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Just as curious as the customers — and some of the staff — were the methods used to treat them. Among the more unusual items to enjoy a renaissance in T&H's salons was the scratcher: an often ornate, sometimes telescopic device designed to reach the parts one otherwise found impossible.
A reminder, perhaps, that the expression "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" was not merely a metaphor, but once a genuine necessity. These fashionable implements came in ivory, silver and carved bone, sometimes telescoping from six to eight inches and tipped with a miniature hand, its fingers sharpened to a fine point.
Mr C. Rutland joined Truefitt & Hill in 1895 and spent the next 66 years preparing all its lotions, perfumes and colognes in the basement of the Old Bond Street premises. In that time, he became as indispensable as the products themselves.
During the Second World War, when German bombs were a nightly reality for central London, Rutland took an extraordinary precaution. He committed to memory the individual ingredients for hundreds of different preparations — every formula, every ratio — so that if the shop took a direct hit and the written records were destroyed, the knowledge would survive inside him.
He was the recipe book, and he walked out of the shop each evening carrying centuries of craft in his head.
When he finally retired, Rutland passed his knowledge to Miss Joyce, not through a printed manual but through handwritten notes accumulated over years. Miss Joyce proved a gifted perfumer in her own right, and many of the fragrances she went on to refine remain in production today. The chain of knowledge that runs from Francis Truefitt's original recipes to the modern range passes, in part, through Rutland's remarkable memory.
When Peter Truefitt opened his Burlington Arcade premises in 1819, something unusual grew alongside the business: a subscription society for gentlemen that would run, uninterrupted, for over a century. Members of the Toilet Club carried punched tickets recording each shave, each haircut, each treatment received.
To this day, these cards occasionally surface among the papers of deceased patrons and are forwarded to T&H as souvenirs. The club became so well known that cabmen who ferried members to and from the shop were given small metal tokens — each redeemable for twopence at a nearby tavern — as a standing gratuity.
Engraving of the interior shows fashionable gentlemen seated before mirrors, their hair being worked over by a Heath Robinson device suspended from the ceiling.
A stiff revolving brush, guided by a frock-coated operator, apparently bulldozed its way backwards and forwards across each customer's head with some efficiency. The club finally closed in 1936, but its membership tickets, its metal tokens and its engravings remain among the most evocative relics of the shop's long social history.
Truefitt & Hill took some pride in the claim that, like the Windmill Theatre, it never closed. During the Blitz, that claim was tested seriously. Bomb damage meant the shop relocated briefly to Burlington Gardens, where customers were escorted past falling masonry by the front-of-house commissioner and led to the temporary home around the corner.
Throughout the war years, Battle of Britain pilots would stop in for a shave and a trim before heading out to their airfield stations, lending the salon something of the atmosphere of a forward operating base. It remained open through it all, and closed on only one occasion by choice — in respect of the death of Sir Winston Churchill.
Churchill had been a client for decades. His was not the only famous name in the appointment book: Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire and John Wayne had all occupied the same chairs, waited on by the same barbers, some of whom gave over seventy years of service to the company. Add up the tenure of the six most senior barbers working at any one time, and the total passes 350 combined years.
Truefitt & Hill's story touches the greatest maritime disaster in history. Several of the salon's regular clients were aboard RMS Titanic when she sank in the early hours of 15 April 1912, and a number of them did not survive.
In the years that followed, salvage operations recovered bottles and pomade containers from the wreck bearing the H.P. Truefitt name — items that had sat in the luggage of first-class passengers heading to America. Some of those artefacts can be seen today at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich; others are part of the permanent Titanic exhibition in New York.
Bottles bearing the H.P. Truefitt name were recovered from the wreck, and can be seen today at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
It is a small and sombre footnote to a history otherwise full of colour — a reminder that a barbershop, more than perhaps any other institution, sits at the centre of ordinary life, in all its grandeur and its fragility.