by Jilly Cooper
Viewing patterns of course vary from class to class. Mr and Mrs Definitely-Disgusting stay plugged in to I.T.V. whatever’s on. They are such telly junkies that if it breaks down they nick another one. The only time Mr D-D switches over is for Match of the Day, Miss World and That’s Life (Esther’s so good at getting at ‘Them’). They much prefer serials and variety to current affairs. And they believe implicitly everything they’re told in the ads. Mr D-D admires Twiggy and the Campari girl, although they’re both a bit skinny.
Jen Teale enjoys Come Dancing and ‘ice skating’ as she calls it, but she only watches television if she’s sewing or knitting. Bryan grumbles that there’s not nearly enough ‘motor sport’. He doesn’t enjoy current affairs, general knowledge programmes or even quizzes very much, but he finds it a ‘social asset’ to have opinions when he talks to colleagues at work.
Eileen Weybridge admires Angela Rippon, and has a soft spot for Julie Andrews because she comes from nearby Walton-on-Thames. Howard watches Rugby Special and Panorama. They are much less influenced by commercial television than the D-Ds.
Samantha and Gideon firmly try to restrict Zacharias and Thalia’s viewing. They think Play School, Blue Peter and general knowledge programmes are all right. When they go out, Zacharias bribes the au pair to let him watch Target and The Sweeney. Samantha insists on watching all the cultural programmes which send poor Gideon to sleep. She actively disbelieves everything the ads tell her.
Mrs Nouveau-Richards naturally has a video tape. ‘Hubby and I go out so much, but all our show-business friends would be so disappointed if we missed their programmes.’
Harry Stow-Crat turns the television on as soon as he gets home from shooting and sleeps peacefully through it until the little white dot appears. He might wake up for Anna Ford, whom he prefers to Angela Rippon. So does Mr Callaghan who referred to her with typically lower-middle caution as ‘rather an attractive character’. Harry also watches racing and may have a bet if he’s ever home in the afternoon.
Finally, a brief word about the ads themselves. Most of them are deliberately aimed at Mr Definitely-Disgusting because he and Mrs D-D belong to the largest class and are more prepared to splash out than any of the other classes at the moment. Generally speaking, said an ad man recently, social mobility pulls don’t work on the C.2s, which is how the advertising world catagorizes Mr D-D. The idea of doing something because Lady X or the vicar does it, wouldn’t appeal to Mr D-D. He’s read the News of the World; he knows all about vicars. Success figures like Twiggy, David Niven, Nyree Dawn Porter and Frank Muir are therefore used rather than class figures in ads.
According to Charles Plouviez, chairman of Everetts, who has written a brilliant paper on ‘Class and Advertising’:
‘When Americans are planning a campaign and deciding how to reach the people most likely to buy the product, the main considerations are age and sex. In England they are age, sex and class. The advertiser must not offend class susceptibilities.
‘The disaster is not in showing affluent or upper-class characters (brands with quality or high-class images require this, and this is accepted) but rather in the tone of the voice (not necessarily accent) in which the situations are portrayed. Jokes at the expense of women or working-class stereotypes, and situations involving master-servant relationships are widely resented.’
The newspapers are luckier. The Times, Guardian and Telegraph, the Mail and Express, the Mirror and the Sun, all cater for a slightly different class of reader. But on television the advertiser must avoid giving offence to all classes. All commercials are built round the classic telly family. ‘Rural and Scottish accents,’ according to Mr Plouviez, are always acceptable, ‘but the really rough urban accents are avoided, and “posh” accents, which used to be the rule on radio and T.V. in the days of the B.B.C. monopoly, are only used for commercials when they are being sent up. The voice over or unseen voice which delivers the selling message, presents the greatest difficulty because if it is too posh it offends the viewer and if it is too common it offends the client.’
18 WORLD OF SPORT
O Skipper! my Skipper! our fearful excursion is executed.
In the last fifty years there has been a complete revolution in sport throughout the world. This is particularly noticeable in England and can be directly attributed to the influence of two world wars, and more generally to the advent of wireless and television. More evenly distributed wealth has created more time for ‘leisure’, and, while we have become more a nation of spectators than participants, less fashionable games and pastimes have, through their exposure on the media, led to a much more varied participating pattern across society.
The aristocracy seldom indulged in such games as football, cricket or hockey. Sport to them has always been either closely linked to survival—hunting, shooting and fishing—or to gambling, hence their traditional addiction to racing.
It was left to the middle classes, working through the medium of the public schools, aided and abetted by the Church which thought that violent athletic activity took boys’ minds off masturbation, to champion ‘organized games’ and the noble art of self-defence. It should not be forgotten that one of the first Association Football clubs founded in this country was the Corinthians, a team of gentlemen. They even won the F.A. cup. Team games which emphasized manly virtues and social solidarity led naturally to the creation of exclusive clubs—almost a defensive movement. This sort of coagulation has always been peculiar to the English. Look at the regimental system in the army, which, although it goes back much further, pays homage to the same code of values. Never let the man next to you see you are afraid; never let the side down; ‘Play up and play the game’.
The social history of cricket is very complicated. It began as a peasant pastime, was only later taken up by the gentry and, today, with all the posturing and cuddling at the fall of a wicket that occurs during a Test match, is fast going back to the peasants again. Exactly the opposite happened with rugger, which began as an upper-middle-class pursuit, was then taken up by grammar and then comprehensive schools and ended with the ultimate peasant adaptation of Rugby League.
One only needs to go to the Varsity Match or any home international at Twickenham, ‘the last fortress of the Forsyths’, as Christopher Laidlaw called it, to see the English middle classes in all their glory and to realize that when the crowd howls for England they are really howling for the middle classes and the survival of middle-class values.
Today the only really smart game left is real tennis, possibly because there are so few courts. Hunting is no longer smart but bristling with Mr Nouveau-Richards and television stars. The Welsh miner in a red coat is no longer an isolated phenomenon.
Fishing is not really a sport, although many of the lower classes who indulge in coarse fishing would argue that it was. Harry Stow-Crat has a beat on the Tay, but the fishing on either side is now rented by Arabs and stockbrokers. Samantha goes to the fishmongers, the Cousteau-Richards go deep-sea fishing off Looe. Mr Definitely-Disgusting sits all day under a green umbrella on the edge of a gravel pit catching inch-long roach and throwing them back.
Harry doesn’t take much exercise. He plays billiards (not a sport), backgammon (bridge is too difficult), and might have rowed at school. He seldom rows after leaving Cambridge. That is left to the working-class clubs such as Poplar and Blackwell, and Thames Tradesmen. He sometimes hunts, and takes a packet of pheasant sandwiches. He played fives at school and perhaps raquets, and nowadays occasionally has a game of tennis or croquet (which he pronounces croky, not cro-kay as Howard Weybridge would.) He wouldn’t dream of joining a tennis club. Nor would he use expressions like ‘lawn tennis’ or ‘partner’ (for ‘play with’). He would never be seen dead on a golf (which he pronounces ‘goff’) course, and would soon be dead in a squash court. He would never, never jog.
Gideon plays squash, tennis, cricket, rugger until he is thirty, but never hockey which he regards as common and only played by minor public s
chools, Indians and fat-bottomed female clerks from Barclays Bank, and fat-breasted female clerks from Lloyds Bank.
‘No we’re not staying and having a bloody drink with the others. Get the children into the car.’
Howard Weybridge has a ‘Support Surrey Rugby’ sticker in the back of his car and enjoys ‘a few jars’ at Esher Rugby Club. He also plays ‘gole-f’ if he can find room at Moore Place or Burhill alongside all the bank managers playing against other bank managers, and spiralists playing with their bosses and letting them win after a tough fight.
Although they now allow the pro to drink in the bar, it is evidently still quite difficult to get into the Royal Berkshire and Sunningdale Golf Clubs. You have to be proposed and seconded by members who’ve known you for a considerable time, fill in a form stating your profession and where you went to school, and then get letters of approval from between six and eight members saying you’re the right sort of person. At Sunningdale you actually have to play in front of the management committee to prove you’re good enough.
‘What happens if a nice bricklayer wants to join the club?’ I asked the secretary at the Royal Berkshire.
‘Well it would be most unlikely,’ he said. ‘How could he possibly know six of our members?’
Bryan Teale is too busy with home improvements and tinkering with the Volkswagen to play with anything but himself. His father plays bowls.
Mr Definitely-Disgusting never does anything much out of doors except kick a ball against the factory wall during tea breaks, and watch television all the time when he’s not going to the dogs or football matches on Saturday afternoon, filling in football coupons or having a bet. At the pub Mr D-D plays darts, snooker and dominoes.
Mr D-D’s brother, who’s a miner, races pigeons. He also owns a lurcher. Coursing has a strong cloth-cap following. When Harold Wilson wanted to give government backing to a bill banning stag hunting and hare coursing, Richard Crossman directed his acute political antennae in that direction:
‘He [Harold] thinks this is an election winner, and hundreds and thousands of people who read the Daily Mirror will love this idea. Deer hunting is probably very unpopular, but hare coursing is a very proletarian sport, people in the North enjoy it. I didn’t think we should jump into this without a much more careful analysis of the minority who oppose it.’
Mr D-D hates athletics because of all them soap-dodgers. Athletics is now the sole province of the black community who in the days of empire were so used to running from place to place with messages in cleft sticks, as well as running after their dinner, that they developed a talent for long-distance running which brings them medal after medal. They also got used to sprinting away from Lee-Enfields and Gatlings, hence their great speed over short distances.
Ping-pong (now called table tennis) is a game only played by young Conservatives or in the games room of decrepit boarding houses in Grange-over-Sands. Swimming is only O.K. if it’s done in one’s own swimming pool or in the sea. Public swimming baths are out because the working classes use them as lavatories. Caroline Stow-Crat talks about bathing and wears a bathing suit. Samantha gets round the problem by saying ‘bikini’. Jen Teale says ‘swimsuit’ or ‘swimming costume’.
The best and only sport the English were ever any good at was war, which all classes could have a go at, but even that is only now on television.
HORSES
God save our gracious Quorn.
The horse was one of the first status symbols. Like the car, it gave it’s owner mobility. Originally the upper classes were the only people who could afford horses, and a number of words with aristocratic associations come from riding, the French ‘chevalier’ for example, the German ‘ritter’, meaning rider, and the English ‘cavalier’. Sitting on a horse enables you to look down on your fellow men. Horsy people invariably have that deadpan look one associates with the aristocracy.
Horses have always been a good way to climb the social ladder, as Mark Phillips showed us. In the nineteenth century the Rothschilds were accepted into the grandest Victorian society because the Prince of Wales was at Cambridge with Nathaniel Rothschild and shared his interest in racing.
Today show-jumping stars like David Broome and Alan Oliver get asked to Princess Anne’s pre-wedding ball and the livery stables are full of expensive horses acquired as status symbols by pop stars and actors who are too frightened to ride them. Douglas Bunn, a butcher’s son, is referred to by himself and the press as the Master of Hickstead.
Mr Nouveau-Richards buys polo ponies, takes up hunting, slaps point-to-point stickers on the back window of his car and, even if he doesn’t ride himself, struts around at local gymkhanas in breeches, having frightful rows with the collecting ring stewards and the judges when they don’t put Tracey-Diane first.
Samantha Upward’s father, like many another retired army Colonel or Brigadier, often finds an interest in running the local pony club and bossing about nubile little girls. Competition is as fierce between the little girls as it is between the guns out shooting. There was fearsome grumbling at the local Putney show a few years ago because they all thought the jump in the Working Pony Class had been specially lowered for Princess Alexandra’s daughter.
Harry Stow-Crat has his breeches made for him and pays about £600 for black leather boots, which have a garter strap which attaches to buttons on his breeches and keeps the boots up and the breeches down. Georgie Stow-Crat, however, is feeling the pinch and has bought a pair of rubber boots so well made as to be indistinguishable from leather ones. Even he wouldn’t resort to the stretch nylon breeches worn by Mr Nouveau-Richards. Georgie wears brown boots for polo and laced boots if he’s in the cavalry.
It used to be considered extremely vulgar to have buckles on your reins, they had to be sewn on. But now, except for showing, most people have studs which fasten on the inside. Coloured brow-bands are beyond the pale. It is permissible to wear a white hunting tie or a stock with coloured spots. But Harry Stow-Crat considers it very nouveau to wear a coloured stock with white spots.
When Mr Nouveau-Richards goes out hunting he wears an ordinary white tie instead of a stock with his unauthorized red coat—like the show jumpers do on television—and carries his hunting whip upside down without a thong. Tracey-Diane looks like an advertisement on the back pages of a riding magazine. She wears thick eye make-up, dangling earrings, and her loose blonde locks stream out from her black cap. Mr N-R tells everyone she is a marvellous ‘horsewoman’. Harry would say ‘a very good rider’. Howard Weybridge calls it ‘horse-back riding’.
Samantha Upward carefully talks about ‘hounds with their “waving sterns”, and “pink” coats’. She is rather shocked when Harry refers to his ‘red’ coat. Far too many nouveaus have started talking about ‘pink’, so the uppers have reverted to ‘red’.
Harry says his horse is lame, whereas Howard Weybridge says ‘his mount is limping’.
Howard says, ‘I was thrown from the horse which was very frisky.’
Harry says, ‘My horse was too fresh and bucked me off/gave me a fall/I fell off.’
Howard says his horse ‘jibbed at a hedge’. Harry would put it ‘put in a stop’ or ‘refused at a fence’.
Howard’s horse ‘gets the bit between the teeth’. Harry would say, ‘It took off with me’, or ‘ran away’, or ‘I was carted’.
Howard’s horse ‘keeps rearing’; Harry’s horse ‘goes up with him’.
SHOOTING
‘Hunting,’ wrote Bishop Latimer in 1820, ‘is a good exercise for men of rank, and shooting an amusement equally lawful and proper for inferior persons.’ Yet three-quarters of a century later shooting was the way in which the great landowners entertained their guests throughout the winter months.
‘The railway helped,’ as Jonathan Ruffer points out in The Big Shots, ‘so did technical improvements of the gun . . . you combined the opportunities of a Vimy Ridge machine-gunner with an infinitely better lunch.’
And finally, because Edward V
II was too fat to hunt, he channelled all his enthusiasms into shooting. ‘It was natural that society should exert itself in pursuits which its champion made fashionable.’
A friend once asked the Macnab of Macnab, who is a brilliant shot, whether he really needed a secretary three days a week. ‘Of course I do,’ replied the Macnab indignantly. ‘Every day I have to write letters saying: “Dear Charles, Thank you for asking me to shoot on the fourth, I’m afraid I can’t make it,” or “Dear Henry, Thank you very much for asking me to shoot on the 18th, I should be happy to accept.’”
All through the winter in Scotland and the North of England, in anticipation of the coming season, white plumes rise like smoke signals from various hills, where the heather is being burned. It’s all anyone talks about at upper-class dinner parties. If you’re not careful you can burn a whole moor. (Harry Stow-Crat pronounces it ‘maw’, the middle classes call it ‘maw-er’).
‘At Sandringham and Balmoral,’ Robert Lacey wrote in Majesty, ‘day-long shooting sorties take on the character of a military manoeuvre, with shooting brakes, vans full of beaters drawn by a tractor, and Land-Rovers which you clamber into, possibly to find the Queen sitting next to you.’
Prince Philip is one of the best shots in the country, which means the world. Prince Charles, it seems, is all set to overtake him, and is already the best fisherman in the family.
As soon as people start doing well in business they take up shooting, and photographs of themselves knee-deep in the bracken beside a grinning labrador with its mouth full of feathers are placed on top of the piano.
But the pitfalls are great for the unwary. Mr Nouveau-Richards has no idea what to tip the keeper, and keeps shooting his host’s grouse, rather like poor Charles Clore asking the late Duke of Marlborough if his loader could join them for lunch.