A Word on Loelia Ponsonby

The first place I ever encountered the name "Loelia Ponsonby" was in the novels of Ian Fleming. The character made little impression--almost nothing of her but the name lingering in my mind afterward, I suppose because first and last name were fairly unusual.

Later I was surprised (though by that point I ought not to have been given Fleming's borrowing from acquaintances) to find out that Fleming knew a real-life Loelia Ponsonby--Ponsonby the maiden name of Loelia Mary, Lady Lindsay. Surprised, too (though by that point I ought not to have been given the circles in which the ultra-privileged Fleming moved), to find out that she was prominent enough to rate her own Wikipedia page (styling her Loelia Lindsay).

Far and away the most interesting thing about Ms. Ponsonby (to me these days, far more interesting than what inspiration she may have provided Fleming in creating James Bond's universe) is that she popularized the phrase (apparently beloved by collectors of nasty little aphorisms) that "Anyone seen in a bus over the age of thirty has been a failure in life."

Margaret Thatcher, of course, has been reported to have spoken a variation on that statement: "'If a man finds himself a passenger on a bus having attained the age of twenty-six, he can count himself a failure in life'" (in one version of the story, at any rate).

The discussion about whether Thatcher actually did so is exceedingly contentious, and I will not presume to settle the matter one way or the other here (or anywhere else). However, it seems that one can at least say something about how Thatcher's alleged comment has been interpreted--as an expression of disdain for the working people who depend on public services, and indeed as evidence that, while she promised her policies would help the whole country she really expected nothing of the kind, the claims for their beneficent character pure bad faith on the part of a right-wing ideologue, kicking the interests of those she contemptuously dismissed as "failures" to the curb as she pursued her ideological bias against the public sector and her political interest in pandering to business at working people's expense, while feeling a good deal of Schadenfreude toward the victims as she went about it. This is all the more the case in as the pattern really did extend specifically to bus service by way of the Transport Act 1985, which has had exactly the consequences her opponents predicted and feared for the country's transit riders.

The circumstances and implications of Thatcher's supposed utterance makes for an interesting contrast with the spirit of Ms. Ponsonby's statement. Certainly as could be expected given her social origin Ms. Ponsonby's mode of life, personal connections (like her marriage to Hugh Grosvenor), and the outrageous snobbery known to have gone with them, seems to have had utter contempt for "the plebs." Indeed, the comment was even nastier in the '40s than in the '80s, when as yet only a small minority of British households had automobiles. However, there was also the fact that Ponsonby was now in the same boat, or bus, as them, after her 1947 divorce, following which, according to at least one account I have encountered, she was herself riding the bus in the rain. The daughter of a baron who had been a godson to the Emperor of Germany and courtier of Queen Victoria, who as an adult married a duke counted among the world's wealthiest men (the aforementioned Grosvenor), and through it all living it up in an existence that can almost seem a parody of the lives of the idle rich (as a "bright young thing" in the '20s, later as the wife of that duke-real estate millionaire), the now far past thirty Lindsay/Ponsonby would seem to have been speaking of herself when she spoke of "failure" in a display of what, were writers prone to judge the rich as harshly as they do the poor, they would call self-pity.