Complete guide for social occasions

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32430, 17 October 1970, Page 11

Complete guide for social occasions

(From

GARRY ARTHUR,

London correspondent of "The Press")

It will always be possible to give the game away by eating peas off the knife,, but there will soon be no excuse for revealing a shocking lack of breeding by seating the mayor below the town clerk at a dinner party. No less an authority than Patrick Montague-Smith, the editor of Debrett’s "Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Companionage,” has written a 400-page book on the correct way to address letters, to write and reply to invitations, and to design socially faultless table plans. Mr Montague-Smith has been editor of Debrett’s since 1962, but he was introduced to the organisation long before that by his aunt who used to do the book’s heraldic sketches. He has already written three books in the same field “The Royal Line of Succession,” “The Prince of Wales,” and “Princess Margaret.” Twenty-six years with Debrett’s has made him a walking compendium of noble knowledge. He rarely has to refer to the book. “To a certain extent one knows it all,” he, admits modestly. “You really couldn’t have a card index for Debrett’s because it would have to be bigger than the book itself. I have to rely quite a lot on memory.” Consulted daily But because of his encylopaedic knowledge Mr Montague-Smith finds himself being consulted almost daily by officials, secretaries and hostesses wanting to know the right way to address their guests, and the guests wanting to know how to reply. “Sometimes if I was in doubt I would have to worry some official or other,” he said, “and as there was no comprehensive book on the subject I decided to write one.” His guide through the maze of social behaviour is not aimed at the nobility, but at those lower down the social ladder who want to make sure that the “nobs” don’t look down their aristocratic noses at them. He thinks such things are almost instinctive with the blue-bloods. “The further up you go, probably the more they know about it,” he said. “For one thing, when it comes to all these invitations, well the thing is, they’ve got them all over their mantelpieces, haven’t they? “But when you come to busy • business people who haven’t got time, or are not particularly interested in that sort of thing, and they suddenly need to know the answer to one of these questions, the poor secretary has got to find out and doesn’t know how to. She’s got to make thousands of phone calls to find the answers.” Now that he has written “Correct Form,” Mr Monta-gue-Smith hopes that his telephone will take a rest. To write it, he had to spend countless hours consulting civic, military, church, legal and social experts. But not infrequently he had to decide a disputed point himself. Some conflict “Certain departments gave conflicting opinions,” he confided. “In those cases I just chose to listen to the best answers and ignored the rest. For example, there was a conflict of opinion over the position of the letters ‘P.C.’ for privy councillor after the holder’s name. I decided that as it was more of an office than an honour, it should go right at the end.” Inevitably, he has picked up some curious items of information. He now knows for example that a brigadier is lower in rank than a colonel in the. Salvation Army. “I said to them That s funny, why have you got it that way around?’,” he said, “and they said somebody must have made, a mistake a long time ago.” Another oddity arises from the growing practice of renouncing titles, for political purposes. Although Sir Alec Douglas Hume could renounce his peerage (but only for himself, not for his descendants), there is no way in which haronets can renounce their titles. “They may stop using the title of course,” said Mr Montague-

Smith, “but they still have it. You have quite a few baronets in New Zealand.” It turns out that very few of Britain’s former colonies have started their own customs. “Largely it’s branched off from our thing,” he said, “but when you look at Scotland and England, which were two completely different peoples, of course they still have two completely different systems. In Scotland they have provosts instead of mayors, and burghs instead of boroughs, and very different rules in many cases. I’ve put in some interesting tips on how to address a Scottish laird.” New Zealand figures in “Correct Form,” but merely to record what kinds of judges-we have. “It’s just to say that you haven’t got our county court judges or something like that,” the author explained. Form of address Mr Montague-Smith’s book is full of esoteric information—from the correct way to address the divorced wife of the younger son of a marquis, to the right way to address sergeant-majors (sometimes “Dear Sergeantmajor Smith” and sometimes “Dear Mr Smith,” depending on his regiment) and female high court judges (the Right Hon. Mrs Justice Smith). There is a section on foreign titles and honours (“rather difficult because nobody knows if some of the titles are genuine, and they keep changing the honours”), and one about the curious American dynastic designation. “I’ve put in a long rigmarole about this,” he said. "If a father and son have the same names, the son is called John D. Smith, junior. But if they go on to be John D. Smith I, II and 111, the second is not the son of the first, but some other relation, such as a nephew. For example, Henry Ford II is not Henry Ford’s son but his grandson. It’s really done for the sake of distinction; they use the same Christian names such a lot, which we don’t do here.” Hyphenated names were a delicate question to raise with Mr Montague-Smith, but he has gone into this too. “The idea originally was to have the families represented in the name, for the inheriting of estates, you see,” he said. “Take the Montague - Douglas - Scotts: they inherited the lands and estates of the Montagues, then the Douglas’s, and intermarried with the Scotts, so you’ve got all these three. “When you get to common names, the hyphen is for distinction. In Wales where you get very few surnames because they used their fathers’

Christian names originally, you get heaps of Jones’s, so they tacked other names on with hyphens, for the sake of distinction. “It’s the same in this country where you get very common names like my own. Hyphens have been used to combine old family names, and also for the sake of convenience. “But now the fashionable thing is to leave hyphens out. We’ve found that with Debrett’s. A lot of these people with hyphens want the hyphens to be taken out of their entry in the book. They like you to use the double names, mind you, but they don’t want the hyphen in there. It’s because there are now so many people with hyphens, probably.” Legally, he said, a person could simply drop his hyphen and stop using it. But if a coat of arms was involved he would have to pay £l5O to have the tiny line excised by royal licence. Mr Montague-Smith foresees the eventual disappearance of hereditary titles, as family lines die out and no new ones are created, and also an increasing simplification of forms of address. Already it is no longer necessary to end a letter to a bishop with “I am, my Lord, your Lordship’s humble and devoted servant.” Nowadays “Yours faithfully” is enough, and the formal phraseology would be used only for extremely formal communications, such as an ambassador’s letter to the Queen. Never “My Lady” “Even ‘My Lord’ sounds subservient these days,” said Mr Montague-Smith. “Incidentally, the funny, thing is that you would never start a letter with ‘My Lady’.” While he approves of simplification, Mr MontaqueSmith firmly opposes the trend for Honours to become automatic for certain people. “The field is getting too wide,” he said, “and not the most deserving get them. The trouble is that the person who knows of someone who is deserving may not know the system for getting them an honour. The routine thing should be got away from; it does make the honour less outstanding. I think some sort of small independent board should be set up to keep a look-out for suitable people.” Considering the qualification of its editor, “Correct Form” is almost certain to receive the same mantle of infallibility as Debrett’s. Depending on the public’s reaction, Mr Montague-Smith thinks he may at some time in the future broaden its scope to cover wider aspects of etiquette—even at the risk of becoming known as Britain’s Emily Post.