It has become a summer ritual for the Young family to attend the annual tennis tournament in Hunstanton, a Victorian seaside town in Norfolk. Normally a minor stop on the amateur circuit, it was elevated to number three in the county earlier this year on account of the quality of its grass courts. For some reason, they have suffered less than most from the drought, although they looked pretty threadbare to me. Separately, it is graded 5/6 by the LTA.
About ten years ago, Caroline entered the ladies’ doubles and, because she was partnered by her tennis coach, took home a cup. It’s been downhill ever since, with the young Youngs making less progress each year as they’re forced to compete in older categories. I’m not a player – or, rather, I am but cannot abide the humiliation of being beaten by some wily vet in his eighties – so my role is to sit on the sidelines and assure my children they’ve played really well after they go out in the first round.
It’s easy to sneer at Hunstanton –the tournament, not the town – and I’ve been guilty of that myself. Most of the older attendees, with their Land Rover Defenders and burgundy gilets, could have walked straight out of The Sloane Ranger Handbook, while their teenage children drink too much and terrorise the town at night, only to show up on court first thing in the morning and play beautiful tennis. There’s a sense that everyone belongs to the same social milieu, having gone to public schools and then on to Russell Group universities. Even Caroline, who went to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, can become a bit ‘class warrior’ at times. After a man in his fifties recounted a story of being allowed into Switzerland for a week’s skiing in spite of having forgotten his passport, she turned to me and said: ‘That’s white privilege.’ (The context for this is that I’ve long maintained there’s no such thing.)
But this demographic undoubtedly has many virtues and I sometimes think Britain would be in better shape if they were still in charge. For one thing, they’re quietly patriotic and many do their bit to maintain the institutional fabric of the country. On Sunday I attended evensong at a church in Holme-next-the-Sea, a neighbouring village, and was impressed to see that the parishioners were only £16,000 short of raising half a million pounds for the restoration of the Norman tower. It’s not unusual, when sitting down for a beer after a match, to discover that the red-trousered, pink-faced man sitting next to you is the chair of a big cancer charity. People like him have been chased out of politics, but they’ve found other ways to serve. When talking about their children’s career plans, you can hear the regret in their voices when they reveal they’re moving to Australia – and not just because they’ll be so far away. They know their type is no longer wanted in Burnham’s Britain.
Forty years have elapsed and that dream of a new Britain run by a meritocratic elite has turned sour
I was particularly struck by what a loss this is when watching some of the doubles matches in which beginners were paired up with seeded players. Sometimes, the sides were ridiculously uneven, and it would have been easy for one pair to prevail by constantly hitting the ball at the novice on the other side. But that rarely happened. Instead, the experienced players would modulate their strokes, sending fast balls fizzing over the net to one half of the court and much softer shots to the other. Nor did the stronger players express their frustration when their partners lost a point. Where else in the world would competitive tennis enthusiasts behave like this? Only in Hunstanton.
Maybe I’m guilty of romanticising this fading demographic, and God knows they have their faults. At Oxford, where I was surrounded by them, all I could see was their complacency and insularity and looked forward to a new age of opportunity when they’d be replaced with the best and the brightest from every walk of life. But 40 years have elapsed and that dream of a new Britain run by a meritocratic elite has turned sour. Our lanyard-wearing overlords owe as much to inherited privilege as the class they’ve eclipsed, only they’re the sons and daughters of chippy public-sector managers and Labour apparatchiks. They’re animated not by a sense of public duty but by inter-generational grievance, and seem determined to dismantle the traditions and institutions they’ve been bequeathed. Their project is to turn Great Britain and Northern Ireland into the Yookay – a comically awful parody of what used to be a flourishing constitutional monarchy – and they are three-quarters of the way there. If you want to know what it is they loathe so much about the old country, you could do worse than make a trip to Hunstanton.
Comments