Older sons
Auberon Waugh
The British Aristocracy Mark BenceJones and Hugh MontgomeryMassingberd (Constable £6.95) On page 172 of this admirable new study of the British aristocracy, readers will find the beginning of a brief (two-page) essay on the Waugh family. Those who wonder what on earth the Waughs are doing in a book of this sort will have to accept my word for it that I have never bought either of the authors a drink, let alone luncheon, although it is true that one of them — Hugh MontgomeryMassingberd — was once my guest at a Private Eye luncheon. Perhaps it is in acknowledgement of this hospitality that the authors, on page 234, while discussing the sexual scandals of the 1960s, add in parenthesis: 'most of which, incidentally, were first brought to light by the largely aristocratic journalists of Private Eye'.
The only journalist on Private Eye with any aristocratic pretensions — in the common or garden sense of 'aristocratic' — was • the Honble Paul Foot, whose father and uncle are peers of the realm. But Foot, to everyone's sorrow, has moved on and the remaining hacks on Private Eye may well stare at each other in wild surmise, wondering which of us is 'largely aristocratic'. Nothing can alter the fact that it is a charming way to say 'thank you' for what I fear may have been rather an indifferent luncheon, but one begins to wonder if a scholarly treatise on the subject of the British aristocracy is really a suitable vehicle for these little courtesies.
After these discoveries it would be easy to use the book for a game of spot-thebread-and-butter. In one extreme instance — an extended study of the Lutyens family — I even began to wonder if it might not be a case of spot-the-bed-and-board. Sir Edwin Lutyens's father we learn was a wayward and impoverished painter of Danish descent, nephew of a French Master of Foxhounds, who married an Irish girl, Mary Gallway 'whose family had been prominent among the mercantile aristocracy of the City of Cork from mediaeval times until the end of the 17th century'.
Presumably the Gallways lost their prominence among the mercantile aristocracy of Cork after the end of the 17th century, and the authors give no clue what happened next. Did they go into domestic service, perhaps, or become takented peat-cutters or join the catering profession in some capacity or other? At any rate, she bore Lutyens 14 children of which the 1 1 th was the architect. Without the benefit of public school or university education Edwin Lutyens was successful in his profession. By the end of his life he had married an earl's daughter, resided near Cavendish Square and was accepted everywhere. A wholesome story, but scarcely illustrative of the book's subject, I feel. My suspicions had been aroused nearly 100 pages earlier when, in discussing aristocracy through the ages, the authors come to the Edwardians: 'And while the taste of some of the Edwardians was such as to justify the reputation which the Edwardian age has acquired for opulence and overblown vulgarity, it must not be forgotten that there were other Edwardians discriminating enough to realise the genius of Lutyens, perhaps the greatest English architect since Wren.'
The authors are adamant that the concept of aristocracy embraces far more than the nobility and landed gentry. At one point, they seem to be accepting its Greek or first OED meaning of 'rule by the best' but such a definition would be no different from the modern coinage of 'meritocracy', and aristocracy, of course, means much more than that. Some indication of the authors' use of the word may be given by their account of the Waugh family. Of Evelyn Waugh, they say that his 'forbears, both on his father's and on his mother's side, provide a classic illustration of the professional and service aristocracy', and conclude that 'his rise into fashionable society— which cannot but have caused a certain amount of jealousy among the less socially successful of the literary world — his marriage into the family of the Earls of Carnarvon and his membership of White's, can simply be seen as yet another instance of someone from the lesser aristocracy crossing the divide into the greater.'
A more straightforward way of saying the same thing might seem to be that he moved from the upper middle into the upper class, but such a bald statement would deny the whole mystique of aristocracy which it is the authors' intention to elucidate. The aristocrat, in their usage, combines the chivalry of the mediaeval knight, the sprezzatura of Castiglione's courtier, the honour of the Lloyds underwriter, the financial acumen of a Medici and the social ease of a television chat-show presenter. He is beautiful and good, and so are his womenfolk. To which those with a knowledge of the English class system can only reply, 'Oh, rot'. The whole concept of the English gentleman (as opposed to the nobleman or landed proprietor) was invented as a sop to disinherited younger sons. It is the cruel English system of primogeniture which once preserved and now threatens to destroy our bourgeois culture, and it is this bourgeois culture which enshrines the only standards worth preserving in western civilisation.
The Waughs and Lutyenses were good eggs in their time because they aspired, through their ingenuity and talents, to join the society of the hereditary rich. The death of this society was apparent when, after the war, the new rich no longer chose to copy the standards and life-style of the old aristocracy. Its requiem can be found every day in the gossip columns, where we read of the brighter, more dashing young aristocratic survivors aping the life-style and courting the attention of the new, basically proletarian, show biz or pop culture.
The reason that the upper classes can't and won't survive in England — whereas they can and will in France, Germany, possibly even Italy — is simply that there aren't enough of them. Public schools, in their time, were admirable enough agents of social mobility; they survive merely as a focus for class resentment, as a justification for proletarian hatred of education.
All of which can be extrapolated from the information supplied by the two authors, despite the wrongheadedness of their conelusions. They mourn the disappearance of domestic chaplains in the households of Catholic gentry; they regret that Anglican clergymen are no longer prepared to venerate the peerage and squirearchy, have lost the knack of showing a real and practical concern for the poor without feeling the need tobe 'abrasive' to the rich. All the authors lack is a clear understanding of the reasons for this lamentable state of affairs. Egalitarian democracy can be frustrated, but only if there are enough intelligent, selfish people engaged in the struggle. The greed of generations of older sons has left the English rich naked to their enemies.
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