Apparently missing from modern society is a character much at large in early 20th-century Britain: the bounder. The term implies a literal bounding over class constraints by a man wearing garish socks and a strobing jacket, who, while racy and opportunistic, is not — unlike his cousin, the cad — deliberately callous.
This weekend marks the centenary of the birth of a man who embodied the bounder: the brilliant comic actor, and sometime professional ballroom dancer at Cricklewood Palais de Dance, Terry-Thomas.
The characters he played were slightly socially wrong. As Sir Percy Ware-Armitage in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (a portrayal that inspired the creation of the cartoon character Dick Dastardly), he demonstrates a lack of graciousness when he stands on the hands of his manservant, Courtney (Eric Sykes), to get a leg up. “I trust your hands are clean, Courtney,” he says.
In his first scene in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, T-T, playing Lieutenant-Colonel J. Algernon Hawthorne, gives a lift to a young couple. He immediately begins ogling the woman with such intensity that the man has to say: “Would you mind just keeping your eyes on the road?”
In School for Scoundrels, he puts off his tennis opponent (Ian Carmichael) by saying “hard cheese, old boy” — or sometimes “hard cheese” or “hard cheese” — whenever he makes a mistake.
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Judging by the index of Graham McCann’s excellent 2008 biography, Bounder!, T-T himself had bounderish traits, as suggested by multiple entries for “cigarette holders”, “bespoke underwear”, “cars”, “clothes”, “hedonism”, “hyphen in name” and “starts writing guide to sexual etiquette”.
Today you could say the term is meaningless, because most men — certainly many Premier League footballers — just do what they want. But there are still some who show the bravado and swagger that has always been a precondition of bounderism. I’m thinking of Jeffrey Archer.
Peter Mandelson also has a bounderish profile, as in his reported meetings with Saif Gaddafi — an undoubted cad, incidentally — and his famous statement: “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.”
Julian Assange is potentially bounder material, with his industrial-scale indiscretion and too-careful taste in leather coats. But a court verdict may yet prove him a cad as well.
In sport, Lewis Hamilton is starting to look the bounder, but he will never supplant that real-life Dastardly, Michael Schumacher. John McEnroe was a tennis bounder, but Andy Murray is too dour. The sad fact is that most men are too dour when compared with the immortal Terry-Thomas.