LONG hair on men was causing consternation around the time this picture was taken, in the summer of 1971. Rock stars and some footballers favoured shoulder-length hair; lots of young men rather liked it, too. The head masters of at least two Glasgow high schools had forbidden their male pupils from following suit.

“Long hair,” noted the Evening Times, “has reduced more people to enraged and spluttering incoherence than any other topic of recent years, including the Common Market.”

Glasgow hairdresser Ron G Stewart noted in a letter to the newspaper, however, that when a long-haired man went for a job interview he came in to get his hair cut short - “sometimes quite dramatically. That must prove something!”

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Herald Diary

Another city hairdresser, however, spotted an opportunity - ‘girl barbers,” to quote our sister newspaper.

Frank Lynch, owner of the Mayfair salon in Sauchiehall Street, had recruited several young women to tend to the longish locks of male customers.

“We’ve had a ladies’ hairdressing business here for years,” he said, “and we found more and more men coming up the stairs wanting their hair done.

“We opened the men’s salon, and I thought, why not girl barbers? They look better than the other kind and they’ve been doing a grand job in the ladies’ department.”