Ann Barr, writer and editor, 1929-2015

When the languid, leisurely twentysomethings of Made in Chelsea began to attract British public fascination with the launch of the reality television series four years ago, they evoked recollections from three decades earlier.

First to depict them in their southwest London habitat had been Ann Barr, whose assemblage of impressions gleaned while on a glossy magazine formed a big basis of her 1982 work with co-author Peter York: The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. Barr, who has died aged 85, brilliantly dissected an upper slice of society at a time when Margaret Thatcher was etching her ideas on the country.

Yet the Sloane Rangers were not, in the words of WG Runciman's assessment for the London Review of Books, "the rapacious financiers, or the galvanic industrialists, or the power-hungry politicos" who dominated the headlines of the time. Instead they formed a discreet, almost covert tribe that deployed a subtle and secret verbal culture to keep upstart intruders at bay. While the authors' swipes were gently satirical, Viscount Runciman applauded their anthropological rigour.

Put another way, if Harry Enfield's "Loadsamoney" television comedy character represented one end of the spectrum of Thatcherite consumerism, the Sloane Rangers flew the colours at the other end, for a quieter, more traditional form of aspirational living.

The book, which sold more than 1m copies, was a compilation of articles by contributors at Harpers & Queen, the monthly for which Barr was a brilliant and original features editor. Her sharp observational skills and voracious hunt for young talent brought a stream of stylish writers including Craig Brown, Nicholas Coleridge, Mary Ann Sieghart, Stephen Bayley, to the magazine's pages.

"She was like a very clever university don," wrote Mr Coleridge, meanwhile president of Conde Nast International, in a 2004 article on his most influential mentors. "A very improbable person to be working on a glossy magazine: eccentric, dithery, fiercely intelligent, untidy." It was to Barr he owed his first commissions: she paid him £40 each for two articles when he was just 16.

Born on September 16 1929 in London, Barr was of Scottish and Canadian stock, her grandfather the founder of Barr's Irn-Bru, Scotland's most famous soft drink. Her mother was born in Vancouver and brought up in Montreal, where she took Ann and her two younger siblings at the outset of the second world war. Reunited in London, the family moved to Eaton Square in Belgravia and Barr started work as a secretary at The Times, which gave her a taste for high-end partying.

At that newspaper, and in subsequent jobs at House & Garden and the Weekend Telegraph magazine, she honed her journalistic skills and in 1969 became features editor of Queen (which turned into Harpers & Queen the following year). Her eye for trends proved invaluable and the sharply written features she commissioned helped the magazine more than double its circulation.

The success of the Sloane Ranger book, the cover of which featured Diana, Princess of Wales, as well as a host of indispensable social tips such as "Read Dick Francis and the FT" and "Eat jelly with a fork", meant she became much in demand.

Its publication was followed two years later by The Official Foodie Handbook , co-written with Paul Levy. That too was a piercing social analysis, which identified a sudden British obsession with eating well, and pretentiously.

"It takes several things to support a Foodie culture," wrote the authors, listing "high-class shops, fast transport bringing fresh produce from the land, enlightened well-paid eater-outers who will support the whole expensive edifice, lower-paid workers to make the food. Suddenly they are all present." It was a prescient observation.

Barr, who never married, lived in a small apartment in Notting Hill with her pet parrot Turkey. On moving to The Observer as women's editor, she published groundbreaking articles on a more serious range of subjects: crack cocaine, child abuse, Aids.

In a 2008 letter to that Sunday title, Barr was at pains to correct misconceptions over her most famous creation. Sloanes should not be confused with the super-rich, she wrote. "Sloane Rangers are not necessarily well-off or aristocrats, but a stratum of a bygone middle class, at least one rung down from David Cameron and friends. They work behind the scenes to help the community, but do not expect to lead it - and don't all vote Tory."

She, of all people, knew that times had changed once more.

Peter Aspden

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