Class and Moray Dalton: There's Death in the Cup

Moray Dalton (Katherine Renoir) wrote several mystery-thrillers that deserve more fans. They are very revealing about attitudes of the time. Other books include acrobats and failing private zoos, but this one is firmly placed in a stuffy little seaside town. The Armour family are beyond the pale of society. Though they have a big house and servants, the other middle class residents do not mix with them. The patriarch's second wife ran off with a French teacher, you see.

“What’s their social status?”
“Oh, middle class, I suppose. The father was a retired manufacturer from the Midlands. But they weren’t visited."
"One does not want to be censorious and Pharisaical, but they weren’t the sort of people we’re used to."

Mark Armour, our hero, is under a cloud for forging a cheque at school. He joined up and had a good war, but when peace broke out couldn't find a job. So he parlayed his startling good looks into a career as a gigolo. We get just a glimpse of this life in the first chapter.

He is forced to return home, where his bossy older sister Bertha inherited all the money. His half-siblings need looking after. George is clearly autistic, sympathetically portrayed, who is happy cutting pictures out of magazines. Winnie is "man mad". She was never very stable and is now about 40. As we've seen from other novels of the same vintage, there was a general idea that if a woman didn't get married she would start to go barmy by the age of about 30.

"One of the sisters is odd. Peculiar in her dress and so forth."
“There’s a taint of insanity then?”

As well as sewing finery out of old clothes, Winnie stalks the local doctor, sitting and crying on the kerb outside his house.

Yes, this is an other stiflingly inturned family, where everyone is forced to dance to Bertha's tune. If she dies, the inheritance is split between Winnie, Mark, George and Claire - the other child of the absconding French wife.

Mark has somehow met and fallen in love with Lucy, only child of what could be another repressive family unit. "I suppose you’ve seen to it that she met any eligibles that happen to be about?” asks her uncle, one of the subsidiary detectives. Oh no, woofles her father, coming up with some feeble excuse. "Lucy is a home bird" – the same phrase used by Joanna Cannan about the pathetic Nancy in They Rang Up the Police.

More about class: a servant going to give "evidence" to the police "was rather too smartly dressed in a bright blue coat lavishly trimmed with cheap fur, opening over a blue silk frock and ropes of pearls." And someone puts on "her high, affected company voice".
     
Though we barely leave the snobbish little resort, and nothing very dramatic happens (there isn't even a dispute about the will), it is a gripping read. Dalton is a good writer:

It was pitch dark in the drive and silent but for the crunching of the loose gravel under their feet and the steady drip drip of the rain on the laurels.
                
The car roared through the darkness. The hedgerows streamed by, every twig and blade of grass flashing out in the white glare of the headlights for a fraction of time to sink back again into the peaceful obscurity of the November night when they had passed.

I guessed the killer, mainly because they are the last person standing.

More Golden Age snobbery here, and links to the rest.
                


                

Class and Joanna Cannan III: They Rang Up the Police

Toby frill

You might think this is one of the limpest titles ever, but for the Cathcarts it's not a simple proceeding. One of a family of spinster sisters goes missing, and they eventually call in the law. "After all, I know the Chief Constable."

Before this happens, we peer into the inside workings of one of the most toxic families ever put on the page. Three "girls" and their helpless mother barely see outsiders, and constantly call each other "darling". The youngest, Nancy (38), is addressed as "baby". They have nothing whatever to do (large staff of servants), and don't think this odd. Nancy passes the time sewing. Sheila (red-headed and plain) plays the piano or just sits about. Delia runs the show, and also has some equestrian skills and is part of the local horsy world. Resemblance to the Borden family purely coincidental?

It's Delia who goes missing. Guy Northeast of the Yard is called in, and the middle of the book sags as he goes about his investigation. Meanwhile the ladies reveal a lot about the mores of the time (the 30s).

Someone says, mysteriously: "Well off you may be, but you’re only biscuits when all’s said and done.” I wondered if "biscuits" was contemporary slang, but it turns out the Cathcart family made its money selling digestives.

"I don’t believe there is such a thing as an artistic temperament. It’s not temperament, darling; it’s temper.”

The Cathcarts relate: "We decided that we’d keep calm till eleven” – before calling for help about Delia's absence.

It's the author who despises meals such as this: Besides the tea there was a white loaf, half a pound of margarine, a slice of Canadian cheddar, some beetroot swimming in vinegar, a pot of strong tea, a jug of thin milk, a basin of lump sugar, a cold boiled onion, and seven fancy cakes on the table.  
                
“We never leave any of our personal belongings in the bathroom,” said Mrs. Cathcart. “It’s so suburban.”

The rude servant is "a short young man with oily hair that smelled of violets".

"Rather suburban tidiness" is referred to.

"The Cathcarts were biscuits, but they’ve been out of it for some time," but "three generations and back to the plow?”


The characters come out with some pop psychology to diagnose the sisters, and in the frame of the book, turn out to be right.

"Can’t get ’usbands yourselves, so you don’t want no one else to. That’s what ’tis." An uppity servant says this directly to Delia, shortly before she vanishes.
                
"Sex repression," opines another character.

When Sheila meets Northeast, she doesn't answer his questions immediately because "she had been wondering if he were married, if his wife understood him, if he realized that a pretty face isn’t everything."
                
Delia is dismissed as a "repressed spinster, who had practically given up hope of any sex life — an easy prey for any man."

"She may have bottled things up all her life and cracked suddenly.”
"If a silly woman chose to give way to her nerves."
"You know what old maids are, especially at the time when they gives up ’ope."

As for the mysteriously absent Mr Willoughby, "I’ve heard of lots of men with kinks, who just left home for no real reason at all."

One theory is that Delia has run away with Mr Willoughby, who disappeared at the same time. This means Guy has to interview Mrs Willoughby, an irritatingly self-conscious Bohemian who winces at the word "sketching".

I’m too intelligent to worry about something that isn’t. Time isn’t. It only exists for the benefit of the insane majority.

Well, I hung about here thinking how sordid it all was.
              
“A fruit shop?” “A stall in the market place. I hate smug shops.”

Solicitors are so sordid and everything’s so simple and nothing’s ugly if you just bare your soul.

He was a "typical member of the lower middle class, quite cancerous with respectability".
                
Eventually, she exits: Of course, it’s been horribly sordid, but it’ll make us more sensitive to beauty, so in a way, you see, it’s been good for our souls. I feel terribly hurt — ugliness does hurt me terribly — and I’m going to rush off now to be healed by flowers and trees and birds.               


Clothes are stressed throughout – pay attention.
               
Delia keeps her hair in order with a hairnet. The cretonnes in the Cathcart's drawing room are "sweet-pea colouring" – mauve, pink and blue. Nancy wears floral fabric.

Mrs Willoughby "wore an orange smock over a black satin skirt, black satin shoes with rubbed toes, and no stockings".

A platinum blonde waitress stepped through a curtain of bamboo and beads.
                
A peripheral character recalls her own outfit: Scarlet and white checked skirt, scarlet jacket, no hat and white shoes. (Probably marks her as not quite quite.)
                
Another wore: mauve jumper, mauve halo hat, and gray flannel coat and skirt. (A "coat and skirt" was what we'd call a "suit", but for some reason this word was taboo for women.)
                
At the inquest, Gerda Willoughby is "dressed dramatically in black and orange".   

Nancy complains to her diary that Delia has accused her of wearing a dress with a "Toby frill" – as worn by Mr Punch's dog. "Whenever I make friends with anybody, she says they are boring or common," she adds.

It's maybe not so great as a mystery, but the snobbery and wit keep one reading. He hoped this wasn’t going to be the sort of case you read about in novels, where the detective knows that the victim couldn’t have been in the music room at the time stated, because so great a musician would never have played Puccini.

More here, and links to the rest.               
               

Class and Barbara Pym's An Unsuitable Attachment

This novel was rejected by Barbara Pym's publisher, in the early 60s. Perhaps it didn't seem in tune with the times. Pym took it back and reworked parts of it, and it was eventually published after her death, when she'd regained her popularity. However, it seems unfinished. She revealed that she originally made John "much worse", but in her world that might mean that he wore a corduroy suit, or dropped more H's. The romance between John and Ianthe is understated, but what she gives us goes straight to the heart.

John is a former film extra who goes to work in Ianthe's library, where they are overseen by the waspish Mervyn. Ianthe, a spinster in her late 30s, attracts interest from some unlikely men. Mervyn is probably gay, but covets her inherited furniture. Rupert Stonebird thinks Ianthe would look so perfect in his house. 

Ianthe inherits some money, and buys a cute little house in a London suburb that has definitely not gentrified - yet. As a clergyman's niece, she is welcome by the local vicar and his wife, Sophia, and cat, Faustina.

Sophia thinks Rupert will do for her jilted sister, who is "modern" in an early 60s fashion, wearing a "beehive" hairdo and sometimes a hat like a yellow tulle soufflé.

Everyone agrees that John is an "unsuitable" partner for Ianthe, and the words suitable/unsuitable pepper the text.

There is a local vet and his sister who act as a Greek chorus. And women tend to wear tweeds.

Lady Selvedge and Mrs Grandison set off to open a bazaar, stopping only to consume a "lunch of Welsh rarebit and trifle at a café run by gentlewomen. Class is frequently expressed through food:              
‘We have come to this,’ her mother used to say, ‘eating frozen vegetables like Americans.’
                
In about ten years from the date of the novel, feminism happened and girls pretended that marriage and pairing off were about to disappear from the face of the earth. But this idiocy has not happened yet.

Penelope had now reached the age when one starts looking for a husband rather more systematically than one does at nineteen or even at twenty-one.

Matchmaking Sophia probes "to find out without actually asking whether he had a mother, wife, fiancée, or ‘friend’ in the background".
               
Everyone values Ianthe for her apparent class. Sophia's mother notes her "feather-trimmed hat which had just the right touch of slightly dowdy elegance".
                
Ianthe goes looking for her retired former colleague Miss Grimes, and finds her living in one room in a house of multiple occupation with many bellpushes by the front door, and a hall laid with "frayed chocolate brown linoleum".
                
It's Daisy, the vet's sister, who notes the bromides people wheel out when anyone's ill. "Perhaps others didn’t feel they could give in to it as I did.’ ‘No, they felt it their duty to struggle on,’ said Daisy, half to herself.

The gang go on holiday to Italy, and Sophia takes the opportunity to tell Ianthe that there are alternatives to marriage: good works, being a pillar of the Christian community. But, cries Ianthe, "Mustn’t all these things be a second best? Oh, not to God – I know what you’re going to say."
               
‘Well, some books are destined never to be read,’ said Mervyn. ‘It’s the natural order of things.’ Like the women who are destined never to marry, thought Ianthe, remembering Sophia’s words to her in the gardens at Ravello. There had been something almost cruel in the way she had spoken.               

When Ianthe goes so far as to announce her engagement in the times, Sophia wails: ‘I wanted her to stay as she was, almost as if I’d created her.’
                
There are other details that nail this book to a time and a place (and publishers never like that unless the time is 1550): Ianthe wears a "white orlon cardigan" over her summer dress and the tourists are delighted to discover "osso buco" and spaghetti, not to mention Tuscan red wine.

Authors are often sold as exemplars of "subtle humour" that presumably has to be mined for. This humour, as well as being unfunny, is usually "mild" or "gentle". Pym's humour really is subtle, and neither mild nor gentle. It's no coincidence that, as so often, anthropologists form a background. Their papers of "jural processes among the Ngumi" don't promise to tell us anything much.

"Meeting people in everyday life in north-west London isn’t quite the same as studying a primitive community in Africa", protests Rupert. But by the end of the book he's joking that his next book is going to be called The Wiles of Nice Women in a Civilised Society. And what is this book if not...?

Sophia is revealed as a manipulative woman who has never loved anybody apart from her horrible cat, with whom she is obsessed. (I see Faustina as a Persian with a cross expression.) However, the whole book seems a little unfinished. Sophia's marriage, the lives of the well-meaning vets, are glossed over, hinted at. Another writer (especially one writing today) would make a meal of them, and underline the significant points. Pym just glances at them. Perhaps that's her cleverness.

More here, and links to the rest.
                

Happy Christmas and a Merry 2025!

"Ordinary folk" talk about “making memories”. You do all the hoopla and games so that your children can “make memories”. They also call photographs and videos “memories”.

Lower middle-class Jen Teale makes all her decorations every year out of brown paper and string. She  sticks stuff onto ping pong balls with a glue gun.

Morning guys. Yesterday we were wrapping your Christmas decorations created at the “Paint your own handmade porcelain Christmas decorations” workshop at the Note Warehouse. (@martinharmanart)

People's Trust for Endangered Species @PTES: Handmade plastic-free decorations for your Christmas tree! Shop now! 

Caro Stow Crat has never heard of glue guns: she gathers greenery, conifer branches and red berries in the family’s private woods and sprays them liberally with gold paint.

Samantha Upward avoids Costa – at this time of the year they play "Christmas music" about bells and frost, sung by Nat King Cole imitators.

Journalists take the opportunity to write about their own damaging drinking habits, as if asking for approval or permission.

A vicar has taken on the tradition of telling children Santa doesn't exist and leaving them all sobbing.

But @ferrispictures wins game, set and match: OMG, it's here far too early. I loathe Christmas for its disgusting commercialism. All greed and unfairness.

The sending of valentines has quite gone out of fashion, except amongst persons of the lower class. (@GirlsOwn quoting the1880s)

@MarcCorbishley asks: Is trifle essential at Christmas? (Not among the best upper sets, Marc.)

Enjoy! And Chag Sameach.

More here, and links to the rest.

Vogue's Book of Etiquette

What not to wear

Vogue’s Book of Etiquette was published just post World War Two. 

All etiquette books start “the old rigid formality of the past has quite gone, but we still need modern manners”. They then go on to guide you through throwing a formal dinner party with ten courses, and explain how to address an Archbishop in a telegram.

But apart from terrifying descriptions of equipping a house with the right kinds of wineglasses, chandeliers, chairs and bath towels, you can find here some of the good sense promised by Clothes in Books. 

One of the most egregious form of rudeness is to give an invitation to one person in front of another, who is not included. 

In conversation, don’t monologue. Don’t lapse into a language not everyone understands. Don’t leave anyone out. Don’t embark on a difficult topic. Don’t attack religions, nationalities, groups of people. (I think this is what self-help books mean when they say “Don’t generalise”.)

Vogue instructs men to “bow while half-rising from your seat” if they spot a female acquaintance across the room. I’m glad this ungainly pantomime has gone out.

In a public place, a man may help a woman to carry a heavy bag up a flight of stairs, pick up something she’s dropped etc, but must not use this incident to scrape an acquaintance.

Do we still bow? Discreetly, when meeting a monarch. We also nod across crowded rooms, and sometimes bow slightly when shaking hands – but there's no need to go over the top and turn it into a comic performance.

There are rules for single girls who may even (gasp!) live alone. Don’t dine alone with a married man. Avoid being alone with a man, married or not, in his apartment or yours, in his hotel room or yours. Vogue adds: stick to one sherry, and a glass of wine at dinner. Vogue is right about all this, and warns against getting any kind of “reputation”.

Sometimes Vogue really hits the spot. Enjoying a party or dance is a “matter of technique”. If you find yourself without a partner or a prospect of one, and no table of friends to sit down with, instead of sitting alone on the sidelines and wishing you were dead – GO HOME! Parents should tell their daughters they can phone to be collected at any time, and should not force them to go to parties unless the girls want to go. How I wish my parents had read these wise words. (And this practical approach is more likely to yield results than getting therapy and "letting your subconscious speak" or any such nonsense.)

“Marriage is the single most important event in a lifetime”, but if it doesn’t work out, it’s the husband who leaves the family home. Vogue assumes that all women get married. 

Wear a suit to the interview: nobody “will take on a dull, lifeless, untidy and incoherent prospect, who cares only about getting a job as a practical necessity”. 

There’s a section on language that’s very like U and Non-U. “Contact” is barred – instead you should “reach” someone. Well, that explains “reach out”. Sofa is preferred to “settee” or any alternative such as “Davenport”. “Couch” is condemned as a “Gallicism”. (Davenport is from the A.H. Davenport company of 19th century Boston, says the dictionary.) As for pronunciation, avoid “cah-viar” or “ah-qua blue”.

“The procedure of entertaining” sounds unbearably strenuous, but “as always, the process of learning is not an unmitigated delight”. Vogue doesn’t tell you how to speed the parting guest, but gives timings for cocktail parties, dinners etc. 

THOU SHALT NOT

The “thou shalt nots” are far more amusing than the stuff about choosing Waterford glass and Rockingham china and French Provincial table settings. 

It is not decorous to sing or whistle on the street, less so in a crowded elevator.

Never smoke while dancing.

Women shouldn’t wear hats when entertaining at home.

Rings should never be worn outside a glove.

You don’t want to revolt fellow diners, but don’t be furtive or over-genteel.

Valenciennes lace and Valentine’s Day should not be shortened to “Val”.

Widow’s veils shouldn’t be worn with “bright jewellery or coloured stockings”.

Serve only three types of cocktail. More than this puts an unattractive emphasis on drink.

Banned on the exterior of your house are “would-be Tudor mullioned windows – a very Tea-Shoppe touch”. 

Indoors, avoid “tables with long, spindly legs and tops made of glass”. 

Fuchsia, lime, turquoise and chartreuse should be eschewed in the country, as shades for writing paper, and for your small daughter’s clothes.

Ladies, do not sport a tricorne hat in the hunting field – unless you’re in France.

More here, and links to the rest.

Classy Jobs

My upmarket accent means that people have always made assumptions about me. When I left university, I needed a job, any job. It was my ambition to “work in publishing”, which to me meant book publishing. Such jobs seemed to be few, or “like gold dust”, as we used to say. So I applied for secretarial jobs that sounded interesting. Sometimes I got as far as the interview, but when they heard my voice the interview panel would become inexplicably frosty. Why was someone like me trying to take a job away from someone who actually needed one? 

Posh people need jobs too. But as well as avoiding “trade”, those "jobs in the arts and publishing" were a way of staying among “those of a similar background” and even finding someone suitable to marry. And they paid less because it was assumed Daddy had bought you a London flat.

Oh, and the real value of having a job in publishing is being able to say "I work in publishing" to strangers you meet at parties. It's like saying "I really am middle class, don't worry". People used to say to me “But YOU can’t be a secretary!”. I thought they meant “you, with your brains”, but it was like confessing to being a parlourmaid. 

Sometimes it's what other people want for you. Oh, you're a “nice young girl”? You'd better work in book publishing where you'll “fit in”. It's almost protective. But perhaps they don't want anyone to step out of their niche. Are they subtly indicating "You don't belong here?" Sometimes they want you to fulfil a fairytale they believe about the lives of the “posh”. A man once asked me “Why aren't you married to a barrister and living in Fulham?”. (Because one didn’t ask me to marry him, that’s why.)

I cleverly worked out I couldn’t afford to work in book publishing anyway. Girls who could operate these new-fangled “word processors” were paid £2,000 a year more – and that was a lot in those days. I did a course, applied for a job, got taken on as a temp for a week and stayed for seven years. In publishing! Newsletters, not books. 

I once went to a party in Marlborough which was full of women who worked in book publishing. When I told them I worked in magazines they looked at me as if I was something the cat had dragged in. “I love magazines!” I enthused. “What are these magazines you love?” one asked with a sneer. Hadn’t she ever been to WH Smith in the high street? It had a wall of magazines, from Angling Times to The Zookeeper’s Gazette. Perhaps she was too grand to visit Smith’s and had The Lady delivered.

More here, and links to the rest.

Keep Christmas Classy

It’s OK to celebrate Christmas as long as you refer to it ironically as “rampant capitalist excess”. But how do you use the festival to demonstrate your unique wonderfulness?

It’s Aug 1 2023, and Selfridges have opened a Christmas department and the middle classes are furious. They call Christmas “ecksmess” – because it’s tacky, commercialised and starts too early – and think themselves veritable Noel Cowards.

Presents should only be opened after lunch, doing so first thing in the morning is common as it shows a lack of self control. (@archer_rs. As does starting drinking at 11am.)

Christmas can often involve greed and consumerism, not to mention huge waste in plastic packaging, unwanted gifts and food waste. (Brighton Journal, 2018. "Consumerism" means other people buying the wrong things.)

A Facebook member explains why she doesn't celebrate Mother’s Day: It’s not just a question of feminism, but of refusing homogenisation. In other words, I don’t want to be festive on command. I prefer to be me and choose if this is something to be celebrated. Well, that’s my opinion. 

Who are these people who must ‘ring the changes’ at Christmas, ditch the boring old traditions for something new and radical? I wish them a merry one, but it baffles me every year. I flinch a bit at design-conscious householders who buy a new set of tree decorations every year (‘our theme is silver and burnt-orange for 2019’ etc). Whaaaaat? No old, scratched family baubles? No wonky toilet-roll angel? Do you not value the past, with all its flawed, naff decisions? (Libby Purves, Mail 2020) 

Other people’s Christmas traditions are duller than their dreams, says Caro Stow-Crat. And they’re always accusing each other of “ruining” Christmas.

Middle-class Upwards would never go on a cheap “break” to a European Christmas market. They started out as an independent, tasteful, handmade alternative to those awful shops with their mass-produced goods, but despite their picturesque atmosphere they’re just as tacky and exploitative. (If you want handmade cribs and baubles, try Etsy – but avoid T shirts with Nazi symbols and death threats aimed at rival political groupings.)

Every year, Upwards moan about what Hell it all is, while magazines and TV programmes tell us how to do the whole thing ourselves in the most ridiculously time-consuming way – embroider your own gift tags! Gather green branches and twigs. Make all your decorations, and a wreath for the front door. Bake your own mince pies, cake and pudding.

This year (2023) the Holier than Thou prize goes to the woman who claims “the best Christmas present is no present”, is not giving anything to any of her family, and claims “my five-year-old is on board”. The original Puritans banned Christmas as pagan. This female is afraid her children will want items that are common, vulgar, flashy and plastic. Plus she’s really, really mean.

So Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly, Rock Around the Christmas Tree, Let It Snow – Santa Claus is Coming to Town!

More here, and links to the rest.