If you want to get ahead, get a hat

There was a time when every man appeared to wear a hat. In the UK the hat you wore to go to work in defined your social class. Even in my youth many office workers and professionals wore Bowler hats or Trilbies, whereas workingmen tended to wear flat caps. For some it became so ingrained a habit to wear a hat that they were seldom seen without one, even indoors at home. For example, I can hardly remember by paternal grandfather without his flat cap.

After the Second World War younger people began to stop wearing hats, and a famous chain of UK hat makers and gentleman's outfitters began to use the advertising slogan 'If you want to get ahead, get a hat.'in the hope that young men would buck the trend and take up wearing hats. As an advertising campaign it failed, and other than the ubiquitous baseball cap it has become a fairly rare sight to see anyone wearing a hat that is not worn for safety reasons.

So what has all this to do with wargaming? The answer is simple – 'silly' hats can make a game just a little more memorable and/or enjoyable for the participants.

My introduction to 'silly' hats began with my becoming a founder member of Wargame Developments. I discovered quite quickly that getting a player to wear a 'silly' hat enabled them into 'character'. For example, give someone a tricorne hat and they seem to transform themselves into someone from the eighteenth century. 'Silly' hats therefore became part of the game designer’s toolbox, especially if you wanted to set the scene quickly for the players.

Over the years I have acquired a collection of 'silly' hats. (As an aside, they are called 'silly' hats because in the early days of Wargame Developments some 'opinion makers' amongst the UK wargaming community regarded members of Wargame Developments as rather too radical and/or not serious enough, and saw the wearing of hats to help players as being very silly. Mind you they also seemed to have a 'down' on the organisation for calling the figures we played with 'toys' or 'toy soldiers' and not something rather more pompous such as 'miniature military figurines'.)

My collection of 'silly' hats includes several berets, a British Colonial cork helmet (as worn during the Zulu War), a Planters-style pith helmet, a German World War II Field Cap, a Spanish Civil War helmet, three Budionovka hats ... and now a replica German pickelhaube. I bought the latter from a fancy dress suppliers and it arrived by post in just over 24 hours. It is made of thick plastic and looks quite convincing from a distance. I have bought it so that I can wear it during Paddy Griffith's plenary game at the forthcoming COW2010, after which it will go into the box with all my other 'silly hats', no doubt to be used again at some time in the future.