On July 26, 1924 the Daily Mail reported on a strange “new society game,” which took the form of a midnight motor car chase across London. The fifty cars, filled with aristocratic men and women, thundered across the capital “in search of an elusive clue.” This incident would form the kernel of a social phenomenon that captivated Britons during the interwar period. In the years that followed, the Bright Young People (as the Daily Mail had dubbed them) would be fixtures of gossip column reporting, which provided details of their “freak parties.” These included a “Bath and Bottle Party,” held at the St. George’s Swimming Baths and featuring a bathwater cocktail, a “Second Childhood Party” (complete with prams and drinks served in baby bottles), and an unfortunate “Savage Party” to mark the occasion of Mohandas Gandhi’s visit to London in 1931. This never-ending stream of parties—largely organized by Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, Babe Plunkett Green, Brian Howard, and Elizabeth Ponsonby—would build up the Bright Young People’s fame.
A century later, they continue to live on in popular media. We have seen recent adaptations of Bright Young People novels, such as The Pursuit of Love (2021), a proposed Luca Guadagnino-helmed Brideshead Revisited (which has ultimately failed to materialize), and a forthcoming television series about the Mitford sisters. While there remains a popular cultural fascination with the Bright Young People—a Cecil Beaton-styled menu at Claridge’s cocktail bar, The Fumoir, encourages patrons to “[mix] with the Bright Young Things,” itself a clever tie-in to a recent exhibition of related photographs at the National Portrait Gallery—they remain comparatively ignored by historians of interwar Britain.
When they do appear, it is usually as an amusing blip or a passing reference. The only book-length study of the group and their cultural impact remains D.J. Taylor’s contribution from 2007. Have we become too averse towards attempts to study elite culture? What do we lose with its exclusion? In many ways, attention to elite culture helps us to understand culture more broadly—whether we are fascinated by wealth and celebrity, or find such conspicuous displays of inequality to be problematic or repellent. Admittedly, there have been recent scholarly works which have sought to understand the history of British elites and suggest new ways forward for understanding the very wealthy. Matthew Bond and Julien Morton, for instance, recently used probate records adroitly to suggest the persistence of aristocratic wealth beyond the immediate postwar period. Additionally, Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman have tracked the transformations and doggedness of British elites from the Victorian era to the present, suggesting that while the ways elites comport themselves publicly has changed, their desire for self-preservation and replication remains strong. Both, however, are largely preoccupied with the materiality of wealth, eliding, perhaps, the importance of cultural or social capital. That the Bright Young People were largely wealthy is important to the way that they socialized, but perhaps incidental to why people found (and find) them to be interesting. Are we drawn to their wealth or simply their peculiarities and eccentricities? We might look beyond studies which connect elites to economic wealth, instead focusing on the development of an elite social culture. This could, for instance, showcase how the Bright Young People—and elite social actors across time—spent their social assets as they worked, through play, to shape elite (though not necessarily highbrow) practices and traditions.
While many of the Bright Young People were to the manor born—Baron Ponsonby’s daughter and Baron Kinross’s son among them—others, like Evelyn Waugh, were middle-class aspirants to this world of elite social life, which featured (as my current book project argues) travel between sites in Mayfair, greater London, the British countryside, and the European continent. Although many accounts of elite social life focus on London’s West End, I have argued that the Bright Young People’s social lives were in fact much more dynamic and mobile than previously suggested. Ordinary Britons would also find the exploits of the Bright Young People practically inescapable, with most major dailies reporting on their movements with amusement and bemusement.
Reader responses to interwar gossip columns would be multi-faceted, with some writing to offer helpful suggestions to queries, or to send in their own interesting tidbits, with others still seeking to write themselves into this elite social world by association with the gossip columnist himself. Our own contemporary relationship—namely our fascination—with wealth and celebrity has remained largely unchanged. Take, for instance, the prevalence of DeuxMoi, the anonymous Instagram account which relies on tips from followers to report on celebrity gossip.
While their activities seem somewhat frivolous, the Bright Young People serve as something of a prism through which the revelatory aspects of the interwar years, in addition to the anxieties around the period’s political and economic crises, converge. Studying these trivialities allows us to get at questions of belonging, societal (and Society) norms, gender, and class. Critiques of the Bright Young People most frequently came not from below, but from their fellow elites. In his diary, David Lindsay would write that “the vile social columns [...] describe day by day the extravagance and vulgarities of the smart London set—a positive disgrace. And it is all ascribed to fashionable society whereas the heroes and heroines of this tittle-tattle from the cocktail parties and night clubs are all second-rate people… .” Echoing a popular sentiment at the time, Marjorie Lawrence wrote in Britannia & Eve that such displays of aristocratic excess would undoubtedly lead to a socialist revolution in Britain. And Virginia Woolf would describe members of this set as “tubular cropheads.” While Bright Young men and women made merry, it was often the women—as a forthcoming article in Britain & the World demonstrates—who would receive the bulk of onlookers’ critiques.
The group was actively mythologized and satirized even as they remained fixtures of the contemporary gossip columns. Members of the Bright Young People themselves contributed to their own myth-making. Patrick Balfour was employed, for instance, as “Mr. Gossip,” by the Daily Express from 1928 to 1931, and would go on to write about his disillusionment with this elite social world in his book, Society Racket: A Critical Survey of Modern Social Life (1933). Perhaps most famously, Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930) was a loosely fictionalized account of Waugh’s social circle. This myth-making has contributed to a difficulty in pinning down who exactly was a Bright Young Person, the extent to which they actually existed, and whether or not contemporary Britons actually cared about them.
Although it is easy to dismiss them as something of a historical diversion—the embodiment of the interwar years as a glorious long-weekend—the Bright Young People are a vehicle for deepening our understandings not only the 1920s and 1930s, but also of privilege, wealth, status, and celebrity more broadly. Even after the decline of the group as a recognizable social phenomenon, others have emerged to take up their mantle of fancy-dress, aristocratic excess, and public condemnation. To some extent, there remains a lingering fascination with wealth both in the recent past and today.
Take, for instance, the Sloane Ranger who emerged in the latter half of the 1970s, known for similar extravagant displays of wealth and status as their Bright Young grandparents. Or the persistence of the Channel 4 series, Made in Chelsea, which has featured rich, beautiful idiots and their exploits since 2011 with no signs of stopping. Like the Bright Young People before them, the Made in Chelsea set is depicted as consistently moving between West London, country estates, and Continental resorts. More recently, the libertine bohemianism of the Bright Young People has taken a pastoral turn in the form of the “Bopeas.” How will British elites refashion themselves as we move through the Twenties once more? Will they, as Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman argue, attempt to present themselves as ordinary in an effort to avoid public ire? If so, what are we left with? So much of the Bright Young People’s appeal was in the spectacle of their bad behavior. This spectacle, however, left them more open to vociferous critique. While it is absurd to celebrate a potential return of the “Roaring Twenties,” we still live in a similar world to the Bright Young People—one of widening economic inequity and political divisions, but one that is still interested in the trivialities of celebrity.
Thomas J. Sojka is a Lecturer in History at Southern New Hampshire, where he teaches courses on the history of intoxication, modern Europe, war, and revolutions. His research is primarily focused on the intersections of class, culture, social life, and media—particularly in 20th century Britain. His work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in the Journal of British Studies, Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, Modern British History, and Britain & the World. He is currently revising a book manuscript on elite social life in interwar Britain, and beginning a new project on the impact of television cookery programming on the development of British taste in the postwar period.
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