Thursday 28 March 2024

L'appartement parisien de Karl Lagerfeld aux enchères le 26 mars | AFP / Karl Lagerfeld’s futuristic Paris apartment sells for €10m


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Karl Lagerfeld’s futuristic Paris apartment sells for €10m

 

The late fashion designer lived at the flat overlooking the Seine River for a decade

 

Agence France-Presse in Paris

Tue 26 Mar 2024 16.50 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2024/mar/26/karl-lagerfelds-futuristic-paris-apartment-sells-for-10m-euros

 

The futuristic Paris apartment of the late fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld has been sold for €10m (£8.5m) at auction.

 

The final price, €11m including notary fees, was roughly double the guide price, set at €5.3m. No details were given of the buyer.

 

Located in a 17th-century building on Quai Voltaire, the three-room home has a view overlooking the Seine River and the Louvre museum.

 

The apartment of 260 sq m has a 50 sq m dressing room and was completely refurbished by Lagerfeld “in a futuristic style with a concrete floor and sections of sandblasted glass”, according to the notary.

 

German-born Lagerfeld, whose spectacular creations and shows for Chanel, Fendi and his own brand had a profound impact on the fashion world, lived there for about 10 years until his death aged 85 in February 2019.

 

His office and library is now open to the public as a bookshop and event space in the Latin Quarter of Paris.

 

A series about his life, Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, starring Daniel Brühl, is due to stream on Disney+ in June.

 

In an interview with AFP earlier this month, Bruhl said he had tried to emulate Lagerfeld’s extreme aesthete tastes.

 

“I tried my best … but the furniture, the posters, the photographs, the paintings, the books … to be such a perfectionist in aesthetics is something I absolutely share, but obviously I’m useless in comparison,” Brühl said.


Wednesday 27 March 2024

Beyond Chic – October 22, 2013 by Ivan Terestchenko (Author)


 

Beyond Chic – October 22, 2013

by Ivan Terestchenko (Author)

Some of the most important people in fashion—Chanel, Alaïa, Yves Saint Laurent, Pucci, Kenzo, and Missoni—are known for their public image and their iconic designs. But what kind of world have they cultivated behind closed doors? From France to Italy, from England to Morocco, come along on a private visit to the remarkable homes of couturiers, stylists, muses, and fashion personalities. Photographer Ivan Terestchenko shows the décor, works of art, and the personal collections of these legendary designers. Some interiors, such as Chanel’s apartment at 31 rue Cambon, are mythic, while others like those of Giorgio Armani’s châlet or Vanessa Seward, Azzaro’s head designer, are completely unconventional. From minimal (Nicole Farhi) to exotic (Franca Sozanni), to a deceptively simple French apartment (Loulou de La Falaise), this book explores the spaces and places created by some of fashion’s biggest names.

 

Praise for "Beyond Chic"

 "Photographer Ivan Terestchenko traveled the globe--from Ottavio Missoni's Venetian Manse to Christian Louboutin's adobe home in Luxor, Egypt--to capture the more than 200 images in this lush and inspiring bit of voyeurism." -- Details "Photographer Ivan Terestchenko is known for his work photographing the homes of some of fashion's most notable names. Their iconic designs are well known, but what kind of style do they have behind closed doors? Take a peek into some seriously fashionable houses." -MarthaStewart.com

"Manolo Blahnik's house is like a pair of his shoes: elegant, well-proportioned and far more comfortable than it might appear. And it is appearances that are often at stake in Mr. Terestchenko's 19 beautiful photo essays on the homes of designers as varied as Azzedine Alaia, Vittorio Missoni, and Reed Krakoff." - Wall Street Journal

"Terestchenko opens doors to the homes of an extended collection of notable names in fashion....Beyond Chic: Great Fashion Designers at Home invites readers into the private homes of these very public tastemakers and a lustrous list of equally-inspiring courteriers, stylists, muses, and fashion personalities." -Veranda

"Terestchenko draws parallels between the aesthetics of renowned fashion companies and their creators' interior stylings. The visual study is more than just a discussion about decor." -Lonny

"Beyond Chic: Great Fashion Designers at Home by Ivan Terestchenko may just be the most beautiful book of the past few years." -From the Right Bank to the Left Coast

"People love to see the homes of fashion designers. In Beyond Chic: Great Fashion Designers at Home...Ivan Terestchenko takes readers into the private spaces of the late designers Coco Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent, as well as Azzedine Alaia and Vaness Seward, to name just a few." -Habitually Chic

 

"A fascinating look into the private residences of some of fashion's most influential designers, tastemakers, and stylists from photographer Ivan Terestchenko. This volume of eye candy spans both the globe and a wide array of décor styles, highlighting the diversity of the residents and their corresponding brands." --Domainehome.com

Monday 25 March 2024

REMEMBERING : The exhibition at Drexel University, Citizen, Soldier, Diplomat: An Exhibition on the Life and Career of Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, Jr., chronicles the extraordinary life of the great grandson of Drexel University’s founder, Anthony J. Drexel.





The Stylish Millionaire Diplomat, Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr.

 

The patriotic scion of several prominent Philadelphia families is the subject of an intimate exhibition.

BY DAVID NASHPUBLISHED: JAN 2, 2020

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a30272166/anthony-drexel-biddle-jr-exhibition-drexel-university/

 

Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, Jr. could easily lay claim to being one of the most fascinating—though often forgotten—figures of the 20th century. Now a new exhibition at Drexel University, Citizen, Soldier, Diplomat: An Exhibition on the Life and Career of Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, Jr., chronicles the extraordinary life of the great grandson of Drexel University’s founder, Anthony J. Drexel.

https://drexel.edu/drexel-founding-collection/exhibitions-events/exhibitions/AJDB-Jr/

 

 

The prominent Philadelphian was a favorite subject of society columns, receiving regular recognition for his personal style and athleticism. In 1937 Biddle was named among the best-dressed by the National Association of Merchant Tailors of America, and by Flair in 1950, and Esquire in 1960. He was also a founding member of the Palm Beach Bath & Tennis Club, and as a court tennis champion won the Racquet d’Argent in France in 1933. But it’s perhaps his service to the United States during the course of two World Wars, and several administrations, that should be remembered as Biddle’s most meaningful contribution.

 

Born in 1897, Biddle was the son of the eccentric and wealthy Colonel Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, whose unconventional life was immortalized in the 1967 Walt Disney musical film The Happiest Millionaire, itself based on the book My Philadelphia Father written by Biddle’s sister Cordelia. In 1955, in response to the book’s publication, the New York Times reported that “What the Cabots are to Boston the Biddles are to Philadelphia, and if the Biddle position with respect to Deity is not quite as clearly defined as the Cabots, they have a distinction of their own; they are known for their charm.”

 

Biddle graduated St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire in 1915 and married his first wife, tobacco heiress Mary L. Duke, a cousin of Doris Duke. In 1917, at age 20, he enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army. After leaving the military in the early 1920s, Biddle engaged in a number of ventures and was, at one time, a director of 11 corporations simultaneously.

 

The stock market crash of 1929 curtailed most of his earlier business interests, and his marriage to Duke ended shortly after in 1931. Biddle married his second wife, copper mining heiress Margaret Thompson Schulze, that same year. President Roosevelt first appointed him minister to Norway in 1935, and then Ambassador to Poland in 1937.

 

“In addition to the many personal objects in the exhibition, we have a number of pieces Biddle used in the U.S. Embassy in Poland including the desk he used, the official embassy seal removed when he fled Warsaw in 1939, and a lot of rare occupation documents,” says Lynn Clouser, director of the Drexel Collection.

 

This second appointment also led to his London-based commission in 1941 to the governments-in-exile of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Yugoslavia–making Biddle the ambassador to more countries at once than any other person in history. The prior year he had also served as the interim ambassador to France.

 

After leaving the State Department in 1944 Biddle re-enlisted in the army, rose to the rank of Brigadier General, and served in various high-level positions under General Eisenhower until retiring in 1955. In 1946 Biddle married his third wife, Margaret Atkinson Loughborough, a major also serving under Eisenhower. The couple raised their two children between France, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania.

 

“He passed away when I was 12-years-old–it was a short but memorable period,” recalls Biddle’s son, Anthony "Tony" J. Drexel Biddle III. “I remember being two or three on the front lawn [of our house] in Paris and he stood me underneath an apple tree, then stepped around back and shook it so hard that apples were raining down on me–that was the first trick he pulled that I can remember,” he laughs.

 

In January 1961 Biddle reluctantly took his final State Department appointment as Ambassador to Spain under President Kennedy. “America and Western Europe were having a difficult time with [Spanish dictator] Francisco Franco over possibly losing [the territory of] Gibraltar,” says Tony. “So, Jack [Kennedy] implored my father to return to the diplomatic core though, initially, he respectfully declined.”

 

Kennedy then approached Biddle’s close friend, General James Gavin–who Kennedy had just appointed Ambassador to France–to help convince him to take the job. “Gavin said to my father, ‘if you go to Spain, I’ll go to Paris–but if you don’t, I won’t.’ Then, suddenly we were in Spain,” Tony remembers. “We must have landed there a week after Jack was inaugurated and in a remarkably short period of time Dad nullified the problem, and Franco was absolutely in love with him.”

 

Biddle maintained three strong political relationships throughout his life and nearly 30-year career—those with Presidents Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. “Ike [Eisenhower] was being drafted to run for president and he asked my father to consider running as his vice president,” says Tony. “Dad accepted that as an enormous compliment but declined.”

 

When pressed, Biddle offered two reasons: First he wasn’t cut out for campaigning, and second he was a Democrat, to which Eisenhower replied, “Who cares!” According to Tony, at one time both the Democratic and Republican parties in Pennsylvania were after his father to run for governor.

 

Biddle’s relationship with Kennedy began when the future president was a student at Harvard. “Joe [Kennedy] was in London at the time and called up Dad in Warsaw to say, ‘I have this vision my son is going to be Secretary of State one day, and it would be good if he learned some of the ropes early.’”

 

The younger Kennedy would spend a summer in Poland with Biddle, and the pair became fast friends. “Jack always depended on him a lot for the rest of his life,” says Tony. “When Jack ran for the nomination the first time—and didn’t get it—my Dad was a very important morale-boosting supporter. He encouraged Jack to stay the course, and the next time he won.”

 

By the time they arrived in Spain, Tony recalls having, at 11-years-old, a “young person’s understanding” of what his father did. “We were there basically a year, then Dad became ill and died that November.” At the end of his life, Biddle spent a month at the Airforce base outside Madrid before being transferred to Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington DC, and ultimately succumbed to lung cancer at age 64.

 

“One of the most important things in life to Dad was a sense of humor,” says Tony. “Today that would translate into not taking yourself too seriously. He loved people, and the more he loved you, the more likely he was going to do something funny.”

 

Located in Drexel University’s Rincliffe Gallery and A.J. Drexel Picture Gallery, the exhibition runs through May 1, 2020.



Sunday 24 March 2024

Princess of Wales cancer treatment: reaction after weeks of speculation


The Observer view on The Princess of Wales: calm and courage amid a family already beset by crises

Observer editorial

Catherine’s moving message revealing her treatment for cancer showed a candour that the monarchy has often lacked

 

Sat 23 Mar 2024 15.39 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/23/observer-view-on-the-princess-of-wales-calm-and-courage-amid-a-family-beset-by-crises

 

The video recording in which Catherine, Princess of Wales, revealed she is undergoing treatment for cancer will be remembered as a moving personal testament and a public profile in courage at a time of great challenges for the monarchy. Catherine’s demeanour was calm, her clothes and appearance ordinary, her voice steady, although the strain showed behind her eyes. Yet most of all, it was Catherine’s bravery that shone through as she described the “incredibly tough” two months that she, her husband and children have endured since her illness, so shocking and unexpected, was first diagnosed.

 

All those people across Britain who are afflicted by cancer – the total is about 3 million, with about 1,000 new diagnoses each day – and relatives and friends whose lives are upended by the disease will identify closely with the feelings Catherine expressed or intimated. Fear for the future, present pain, the often distressing side effects of modern treatments, worry about the impact on the children: such thoughts besiege and oppress the mind even as the body struggles. Catherine spoke vicariously for all who suffer.

 

This ability – to speak for and to speak to all of this country’s less exalted, less heard, less fortunate “ordinary” people – is a quality that the monarchy, in its uncertain, slightly anachronistic national leadership role, needs badly and has often lacked. It is essential to its continued relevance and popular support. Kate Middleton, the middle-class girl from the home counties whose very surname smacked of ordinariness, has occupied that treacherous common ground from the moment she and William married at Westminster Abbey in 2011.

 

Catherine’s positive, smiling personality, obvious commitment to her role as a mother and lack of airs and graces have helped make her the most popular younger royal since Princess Diana. Her normalising presence has proved especially important as the royal family experienced a string of difficulties. In hindsight, the death of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 and the close of the second Elizabethan era triggered a period of turmoil. It has brought a cancer diagnosis for the late queen’s son and successor, King Charles III, further disgrace of Prince Andrew and damaging ructions over the maverick behaviour of Prince Harry.

 

Catherine’s key role in keeping “the Firm” afloat means her prospective absence from public duties for the foreseeable future will be all the more deeply felt in Buckingham Palace. With the king also out of action – like Catherine, the type of cancer he is suffering from has not been revealed – and with two princes in self-imposed or enforced exile, an already supposedly “slimmed down” monarchy begins to look depleted, overstretched and vulnerable. Yet this is not the moment for republicans to re-open the debate about its future. That must come, in time. But not now.

 

Right now, Catherine and her family deserve and must be afforded the privacy, time and personal space for which she has asked, in order that she completes a full recovery. Cancer charities have rightly praised her openness about her condition. Catherine has been laudably candid after weeks of unfair, sometimes malicious, speculation on social media and the international press. We wish her well over the difficult weeks and months ahead.

 

Catherine became a fairytale princess – the girl with everything. And yet, so it turns out, hers was not a charmed life after all. Her challenge is everywoman’s and everyman’s.



 

Princess of Wales ‘enormously touched’ by messages of support after cancer diagnosis

 

Kensington Palace says Catherine and Prince William are ‘extremely moved by the public’s warmth and support’

 

Guardian staff and agencies

Sun 24 Mar 2024 04.09 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/24/princess-of-wales-enormously-touched-by-messages-of-support-after-cancer-diagnosis

 

The Princess of Wales and her husband, Prince William, have been “enormously touched” by the messages of support received since she announced her cancer diagnosis, a Kensington Palace spokesperson has said.

 

Catherine said on Friday she was undergoing preventive chemotherapy after tests done following her major abdominal surgery in January revealed cancer had been present.

 

The 42-year-old wife of the heir to the throne called the cancer discovery a “huge shock”. The news came as a fresh health blow to the British royal family: King Charles is also undergoing treatment for cancer.

 

Kate’s statement via a video message, which was filmed at Windsor Castle on Wednesday, triggered an outpouring of support from well-wishers.

 

“The prince and princess are both enormously touched by the kind messages from people here in the UK, across the commonwealth and around the world in response to Her Royal Highness’s message,” the Kensington Palace spokesperson said in a statement on Saturday.

 

“They are extremely moved by the public’s warmth and support and are grateful for the understanding of their request for privacy at this time.”

 

It is not known how long Kate will be receiving treatment but it is understood she may be keen to attend events as and when she feels able to, in line with medical advice, although this will not indicate a return to full-time duties.

 

William will continue to balance supporting his wife and family and maintaining his official duties, as he has done since her operation.

 

The prince is due to return to public duties after his children return to school following the Easter break. He and his wife will not attend the royal family’s traditional Easter Sunday service at Windsor Castle’s St George’s Chapel, which the king is hoping to go to with the queen if his health allows.

 

It is not likely to be a large family gathering or service, according to the Telegraph, as Charles has paused public-facing royal duties.

 

The palace said Catherine started her chemotherapy treatment in late February. It is understood her public announcement of the news was timed to coincide with the children breaking up from school for the Easter holidays.

 

The palace said Catherine had wished to provide a medical update in order to put an end to the speculation sparked by her admission to the London Clinic on 16 January for major abdominal surgery. At the time, the palace refused to confirm what Catherine was being treated for, but said the condition was non-cancerous.

 

The speculation was only fuelled when the first official photograph of the Princess of Wales to be released after her surgery was recalled by some of the world’s biggest picture agencies earlier this month over claims it had been manipulated.

 

With Reuters and Press Association


Analysis

Burden falls on Prince William to steer monarchy through next few months

Harriet Sherwood

With his father and wife diagnosed with cancer, and himself estranged from his once beloved brother, the blows have come thick and fast

 

Sat 23 Mar 2024 16.05 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/23/burden-falls-on-prince-william-to-steer-monarchy-through-next-few-months

 

For the Prince of Wales, the blows have come swiftly one after the other. First his father, King Charles, revealed that he had been diagnosed with cancer, and then came the news from doctors that his wife, Catherine, the Princess of Wales, also has cancer.

 

The stress on the heir to the throne will be considerable. Not only must he support his wife and father, he must also shepherd his young children through a family medical crisis in the glare of global media coverage. And he must shoulder much of the responsibility of steering the monarchy through challenging months ahead.

 

In her video statement released on Friday, Kate acknowledged her husband’s role in her recovery from surgery and treatment for cancer. “Having William by my side is a great source of comfort and reassurance,” she said.

 

Immediately after Kate’s abdominal surgery in January, William took time off to support his family. But on 6 February, he returned to royal duties as Kate recuperated at home in Windsor.

 

Three weeks later, he suddenly pulled out of attending a memorial service for his late godfather, King Constantine of Greece, citing unspecified “personal reasons”. That triggered frenzied speculation on social media. It is thought that Kate’s diagnosis landed about this time.

 

King Charles also missed the service, leaving Queen Camilla and Prince Andrew to lead the royal party.

 

Now Kate is undergoing chemotherapy, it is unlikely she will perform any official duties for the foreseeable future. The king has resumed limited engagements in the past month, such as an audience with Rishi Sunak and a privy council meeting, but is not expected to travel or undertake arduous engagements.

 

William’s priority over the next few weeks will be his family. The prince is able to take as much time as he needs without financial worries or fear of losing his job. Many spouses or partners in a similar position have to make hard choices.

 

“Balancing working and caring” for someone with cancer “can be difficult”, says the charity Macmillan Cancer Support. It advises trying to find a “balance between the support you want to give and what you are able to do”, and talking to employers about possible flexible working arrangements.

 

Many people depend on the support – practical and emotional – of close relatives. Not for the first time, William may be reflecting on the breakdown in the once close relationship with his brother Harry, now living thousands of miles away and largely estranged from his family.

 

While many families pull together in a crisis, and strengthen mutual bonds, this seems unlikely for the royals.


Analysis

Apologies for Kategate – but will the spirit of restraint on social media last?

Vanessa Thorpe Arts and media correspondent

The Princess of Wales’s cancer diagnosis has put a stop to the internet’s wilder conspiracy theories, but it could be temporary

 

Sat 23 Mar 2024 19.02 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/23/princess-of-wales-social-media-apologies-for-kategate-will-restraint-last

 

After Friday’s filmed statement from the Princess of Wales, it is now TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and X, formerly Twitter, who are in the dock. This weekend thousands of individual users have expressed contrition over the conspiracy theories they aired and the boss of X herself tried to reposition her platform by urging compassion.

 

“A brave message delivered by Princess Kate with her signature grace,” CEO of X, Linda Yaccarino, posted, adding, “Her request for privacy, to protect her children and allow her to move forward (without endless speculation) seems like a reasonable request to respect.”

 

Speculation about the whereabouts and wellbeing of Catherine, in the face of repeated contradictions from Kensington Palace, took place chiefly on social media in this country. While British newspapers showed restraint, phones lit up with conspiracy theories – and foreign print and TV news journalists joined in.

 

“Kategate became a cottage industry of clickbait online because it was a mystery, which invites audience participation,” said writer Helen Lewis of the Atlantic. “One of the rules of the internet is that people like to put themselves into the narrative, and here, everyone got a chance to be the lead in their own version of CSI.”

 

Rosie Boycott, a crossbench peer and former editor of the Independent and the Daily Express, sees it as “a very shabby episode”. “I hope people feel quite ashamed because the internet hit a real low with poor Kate,” she said. “There may have been a briefing for some British newspaper editors, telling them to take it seriously, but we have zero control over social media – and then that viral outbreak itself becomes the story.”

 

Forensic analysis of the princess’s clothes was conducted online by amateur sleuths arguing the edited royal Mother’s Day photograph was a total composite, while others disbelieved the farm shop video of the couple that became public last week. Although some of this spurious detective work was driven by misplaced concern for Catherine, it also demonstrated a current distrust of “legacy” media.

 

“It is the wild west online, partly because of the anonymity,” said Boycott. “But Kategate has been horrid and I don’t understand it, except that it reveals this strange thing we have about feeling we own celebrities.”

 

Lewis watched as the vacuum of real news spawned online content: “There was just enough truth among all the speculation to make the conspiracy theories not entirely absurd. By accident, Kensington Palace fed the fire rather than quenched it,” she said.

 

“So you could watch videos explaining how the photo of Kate and the children was suspiciously edited – which it was. That legitimised the wilder stuff about body doubles and AI generation. I even saw a 3D animated reconstruction of one of the photos taken of Kate in the car.

 

“Some people were doing all this with self-aware irony, but other people presented themselves as trying to ‘save’ Kate, in a way that was reminiscent of the stories around Britney Spears – and again, that’s someone who apparently was sending coded messages about her conservatorship through her Instagram captions. So the idea isn’t completely ridiculous.”

 

The new tone of online sobriety might last a while, given the gravity and sensitivity of the princess’s situation, even on digital forums that are built to discourage moderate voices. But the appetite for status updates on her health will not go away.

 

“What this proves is that Kensington Palace can still control the British press to some extent,” said Lewis. “But they can’t control the internet, or the American media, who are hugely interested in our royal family but have very different standards on privacy and libel.”


Wednesday 20 March 2024

GENTLEMEN.


 










Laurence Fellows


This is the only photograph I was able to find in my search in the Internet ...namely a group Photo of Young American Artists ( Wikipedia).The "blow up" of Laurence Fellows was made by the "blogger" Maxminimus, in Maxminimus.blogspot.
Young American Artists of the Modern School, L. to R. Jo Davidson, Edward Steichen, Arthur B. Carles, John Marin; back: Marsden Hartley, Laurence Fellows, c. 1911, Bates College Museum of Art


(1885 - 1964)
From the Gay Nineties up through the 1920s, American humor magazines played a greater social role than is generally appreciated. Their candor in recording the current events in a satirical weekly or monthly forum presented the contemporary American attitudes, prejudices, and mores in the guise of humor that was not found in the more sober mainstream periodicals. Publications such as Truth, Life, Puck, Leslie's, and Judge showcased the talents of such major illustrators as Charles Dana Gibson, James Montgomery Flagg, Orson Lowell, T.S. Sullivant, Peter Newell, Art Young, and many others who mirrored the country's foibles in their enthusiastic ridicule.

Joining the group in the early teens was an ultra sophisticated young artist named Laurence Fellows. A native of Pennsylvania, Fellows had received his training at the Philadelphia Academy of Art, with several follow-up years studying in England and in France at the Academie Julien under J.P. Laurens.

Upon his return to the United States, Fellows' fresh point of view, particularly reflecting a French/Vogue influence, found him a ready audience. His style was distinguished by a thin outline, flat tonality or color, with the emphasis on shapes rather than details. Just as quickly, however, he acquired many imitators. Before John Held, Jr., for instance, had invented his "flapper," he was clearly adapting much from Fellows' mannered drawing style into his own submitted gags. Other new converts were Hal Burroughs, Bertram Hartman, and Ralph Barton, who would each run with it in their own way. Fellows particularly liked to play with off-balanced compositions, even in the more conservative arena of illustration for advertising.

One of his early commercial clients was Kelly-Springfield Tires, which gave him the opportunity to combine his elegant draftsmanship with the clever, humorous copy depreciating the competition, thus often violating the rule against "negative" advertising. But Fellows' drawing and the copy had an edge of good humor that attracted a national following and the successful campaign lasted for many years.

In the thirties, Fellows gradually shifted his emphasis to fashion art, including both men and women, finding clients in Vanity Fair, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, The American Magazine, and McClure's. He also became a regular contributor to Apparel Arts magazine.

With only a limited number of men's fashion artists available, Fellows was most in demand for the male-focused subjects, particularly by the newly launched Esquire magazine in the thirties, where he was regularly featured in full-color spreads for many years.

Although Fellows considered himself a commercial illustrator, he was also a painter who exhibited periodically, later concentrating on abstractions. In reviewing his entire career, however, it is his early work, when he found a fresh viewpoint in a sophisticated spoof of the social upper crust, that makes us admire his audacity and leaves us with a smile of appreciation.

Walt Reed


"Fellows was born in Ardmore, Pennsylvania in 1885. He was trained in illustration at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and honed his trademark “continental” style studying in England and France. But the real story begins when he returned to the States in the early 1910s and burst on the scene as an eager and talented young artist.
Fellows found work contributing to satirical magazines like Life and Leslie’s, and his European-influenced style was fresh and new, reflecting the sleekness and stylization that led to Art Deco. His work was so fresh, in fact, that he found many of his better-known contemporaries, including John Held, Jr. and Ralph Barton, were adapting his stylistic elements for their own use.
Fellows’ style during this period was very mannered and graphic, with thin black outlines enclosing flat expanses of tone and compositions that emphasized graphic weight and balance over fussy illustrative detail. His bread and butter throughout the 1920s was his work for the Kelly-Springfield Tire company. He brought an idea to the Kelly advertising manager for a series of magazine ads featuring “smart cars and smart types of people.” It was the beginning of an assignment that lasted for nearly a decade. The ads are still smart and fashionable today (and becoming collectible, by the way).
But it was in the 1930s that Fellows found the niche that would shape the lives of dandies for the next 80 years: fashion illustration. Though he contributed to Vanity Fair, McClure’s, and The American Magazine, among other publications, it was men’s fashion where he was most in demand, and Apparel Arts, aimed at the tailoring trade, and Esquire were his showcases.
Fellows’ technique as a fashion illustrator was more painterly and detailed than his earlier commercial work. The man could draw fabric, plain and simple. His fabric had weight, heft, drape, texture, and sheen. His flannels, worsteds, tweeds, and linens, his barathea and velvet and twill were all fabulous.
He also defined a very specific, very masculine world. Unlike today’s fashion magazines, Apparel Arts didn’t dictate fashion trends by using underfed models in unwearable suits. It showed what was already being worn by the well-heeled, trend-setting folk. Fellows’ genius as an illustrator lay in his ability to depict them in their everyday activities. Whether they were traveling the world, hosting dinner parties, hunting grouse, or just lounging around the penthouse or club, Fellows somehow made their rarified universe accessible. Ordinary folks could look at the illustrations and say, “I could wear that.”
Rather than looking overdressed and stuffy, or merely human shapes on which to hang clothes, Fellows’ subjects are men for whom dressing splendidly comes naturally. They’re having a good time, smiling, and enjoying themselves in their relaxed, party-filled sphere, and all of them are illustrations of casual, well-tailored elegance.
Laurence Fellows died in 1964, and in 2009 was named to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. His immortality in the world of men’s fashion is assured simply because he had the ability to illustrate real men in their real lives and make those lives ones we all want to live." — BILL THOMPSON in Dandyisme.net













Tuesday 19 March 2024

Boarding schools have a devastating impact on society, says Charles Spencer / SAD LITTLE MEN by RICHARD BEARD

 


Boarding schools have a devastating impact on society, says Charles Spencer

 

Brother of Diana reveals he was sexually abused as a child at Maidwell Hall and that a nanny would beat him and his sister

 

Jamie Grierson

Sun 17 Mar 2024 17.26 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/17/boarding-schools-impact-charles-spencer

 

Charles Spencer, the younger brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, has said the brutalising effect of boarding schools on people who have come to power has been devastating for society.

 

Spencer was speaking on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme after the release of his memoir, A Very Private School, in which he revealed he was sexually assaulted as a child at the boarding school Maidwell Hall in Northamptonshire.

 

In an extract, the 59-year-old detailed the sexual assaults and beatings he experienced at Maidwell, saying they had left him with lifelong “demons”.

 

He said he was abused by an assistant matron at the school when he was 11, leaving him with such trauma that he self-harmed over the notion that she might leave the school.

 

Elsewhere in the book, Spencer suggested the impact of public school culture had made a difference to some of the people who lead the country.

 

When asked about this, he told Kuenssberg: “When it goes really wrong, as it did in Maidwell in the 1970s, you’re going to come out very damaged, and I know I did. And I actually say in the book, you know, to survive that, a small but important part of me had to die. And I think that’s true, you know, there was a softness that had to be trampled on, because otherwise it would be too painful.

 

“So if you extrapolate that and think of the damage it’s done to other people who have ended up in powerful positions – and I’m talking over the centuries, not just contemporaries – they have to have had their view of what’s acceptable behaviour, what other people mean in terms of empathy, they have to have been brutalised.

 

“And I cannot think that all of the effects of these schools can have been good for society, or for the empire, or whatever we were in control of at the time. I think it’s been devastating in some ways.”

 

In the wide-ranging interview, he revealed that his and Diana’s childhood nanny would “crack our heads together” if they misbehaved, with a “cracking crunch” that “really hurt”. He said it emphasised the “disconnect of parents”, but he did not criticise his mother and father, saying it had been “normal” to “leave it to the nanny to deal with”.

 

He claimed that another nanny punished his two older sisters by “ladling laxatives down them”.

 

In his memoir, Spencer described reliving his experiences at boarding school as “an absolutely hellish experience”, writing: “I’ve frequently witnessed deep pain, still flickering in the eyes of my Maidwell contemporaries.”

 

On the matron, Spencer wrote: “There seemed to be an unofficial hierarchy among her prey … She chose one boy each term to share her bed and would use him for intercourse.

 

“Her control over mesmerised boys was total, for we were starved of feminine warmth and desperate for attention and affection.”

 

As a result of the experience, Spencer said, he lost his virginity to an Italian sex worker at the age of 12.

 

“There was no joy in the act, no sense of arrival, no coming of age,” he wrote. “I believe now that I was simply completing the process set in motion by the assistant matron’s perverted attention.”

 

He also said he was beaten with the spikes of a cricket boot by the school’s Latin master.

 

In a statement, Maidwell Hall said it was “sorry” about the experiences Spencer and some others had had at the school.

 

“It is difficult to read about practices which were, sadly, sometimes believed to be normal and acceptable at that time,” it said. “Within education today, almost every facet of school life has evolved significantly since the 1970s. At the heart of the changes is the safeguarding of children and promotion of their welfare.”


SEE ALSO: 

https://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-guinea-pig-1948-clip-on-bfi-blu-ray.html

 

https://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-clique-of-pseudo-adults-britains.html

 

https://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-riot-club-official-trailer.html


In 1975, as a child, Richard Beard was sent away from his home to sleep in a dormitory. So were David Cameron and Boris Johnson.

 

In those days a private boys' boarding school education was largely the same experience as it had been for generations: a training for the challenges of Empire. He didn't enjoy it. But the first and most important lesson was to not let that show.

 

Being separated from the people who love you is traumatic. How did that feel at the time, and what sort of adult does it mould?

 

This is a story about England, and a portrait of a type of boy, trained to lead, who becomes a certain type of man. As clearly as an X-ray, it reveals the make-up of those who seek power - what makes them tick, and why.

Sad Little Men addresses debates about privilege head-on; clearly and unforgettably, it shows the problem with putting a succession of men from boarding schools into positions of influence, including 10 Downing Street. Is this who we want in charge, especially at a time of crisis?

 

It is a passionate, tender reckoning - with one individual's past, but also with a national bad habit.

 

© Richard Beard 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

 

Listen on your Booktopia Reader App

 


Richard Beard Q&A: ‘This is a very private-school idea – you just have to live with social injustice’

Author Richard Beard.

Author Richard Beard. Photograph: Urszula Soltys

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/08/public-schoolboys-boris-johnson-sad-little-boys-richard-beard?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR0u-1O8sYoxjXRP0qkEL9ImB_5ecE0AcmsJKwqemcxWrUANP_bHQOPYnmM#Echobox=1628416840

 

How has your schooling affected you?

My relationship with my own emotions was distorted from the moment it was taken as gospel truth that it was good for me to be separated from my family aged eight. You’re doing something that feels terrible, but everyone tells you it’s good. That leads to further dislocations, which allow individuals to become fractured, divided, and very good at leading a double life.

 

Boris Johnson and David Cameron attended similar schools at a similar time. How do you think it shaped them?

In so many ways. Almost every day I read the paper and think, yes, I recognise that. Recently, it’s the idea that you just have to live with stuff – with Covid, for example. Just as at school you just had to live with your parents leaving you behind, with the daily authoritarianism, with not going home for weeks at a time. This is a very private-school idea – you just have to live with social injustice.

 

There’s also the extensive training in dissembling and putting up a front. I don’t get any sense of authenticity from them, or genuine empathy. At some point, you start feeling sorry for them.

 

Do you feel sorry for them?

Well I hope it’s there in the title of the book – it’s not just the pejorative name-calling of sad little men. I know that they had to create their own coping mechanisms. And those coping mechanisms are what you see in these behaviours, which do seem to me to start out from the sadness of little boys out of their depth, but who learned early in their lives how to hide that.

 

Johnson has been described as confusing and contradictory, but you say that’s precisely what boarding school produces… shapeshifters with fluid identities.

That connection is made quite clearly by John le Carré – he often links this type of education to the vocation of being a spy. I do think it’s different now, because we’ve grown up through a period of peace and prosperity, and we haven’t had that tempering that previous generations have had, when confronted by major world events – being goaded into seriousness, but also into empathy for other people in the country.

 

You’re pretty unambiguous about the hellishness of boarding school. Why do parents send their children to these places?

It’s not hellish on a daily basis. On the surface, it seems quite the opposite, especially to the parents. When you see the tennis courts and the swimming pools it looks fantastic. The problems are underneath the surface.

 

But a lot of these parents have gone through it themselves, so they are well aware of the damage it creates…

If you’re now in a position to send your children to private school, it means you either managed your inheritance wisely or you’re a QC or an investment banker or the prime minister and you can say: “What a great success!” It’s very hard to fight back against that surface, against that lie.

 

Did you ever consider sending your kids to private schools?

No. I wanted the kids to be coming home at night, and I wanted them to be in co-education.

 

Did that extend to sending them to state schools?

I lived abroad a lot, where they were in lycées, French-speaking schools. In this country, to keep the language going, that meant finding what’s now a free school, so a state school but not a classic comprehensive.

 

Do you feel that by writing this book, and facing up to your schooling, you’ve exorcised it in some way?

I think facing and unpacking a past life is the antidote to some of its effects. But I was deeply formed by these experiences. The lies create habits for life which are, in many cases, detrimental to living well, and that takes a long time to undo.

Interview by Killian Fox

 

‘Everyone who was not us, a boy at a private boarding school from the late 70s to the early 80s, was beneath us’: Boris Johnson, centre front, at Eton. Photograph: Richard Shymansky from News Syndication/Gillman & Soame UK Ltd / News Licensing

 

Why public schoolboys like me and Boris Johnson aren’t fit to run our country

Boris Johnson, centre front, at Eton.

 

Our elite schools foster emotional austerity and fierce clique loyalty. Here a privately educated writer of the prime minister’s generation reveals the lasting damage public schools do

 

Scroll down for a Q&A with Richard Beard

Richard Beard

Sun 8 Aug 2021 07.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/08/public-schoolboys-boris-johnson-sad-little-boys-richard-beard?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR0u-1O8sYoxjXRP0qkEL9ImB_5ecE0AcmsJKwqemcxWrUANP_bHQOPYnmM#Echobox=1628416840

 

I had a feeling I couldn’t immediately place. I wanted to go out but wasn’t allowed. Shelves were emptying at the nearest supermarket and instead of fresh fruit and vegetables I was eating British comfort food – sausages and mash, pie and beans. My freedom to make decisions like an adult was limited. I wondered when I’d see my mum again.

 

March 2020, first week of the first lockdown: I was 53 years old and felt like I was back at boarding school. Which wouldn’t have mattered, but for the fact that at a time of national crisis my generation of boarding-school boys found themselves in charge.

 

My first night at Pinewood school was two days after my eighth birthday in January 1975. A term earlier David Cameron had left his family home for Heatherdown preparatory school in Berkshire, while also in 1975, at the age of 11, Alexander Johnson was sent to board at Ashdown House in East Sussex. This means I know how two of the past three British prime ministers were treated as children and the kind of men their schools wanted to make of them. I know neither of these men personally but I do know that they spent the formative years of their childhood in boarding schools being looked after by adults who didn’t love them, because I did too. And if the character of our leaders matters then I’m in possession of important information.

 

At the age of 13, after prep school, Cameron and Johnson progressed to Eton. I went on to Radley College near Oxford. The exact school picked out by the parents didn’t really matter, because the experience was designed to produce a shared mindset. They were paying for a similar upbringing with a similar intended result: to establish our credentials for the top jobs in the country. We were being trained for leadership, or if not to lead then to earn. The most convincing reason to go to a private school remains to have gone to a private school, with the prizes that are statistically likely to follow.

 

It is noticeable, and often noticed, that something immature and boyish survives in men like Cameron and Johnson as adults. They can never quite carry off the role of grownup, or shake a suspicion that they remain fans of escapades without consequences. They look confident of not being caught, or not being punished if they are. Cameron has his boyishly unlined face and Johnson his urchin’s unbrushed hair, and his arch schoolboy’s vocabulary.

 

But what kind of boyhood was it, in our paid-for rooms in those repurposed mansions that housed our schools? What of the distant past still works in us as adults and can we pass on the harm to others? Are we the right people to steer the country, either clear of trouble or in the direction of sunlit uplands? The answer to these questions depends on lessons learned at an impressionable age. Unless, of course, we learned nothing. And no one pays hundreds of pounds a term, even in the late 70s, to learn nothing.

 

I remember the feeling of desolate homesickness: abruptly, several times a year, our attachments to home and family were broken

 

One of the first things we learned – or felt – at prep school was a deep, emotional austerity, starting from the moment the parents drove away. That first night, and on other nights to come, the little men in ties and jackets reverted to the little children they really were – in name-taped pyjamas with a single soft toy (also name-taped), blubbing themselves to sleep and wetting their beds.

 

I remember the feeling of desolate homesickness: abruptly, several times a year, our attachments to home and family were broken. We lost everything – parents, pets, toys, younger siblings – and we could cry if we liked but no one would help us. So that later in life, when we saw other people cry, we felt no great need to go to their aid. The sad and the weak were wrong to show their distress, and we learned to despise the children who blubbed for their mummies. The cure was to stop crying and forget that life beyond the dormitories and classrooms existed. Concentrate instead on the games pitches and the dining hall and the headmaster’s study. By force of will we made ourselves complicit in a collective narrowing of vision.

 

In Richard Denton’s BBC documentary Public School, filmed at Radley College in 1979, the Radley headmaster Dennis Silk tells a daunted audience of new boys that they’re about to pick up “the right habits for life”. Among these habits was cultivation of the stiff upper lip. We could be ourselves – homesick, vulnerable, lovelorn and frightened – or, with practice at putting up a front, we could pretend to embody the idealised national character. We could perform being loyal and robust and self-reliant. Wearing a commendably brave face we could distance our feelings, growing the “hardness of heart of the educated”, as identified by Mahatma Gandhi from his dealings with the English ruling class.

 

This wasn’t healthy. In her 2015 book, Boarding School Syndrome, psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien describes a condition now sufficiently recognised to merit therapy groups and an emergent academic literature. The symptoms are wide-ranging but include, ingrained from an early age, emotional detachment and dissociation, cynicism, exceptionalism, defensive arrogance, offensive arrogance, cliquism, compartmentalisation, guilt, grief, denial, strategic emotional misdirection and stiff-lipped stoicism. Fine fine fine. We’re all doing fine.

 

We adapted to survive. We postured and lied, whatever it took. Abandoned, alone, England’s future leaders needed to fit in whatever the cost, and we were not needy, no sir. We could live without, and we convinced ourselves early that we had no great need of love, in either direction. Acting like a grownup meant needing no one.

 

Discouraged from crying out for help, frightened of complaining or sneaking, we developed a gangster loyalty to self-contained cliques, scared to death of being cast out as we had been from home. Of being cast out again. In the absence of family we kept in with our chums, but also ingratiated ourselves with the teachers: God knows what might come next after abandonment if we kicked up a fuss.

 

From the teachers we learned about mockery and sarcasm as techniques for social control, with our boy hierarchies regulated by banter, ranging from a sharp remark to a knuckle in the crown of the head. Attack was the best form of defence, and ridicule was honed as a deeply conservative force, controlling by means of fear, either of being the joke or of not getting the joke. There was plenty of fear to go round. The author Paul Watkins, in his memoir Stand Before Your God, remembers at Eton the huge amount of energy, in the time of Cameron and Johnson, that went into “teasing and ignoring people”. “I felt a harshness that I’d never felt before.”

 

George Orwell, during his time at prep school, remembers being ridiculed out of an interest in butterflies. The banter that day must have been immense. Nothing was sacred, and once we found out what another boy took most seriously we were ready to strike, when necessary, at its core. Our most effective defence was therefore to act as if we took nothing very seriously at all.

 

We learned to stay detached, some would say cold – “You had to have a coldness in yourself,” writes Watkins. “Of all the rules I learned and later threw away, this one I kept. If you did not know it, you could get hurt very badly at a place like Eton.”

 

Later in life, these unwritten school rules could infect every type of relationship. Prematurely detached from our parents, we had a preference for abandoning others before getting abandoned ourselves. Jump ship. Also, to be on the safe side, keep an emotional reserve.

 

Prof Diana Leonard, who established the Centre for Research on Education and Gender at the University of London, published research in 2009 showing that boys from single-sex schools were more likely to be divorced or separated from their partner by their early 40s. And mental health professionals, like Schaverien, are convincing in their explanation that those years of disconnection mean we expect too much, our fantasies rarely surviving contact with reality. Making up for lost time, for example, we want sex but come to resent women for our weakness for sex – as adults, erotic dependence becomes a new form of vulnerability to be doubted and denied. Why couldn’t women be more like our boyhood Athena posters?

 

At school we tried not to feel foolish, angry, loving, stupid, sad, dependent, excited or demanding. We were made wary of feeling, full stop. By comparison, children not blessed with a private education must be fizzing with uncontrolled emotions and therefore insufferably weak. How did the schools teach us this sense of superiority? The language was always chipping away – in the documentary Public School the boys casually refer to “the lower orders”, as if to a species difference, reptiles considering insects. In our isolation we learned that we were special. Everyone else was less special and often stupid – school was where we went, aged eight, to learn to despise other people.

 

Cameron, Johnson and I absorbed attitudes once familiar to Orwell, who was confronted with some realities about his Eton education when documenting the living conditions of working-class households in Lancashire and Yorkshire. “Common people seemed almost sub-human,” Orwell writes in The Road to Wigan Pier. “They had coarse faces, hideous accents, and gross manners… and if they got half the chance they would insult you in brutal ways.” Alien and dangerous, the working class evoked “an attitude of sniggering superiority punctuated by bursts of vicious hatred”.

 

Anyone underestimating the durability of this divide should consider the evidence of the Radley College swimming pool, circa 1980. A story used to circulate that the pool was a yard shorter than a standard pool, so that no local swimming club would want to use it for practice or competitive events. Christopher Hibbert’s history of Radley, No Ordinary Place, corrects this myth: the pool was deliberately designed a yard longer. The same reasoning applied. The locals shouldn’t be encouraged. Typically, in a summer term ending in early July, we didn’t swim in it much anyway.

 

In the early 80s, Radley’s non-teaching staff were known as College Servants. We had cleaners, chefs, groundsmen, bit-part players and comic mechanicals. They represented the proles, the plebs, the oiks, the yokels, the townies and the crusties (a term Johnson continued to use 40 years later). Our special language had its range of words to set these unfamiliar animals apart, meaning people not like us, and if you didn’t know the language you were probably one of them. As Orwell doubles-down in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The proles are not human beings.”

 

In his autobiography, For the Record, David Cameron admits that about Brexit he “did not fully anticipate the strength of feeling that would be unleashed both during the referendum and afterwards”. Of course he didn’t. Strong feelings were involved, and also the common people. He was floundering in a pair of blind spots, to emotion and the British public. He gorged on a double helping of ignorance undisturbed since his schooldays.

 

Looking now at old school photos, I find I can count the darker faces on the fingers of one hand. At Pinewood we had two brothers recently arrived from Nigeria, and the son of an Indian doctor who lived not far from my parents in Swindon. The only other dark faces we saw were in our Saturday-night films, in Zulu and Young Winston, where savage natives were subdued by the civilising force of white British warriors. Did that turn us into racists? Yes, I think it did.

 

In the holidays I’d go to the post office on Victoria Road, to collect Mum’s child benefit, and when the British Asian post office worker stamped the book I was immensely pleased with myself for acting as if he were just like anyone else. At Radley one boy in our year was possibly mixed race – we didn’t really know but mocked him for it anyway – and the two of us played in the same rugby team. In my end-of-year sports reports I make feeble gags about Brownian motion and his “blacking” of other players. I don’t even know what that means, beyond the racial slur. The supervising editor of the school magazine, a teacher, saw nothing in need of editorial attention. And why would he? The racism was institutional – with the evidence currently available online in the school’s digitised archive.

 

Girls, swots, oiks, wogs and queers were synonymous with weakness, to be joshed without mercy by the strong

I find the son of the Indian doctor on LinkedIn – Ravi is successful in business, though he asks me not to use his real name. Whatever I think about private schools and racism, what does he think? Initially he’s cautious. He writes back that “frankly there are some very bad memories of that time that are very painful”.

 

As first-generation immigrants, he tells me later by phone, his Indian parents wanted to give him a good education. Overall, Pinewood was “pretty decent”; his public school less so. He asks me not to name it.

 

“I was called a wog and a Paki. There was the National Front.”

 

In his school as at mine, public speaking was encouraged – good for the confidence – and one boy was “passionate about the National Front”. Ravi regrets sitting in the audience and at the end of a hate speech clapping politely, demonstrating the good manners he’d been educated to value. There was also racism from the teachers, in remarks that casually encompassed Ravi’s father and family.

 

Our schoolboy vocabulary, with its stock of disparaging words, expanded to include everyone who deserved our scorn, like poofs and homos. As long as we weren’t girls, swots, oiks, wogs or queers, we could be jolly decent chaps. All those other categories were synonymous with weakness, to be joshed without mercy by the strong. And if a boy struggled with the spontaneity of banter, he could memorise jokes about the Irish, who were unbelievably thick. We laughed at anyone not like us, and the repertoire on repeat included gags about slaves and nuns and women hurdlers. One September, after a boy came back from a holiday in Australia, we had jokes about Aborigines. We internalised this poison like a vaccine, later making us insensitive as witnesses to all but the most vicious instances of discrimination. Everyone who was not us, a boy at a private boarding school from the late 70s to the early 80s, was beneath us. Obviously, we too were a minority, but of all the minorities we were the most important. Of course we were. We’d end up running the country.

 

Single-minded ambition became acceptable as a way of deadening the self. Get elected president of the debating society. Edit the school magazine. Lobby to become head of house, head prefect. Join a milkround company, get a column on a national newspaper, write a book. For the worst afflicted, at the high end of the greasy pole, become prime minister. The drive for success was an ongoing plea for attention and affection, a condition described by Lucille Iremonger in her book Fiery Chariot as the Phaeton complex. In Greek mythology Phaeton was a frustrated child of the sun god Helios, who insists on driving his father’s chariot just for one day. He crashes the chariot, turning much of Africa into desert.

 

According to Iremonger, a hunger for power is the tragic fate of children abandoned by their parents, and she developed her theory from a study of British prime ministers between 1809 and 1940. No prizes for guessing where most of them were educated, and many former boarders can be recognised as Phaetons.

 

In his book The Old Boys, David Turner has the statistics for the “highly disproportionate share” of public school alumni in the top jobs of the UK. These figures come from 2014, to include boys at school at the same time as me in their middle-aged professional prime: “seven in 10 senior judges, six in 10 senior officers in the armed forces, and more than half the permanent secretaries, senior diplomats and leading media figures”. Seventeen out of 27 members of Johnson’s full cabinet in 2020 went to private school. Of the more visible recent political buccaneers, leading English private schools have sent out Rees-Mogg, Hunt, Mitchell, Cash, Redwood and Cummings: English boys with English minds.

 

A follow-up report by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission, Elitist Britain 2019, paints a mostly unchanged picture. Private schools account for nearly 70% of the judges and barristers in the country. To this list can be added more than 50% of bishops and ministers of state and lord lieutenants and the England cricket team, these doors not even half open to anyone else.

 

Johnson was any boy who started boarding in 1975, only more so, because not growing up was openly a part of his act

When deciding on a private school education for his children, my dad must have envisaged useful connections for life that seem psychologically plausible as well as professionally desirable: a segregated elite united by a common uncommon experience. Cameron surrounded himself with like-minded people – of the six men who worked on the Conservative Party Manifesto in 2014, five had been to Eton. The other was an old boy of St Paul’s. Sonia Purnell, Johnson’s biographer, says Johnson doesn’t have friends – his younger brother was best man at his first wedding – but he knows what kind of person makes him feel comfortable. He remains loyal to boys’ school boys like his friend Darius Guppy (who famously asked Johnson for the address of a fellow journalist so he could have him beaten up) and Cummings, rebels but public school rebels. Or loyal at least for a while. Once Johnson and Cummings fell out, each was right to be frightened of the other. Their schooling was more powerful in them than any self-projection as icon or iconoclast: they knew how to hurt their own.

 

In her biography, Purnell calls Johnson “an original – the opposite of a stereotype, the exception to the rule”. Not quite. He was any boy who started at a private boarding school in 1975, only more so because not growing up was openly a feature of his performance. He flaunted shamelessly what the rest of us tried to conceal: he was chaotic, unformed, cruel, slapdash, essentially frivolous. When he messed up he was just a boy, with his boyishly ruffled hair, and expected to be excused.

 

Cameron likewise turned his back on the mess he’d made with the serenity of a public school boy whose ancestors had been public school boys too. Between the lectern and the door of yet another temporary home Cameron hummed a happy tune, pretending to be fine. All is well, thank you and goodnight. Possibly he’d been a bit naughty, but luckily England was arranged in such a way as to protect his own best interests. Of course it was. Boys like us had arranged it.

 

In the end we can’t take anything seriously.

 

In earlier generations, Orwell and others like him were exposed by war and other calamities to a seriousness that grew their stunted selves and tempered the isolated and ironic cult of an English private education. They were goaded by events into compassion, so that sooner or later, Orwell believed, even in “a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly”, England would brush aside the obvious injustice of the public schools.

 

The wait goes on. Maybe in 40 years’ time, assuming the country survives Brexit and Covid, a more enlightened nation might look back on Cameron and Johnson as a self-erasing supernova, a final bright flare and a burning out, the dying of the public school light in a burst of corruption and incompetence so spectacular the glimmer will be visible from space.

 

Anyone betting on that outcome, at any point in the past 600 years, would have lost.