Playboys and Mayfair Men

‘Burlington Bertie’s the latest young jay: He rents a swell flat somewhere Kensington way. He spends the good oof that his pater has made Along with the Brandy and Soda Brigade.’ Harry B. Norris’s 1900 recruiting song, sung by Vesta Tilley around the music halls, delineates a stock figure of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British culture, the upper-class young man-about-town with, apparently, enough money to live a life of leisure in and around central London. Later parodied in William Hargreaves’s more famous ‘Burlington Bertie from Bow’ (1915), this figure forms an important point of cultural reference throughout inter-war Britain in fiction, film and the popular press. In this book, Angus McLaren explores the significance of this archetype, which he defines as an early British manifestation of the ‘playboy’, as later defined by Hugh Hefner’s eponymous magazine in 1950s America. He does so through a close examination of the press coverage and related cultural output relating to the notorious 1937 trial of four former public schoolboys for an assault on a representative from Cartier and the theft of eight rings at the exclusive Hyde Park Hotel in London. McLaren positions the case as a significant cultural marker in relation to cultural understandings of pain, masculinity, crime, class and fascism in 1930s Britain. Dividing the book into two parts, he first constructs a fast-paced, highly readable narrative of the crime, trial and aftermath of the case itself, before exploring the wider ramifications in more detail in the five thematic chapters which make up the second half. Throughout, he argues that the figure of the inter-war playboy, as represented by the Mayfair Men, as they were known in the press, performed the ‘burdensome [cultural] task of personifying many of modernity’s most worrisome challenges’ (p. 208)

Class (philosophy · Criminology · Epistemology · Masculinity · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · European history and politics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Philosophy