THE CAMBRIDGE BOWLER

CHURCHILL’S “BOWKER”

By PAUL MONTGOMERY

Many famous photographs of Prime Minister Winston Churchill during the Second World War show him wearing a distinctive high-crowned bowler hat known as the “Cambridge bowler.” The hat has often raised questions about it origins and Churchillian associations.

The Cambridge bowler was originally made by Lock & Co. for the Duke of Cambridge in 1865 and is a combination of a top hat and a bowler. Located in St. James’s, Lock & Co. is the world’s oldest hat shop and continues to take pride in having had Churchill as a customer. He purchased his own Cambridge bowler in 1919 and wore it when he visited President Herbert Hoover at the White House ten years later. Most famously perhaps, Churchill wore the hat in the iconic 1940 photograph of him holding a Tommy gun.

Churchill, a consummate politician and showman, may have chosen this rarely worn hat, in preference to the more commonly worn classic bowler so that he could stand out in a crowd. The hat today is on display in the Churchill War Rooms in London and is referred to as his “Bowker,” which raises the question as to why.

Churchill was known to invent new words, and it may be that in order to distinguish his Cambridge bowler from the classic bowler he substituted the “L” of Bowler with the phonetic “K” of Cambridge, thus Bow-ler became Bow-ker. One can imagine Churchill calling out to his valet “Get me my Bowker!”

Bulletin #204 — May 2025