If there’s a duke there, he can sit somewhere opposite me

Lady Elizabeth Anson, who recently departed for Fabulon, was a cousin of Her Majesty The Queen on her mother's side - and by all accounts sounds as if she was quite the hoot. It's not every royal who counted Paul O'Grady as a best friend, or could have had the nickname for Her Maj of "Shirley Temple"...

Lady Anson's forte - her career - was as a party planner, not just for royal events such as HM's 80th and 90th birthday parties and Wills and Kate's wedding reception, but also Sting's wedding, Margaret Thatcher's 70th birthday party and events for clients such as Tom Cruise and Sacha Baron-Cohen, among many others in her 50 year career. All of them had such nicknames, to ensure confidentiality when the Lady was making her arrangements.

From an interview with The New York Times in 2016, here are a few of her tips for success, dear reader, when planning your next dinner party for several hundred people including Baronets and Earls:

• The invitation sets the tone.
  If you have a cheap-looking invitation, she says, “you imagine there’s going to be acidic wine and miserable food.” Simple and elegant are preferable to invitation one-upmanship: “Someone wanted me to do ‘save the dates’ with Swarovski crystals costing no less than £2,500 a card, and that’s just vulgarity.”
• Good parties don’t have to be extravagant.
  “A party with good table wine and good pasta or good sausages and mash can be just as much of a success as one with Krug, caviar, oysters and lobster,” Lady Elizabeth says. “It’s not about expensive ingredients. It’s about people.”
• Good lighting is essential.
  After the guests, the single most important element of a party is proper illumination. “Lighting makes or breaks it. You can use it to make people look nice and to divide a big room up.”
• Getting everyone seated.
  If you’re trying to get guests to take their seats, tell them it’s a soufflé. “I’ve never had anyone come back to me later and complain that it wasn’t,”.
• Seat all the bores together.
  “They don’t realize they’re the bores, and they’re happy,” she says. “It’s my biggest tip.”
• A round dining table is best
  When entertaining at home, Lady Elizabeth is always glad she has a round dining room table so she can dispense with protocol - no worries about determining who is the most important guest and thus seated in the middle. “It makes life easier. If there’s a duke there, he can sit somewhere opposite me if I think there’s somebody more amusing that I want to sit next to.”
• Pick up the phone.
  It’s the fastest way to get organized, and there are fewer misunderstandings. “It’s old fashioned but it’s instantaneous. I don’t want endless emails and bits and bobs.”
• End a party when there’s at least 20 people on the dance floor.
  “If you let it peter out, it’s death,” she says. “I made one mistake in the whole of my career, which was being persuaded to restart the band. It was a flop.” Announce (or have the band say) that it’s the second to last dance, and then stop the bar from serving. “People leave fast when they can’t get a drink.”.

RIP, Lady Elizabeth Georgiana Shakerley CVO (née Anson, 7th June 1941 – 1st November 2020)

Grosgrain is so dull

Feeling under-dressed?

A man, especially a young man, may be able to do without a morning coat, but he needs a dinner jacket (even if he never owns a tail coat). Here is a suit that should do duty for five years if it is well chosen, of good quality, from a good men's shop, if ready-made, or carefully tailored by a recognized tailor. Unless a man can afford two or more dinner jackets, he should stick to the conservative black, for if he appears in it time and time again, no one knows but what he may have two or a dozen like it. If he chooses his one tuxedo in the newer midnight blue, it would seem inconceivable to the observant eye that he had two such alike. And there are occasions on which he might feel slightly conspicuous in the slightly less formal blue. As for dark red or other colours in dinner jackets which may have seasonal popularity, it's better to shun them unless he has an extensive evening wardrobe...

...The vest [note to people who speak The Queen's English: read "waistcoat"] usually matches the suit but may also be of white pique, marseilles (or marcella), or black or midnight blue silk, ribbed or figured. Small braid matching that on the trousers may trim the vest in a custom-made suit. It is fastened with self-covered or smoked pearl buttons, not links. The vest is always dispensed with with a cummerbund (silk, rib-hugging sash which hides the top of the trousers), but this somewhat dashing accessory is no asset to a gentleman of expanded girth. The cummerbund is now best worn in black, maroon, or midnight blue. The cummerbund is particularly attractive, and certainly more comfortable, in summer and may be topped by a summer dinner jacket in white, with or without lapels or shawl collar in the same fabric. Or, if a man's figure can stand it, a white linen mess jacket, but this has come to be considered theatrical.

Dinner jacket lapels may be more peaked than those of business suits but should avoid eccentricity. A shawl or a notched collar, considered more casual, is preferred by some, and the facing of either type may be satin, grosgrain, or of the same fabric if the jacket is white.

The lines of a dinner jacket should be about the same as those of an easy, comfortable business suit. Avoid the too-fitted waist and the too-narrow Latin-style trousers as well as the absurdly built-out shoulders, although some padding is advisable for most men...

...Like the dinner jacket, the tail coat may today be black or the deep midnight blue which reputedly looks blacker than black at night. The trousers worn with it may be the same as those for the dinner jacket, for economy's sake, or have the somewhat wider, finer braid usual for full dress. The lapels are satin or grosgrain (of course grosgrain is so dull that one might almost as well wear a dark blue or black sack coat), always conservatively peaked and never the shawl collar sometimes seen on dinner jackets. If he can possibly afford it, a man should have his tail coat made to order, unless he is of average proportions, because it is almost impossible to alter a ready-made tail coat so that it fits as if it were made for him. A man somewhat under average height may shun the tail coat, because he feels it makes him look shorter. Yet if the tails are proportioned to his height by an expert tailor the suit can seem to give him several inches in height. A ready-made tail coat or a rented one for such a man can make him look like a small boy masquerading in his father's clothes. But, tailored to fit, "white tie" can give any man a special dignity and distinction as do no other clothes...

...Gloves worn on the street are white doe-skin or chamois. Today the white kid gloves, ultra-correct for indoor wear with formal clothes, are seldom seen, although some fastidious men don them for dancing, to avoid having to place a moist hand on a woman's bare back. Actually, a man's white kid gloves worn this way are not removed even when he is acknowledging introductions or having supper...

[and, finally] ...If you don't own a black silk hat or an opera hat, don't wear tails at all.

Essential tips for the modern man, courtesy of Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette - a Guide to Gracious Living (1952).

Amy Osborne Vanderbilt (22nd July 1908 – 27th December 1974)