Who's the poshest person on ILE? And why?

champagne is extremely vulgar

Posh?

Now that's what I call a solid Posh Tash.

But my ancestors were genteel poor Hebrideans: teachers, post office workers and poets (in fact my great and great great grandfathers both won bardic crowns at the Mod, the annual Gaelic poetry competition, for their verse).

The rest of it...well..HOT DAMN! My trailer's showing! I have several relatives who find the 'pull my finger' joke absolutely hilarious.

My auntie is posh, she has marble floors in her house.

Apropos to nothing perhaps, but (according to Mr. Nabokov) the word poshlost' is roughly synonymous with "philistine." And what could be more philistine than to compete in the "posh" race? (Granting, of course, that the English "posh" probably has no relation to the Russian "poshlost'".)

My dad has a Title.

Why am I 'D. Nick'?

Ok I don't know if it's a title, but he went to see the queen last year or the year before and he got an OBE. Or an MBE. Whatever the PLEBS get anyway.

So let's cut to the shit. All you la-di-da poshoes:
GIVE ME SOME MONEY!!!

I thought this was common knowledge, but the word posh is actually an acronym:

Port Outward Starboard Homebound

British aristocrats and diplomats, sailing to colonial India, would generally specify POSH cabins. Something to do with the sun; preserving their lily-white skins, and hence their supposed racial superiority, no doubt.

Maybe that makes my family too posh to be POSH?

when ships used to go over to Australia/far east etc, the best cabins would be on the Eastern facing side (something to do with the sun). Hence they would be on the Port side Out and the Starboard side Homewards, hence POSH.

Without the temerity to start a new thread, who's hails from the roughest, most impoverished, never-been-nuthin' background? It could be between me, Stevie T and Cabbage, but I've no doubt there are folks who'll make us look like right little Fotherington-Thomases.

My grandmother lived in a palace for a bit, you know. And my great- grandmother on the other side lived in a very big posh Salisbury manor house. OK, so they were there as staff, and my great- grandmother in particular as old-fashioned kitchenmaid, not as members of the family owning the house, so it's not at all a sign of poshness, but hey, it sounds posh...

(I always thought I had an embarrassingly posh accent - indeed I believe I've been beaten up for the poshness of my accent before, though I perhaps I was mistaken about the particular motives and it was a generic anti-short-fat-ginger-weirdos thing - and then I heard myself on my parents' answerphone, oo arrr. I not only sounded distinctly unposh, I sounded like a pissed-off seven-year-old boy trying to be rebellious. Hrm. No wonder I always get the "are mummy and daddy in?" treatment when I answer the phone. Hopefully I sound slightly less like that when I've not just missed a train at a time when doing so has many mildly annoying implications.)

Yeah. Me.

I'm not joking by the way - GIVE ME SOME MONEY! C'mon! Send me one of yer chandeliers or something...

I was errrr, fortunate enough to spend a holiday in a very exclusive private resort on the Costa Del Sol a few years ago. There was a central complex by the harbour which housed a group of high fashion boutiques and fancy restaurants. I was working through this and passed a very well-dressed family whose Mercedes had apparently run out of petrol. The youngest daughter, probably not more than fifteen years old, was on the phone, presumably to a subordinate back at their villa. "Which car should he bring over, mummy?", she said, turning to her bored-looking mother. "Oh...the BIG one, I suppose", she replied.

stence, what about the characters in the great gatsby, would they not qualify as posh?

No, this is different. these people seemed like old money Eurotrash, possibly with dubious claims to titles. But the majority of the resorts are for the people you are talking about, I think.

Lord Skilla,

Everybody knows you can claim descent from the Gothic Amali on your father's side and from several Roman Senatorial families on your mother's, though the rumors of Brahmin descent, are, I believe, mostly fanciful. Why be ashamed of one's birth? There's nothing one can do about it.

Did JtN just mention Traci Lords?

*Silence follows*

(I know Whit Stillman and he is EXTREMELY posh)

ps - i'm wearing lip gloss that i purchased in a gigantic metal and glass and marble SHOPPING MALL in reading so take that, hstencil! DID YOU HEAR ME? A BIG 3-FLOOR SHOPPING MALL IN ENGLAND! HOW POSH IS THAT??

May 16, 2004
JOHN KERRY'S JOURNEY | THE EARLY YEARS
Prep School Peers Found Kerry Talented, Ambitious and Apart
By TODD S. PURDUM

CONCORD, N.H. — He was a champion debater, a good student, a strong and graceful athlete in a small, judgmental universe that prized such skills and knew him well. But for five formative years, John Kerry stood a step apart at St. Paul's School, gaining achievement more than acceptance.

Danny Barbiero, a middle-class boy from suburban Long Island who was Mr. Kerry's best friend, remembers how they made common cause in a boarding school full of Pillsburys, Peabodys, Pierponts and Pells. One day, Mr. Barbiero went to see a favorite teacher, the school's first black faculty member, and found someone else already there.

"I went into his apartment," recalled Mr. Barbiero, now an employee benefits consultant. "And he said, `This is Johnny Kerry. He's just feeling a little out of sorts because he thinks people don't like him.' I said, `Who cares what people think! You're obviously a terrific person.' "

Mr. Kerry is 60 now and running for president of his country, not of his class. But to a striking degree, the personal qualities that propel him — and daunt him — are the same ones that buoyed and bedeviled him when he was 16 and striving to succeed at St. Paul's, then an austere all-boys enclave, the seventh school Mr. Kerry had attended by the time he arrived here in eighth grade.

Mr. Kerry has always been a pace apart in every world he has inhabited — from grade school to college to Vietnam to the Senate — moving forcefully and successfully through diverse milieus without ever being fully of them. To his critics, his ambition has always been just a little too obvious, his manner too calculating. To his friends, his tenderheartedness and complexities have been too little understood. Always and everywhere, his seriousness has stood out.

"I wish I could give you fresh material, but I can't," said Max King, another classmate, who went on to edit The Philadelphia Inquirer and now, by coincidence, is president of the Heinz Endowments, the wealthy Pittsburgh charity of which Mr. Kerry's wife, Teresa, is the chairwoman. "He was at 13 and 14 as serious and earnest and idealistic as he is today, and very much like the person he is today."

If only because life is like high school, Mr. Kerry's adolescent experiences are worth examining in some detail. But for him, those years may loom even larger, since as the son of a diplomat, he grew up in various temporary quarters in America and Europe. From 1957 to 1962, his real home was St. Paul's, and it was here that enduring patterns were set.

"The culture was alien," Mr. Kerry recalled in one of two long interviews late last year. "It had a language that I didn't know at first, kind of a body language. It was just a little different. I came from a very different experience. It took some learning."

In an 11th- or 12th-grade student production of "Julius Caesar," Mr. Kerry played a memorable Cassius, warning in his already sonorous voice, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

"And he still has that lean and hungry look," said another classmate, Philip Heckscher, now a teacher and Chinese calligrapher, who played Marc Antony. "He was a very good actor." He was also, Mr. Heckscher said, "a very focused person, and that might have made him seem ruthless to some. He was very focused in a culture where people were generally indirect about things, and that made him stand out a bit."

Mr. Kerry had his detractors then, but also many skills, said John Rousmaniere, a nautical historian who played with him on a hockey team led by the class's best athlete, Robert S. Mueller, now the director of the F.B.I.

"I think hatred is too strong a word," Mr. Rousmaniere said. "Loathing is too strong a word. He may have seemed a little calculating to some people, and perhaps to me as well at the time, but he wanted to be liked. He may have just been a little more obvious about it. Not bad training for a politician. He wanted recognition, and in a place like that, anybody who did stand out in a noneccentric, nonsarcastic way, some people might be a little suspicious of."

Where the `Old Boys' Went

St. Paul's was founded in 1856 and, from the beginning, was more elite than competing schools like Andover, President Bush's alma mater, which was started during the Revolutionary War to offer education to "youth from every quarter." At St. Paul's, the ethos was Episcopal, not Congregational, and the spirit that ruled was British, not Colonial. It was the first American school to play hockey and build squash courts. It called its classes forms, not grades, and it had six of them, beginning in the equivalent of seventh grade. Teachers were called masters. Students wore coats and ties, and there was chapel every morning, twice on Sundays.

The names of the school's "old boys" are carved in oak panels in the vaulted dining hall, and its previous presidential aspirants include William Randolph Hearst and John V. Lindsay, who was a congressman and role model when Mr. Kerry was a student. In a hallway featuring the autographs of every president since Washington, a note to the school from Theodore Roosevelt dated 1917 exhorts students to "behave in life as a game and clean man behaves on the football field. Don't flinch; don't foul; and hit the line hard."

Mr. Kerry arrived here in what his classmate Piero Fenci recalls as "the last gasp of a dying era." The winds of change — civil rights, student activism — were just barely beginning to blow. Eleven years later, Mr. Kerry's younger brother would graduate in a class whose senior-year protests helped prompt sweeping changes, including coeducation and more scholarships.

But the school Mr. Kerry entered was in some respects much like the one his brother's class described in an angry manifesto in 1968: "Spontaneity, openness, honesty and joy in general are not encouraged. Relationships are often based on one-upsmanship of the most vicious sort. Open frankness is often greeted with cynicism; and as one master has remarked: `For someone to say to another person, "I like you" is almost unthinkable.' "

By many measures, Mr. Kerry should have fit right in. His mother was descended from one of the founding families of Massachusetts, and his father was a graduate of Andover, Yale and Harvard Law School. Yet it was not so simple. Mr. Kerry was not rich (his tuition was paid by a great-aunt). He was not Republican (his father was an ardent internationalist and staunch liberal). He was not Protestant (he had been raised Roman Catholic, and he had to take a cab to attend Mass in town).

In fact, it would turn out, Mr. Kerry was not even what he thought he was. Not at all.

Growing Up All Over

Mr. Kerry's mother, Rosemary, was born into two of New England's oldest families: on her mother's side, the Winthrops, whose patriarch, John Winthrop, helped settle Boston in 1630; on her father's, the Forbeses, who pioneered trade with China and had extensive land holdings on Cape Cod. But Rosemary was one of 11 children of an international businessman, and by the time she met a young Boston law student named Richard J. Kerry on the eve of World War II, her own family's wealth had dwindled.

Richard Kerry had gone to the Brittany coast of France, where the Forbes family lived in a hilltop house near St. Briac, for a summer of studying ship modeling in 1938. He fell in love with Rosemary Forbes, who was studying to be a nurse. By the time Richard Kerry graduated from Harvard Law School two years later, war had broken out in Europe, and he joined the Army Air Corps as a test pilot. Eventually Rosemary joined him, they married and, a month before Pearl Harbor, they had a daughter, Peggy.

Their second child, John Forbes Kerry, was born Dec. 11, 1943, in Denver, where his father had been hospitalized with tuberculosis.

After the war, Richard Kerry went to work as a lawyer, first in private practice, with his family living in the countryside near Boston, and then for the Navy and later the State Department in Washington. In 1954, he took a job as legal adviser at the United States Mission in occupied Berlin. For John, the joys of biking around the bombed-out city quickly gave way to a harsher experience: at 11, he was sent to boarding school in Switzerland.

"I tell you, I think I cried for about three weeks," Mr. Kerry told his biographer Douglas Brinkley. "I was one homesick puppy." In his second year there, he was quarantined with a case of scarlet fever. His parents stayed in Berlin.

In an interview last year, Mr. Kerry reflected on the realities of living away from home from such an early age. "I missed not having my parents around. I consciously remember feeling their absence," he said, then interrupted himself to add: "I wasn't angry about it or anything. I just consciously felt they were doing the thing they had to do and this is the way it was, but I nevertheless — there were times when you wished your parents were around."

"Don't kid yourself," he added. "I also learned to be very independent, and loved that independence, may I say."

William Ducas, a Boston money manager who was one of Mr. Kerry's St. Paul's classmates, recalled not knowing much about Mr. Kerry's family.

"You go to those schools, you have a clue where your friends' families come from, who their sisters are, a whole framework that attaches," Mr. Ducas said. "I promise you, I knew John for five years, but I knew nothing about that. There were echoes of a big Boston family, but that side of him was a total blank — where he went in the summer, where he went on Christmas vacations."

By all accounts, Richard Kerry was a deep but difficult man, reserved, private and more given, in his son's words, to discussions of theory and policy than family and people. In acknowledgments for "The Star-Spangled Mirror," a book of foreign policy analysis published in 1990, Richard Kerry made no mention of his wife or children, writing instead, "I prefer not to name one by one the many members of my family" who helped.

The truth is that for all his adult life, Richard Kerry lived with the most painful kind of scar: when he was 6, his immigrant father, Frederick A. Kerry, shot himself to death in the men's room of the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, apparently in the wake of reverses in his shoe business. Richard never spoke of the details before his death in 2000, and it is not even clear what he knew about them.

What is clear is that while John Kerry "always knew that his grandfather had killed himself," as his campaign spokesman David Wade put it, he learned the details only last year, when The Boston Globe presented him with newspaper clippings from 1921 about his grandfather's death in a hotel where he himself had held fund-raisers and celebrated birthdays.

An investigation by The Globe produced another revelation as well: Frederick Kerry had been born Fritz Kohn in what is now the Czech Republic, to parents who were Jewish, not Catholic.

"It was a revelation of enormous import, but in a nice way," Mr. Kerry said. "I found it kind of provided a picture where there hadn't been one, sort of gave you something where there was an empty, just sort of dark hole."

Richard and Rosemary Kerry kept building their own family. Eventually they had another daughter, Diana, and a second son, Cameron, known as Cam, and moved from Germany to Norway, where Richard Kerry became chief of the political section of the United States Embassy in Oslo. Finally, he became disillusioned with the backbiting and infighting of bureaucracy and left government without ever achieving his goal of becoming an ambassador.

The young John was "sort of the leader within the family," his brother recalled in an interview. And if he lacked geographical roots and was in the dark about certain aspects of his patrimony, the light of his family legacy burned bright enough in other ways. As a student at St. Paul's, Mr. Kerry was a founder of a political club, to discuss not ancient history or old wars but the current events of the cold war era, which was shaping his own life.

And the name he picked for that club effectively paid tribute to both his diplomat father and the grandfather he never knew. He called it the John Winant Society, in honor of a beloved St. Paul's alumnus and teacher from the teens and 20's who had gone on to become governor of New Hampshire and Franklin D. Roosevelt's ambassador to Britain at the height of World War II, and who came home to New Hampshire and committed suicide in 1947.

Curiosity, Energy, Ambition

In 1956, still living in Europe, the Kerrys decided to send John back to the United States to school. He entered Fessenden, a boarding school for younger boys in West Newton, Mass., whose motto was "Labor omnia vincit" (Work conquers all). After a year there, he entered St. Paul's, where, he recalled, he was "tiny at first, undersized," then had a growth spurt and "just shot up" toward his full height of 6 feet, 4 inches.

He loved sports and the New England outdoors, but he also loved schoolwork and activities. He was a member of the French club, Le Cercle Français, and active on the staff of the student newspaper, The Pelican (in whose pages a few years later a budding cartoonist named Garry Trudeau would test his wings). He was a superb debater and won the school public speaking contest one year. He played bass guitar in a band called the Electras, which cut an album whose liner notes described him as "the producer of pulsating rhythm that lends tremendous force to all the numbers."

"I was sort of one of those journeyman people who could do a lot of things, but none so brilliantly," he said.

Some of his classmates and teachers paint a more effusive — and complex — picture.

"You would have been very hard pressed to find somebody with as much curiosity and energy as John," said Lewis Rutherfurd, a venture capitalist in Hong Kong who was Mr. Kerry's roommate for part of their senior year, when they were "supervisors" assisting the housemaster of Conover, a younger boys' dormitory. "He's an extremely loyal, funny person to be with."

But, Mr. Rutherfurd added: "When you're in an environment like those very conservative environments back then, the trick, to be cool, is not to show how ambitious you are. And John wasn't very good at that trick."

Alan Hall, an English teacher who advised the Concordian Literary Society in Mr. Kerry's senior year, recalled how the club's weekly meetings always began with a bit of fluff called the Clock Report, a rundown of "comments about the world of the school and the world in general." Most people, assigned to the task on a rotating basis, "got about six ho-ho's off" and then moved to the reading of short stories or essays and the evening's main event: a debate.

"I can remember his skill and enthusiasm for that," Mr. Hall said. "If he ever made a joke on the Clock Report, that has not stuck with me. To be serious, outwardly, to be actively concerned about Republicans versus Democrats, or world poverty, or unions, was different from many people, and I think John was a puzzle to many people."

Herbert Church, an English teacher who was head of Conover House, recalled that Mr. Kerry would stay up late at night talking, after the younger boys had gone to bed. "The school was changing," Mr. Church said. "It was much more open than it used to be, but a place like that doesn't change overnight. I think it's fair to say that John reflected this more serious view of the future."

On a visit to the school last year, Mr. Kerry said simply, "The value of service was instilled in me here."

Among the Republicans

An important mentor was John Walker, the school's first (and, at the time, only) black teacher, who arrived the same year as Mr. Kerry and would later become the Episcopal bishop of Washington. Mr. Walker opened the world of civil rights and social justice to Mr. Kerry, who helped teach him to ski. When Mr. Walker married a young Costa Rican woman who spoke virtually no English, Mr. Kerry went out of his way to speak to her in Spanish.

"I do remember my husband always talking about John," Bishop Walker's widow, Maria, recalled. "He'd say, `He's going to end up being a politician — a senator, or congressman, or president."

By 1960, the politician Mr. Kerry idolized was John F. Kennedy, and on the eve of the fall election, he spoke to the school on Kennedy's behalf, while the class president, D. Lloyd Macdonald, made the case for Richard M. Nixon. With the overwhelmingly Republican student audience, Nixon won, but Mr. Kerry's eloquence and ambition were both clear.

"I wanted to be president of the United States when I was 17, and it was the last thing in the world you would admit to," said Mr. Macdonald, now a lawyer in Boston. "In 1962, virtually the last thing, if one wanted to be honored with something, was to say to anybody that you wanted it, or thought you deserved it. You wait to have the hand of approval placed on your shoulder. I think it's very difficult. Any issues which John had at the time have to be seen against the fact that we lived in a hermetic and completely alien environment. He was there from age 13 to 18, the first two years without being able to leave a single night," except for vacations.

Mr. Macdonald sharply disputed an account in April 12 issue of The New Republic that when he toasted the class's prominent achievers at its 40th reunion two years ago (Mr. Kerry was not present), the room reacted to Mr. Kerry's name only with scattered boos. "It's an absolute fabrication," he said.

But even Mr. Kerry's best friend from high school, Mr. Barbiero, acknowledged that old adolescent divisions linger. "I'm working with some other members of the class to put together a class of '62 support for John, and there aren't a lot that are supporters."

Mr. Barbiero himself is a Republican who voted for George W. Bush in 2000. Not this time. Now, he wishes more people could understand his old friend as he does.

"I think what doesn't come across publicly is exactly the problem he had when I first met him, is that people don't see that — first of all, I liked the fact that he was hurt, that he could be hurt. He's a guy who can be wounded. He's got tremendous sensitivities. I don't think that comes across at all in his public persona. He sometimes will close off, like he doesn't need anyone. But he does."

(obv. I'm very much joking y'all, but I like prolonging the joke)

PLUS MAYBE THEY ARE EXTREME IRONISTS:

http://janusmuseum.org/photos/druid.jpg

They want to flat-iron Spencer's hair? That's just cruel.

OTOH the posher you are, the more likely you are to have or even be the relative consigned to mad attic life.

but a shopping mall in Reading?

In fact Orson Welles was posh enough to share an apartment post-college with my pal Stuart's grandfather. Stuart is an artphag who makes Tom Ford look like a pleb.

My claim to poshness: my dad's family are checked by name in The Great Gatsby.

Lady Doucebag: Just some vinegar and water, thank you."

the shopping mall in reading was brought up in response to hstencil assertions that england is automatically posh. which is nonsense.

It's a French-Jewish name, right?

"Louis-Dreyfus is a member of the famous New York financial Dreyfus family. Her father is French billionaire Gerard Louis-Dreyfus; her grandfather Pierre Louis-Dreyfus fought for the French Resistance during World War II."

Also Gene Tierney: posh debutante.

heh heh, I think they had an "affair."

I always love this. Pardon my translation.

Figaro : Because you are a grandee, you think you are a genius! Nobility, wealth, rank, these all make you so proud. What did you do for all these things? You took the trouble to be born and nothing more.

poshness-masquerading-as-american is a total dud.

i agree. i think we need a new thread.

that's why something so cool has such a gay name.

Or so Europeans would like the rest of the world to think. How many titled such-and-suches lounge about Briatin with titles scarcely older than Lord Black's? Real nobility has nothing to with such things.

No guarantee that the new thread won't devolve the same way.

That's why Americans are noble but not posh.

how about "people born into large amounts of wealth, with a family name which has always been associated with wealth, going back a number of generations, who are associated with other people in similar situations, frequent exclusive establishments, schools"

do any americans fit this description? how about other countries? upthread, i see assertions that only europeans can fit the term 'posh'. this seems strange, considering places such as brazil, with incredible class divisions, and moneyed dynasties.

how about "wankers"?

also lauren are you related to Buddy Hackett? That would make you "Vegas posh."

(of course, there are people who display the characteristics, but they are consciously or unconsciously displaying certain signifiers, posh as verb, not posh as noun)

I posh We posh
Thou poshest You posh
S/He poshes They posh

pp poshed, poshen (dialect), posht (archaic)

But The tabloid press wasn't very nice
Calling her prostitute spice!
Easy V doesn't come for free,
No, she's a real lady!

And oh, beloved Victoria,
How can they call you dumb,
When you are the smartest one?
Oh, beloved Victoria,
You're beautiful, smart, and fun!
Yes, Posh, you're the coolest one!

If my love
Is better left unsaid,
How will they get it through their heads
That this fool
Is falling for you?
And my friend,
If we do endeavor,
Love will bring us together
For so long
How could we possibly go wrong?

When you said Santa doesn't exist,
The funniest joke on your list, (Ha Ha Ha Ha!)
But The tabloid press wasn't very nice
Calling you prostitute spice! (no-no-no-no!)
Easy V doesn't come for free,
No, she's a real lady!

And oh, beloved Victoria,
How can they call you dumb,
When you are the smartest one?
Oh, beloved Victoria,
You're beautiful, smart, and fun!
Yes, Posh, you're the coolest one!

Oh, oh, beloved Victoria,
How can they call you dumb,
When you are the smartest one?
Oh-woh-woh, beloved Victoria,
You're beautiful, smart, and fun!
Yes, Posh, you're the coolest one!
Oh-woh-woh, beloved Victoria,
How can they call you dumb,
When you are the smartest one?
Oh-woh-woh!

Oh-woh-woh, beloved Victoria,
You're beautiful, smart, and fun!
Yes, Posh, you're the coolest one!
Oh-woh-woh, beloved Victoria,
How can they call you dumb,
When you are the smartest one?
Oh-woh-woh!
Oh-woh-woh!

Posh? No.
Belle & Sebastian 'fan'? No.
London-based? No.
Work in the meida? No.
Enormous wang? No.

Er, I'm not going to comment on that last one (DON'T BE SMART-ASSED), but I'm probably one of the least "posh" people around here, and I'm neither a Belle & Sebastian fan nor London-based nor do I work in the media. So CALM DOWN, NICK. I'm in the same rickety boat you're in.

Fucking hell, though, there seems to be an amazing lot of you who purport to come from a "posh" environment. I guess I shouldn't be surprised as I'm probably one of only a handful of people who post here who were the first in their families to earn a college degree, but damn, you guys, I should hit you up for some fundage!

I very much doubt this is the case.

Probably I say the same far above, in some other year.

Bollocks

Calumny! I only sound posh innit. Second generation university-goer, proud peasant stock. What I wouldn't give for titledwanker media connections, *sigh*.

Sorry Dappers, I just assumed after hearing all the FO tales, for some reason I thought you were from Diplomatic stock, and not a bunch of bumpkins

New money -> posh -> where?

Can you carry on being posh for ever if you don't inject more cash into the family line? Sometimes I think I'm letting my ancestors down with my downward mobility.

Neither of my parents went to university, unless you count the term my dad did before dropping out as there was no major in billiards (my dad is a lazy, privileged and ignorant ex-jock so cue the pathology for my Dubya-hate).

Both of my grandmothers went to art school; one of these was a university graduate three months before her 20th birthday. She was actually proper posh: her dad was a Huguenot shipping millionaire and her mum's folks came to Virginia in 1620.

I was the first of my family to attend a college outside Minnesota.

re the posh Aussies that is.

This is where little Nick Currie was brought up:

http://www.oldprints.co.uk/prints/ed/images/ed03.jpg

I think Dave Stelfox is very posh.

Gold Toe Socks

http://www.modells.com/graphics/product_images/p847999nm.jpg

they are ver ver comfy though

posh americans do not exist

hmmmmmm, american "posh" is diff. from euro-posh, but it exists

opened this thread hoping to find out posh spice was a secret ILXor, just found a bunch of britishers talking about their great grandaddy's money. disappointing thread, C-.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/03/27/article-1165131-041C18BD000005DC-599_468x327.jpg

is that what life in wales looks like?

it's what 'posh' in wales looks like, perhaps. i blame mtv

we need more Welsh people (who still live there) on ILX

No internets in Wales, innit?

"there's ISDN for you, look you boy"

we need more Welsh people

what for?

consonants

i like to try being posh in a really fucking poor way

here's why we need more welsh people:

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

woman at local post office- " we just call it hcchlan fair PG luv"

Hi there Ian!

we need more Welsh people

what for?

Because they're fun:

http://ajanlo.kapu.hu/pics.php?d=cardiff

Do they wear leeks in their Monmouth caps on St. Tavey's day look you? If so, they are most welcome on this thread.

Well, at least they know how to hold their liquor and maintain their dignity...

xpost

I am boringly lower middle-class, I always aspired to befriend some properly posh people and sponge off them for the rest of my life, but I never managed to do this, I have to make do with looking at pictures from Tatler

http://img.tatler.co.uk.s3.amazonaws.com/1080x720/a_c/Cirencester-7-Tatler-18May16-tweeddiaries_1080x720.jpg

http://img.tatler.co.uk.s3.amazonaws.com/1920x1280/a_c/Cirencester-9-Tatler-18May16-tweeddiaries.jpg

http://img.tatler.co.uk.s3.amazonaws.com/400x600/a_c/archie-manners-and-kitty-jenks-tatler-18oct16-lara-arnott_b_400x600.jpg

http://img.tatler.co.uk.s3.amazonaws.com/400x600/d_f/ella-may-sangster-and-alex-cherry-tatler-18oct16-lara-arnott_b_400x600.jpg

I probably missed my chance when I was at university, because I hardly ever cross paths with posh people these days

oh my god thanks for this, just went to Tatler and found this amazing article about DNA testing the peerage rolls

'Now' means post-Pringle. There had, said Woodcock, of course been precedents, but precedents that involved current holders of titles, rather than going back generations. The 9th Marquess of Londonderry divorced his wife in 1971 after he had 'proved his son wasn't his son, and so the son ceased to be Viscount Castlereagh [his title] and Londonderry's wife went on to marry Georgie Fame, who was the boy's father.' (Georgie Fame was described in the Marquess's Daily Telegraph obituary as 'a Lancastrian weaver's apprentice turned pop star'). In the Londonderry case, a blood test was used and proved conclusive. But DNA is even more conclusive, and it was DNA that figured in the 'mess', as Woodcock put it, that was the succession to the 3rd Lord Moynihan.

Moynihan died, according to the Independent, 'from a stroke in 1991 while running a string of lucrative brothels in the Philippines'. By 1996, there were two young Filipinos vying for the barony, the sons of Moynihan's fourth and - allegedly - fifth wife. Wife No. 4, Editha, claimed that her signatures on her divorce papers were forged, a claim accepted by the Queen's Proctor. Which would seem to give her and Moynihan's son, Andrew, the title. Alas, DNA tests on Andrew and on samples left by Moynihan showed that Andrew could not have been Moynihan's son.

You'd have thought that would have made his heir Daniel, his son by Wife No. 5, a belly dancer called Jinna. Wrong - because Moynihan's divorce from Editha was fraudulent, his marriage to Jinna was bigamous and Daniel was therefore a bastard who could not inherit the title. Instead it went to Colin Moynihan, a former MP and Oxford cox - a mixed blessing for Colin, who'd been keen to pursue a political career in the Commons. (To add even more spice to the story, the late international drug smuggler Howard Marks told me that an old rowing chum of Colin's had persuaded Howard to dig around in the Philippines to find evidence of the 3rd baron's sexual adventuring. Howard had an interest: the 3rd baron had grassed him up to the US Drug Enforcement Administration.) If that was a mess, the Ampthill affair was even messier - as Woodcock rather nervously said, 'You wouldn't want to re-open a case like that.'

link http://www.tatler.com/news/articles/october-2016/peerage-titles-legal-ruling-dna

this article about gender transition and primogeniture is quite something:

http://www.tatler.com/news/articles/august-2016/trans-toffs

Until 2004, transgender people were not formally recognised by English law in their acquired sex. Then came the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) 2004, which allows them to be fully recognised in their new gender by the law, provided they meet certain criteria. But the lawyers who thrashed out the act must have debated the issue of trans toffs, because they made one exception. Section 16 states: 'The fact that a person's gender has become the acquired gender under this Act (a) does not affect the descent of any peerage or dignity or title of honour, and (b) does not affect the devolution of any property.' So, as the law stands, the marquess's transgender brother would not get the dukedom.

Today, science, medicine, the law and the media have all rethought their position on the transgender community. It is no longer viewed as an aberration, but as a fact of life. The only section of society yet to embrace it formally is the aristocracy: for them, male primogeniture is enshrined in law, and transgender people are not allowed the same rights to inheritance as their siblings. It's true that a sex-change duchess would represent the overlapping of two teeny tiny circles on a Venn diagram - the nobility and the transgender community. But were it to happen, nothing could raise the profile of these very different minority groups better.

That 3rd down pic that you linked upthread could quite easily belong to the "so unlikely to happen but probably will because of base class logistics rather than brutal Darwinism thread".