Class (42 page)

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 VII 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.

‘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.