Tag Archives: Parties

A Party for Tony and Marcelle Quinton

Quinton and Marcelle party list 001Found among papers at Jot HQ ( heaven knows where it came from ) is this printed list of the good and great ( some not so good) who were invited by a friend or friends to attend a party for the philosopher (Lord) AnthonyQuinton and his American-born wife Marcelle ( nee Weiger), a sculptor.

 

We don’t know who drew up the list or when the event took place, although it must have been in or before 2003, the year in which one of the invited died. Nor do we know where it happened, although one must assume that since most of the invited were Americans, the venue was in the US, most probably in the home of the host and hostess. This could have been in New York City, where the Quintons had one of their  homes. This philosopher had four homes around the world! Diogenes made do with a barrel, Wittgenstein with a bedsit furnished mainly with deck chairs.

 

Quinton taught philosophy at Oxford and is credited with having a rigorous intellect, but he was hardly a Wittgenstein or even an A. J. Ayer. The fact that he was a Tory and the intellectual force behind the political movement that propelled Margaret Thatcher to Downing Street, couldn’t have recommended him to the young who were reading PPE or PPP at his University in the 1980s. In the tributes that followed his death in 2010 friends and colleagues praised his bonhomie. Much of his clubbable personality came across when he presented the popular and long-running radio series ‘ Round Britain Quiz ‘, a truly challenging quiz show in which a  panel of high powered intellects ( as opposed to some of the nitwits that perform on ‘Celebrity Mastermind’ ) try to make connections between seemingly unrelated people, concepts and texts. Luckily, despite the general ‘dumbing down’ of broadcasting, the show has survived and, thank goodness, remains as challenging as ever it was. Continue reading →

More Bright Young Thing Parties

img_2731In an earlier jot we referred to a Schoolboy Party held at the Punch Club in 1932 which was attended by the cream of young society but there are many more such parties covered in the now rare book Society Racket: A Critical Survey of Modern Social Life (Long, London 1933). Patrick Balfour (Baron Kinross) was a journalist, at the time of this book he was ‘Mr Gossip’ at the Daily Express and the character Adam Fenwick-Symes in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, who works for a while as ‘Mr Chatterbox’ at ‘The Daily Excess’ may have been partly based on him.

Balfour traces this style of party back to the ‘freak’ parties of the nineteenth century citing Lady Castlereagh’s parties where guests took chloroform. In the era before the BYT’s many parties were marked by extreme drunkenness among the young toffs  and women were either excluded or fled to their rooms rather than risk an encounter with ‘drunken gentlemen.’ Balfour writes “..right up until the war, in the days of the Empire Promenade, young men used to behave drunkenly in public.’ By the late 1920s this was disapproved of. He notes that the themed parties started in a modest way with things like ’Treasure Hunts’ and ‘Midnight Chases’ as a reaction to the dullness of the sozzled, dowager-ridden previous generation.

They set the Thames on fire at Henley, they held a false surrealist exhibition of a hoax artist called Bruno Hat, the leaflet for which -‘Approach to Hat’ is now extremely collectable. Among the parties recorded by Balfour were a Circus Party, A Russian Party, A Baby party, A Wild West party and the famous ‘bottle and bath’ party put on by Brian Howard and Elizabeth Ponsonby. The two hired St. George’s Baths at the height of a heat-wave, so that their guest might swim between dancing and supping. This do caused a shock in the media, mainly because the music was provided by a ‘negro’ band. David Tennant gave a Mozart party where guest wore 18th century costume, there was a wild party in Royal Hospital Road in ‘fancy undress’…

In Vile Bodies Waugh writes: –“…Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies…”

Bright Young Things Schoolboy Party

Found- an American press photograph from 1932. On the back is typed “Schoolboy Party Society Stunt. The latest fad of society in London is the schoolboy party, one of which took place at the Punch Club. The invitations were entrance forms to ‘St Barnacle’s School’ and many prominent society members attended dressed in appropriate costumes. Above are some of the guests in ‘uniform’. In centre is Lady Ashley (without hat) and third from left is Elsie Randolph.. Acme Press 7/25/32.” 
IMG_20160312_0001 This is the world of Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 novel Vile Bodies. The  hero of the novel, Adam, becomes a society columnist – ‘Oh Nina, what a lot of parties’ he complains to his girlfriend – and the narrator adds:

“…Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies…”