Two hundred years before the trial of the Hyde Park Hotel robbers, William Hogarth depicted the rise and fall of a ne’er-do-well in his famous series of paintings The Rake’s Progress (1733). Rebecca West, responding to the belief that this type of character seemed to be flourishing once more, produced in 1934 an updated version with illustrations by the cartoonist David Low. George, the central character, having inherited a title and an estate, dissipates his money on parties, cocktails, “lovelies,” nightclubs, and gambling dens. The story ends with the debauchee divorced, losing the last of his funds in the crash, and forced to go on the dole.1 The Mayfair playboys’ careers followed similar trajectories but ended even more disastrously. In Hogarth’s day fashionable men and women amused themselves by viewing the lunatics in Bedlam. In 1938 the same sorts of people went to the Old Bailey to witness firsthand four young men being sentenced to imprisonment and floggings. Thousands more around the world followed the proceedings through syndicated press reports.
“Society bigwigs today,” reported the Chicago Tribune, “made a Roman circus out of the trial of four Mayfair playboys.”2 The trial received so much attention in large part because it brought to light stresses and strains within the British class structure.3 The spectacle of four upper-class young men stealing diamonds was in itself disconcerting, but their behavior appeared all the more outrageous given that in the same year millions of unemployed working-class men and women were stoically enduring privations that West End playboys could not begin to imagine. Accordingly, the trial offered commentators a way of broaching the “condition of England” question. Was society becoming more democratic and egalitarian? Was the power of the social elite declining? Many worried that the robbery was a symptom of a weakening of the existing social contract. Others were angered because the trial demonstrated that, despite evidence of upper-class criminality, the elite still enjoyed immense social power. Observers from both camps held that in having respectable families, public school educations, money (or access to it), West End residences, acceptance by London society, and extensive networks of friends, the Mayfair men enjoyed every advantage of their class. Their turning to robbery thus only made sense if regarded as a release of the youths’ worse “instincts.” From another point of view, however, perhaps their crimes are best understood if the extent to which the idea of the Mayfair men was socially constructed is appreciated. Their “advantages,” far from acting as restraints, instilled in these playboys a dangerous sense of social superiority. Their hubris in turn incited them to seize that which their culture told them was their due.
Did the Mayfair men represent the elite? Was it in decline? Frank Mort notes that “historians have conventionally defined the years after 1945 as witnessing the near-terminal decline of the English social elites.”4 A decade earlier some believed that the Hyde Park Hotel robbery was a symptom of that decay. Such scandals appeared to call into question the elite’s claims justifying its privileged status. The popular press played up the notion that the Mayfair men came from the upper classes, if not the aristocracy. The four dapper young men were described as “aristocratic both in bearing and lineage, all were graduates of outstanding British public schools. And one of them was the son of a high Army official.”5 Another reported: “Fashionably dressed men and women jostled for seats in Westminster police court today at the hearing of four ‘young men about Mayfair’.… All moved in swanky West End society circles.”6
In contrast, the Times tried to distance the robbers from the establishment. It admitted that the trial revealed that even a good environment might produce the occasional bad apple, but it insisted that the accused had succeeded in penetrating no farther than the margins of elite society. “They have naturally moved among people of some rank and culture, however naturally they may have gravitated to those fringes of society whose horizon is bounded by bars and night clubs.”7 The tabloids harped on the theme that the overly ambitious young men’s love of luxury and easy money inevitably led to prison. The Mayfair men were not wealthy, but an enormous gulf separated them from the lower classes. When asked at the 1938 trial about his financial situation Wilmer stated unapologetically that he spent about £6 a week—twice the weekly wage of a male worker in manufacturing—solely on entertainments.8 In describing their discussions Jenkins admitted, “We were all fairly short of money and were trying to think of a way of making some fairly quickly.”9 The four could probably be best described as upper-middle class. Lonsdale and Jenkins’s fathers were successful businessmen, Wilmer’s was a brigadier-general, and Harley’s a colonel. Wilmer and Lonsdale had family money, and Jenkins drew interest on his parents’ will. Having lost his father, Harley appears to have been the least advantaged of the four. All managed to live beyond their means by borrowing from friends, writing bad checks, and skipping out on hotel bills. The four may at times have been spongers and bilkers, but they had the cultural capital that won them the attention of the members of the social elite attending their trial, such as the Duke of Rutland and Viscountess Byng.
The upper classes, consisting of perhaps 40,000 people, were defined by their wealth and status. The Great War had been a shock. Between 1918 and 1922 one-quarter of the land in England and Wales changed hands on account of increased taxes and death duties. There was also a shift in influence from land and finance to commerce and manufacturing. Some assumed that financial embarrassment explained why the aristocracy allowed middle-class interlopers like the Mayfair men to enter the best circles. For the same reason the sons and daughters of the upper classes were beginning to enter business and the professions. “No surprise was caused when Mayfair women opened dress-shops in Bond Street, or started Social Bureaux for supplying guides to American visitors,” reported Robert Graves. “ ‘Society’, it was generally assumed, had to earn its living like any other class; so ‘Society’ came to mean ‘people worthy of a columnist’s respectful mention.’ ”10
Taxes and inflation tested the elite, but if the super rich slightly declined, the numbers of the ordinary rich increased. In the 1938 Sir Halley Stewart Lecture, John Hilton, professor of industrial relations at Cambridge, reminded his audience of the enormous disparities in wealth between the rich and poor. The old saw held that thrift was the basis of wealth, but in fact it was old money that led to new money. Similarly, the cautionary tale of the man of means who, due to lack of foresight, ended up in a dole queue was a fiction. Such cases, declared Hilton, were so rare as to be mythical. “But apart from the rarest personal disasters and tragedies, ‘family’ in our land stays put. Wealth stays put. Riches to-day have a high margin of safety.”11
Disparities in income were similarly enduring. The socialist academics G. D. H. Cole and M. I. Cole pointed out that those with incomes of £1,000 a year and up equaled only 1.5 percent of the population but took 22 ½ percent of all earnings, whereas the bottom 87.5 percent received only 58 percent. Sixty percent of all incomes were under £125 a year and 73.5 percent of families had an income of less than £4 a week.12 Of 12 million families, 8 million had less than £100 in capital.13 The disparities were even greater when it came to property holding. The top 1 percent held almost 40 percent of all property, while the bottom 63 percent held only 7 percent.14 In 1938, 20 percent of the population, according to Hilton, even fell short of obtaining adequate nutrition. These marginals never “had a chance,” tumbling into poverty if hit, as they inevitably were, by sickness, job loss, or accident.15 In A Night in London (1938) the brilliant photographer Bill Brandt provided the most memorable graphic illustrations of such class differences. Next to “Late Supper,” which captures a well-dressed, apparently bored couple trying to decide what to take from a table loaded with crystal, crisp linens and innumerable meat and vegetable dishes, he placed “Behind the Restaurant,” showing a vagrant, under a waiter’s indifferent gaze, rummaging for food in the trash cans of a darkened alley.16
Despite all the statistics, many conservatives believed in the pauperization of the rich or the emergence of what was known as the “new poor.”17 The phrase was used after the war to describe those on fixed incomes hit by rising taxes, rates, and inflation. According to the alarmist tabloids even a well-off man earning £2,000 a year would soon be impoverished by the steady increase in school fees, taxes, and servants’ wages. The Daily Mail called for a new political party to represent this endangered portion of the population. On the continent powerful fascist movements emerged as a result of similar fears. In Britain, after the 1920 upturn in the economy, the issue ceased to be a subject of public discussion for close to a decade.18
After the 1929 crash it predictably resurfaced. The wealthy were once again shocked, not by actually being impoverished but by a sense of relative deprivation. A potent mix of feeling that others were doing better while they were falling behind and a belief that the respect that they once enjoyed had been lost fuelled the discontent of the propertied. According to the French politician and academic André Siegfried, “In their wounded pride they aggressively refer to themselves as the ‘new poor.’ ”19 “ ‘The New Poor’ positively boasted of their penuriousness,” agreed Robert Graves.20 Under the headline “Distress among the ‘New Poor,’ ” the Times reported that the Professional Classes Aid Council had helped 1,200 highly educated clients in 1931–1932.21 More worrying were reports that otherwise respectable individuals were seeking to dodge taxes and that others had become contemptuous of the democratic state. Outsiders showed little sympathy. An Australian newspaper coolly mocked the anxieties of the English upper classes:
London’s new poor: 1939 vintage. The new poor are with us again, it seems from the advertising columns of The Times. Mink coats which cost £500 are being thrown on the market for half that price; certified gentlefolk and country people desperately are trying to get rid of large houses, oil paintings, Rolls-Royces; a serving cavalry officer appeals to a “patriotic person” to give him an unwanted high-powered or medium-powered car—a Mercedes would be acceptable, he says. The agony column is a mirror of these times, more than ever abounding in pointers for novelists and short-story writers. A refugee must sell four internationally known Hungarian paintings; Royal Academy exhibitors will paint portraits at a quarter of peace-time fees; you may rent for seven guineas a week, furnished, an eighteenth century country house that Dean Swift lived in, now complete with three bathrooms and a garage, and intersected by a trout stream, a “human machine,” unwanted by the fighting services (“to the machine’s great disgust”) announces himself for hire at half his peace time salary of £1,040. And is there an art-loving person who can give a home to a young, “rather unknown” refugee poetess, now working as a maid?22
In his “confession” John Lonsdale sought to present himself as yet another member of the “new poor.” Why did so many well-educated youths fall into crime? Lonsdale replied that normally they would be in real estate, stocks, car sales, or insurance, but they were hit by the slump. Yet being middle or upper class they had to keep up appearances, which meant living well. He presented himself, strained by social demands and trying to keep pace with his wealthy friends, as “forced” to write bad checks. Indeed, he became a “check chaser,” covering one check with another—at one point being £800 in debt.23
It was one thing to be rich; it was another to be a member of “society.” The Times regarded the Mayfair men as interlopers, but the tabloids made much of the fact that the elite had opened its doors to them. News stories referred to “four well-known young Mayfair society men.”24 Journalists noted that the four all had West End addresses.25 The Daily Sketch described “society” flocking to the trial of the four immaculate and debonair youths.26 Others referred to the expensively dressed friends of the accused who attended the trial.27 “The little Westminster Police Court room was crowded to capacity for the preliminary hearing. Only one-third of those attending could be seated. Many smartly dressed women were among the spectators.”28 The Mayfair men exemplified how far (and how low) the ambitious young man might go in society by exploiting friends, family, and social connections.
“Society has a thoroughly English conviction of the superiority of the man to whose breeding, heredity, tradition and education have contributed their best,” a foreign observer noted, “and it regards itself, on the whole justifiably, as a highly bred class in that sense—not, that is, as constituting a higher type of humanity all round, but as specially developed and trained to be the best possible leaders and governors of the country.”29 High society had at one time exerted both social and political power. Following World War I it no longer had the ability to rule. Society now served a different function. Because of death duties and tax increases, more members of what had been the leisure class moved into business. With the government cutting back on army and navy budgets, not to mention the increases in the cost of living, sons who had previously assumed the right to positions in Parliament and the services had to reconsider their career options. Upper-middle-class families on fixed incomes sought to reduce expenses. Some sold off their mansions and moved into flats. In the future their political power depended on their success in business.30
According to Patrick Balfour, “society” had replaced the world once dominated by aristocratic castes.31 Society nevertheless embraced what was an inherently snobbish culture, sustained as it was by the monarchy. Some of its barriers were dropping, but there was no prospect of them disappearing. “Society now presented a picture of metropolitan glamour which none the less still legitimated the existing distribution of wealth and social esteem.”32 Entry was based on one’s kin, schooling, and wealth. The big London houses such as the Devonshire, Dorchester, and Grosvenor ceased to function as political hubs, but society hostesses continued to integrate the old closed landed elite with a more open eclectic elite.
Hostesses like Emerald Cunard were powerful.33 These gatekeepers reviewed a newcomer’s breeding, background, and education. Style and cultural habits were of great importance. One needed capital or, as was the case with the Mayfair men, links to it via relations or friends. “So that although wealth was continually sought after, birth and ‘breeding’ were treated with, if anything, greater deference. Thus you could be the penniless younger son of a younger son, but if you came of ‘good’ family it could enable you to marry an heiress from among the newer rich, or get a top job in the Diplomatic Service if you were clever, or in the armed forces if you were not so clever.”34 If accepted, it was said one “moved” in the best circles.
Society’s function was to prolong the power of the upper classes by protecting and promoting privilege. The Times and Telegraph informed their readerships who were the “best people,” what degrees or promotions they had won, and when and where they held their weddings, christenings, and funerals. Everything else one needed to know about high society was conveyed by gossip columnists like “William Hickey” (Tom Driberg) and aristocratic journalists, including the Marquess of Donegall and Lord Castlerosse. The popular papers, such as the Daily Mail, Daily Sketch, Daily Express, and News of the World, in publicizing and glamorizing the doings of society promoted snobbery and caste consciousness.35 Society in turn used the press to broadcast reports of the cycle of celebrations and social displays that justified its existence.
The popular press was always fascinated by the minutiae of the wealthy, who, it was assumed, represented glamour and style. Despite this fetishization of the elites, stories of their fall from grace, journalists knew, also sold newspapers. If the upper classes dominated culture, they paid the price in having the press broadcast often sensationalized reports of their peccadilloes tailored to entertain a lower-middle-class readership. To be a member of high society, grumbled one writer, meant always talking to some hack or being photographed. “It can only be a question of time before married couples are photographed in bed.”36
Some felt standards had declined. “Since ‘society,’ so-called ceased to be a purely leisured class, since the idle rich became the new poor, the term ‘London season’ has lost the distinctive significance which it bore in the past.”37 Nevertheless the majority of the elite slavishly followed the traditional calendar of events (as did the lower-middle-class tabloid readership) from the presentation at court of debutantes in their coming-out to Royal Ascot to the Cowes Week regatta. Continuing to meet at such events as well as at parties, balls, races, and the opera, London society seemed to have been almost oblivious to the economic crisis the nation had faced. The trial of the Mayfair men served as a reminder that even high society could harbor men whose sense of relative deprivation might lead them into criminality.
Where one lived was as important as how one lived. When the police stopped poet Brian Howard and asked his name and address, he insultingly replied: “I live in Mayfair. No doubt you come from some dreary suburb.”38 The Hyde Park Hotel robbers shared Howard’s fixation on their famous environs. This posh, central district of London was bounded by Piccadilly on the south, Regent Street on the east, Oxford Street on the north, and Hyde Park on the west. In December 1937, Harley was staying on Curzon Street; Wilmer at Brook Mews, Davies Street (between New Bond Street and Grosvenor Square); Lonsdale at the Mayfair Hotel, Down Street, Piccadilly (just north of Green Park); and Jenkins at Fleming’s New Clarges Hotel, Clarges Street, Piccadilly. It was clearly important for their self-presentation to have a good address, and sacrifices would be made to retain it.
Mayfair had a particular cachet. It had for more than two centuries been in the English-speaking world the synecdoche for wealth. According to Clarence Rook, in the early 1900s one could identify a London neighborhood by its inhabitants.
Thus, you may know Bloomsbury by its Jews …, the “City,” by its black-coated business men; Whitechapel, by its coster girls with fringes; Somers Town and Lisson Grove, by their odoriferous cats and cabbages; Mayfair, by its sleek carriage-horses, and also by the very superior maids and butlers you meet in its silent streets. Or, perhaps, by the straw that occasionally fills the quiet square corners, sounding the sad note of Death. I have seen a slum child dying of cancer in a crowded garret,—baked by the August sun,—covered with flies,—in a noisy alley; but only rich people’s nerves require soothing at the last!39
In the mental map of the average Londoner, Mayfair represented luxurious living. It came by its reputation honestly, harboring the townhouses of many aristocrats. The Duke of Westminster, who earned £1,000 a day, or 700 times as much as the average working-class 1914 wage of 30 shillings a week, owned much of Mayfair.40 Accordingly, in 1935, when Waddingtons obtained the license to manufacture and sell a British version of Monopoly, the most expensive property was inevitably called Mayfair. At the same time because of its restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, the district enjoyed a racy reputation. Young men could still find small flats there.41 Lonsdale and his friends followed in the wake of the ambitious youths who invaded the district following the war to turn stable lofts into mews cottages and transform storefronts into nightclubs.42
James Agate, the theater critic, wrote that for the bohemian, Covent Garden was the core of London, for the Cockney it was the East End, and for the man-about-town it was Mayfair. Accordingly, writers such as Oscar Wilde and P. G. Wodehouse often located their characters there. Despite its reputation as a bastion of old money, novelists portrayed Mayfair as having its mysteries. E. F. Benson, a prolific homosexual writer, produced in The Freaks of Mayfair (1916) a series of humorous sketches, including one about a man regarded as an “aunt.”43 In Three Hostages (1924), John Buchan used this district as the locale for a thriller plotting the nefarious practices of a master criminal.44 Mayfair was most famously portrayed in Michael Arlen’s bestseller The Green Hat (1924), a melodramatic account of the lost generation of tragic war heroes, adventurous young women, and raffish cads.45
For many outsiders Mayfair was a fantasy, a dreamland where they could experience what they most desired. In discussing the 1933 Unemployment Bill, the Labour Party firebrand Aneurin Bevan so indulged himself in a curious assertion: “I was born the son of a miner, and I went underground when I was 13 years of age, inevitably. Down the pit was the only place to go. I was as inevitably made into a collier as I would have been made into a shooter of big game if I had been born in Mayfair.”46 For most people the mention of Mayfair more likely brought to mind the pleasures of urban living, not adventures on the veldt, and the elite’s pursuit of foxes and pheasants, not big game.
The war changed Mayfair. In the 1920s taxes and death duties led many aristocrats to sell their London townhouses. The Duke of Devonshire remained in residence in the early 1920s and continued to host balls and presentations. Most of his peers sold off their properties. The great homes disappeared, to be replaced by luxury hotels, though often with the same names, as in the case of the Grosvenor and the Dorchester. Speculators built the Mayfair Hotel on the site of Devonshire House in 1927 to target US tourists.47 Sir Alfred Beit had Aldford House rebuilt as flats and shops. Well on into the 1930s contractors were demolishing eighteenth-century houses as commerce pushed westward around Berkeley Square.48 The population and properties changed; the language evolved. “As the period advanced the ‘Mayfair accent’ changed remarkably,” Robert Graves noted, “from an over-sweet rather French lisp to a rasping tone that had traces in it of Cockney, American, and Midland provincial.”49
Arthur Greenwood, the minister of health in the 1930 Labour government, contrasted the Mayfair man with the slum dweller. “The people who inhabit the slums are much like the people who occupy the benches in this House. It is true that among the slum dwellers there are shiftless people. There are shiftless people in Mayfair, whose shiftlessness never comes to the public eye because they are too well looked after by other people.”50 Greenwood was prophetic inasmuch as the 1938 trial of the Mayfair men was to expose the shiftlessness of a cohort of men-about-town. As a result the term “Mayfair man” took on a darker meaning. In the 1940s John Bull, a muckraking Labour-supporting paper, would report that in Mayfair nightclubs members of high society rubbed elbows with criminals.51 Guy Ramsey’s 1938 article “Mayfair: Where Men Live on Their Wits” provided a composite portrait of the ruthless Mayfair man. He borrows cars, wears an Eton tie, cadges drinks, and skips out on hotel bills. He maintains a shaky financial stability by robbing widows and having clubs pay him for bringing in new members. “He gossips in the bored, clipped jargon of the upper classes to maîtres d’hôtel, to waiters, to bar-tenders.” He has perfect manners, but if a woman asks him to repay his loans, he can turn nasty. He knows everyone and is seen everywhere. “He works so hard, just not to do an honest job.”52
When leftists mentioned Mayfair it was often as not to condemn it as the home of the idle rich, but also just because of the association of this district with wealth it was frequently cited by the press when imagining class reconciliation. So under the headline “A Mayfair ‘Shop Girl’ Engaged,” the Daily Mail ran a story in 1931 of the engagement of Lord Castlereagh (a product of Eton and Oxford) to Miss Romain Combe. Unfortunately, the implication that this was an example of love conquering all was dissipated when the reporter admitted that the “shop girl” was the niece of the Duchess of Sutherland and had only spent a few months as a Mayfair hair salon receptionist. Though she was no longer employed, a reporter claimed with seeming seriousness that “she greatly enjoyed the experience of being a ‘business girl’ and getting up at 8 am so as to start work at 9.”53
Turning to films, one finds similar sorts of escapist scenarios.54 Strikingly enough, no producer made a movie about the Hyde Park Hotel robbery. The British Board of Film Censors allowed the importation of Hollywood gangster films since they confirmed the notion of a violent American culture, but it would not permit the showing of British films that glamorized crime.55 The board did allow the working class to be satirized and the upper class to be gently mocked.56 It was most supportive of films that lauded class harmony. Among the earliest and crudest was A Romance of Mayfair (1925, dir. Thomas Bentley), in which a duke’s son falls in love with an actress while the duke’s daughter is wooed by a socialist MP. Predictably, the class gulf that separates them does not succeed in ruining the affairs.57 Mayfair Melody (1937, dir. Arthur B. Woods) was a “quota quickie” (a film made by Hollywood subsidiaries in response to the 1927 law requiring a percentage of movies shown to be British) in which the daughter of a factory owner discovers the wonderful voice of one of his workers and helps him on to a successful career as a professional singer. Critics noted that the film was enjoyable though Keith Falkner, the popular bass-baritone who played the lead, “never suggests the faintest impression of a mechanic.”58 The Playboy (1938, dir. Walter Forde)—also known as Kicking the Moon Around—had a similar clichéd plot. A rich young man—abandoned by his gold-digging fiancée when he pretends to have lost his money—befriends a salesgirl who has singing ambitions.59
Mayfair screen playboys were gentlemen, far removed from the cads tried in 1938. Jack Buchanan, the Scottish singer, most successfully embodied the debonair, affable man-about-town. In the musical comedy A Man of Mayfair (1931, dir. Louis Mercanton), he played the role of Lord William, the epitome of the good-natured English gentleman. The George Formby musical Off the Dole (1935, dir. Arthur Mertz) presented yet another gallant Mayfair playboy, in this case rescuing a young woman from her brutal stepfather.
Almost a Honeymoon (1938, dir. Norman Lee) was a broad farce in which a Mayfair playboy—idle and indebted—has twenty-four hours to find a wife so that he can win a colonial appointment restricted to married men.60 The comic possibilities of denying one’s social status were also exploited by the producers of Fools for Scandal (1938, dir. Mervyn Leroy), a comedy in which a French count pretends to be a Mayfair cook in order to win over an American film star.61 Both the domestication of the playboy and the overcoming of class differences were dealt with in Maytime in Mayfair (1949, dir. Herbert Wilcox), a British musical comedy. A penniless man-about-town is left a high-class Mayfair fashion salon. His plan is to sell it as soon as possible, but he, of course, falls in love with its manager and settles down to help her in fighting off a rival establishment.62
Given these films’ lack of originality and their outlandish plots, the question is what viewers made of them. For some they were “palliative fictions” that allowed their audiences for an hour or two to enter a dreamworld of Mayfair townhouses, home county cottages, luxurious hotels, glamorous Riviera villas, and sleek Atlantic liners. For a population still struggling with the blight of unemployment they provided a form of compensation and escape.63 It is unlikely, however, that working-class movie patrons accepted the films’ message that they could look to the upper classes for care and concern. We know that American films were more popular than their British rivals in part because they seemed to be classless, and at the very least were free of irritating upper-class English accents.64 The most popular movie of 1938 in Britain was A Yank at Oxford (dir. Jack Conway), which followed a brash and boastful American encountering the stuffiness of English society.65 To be pro-American was a way to be anti-upper-class.
The novelist and social commentator J. B. Priestley concluded his English Journey (1934) by advancing the notion of the existence of three Englands—Old England, nineteenth-century industrial England, and postwar England—the last, he wrote in a famous passage, “belonging far more to the age itself than to this particular island. America, I supposed, was its real birthplace. This is the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafés, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor-coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, grey-hound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarette coupons.”66 Especially around London one encountered a more democratic, accessible society. The elite feared this invasion of American culture.67 They tended to support a xenophobic, hierarchical society with strong links to agrarian interests. Intellectuals of both the left and right were critical of popular modernism as represented by newspapers, movies, thrillers, and advertising. One means of defense was the embracing of anti-Americanism.68
In the courts free rein was given to such sentiments. The press described Harley, the most violent of the Mayfair men, as the “moustached American.” His lawyer in his defense played up the idea of Harley being somehow tainted by his time in the United States. “During the last 10 years, years when most young men have the advantage of a home life, this young man has been in America, open to all sorts of temptations and seeing all sorts of things.”69 Although Harley employed that most English of weapons—the life preserver—the tabloid press proclaimed that Britain would not allow importation from America of the “ruthlessness of the gangster.”70 A judge informed another jewel thief who had committed “a most un-English type of crime” that “[w]e are not dealing with the wild West.”71 Similarly, in 1942 two American volunteers in the Canadian army appeared in court, accused of robbing a car driver. The judge who sentenced one to be whipped stated sententiously: “Gangsters are unwelcome in this country.”72
As the press never failed to point out, not only were the Mayfair men members of London society, but they all came from respectable families.73 Those who attended their trial heard how they had betrayed both their families and friends. The audience caught glimpses of Lonsdale’s and Wilmer’s fathers—tragic figures who, having enjoyed successful careers, were unprepared to deal with the humiliating situation in which their sons had placed them. Working-class men and women might have to inform a police court magistrate of conflicts within their family. For the middle and upper classes, such candor was normally unthinkable. Family privacy was one of the essential benefits of privilege. “Keeping a secret, like keeping a servant,” notes a historian, “was one of the ways, then, to define the middle class.”74
The question of whether the Hyde Park Hotel robbery was an isolated incident or only the tip of an iceberg of filial insubordination hovered in the air. The News of the World reported that the police were struck by “how many young men and women of excellent parentage and education live as sheer adventurers.”75 They boasted of swindling tradespeople, hotel proprietors, tailors, and even their friends. Determining how common such behavior was remains difficult, but there are a few sources that substantiate the charge. When her parents complained about her excesses, Elizabeth Pelly (or Elizabeth Ponsonby, as she was known) retorted that compared to her friends she was an innocent. “You may complain of my goings-on, but you ought to consider yourselves lucky that I am not like many of the others: I don’t forge, I don’t drug, I don’t shoot, I don’t steal.”76
When the Mayfair men were tried, Peter Jenkins was twenty-three, John Lonsdale and David Wilmer were twenty-four, and Robert Harley was twenty-six. It was easy for the tabloids to present them as representatives of their generation and compare them to the bright young people of the 1920s, born about a decade earlier. The latter were notorious for their raucous parties and public escapades; the Hyde Park Hotel robbery similarly began as a lark, but it almost ended in murder. The two generations were also alike in having to somehow compete with the indelible memory of the thousands of young men who had heroically sacrificed themselves in World War I. On a more prosaic level, both cohorts found themselves looking for work in a country whose economy was weak and jobs scarce. Nevertheless, with the exception of Wilmer, they all gave themselves professional titles: Robert Harley, journalist; Peter Jenkins, financier; and John Lonsdale, estate agent. And even when family money was running out they found ways of keeping up appearances and were able to “dress for the occasion,” be it a dance, a theatrical performance, or drinks at a nightclub.77 To sustain this prosperous façade the four Mayfair men finally turned to crime. There were even more troubling options. In The Condition of Britain (1937), G. D. H. Cole and M. I. Cole noted that in all countries the fascists were recruiting among such “half-gentlemen.” “They are most dangerous when economic depression prevents them from finding jobs which satisfy their desire for gentility.”78 The Coles cited Hitler as the classic example.
Under the headline “3 Young ‘Mayfair Men’ Ordered Flogged and Sentenced to British Prison in Hold-Up,” the New York Times gave a brief account of the last day of the trial. “All of London has been buzzing over the crime and speculating on what treatment these four sons of respectable rich persons—all public school graduates and entitled to wear the ‘old school tie’—would get in comparison with that of the ordinary British criminal.”79 In a leading editorial in the Sunday Express, entitled “The Lepers of Mayfair,” James Douglas used the same phrase: “They are the product of gentility. They are well born, well educated, and well dressed—the old-school-tie class.”80
Every account of the Mayfair men noted that they had all been educated in elite public schools. Such observations led to obvious questions. Did their schooling contribute in some way to their criminality? Did it nurture their feeling of being somehow above the law? The schools supposedly inculcated a sense of fair play, built character, and instilled correct cultural manners (that is, aristocratic manners) in upper-middle-class boys. Their defenders claimed that the tone and morality taught to the boys in turn spread to the nation. It was certainly the case that many who could never afford such an education were nevertheless fascinated by it. One sign of this was Frank Richards’s (Charles Hamilton) enormously popular series of stories about “Greyfriars,” a fictional public school, complete with saintly headmaster and sports-mad students, that appeared in the boys’ papers The Magnet and The Gem for close to half a century. The success of James Hilton’s international best-seller Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1934) provided further evidence of the appeal that even the fictional portrayal of a second-rate public school held, as long as it harbored a beloved teacher.
The influence of the public schools peaked in the 1930s, but they were not immune to attack.81 Critics argued that public schools focused on character, not intelligence. They encouraged the belief that one’s position should depend not on performance but on family or school connections. They indoctrinated their charges with a ruling-class ideology based on a disdain for trade.82 The poet W. H. Auden recalled his school’s express contempt for the working class. It saw as its purpose the production of gentlemen. In his case it failed. “I was—and in most respects still am—mentally precocious, physically backward, short-sighted, a rabbit at all games, very untidy and grubby, a nail-biter, a physical coward, dishonest, sentimental, with no community sense whatever, in fact a typical little highbrow and difficult child.”83 Yet despite his own failings, Auden enjoyed his time at Gresham’s School.
The best-known critics of the public schools were other “highbrow” writers—including Alec Waugh, H. G. Wells, George Orwell, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, and Esmond Romilly—who had had unhappy school experiences.84 They accused the public schools of producing snobbery, philistinism, and homosexuality. Authoritarian masters rewarded conformity and suppressed individuality. The resulting products were ignorant and arrogant young men, toughened to mask their feelings, seeking protection in drinks and jokes. Members of all male institutions, they, of course, knew little about women. Most did not go on to university, and given that their impressionable years were those spent in school many old boys were forever entangled in a “permanent adolescence.”85
The practical value of the public school lay in the contacts it provided and the self-confidence and class consciousness it instilled, which were so crucial to networking once out of school. Determining who was worth approaching was a challenge. The “old school tie” provided one solution in signaling one’s status. It bore a code that informed others of one’s class affiliation, education, and school. Other ties referred to aspects of life worth vaunting, such as one’s club, regiment, or cricket team. The tie thus served to both include and exclude.86 As a result some seriously argued that the sale of ties had to be controlled. A writer in the Malvern College magazine complained that since the Old Malvernian tie sported bright colors it was being worn by “Negroes in Liverpool docks or by bookies’ touts.”87 When Robin Alexander Lyle, a twenty-seven-year-old ship owner and adopted Conservative candidate for a Scottish constituency, appeared in court, the magistrate’s first question was: “Are you entitled to wear that tie?”88 In an article titled “Protect That Old School Tie,” one journalist asserted that the “imposter” or “supercad” who wore a tie to which he had no legitimate claim should be prosecuted.89
Even the most conservative of old boys recognized that by the 1930s mention of the old school tie often as not raised a laugh.90 Many equated it to back-scratching and cronyism. Comics derided the mixture of snobbery and sentiment it conjured up. “The Old School Tie,” was the most popular song of the Western Brothers, who made a career playing two silly asses on stage and radio.91 In formal dress and monocles, and with the irritatingly bored drawl of the arrogant upper-class male, they paraded their stupidity by, for example, listing as elite schools Eton, Harrow, Borstal, and Pentonville.92
The Mayfair men clearly exhibited the worst traits of the public school. Idlers and spongers, they tried to make careers out of exploiting their networks of friends and acquaintances. Noting that the press was fixated on their elite schooling, Lord Chief Justice Hewart went out of his way to deflect criticism of the public schools. The accused may have attended exclusive institutions, he conceded, but they had not really been educated. Though their parents had invested heavily in their sons’ educations, the youths had obviously squandered their opportunities.93
Lord Chief Justice Hewart’s support was not needed. The reality was that the schools, though under attack in the 1930s, continued to have enormous influence. John Hilton noted that an expensive education guaranteed one a place in the “reserved stalls” of life. One-sixth of MPs had gone to Eton; fifty-two of fifty-six bishops and twenty of twenty-one cabinet ministers had been privately schooled.94 Thanks to the old boys’ networks one’s entrée into the army, police, civil service, or colonial service could be expedited. Although Britain was modernizing, its elite still relied on tribal loyalties, school friendships, and family connections. The upper classes assumed that rules and regulations could be bent for the privileged. What was important was to know the right people. In this endogamous society who would vouch for them? Were they “one of us”? Did we “know their people”? The courts, of course, made an example of the Hyde Park Hotel robbers, but it was a case of the exception proving the rule.
Arrivistes, the nouveaux riches, and those whose industriousness smacked too obviously of the world of trade found themselves excluded from the best social circles. The pose struck by the ex-public-school boy and the Mayfair playboy involved the studied appearance of carelessness or nonchalant boredom. André Siegfried attributed England’s decline to the fixation on this notion of the gentleman, which held that appearing to be engaged in hard work was unseemly. “A gentleman, we must realize, never strives too much; it is not considered the thing.”95 In 1932, Harold J. Laski, the left-wing political theorist, produced The Danger of Being a Gentleman, in which he lamented that in the culture inculcated by the public school the question was always who someone was rather than what they did. This was the culture of the amateur and sportsman. England could once afford this type, but it could no longer govern on the premise that others were inferior on account of class or race.96
The public schools also had a few critics on the right. In a 1941 essay, Douglas Reed, an anti-Semitic journalist who believed in a Zionist conspiracy, held the schools responsible for a host of evils.
The old school tie bears more blame for the dreary advent of this war than any other single thing, because it kept all the keys of power in the hands of men unfitted to hold them. Not merit, but money, gave them those keys. For the government of the country, the conduct of its policies, is also “man management,” and history can show few examples of man mismanagement more horrid than that of the years 1918–39 in England. The old-school-tie system has the Somme, Passchendaele and Dunkirk among its battle honours, or dishonours, and it also produced those “Mayfair Men,” criminals of the most unprincipled kind, who infested the social scene of London in those between-war years. When its virtues are extolled in such immoderate terms, that needs also to be said.97
Reviewing the Hyde Park Hotel robbery today, one is not particularly surprised to learn that some expensively educated youths from good families fell afoul of the law. One is taken aback, however, by a minor but nevertheless significant detail in the court record. Cartier’s representative did not think it at all unusual, when asked by a supposedly wealthy customer, to carry across London diamond rings worth approximately sixty-four times a worker’s annual salary. And it would appear that his view was shared by journalists, the police, and court officials since none of them thought the issue worthy of comment. Apparently one would have to have been naïve indeed to be shocked by the startling contrast of the enormous wealth of the few with the impoverishment of the many. In the 1930s the British took the yawning gulf separating the classes as a basic fact of life.
“Traditional British class society was at its apogee in 1939,” asserts historian Arthur Marwick. Others have argued that in 1930s Britain the idea of class was more important than the reality.98 The Marxist typology might have been simplistic, but class remained at the very least a potent rhetorical construct. Evidence of class warfare, us against them, was found everywhere. It emerged in discussions of every aspect of the lives of the Mayfair men—how they had been raised, what schools they attended, where they lived, with whom they socialized. Each of these aspects could, with hindsight, be seen to have contributed to the young men’s sense of entitlement that ultimately tipped them over into criminality. One newspaper summed up the story in the headline “Mayfair Playboys, Too Poor for Luxury Lives, Took to Crime.”99
There were young men in the 1930s who were fortunate enough to have a “good” family, an expensive public school education, an entrée into London society, and the support of powerful friends who nevertheless felt that they deserved better. The evidence suggests that in the case of the Mayfair men their “advantages” legitimated, at least in their own eyes, their seizing that which they felt society owed them. It is telling that though forced to admit to having moved from lying and cheating to robbery with violence, they never showed any sense of guilt or remorse. Most members of the middle and upper-middle classes were clearly appalled by the behavior of Harley and his confederates, yet many, especially those who regarded themselves as the “new poor,” also complained of having been somehow victimized, of having had to unfairly bear the costs of their nation’s awkward adjustment to social and economic change. They were further frustrated by the apparent inability of the older political parties to respond to their pleas for aid. The British Union of Fascists’ assertion that it was listening and would do something to protect the propertied played a key role in its early successes. Its ultimate failure, argued some observers, was in part due to fascism’s association with the playboy.