The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
The cruelty of the upper classes is a silly myth
Steel yourselves for a weekend of toff-bashing. Earl Spencer’s childhood memoir is being trailed and he’s taking a croquet mallet to the upper classes, private schools, the whole damn shooting match.
Today, at the age of 59, a successful author, chatelain of one of the most beautiful stately homes of England, father of several very handsome, beautiful and charming children, he is nevertheless scarred.
Not from decades of unpleasant press dealings, nor the travails and tragedy of his younger sister Diana, but from his prep school, his parents and the filthy cruelty of the upper-class system that saw him abandoned and desolate as a young boy.
Writing in talks of how he was “starved of feminine warmth”, his time at
Maidwell Hall in Northamptonshire one of “casual cruelty, sexual assault and other perversions”.
If anyone ever suspected that British toffs were a uniquely vile and merciless category of people, here is the proof. One of their own – an earl, uncle to princes, seriously landed, stately housed, replete with a deer park, fine furniture and fabulous paintings – is dishing the dirt from within. As Prince Harry’s attempted to tear down the monarchy, so Spencer’s bulldozes, buries and flattens the British nob.
Your classic dynastic grandee, sitting in a frayed jumper, wondering if they might have switched the heating off a little too early in the season, will be turning the pages of the weekend press as if they are sheets of lead. For the British upper classes are under brutal attack. Barely a week passes without a savage portrayal of them on television. Take the beautiful
he portrayal of a friendship from a couple’s first meeting at graduation until their early 40s. And I’m not talking about Leo Woodall’s talented portrayal of upper-middle-class boy Dexter or his remote but thawing father played by Tim McInnerny. No, while the Netflix series is so good because it feels so grounded in reality, there is just one bunch of unreal, over-the-top, horrid, cold, snooty, out-of-touch, seriously weird, unfriendly and frankly revolting characters. And they are the toffs: Dexter’s first wife Sylvie’s father (Toby Stephens), pompous, aghast, snobbish; her mother (Joely Richardson), ignorant, thick, lazy; and those twin brothers, Sam and Murray (Finlay and Angus Alderson) are just evil.
is also dishing it out with the portrayal of the titled Catton family – eccentric, snobbish and peculiar. And it’s everywhere else: the pasting dished out to the snooty British pilots by the cool US airmen of Apple TV’s Masters of
Not to mention the odd episode of all those gentle evening dramas:
From to the toffs are bad, dim, stupid and guilty.
Except which is written by brilliant uber-posh scribbler
Julian Fellowes, but whose plot lines are so infuriating the characters turn into unlikely cartoon characters.
So what of this apparent and consistent cruelty? As I have written in
I was at Maidwell some six years after Spencer. But my contemporaries and I, who still meet up every few years, were never molested, did not feel long-term emotional trauma from the regular slipperings and canings, bullying by older boys, the filthy food or the tutoring by a man who called himself Uncle Adolf and styled himself with a Hitler moustache.
Us naughty boys paid the price for bad actions or poor work but there was also much care and love from other teachers: one Martha Best Shaw who presided over the youngest boys, the adorable assistant matron Miss Darling, the kindly headmaster’s wife Susan Paul, the brilliant English teacher Seb Eden, the eccentric but warm and generous French master Robert Boas. When there were cold dips and meanness it was a life lesson that not all the world was warm and chocolatey.
There is unhappiness and misery in every walk of life. But also plenty of gentle kindness. Today’s world of dangerous international affairs, economic uncertainty, and social earthquakes such as gender fluidity, require strong individuality. It strikes me that an early life of militaristic schooling, of being left to fend for oneself for a time, to learn to forge friends in extremis, to live on filthy food, might help one grow a little backbone. And teach one to endure experiences so that you realise that you alone are responsible for your actions.
I have no doubt Spencer’s book will be a harrowing, well-written memoir. But the English aristo will be back and fighting – with cold dips galore – for some time yet.