Truefitt & Hill 1805 Cologne

You will already know, if you have spent any time with this guide, that I am a Truefitt & Hill man. This requires no elaboration and, under ordinary circumstances, no examination. A gentleman does not review his barber any more than he reviews his club or his bootmaker. These institutions exist; they endure; they are attended. The matter is settled. My assistant, however, who has appointed himself the engine of my continuing education in modern commerce, has observed that other readers may not share my familiarity with the establishment, and that the house has produced a cologne bearing the date of its founding which might, in his view, merit my attention. I have yielded to his suggestion with the resignation of a man who has learned that resistance, in such matters, only delays the inevitable.

The house itself

My assistant informs me that Truefitt & Hill holds the distinction, confirmed by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2014, of being the oldest barbershop in the world. I have no reason to doubt him. The establishment was founded in 1805 in Mayfair, during the year of the Battle of Trafalgar, when George III sat on the throne and William Pitt the Younger governed the country. From those fashionable beginnings, serving the particular requirements of London’s gentry at a moment when personal presentation was understood to be a serious occupation, the firm grew into the institution it remains. Its clientele, over the course of nearly two centuries, has included most male members of the British Royal Family since George III, as well as Gladstone, Wellington, Churchill, and, if one ventures further afield, Dickens, Byron, Wilde, Beau Brummell, and — in more recent decades — gentlemen of the stage and screen whose names my assistant has supplied and whose distinction I accept on faith. Royal Warrants have been held throughout, which is the only endorsement, in such matters, that carries real weight.

The modern era of the firm as we know it properly began in 1935, when Truefitt acquired the hairdressing business of Edwin S. Hill & Co., and the name was compounded into its present form. From its premises in Burlington Gardens, the shop continues to offer barbering services and to supply shaving requisites, hair preparations, and fragrances of a quality consistent with its reputation.

What one actually received

Since I am in a position to speak to this directly, I shall.

A visit to one’s barber in my own day was not the exercise in product selection that my assistant seems to imagine it. One did not arrive and choose a signature scent from a curated arrangement of bottles. One sat in the chair. Hot towels were applied — this being the indispensable preliminary that distinguished a proper shave from everything else calling itself by that name — and the beard was softened before the soap was built into lather with the brush. The soap of the period was tallow-based, lightly scented with lavender or rose, occasionally quite plain, and the scent was never the point. The scent was a consequence of cleanliness, not an ornament placed upon it.

After the straight razor had done its work and the cold towel had completed the close, a hair tonic was applied — bay rum being the most common, that spiced, faintly clove-edged preparation that smelled of colonial enterprise and clean linen — or else a citrus water, or a simple lavender preparation. These were fleeting things. By luncheon, one smelled of wool and the out-of-doors, which is precisely as it should be. The Edwardian gentleman’s understanding of scent was that it should register at conversation distance and nowhere further, and dissolve within the hour. The idea of a ‘signature fragrance’ — a persistent, projecting statement worn throughout the day as a form of self-advertisement — would have struck us as rather more suited to the theatre than to civilised life.

On the cologne itself

The 1805 cologne is, as my assistant correctly identified, the scent that comes closest in spirit to what a gentleman of my era would have recognised as appropriate. Its structure follows the classical lines: citrus at the opening — bergamot principally, with mandarin in attendance — giving way to a light, clean middle before settling into a foundation of restrained musk. There is nothing strident about it. Nothing that announces itself. It smells, at the right hour of the morning, like a well-ordered life.

I should note, in the interest of full candour, that the formulation is somewhat smoother and more blended than the colognes and waters of my own day would have been. The perfumer’s art has advanced considerably, and the modern tendency is toward coherence and longevity — two qualities that were, in my experience, rather less central to the purpose of a grooming preparation than they have since become. A tonic applied at the barber’s chair was not expected to still be present at dinner. The 1805, applied with restraint, performs in something closer to the original spirit of such things. Applied as my assistant first applied it — what he described as ‘a couple of sprays’ — it will follow you into the next room, which is further than strictly necessary.

Used correctly, however, it is an entirely admirable product, and one in which the house’s history is genuinely present. The name is not mere marketing. There is something in the construction of the scent that recalls the clean, spare, barbershop-and-clubland atmosphere that Truefitt has always understood and served. That this impression survives into the present century speaks well of the house.