I AM stroking my chin as I write this. It has a couple of days’ stubble left on it in honour of Gareth Southgate’s appointment on Wednesday as the first of England’s 19 national football managers to have a beard.

Going right back to the first England manager, Walter Winterbottom, who was appointed in 1946, they have all been clean-shaven. In fact, Alf Ramsey was so keen to avoid beards that when he became manager in 1963, he introduced the controversial “chinless wonders” formation.

The study of beards is “pogonology” – from the Greek word “pogon” for beard – and my pogonological research was sparked when, before my talk to the Darlington Trefoil Guild on Wednesday evening about the history of Darlington Covered Market, I checked a fact. This is a rare occurrence in itself, but I wanted to remind myself of what solicitor Francis Mewburn said in 1864 about the £500 construction of the market clocktower which is now the icon of the town.

“What a sum to pay for an encumbrance!” fumed Mr Mewburn, the world’s first railway solicitor, in his diary.

Then, far more interestingly, he went on: “To pass from grave to gay – I have been struck with the number of long bearded and moustached men I meet in the street (none, however, with a beard larger than my own).”

Unlike Mr Southgate, whose beard perfectly covers his chin and cheeks, Mr Mewburn had what pognologists call a “chilly chin” – hairy down the sides and under the jaw, but the chin and upper lip clean shaven and exposed.

He continued: “This exhibits a curious change in the habits of the men of Darlington since 1809. In that year, a man with beard like mine would have attracted attention in the streets, and the lads would have shouted after him.

“It is singular that in a country like England, where the climate is so variable, beards and moustaches should have been so late in coming into use. All classes now wear them.”

Indeed, today in this country all classes wear beards, and they seem particular popular among twenty-somethings and those, perhaps like Mr Southgate, who are desperate to cling to their youth by looking hip and trendy. Even politicians have beards – in 2015, Stephen Crabb briefly flickered onto the nation’s conscience when he became the first Conservative Cabinet minister to have a beard since the 4th Earl of Onslow in 1903. Mr Crabbe even marquisotted his beard – a genuine, although obsolete, word, meaning to trim or shave a beard with “exaggerated fastidiousness”.

There is a saying that British beards only flourish when there is a great queen on the throne, and Mr Southgate, in our time, and Mr Mewburn, in Victorian times, appear to bear that out.

In fact, Mr Mewburn lived in the last great pogonological age which created some of the whiskery words we still use. For example, the “goatee” was American slang from the 1840s and the “sideburn” was, quite brilliantly, I think, named after Major-General Everett Burnside, who was a hairy combatant in the US civil of war of 1861-65.

Perhaps in decades to come, the word “southgate” will be added to our dictionary for the sort of perfectly polite beard that puts on a decent show without getting any decent results.