As The Lady dies, we must fight more than ever to cling on to our Britishness

It was that rare publication read both upstairs and downstairs. A magazine founded in 1885 that combined practical features with advertisements for staff, and that was the longest running women’s magazine in the country. Until now. This April’s edition will be its last. But unlike Just Stop Oil, The Lady is no virile serpent’s head. Its death means exactly that: a little piece of old, traditional Britain dead and buried.

And its demise makes me feel a little mournful. Although it’s like that feeling one gets when a pub or village shop shuts. You wonder why it closed then realise that one of the reasons was that you never actually went there.

But then I can offer an excuse that I’m not a lady, nor one of those kinds of ladies, and I’ve not had enough cause to either find myself frequently advertising for household staff nor, having made an early decision to scribble rather than buttle, seeking relevant work.

Yet the magazine’s demise is sad because it represents another brick eroded, then slipping out and falling to the ground, smashed to dust, from the edifice that was once our great nation.

And The Lady was a proper magazine. It had its own building in the middle of London, at number 39/40 Bedford Street in Covent Garden – although it had its heart ripped out when, in 2019, it became physically not a building but a bunch of desks at the Kinetic Centre in Borehamwood. A phenomenon mirroring the state of its advertising and editorial: just as the nouveau pauvre dowager duchess finds herself with her stately home flogged and her staff let go, she downsizes to a flat in London’s Dolphin Square with nothing but a weekly cleaner who can’t speak English.

The Lady had battled a long-term falling readership and more recently a catastrophic tax bill and a slide in popularity that not even the appointment of Rachel Johnson to the editor’s chair in 2009 could arrest. A salutary lesson perhaps that if you want to protect either your magazine or your country from oblivion, a Johnson at the helm is no guarantee of success.

The Lady’s first issue, published on Thursday February 19 1885, priced at sixpence and with the tagline of “A Journal for Gentlewomen”, carried advertisements for linen and silk, “iced savoy moulds”, “fashionable bonnets”, the services of “velveteers”, as well as sheet music for “new dances” and “songs for ladies voices”.

Its final issue, domestic ads for cooks and chauffeurs aside, features a short story on a granny’s 90th birthday and a recipe by Tom Parker Bowles for Gugelhupf; a fruity cake cooked for a dinner given by Queen Victoria at Windsor, on May 14 1874 for His Imperial Majesty, Tsar Alexander II of Russia.

All such little British gems are now discarded like a crumb of that cake. I’m thinking of the likes of the visiting GP; he with his doctor’s bag and stethoscope who actually came to your actual house. Or the vocational, charming and incorruptible Conservative member of Parliament, unlike today’s rasping and bitter, power-hungry lunatics. Or country sports like shooting and stalking or hunting: once a natural extension of the landscape, as normal and unobtrusive a human endeavour as dry-stone walling, but now politicised and hated. Or fishing, which was once about relaxing by the idyllic banks of a river with maybe the prospect of taking a fish home for dinner, now a televised sport for bores made utterly pointless by “catch and release”.

Or being able to sit somewhere for a few hours and read a book without a small computer by your side buzzing every few minutes with demands and awful news from the outside world. Or a world where a pub offered only wine, ale or spirits and the only fizzy drink was a tonic for your gin and there was no such thing as “non-alc” (unless that referred to some rare person who wasn’t, like most people, a happily functioning alcoholic).

Trinity College London published a survey this week of British polite-isms, those refined phrases that actually conceal awkwardness or, indeed, seething resentment. The top 10 includes: “Ooh, could I just squeeze past you?” (Please move out of my way), “Sounds fun, I’ll let you know” (I’m not coming) and “No rush” (I need it now).

These phrases are one of the few great British things we have left. And I’m reminded of my grandfather Sacheverell who would often say to visitors: “Will you come back and visit me again before too long,” within about five minutes of their arrival and we all knew what he actually meant.

So as The Lady dies we must battle to cling on to what is left of our Britishness. And if that’s not a butler, it’s a polite-ism. Use them or we’ll lose them.