PLAYBOYS & MAYFAIR MEN

Crime, Class, Masculinity, & Fascism In 1910s. London in December 1937, four respectable young men in their twenties, all products of elite English public schools, conspired to lure to the luxurious Hyde Park Hotel a representative of Cartier, the renowned jewellery firm. There, the "Mayfair men" brutally bludgeoned diamond salesman Etienne Bellenger and made off with eight rings that today would be worth approximately half a million pounds. Such well-connected young people were not supposed to appear in the prisoner's dock at the Old Bailey. Not surprisingly, the popular newspapers had a field day responding to the public's insatiable appetite for news about the upper-crust rowdies and their unsavoury pasts. McLaren recounts the violent robbery and sensational trial that followed. He uses the case as a hook to draw the reader into a revelatory exploration of key interwar social issues from masculinity and cultural decadence to broader anxieties about moral decay. In his gripping depiction of Mayfair's celebrity high life, McLaren describes the crime in detail, as well as the police investigation, the suspects, their trial, and the aftermath of their convictions. He also examines the origins and cultural meanings of the playboy, the male 1930s equivalent of the 1920s flapper and includes in his cast of characters such well-known figures as Noel Coward, Evelyn Waugh, the Churchills, Robert Graves, Oswald Mosley, and Edward VIII; and convincingly links disparate issues such as divorce reform, corporal punishment, effeminacy, and fascism. The trial is fascinating because it revealed for the first time in the media troubling aspects of British society which had escaped serious scrutiny. "One of the more enjoyably horrible considerations of the case was the sentencing of one of the Mayfair Men to twenty strokes of the lash... In the section entitled "Fascism," we learn the history of the idea of the "playboy," through the examples of Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British fascist movement, writer Evelyn Waugh, who insisted he was not a fascist, a member of parliament who slapped another MP in the House of Commons, and various other dandies, traitors, and Francoists. Map and illus, 264 pages.