A celebration of the Sloane Ranger
It’s the 40th anniversary of a book that affectionately skewered Britain’s upper class. What’s changed?
Forty years ago, back in January 1982, Mark Thatcher disappeared in the Sahara, Bucks Fizz was topping the charts and a portly chap called Jocky Wilson won the world darts championships. It was also the year, as Sophia MoneyCoutts points out in The Daily Telegraph, that an “absolutely barking” book came out – The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. This was the era of Lady Di, the quintessential Sloane, when “being posh and talking like a horse that’s recently had root-canal work wasn’t embarrassing”.
Back then, being a “Sloane Ranger” – Sloane Square in London being the natural watering hole of the species – was aspirational. “While the miners haggled with the National Coal Board, the stars of the book, Caroline and Henry, were trotting about Fulham in their loafers and eating beef bourguignon at dinner parties.” As unemployment hit a new high, the book declared itself a “guide to what really matters in life”, advising wannabe Sloanes to “eat jelly with a fork, cry while singing carols but not at funerals, wear navy Barbours and live in a postcode that begins ‘SW’”. Incredibly, it sold more than a million copies and coined a phrase that is still trotted out to this day – the Sunday papers still regularly announce the return, the death or perhaps even the extinction of the Sloane Ranger.
The Sloane Rangers haven’t died out, however, just evolved, says Peter York, the book’s co-author, in the Financial Times. The Sloanes first appeared pre-Big Bang (1986), pre-Cool Britannia (1996) and financial crisis (2008), before other rich international homebuyers (from the 1990s) moved onto their turf, and above all preinternet and globalisation. House prices and school fees have ballooned, and the Sloanes have moved on. Princess Diana, for example, described herself as “thick as a plank”; Sloane mums and dads now “boast about their daughters’ MBAs and PhDs”. The younger Sloanes are also more likely to feel uncomfortable about “the tokens of class membership” – the pony club, the hunt – and the colonial references – greatgrandfathers “photographed with smiling natives somewhere in the Empire” – that their parents “loved to put centre stage”. They live in humbler houses in different neighbourhoods, and have chucked out the chintz in favour of a more minimal, if still recognisably Sloaney, look. The Sloane Ranger Handbook in fact received “no serious pushback” about its rules for interiors. “So we felt we’d got that right.”
Some invaluable lessons
The “invaluable volume” taught us about more than the value of old furniture though – it also taught us that “understatement, during life’s biggest occasions, is everything”, says Joseph Bullmore in Tatler. Writing off the Volvo somewhere outside Cirencester is simply “a spot of bother”. As for one’s age, “gosh, how dull of you to mention it”. Rather, life is all about the small things – “the right horse motif in one’s ashtray”, the “correct shade of blue for a Tuesday afternoon”. The book’s dissection of the British upper class was affectionate and funny, but above all “accurate about life; and accurate about the details”.
“This was an era when talking like a horse that’s recently had rootcanal work wasn’t embarrassing”