Playboys and Mayfair Men by Angus McLaren

Author:Angus McLaren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Chapter 9: CLASS

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.

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