Heroes, Mavericks and Bounders: The English Gentleman from
Lord Curzon to James Bond– September 16, 1991
by Hugh David
The author of "The Fitzrovians" examines the
fortunes of the English gentleman from the end of the 19th century to the
present. Starting on the playing fields of Eton, he reveals the true origins of
our modern idea of a gentleman and comments on how the gentleman has fared
since his heyday in the Edwardian summer. From Lord Curzon and the
"souls" to C.B. Fry and from Oswald Mosley to Guy Burgess, by turns
glamourous, moving and startling, Hugh David unravels the story of a breed
whose code of behaviour is recognized throughout the world as being that of the
English gentleman.
The International Journal of the History of Sport, 9:2,
316-334, DOI: 10.1080/09523369208713797
Hugh David, Heroes, Mavericks and Bounders (London: Michael Joseph,
1991). Pp.xiv + 306. £18.99. ISBN 0-7181-3264-5.
M. D. W. TOZER Northamptonshire Grammar School
It was a clever idea, but it does not quite come off; but
marrying popular journalism with serious scholarship is never easy. The author
almost succeeds with the former, an approach that allows him to dip at will
into the biographies of the famous and not-so-famous of the twentieth century.
Here we follow the fortunes of the heroes, mavericks and bounders of the book's
title. The sub-title - The English Gentleman from Lord Curzon to James Bond -
signals the line of intended scholarship, but little that follows lives up to
that first expectation. This surely is a scissors-and-paste job from a full
suitcase of books borrowed from 'Science & Miscellaneous' in the London
Library. But there is some fun to be had: Stanley Matthews makes a surprise
appearance as one of nature's gentlemen; a gold-plated Sir Bernard Docker is at
first cheered on by hoi-polloi, but then goes too far and gets his
come-uppance; the class A James Bond intended for a class A readership becomes
a runaway hero with his millions of BC readers; and Douglas Hurd denies that
his titled father was anything other than a tenant farmer - though of 600
acres. It all makes good holiday reading. The scholarship is at its safest
right at the start of David's period, the 1890s. Lord Curzon, inevitably, is
his personification of the English gentleman, that very superior person. The mantle passes to
King Edward VII, John Buchan, Raymond Asquith and others, and becomes
increasingly creased and worn as each decade goes by. By the time it has
reached Oswald Mosley, it is decidedly threadbare. David's 'gentleman' simply
did not survive the Great War, let alone the People's War and the coming of the
Welfare State. Harold Macmillan may have affected the hauteur of a gentleman,
Guy Burgess had indeed enjoyed a privileged upbringing, and John Profumo relished
a high society redolent of Tum-Tum himself — but these are the trappings and
trimmings of a gentlemanly style, not the solid stuff of the mantle itself. So
back to the beginning. David properly charts the importance of the Victorian
public schools in the inculcation of the gentlemanly ideal, and his assessments
of Thomas Arnold's legacy and Eton's all-pervading influence are accurate. The
Oxbridge connection is also reliably traced. The central role of sport is
identified, whether at home, school or college, and its adaptation to fit both
the education and the recreation of the gentleman is properly recognized. But
this is where David starts to be led astray by his own cleverness. Gentlemanly
sport is country sport: hunting, shooting, fishing and the like. Modern sports were invented as school and
college term-time substitutes, because local geography or magisterial veto
curtailed the real thing, but once the holidays began so the country called
once more. In the same way, London-based gentlemen might from Tuesday to
Thursday play tennis or row, but each long weekend allowed easy escape to the
serious round of country estates. It is true that many a gentleman became
proficient at decidedly middle-class games, but only for the short duration of
his education and the fling of a few years beyond; time enough perhaps to play
at Lord's for Middlesex or for the Casuals in the FA Cup, maybe even to answer his country's call
in a Test or an International. Yet none of this was ever taken too seriously.
The play had to appear effortless, and the company had to be congenial. In due
course it was back to a lifetime of true sport in the shires. No 'pukka'
gentleman would seek perpetual glory in cricket or football, and he would
certainly never countenance making it his living. Thus the cricketers W. G.
Grace and A. J. Raffles - the former always larger than life, the latter the
fictional creation of E. W. Hornung - were inevitably on the periphery of the
gentleman's world; outsiders looking in. Grace's ambitions were far too
transparent for membership of the gentlemanly MCC, while Raffles's skills were
merely enjoyed and admired like those of any other hired entertainer. The 'Gentlemen' who annually met the
'Players' were unlikely to be real gentlemen;
C.B. Fry was not; nor was Prince Ranjitsinjhi. The middle
classes and Indian princes might aspire to be English gentlemen, but that is
another story. One of David's happier digressions follows the spivs on the make
in the ration-book years of austerity: like their flashy wares, this book is
not all it is cracked up to be, and it should be treated with marked
circumspection. M. D. W. TOZER
Northamptonshire Grammar School
No comments:
Post a Comment