–Writing in the Times newspaper, Johanna Thomas-Corr comments on Queen Camilla’s appearance in public wearing her wedding dress. Thomas-Corr thinks that this is a good practice and one in which she herself has engaged. Here’s the conclusion:
…I often wonder if I should see what I can get for [my wedding dress] on Vinted or one of those many online sites that barely existed when I bought it second-hand. Would it fetch enough for a weekend away — or a new mattress? Or should I keep it hanging in my wardrobe ready to pass down to a niece or daughter-in-law? Another idea is to just liberate it, allow it a more fun fate. I’m inspired by a comment in Evelyn Waugh’s letters in which he describes how in the 1960s, his daughter Margaret got married in a dress of her great-grandmother’s “out of the acting cupboard, used in countless charades”.
Why not, then, throw it in a family dressing-up box? Perhaps one of my male descendants can squeeze into it for some sport? I envisage a glorious afterlife for my wedding dress in which it lives as fully and undemurely as I have.
—Tatler magazine devotes a substantial part of its latest issue to the Mitford family, several of whom were close friends of Evelyn Waugh. Here is their description of the magazine’s display of Mitfordiana:
‘If one can’t be happy,’ Nancy Mitford once wrote, ‘one must be amused,’ And how better to beat the blues when life gets dulling than sitting down with a copy of Tatler? Nancy herself would certainly approve: the May issue is full of more Mitfords than the Black Cat Club itself. Cover star Bessie Carter may not actually be part of the family dynasty herself – though with parents like Imelda Staunton and Jim Carter, she’s close to British theatre royalty – but she tells Tatler just how she transformed into the Pursuit of Love author for the upcoming Mitford biopic Outrageous. …
And while the Outrageous days of Nancy, Diana, Unity, Deborah, Pamela, and Jessica may be behind us, their legacy lives on in the hotspots of Britain’s new Bright Young Things. Just ask Lady Gina Hope, who has followed in the footsteps of Nancy (as well as her own grandmother, Lady De La Warr) by selling books to the cognoscenti at the storied Heywood Hill bookshop.
In the Tatler May issue, she takes readers behind the scenes at the shop that Cecil Beaton and Evelyn Waugh once stalked – and where Nancy’s ghost might still have a thing or two to say to slacking shelf stackers. With the shop now owned by Nicky Dunne, son-in-law of Nancy Mitford’s nephew, Stoker Cavendish, 12th of Devonshire, today’s customers are just as discerning: A Second World War biography with ‘only planes, no boats’?…
The Last Mitford: on the anniversary of her birth, discover the magical world of Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire in one of her final ever interviews. Revisit one of the final ever interviews of Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, published in the March 2010 issue of Tatler
–The Financial Times has a story by Charles Spencer about the origin and recently renewed interest in country house “attic sales”. After describing the experience of such a recent sale at Holkam Hall, the story continues with a description of one held several years ago at Castle Howard and concludes with this:
…James Miller, for 25 years in charge of Sotheby’s attic sales, says: “[The success of such sales] didn’t go unnoticed by those with historic houses who had lots of bog-standard stuff knocking about.” Indeed, when, in 1991, Miller was asked by the owners of Castle Howard to select one of their pictures for disposal, he recommended an attic sale instead.
It was all cleverly curated. Castle Howard had achieved fame as the setting for TV series Brideshead Revisited, based on the Evelyn Waugh novel. Aloysius, a lead character’s teddy bear, became the motif of the sale, and the recent appetite for aristocratic Englishness — identified and commercialised by Ralph Lauren — was deployed by Sotheby’s marketing department.
The behind-the-scenes reality of the Castle Howard attic sale was rather less refined; some lots were hoicked out of their castle cubbyholes at the last minute. Miller remembers how “the ceramics came out last, were shoved into an industrial washing machine, then passed down a line of my assistants, some wielding a hairdryer, others a glue gun”, before being presented for sale. The key to successful sales was found to be keeping estimates reasonable. …
Britain has … moved on from the Brideshead days, when ancestral mansions were viewed as bastions of a distant but still relevant past. Now, many of the great historic houses have little to sell: their attics have long been cleared out.
Here’s a link to the full story.
–Finally, The Spectator has an article by Ameer Kotecha exploring whether there has been a return of the “Young Fogey”. The article is headed by a photo from the 1981 Granada TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. The story opens with a discussion of the origin of the Young Fogey concept:
…The term Young Fogey was popularised by Alan Watkins in a Spectator diary in 1984. Attempting to put his finger on this curious breed that he encountered at the Spectator offices and among most of his friends, he mused that it was a conservative type defined by his politics (‘libertarian but not liberal’), but also by his aesthetic and interests:
“He is a scholar of Evelyn Waugh. He tends to be coolly religious, either RC or C of E. He dislikes modern architecture. He makes a great fuss about the old Prayer Book, grammar, syntax and punctuation. He laments the difficulty of purchasing good bread, Cheddar cheese, kippers and sausages – though not beer, because the cause of good beer has been taken over by boring men with beards from the Campaign for Real Ale. He enjoys walking and travelling by train. He thinks the Times is not what it was and prefers the Daily Telegraph.”
So does he exist today? Young men’s drift to the political right is well-documented. And that social and cultural conservatism is cultivating what has been described as a ‘right-wing retro revivalism’…
The story continues with an exploration of the characteristics of the renewed variety, but there is no reference to their interest in Evelyn Waugh novels or those of any other writer. Their reading material seems to consist of magazines in which they are likely to find discussions of examples of contemporary Fogeydom. A copy of the article is available here.
