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

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When a male Sloane was not in a suit he could be seen wearing corduroy trousers—or khaki ones in the summer—and a big tweed coat or sheepskin jacket (most likely from Burberry or Barbour). Foreign jaunts and Cornish seaside holidays are interspersed with weddings of friends from childhood, school and university.

But they weren’t bothered by that in success-loving America, it was Britain’s culture of envy—and so forth. 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).

The top bananas were toughs and technocrats from absolutely everywhere—people who didn’t know or care about subtle semantic class indicators or the significance of milk-in-first and who didn’t care if their suits looked a bit Charlie. But those Sloanes who would have gone to Lucie Clayton [secretarial college] now go to university, often an American one.

If the Sloanes became suddenly, unwittingly, fashionable in the early 1980s, by the end of the decade – after the Big Bang (1986) – they couldn’t have been more out, more wrong. Higher maintenance, hair and make-up, proper designer clothes, a house completely done over, a decorator. A quick conversation with Handbook co-author Peter York, however, proves that – despite the wardrobe – I would fail any serious Sloane Ranger test.Follow-up pieces were published and then came the book, a masterpiece of social observation that identified and exposed the codes, speech, manner and lifestyles of Rangerland’s Henrys and Carolines.