Whatever happened to teaching children good manners?
thank-you letters and had written the first paragraph. She’s about to become a professional piano player.
“The children brought up with strict manners are the best company as adults. They’re on time. They’re considerate. They end up with the best jobs and the happiest relationships.”
It doesn’t matter how many A-levels you have, what kind of a degree you have, if you have good manners people will like you. And, if they like you, they will help you.” Kate Reardon, editor of Tatler
‘Manners makyth man’
The Duchess of Cornwall may be grand, but manners aren’t a class thing. I’ve met some of the rudest people on earth in St James’s gentlemen’s clubs. “Manners makyth man”, as the motto of Winchester and New College, Oxford, declares; they also makyth woman, and makyth anyone of any background or intelligence.
“It doesn’t matter how many A-levels you have, what kind of a degree you have, if you have good manners people will like you,” agrees Kate Reardon, editor of Tatler. “And, if they like you, they will help you.”
Manners are much like muscle memory — once learnt, never forgotten.
“All our impeccable Johnson table manners were imported by our French grandmother, who was born in Versailles and extremely bon ton,” says the writer Rachel Johnson. “She insisted we ate crisps with a knife and fork, and made us look around the table to see if anybody needed salt, pepper or redcurrant jelly, before we put our faces into our nosebags.
“In Brussels in the Seventies, we had a heavenly Norland probationer, Mary Kidd, who made sure that we did not hold knives like pens, that we stood up when an adult entered the room.”
Even if manners are for life, that doesn’t mean they automatically pass down the bloodline.
“I have sadly failed to impart these crucial life lessons to my own children, but have only myself to blame,” says Johnson. “As for conversation — it’s every man for himself.”
Harry Mount is author of How England Made the English. (Viking).