Lewis Jones

Ignoble nobles

Badly behaved toffs have been a gift to writers since ancient times, and in English from Chaucer to Waugh.

Badly behaved toffs have been a gift to writers since ancient times, and in English from Chaucer to Waugh. A quotation from the latter’s Put Out More Flags, about some shady manoeuvres by Basil Seal, supplies the epigraph to a chapter of Marcus Scriven’s Splendour & Squalor: ‘From time to time he disappeared … and returned with tales to which no one attached much credence…’

The chapter in question concerns ‘Victor’ — Victor Hervey (1915-85), 6th Marquess of Bristol, whose defining traits, by Scriven’s account, were his ‘tendency to criminality’ and ‘taste for wounding the vulnerable’ — which sounds like Basil Seal, as does Selina Hastings’ recollection that he ‘was very keen on trolleys with booze on’. (It may be worth noting, by the way, that Waugh was not the only writer of his generation to take an interest in alcoholic sadists — Greene and Fleming spring to mind.)

Victor’s criminal debut was a disaster. In 1939 a director of Cartier was telephoned in Bond Street by a ‘Mr Hambro’, who said he was ‘engaged to a woman of position’ and asked for a selection of rings to be sent to the Hyde Park Hotel. When the director arrived he was badly beaten and robbed of rings worth £16,000 (£3,648,000 in today’s money — this book abounds in startling examples of inflation). In due course convicted of the crime, Victor was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude, which established his lasting association with what Scriven calls ‘the knuckle- duster classes’, and to a public flogging — 20 strokes of the cat-o’-nine tails.

His subsequent career entailed dodgy wheezes great and small. To unwary Americans he offered 4ft-square plots of his Ickworth estate, complete with illuminated scrolls, at £3 16s 8d a go.

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