Bucks and berks

They probably consider themselves latterday bucks, striding around with high noses and even higher voices.  To the outsider, they look more like berks in their silly blazers.  But then the Henley Royal Regatta is so far out of the ordinary range of experience that it is probably unrealistic to judge it on those mundane terms.

Consider the facts. A small, rather quaint Thameside town is taken over by the crispest of upper crusts for five days.  Most of them are weekdays, ensuring that hoi polloi with anything so vulgar as a job are excluded from this important social event.  Instead we have Britain's finest youth, from the very finest schools, accompanied by mama and papa - plus the butler to look after the champers in the roller. 

The activity itself, needless to say, is totally pointless, and requires resources beyond any but the best-endowed institutions. Of course latterly this has meant that a number of those tiresome Americans have come across, rowlock, stock and boat - though at least they tend to be from those quaintly-named Ivy League universities.

The rowing provides only the pretext; the real business lies on the land.  There we see the upper classes in full regalia, conducting those rituals of immemorial antiquity - that is, at least late Victorian times - which help to set them apart from the hurly-burly of the vulgar mob.  They are there to show themselves off, their family, their connections; they are there to indulge themselves in a suitably sybaritic fashion; they are there to see who else is there, and who should not be. 

They are also there to train the young master in some of the essential arts of a gentleman.  He will be introduced to all and sundry, and taught how to tell the difference.  He will be encouraged to bawl for cousin Henry as he flashes by the picnic - providing invaluable training for later years when he will have to bawl at and out underlings.  He is there to be sized up as a strategic alliance.

Of course things are changing.  The traditional hierarchy on the riverside remains; everything is measured by and from the Stewards' enclosure: if you are out of it, you are truly out, but it depends how much.  Now, however, aristocracy has had to come to an accommodation with plutocracy, and not for the first time.  Plots of land have been rented out to companies for entertainment.  Of course many of these companies - stockbrokers, banks - are in any case populated by the self-same people who would be there anyway.  But there are still certain dubious elements - mere business people, customers. Anyone, it seems, can drink Pimm's these days.

But the top nobs are a resilient lot.  Nothing through history has weakened their stranglehold on British society, though it may have shifted once or twice.  The interesting thing about Henley, and with it places like Glyndebourne, is not how it has changed, but how it remains the same.  It represents the Utterly Idle Rich at play and furthest from being at bay.  It is also the strongest argument for class warfare I know.

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