by Jilly Cooper
‘Whatever for?’ asked the Duke sarcastically. ‘Is he teaching you to eat as well?’
It is very smart to drink sloe gin at lunchtime but social death to turn up in gold boots and a shocking pink fun fur and talk throughout every drive like Mrs Nouveau-Richards.
Despite the Freudian terminology of shooting handbooks—all that talk about ‘pricked birds’, ‘cocks only’ days, and ‘premature gun mounting’—women are expected to keep very much in the background. Their duty is to provide a good lunch, keep an eye on the dogs and occasionally load. ‘After August 12th,’ sighed one Edwardian beauty, ‘wives and mistresses don’t exist.’
The exception was a Spanish prince who turned up to shoot in Yorkshire with a ravishing mistress, and missed everything he shot at on the first two drives. Bumping along in the Land-Rover to the third drive the keeper heard scufflings and, looking round, saw the prince and his mistress humping away on a mattress of slaughtered grouse. After that he shot brilliantly.
19 DOGS
The pooch it was that passed away.
‘I can get on perfectly well with the people my children marry,’ said one aristocratic old woman. ‘What I find difficult is dogs-in-law.’ She was talking about the troops of Tibetan spaniels, dachshunds and fat irascible terriers who join the family circle with a new daughter-in-law.
The upper classes, of course, adore their dogs. In the country they usually have at least five, like Catholics, and have grilles in the back of their cars to stop them being bothered by the children. The dogs coat the furniture with dogs hairs, wipe their faces on the chair covers, and most of them sleep in the bedroom. (Sir Sacheverell Sitwell’s Cavalier King Charles spaniels have a turquoise drinking bowl to match the bedroom wallpaper.) Their portraits hang under picture lights. Most of them are incontinent but no one seems to mind very much. Randolph Churchill was once heard balling out one of his dogs for peeing on the sofa.
‘Get down, Boycott, you know you’re meant to do that on the carpet.’
There was an old duke who was absolutely devoted to a foul terrier called Spot, who was rotund, blind, incontinent, bit everyone and was over twenty. Finally, under extreme family pressure, the duke agreed to take the dog out and shoot it. Tears pouring down his face, he and Spot set out into the twilight. The family waited in anticipation and jumped out of their skins when, ten minutes later, there was a feeble clawing on the door. It was Spot wanting to be let in. At the prospect of having to kill him the Duke had had a heart attack. Spot lived on for several years.
Walk through the garden of any upper-class house and, in a quiet, shady corner, you will find a lot of little crosses. This is the dogs’ graveyard. One I know in Lancashire includes a favourite parrot buried in a cake tin. A small tombstone at Sandringham bears the inscription ‘To The Queen’s Faithful Friend, Susan’.
On the whole the upper classes prefer what they call working dogs—labradors to ‘shoot over’ (they never shoot ‘with’ them) and Jack Russells, Norfolk or hunt terriers to dig ‘Charlie’ (as they call the fox) out, although they never get that far. Black labradors are much grander than yellow, and are quite often invited without their owners to shoot in Scotland and travel up quite happily on the train. Another labrador came all the way down to London from Northumberland to be mated. The owner of the bitch booked a room at the Turf Club (presumably in the name of ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’). The dogs screwed away merrily all night and produced eight puppies. The owner of one stately home told me he had terrible trouble when members of the visiting public were stretched out asleep on the grass in summer, because his labrador always went and lifted his leg on any bald head.
King Charles spaniels are very upper-class dogs, so are whippets, springer spaniels and corgis. Hounds are never kept as pets, but ‘walked’ as puppies in the summer. Upper-class dogs often have two addresses on their collars: one for London and another for the country. On the label should be engraved the owner’s surname, address and telephone number. It is very vulgar to put the dog’s name in inverted commas, and to have anything other than brown leather collars. Tartan collars for Scotties or West Highland terriers and diamanté for poodles are also out. So are red bows on longhaired dogs, or topiary on poodles.
Upper-class dogs only have one meal a day and are therefore quite thin, like their owners. Snipe Stow-Crat is so well trained he doesn’t need a collar or lead at all. (Jen Teale would say ‘leash’. Mr Definitely-Disgusting uses string, and calls his puppy a ‘pup’. He also talks about ‘pooches’.)
It is very lower-middle to be frightened of dogs, or to go into queeny hysterics whenever a dog lifts its leg on your garden fence.
Upper-middle dog owners are almost keener on them than the aristocracy. They don’t have so many, so the affection is not divided and they don’t keep them for working but to talk to and through. Colonel and Mrs Upward address each other through their dalmatian. Samantha has an evening bag lined with congealed fat from bringing home chops and bits of steak for Blücher, her English setter.
Dogs belonging to the upper-middle merry-tocracy always reek of garlic from having doggy-bag pork chops or chicken a la Kiev posted through the door to stop them barking and waking the nanny when their owners return from restaurants too drunk to find their keys.
‘Howard—did you remember to give Petal her pill?’
Dalmatians, English setters, cairns, golden retrievers, are upper-middle-class dogs. The upper-middles have also recently taken to foreign breeds—Weimaraners, and rotweillers—because the classes below can’t pronounce them. Old English sheepdogs used to be upper-middle but have lost caste since they appeared so often on television advertising paint.
Howard Weybridge likes airedales and rough-haired terriers, great danes and Irish wolfhounds. They look so heraldic loping through the pinewoods of Surrey. He also likes red setters and cocker spaniels.
Mrs Nouveau Richards loves Yorkshire terriers and poodles and all the show-off cruising-partner dogs like collies and Afghans.
Bryan Teale likes dobermanns and boxers because they don’t shed hairs. Jen hates all dogs because they’re so smelly.
Mr D-D belongs to the Daily Mirror Pets Club and loves all ‘pooches’. But he’s particularly partial to ‘Westies’ as he calls West Highlands and Alsatians because they’re such good guard dogs (and some of his rougher friends might try to get him one day). And of course you can’t beat a good mongrel (though he frequently does). Mongrels (which Mr D-D pronounces to rhyme with ‘long’ and Harry Stow-Crat to rhyme with ‘dung’) are sometimes called ‘street dogs’, or ‘butcher’s dogs’ because they used to follow the butcher’s van.
Nigel Dempster, in a recent piece on ‘In and Out’ trends, said that mongrels from Battersea were very ‘In’. But on the whole the upper classes don’t approve of mongrels. I always pretend mine are lurchers when I go anywhere smart. Caroline Stow-Crat would swallow, then cover up her disapproval by saying, ‘But they’re supposed to be awfully intelligent and loyal.’
It is pretty unsmart to show your dogs—rather like going in for a beauty contest—and also to enter your guard dog for what is called ‘O-bedience tests’. Field trials, however, are all right.
Jen Teale talks about ‘veterinary surgeons’ instead of ‘vets’, and ‘lady dogs’ instead of ‘bitches’. Mrs Nouveau-Richards talks about ‘doggies’ and ‘pups’.
Mr Nouveau-Richards recently paid £100 for what he thought was a pedigree labrador puppy for Tracey-Diane. It turned out to be a hamster.
Upper-class dogs have simple names like Badger, Ranger and Bertie. The middle class, however, are madly into the Victorian names which the upper-middles were calling their children ten years ago: Emma, Jessica, Fanny, Cassandra, Sophie, Jason, and funny-ha-ha names like Wellington, Melchester, or Ugly for a pug.
The working classes either name their dogs according to their appearance—Spot, Blackie, Patch, Snowy—or try and upgrade them with names like Lady and Duchess. On Eel Brook Common at night it sounds l
ike a mediaeval roll-call, with cries of’Rex’, ‘Prince’, ‘Duke’ echoing plaintively through the darkening mist.
The upper classes don’t like cats as much as dogs, and tend only to keep them in the stables to keep the rats down. The more well-bred a cat, usually the commoner the owner.
Mrs D-D refers to her cat as ‘Pussy’: ‘A neighbour took Pussy when I went on holiday.’
20 CLUBS
If the Englishman’s home is his castle, the English gentleman’s bolthole is his club. I don’t mean the kind of club like Esher R.F.C. or Hurlingham (which is not a club, but a place where foreigners go when Harrods is closed) or the M.C.C. which people join to meet people and play games with their ‘own sort’, but the sort of club that a man joins to avoid meeting people—not least members of his own club. A club is a useful place for a gentleman to remain incommunicado, particularly from his wife. The porter will always put up a smokescreen.
Although a lot of London clubs now allow women in as guests, this has been done grudgingly. At the Army and Navy there’s a separate dining room for them. At the Naval and Military there’s a special entrance. At the Garrick they are not allowed to use the main staircase before 7 p.m. and are bundled into a side room at lunchtime, where they are forgotten for long periods by the staff. In the rule book it says that no lady visitor be introduced more than ten times within the same year, except members of the family of the member—which presumably keeps mistresses at bay.
There used to be a famous ladies’ club called the Cowdray, of which my mother-in-law was a member and which described itself, rather wildly, as a club ‘for professional women’. One of the oldest members was a Miss Eardley Wilmot, who wrote the words for ‘My Little Grey Home in the West’. Miss Wilmot once met my father-in-law on the landing (men were allowed to stay with their wives towards the end of the Cowdray’s existence).
‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘a man,’ and fainted away.
I always like the story about the Athenaeum, the august haunt of bishops and dons. It is said that a notice appeared in one of the papers saying: ‘The Athenaeum re-opened today after the annual cleaning, and members were replaced in their original positions.’
Harry Stow-Crat would probably belong to White’s. If not White’s, Boodle’s, Brooks’s, Buck’s or the Turf. He would never be seen in the RAC (The Chauffeurs’ Arms) or the Junior Carlton. He would have been lunched at the Garrick probably by his lawyer, but never wants to be asked back there because he saw Robin Day in the dining room.
Colonel Upward is a member of the Army and Navy, which he calls the Rag; his brother, Commander Upward, goes to the Naval and Military, known as the In and Out, but both of them know little places somewhere else called ‘Clubs’ where you can drink in faintly louche surroundings for longer hours.
All but the very smart London clubs have allowed the spiralists to become members in order to boost membership; uneasy-looking goosenecks with brushed-forward hair in High Street suitings can be seen looking bewildered by the unfamiliar surroundings, wondering which fork to use and desperately trying to stop their gooseneck guests pulling out sheafs of papers and talking shop in whining, nasal voices. Clubs may not be used for business purposes or used as a business address.
Clubs Harry would never be seen in include the Savage, the National Liberal, the East India and Sports and the Gresham Club in the city. The Reform is also way down the list now. It is interesting that when Mr Thorpe took Norman Scott there for a drink he used to pretend that Mr Scott was a constituent he was helping with some family problem. He felt Mr Scott was too ‘suburban’ (his very words) to be introduced as a friend.
Bryan Teale joins the Rotary Club, prompted by Jen who thinks it might advance his career, and belongs to a social club at work. Mr and Mrs Definitely-Disgusting go to the working men’s clubs on Fridays and have a whale of a time watching high-class variety acts and filling themselves with beer. The working men’s club, in fact, is the lynch-pin of working-class culture. Ironically, they were started as temperance clubs by a vicar in 1862 to add a bit of colour to the dismal life of the working man. Later Lord Rosebery introduced drinking and smoking. Some of the clubs are colossal. The one at Batley in Yorkshire is now closed but could hold 15,000 people, big enough to attract such names as Frank Sinatra, who might by-pass London on his way. Even Mr Definitely-Disgusting laughs at Charlie Williams, the famous black comedian who made his name in working men’s clubs. Evidently part of his turn is to mop his face and say,
‘My God, it won’t come off. If thee don’t laugh, I’ll come and live next door to thee.’
‘Yes, but why White’s for goodness sake?’
He deals with problems familiar to the working classes: rents, unemployment, mothers-in-law, class (‘our lodger’s such a naice young man’).
One of his favourite jokes is Enoch Powell going up to the pearly gates and a voice says, ‘Who Dat out Dere?’
‘No,’ said Enoch. ‘Forget it.’
There was once a very rich financier who wanted to join a smart London club. Anxious to find out how his election had gone, he despatched a sycophantic minion to find out the result. The minion returned sometime later, looking uneasy.
‘How did it go?’ said the financier.
‘Pure caviare, I fear,’ said the minion.
21 THE SERVICES
The origins of most of the oldest families in England are military and feudal. When William the Conqueror was establishing himself in this country he offered his henchmen pieces of land if they would provide him with a certain number of soldiers for a specified number of days a year. The henchmen who produced the most men got the most land. By Henry V’s reign things had got a bit out of hand, with everyone calling himself ‘knight’ or ‘esquire’, regardless of right. Henry therefore ordered that coats of arms would only be granted to people who had fought at Agincourt or who could show ancestral right. Even so several hundred people were granted arms in the fifteenth century, and in the sixteenth century many more, an increase that has no parallel in any continental country. It has also always been the practice of monarchs to reward their great soldiers with titles, hence the Dukes of Marlborough and Wellington, or, more recently Earl Alexander, Viscount Montgomery and Lord Portal.
Once upon a time the army was very smart. ‘An officer’, wrote Lord Stanley in the nineteenth century, ‘shall still be the son of a gentleman. A gentleman is understood to mean a man who has plenty of money, and does not exercise any retail trade or any mechanical profession. If you find a horse dealer or a shopkeeper’s son, you may be certain that the rule has been relaxed because his father has contrived to ingratiate himself with the class above his own, and not on account of the personal merit of the candidate.’
Because of the last two wars and National Service there is hardly a family in the land which has not at one time had some military experience. There are those who would argue that this did more to break down social barriers than any other single influence during the last century. Certainly the First World War taught young gentlemen from country houses that little men from Durham were not just hairy, illiterate dwarfs who lived and worked underground, but sensitive, loyal, and often fantastically brave human beings. Equally the Durham miners and the Somerset yokels discovered that, far from being aloof, etoliated drips, their officers loved and cared for them, and died for them in what they believed to be the cause of right. This and succeeding wars formed a mutual bond which began to alter the whole social scene, but the Trade Unions and the Labour party in the last few years have done their best to recreate the social divisions that existed in the early 1900s.
Today, sadly, the army has lost caste, as their numbers are cut, their regiments merged, and the cost of living outstrips their pay.
‘Colonels used to impress’, Heather Jenner told me, ‘but today there is a completely different attitude to them. It’s a devil of a job to get them married’.
But although it may no longer be a repository for chinless wonders or
second sons of noble houses with nothing better to do, the army has, regardless, a rigid social structure.
There are still smart regiments and not so smart regiments. At the top are the Cavalry, still so called, and the Foot Guards (part of the Household Brigade.) There are the Greenjackets, light infantry, line regiments, Scottish regiments and, last and certainly least, the Corps who tend to have even fiercer snobbery and larger chips than their superiors and betters. All Gunners, according to my husband, are boring and most of them are stone deaf.
Of the Cavalry regiments, the Blues and Royals, the Greys, the 17/21st Lancers and, until recently, the 11th Hussars, could claim to be the élite; but when the 11th joined the 10th, they claimed to have been dragged down, just as the Blues have been by the Royals. It used to be smarter to be in armoured cars than tanks, which gave an edge to the 13th/18th, KDGs, Royals, 15th/19th, 11th Hussars and 12th Lancers. Nowadays they chop and charge.
The Scots, Welsh and Irish Guards are looked down on by the Coldstream and the Grenadiers, but all except the latter unite in regarding the Grenadiers as the stupidest.
The Green Jackets (formerly the Rifle Brigade and the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, and now including the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry) are the soundest socially. They look down on Regiments of the Line. You can’t get much lower than The Royal Corps of Transport and The Royal Army Ordnance Corps, unless you are part of an Amalgamated Regiment like the Royal Anglians. The Army Catering Corps is not even Royal yet. The WRAC is staffed almost wholly by lesbians, incipient traffic wardens and lady brigadiers who become dames.