Class report

Photographer Dafydd Jones's latest book, England: The Last Hurrah, is a fly-on-the-wall account of eighties upper-class England at its most riotous and vulnerable. Peter Dench fixes his cummerbund and joins the party

- Peter Dench

In 1981, photographer Dafydd Jones was featured in a competition for The Sunday Times Magazine for his set of pictures, Bright Young Things, depicting undergraduates at Oxford University living a Brideshead Revisited life far removed from Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of national economic and race riots. The very bright editor of Tatler magazine, Tina Brown, had been hunting for a lucid lens to fill the magazine’s social pages. ‘The series by the runnerup, one Dafydd Jones, immediately caught my eye with its stark black & white definition and the sheer effervescent brio of its depiction of oblivious aristocratic bad behaviour; photographic moments as memorable as Evelyn Waugh’s sentences,’ writes Brown in the introduction to England: The Last Hurrah (ACC Art Books, 2023).

Brown sent Jones off to Sandown Park to photograph the then Lady Diana Spencer. A black & white image of the Princess-in-waiting ran as a double-page spread. For the following eight years, Jones’s photographs helped revive and define Tatler. He was being paid to photograph a world he wanted to photograph. It would be easy to assume Jones was born into the elite environments of the events, clubs and balls he was documenting.