Good manners are vanishing- we’re a poorer country without them ...0

When surveying the obituary pages of newspapers, I often find myself shocked. Not that someone in the public eye had died, but that they were still alive in the first place. So it was with the same sense that I greeted the news that The Lady magazine, at the grand old age of 140, has reportedly breathed its last.

Who knew that The Lady was still going? Who knew that there was still a market for features on whether Downton Abbey’s Lord Grantham was patronising his butler by addressing him as “my dear fellow”? Or for advice if your travel companion insists on checking in a bag when you only have walk-on luggage? Or for tips from a former Royal butler on hosting the perfect summer garden party?

I know what you’re thinking. Actually, we might like to know the answer to all those questions of good manners, and thus The Lady, even in the transactional, individualistic, celebrity-centric 2020s, still had something of a market, even if most of it was in the form of classified advertising from people who sought or offered domestic help.

Peaking at a circulation of 70,000 in the 60s, the last available figures for the magazine in February 2023, showed that sales had dropped below 20,000; the average age of its readers, believe it or not, was 78. How’s that for an ageing demographic? At that point, its demise was, along with that of its readers, on the horizon, and The Times reports that last weekend the staff received a letter saying that the magazine was going into liquidation and that the April issue would be the last one.

There will not be many who will mourn the passing of “The Journal for Gentlewomen” (as its first issue in February 1885 styled itself). Rather like WH Smith, or indeed many of the venerable businesses that have fallen by the wayside recently, its name will disappear and most of us will quickly forget it ever existed.

The Lady has fallen victim to twin pressures: the decline in print titles (although some current affairs magazines have shown great resilience); and the mores of the modern world. The very concept of “a lady” belongs to another age, and the magazine’s air of de haut en bas would be seen today as very non-U, to borrow the invention of Nancy Mitford (coincidentally, one of The Lady’s historic contributors).

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Even a flirtation with celebrity culture was not enough to revive its fortunes. The appointment of Rachel Johnson (the former prime minister’s sister, and a minor celebrity in her own right) as editor in 2009 and then, almost immediately, the filming of a fly-on-the-wall documentary set in the magazine’s offices, gave it some fleeting notoriety, but in the end Ms Johnson’s stated desire to make it “more hip, less hip replacement” was seen as inauthentic, and she left after a three-year tenure.

In a valedictory piece in The Spectator, Ms Johnson wrote that her time at The Lady had been described by the magazine Vanity Fair as “ceaseless brouhaha”, a term that may be considered somewhat obscure by today’s audience. If that is indeed the case, look no further than the current iteration of… yes, The Lady.

“Brouhaha is a noun that describes a hubbub or uproar,” it explains helpfully in a feature on quintessentially British words or phrases. “While it seems very British,” it adds, “the word brouhaha isn’t British at all – it’s French.”

So there you have it. Even in the modern world, when you are only a click away from anything and everything you might want to know, there is still a place for the sort of specialised, recherché knowledge and wisdom that comes from a long life.

A stiff, upper-crust idea of how one ought to behave at all times might sound outdated, and with The Lady gone it’s hard to imagine anyone pining for advice on – say – whether it’s ever appropriate to swear. (“Bad language could cause appalling embarrassment to a group of people at, say, a golden wedding party,” as a recent advice column warned.) 

But given our increasingly atomised, digitally connected lives, it’s easy to forget that the way that we relate to other people still matters. The Lady might have been slightly fusty, but its insistence on respect and consideration still stands. Take, for instance, this advice from an 1898 edition, as true now as it was then: “True hospitality means the doing and giving – freely and heartily – the best you can, and of the best you have.”

The demise of The Lady should be noted and regretted, not for what it was, but for what it represented – a gentler world of good manners and politesse, far away from the brouhaha of today.

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