Whenever Sir Benjamin Slade sniffs out new money, he homes in on it like an
Exocet missile and asks how it was made because, he says, he genuinely wants
to know.
As someone who, at 16, inherited a title but no money, he has had to make
several fortunes to buy back the accoutrements that define his upper-class
status. It has been damned hard work and now, irony of ironies, he finds
himself, at 61, divorced, happily attached to a long-term partner called
Kirsty who comes from a good family herself, and with all the stuff of his
class - but no heir.
Can you buy your way in?
“Of course you can,” he bellows. “They always did. All you have to do is make
shedloads of money, learn the code, and life's your oyster. The class system
is a game that's played behind walls. To keep things going you always have
to marry a bit of money. My folks forgot the habit for about eight
generations and it was a nightmare. We needed dosh. You've got to be
entrepreneurial to survive. The whole thing is a nightmare, quite
exhausting.”
He is an amiable man, a welcoming host and a bit of a ham. Most of his
anecdotes are about his own misbehaviour, but he strikes me as harmless, and
it occurs to me that misbehaving is a mark of the confidence that comes not
just from a public-school education but from knowing that you belong in your
chosen milieu. He didn't always, and that is doubtless why Sir Benjamin
enjoys it so much.
“I wanted my roots back,” he explains, perching on a fender in front of a wood
fire in the library of Maunsel House, the 13th-century family seat near
Bridgwater in Somerset, that he bought as a listed wreck and has renovated
and developed into a conference and wedding business. Three of his dogs vie
for attention: Brictwold the Saxon, named after an ancestor; Prince Charles
and Gerald Westminster, thus named because when they visit grand houses he
likes to put their names in the visitors' book. “It means that I shoot with
the right people.”
The room has no books but it does have a stuffed crocodile wearing what looks
like a German helmet, and a stuffed bear topped by a Tommy Cooper fez.
“Course I bought the bear in. I ain't going hunting bears. It's expensive, and
I'm not a very good shot - he'd get me. He often stands in line and greets
the guests, which is terribly funny. He sometimes ends up in bed with the
bride and groom, so he's quite busy. Every house has to have a bear. And a
couple of suits of armour.”
Sir Benjamin made his money by setting up a shipping container company, and
was initially regarded by his relatives as a new man. “A spiv because I'd
made money. They don't think sometimes that I'm out of the top drawer at
all.” Because you're indiscreet? “Hopeless. Actually my family made their
money by killing French people. We were into fighting, drinking and hunting.”
We digress. He is about to tell me how he redeemed himself. “Then I went and
bought a grouse moor and I was made. Great landed magnets. People with
pedigrees and ambience and castles said, ‘Hello, how's it going, old boy?
Nice to know you.' It was bloody marvellous. I said, ‘Having a slight
problem, ain't much heather and hardly any grouse'. They thought I was
trying to fend them off and got even nicer.”
Just as other classes have codes for recognising each other, so the upper
class is a tribe with its own behaviour and attitude traits, he explains,
and naturally it doesn't follow any logic because if it did it would be less
exclusive. The lavatory is a dungy, a bog, a s***house, a ladies' room -
anything but a toilet. At dinner you use a table napkin but never a
serviette. And you must be careful how you spend your money. “If you get a
pink striped Rolls-Royce everybody knows you can afford a Rolls-Royce but
they say it's not been spent the right way.”
Sir Benjamin has several cars, but likes his Ford Ka because it can get him to
London for £15. He has never sold a car in going condition, and his
favourite is the Volvo that has done 324,000 miles, which he intends to burn
on a raft like a Viking funeral. There is also an ancient Saab, which the
dogs like. “We drive cars until they drop. I can get away with that. If
you're new money you have to buy something like a Ferrari. It's much easier
being old money.”
He notes, too, that he is wearing the uniform: a checked jacket, reminiscent
of a benign Toad of Toad Hall, that he bought a decade or two ago from a
friend for £50. He wears this over mustard cords, brown brogues and a
Longines watch. “It's best to inherit a few clothes because you don't want
to look as though you arrived yesterday, but I have a tailor called George.
He makes suits for the nobility. You also have to be hysterically funny or
terribly knowledgeable - that's more important than diamonds. A lot of my
friends are self-made and they dine out all the time because they're bloody
amusing. Essentially you've got to sing for your supper, make plenty of
money and learn the ways to spend it. We are pack animals.”
Lunch is served in the dining room by one of his 19 staff, then he shows me
round the house. It is warm, comfortable and a tad distressed in places, a
bit like an upper-class theme park with all the ingredients on a plate for
the delectation of the middle classes. “If you sell class, they say, where
did you get that paint? The middle classes are trying to learn all the time.”
He is looking for a Slade to become his heir. Does the heir's class matter? He
says that it would be nice if he were clubbable, interested in books and
furniture and trees and gardens. And not very new money.
“A wide range of interests, that's what you want. The trouble is, you get
somebody who's run a factory and made £50 million, or a farmer whose sole
job was to pull cows' tits - very boring. It would be nice if they'd fought
in a battle or could ride a horse well. I was always falling off my horses,
but there we are.”
Someone like him, then. A member of the tribe. And someone who can afford the
£50,000 or so that's needed for a new drive.
‘What they aspire to are white carpets and fake grass'
It's the hair that you notice first in Sandbanks. All the women look as though
they have just had a blow-dry. Their nails are professionally tended, their
legs toned, their heels spindly. High- maintenance and, in the local
vernacular, classy.
That's the trouble with trying to talk about class on this notoriously
expensive stretch of the Dorset coast: the word is surrounded by confusion.
I'm talking about class as a noun that means tribe, but people here often
use it as an adjective. Not that class isn't an issue - this is the land of
new money, a few square miles where one resident reckons there are 100
Bentleys. I have never previously seen so much conspicuous wealth outside a
metropolis. Or felt so inadequately groomed.
The big money began to arrive in 2000 when a canny estate agent called Tom
Doyle performed a sleight of hand that gave Sandbanks the reputation of
being the fourth most expensive location in the world. It probably wasn't,
and he admits that it isn't now, but the sale of a £1 million - or £695 a
foot - flat enabled Doyle to get it logged on a global league table collated
by a New Yorker who, he admits, had no idea that Sandbanks wasn't close to
London. He may have forgotten to mention that. But the label stuck and now
this sandy spit overlooking Poole harbour is a strange mixture of palm
trees, 1930s bungalows, building sites and multimillion-pound palaces with
concrete lions outside and footballers, their wives and ludicrously
successful business people inside.
There's old money around, too, but it's discreet - some of it up the hill in
Canford Cliffs and Branksome Park, a wooded conservation area where houses
that look like spaceships are landing in the broad avenues of mock-Tudor
piles. The new-money properties are still in the minority but, as their
owners parade their trophies and an infrastucture of hairdressers, gyms,
eateries and estate agents emerges to cater for them, it's impossible to
miss the invading culture.
At Café Shore, Julia Brafman, Bulgari sunglasses on her head, perches on a
leopard-print chair. Cleverly, in turning a greasy spoon into a high-end
restaurant (caviar with traditional accompaniments, £95; Château Mouton
Rothschild, £470) and a vast bar where you can have a burger for a tenner,
she has provided a social focal point for Sandbanks's new residents.
“I like my bling,” she says - and her formula for sophistication certainly
attracts expensively turned-out clients. There's a Maserati outside, lots of
Mercedes in the car park across the road, and the middle-aged men who bring
their girlfriends for lunch (most are too attentive to be with their wives)
wear beautifully cut jackets. The dress code is smart casual, but Brafman
likes to be flexible to accommodate the labels. “If they come in at 6.30pm
wearing Ralph Lauren and Gucci sandals ... we do try not to upset people.
You do understand what I'm trying to say?” Perfectly.
Brafman is a Bethnal Green girl by birth and keeps the accent. Her parents
worked their way up from fruit and veg to running Lucy's, one of London's
first designer chains. Her Sandbanks venture has yet to show a profit but
that doesn't stop her driving a CLK convertible, or educating her four
children privately. “It pays off in respect for elders, being polite, and it
affects their social life. My eldest son is friends with Mick Jagger's son
and goes to his house, so they see the lifestyle.”
When I ask how she would define the class of local people, she replies
“stylish”. And how do stylish Sandbanks people assess each other? “I
wouldn't say it's class. They want to know who they want to know. A lot of
networking.” In another bar, I meet a young man who is wearing £10,000 of
diamonds because it's what his generation does: “You look at TV and stuff
and everyone is glamorising themselves to look like they're classy.” His
friend mentions his £3,000 Cartier watch, though he says that flash cars
aren't classy because finance options mean that anyone can have one these
days. As Tom Doyle - the son of a painter and decorator from Ladbroke Grove
and now the owner of two Bentleys and a house in Branksome Park - puts it
with a smile: “People here judge each other by how much money they've got.
Education never comes into it here; accent doesn't matter. It's what sort of
car you drive, how big is your boat? What school do your children go to?
Class is all about money and how you lead your life with that money.”
Jack Holsgrove has seen Sandbanks change. A self-made property developer who
built middle-class estates, he bought his present home in 1972 for £60,000.
The view is stunning and the land is now worth £5 million, but Holsgrove
rejects the entreaties of developers waving cheques. He's 86, where else
would he live, he reasons, but in truth he doesn't want to engage with the
culture that revolves around money rather than people. When he employed men
he kept them on until retirement, protected them if his schemes lost money.
Today everyone works on contract. “It's all about money here. He's got more
than me. I want more. The people who buy houses don't occupy them, they
treat it as an investment. You don't talk to them. There's no community.
People just show their wealth.”
Steph and John Stevenson, both from middle-class backgrounds, run a chain of
hairdressers in the area. Their 4x4 Mercedes, Steph's Jimmy Choos and the
liveried commissionare outside their Canford Cliffs branch make it clear
that they are not averse to playing the Sandbanks game, but as they are not
residents they also stand slightly outside it.
“The problem is that people confuse style and class,” says Steph. “They're
different. Kids today follow their icons in terms of fashion - it's a
lifestyle choice in which everything looks amazing. There's a uniformity
about it: the white carpets, white kitchens, fake grass. That's what they
aspire to, not to landowners and green wellies.
“You can reinvent yourself now, buy into a class and do what used to take
generations, send your son to Eton and into an old boys' network. I think
we're going to end up classless like the US.”
Michelle Harrison is a director of the Henley Centre, which observes social
trends in Britain. “There has always been new money but at the moment
celebrity culture is seen as an alternative route to money and a particular
type of aspirational bigticket consumption,” she says.
“They [celebrities] don't normally have the education associated with the
middle classes, but they have money and they provide a statement that is a
visual representation of success.” She identifies one other new group, also
small but socially significant. “There are people earning big money in the
City who were not born into the aristocracy but are buying up estates and
adopting aristocratic hobbies like shooting. It's what's going on at the top
end that is changing our notions of class.”
