Anti-frippery
James Hughes-Onslow
Undoubtedly the most over-used word at Ascot last week was 'frippery', a term which, until recently, was not widely familiar outside the trade union movement. As a resident of Ascot, now described as a frippery (see Jack Jones—'fripperies such as Ascot and the like'), I have been consulting the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary to see where this word came from and where it is likely to go now. Most of the meanings given describe the Transport and General Workers' Union better than Royal Ascot : 'Rag, old clothes, cast-off clothes, finery in dress, tawdry finery, trifles, empty display, especially in Speech, showy talk, old clothes shop, trade or traffic in old clothes, trade in tawdry style ...' They quote Goldsmith : 'as fond of gauze and French frippery as the best of them' and Congreve : reduce him to frippery and rags'. The Penguin English Dictionary mentions showy knick-knacks and affected elegance. You have only to follow the average trade union speech for examples of frippery. Mr W. H. (*Mind the socialists don't get You') Parnell, the ironmonger in Ascot High Street, was making a bit of a thing of all this last week for the benefit of the nobs passing his shop on their way to the races. What really got him going were the newspaper stories that coincided with Ascot : the TUC Jamboree, Joe Gormley and Lawrence Daly having their rates paid by their unions and the Government's claim to have reduced the rate of inflation.
This consisted of a tour of the shop seeing What's happened to the price of ironmongery since Labour came to power. A screwdriver that cost £5.25 a year ago is now £8.15 and a saw has gone up from £8.27 to £13.80. Almost everything left over from the previous year's stock (each year's price tags are a different colour in this shop) has doubled in Price. Ascot racegoers, of course, are not in the least interested in ironmongery and the best he was able to do was to sell a few carnations and umbrellas brought in for the occasion. Most people seemed to think he had also put the prices up for the occasion.
Mr George Sole, the Ascot coal merchant, Is another who likes to see some frippery from time to time and does what he can to encourage it. He owns a field with parking Space for 800 cars within easy walking distance of the track. He could charge £1 a car, but this year, after his new, more expensive Signs had been painted, he reduced the price
to 50p on the grounds that it is the Ot dinary
working man who enjoys Ascot most. As a result of this magnanimous gesture, Sole had to turn away more cars than he allowed in on the big day last Thursday. Then he retired to the ticket kiosk, which he uses as a sort of cold storage depot for cases of champagne throughout the winter, and prized the cork off a bottle of Bollinger with a pair of pliers.
In general the locals are surprisingly unresentful of the expense-account Bentleys that block up the traffic. The most unlikely people spring into action, mowing, repairing fences and painting things, so that the week before the races is itself a spectacle. Personally I'm anti-frippery and would like to abolish top hats as an interim measure. But people who know, working on Groucho Marx's theory that he wouldn't join a club that let in people like him, say that if you let everybody into the Royal Enclosure nobody would want to go, not even everybody. Now that each economic crisis seems to attract more crowds to the races, maybe there should be an even more arbitrary process of distinction. People with red hair shouldn't be allowed in. I go as a kind of journalistic tramp hoping to pick up fag ends but this is getting more difficult. One sensitive gossipcolumnist said he felt like the hero in Brideshead Revisited who spends his first year at Oxford making friends and his second year making enemies of them. Only at Ascot it gets worse every time.
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