Crispin Balfour, photographed by Dafydd Jones at a tea party for the Dangerous Sports Club at the Gloucestershire home of the Dutch ambassador to Britain, in 1981.

Francesca Hobart at the Palladian Revels, at Chiswick House, in London, in 1988.

The Countess of Lichfield, with her shoe on a stick, at a party given by Mrs. Yousof Mazandi in Chester Square, London, in 1982.

Elizabeth Pulford snacks on cotton candy at the Cambridge University Charity Ball, in 1985.

At a party in Totteridge, London, in 1984.

Guests admire an inflatable Perrier bottle at the Henley Regatta, held on the River Thames, in 1984.

*Top,* a wedding in Frampton Mansell, Gloucestershire, in 1986; *above,* six A.M. at the Trinity May Ball, in Cambridge, in 1984.

Olivier de Fallentons and Lucinda West at James McMullen’s 30th-birthday party, at Cliveden House, in Berkshire, in 1986.

Henrietta Thompson’s hand reaches for a bottle at the Falklands Ball, at Grosvenor House, in 1982.

The Last Hurrah

A new book collects the 1980s party photographs of Dafydd Jones, chronicler of British high society at its most riotous, just as that world was coming to an end

“Parties are a theater,” the photographer Dafydd Jones says. “And I just try to take photographs of the characters in that theater.”

Jones started chronicling English society fêtes for Tatler in March 1981, after he published his first photograph of the future Princess Diana. She is at the Sandown Park racecourse, dressed in a dowdy wool suit and walking past a wall of paparazzi she doesn’t acknowledge. The black-and-white shot is prescient—she is alone, set against the swarm—and on the strength of it Jones was hired to be the magazine’s party photographer.

“Shooting these things was interesting from the outset,” Jones says, “because English people sort of hate each other. There were private-school kids who were snobbish about each other. There was even an internal hierarchy at Eton.”

At first Jones attended open events. As the magazine gained relevance, proper invites soon followed, and he became a mainstay at galas, dinners, and debutante balls.

“I think I lasted because I didn’t get carried away too much, partying,” says Jones. “I know photographers who enjoyed the parties, but then they didn’t last. I’ve always tried to be invisible.”

His years at Tatler began two years after Margaret Thatcher took office, in 1979, and ended when she took her leave, in 1990. During that time Jones shot drinking sessions; cigar smoking; Charles McDowell throwing Pop Vincent into a pond; the Saint-Moritz Dangerous Sports Club ski race; and one particularly evocative shot of a bride and groom on a lake, floating away as their guests look on. His new book, England: The Last Hurrah, which includes introductions by Jones and Tina Brown, compiles pictures of the British upper classes “behaving badly” throughout the 1980s.

“Rowers in Oxford might train every morning and then they have this very intense competition,” he says. “If they win, they have dinner, drink wine, and set fire to the boat. Is that really bad behavior?” —Elena Clavarino

England: The Last Hurrah, by Dafydd Jones, will be published on June 12 by ACC Art Books

Elena Clavarino is the Senior Editor at AIR MAIL