Riotous photos of posh Brits partying through the '80s

Estab­lished in 1709, Tatler was a stal­wart of the old guard, faith­ful­ly chron­i­cling the com­ings and goings of the British upper class­es. Its fate was close­ly tied to that of the nation, falling into decline after World War II – until Tina Brown took over the edi­tor­ship in June 1979.

Recog­nis­ing the endur­ing allure of wealth and its dis­con­tents, Brown restored Britain’s old­est mag­a­zine to its for­mer glo­ry by devis­ing a glossy that was equal parts glam­our, romance, deca­dence, and impu­dence. Deter­mined to tell sto­ries that reflect­ed the cross cur­rents of the rul­ing class dur­ing the Thatch­er years, Brown searched high and low for the per­fect photographer.

While pag­ing through the Sun­day Times mag­a­zine in 1981, she hap­pened upon the work of Dafy­dd Jones, who was fine­ly attuned to the nuances of priv­i­lege and youth. Struck by his intu­itive under­stand­ing of Britain’s Bright Young Things, she com­mis­sioned Jones to pho­to­graph then-Lady Diana Spencer at Sandown Park.

He returned with an eeri­ly pre­scient pho­to of a young woman alone, the tar­get of paparazzi whose relent­less hunger would hound her until death. The pho­to­graph ran as a dou­ble page spread and marked the start of a col­lab­o­ra­tion that would span eight years and some 9,000 rolls of black and white film.

“The Tatler was run on a shoe­string but had a buzzing office with an air of excite­ment,” Jones remem­bers. ​“I liked Tina because she was very direct, but more impor­tant­ly because she hired me as an unknown young pho­tog­ra­ph­er. I moved to Lon­don to work for the mag­a­zine. I found a sub­let room in a run­down house in an insalu­bri­ous area and yet would be going out in evening dress to glam­orous parties.”

Learn­ing on the job, Jones devel­oped his sig­na­ture style, blend­ing charm, may­hem, and wit into a whirl­wind tour of balls, regat­tas, hunts, polo match­es and wed­dings. Now, Jones looks back one that piv­otal era in the new book, Eng­land: The Last Hur­rah (ACC Art Books).

With Jones craft­ing indeli­ble images of gen­er­a­tional wealth run amok, Tatler became emblem­at­ic of the leg­endary excess­es of 1980s Britain. ​“At the time it felt like a world that had always been there and hadn’t real­ly changed. What was new was that through the pic­tures in the mag­a­zine it was being revealed,” he says.

Jones quick­ly became an essen­tial fix­ture on the scene, his sparkling images of mis­chief and debauch­ery wel­comed by all. ​“I would walk around, look­ing, and pho­to­graph what­ev­er and who­ev­er stood out – any­thing that was hap­pen­ing,” he says. 

Long before Nigel­la Law­son and Hugh Grant rose to fame, Jones pho­tographed them for the mag­a­zine, recog­nis­ing in them an innate star pow­er. This sixth sense applied across industries. 

“I have won­dered now why at a par­ty for 500 peo­ple, out of the 30 or so peo­ple I pho­tographed, why did I select the young men that would lat­er become England’s prime min­is­ters?” Jones won­ders. ​“Maybe they had a kind of charis­ma. Per­haps it was just luck.”

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