Old Money vs New Money: In the words of Lady Colin Campbell

Fernando Fitz-James Stuart, the 17th Duke of Huéscar and Sofía Palazuelo.

Photo: CP

Obviously, the traits, skills and mind-set were different for each group, but of one thing you could be certain. Once those who had aspired had achieved, their focus invariably expanded to include the goals of preservation and survival that were the characteristics of the Haves.

Old Money, New Money, No Money and Real Money all have distinguishing features. Old Money has the grand houses, castles, and palaces that are stuffed full of chattels which would seriously deplete the bank accounts of New Money and even make a dent with Real Money, should they be able to buy the items which are seldom if ever for sale.

Old Money might not have readily realisable assets, but what they have is an accumulation of riches, now mostly in everything but cash, which New Money can only replicate, in a contemporary setting, by consuming its funds in a latter-day version of the real thing.

HRH Prince Abdul Mateen.

Photo: GQ Thailand

Old Money also has some things that New Money and Real Money cannot buy. It has history, tradition, and breeding. These can be very discomfiting to newcomers for the one thing that someone like them would find difficult is relating to people who, because of their heritage, are so unconsciously themselves that they wear their every advantage lightly and take no one, including themselves, too seriously. This conflicts with neophytes who are far more conscious of themselves and invariably take themselves far more seriously.

The philosophical differences between Old Money and New Money are at the root of many a misunderstanding.

There are differences between the upper reaches of Canadian and British society. Canadians of all classes are more similar to their American counterparts than to the British. They are also more simplistic than the British. Here, use of language, pronunciation, phraseology, body language, overt and unstated demeanour are radically different.

If you are an American or Canadian who is authentically yourself, you will fit in without any difficulty into all strata of society in Britain. On the other hand, if you are a personality whose development has been self-conscious, the only class in Britain into which you will fit comfortably is the arriviste. This is because all other segments of the British population are renowned for their adherence to the mores of the worlds in which they function, with only the arriviste adopting new modes of behaviour and the attitudes to go along with their newfound status.

Old Money, whether in the US or the UK, generally finds many of New Money’s practices vulgar and crass, and therefore unpleasant to be around.

New Money, on the other hand, finds what it regards as the prissiness and restraint of Old Money constraining, tiresome, and boring. It is also seriously disconcerted by the sudden way Old Money often lapses into unrestrained political incorrectness, riding roughshod over New Money’s treasured politically correct attitudes. Inevitably the values of these two worlds collide.

Note from Byron Tully: here I believe the author details two of the characteristics of Old Money…

(…) Their relish for the traditional country lifestyle, with its emphasis on blood sports; but worst of all, their supreme distaste for personal publicity.

(…) Their tolerance of personal discomfort, born of their lifestyle’s activities such as hunting, fishing, shooting, and stalking, not to mention the tendency for their houses to be seriously under-heated. This, of course, was because Old Money homes are usually so large (a small house might be thirty rooms, a large one two or three hundred) that only the rooms the family uses on a regular basis will be heated constantly.

Receptions room, Naworth Castle.

Photo: Naworth Castle

Even when you stay in beautifully appointed castles like Naworth, you walk from one warm room to another via something on the more Arctic side. Old Money understands that comfort is always relative, that each individual must sacrifice some of what he would prefer in an ideal world if he is to retain the endowments good fortune has provided him with in this one.

New Money does not accept trade-offs like this, the New Age concept of Having It All being something it lives by, or at the very least, aspires to. Old Money would never waste its time on trying to have it all; it knows from generations of acquisitiveness that you can’t. It even goes as far as disapproving of such a mandate, dismissing it as greed. Over the centuries, it has learnt that possession might be nine tenths of the law but retention requires self-sacrifice.

New Money is therefore both more demanding and less hardy than Old. What Old Money accepts unflinchingly, New Money regards as a personal assault on its right to be comfortable at all times.

Conor McGregor.

Photo: UFC

New Money is materialistic in a way that no other class in society is. It uses not only itself, but others, to get what it wants. It is ruthless in a way Old Money seldom is. It thinks money is more important than it actually is, that cash can buy what it cannot, and that money is a magic stick rather than a means of exchange. It too often thinks people have a lower value than they do, and that anyone and anything can be used by them without damaging consequence. Usually, it learns the error of its ways in the second and succeeding generations, by which time it has been absorbed into the Old Money set, replicating its values.

Old Money people are generally very comfortable to be with as long as you understand what their values are. They have codes of conduct which stretch back to the beginnings of civilisation. They have invisible boundaries which regulate their conduct and wellbeing from the cradle to the grave. New Money and Real Money are far more exciting. Their very lack of knowledge of these invisible boundaries makes for a freedom that is refreshing until you realise that you’re at sea with someone who doesn’t know how to paddle the boat.

Prince Charles’s former butler Grant Harrold once said in my presence that he much prefers working for Old Money rather than New, because people with Old Money treat their staff better than people with New. There are reasons why expressions such as ‘rough diamond’ or ‘not polished’ used to be used.

New Money people simply do not have the awareness that comes with a heritage stretching back generations. But now that so many of the Old Money people have lost prominence and so many of the New Money people have joined the feast, there has been a relaxation of the rules, which has loosened up behaviour and allowed cross pollination between different social groupings. It is this influx that has allowed even No Money people to take seats in the banqueting hall.

This post originally appeared on https://theoldmoneybook.com/2024/03/13/lady-colin-campbell-talks-old-money/