Pizzas galore!

A bushy growth stuck to the front of his face like a squirrel clinging to a branch, Dickens’s beard was an integral part of his image as the most famous author of his day. His facial hair made him instantly recognisable to the huge crowds who thronged to see him in Britain and America. Only one original photograph of a clean-shaved Dickens has ever been found, and so strikingly unusual is the image that it fetched no less than £40,000 when it was sold in 2001.

However, his beard failed to impress the banknote designers at Bank of England, who turfed him off the £10 note in favour of the even more luxuriant growth sported by Charles Darwin. Apparently the bushier the beard, the harder the note is to forge. “Particular details such as facial hair can be very finely enhanced. This makes it harder for forgeries to be made,” the bank explained at the time.

6. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Few beards have been tended so carefully beyond death but Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's wispy, red example (along with the rest of his embalmed body) was groomed by experts at least twice a week. One veteran of the beard-tending operation was a Dr Sergei S Debov who worked at it for over 40 years from 1952. On Mondays and Fridays, Dr. Debov gave Lenin a refreshing daub of embalming fluid on the hands and head. Every year and a half, he is given a full bath. Dr Debov concedes that his charge’s hair is not precisely as it was at the moment of death. “There was one small alteration," he conceded with a conspiratorial smile. "Just before his death, his wife gave him a haircut. She cut his hair extremely short, so when he was laid out, it looked as if he had no hair. So they performed a little cosmetic operation and darkened his hair a bit."

The life of Darwin

It has been said with truth that we must go back to Newton before we meet with Darwin's peer

Related Links

• Darwin at the Natural History Museum

• The beard is back

• Bushier the better in the land of beards

7. Charles Darwin

Like his arch-rival, God, Charles Darwin is always pictured with his long, flowing beard, but for much of his life Darwin was actually clean-shaven. He only grew the beard in 1866, at the age of 56. It has even been claimed that he grew it as a way of disguising himself to avoid the notoriety brought to him by the publication of The Origin of Species seven years earlier.

If so, it didn't work. Although his closest friends failed to recognise him the first time he sported it in public, Darwin found that the emerging art of photography quickly made the beard integral to his enduring image. From then on, a bushy tangle of white hair was an essential prop for any high Victorian intellectual looking for something to stroke in a thoughtful manner while pondering the weighty problems of the world.

8. Abraham Lincoln

Four-score and 68 years ago (or 148 years ago, in conventional terms) a young girl called Grace Bedell wrote to the 16th President of the United States advising him that he would “look a great deal better” with a hairy chin and that “all the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be president”. Whether Lincoln actually employed a beard as an electoral strategy is a moot point, but along with his masterful rhetoric and anti-slavery principles it became a defining feature of his presidency.

Times Archive: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln

9. Fidel Castro

The former Cuban dictator’s facial hair was considered by the CIA to be so instrumental to his rule that they concocted not one, but two plots to make it fall out. In the first, they would supply him with a box of cigars treated with a beard-removing chemical. In the second, they hoped to place a thallium salt in his shoes to much the same effect. Happily for Castro, neither plan - nor a similarly outlandish scheme involving a booby-trapped seashell - was ever put into operation.

10. Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill

Respectively the guitarist and bassist from ZZ Top, they are known to music afficionados for their middle-of-the-road rock and to everyone else for their beards, which go on for about as long as the drum solos of the band’s third member, Frank Beard. He only has a moustache.