WE are all pogonophiles now. Match of the Day is full of footballers celebrating their beards; pop stars and actors are proud to be facially hirsute; and half of the office and many of my neighbours are sprouting tufts for “Movember”.

Some of the men in my street are joining in, too.

By coincidence, I was looking this week in the diary of Francis Mewburn, the world’s first railway solicitor, when my eye fell on an entry entitled “beards and moustaches” from exactly 150 years ago. Mewburn was born in Bishop Middleham in 1785, came to Darlington in 1809 where he remained until his death in 1867, when he had great growths of white sideburns billowing from his cheeks.

In 1864, he wrote: “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). This exhibits a curious change in the habits of the men of Darlington since 1809. In that year a man with beard and moustache 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.”

Beards come and beards go. The ancient Egyptians 3,000 years ago were the first great shavers. They were fastidious about cleanliness and shaved anywhere that lice might live. The first great individual shaver was Alexander the Great of Macedonia (356BC-323BC) who demanded that before battle all his men were beard-free so that the enemy would have nothing to cling to.

Romans were generally clean shaven –Julius Caesar was apparently tweezered every day, but Hadrian, when he wasn’t wall-building, brought the beard back to hide his acne’d complexion.

As Roman civilisation collapsed, the beard took hold everywhere as a sign of male virility. That changed in the 15th Century, when Europe became clean shaven, only for the 16th Century to be horribly hairy – that’s why, in 1587, Francis Drake was able to singe the King of Spain’s beard.

In the 17th Century, barbers were back in fashion, and in 1698, Peter the Great of Russia was so keen for his countrymen to follow suit that he introduced a beard tax to encourage them to adopt the latest look.

Francis Mewburn lived in the last great pogonological age (pogon is Greek for beard). It began in the US – goatee is American slang that was first used in the 1840s and sideburns are named after Major-General Everett Burnside who was a hairy Union leader in the civil of war of 1861-65.

The end of the beard age was signalled when Gillette started mass producing safety razors in 1901, and it was accelerated by the First World War when soldiers needed a clean face to ensure a snug fit for their gas masks. That the 20th Century was largely beardfree can be shown by examining our leaders’ faces: in the US, no president since William Taft left office in 1913 has had facial hair, and in the UK, the only Prime Minister since the moustachioed Henry Campbell-Bannerman left office in 1908 was Harold Macmillan in the early 1960s.

But, as Mewburn noted, times change. Now we are on the brink of a new pogonological age; perhaps if Ed Miliband grew big bushy ’burns he would put all leadership problems aside, leave shiny faced shaver David Cameron in the shade and prove that he is bang on the beardy trend.