printer friendly version

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 surprise. 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 Old Labour’s killjoy goverment had just been replaced by Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives, eager for conspicuous consumption, and social barriers had come tumbling down.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.

email Jeremy Wayne