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

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People were forever asking us to spell it out: who really were the Sloanes anyway, if not toffs (to be fair, our cover model was Diana, Princess of Wales)? In his review in the London Review of Books, which ran under the title “Henry and Caroline,” the academic sociologist “Garry” Runciman—now the third Viscount Runciman, author of Relative Deprivation and a copper bottomed intellectual toff—explained it all. Sloane Rangers were strictly a stand, a group united by the way they saw the world and related to it, rather than a class interest group (Margaret Thatcher, of course, couldn’t be doing with the language of class at all, it was a “Marxist concept,” she said). Runciman went on to make interesting comparisons between the Sloane Ranger Handbook and Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Hardly scholarly ourselves, we were flattered beyond measure. And it gave us the answer too—the great Runciman says they’re a “stand.” Ann Barr, who has died aged 85, will be remembered for adding the word Sloane – to describe a fashionable upper-class young woman – to the English language. Ann was deputy editor of Harpers & Queen (now Harper’s Bazaar) when her first book, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, co-written with Peter York, was published in 1982. It described in colourful detail what her readers were like. It was mischievous, gossipy and funny, like Ann herself. When Diana Spencer began to appear in newspapers in the summer of 1980, Sloane Ranger style started to gallop down to the high streets,” York has noted. “Suddenly, a Sloane – as we saw her – was the most interesting and publicised person in the world.” And one, perhaps, ripe for gentle pastiche.

The idea of Sloane Rangers – the native population of the bestselling Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (Ebury Press, 1982) – started with what I call a Martian moment, a ‘Have you seen it?’ sensation. After what had seemed like decades of an intellectual moratorium on big picture discussion of class and inequality, it was everywhere (I’d been told by broadcasters before 2008 “that’s so not today’s issue,” when I’d wanted to look at the rich as anything but lifestyle options, and immediately after 2008 it was off the table). The time we’re looking at, Britain was coming out of the terribleness of the late 1970s and an enormous [economic] depression," says York. "It was a combination of escapism and aspiration.”The new-decade Range Rover lifestyle, with its air-conditioning, leather upholstery, massive carphones and alloy wheels arrived at precisely the right moment for the 1980s boom in the City of London. That greed-is-good explosion saw bonus-boosted ripples out through Belgravia, Kensington and Fulham, and even over the river to Battersea and Wandsworth. Some industries – among them public relations, the charitable sector, wine merchanting, anything that involves brokering goods for the super-rich and boutique businesses funded by the bank of mummy and daddy – remain dominated by double-barrelled names. That, though, is possibly just a product of needing to come from money to make headway in an effervescently expensive capital. Meanwhile, social inequality has become a hot topic. Class remains a curiously British obsession.

The Sloane population of the City was winnowed out—now they were competing with other types and other breeds from other places"Traditionally the brand is synonymous with the British upper classes, a horsey, hunting staple on a par with Land Rovers and Hunter wellington boots. It shares a similar cachet to Burberry or Harris Tweed – a signifier of class, history, heritage and quality. But the trajectory of Barbour is a nuanced one, and its appeal now much wider.