Prince Charles should ditch the monocle – only cads wear them

As a report suggests Prince Charles has adopted a monocle, Harry Wallop examines why this item of eyewear is only worn by evil villains and bounders.

Harry Wallop wears a Monocle from Roger Pop & Partners, London
Harry Wallop wears a Monocle from Roger Pop & Partners, London Credit: Photo: Rii Schroer/The Telegraph

The Prince of Wales has spent the past three decades persuading us he is not an eccentric, out of touch, talking-to-the-plants heir to the throne. And a pretty decent job he’s done of it too.

But all that fine work – all those youth unemployment initiatives and frugal patching of his suits – could soon be undone. By a monocle.

If reports are to be believed, Prince Charles is not keen on being seen in public wearing reading glasses. So he thought he would experiment with wearing a monocle, which he unveiled to friends at Sandringham.

Unsurprisingly, it did not go down well. There is no clearer sign of being one footman short of a full royal household than sporting one of these ludicrous items.

Monocles are for evil villains, bounders who whip their servants, and those with only a loose grip on reality.

I should know – I spent some of yesterday wearing one. And it is impossible to do so without resembling someone who has just stepped over an unwashed beggar in disgust. With a monocle clamped in your eye socket, you sneer.

There is a good reason for this – a monocle is an astonishingly uncomfortable piece of kit. The only way to fix the lens to your eye is to contort your face muscles into a grimace of disdain. And once you’ve got the dratted thing into your socket, you have to thrust your brass neck out and ignore the sniggers of passersby.

There are not many opticians who stock monocles, which gives some hint of their unpopularity. When I ring up Specsavers, the customer service person on the end of the line repeats several times, “a what, a montycal?” before I give up. Vision Express won some publicity for itself back in 2009 when it claimed to have started selling them to satisfy demand from young fogeys. Yesterday, the company said it had none in stock but could order one for me.

One firm that does sell them (at £75 a pop, mind) is Roger Pope & Partners, which holds the royal warrant as a “dispensing optician” to both the Queen and Prince Charles.

Stephen Hopkinson, co-owner of the rather chic shop in Marylebone, is discreet about whether he has supplied the heir to the throne with his monocle, but seems to suggests not.

“They are affected. They create a certain look – do you remember Fred Emney?” he says, referencing the character actor who specialised in obese, golf club bores, invariably with a monocle. Hopkinson reckons he sells no more than two or three a year.

There was a time when a monocle was a solution to a very particular problem: namely, if you were long-sighted in the gloomy, pre-electricity days, how did you read a book, or inspect a document, without fishing out a pair of spectacles? Answer: you used a “quizzing glass”, a miniature magnifying glass with a handle, worn on a ribbon around your neck.

These morphed into monocles in the late 18th Century, and were spotted in Vienna before making their way to Britain.

In the early days, some sensible people wore them, such as Joseph Chamberlain, the politician. Patrick Moore, who was as mad as a March hare, wore one after he was told by an optician that he had weaker sight in his right eye than his left.

PG Wodehouse declared monocles “may be worn by (1) good dukes (2) all Englishmen. No bad man may wear a monocle.” The author dresses the languorous, old-Etonian Psmith in a monocle – all the better to peer superciliously at various house masters, bank managers and oily types.

But they were also favoured by Prussian infantry officers, which struck a rather deadly blow to their status as fashion item. Along with jack boots.

If your Weltanschauung is entirely derived from the adventures of Tintin (as mine is), then monocles are irretrievably caddish. Colonel Sponsz is the monocle-wearing, shaven-headed, cigarette-wielding head of the Bordurian Secret Police. A nasty piece of work. The criminal mastermind Rastapopoulos is also a monocle wearer.

It is no surprise when Captain Haddock comes into money – and goes off the rails – he invests in cravats, a butler and monocles.

In recent years some fashion writers have claimed Hoxton hipsters have adopted monocles to complement their cocktails-out-of-jam-jars and Bakelite vinyl record players. But Hopkinson is dubious. “I live in Hackney in east London and I see plenty of these hipsters with their bushy beards and wonderful moustaches. But I’ve never seen one with a monocle.

“In 45 years as a dispensing optician, I’ve yet to see the monocle become fashionable.”

Prince Charles, despite his undoubted influence, is unlikely to change that.