NEW SNOBBERY

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 19940, 26 October 1934, Page 12

NEW SNOBBERY

REVOLT AGAINST SCHOOLS

DESPISING CULTURE It is a long time since Thackeray wrote his “Book of Snobs.” But how I wish I had his pen to write a modem sequel. Perhaps I shall attempt it one day. Even if I fail, it will be worth while trying, writes Gilbert Frankau in the “Daily Mail." And, after all, I am not so badly fitted for the task, having been brought up to a healthy contempt for all forms of snobbery by a father who never forgot to remind me that I was the son of a cigar merchant; and a mother who used to say, “Any fool with a bank balance can get into society. Most people will go anywhere for a well-cooked chop.” My mother had a sense of the realities, even though she did write novels —and she was an excellent cook, too! Those were the days during and just after the South African War, when gold was booming even as it is now; and houses in Park Lane were fetching the most fantastic prices, and the mythical subaltern of cavalry, asked to state the function of his particular service in warfare, was presumed to have answered. "The function of the cavalry in modern warfare is to give tone to what might otherwise be merely a vulgar brawl!” Not Yet Gone Sir Gorgius Midas and Mrs Ponsby de Tompykins, symbols of the multimillionaire and the "climbing” hostess, were not yet gone from among us. And the highbrow form of snobbery—still not entirely suppressed—had only just ceased to be represented by the “green-ery-yallery Grosvenor-Gallery" young man posing aesthetically by a china vase with a golden lily in his hand. People, moreover, could still refer to themselves as being out of the “top drawer” without fear of ridicule: a feat which, I am creditibly informed, is barely possible to-day. In the City, too, men of substance—and even men of no substance —were easily distinguished from the “hoipololi” by their spats and their top hats. Indeed, I well remember a certain stockbroking friend of my mother’s—who once bought ninetyseven pairs of trousers in one order on hearing that his favourite cutter meditated an early retirement—taking his tennis racket with him to Throgmorton Street one Saturday morning, “so that people shall understand, Julia, why I happen to be wearing a flannel suit.” How I laughed at poor H. about that. How I laughed when a young friend of my own, newly commissioned to the Household Brigade, told us, “I don't despise Line regiments, you know. I’m only sorry for the poor chaps who have to go into them.” What fun we had —my father and mother and I—pricking all the bubbles of Edwardian conceit! May Be Preferred But now that I have lived to see all of these bubbles pricked and the whole bath of Edwardian self-satisfaction emptied I am not at all sure that I do not prefer the Edwardian form of snobbery to the new snobbery—the "inverted snobbery” as some folk call it—of this our present age. For nowadays—or so at least it seems to me—anyone who wishes to write a new Book of Snobs will have to launch his principal shafts at this new snobbery rather than at the old. Admittedly we no longer gape at a lord. But we do still gape—taking him for our social example—at the kind of man who tells us, “None of your public schools or ’varsities for my kids. What’s the use of education? Let them start at the bottom like I did and work their way up.” Now, to laugh at a man for wearing his public school or regimental tie does neither him, his public school, nor his regiment any harm. But to take it for granted, as some people are in danger of taking it for granted, that any man who wears a public school or regimental tie is of necessity a moron is just as ridiculous as to presume that the youth who rides a push-bike is of necessity a finer fellow and a better sportsman than the youth we see at the wheel of some high-powered "straight eight.”

The bicylist may be the better sportsman. He often is. But to presume that he must be the better sportsman is merely snobbery-the-wrong-way-round. It is also snobberv-the-wrong-way-round, in my opinion, to imagine that policemen are worthy of sneers because they do not wear regulation boots, do know how to speak French, or do possess a dinner-jacket. And a further excellent example of this new form of self-satisfaction was furnished to me only the other evening at a civic banquet. when one gentleman with a knighthood reminded another gentleman with a knighthood of the days when they had been "navvies together” and eaten their lunches out of their handkerchiefs.

There is this new snobbery. A snobbery which affects to despise all culture and all education. A snobbery that pretends, in effect, “Look at me! I was never at a public school. I was not at a university. Aren’t I marvellous?”

Which is a good enough pose in its way—and a magnificent challenge to that bugbear of my own youth. “Privilege.” But does that particular bugbear exist any more? Have we not at least thrown down all the Victorian and all the Edwardian barriers of privilege? I am sure that we have. Just as I am sure—and I speak from some experience—that you will find far less snobbery of any kind in the public school house than in the public-house, in the university common-room than in the city board-room. Nevertheless, I cannot conclude this article without warning those whose experience of snobs is less than my own that it is seven-to -four on the man, whether with or without a public school tie, who suggests to you. “Can’t we settle this little trouble as between sahibs, old boy?” being an undischarged bankrupt, previously cashiered.