A journalist brings verve and expertise to a subject that is still weighed down by tedious dynastic detail
A
large number of paragraphs, maybe every paragraph, of Eleanor Doughty’s Heirs and Graces starts like this: “Bert was the son of Charles “Sunny” Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough.” Why do aristocrats insist on broadcasting their domestic nicknames to the wider world and to history, as though these are the passwords to polite society? “My dear, you thought he was called Henry? But anybody who’s anybody knows he goes by Boydy! Because of the time he once caught a ball, and ran around for a week, shouting, ‘I’m just like a real boy!’.”
Like any jargon, it’s a system designed to dominate and exclude, dressed up in the language – not really language, more like mouth-noises – of the nursery, but reader, you do not have time to get irritated by this, because you will need all your resources of patience to get to the end of the sentence, without thinking: who cares whether he’s the 9th Duke of Marlborough? Who knows which century the 6th Duke was in? I bet the Spencer-Churchills don’t even know!
In the end, the problem with any history of modern British aristocracy like Eleanor Doughty’s is not the implicit contempt of a class that believes in its own superiority to the extent that it considers the nicknames of its great-grandmother’s lurchers worthy of your time, yet will look you in the eye and tell you that hard work and merit are all that count – or to put that another way, piss on your shoes and tell you it’s raining.
