Claimed Silk Hat Riot of January 1797
- When
- 15 January 1797 (claimed)
- Where
- London public highway (as claimed in the story)
A late nineteenth-century note claims Hetherington wore a silk hat in London on 15 January 1797, provoking a mob and legal charges.
The note claims Hetherington decided to wear his invention of a silk hat in public on 15 January 1797 with the intention to cause a sensation, only to be surrounded by a howling mob. He was supposedly arraigned before the Lord Mayor on a charge of breach of the peace and inciting to riot, and required to give bonds in the sum of £500 for appearing on the public highway wearing a tall structure with a shiny lustre, calculated to frighten timid people.
Sources
- John Hetherington (haberdasher) Wikipedia, revision of 2025-07-26
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.