The Irn-Bru heiress who invented the Sloane Ranger
By Craig Brown ... and may have inspired the rise of the Middletons
The young Lady Di seemed the archetypal Sloane Kate and William are the ultimate Sloane family
FEW shoppers in Kensington who, a few years ago, passed an old lady with bright red hair and a parrot on her shoulder would have realised they had set eyes on one of the most remarkable magazine editors of her day.
Her name was Ann Barr. She died last week, aged 85. From 1971 to 1985 she was the deputy and features editor of Harpers & Queen. She also co-authored one of the biggest-selling books of the Eighties, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook.
Many writers were given a great start by this eccentric, brilliant woman and I am pleased to count myself among them.
During her days on Harpers & Queen, Ann Barr encouraged countless young writers to spread their wings, commissioning us to write about things that fascinated us in our own style, the odder the better.
Nicholas Coleridge, now a successful novelist and publisher, wrote regular pieces, and so did psychologist Oliver James, quirky documentary maker Jonathan Meades, rock journalist Jon Savage and style guru Stephen Bayley. The fashion editor of a special teenage issue was 17-year-old Johnnie Boden, now the titan of his own clothing empire.
I remember a learned article in Harpers by Loyd Grossman, now the king of supermarket sauces, all about the architecture in the Babar children’s books. No conventional magazine or newspaper would have run such a peculiar piece.
We were all the beneficiaries of Ann’s offbeat enthusiasms. When I was only just out of my teens, she was letting me write long pieces on all sorts of things.
One month I would write about the rise and rise of Space Invaders, the slotmachine forerunner of computer games, the next I’d be off to Northern Ireland to meet Ian Paisley. For a whole week, I trailed Andy Warhol as he met the great and the good of Britain. His sole conversational ploy involved replying ‘Gee, that’s great’ to everything. It was all that he said, and all that he needed to say.
For some unexplained reason, the wellheeled readers of this glossy women’s magazine took to Ann’s exotic medley: during her reign, the circulation shot from 40,000 to 100,000.
But these were the days before success was measured in numbers. In fact, quite the opposite: popularity seemed somehow vulgar. I remember being in the office when a set of new sales figures came through; the editor, an exotic Italian called Willie Landels, simply looked aghast and asked, only half-jokingly: ‘But who ARE all these GHASTLY new readers?’
Ann later admitted that one reason she liked to encourage unknown writers was that the magazine couldn’t afford to employ anyone better established. But this also meant that it remained fresher, more unusual and up-to-the-minute than it might otherwise have been: she was the first to publish journalism by the feminist writer Angela Carter and the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng; one issue in 1976 carried an entire book on the pretensions of conceptual art, The Painted Word, by the flash American writer Tom Wolfe.
But magazines come and go; for all her genius as an editor, Ann is remembered for The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, which she masterminded with yet another writer she discovered, Peter York. It sprang from an article printed in 1975, when it was largely overlooked, but when it was published in expanded book form in 1982 it proved an instant success.
It was reprinted five times in its first year and went on to sell a million copies, making it one of the decade’s biggest-selling books.
Ann was a great addict of puns — a gardening article in Harpers sported the headline ‘ Mass Wisteria’. The Sloane Ranger title was, of course, itself a pun.
Who were Sloane Rangers? The authors characterise them as Henry and Caroline, stalwart, unimaginative upper-middle-class men and women, slightly down on their uppers, who never cry at funerals, only at carol services, and only ever read glossy magazines, Dick Francis novels and party invitations.
The observations were razor-sharp, yet somehow still affectionate. I suspect this reflected the characters of the authors: Peter York had a background in marketing and is brilliant at placing people in categories and defining them by their possessions and attributes, while Ann sprang from solid Sloane stock and inherited some of their innocence: she was brought up in Mayfair and Belgravia, and as a young woman made pilgrimages to Ascot and Henley.
Her kind heart proved the perfect counterbalance to Peter’s beady eye. The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook proved such a success because it pulled off the trick of viewing the British upper-middleclasses from within and without, as at the same time both thoroughly sensible and ever-so-slightly silly.
Sloanes believed in Keep Calm and Carry On. They never liked to make a fuss: for instance, they would say ‘I’ve got this stupid arm’ when what they really meant was that it was broken in three places.
They drove Volvo estates with bars for the labrador, and would never just ‘go’ anywhere, but whizz, toddle, rush, beetle, tear or zoom. Asked a question, they would invariably say ‘AbsoLOOTly’ instead of ‘yes’.
Caroline would wear striped shirts with stand-up collars, Benetton cardigans in bright colours, a string of pearls and an Alice band, while Henry would sport yellow cords, a tweed jacket, green wellies and a beetroot complexion.
On a culinary level, they eschewed anything fancy, preferring spag bol or bangers and mash. ‘Sloanes like their food to wear a hat,’ observed the witty authors, meaning shepherd’s pie and creme brulee.
If Sloane men weren’t called Henry, they would be called Charles, Mark, Peter, Simon, Christopher, Richard or William. Acceptable names for Sloane women all ended in ‘ a’: Emma, Lucinda, Diana, Camilla and so forth.
One of their most distinctive traits was to underplay everything major while at the same time exaggerating the importance of everything minor: a car crash would be ‘a spot of bother’ but they would describe the fridge breaking down as ‘a major disaster’.
One section of the book showed the Sloane’s ability to turn any part of the world into an outpost of Rangerland. Vancouver was ‘just like England’, and Martha’s Vineyard was ‘where Edward’s boss has a boat’. Delhi was ‘where we lost Johnnie during his hippie phase’ and Hong Kong was ‘Dumfries-on-Sea’.
If she hadn’t been such an instinctive bohemian and so clever, Ann Barr might well have ended up a Sloane herself. She came from a wealthy family — her grandfather invented Irn Bru, which remains Scotland’s favourite fizzy drink — and up to her early 20s she lived a pretty conventional life, doing the rounds of smart parties.
She may have been too restless, mischievous and scatterbrained to allow herself to sink into the comforts of Sloane Rangerdom, but she kept a deep respect for those, like her sister Deirdre, who had pursued the conventional route.
Whenever a member of the Harpers staff came up with a new characteristic of a Sloane Ranger, Ann would say: ‘I’ll just ring Mrs Average and see what she thinks.’ And, with that, she would ring Deirdre, giving her the final say.
What became of the Sloane Ranger? By the time the Eighties had given way to the Nineties most of them seemed to have disappeared, or to have transmogrified into something a lot more modern and alarming.
The original Handbook had a photograph of the young, blushing Lady Diana Spencer, fresh from her job in a nursery school, on its cover. At that time she seemed like the archetypal Sloane. But ten years on, Laura Ashley, labradors and spag bol were out the window, and Diana was in rapture to all the sparkly gold things that the Sloane had been brought up to abhor: glamour, vast yachts, money, celebrity, corporate sponsorship, and abroad.
And self-pity, too: the Sloane Ranger had been brought up to make the best of things and put on a sunny smile, no matter what. But Princess Di had long ago sunk into a sea of psychobabble.
Moreover, her sister-in-law Sarah Ferguson, once the ultimate broad-buttocked, jolly-hockey-sticks, bun-throwing Sloane, was soon to disappear down the plughole of self-obsession: her second volume of autobiography, published in 2011, was called — eek! — Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey To Find Herself.
The world has moved on: the children of the dim, shy, amiable Sloane Rangers now spend their time bragging on Facebook, taking endless selfies and wangling for places on TV’s Made In Chelsea.
Or do these things go in cycles? Kate Middleton was born in 1982, the same year the Sloane Ranger Handbook first appeared.
‘Did the rising Middletons pore over the Sloane Ranger Handbook?’ asked Peter York, a while ago. My guess is that it’s more than likely: at that time, it was the most unavoidable book of all.
Thirty-three years on, Kate and William, George and Charlotte represent the ultimate Sloane family: cheery, dependable and reassuringly dull.
Though Ann Barr has gone, her world is back on track.