Click here to print this
page
| Press Cutting
Click here to print this
page |
|
Its Dafydd- Duck!
Top photographer Dafydd Jones caught Oxford’s most decadent years on camera.
Jeremy Wayne, much to his shame, was there.
On a sunday morning in March 1981, respectable parents in houses-and stately
homes- across Britain, awoke to an unpleasant suprise. That day, The Sunday
Times had runa cover story called ‘The Return of the Bright Young Things’.
It was about gilded youth of Oxford, and the pictures would have made Brideshead’s
Anthony Blanche blanch. There was Katie Hickman, daughter of His Excellency
our ambassador to Ecuador, removing a young fellow’s trousers, and- good
gracious-a buttock was exposed. And Nigella Lawson- wasn’t she something
to do with the Cabinet?- was snogging Guy Faber, a scion of the famous publishing
family. And there was someone called Paul Golding, if you could believe it,
in a frock! Yards and yards of brillant white tulle , and oh! that disdainful
look on his face . And no, surely that couldn’t be- but, oh, it was- the
Hon Pandora Mond, daughter of society hostess Sonia Lady Melchett(now Lady Sonia
Sinclair), in a shocking sheer black dress with a nipple exposed. Good Lord,
cried their parents, choking over coffee and kippers, is this what they get
up to at university?
Dafydd Jones had arrived in Oxford the year before and was renting a studio
in Jericho, still an interesting, vaguely bohemian district in those days, before
the Cafe Rouges and scented-candle shops arrived. Slight, dark-haired, unobtrusive-
quietly assured, yet curiously retiring- Dafydd was just starting his career
as a photographer when he heard about a competition being run by The Sunday
Times. Entrants could choose from three themes, one of which, Bright Young Things,
caught his imagination. The grandsome of a Welsh miner, Jones realised, with
remarkable prescience, that he had found himself in the right place at exactly
the right time. Old Labour’s killjoy goverment had just been replaced by
Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives, eager for conspicuous consumption, and social
barriers had come tumbling down. Oxford was alive and kicking with verve and
eccentricity, and awash with dosh.
The first time I met Dafydd was at a meeting of Vile Bodies, the Oxford society
of John Harrison (now a housemaster at Eton), which paid homage to Evelyn Waugh’s
nonsensical novel. I was dressed as the bible-bashing Mrs Melrose Ape in a fur-collared
black astrekhan coat, and wielding an oversized crucifix- disgraceful, as someone
joking observed, for in nice Jewish Boy from north London. In anyone’s
book, it was a magical time: outrageous, frenetic, extravagant and bad, and
Dafydd was there, capturing it all on film. If we were precocious, we counterbalanced
it with style- and is we had style, surely it was OK.
Suddenly, the self-effacing fly-on-the-wall photographer had become the fly-in-the-ointment
paparazzo. His instinct led him to a good party, and his lens did the rest:
Caroline Kellett, later fashion editor of the Evening Standard, in a macro-tartan
skirt, her left leg chained to a giant cannonball; Nicky Shulman, daugher of
doyen of theatre critics Milton Shulman, high-kicking on a table. The parties
were never-endings and we saw no reason for them to end. In Eight Week of my
first summer term, my mantelpiece was choked with 36 unexpired invitations.
But that was nothing. My friend the brillant Keble theologian Matthew Stonehouse
never happier than when wearing silver lame (who tragically, died three months
after coming down in 1979), had 50. There wasn’t time to party, let alone
to work. When I asked my tutor, now the journalist AN Wilson, about my chances
of getting a degree, he said: ‘ Finals are like window-dressing. Make what
you write sound attractive and inviting and, even if there’s little substance,
you’ll be OK.’ Sound advice. Like most of the cross dressers of my
generation, I got a third.
Beagles and hunt balls were out; louche and oblique dining clubs were in. At
Piers Gaverston balls and Assassins parties, Jones lay in wait. He shot Charlie
Cory-Wright wearing leopard-skin with his hand where it should not have been,
namely sliding up Pandora Mond’s skirt. He found Jonathan Burnham (former
head head of Chatto & Windues, now working for Tina Brown’s Talk in
New York), and Hughie Grant, unknown then, but pretty beyond belief- also in
leopard-skin (I guess it was a look)- in stitches at a boys only Gaveston dinner.
He snapped musician and playwright the Hon Valentine Guinness in taffeta and
feathers and writer Paul Golding, founder of the exotic Kay White society, emerging
from his finals in knickerbockers and gold bangles.
When the Eighties began, where they were going was anybody’s guess. But
photographing first in Oxford, and later for Tatler and Vanity Fair, Jones seems,
in a curious way, not just to have been pursuing celebrity, but to have predicted
it. One example is a 1981 picture of Nigella Lawson, snapped as she played Croquet
through the window of a sedan chair ( for David Kirk’s Dangerous Sports
Club), a seminal picture of its time. It was reproduced everywhere and her face
became widely known. It is not too fanciful to say that, though Nigella was
always going to go far, this picture was largely responsible for launching her
career, just as a Versace dress held together with safety pins could be said
to have given Elizabeth Hurley’s career a boost 14 years later.
It was a golden age, post-old Labor and pre-AIDS. When Andy Warhol told us that,
in the future, we would all be famous for 15 minutes, the cry from Oxford went
up in unison, ‘Why only 15 minutes?’ The dining clubs, whose parties
Jones would record on film for the next few years- the Piers Gaveston Society,
the Assassins, the Vile Bodies, the George Club- were to produce future celebs
by the score, When Warhol himself pitched up in Oxford for a party given in
his honour by the George Club, early in February 1981, he was impressed. Decadent,
original, sexy- he pronounced it even more fun that the lunch party Marquerite
Littman had given for him in Chester Square earlier that day, where guests had
included Bianca Jagger and Nicky Haslam, and pink drinks and fishcakes served
by a butler called Quaalude, The Bright Young Things were on the right track.
When we all finally drifted to London, Dafydd- now at Tatler- was waiting for
us. Perhaps without knowing it, the faceless photographer in the zip-up cardie
with his battered Leica on a string had become part of the new society he’d
set out to chronicle. Ours was a meritocracy, open to all. With wit and imagination,
you were in- otherwise, you could forget it. Better, after all, to know an amusing
or attractive grammer school boy or girl that a boring nob. This might seem
obvious today, in an age where celebrity comes from every quater but, back then
it was quite a revelation. Tweeds and brogues(unless worn by the sapphie Anna
Fell), and the mind fryingly dull Gridiron Club were on the way out, as the
feeling of stuffy Oxford society loosening up became almost palpable. The Hon
Rosie Pearson swapped the comforts of Cowdray Park for the self-imposed and
rather wonderful squalor of the Abingdon Road, while her housemate, the angelic
looking Charlie Cory- Wright, was said to prefer the compant of tramps and winos
on St Aldate’s to that of his Old Etonian peers. Things would never be
the same again.
As Andy Warhol put it: ‘Now it doesn’t matter if you came over on
the Mayflowe-so long as you can get into studio 54.
