The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook: The First Guide to What Really Matters in Life

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In his brilliant book Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?, David Boyle describes how the “middle classes”—and his perspective is much more Sloane than Pooter—put a touching faith in Thatcher, the City and a range of forces that would hollow out their world, and leave them mostly poorer in real terms, except for the minority of winner-takes-all top professionals, City men, corporate lawyers and top 250 board members who’d scooped the pool. But they know that no one except their mums are going to feel remotely sorry for them.

Diana was a major cautionary tale. Sloanes had loved her at the beginning (her ‘Shy Di’ portrait in that three-row pearl choker on the cover of our book said it all!). The list of Sloaney jobs for men, seemed to confirm our private definition—that Sloanes were the loyal and devout second bananas of the Establishment; they were the useful people who carried on the great upper middle-class love affair with the toffs and the most assimilated plutocrats. The people who went to Cirencester Agricultural College and then ran great toff’s estates for them, the merchant bankers in The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism (Philip Augar described the end of all that in his 2008 book on the fate of the British merchant banks). And they were the wine merchants and smart estate agents, the army officers, the intake of “nice” law firms of the Farrers and Withers kind. All, as Galsworthy had said of the Forsytes, pretty much indistinguishable from the top toffs to an outsider’s eye. Yet surely few now would embrace the description, as they might have 40 years ago. Then ‘Sloane Ranger’ may have been used affectionately, latterly more derisively. Perhaps the Sloane has become more a figure of fun than one of aspiration. After all, even they have been priced out of the heart of west London, pushed all the way to Earl’s Court, less able to congregate in sufficient numbers to define an area. Sloanes were squeezed out – geographically but also culturally – by the holders of brash, new, huge money who came in, gobbled up all the Sloane institutions and imposed some meritocracy. In 1989, the Sunday Times Rich List noted that two-thirds of the wealth of those on its register was inherited; by 2000, three-quarters of it was self-made.Transpose Martha’s Vineyard for the Cotswolds, or somewhere in Surrey, and the archetypal Sloane was very much a British incarnation of the prepster, as Ann Barr and Peter York hinted at in the title of their defining book, published soon after: The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. Barr, an editor at Sloane bible Harpers & Queen, York, an astute observer of social groups and behaviours, had long been prodding at the lifestyles of this type of west London native, a portion of society that in 1975 they’d first dubbed the Sloane – a type no doubt rather close to home. An excerpt from The Official Preppy Handbook, 1980 The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, 1982

He published a series of essays in social and cultural observation in the magazine Harpers & Queen during the late 1970s. Written in the style of Tom Wolfe's new journalism, these were collected in the book Style Wars (1980). Following the success of his collaboration with Ann Barr, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982), itself an extension of such social observation, he became a media commentator on English social trends and traits. A further collection of essays, Modern Times, was published in 1984. Peter York's Eighties (1996), this time co-authored with Charles Jennings, was both a book and a BBC television series. [3] [4] Indeed, it was the soon-to-be-Princess entering the national consciousness that put the tribe on the sociological map. The tribe in question was the Sloane Ranger, which was suddenly easy to spot around west London (they never went North, South and definitely not East). I’ve been following the rise of the rich in Britain since the 1980s, when I noticed people I knew a bit starting to make what Caryl Churchill called, in her 1987 play, And the Sloanes moved. In London, they had to, as New People, many of them from Other Lands, took over those nice central London postcodes – SW1, SW3, SW7 – Sloanes had thought of as theirs. As London became the World City, the smartest bits were taken over by Russian oligarchs and Indian and Chinese billionaires, and South Ken fell to smart young European City types.

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The first big split was between London and the country. The new City investment banks, owned by people from New York, Tokyo and Hamburg, rather than PLU, culled the Sloanes. Downward social mobility is the other part of the inequality issue. Its history is complicated and easily misread. Basically, the story is that of the postwar upward social mobility that followed the Butler Education Act of 1944, the expansion of the university population from the 1960s onwards and the development of a whole range of new jobs at or near the top of the private and public sectors, jobs occupied by meritocrats. There was “room at the top,” then. During the 1980s, however, as the postwar forces that had driven a flattening of income inequality retreated, so there was less room being created at the top, but a larger group at risk from the changing structures of work and wealth. In other words, there were more people facing downward mobility for the first time in decades. John Goldthorpe of Nuffield College, Oxford, has been the academic expert on social mobility since the 1960s (see box, p58). He told Prospect in 2013 that he’d tried, in the late 90s, to explain the trends in absolute and relative social mobility to Tony Blair, who clearly didn’t understand them, though his bright-eyed policy-wonk helper, Geoff Mulgan, did. These two fashionable sets may have been separated by 250 years, but each captured a unique moment in history – and style. By 2021, there seemed to be every possible shade of Sloane around in London. But were they really Sloanes at all? It looked as if the only way for a Sloane to succeed was to UnSloane themselves. ( Made in Chelsea was a positive festival of international rich kids, not Sloanes).