Last time Trump was in office, London’s Savile Row became a target for his administration’s tariffs.

 

UK

Sarah Butler

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/26/trump-tariffs-businesses-global-worldwide

 

Last time Trump was in office, London’s Savile Row became a target for his administration’s tariffs.

 

In October 2019, every bespoke suit sold to the US from the UK was slapped with a 25% tax – part of a list of products targeted with duties in retaliation for the EU giving subsidies to plane-maker Airbus. The tariffs were in place until 2021, well into the Covid pandemic, by which time tailors, and many other businesses, were struggling with a host of other issues.

 

Huntsman, a Savile Row tailor established in 1879 and an inspiration for the Kingsman films, with an outlet in New York as well as London, chose not to pass on the cost of the duty to its clients.

 

Sales did not drop, according to Taj Phull, the firm’s managing director. “We had to absorb it so it didn’t reflect on to our customer,” he said. “It had an impact on operating profit in New York.”

 

The business was partly protected by the ease of travel between New York and London before the pandemic, when US visitors to the UK were able to claim back VAT on goods they took home and “customers wanted the shopping experience of Savile Row”, Phull said.

 

“We are a destination not an impulsive buy when you need a suit,” he added. “It is thought-through process for a lot of customers, whether an aspirational product someone has saved for, or a longstanding customer.”

 

Back in 2019, however, sales to the US were only about a quarter of the tailor’s business. Now they account for more like 40%, so such a tariff would have more of an impact.

 

Phull is nevertheless hopeful that the industry is not in Trump’s sights as a target for future tariff hits. “It was a weird thing when the Airbus tariff came out,” he said. “And I don’t see it being brought up again.”

 

Savile Row in firing line as US tariffs hit the UK

18 October 2019

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50043349

 

Dearbail Jordan

Business reporter

Sean Dixon, co-founder of Richard James, says the Savile Row tailor feels "a bit like collateral damage".

 

He and the other bespoke tailoring firms who line the world-famous London street feel bruised because, from Friday, every suit they sell to the US faces a new export tax of 25%.

 

They are on a list of products the US is targeting with tariffs in retaliation for the EU giving illegal subsidies to plane-maker Airbus.

 

And it has left Savile Row reeling.

 

"I don't think anybody on the street was aware of [the tariff]," says James Sleater, founder and director of Savile Row's newest tailor, Cad & the Dandy, whose clients include British rapper Stormzy and rugby player Mike Tindall.

 

"Conversations about Airbus and [US President Donald] Trump and Savile Row are not normally three words that go hand in hand," he says.

 

The street has had little time to prepare for the tariff, which almost doubles the tax on an exported suit from roughly 13% to 25%.

 

On 2 October, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) gave the US permission to impose taxes on $7.5bn (£5.8bn) of goods it imports from the EU.

It was the latest chapter in a long-running battle between Washington and Brussels over illegal subsidies given to planemakers Airbus and rival Boeing.

 

That same day, the US published the list of EU products that would face the new taxes, including men's woollen suits made in the UK, as well as cashmere knitwear and Scotch whisky - and told businesses the tariffs would come into force on 18 October.

 

The tariffs come at a crucial time for the UK, which is preparing to leave the EU and strike trade deals with other nations, including the US.

 

International Trade Secretary Liz Truss says: "Resorting to tit-for-tat tariffs is not in any country's best interests and we are in regular contact with the Trump administration, urging them to refrain from resorting to such measures.

 

"As well as causing temporary disruption to UK businesses, it would also hit American consumers in the pocket."

 

Important market

Kathryn Sargent, Savile Row's first female master tailor, is concerned that her clients in the US, who make up a third of her business, may not be aware of the new tax.

 

She travels to cities such as New York, Chicago and Washington DC three times a year to visit customers, show them fabrics and do fittings for her suits, which start at about £5,500.

 

"It is a conversation that I'll be having with my clients when I'm over there, to sense what their reaction is and to see if it puts them off placing future orders," she says.

 

North America is an important market for Savile Row, as well as the wider British luxury industry.

 

Mr Sleater reckons that total sales of the street's goods into the US total some £40m.

 

The US is also the second largest export market, behind Europe, for UK luxury products, according to Walpole, the trade body for the British luxury sector, and Frontier Economics.

 

But it is not just the business connection between the two countries that is important to Savile Row's tailors.

 

"All the past US presidents have had garments made in Savile Row," says Ms Sargent. "When you think of all the Hollywood greats like Fred Astaire and Cary Grant, there is a beautiful relationship between Savile Row and America, so this tariff really hits us hard."

 

She hopes that her US clients' "love of British quality craftsmanship" will overcome any concerns about the added cost of buying a Savile Row suit.

 

Small bespoke tailoring firms like Ms Sargent's will not be able to absorb the cost of the tax.

 

Mr Dixon says that Richard James, one of the few Savile Row tailors with a store in the US, says it will do its best to absorb the cost: "But we think there will be a price… we will have to pass some of this on to our customers."

 

'Affluent'

Arguably, the type of people who have a bespoke suit made by a Savile Row tailor are not short of a pound or two.

 

"The customer base is fairly affluent," admits Mr Dixon, whose clients include actor Benedict Cumberbatch, footballer David Beckham and rapper P Diddy. "Nevertheless, an increase is an increase and we pride ourselves on people getting value for money, especially for a Savile Row suit.

 

"The amount of man-hours that go into it, the incredible fabrics used and a suit that can last 20 years or 30 years and then to have a big part of that being paid in tax. I don't know how people are going to feel about that."

 

While Savile Row's tailors were shocked by the tariffs, Walpole was not.

 

"We're disappointed, of course," says Helen Brocklebank, Walpole's chief executive. "But we're not surprised that suiting and textiles and fine fabrics came so heavily top of the list."

 

She says that UK luxury goods such as cashmere sweaters have often been targeted by the US in trade tussles.

 

In 1999, when Bill Clinton was in the White House, Scottish cashmere sweaters faced sanctions following a WTO ruling in a row between the US and the UK about bananas.

 

But Ms Brocklebank does not think this latest round of tariffs will have a major impact on sales of UK luxury goods.

 

"You have quite a weak pound at the moment and the number of US visitors coming to the UK to shop for these kinds of goods is at an all-time high, so I don't think that the impact is going to be enormous," she says.

 

Big win?

President Trump, who reportedly favours suits made by Italy's Brioni, described the WTO ruling at the beginning of October as a "big win" for the US.

 

But his jubilation - and any pain felt by UK businesses - may be short-lived.

 

Ms Brocklebank points out that next spring, the WTO will rule on Boeing, the US planemaker, which it found had benefited from tax breaks.

 

The EU could then be given the green light to enforce its own tariffs on US goods.

 

Mr Sleater says that while Cad & the Dandy was caught unaware by the new taxes, Savile Row should use the opportunity to elevate its brand, which has historically always been about understatement.

 

He says that while Italy's suitmakers - who are not facing US tariffs - have actively promoted their industry, Savile Row has not.

 

"The key thing about this is to stomach the tariffs being placed on us and - I'm talking about the street here - we somehow need to find a way to make our clothes even more appealing.

 

"Never before has there been such a time when branding is really, really important."

Remembering the ( so called ) 'Balmoral Test' and revealing the film location: Ardverikie House , Scotland

 Besides “The Crown” and “Monarch of the Glen,” Ardverikie House has also appeared in:

“Outlander” on Starz

“Mrs. Brown,” the 1997 Dame Judy Dench movie about Queen Victoria

“The Missionary,” the 1992 movie starring Michael Palin

“Miss Marple: A Murder is Announced,” a miniseries in 1985

“Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” a 2011 movie about fly fishing

“Outlaw King,” the 2018 movie with Chris Pine

“No Time to Die,” an upcoming James Bond movie with Daniel Craig

 

Ardverikie House is a 19th-century Scottish baronial house in Kinloch Laggan, Newtonmore, Inverness-shire, Scottish Highlands. The house was made famous as the fictional Glenbogle estate in the BBC series Monarch of the Glen.

 

The lands historically belonged to Clan Macpherson. The 20th chief, Ewen Macpherson, leased Benalder and Ardverikie in 1844 to The 2nd Marquess of Abercorn, an Ulster-Scots peer, "one of the trend setters in the emerging interest in deer stalking in Scotland." The Marquess expanded the original shooting lodge. He served as Groom of the Stool to Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, who along with the prince spent three weeks at Ardverikie in the late summer of 1847.

 

In 1860, Lord Abercorn transferred the lease to Lord Henry Bentinck, another stalking enthusiast, who lived there until his death in 1870.

 

Sir John Ramsden purchased the Ardverikie and Benalder forests in 1871 for £107,500 (equivalent to £10,083,219 in 2019). In 1873, the house was destroyed by fire, and was rebuilt from 1874 to 1878. It was rebuilt in the popular style of Scottish baronial architecture, designed by the architect John Rhind.

 

Ramsden's son, Sir John Frecheville Ramsden, inherited the lands after his father's death in 1914. The majority of the land was sold off following the two World Wars, and in 1956 Sir John transferred the Ardverikie Estate to a family company under the chairmanship of his son, Sir William Pennington-Ramsden. The company, Ardverikie Estate Limited, still owns and manages the estate today. The estate does business renting cottages and letting the property for weddings.

 

Filming location

Ardverikie House and its estate have been used as a location for filming. It is most recognisable as the Glenbogle Estate in the BBC series Monarch of the Glen, that ran for seven series from 2000 to 2005. It was also used in Miss Marple: A Murder is Announced (1985), the films Mrs Brown (1997), Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011), and Outlaw King (2018). The estate has been featured in the series Outlander, and in the first, second, & fourth seasons of the Netflix drama The Crown, standing in for the Balmoral Estate.

 

During summer 2019, filming of No Time to Die was taking place in the town of Aviemore and the surrounding Cairngorms National Park with some scenes shot at the Ardverikie Estate.

Besides “The Crown” and “Monarch of the Glen,” Ardverikie House has also appeared in:

“Outlander” on Starz

“Mrs. Brown,” the 1997 Dame Judy Dench movie about Queen Victoria

“The Missionary,” the 1992 movie starring Michael Palin

“Miss Marple: A Murder is Announced,” a miniseries in 1985

“Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” a 2011 movie about fly fishing

“Outlaw King,” the 2018 movie with Chris Pine

“No Time to Die,” an upcoming James Bond movie with Daniel Craig

 

Ardverikie House is a 19th-century Scottish baronial house in Kinloch Laggan, Newtonmore, Inverness-shire, Scottish Highlands. The house was made famous as the fictional Glenbogle estate in the BBC series Monarch of the Glen.

 

The lands historically belonged to Clan Macpherson. The 20th chief, Ewen Macpherson, leased Benalder and Ardverikie in 1844 to The 2nd Marquess of Abercorn, an Ulster-Scots peer, "one of the trend setters in the emerging interest in deer stalking in Scotland." The Marquess expanded the original shooting lodge. He served as Groom of the Stool to Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, who along with the prince spent three weeks at Ardverikie in the late summer of 1847.

 

In 1860, Lord Abercorn transferred the lease to Lord Henry Bentinck, another stalking enthusiast, who lived there until his death in 1870.

 

Sir John Ramsden purchased the Ardverikie and Benalder forests in 1871 for £107,500 (equivalent to £10,083,219 in 2019). In 1873, the house was destroyed by fire, and was rebuilt from 1874 to 1878. It was rebuilt in the popular style of Scottish baronial architecture, designed by the architect John Rhind.

 

Ramsden's son, Sir John Frecheville Ramsden, inherited the lands after his father's death in 1914. The majority of the land was sold off following the two World Wars, and in 1956 Sir John transferred the Ardverikie Estate to a family company under the chairmanship of his son, Sir William Pennington-Ramsden. The company, Ardverikie Estate Limited, still owns and manages the estate today. The estate does business renting cottages and letting the property for weddings.

 

Filming location

Ardverikie House and its estate have been used as a location for filming. It is most recognisable as the Glenbogle Estate in the BBC series Monarch of the Glen, that ran for seven series from 2000 to 2005. It was also used in Miss Marple: A Murder is Announced (1985), the films Mrs Brown (1997), Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011), and Outlaw King (2018). The estate has been featured in the series Outlander, and in the first, second, & fourth seasons of the Netflix drama The Crown, standing in for the Balmoral Estate.

 

During summer 2019, filming of No Time to Die was taking place in the town of Aviemore and the surrounding Cairngorms National Park with some scenes shot at the Ardverikie Estate.

The origin of the word 'snob' ....

The word ‘snob’ is said to have arisen from the custom of writing “s. nob.”, that is, ‘sine nobilitate,’ after the names of children of untitled parents in certain English schools.

— Norman DeWitt, The Classical Weekly (Pittsburgh, PA), 1 Oct. 1941

“The word snob  is first recorded in the late 18th century as a term for a shoemaker or his apprentice. At about this time it was indeed adopted by Cambridge students, but they didn't use it to refer to students who lacked a title or were of humble origins; they used it generally of anyone who was not a student.”

(…) “Even an approximate age of the noun snob is beyond reconstruction, for no citation of it predates 1776. Judging by the records, it originated in the north of England, which neither means that it is a loan from Scandinavian into Middle English nor makes such a conjecture improbable. Some Scandinavian words that had been current in the north since the Vikings’ raids reached the Standard unexpectedly late. One of them is slang, whose history, contrary to the history of snob, has been traced in detail. The attested meanings of snob are as following (the dates in parentheses refer to their first known appearance in print); “shoemaker; cobbler’s apprentice” (1781); “a townsman, anyone not a gownsman (that is, a student) in Cambridge” (1796); “a person belonging to the ordinary or lower classes of society; one having no pretensions to rank or gentility; one who has little or no breeding or good taste, a vulgar or ostentatious person” (1838, 1859); “one whose ideas and conduct are prompted by a vulgar admiration for wealth or social position” (1846-1848). Snob “cobbler” is still a living word in some dialects, but most English-speakers remember only the last-mentioned meaning.

 The word snob and its derivatives (snobbery, snobbish, snobbishness; rarely snobbism) owe their popularity to Thackeray, who first published his essays on various snobs in Punch and later collected them in a book. His snobs are not always vulgar and ostentatious people: some are insufficiently refined, and their manners are ridiculed only because of the pressure of society, which slights those whose manners violate certain rules. A reader of older English literature may wonder what is meant when snob turns up in the text. Long ago, an annual called The Keepsake (the predecessor of Christmas books) was published in the United States. In the annual for 1831, the following verse appeared: “Sir Samuel Snob—that was his name—/ Three times to Mrs. Brown/ Had ventured just to hint his flame,/ And twice received—a frown.” We applaud Sir Samuel’s perseverance but would like to know why his surname was Snob. Most definitely, he was not a cobbler. I suspect that he lacked breeding, for otherwise he would not have accosted a married woman in such an ungentlemanly way.

 Some tie connects snob and nob. The latter has a doublet knob, and the two are often impossible to distinguish. Among other things, nob/knob means “head.” Cobblers (“snobs”) deal with people’s feet, not their heads, but nobs did not make hats or bonnets. Snobs and nobs are said to have arisen among the internal factions of shoemakers. (Here and below, I am using shoemaker and cobbler as interchangeable synonyms, but originally the cobblers claimed control over the soles of boots and shoes, and shoemakers over the upper leathers.) Allusions to “two great sections of mankind, nobs and snobs” turn up occasionally in 19th-century fiction and the popular press. According to an 1831 newspaper statement (again 1831!), “the nobs have lost their dirty seats—the honest snobs have got ‘em.” A hundred years ago, in British provincial English a strikebreaker, or scab, as such an individual is known in the United States, was called knobstick, blacknob, knob, and nob. Here “nobs” are again represented as dishonest. Although in regional speech the sound s– is often added to all kinds of words (hence the secondary bond between slang and language, for example), nothing suggests that the etymon (source) of snob is nob, with s– prefixed to it. Both snob and cobbler contain the group -ob-, but this coincidence is probably of no importance either.

 It does not follow that “cobbler” is the original meaning of snob because it is the earliest one in our texts. More likely, the starting point was “a vulgar person,” with “cobbler” chosen as the epitome of vulgarity. Students at Cambridge must have had that connotation in mind when they, the gownsmen, showed their contempt to the townsmen. At Eaton and Oxford, townsmen were called cads. Cad is a shortening of cad(d)ee, that is, of caddie “cadet” (cadet is a French word), and it meant “an unbooked passenger on a coach; assistant to a coachman; omnibus conductor; confederate,” in dialects also “the youngest of a litter; an odd-job man” before it acquired the meaning “townsman” and “an ill-bred person.” Cobblers and their apprentices are no more “vulgar” than conductors and their assistants.

 The question is why snob, whatever its age and provenance, came to designate a person deficient in breeding and how it was coined. In the Germanic languages, the consonantal group sn– is sound symbolic, and in this respect it shares common ground with gl– (which often turns up in words for “glitter” and “glow”) and sl– (which is frequent in words for “slime” and things slovenly and sleazy). Initial sn– occurs in numerous words designating cutting (compare snip, snap, and snub) and sharp objects, including “nose” (compare snout) and its functions (compare sneeze, snooze, snort, sniff, and snuff). Among the Scandinavian words resembling snob, especially prominent are a few meaning “fool, dolt, idiot,” but they have the structure sn-p. The connection between cutting/snapping/ sniffing and stupidity is not immediately obvious, but one can be called a fool for so many reasons that guessing would be unprofitable. People may have called the sn-p man a fool because he was of stunted growth (“snubbed” by nature) or had an ugly “snout.” A snotty person produces too much mucus in his nose, but snotty is also “arrogant, supercilious.” Perhaps snotty “arrogant” is a variant of snooty “snouty,” unrelated directly to snot; however, one cannot be certain. Old Icelandic snotr “clever, wise” has cognates in other Germanic languages and continued into Modern Icelandic (snotur). The etymology of snotr remains a matter of debate. In any case, a person who has a sensitive nose smells things others miss and becomes clever in the process. In historical semantics, as in life, the distance between “wise” and “stupid” is short.

Welcome to the sn-club. Snob belongs to it, but its origin is partly obscure. When it emerged, it seems to have designated a person whose social status was low. Although, apparently, a northern word, snob does not sound exactly like any Scandinavian noun or verb and could be coined on English soil. It correlates with nob but was not derived from it, and its association with cobblers is more or less fortuitous. Snob may be a cognate of snub, but their kinship does not explain how it was coined. According to a legend, whose earliest version was offered in 1850, snob is an abbreviation of either s(ine) nob(ilitate) or s(ub) nob(ilitate). Allegedly, those words were written in the matriculation documents at either Cambridge or Oxford, or Eaton if a graduate was not an aristocrat. This legend, as Skeat, himself a long-time professor at Cambridge, put it, is a poor joke.”

Snob Before and After Thackeray

MAY 14TH 2008

By Anatoly Liberman

 https://blog.oup.com/2008/05/snob-before-and-after-thackeray/

------------------------------------------------------------

“No one knows why we used to call shoemakers snobs, although it seems fairly clear that this meaning was the first one intended by this word, beginning in the early to mid-18th century. The Oxford English Dictionary has evidence indicating that the word was next used in Cambridge University slang by the end of that century, to refer to a denizen of the town, rather than of the college.

 By the 1830s snob had taken on meanings that were directly related to class, but not in the way that we use it today. This early 19th century sense was “a person not belonging to the upper classes; one not an aristocrat.” In the middle 19th century the word took on the meaning of “one who blatantly imitates, fawningly admires, or vulgarly seeks association with those he regards as his superiors.”

He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob—perhaps that is a safe definition of the character.

— William Makepeace Thackeray, The Book of Snobs, 1848

 I’ll teach you how to behave to your superiors, you condescending snob of an aristocrat.

— Maude Howe, ”Phillida,” in The Ladies’ Home Journal (Philadelphia, PA), May 1890

Finally, by the beginning of the 20th century snob had come to be used to mean “one who tends to rebuff the advances of those he regards as inferior; one inclined to social exclusiveness.”

 He was in trade, he said, and was proud of it. He was an American through and through, and there was not an inch of the snob about him.

— The Nashville American (Nashville, TN), 11 Jan. 1901

And I had never been a snob about birth or position or money or even intellect, perhaps not even about breeding. I have always had friendly relations with tradespeople and servants.

— Abby Meguire Roach, The Louisville Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), 28 Dec. 1919

 If you can transform that story of snob into the sort of anecdote that crushes in polite company, more power to you. Or you could look for an etymological anecdote which has not yet been debunked; there are a few of them out there still.

Merriam-Webster: proudly ruining your chit-chat since 1843.

Why Were Shoemakers 'Snobs'?

The word wasn't always so hifalutin.”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/snob-word-history-origin

 THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE

 THE DIARY OF A NOBODY

 Great Expectations Pip

Keeping Up Appearances

RAU campus tour / Inside Cirencester's Royal Agricultural University

Living

Inside Cirencester's Royal Agricultural University

 

It is a university like no other, teaching its often privileged students essential skills like land management and ensuring the food supply for future generations, but recently it has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Sophia Money-Coutts reports...

By Sophia Money-Coutts

18 May 2016

https://www.tatler.com/gallery/inside-cirencesters-royal-agricultural-university

 

I am sitting in a large hall surrounded by wholesome-looking boys in fleece waistcoats and girls in fur-lined parkas. On the stage in front of us is a mock-up of Take Me Out, the ITV dating-game show in which a man picks a date from a line-up of  30 women. Tonight, students from the Royal Agricultural University (RAU) in Cirencester are staging their very own version.

 

A second-year student nicknamed Chipsy is our host for the evening. He is wearing a leopard-print suit, a pair of Wellington boots and a signet ring.'What do you look for in a woman?' Chipsy asks Ed, one of the male contestants. The girls on stage smile nervously.'Good childbearing hips,' roars Ed. The hall erupts in laughter. So far, so ordinary student antics. 'Let's get shitted!' shouts Chipsy at the end of the show, encouraging everyone into the Tithe barn, the campus bar where they serve £2 pints.

 

But 'Ciren' isn't your typical university. It never has been. It has only recently become a university, for a start, having been upgraded from college in 2013 when the number of students tipped over 1,000. It has also been in the headlines this year for a rape case, with four former students charged with assaulting a woman on the night of the May Ball in 2014. The university's official position at the time was to immediately suspend all four and comment simply that it was a police matter. Meanwhile, the university's vice-chancellor, Professor Chris Gaskell, kept its president, the Prince of   Wales, updated on the legal proceedings. 'We work on a no-surprises basis, so he knew all about it,' Gaskell tells me during my three days as an honorary student there. The four students involved were cleared after the trial collapsed in April, but cases like this have affected various British universities in recent years and there are increasing concerns about the sexualised atmosphere on campuses across the country.

 

Gaskell, however, says he believes that student behaviour is changing with the introduction of higher university fees: 'There are shifts, which other universities have noticed too. The £9,000 fee has induced a different behaviour pattern. There is a greater concentration on work now, because you're paying for it and the graduate market is more competitive. Come out with a 2:2 these days and you're going to be bottom of the pile.' Not that you can study degrees like PPE or history of art here, though. Instead, the RAU offers more than 30 courses like agriculture and farm management, real estate and equine studies (nicknamed 'pony-patting'), traditionally to dukes' sons in line to inherit half of Devon, but today also to women and increasing numbers of foreign students, with 48-plus countries milling about on campus. 'We had a guy who owned the biggest sugar plantation in Zimbabwe last year,' one student tells me.

 

The next afternoon, I visit one of the university's three farms, a few fields across from the main campus. Because who wants to be sitting in a boring old library when you can be outside in the bracing spring air inspecting tractors? 'We go down lower than milk prices,' says a sticker on the back of a Discovery, one of dozens of muddy student cars parked in the farmyard.

 

A group of about 60 first-year students in beanies and tweed coats, one with a small dachshund on a lead (students can bring their dogs to university with them; they're just not allowed on the main campus), gather around two tractors - a red one and a blue one. The blue one has tyres taller than me and is controlled by an iPad Air.

 

'What's it worth?' I ask Tom Overbury, a lecturer at Cirencester for 30 years and a farmer himself, much loved by his students for his fruity sense of humour. 'Ooooh, 80 or 90 grand,' he says before talking to the students about something called black grass. Not, I learn, a grass that is black, but a prolific weed causing British farmers trouble with their crops. Other classes include hands-on lessons in vocational skills like sheep-shearing, chainsaw-wielding, drystone-walling, blacksmithing and equine dissection. Which is perhaps not so fun with a hangover. Speaking of hangovers, I go to a local pub called the Wild Duck Inn on my second night to meet not one but two double-barrelled Hugos, both second-year agriculture students.

 

'Here, have my seat,' says Blond Hugo, leaping from his bar stool. Brunette Hugo talks me through his week of lectures and student   nights: 'Monday morning's a write-off. Thursday morning's a write-off. In fact, I have 9am lectures most days and they're all write-offs,' he sighs. Brunette Hugo is 23, lives on a farm in Worcestershire and went to London for the first time a few months ago. He also owns nine Schöffel waistcoats - the £130 fleece gilets that are the unofficial uniform of the male Ciren student - along with jazzy socks and colourful trousers. Brunette Hugo lives with Blond Hugo, 21, and four other boys (who aren't called Hugo) in one of the most   sought-after student houses, Bartonbury. He shows  me a picture on his phone. It's a yellow-stone Cotswolds manor house with a charming arched doorway - the sort of place a Goldman Sachs banker would be chuffed with. 'Plus it's only 500 feet from campus,' he says, 'although I still drive there.''Can I come and see the house?' I ask. 'No,' say both Hugos at once, because it's apparently in a 'chronic' state of untidiness. They went through a phase of trying to keep one room clean at all times but it didn't last.

 

 

Blond Hugo mentions a club called the Hedgehogs, Cirencester's equivalent of the Bullingdon Club, whose members are prone to drinking many bottles of Muddy Wellies, the cider and ale brand started by enterprising former students and stocked in the campus shop (alongside prominent bottles of Famous Grouse). The Hedgehogs also play games of rugby in shooting socks and Wellingtons, with matches being started with the firing of three double-barrelled shotguns.

 

Sam Guinness, 21, is another second-year agriculture student. Over a cup of tea in his sitting room, with a clock made from a bottle of Jägermeister on the wall, he talks me through other nightlife options. Cirencester has one club, ReVA, and another bar called Seventeen Black, popular on Mondays, when you can buy four Jägerbombs for a fiver. 'Weekends here are completely dead,' says Sam, because students are away shooting or hunting. He shows me a photo of three pheasants hanging from a washing line in the garden of another student house. There's also a popular pub called the Tunnel, frequented by students because it's fairly remote, so there are no neighbours to upset.

 

According to Fred Dawes, a Masters student who lives half an hour away from the university with his uncle, Detmar Blow, some years ago there was a group of students who decided that it might be cheaper to club together and buy a pub rather than spend three years paying someone else for their pints. So that's exactly what they did. We are chatting in the atrium, where students convene on leather sofas between lectures, eating their hangovers away with paninis. Sitting on a neighbouring sofa is Dick Charteris, Lord Elcho - son of the Earl of  Wemyss and brother of Mary Charteris. Another Masters student, he is working towards a dissertation about Scottish land reform.

 

'What will you go on to do with your degree?' I ask Fred. 'Work on an estate,' he says. 'Any estate.' And he'll almost certainly have a job before leaving the university thanks to its impressive employability rating, with over 98 per cent of students walking straight into a job (in comparison, Cambridge had an employability rating of only 88 per cent last year). Because, despite all the high jinks and jokes about pheasants and red trousers, the university has always churned out graduates who go on to play major roles across Britain and beyond. Whether that's managing estates (their own or someone else's), working for a stud farm or becoming a property developer, an environmental officer or even a cheese buyer for Waitrose.

 

The university was set up in 1845, when 25 young men (it was boys-only until 1979) enrolled to learn about farming methods. The 25-acre Cotswolds site was leased by the local landowner, Earl Bathurst, and an approving Queen Victoria gave it a royal charter. One member of the Royal Family or other has been a patron ever since. Sepia photographs show Queen Mary grimacing in front of the main building, a big gothic house that now contains offices, meeting rooms, student bedrooms and a Hogwarts-esque dining hall. The Prince of  Wales has just donated 30 apple trees from Highgrove for a new orchard.

 

Reading a list of alumni is like flicking through Debrett's: dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, a cluster of baronets, even a Hawaiian prince called Jonah who attended at the turn of the 20th century. In more recent times, graduates have included Captain Mark Phillips and Britain's richest MP, Richard Benyon, plus Jonathan Dimbleby, the trainer Nicky Henderson and the Grand National-winning jockey turned journalist Marcus Armytage, who studied here in the Eighties.

 

'My lurcher and I learned a lot more about poaching from my housemate than rural estate management from the RAU,' says Armytage. 'One night, he and a friend retrieved a deer and we were raided by the police the next morning. We had to get the stiff carcass out of the cottage while they started their search. We managed to hide it in the garden and they never did find it. Apart from venison, we did not want for trout too much either.'

 

'For me, the greatest part was a group of like-minded souls and the great lasting friendships that were made,' says the Duke of Argyll, who studied here shortly afterwards. 'Of course, work had to be done in the lecture hall - but also out in the fields, woods, deer forests, grouse moors and salmon rivers. I have a great deal of respect for a place that can instil such passion and respect for the world that we live in.' It's hardly surprising that 'Ciren' has been labelled a 'finishing school for toffs' - but that, I'm told, is unfair nowadays.

 

'It used to be like a medium-sized public school without the rules,' says James Walker, a former student and union chairman in 2000, and currently the director of Savills Country Department. 'But it's a very different place now, much more academic. Which is exactly what's required for the UK to lead rural economies across the globe.' This is also a particularly significant year for the university because Professor Gaskell, a veterinary scientist, is retiring and making way for the first ever female boss, another veterinary specialist, Professor Joanna Price. The university is keen to point out that it's more egalitarian and more relevant than ever, given the various challenges that farmers face in Britain and across the world.

 

One morning, I sit in on a Masters class about sustainable farming in Africa, the classroom decorated with posters about organic apples and lettuce. Dr Richard Baines, the lecturer, talks about a method of farming that could revolutionise the situation for emerging farmers in countries like Zambia and Zimbabwe. Afterwards, I have a cup of tea with Jackie, 31, from Namibia, who finds Gloucestershire a bit cold and will return home later this year to work for the corporate-responsibility department of a bank. The next day, I go to a 9am livestock lecture and listen to a lively debate about which cows to crossbreed for maximum milk output. There is even talk of 'female semen', something I was certainly never taught about at university.

 

'There is a major opportunity - indeed responsibility - for the university as society tackles the global issues of food production and land use; issues made all the more crucial by a growing world population, constraints on energy and the challenges of climate change,' says Professor Gaskell, adding that he'll miss the day-to-day interaction with the students when he leaves in the summer. 'Occasionally it has its challenges,' he says wryly, 'but it is a fairly vibrant environment.'

 

'Does everyone sleep with one another?' I ask a second-year student, wondering just how vibrant things get. '100 per cent yes,' the student replies. Which doesn't single Cirencester out from other universities (it's been steadily increasing its female-to-male ratio in recent years - currently 47:53); the only difference here being that because of its relatively small size, everyone knows one another's business, and campus gossip spreads quickly.

 

'You might not go home one night,' says another student. 'But before you even get back to your room the next morning, everyone knows about it because it's been all over WhatsApp.' An app called Yik Yak, which allows users to post anonymous messages and others to vote and comment on them, also encourages campus gossip. 'Fittest fresher on campus?' asks a Yik Yak user to various replies, including one wag who simply replied, 'Your mum.'

 

On my last day, I stand on the sidelines of one of the rugby pitches, watching a group of male and female students play a peculiar hybrid game - part rugby, part netball. There is a lot of running up and down and shrieking, mud streaked all over the players' faces, one boy in neon-pink socks, another with fluffy leopard-print earmuffs. The university's motto is a Virgil quote - Avorum Cultus Pecorumque, which means 'Caring for the fields and the beasts'. To which Virgil might have added - 'while having a bloody good time'.

The Poshest Sport On Earth? | StreetSmart

Secrets of the UK's POSHEST Private School

Remembering: The Mob tailor / THE OUTFIT - Official Trailer - Only in Theaters March 18

Review

The Outfit review – Mark Rylance’s mob tailor makes the cut

This article is more than 3 years old

The Oscar-winner gives a cool, calm centre to this tightly-buttoned drama about Chicago gangsters rooting out a mole

 

Peter Bradshaw

Peter Bradshaw

Mon 14 Feb 2022 20.30 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/feb/14/the-outfit-review-mark-rylance-mob-tailor-berlin-film-festival-2022

 

The title has a double edge: it means a suit of clothes, and also the mob. US screenwriter and novelist Graham Moore won an Oscar for scripting The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch as wartime codebreaker Alan Turing. Now he’s made his directing debut with his own co-written screenplay: an amusingly contrived single-location suspense thriller, full of twist and counter-twist, set in 1950s Chicago (the city of Moore’s birth). It sometimes feels like a more refined, more well-spoken and well-tailored version of Reservoir Dogs, with besuited gangsters turning guns on each other in an enclosed space and a shot tough guy seething in agony from his bullet wound. But it has a heavier tread than this: owing more, maybe, to Hitchcock’s Rope.

 

Mark Rylance provides a solid centre with a typically calm, coolly composed, quietly spoken performance, often giving us an opaque and unnerving twinkle of mischief. He plays Leonard, a British tailor who left his homeland (for shadowy reasons) with nothing but his tailor’s scissors, and set up shop in Chicago. The reason he’s been able to make a success of things is that he is almost solely patronised by the local gangsters: the ageing capo is Roy Boyle (Simon Russell Beale), who runs this turf with his unreliable hothead son, Richie (Dylan O’Brien); Richie is snarlingly resentful that his old man now favours a smooth new lieutenant, Francis (Johnny Flynn).

 

These bad-mannered gangsters often order fancy suits from Leonard, but use his shop’s backroom as an HQ and hangout. Poor, sensitive Leonard has to quietly accept their boozy bullying (he’s actually fond of a drink himself) and get on with the trade about which he is passionate. It has given him a skill in sizing up men’s bodies and also their souls: he knows from the way they carry themselves what sort of people they are, and how to dress them. Leonard has a fatherly concern for his secretary, Mable (a nice performance from Zoey Deutch), who is keeping secrets from him. Things go terribly wrong when a rat in Roy Boyle’s organisation is suspected of selling them out to a rival gang and also the FBI, which has been tape-recording incriminating conversations using a device concealed with the rat’s help. Now the guys have managed to get hold of one of these tapes, and if they can play it, they will discover the bug’s location and get a fix on the rat’s identity. But what if the rat is higher up than anyone thinks?

 

In truth, the “tape” MacGuffin is a bit laboured, and the whole movie seems sometimes to be moving at about 80–90% of its required speed and energy. And there is also something stylised and slightly non-realistic about the way the nationwide mob is imagined to be an occult secret organisation called “the Outfit”, slightly different from the Cosa Nostra we already know about. But there is also a theatrical charm and composure to the performances (and once again, it’s time to marvel at the way Brit actors such as Beale and Flynn get to play Chicago tough guys). We know that these soldiers of crime are underestimating humble civilian Leonard, but it remains for us to find out what has actually been going on. It’s an entertaining, fairly overwrought piece, a little tightly buttoned.

 

 The Outfit screened at the Berlin film festival. It’s scheduled for release on 18 March 2022 in the US and 8 April in the UK.