince Consort in 1861, slowly sank into deep depression. A cabal of Harley Street experts and officials at Windsor and elsewhere had seen to it that nothing overly emotional was allowed near her that might upset her very reason.

Demure behaviour before the Queen had always been the rule, but those at the top of society now vied with each other to see who could be the most soothingly bland in manner. Since no one knew who might pass word to the Queen, repression of emotion became general among the upper classes, and those middle classes who strove to emulate them. Foremost among those who cultivated this for their own reasons were men who made up the established Church of England, who believed that this would "refine" the general moral tenor.

By 1863, certain police officials had been given the unofficial task of monitoring public displays of festivity to make sure no disturbance reached the continually grieving Queen. Officers were soon assigned to this full-time, and in 1867 all religious ministers on the public payroll were required to become agents. Showings of loyalty to the Empire, and a political dogfight over the resignation of Lord Derby as Prime Minister in 1868 led to revision of the public employees' loyalty oath to include language promising to control and suppress "dangerous sensibilities" for the good of Queen and Country by the incoming Prime Minister, Disraeli. The Queen herself was seen less and less often ... her real condition unknown to the public.

By 1871 the new measures were adopted in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and in 1873 they were extended to the territories of the Empire as a whole, made binding upon all English-speaking subjects overseas for the purpose of civilising and refining the native peoples. Resistance on the part of these latter led to the creation in 1875 of a department within the Foreign Office, made responsible for overseeing the training and creation of an elite militarised police force, given wide-ranging powers throughout the Empire to see to the suppression of uncivilised tendencies ... while not officially allowed to run within Britain itself, the officers of this Force had an understanding with certain bishops of the Church, and they were enrolled as curates and vicars ... With sympathetic ears in the Home Office, where a subdirectorate was created, attention was given especially to, um, ministering to the labouring and servant classes ... and to those pesky Irish of course, where they formed a hefty percentage of Church of Ireland (Anglican) pastors ...

.. one wonders how this might have all panned out by 1881 or so ... *evil cackle*

And these Clerics would most assuredly get hats ... capes too I think.

[Aedh]

mirabilis said:

"We are...amused!" ;D

Hey ... Queenie V coulda been a Cleric-type ... always went around in black right? And NOT being amused ... Plenty of room for a pair of Berettas Webleys under those hoop skirts ...

[Aedh]

Possible repercussions on the world level ... the 5% of Americans who ape everything British whether or not they understand it launched "Ethical Societies" in the 1870s; an American "Ethical Reform Party" was started and elected a few State and local officials, and even a Congressman in 1882, but the movement did not become popular there. Some Americans followed Mark Twain's lead and ridiculed it; many others, while paying some lip-service to the idea, simply went about their business.

Across the Channel in France the developments were viewed with open disdain; the easy-going Gallic temper did not sort well with this ideology, and measures were passed to exclude any Britons who were suspected of being Clerics. In Germany, however, the idea proved popular, and Ethik-u.-Wissengesellchaften quickly sprang up across the Reich, staffed with grave-faced 'Herr Doktors' and supervised--naturlich--by the Interior Ministries of the various German States. Leading English exponents of the new philosophy lectured at Jena and Heidelberg, and many a ponderous tome was authored on the subject. Scandinavia, too, saw a small but vital movement, and it also took root among Russian intellectuals, as well as in the Iberian peninsula where the clerical establishment fused with it even more wholeheartedly than in England. Japan also mustered a few Societies.

Increasing tensions developed between Britain and France over cross-Channel traffick in "scandal materiel" and the hardening of the French Governments' resistance to increasingly stringent British regulations; successive Premiers--Brisson, Dupuy, Waldeck-Rousseau, and others, blamed English importers for bringing in what was after all perfectly legal to Frenchmen, while Gladstone and Salisbury blamed them for abetting and profiting from the trade. King Edward VII, succeeding his mother in 1901, was the hope of those who chafed under now-entrenched Clerical policing, and he undertook cautious measures to mitigate it. His sudden death in 1903, officially chalked up to apoplexy, was said to be due to foul play by some, perhaps on the orders of Prime Minister Balfour himself, with whom Edward had always been on poor terms. The accession of twenty-eight-year-old King George V was decisive.

Raised in full compliance with ethical principles, the young King disliked any offences of sensibility ("dam' fool French twaddle," as he was once heard to call it), and tensions with that nation increased. When war broke out in 1914, Mr Asquith was known to be sympathetic to the Dual Alliance, and some Britons did go to volunteer in France; the Navy patrolled the seas, but the proposed British Expeditionary Force was not deployed. The Kaiser's armies overran the country and occupied Paris in short order--secretly assisted, it was rumoured in America, by British and Anglo-Irish Clerics. After initial disaster at Tannenberg, the Czar of Russia, seeing the conflict decided in France before his unwieldy forces were fully mobilised, confined himself to protests. Since Germany and Austria-Hungary won the 1914 war, the Russian, German, and Austrian empires remained more or less intact until mid-century; Adolf Hitler remained a semi-employed house painter, Benito Mussolini found work as a mechanic, and Vladimir Lenin died in exile. The twentieth century would look very, very different.

[Aedh]

So now ... if there had been such a thing as standard-issue Cleric cheaters (sunglasses, for those not yet "hep") ... would they have been something like the good old cop-style mirror Ray-Bans, like those pictured below, or something a little more exotic?

[Aedh]

Have begun working on the project outlined above, still tentatively titled "Guardians Of England." The action starts in London in 1885, but the only Preston noted will be the town in Lancashire, and there will be no reference to Libria or, of course, Prozium. Instead of "Father" there is an easily available "Mother" in the person of Queen Victoria, however ... I intend to explore how mid/late Victorian bourgeois mores might have created an atmosphere almost Librian, with "offences of sensibility" being things that were strongly discouraged, and sometimes stamped out ... by whatever means necessary.

[Aedh]

This pic affords me some inspiration ... toffish fellow in a dark den: