Patrick Shaw-Stewart was the cleverest and the most ambitious of the gilded gang of young men who swam in the wake of the not-so-young but perennially youthful Raymond Asquith. Julian Gren- fell, Duff Cooper, Charles Lister, Edward Horner: they were as one in their conviction that the British were superior to other races, that public schoolboys were superior to other Britons, that Etonians were superior to other public schoolboys, and that their own precious clique was superior to other Etonians. Apart from that, the only obligatory common factor was that one should love, or at least profess to love, Lady Diana Manners. The corrupt coterie, as they proudly styled themselves, knew that they were the future. They had no future. One by one they were extinguished in the carnage of the first world war.
Were they gilded or, as they believed, true gold? Duff Cooper was the only survivor. His peers would not have judged him most likely to succeed, yet he achieved great eminence as writer, diplomat and politician. Shaw-Stewart was academically stronger, at least as ambitious and forceful, and far more prudent and calculating. At school and university he had won almost every prize and scholarship that was available. By 1914 he was already a rising star in the great merchant bank of Barings. Within another 15 years he would have made a great deal of money and probably have switched to politics. His abilities and connections made it almost inevitable that he would have prospered; he could easily have been in the Cabinet, and if the cards had fallen right he might even have been prime minister. Though not the most likeable of men, Shaw-Stewart at least was unequivocally gold.
Instead, he was killed, at the end of 1917.
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