Party hat, 'Dismal Desmond', black printed white brushed cotton, pink velvet tongue, cotton lining and stuffed rim, Dean's Rag Book Company, England, 1920s

A children's party hat representing the character Dismal Desmond. The hat is a cone of brushed cotton, stiffened internally with card, off-white in colour, printed with black detailing to resemble the spotted markings and legs of a seated dog. The hat is lined with cotton and has a rounded, stuffed rim. At the crest of the hat is a stuffed dog's head, similarly printed in black to show facial features, with an applied pink velvet tongue and floppy ears. The eyes are applied linen-covered buttons, with a black painted spot in the centre.

Purchased by the museum in 2018 [2018/418]

The photograph shows the hats being worn by the original owners, siblings Gwendolen and Arnold McKerrow. After Gwendolen died in 2004, they passed into the possession of her daughter, Emma Mandley – who consigned the hats and photographs to auction.

Fancy dress parties and costumes were wildly popular at the turn of the twentieth century. It was a craze Dean’s Rag Book Company took full commercial advantage of; from 1910 they offered customers the opportunity to send off for free remnants of their printed fabrics and instruction booklets to make fancy dress costumes for men, women and children.

These two hats feature the ‘Dismal Desmond’ character – a toy introduced by the company in 1926 accompanied by a ‘Dismal Desmond song and dance craze’ and claimed by the company as “a ‘howling’ success”. The character also starred in his own cartoon series, ‘Dismal Desmond the Doleful Dalmatian’, and radio travelogue and was the subject of records, books, charity balls and ornaments – as well as fancy dress costumes.

Richard Ellett (born 1876) was Dean’s Rag Book’s Chief Designer, and likely responsible for the creation of Dismal Desmond. Ellett was a theatrical designer who was also interested in the possibilities offered by the merging film medium, and was responsible for securing rights for the creation of a range of character dolls from a hit musical comedy in 1915, introducing Charlie Chaplin to the range, and post-WWI, for developing new ranges of character dolls from film and theatre and adding humour and distinctive personality to toy characters. Dismal Desmond speaks to this focus on distinctively characterful creations, and the company’s successful translation of one character across a range of mediums.

B.10-2018