The parties would start at 8pm and run until 3am and, of course, when I was in the mix, I’d drink too much. That’s seven hours of drinking, at two glasses of champagne an hour – 14 drinks. But I never got hangovers – I was fit in those days.
Society back then was manageably sized, and rather like a jigsaw puzzle. Eventually you could put all the pieces together and see how they connected. But the upper classes were also having a moment.
The advent of Princess Diana in 1981 meant the popular perception of them changed overnight. The average Briton wanted to know more about Diana’s world and we forgot about the previous caricatures of burst-blood-vesselled, tweed-clad blithering idiots of the Bertie Wooster mould and focussed instead on the tall, beautiful and charming aristocrats like Di.
Featuring Di on the cover, the 1982 and 1983 number-one bestseller in all categories was The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. The whole country became interested in dovecotes, Barbours, wellies, labradors, lawn meets, follies, polo, hunting, deb’s delights (good-looking, unmarried, well-heeled young men), after-dinner games, house parties, estate agents, banking yuppies, upper-class twits, food throwing and nannies in uniform… they were not even ill-disposed towards the Bullingdon Club.
When I was told off by a deadbeat artist friend for working at Tatler, as I did in the 1980s, my older friend Anne, a keen social observer, came to the rescue, expressing succinctly why someone young might want to work on Tatler.
“In the Sixties it was pop stars, in the Seventies it was photographers,” she observed. “And in the Eighties it’s the upper classes – they’re where it’s at.”
But how come I, a Northern Irish doctor’s daughter, was present at Cotswolds parties in the 1980s? At fishing lodges containing parties of 20 glamorous “top people”? At so-called society weddings of Guinnesses and Somersets?
Well I had a stroke of luck and came through the back door, as you could in those days. One minute I was a Manpower agency typist, the next I was working on Tatler’s infamous “Bystander” party-life pages at the very moment the upper classes had come into fashion.
My boyfriend was well-connected and there was an inexhaustible pool of people who were prepared to be interviewed for Tatler, which was then like a school magazine for the upper classes, and edited by Mark Boxer.
He was the first editor to commission profiles of figures of societal interest like Mark Shand (the late brother of the current Queen) or the photographer Peter Beard. Previously, only politicians or film stars were deemed worthy of such investigation. And as for sending a photographer (in our case, Dafydd Jones) out to photograph parties? Well, every single publication was doing the same five years later.
The dynamic between men and women has totally changed since those days. Back then men were still largely allowed to feel they were in control. Women still dreamed of living in the country, gardening and cooking. The women emerging as feminists, like the character of TV exec Cameron Cook (played by Nafessa Williams), were power dressers in padded shouldered suits. Sleeping your way to the top was still a thing.