Submitted by Upperphonny t3_y9gsut in history
TimeEfficiency6323 t1_it6l6s3 wrote
Reply to comment by Cranscan87 in Was this behavior and culture like that with the wealthy Englishmen in the early 20th century? by Upperphonny
Wait, wait, wait. The Drones are a very specific class of aristocratic younger sons. The older sons were being prepped for positions in running the estate, government, trade, the army etc. After those sons you had a bunch of sons who had no role, and lived idle lives on middling stipends.
At the time, open homosexuality was absolutely not tolerated. Campy is not the same as openly gay, but those who walked the line too closely would sometimes find themselves packed off to remote places and sometimes even married off under threat of being "cut off" - that is having their stipend withdrawn.
LanewayRat t1_it6tr7w wrote
Yes this. I get the impression that an upper class male demeanour of those times was often tending towards a flamboyant, carefree, foppish, quirky and theatrical demeanour. Perhaps it fell out of favour in the more practical times of the Second World War and beyond. This doesn’t mean they were necessarily more gay but maybe a gay man might have been at home in this environment, if he kept his sexuality very private.
The negative side of this culture was that it was a privileged and rarefied existence, only sustainable amongst an elite who could afford to ignore the real world and be child-like and peculiar if they wanted to be.
This culture seems to live on, to some limited extent, in the British public school educated elite. To an Australian looking on from a distance, people like Boris Johnson and that Reece-Mogs (?) person seem ludicrously foppish and embarrassingly campy and extreme in many ways.
TimeEfficiency6323 t1_itaxdxr wrote
A lot of it came to an end after World War I. Terrified by the idea of Bolshevism spreading westwards the UK government brought in the start of the social welfare system and paid for it with Income and Inheritance taxes.
Land became less of a guarantee of wealth and by World War II a number of the old estates had fallen into ruin. Meantime, family heads were having to cut off their wastrel sons.
LaoBa t1_itmd3a9 wrote
Since 1900, 1,200 country houses have been demolished in England. In Scotland, 378 architecturally important country houses have been demolished,
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