The Life And Times Of Maudie Littlehampton

The Life and Times of Maudie Littlehampton, 1939–1980 gathers four decades of Osbert Lancaster’s celebrated pocket cartoons featuring Maud, Countess of Littlehampton: aristocrat, social commentator and magnificent survivor of a Britain that repeatedly changed beyond recognition without first consulting her.

Maudie began life as a slightly dotty symbol of the upper classes but soon developed into something much more useful—a sharp-eyed observer capable of saying what Lancaster himself thought while wearing better hats. With her monocled husband Willy, formidable relatives, ecclesiastical acquaintances and various socially complicated offspring, she watched the country proceed from wartime austerity to post-war reconstruction, political upheaval, youth culture, industrial unrest and the deeply suspicious arrival of modern architecture.

Her imaginary biography is suitably distinguished. The daughter of Sir Julian and Lady Claribel Manifest, Maudie married Viscount Draynefleet, later the Earl of Littlehampton, and during the Second World War apparently served MI5, MI6, SOE, PWE and the YWCA, while maintaining close relations with the Free French. This seems an excessive number of organisations, although presumably each believed she was working for one of the others.

After the war, Maudie contemplated a political career. She stood as a Liberal candidate in 1951 and lost her deposit twice, once to Labour and once in a game of pontoon. Her political views remained admirably independent: extremely right-wing on certain subjects, alarmingly left-wing on others and firmly opposed to whichever policy had just inconvenienced lunch. In this she may have been the only genuinely representative figure in British public life.

Through Maudie and her circle, Lancaster sends up politicians, bishops, trade unions, civil servants, fashionable intellectuals, social climbers, clubmen, protesters and the latest cultural enthusiasms. No institution is destroyed—this is British satire, after all—but each is discreetly punctured and allowed to deflate behind the sofa. The cartoons record changing manners, clothes and language as vividly as they record political events, with Maudie ageing gracefully while society performs increasingly strenuous exercises around her.

Lancaster’s drawings are elegant, economical and instantly recognisable. A raised eyebrow, a badly chosen hat or a minor architectural monstrosity is often sufficient to identify an entire national crisis. His sympathy for his characters prevents them becoming mere targets: Maudie may belong to a privileged and vanishing world, but she frequently understands the absurdities of modern life more clearly than the energetic people attempting to improve it.

Selected by Geraldine Cook and introduced by John Julius Norwich, this volume doubles as an illustrated social history of Britain from 1939 to 1980. Wars, elections, scandals, fashions and revolutions pass through its pages, all subjected to the same calm test: what would an intelligent countess say about this after the second drink? The answer is usually concise, devastating and much more entertaining than the official report.

This 1982 Penguin edition is in Good condition—a sound copy which has survived the social revolution, the decline of deference and several decades in which people stopped dressing properly for dinner. An excellent collection for admirers of British cartoons, political satire and a national history in which the Establishment is gently mocked by one of its own members before everyone retires to the drawing room.

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