Suspended between the 1890s and 1980s, the Season of 1939 was far closer in its conventions and the way of life it reflected to the former, yet the young girls who enjoyed or endured it have grown up and lived their lives in the twentieth century, not the nineteenth. Looking back across those fifty years, did the Season have a function: did it work for them ?
One deb said, ‘Society was so that everybody knew each other … but, as it was, the war meant that an awful lot of the people you met completely disappeared.’ Rhoda Walker-Heneage-Vivian hit the nail on the head when she summed it up thus: ‘Looking back on it now it seems like another world full of empty-headed people – but a happy, carefree world full of colour, beautiful clothes and perfume and, I am sure, an excellent introduction into life as it was in 1938.’ Others never stopped to think about it: ‘At eighteen you don’t ask yourself questions like what the Season is for. It appealed to me, personally, because I thought it established the fact that I was now grown-up!’ And another ex-deb said, ‘The majority of debs took part in the Season just for fun – and it was a wonderful way of getting to know a great number of other girls of one’s own age.’ It has proved to be successful in its function of introducing eligible young people to one another, even though the prospect for some was not appealing: ‘The men were awful. Deadly dull, no conversation at all, but a handful of debs had such a burning desire to get married that they accepted the first offer. I remember one girl stitching her trousseau and saying glumly, “All this, and John at the end of it!’”
Lady Mary Dunn was already married and a mother by 1939; but she was then and remains now a perceptive observer of the English upper classes. Does she think the Season had a purpose other than as an opportunity to meet a suitable spouse ?
The Season was overdone in the 1930s and possibly in the 1920s as well. The amount spent in one night would have kept a whole family out of poverty for a year; so I think it’s a good thing that the excesses of 1939 never came back. But, having said that, I think there was more to it than just the narrow wish to make sure that marriages were made among your own class. I can understand that parents wanted to see their daughters taken care of, and wanted them to live a life to which they’d been brought up.
But, in addition to that, these families were very aware of the beauty of their houses and their land: they were aesthetically aware of their heritage, and they felt a great sense of responsibility to see that it was maintained. The house might have been in the family for two or three hundred years; its titles and estates dated back generations. They saw the tenants very much as their responsibility, too; and so they’d like their son to marry someone who understood all this and would carry it on.
If that is accepted as the real purpose of the Season – to keep England’s heritage of ancient land and houses safely within the hands of those who would best understand how to run them – then that of 1939 was quite successful. Many of the noblest debs of that year did indeed marry into the nobility. Lady Elizabeth Scott, daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch, became the Duchess of Northumberland. On the other hand, her great friend, Lady Sarah Churchill, has been married three times but never to an English aristocrat and has now reverted to her maiden name. Lady Isabel Milles-Lade, sister of the fourth Earl Sondes, married the nineteenth Earl of Derby, but her sister, Lady Diana, is unmarried. The Hon. Anne Douglas-Scott-Montagu, daughter of the second Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, married Sir John Chichester, the eleventh Baronet and still lives a few miles from her ancestral home. Ursula Wyndham-Quin, granddaughter of the fifth Earl of Dunraven and Mount-Earl, married Lord Roderic Pratt, son of the fourth Marquess Camden, while her two equally beautiful sisters married the Marquess of Salisbury and the first Baron Egremont, thus becoming mistresses of Hatfield House and Petworth House respectively.
Returning to the sample of forty-five debutantes whose families were analysed in Chapter 4 one finds a high degree of continuity. All but three of those forty-five debutantes married. Eight of the titled girls (meaning those whose fathers had titles and a seat in the House of Lords) married titled husbands. Only one girl married into the aristocracy without having one or other parent titled, and she was exceptionally beautiful. There is in fact a high correlation between good looks and good marriages. All the girls who were frequently named as being among the great beauties of 1939 married ‘well’, as their mothers would have understood the word.
Perhaps the greatest surprise is the number of divorces found among the girls who came out in 1939. Twelve of the forty-five have been divorced, some of them three or four times. This is partly due to the number of hasty marriages contracted soon after the declaration of war and later regretted; while few of the marriages to foreign (usually American or Canadian) servicemen have lasted a lifetime. A divorce rate of over 25 per cent is certainly high, for it was not until the divorce laws were relaxed in 1969 that the number of divorces climbed dramatically. The forty-five women chosen to form this sample are not – it should be stressed – a properly random sample, and it may be that those who divorced are over-represented, and as untypical of their fellow debs as they would be of their whole generation.
Many of those marriages precipitated by the outbreak of war, however, have survived, although others were poignantly short. Sonia Denison married Edgar Heathcoat-Amory in 1940, having met him in the course of the Season, and by 1944 he was dead, leaving her at twenty-three with two young children. The transition, for her, was sudden and gruelling – from the artless fun of the Season into a war during which she worked as a VAD and brought up her two small children alone for the next few years.
Ann Schuster was another girl who married in a rush because of the pressures brought about by the war:
The house had been commandeered; my mother went off on a war job to the Isle of Man, to sort out the people who had been interned there; my father was working in the Ministry of Information ; my brother had been called up. The whole family was dispersed, and we had no home. Literally. I got engaged on 5 September, two days after war broke out. I can remember telling my mother, and she was so distracted, poor love, having to get out of the house and everything breaking up around her, and I think she said, ‘How nice, darling. I’m so glad it’s out.’ But it was a very secondary thing by then. Everything had overwhelmed her, really.
Ann’s husband was killed in the war:
I didn’t know where he was. I wasn’t ever allowed to know until after the war. The General, Colin Gubbins, had to come and tell me that it had happened a few weeks back, but he wasn’t allowed to tell me where. I was never allowed to write to Bunny (my husband) or him to me, because in SOE you didn’t even have your own name. And so the fact that suddenly something had finished … it’s rather like having a bad fall: you don’t feel it for a while. I was living with my mother at the time, in West Kensington somewhere, and she’d find me writing letters. I used to write every week and send it to the Baker Street headquarters, and in fact I think some of them were parachuted in because one or two of them were found with his things. But I used to go on writing these letters because it hadn’t really sunk in. It was happening to everybody. You just went back to work – or whatever you were doing – and then I think the shock of it came later. A little bit like the hurricane of autumn 1987 – you suddenly realized that things could end. Disappear.
It was a considerable shock for a young woman whose world had been largely confined to her close-knit family and the dizzy pleasures of the Season ; and – despite a happy second marriage – it left her with a lifelong sense of the impermanence of things.
Death had a universal impact on the girls of 1939. There cannot be one who did not lose a friend – a partner – a brother – or a cousin. Christian Grant, one of the maddest and gayest and wittiest and most original of the 1939 debs, speaks in a very different voice when it comes to the young men who whirled and flirted through the Season with her:
It was of course our dancing partners who were killed: the subaltern generation, the second lieutenants, the flight lieutenants – they were the ones who really got wiped out. They went into the war in 1939 and they had six years of being shot at one way and another, and by jove, they just were killed. And I miss them awfully, even now, I really do. I quite often think back to all the ones I … It’s something that nobody who wasn’t eighteen when the war started ever really understands. And what’s more, a particular set of eighteen-year-olds, because the gang I was with were all the boys fresh from Eton who would go and join up the first day. Later in the war, when I worked in an aircraft factory – well, the solid workman is a splendid chap, but he did not volunteer. He waited till he was called up. And I didn’t find that the factory workers had nearly the same outlook on this whole question as our group. Ours was a dashing group of young men who had been brought up in a tradition of fighting for their country. And they were just all killed off.
It had been widely anticipated that, as soon as war broke out, a hail of bombs would fall on London and it would be the civilian population that was slaughtered. What happened was mercifully, eerily different. What happened was the phoney war, when for ten months nothing happened. Esmé Harms worth, the beautiful younger daughter of Viscount Rothermere, remembers the strange atmosphere of those months:
The period from the outbreak of war in September 1939 until Dunkirk in June 1940 was a time of quiet, a time when no one knew what to expect. Therefore people were inclined to continue life much as it had been before. Of course the young men were called up to join one of the armed services and to train for warfare. The young women were not called up so early: in my case, not until mid-1942. During this quiescent autumn of 1939 and the following winter some ex-debutantes went happily skiing in the Alps regardless. No bombing, of course, had taken place in England and the Germans had not commenced their great advance through France.
The strength of the German Luftwaffe had been exaggerated, which increased people’s terror of the destruction they were daily expecting. Defence experts had calculated that 100,000 tons of bombs would drop on London in fourteen days. In fact, the total dropped on London throughout the entire war was less than this.1 Liddell Hart wrote in 1939, ‘Nearly a quarter of a million casualties might be expected … in the first week of a new war.’2 This, a cautious estimate at the time, proved wildly exaggerated. In the event, there were 295,000 civilian casualties from air attack throughout the whole of the war, of whom 60,000 were killed. And while the deaths among the armed forces were high (though far lower, proportionately, than in the First World War) only one of the debs from the 1939 Season was killed as a direct result of the war. Her name was Iris Brooks, and she was in the ATS.
This was not because they were all safely at home. Quite the opposite is true. Almost without exception, as soon as war broke out the young girls did exactly what the young men were doing: they rushed to volunteer for war service. Here for instance, is what Rhoda Walker-Heneage-Vivian did:
Wartime was a very different kettle of fish. I enlisted with the FANY at the outbreak of war and after a course at Chepstow learning how to drive and maintain heavy vehicles I was sent to Saighton Camp, Chester, which held 500 infantry and 500 gunners. The only females were a Sister and four VADS, and two FANYS to drive the ambulance. My papa nearly died when he heard and I only wish I had kept the letter he wrote about the iniquities of Army Camps etc. etc. From then on I called the camp Satan Camp and settled down to having a whale of a time. Our ambulance was a converted furniture van with ‘Anytime, Anywhere’ written on the door, which made it difficult to be aloof – but I still remained ‘pure as the driven snow’: Papa’s influence, no doubt !
Sarah Norton had a fascinating, if secret war: she spent most of it working at Bletchley Park, the centre for code-breaking which monitored and deciphered secret German transmissions.
All the debs did something in the war, even before the call-up in May 1941. Lots went into the WVS but I remember I didn’t fancy the idea of having to wear a uniform much, even though many of them were designed by Norman Hartnell and looked very nice. Every day through the war you turned to the casualty lists in The Times and thought, oh God, who’s it going to be now?
The Hon. Sheila Digby (now the Hon. Mrs Moore) had been a shy and initially reluctant deb, but when the war began she threw herself into it with eager and sometimes excessive enthusiasm:
At the end of my Season, I said I wanted to get a job in London. I was told that my elder sister Pam, afterwards married to Randolph Churchill, was going to be in London and Mummy wouldn’t have two daughters in London. So I joined the ATS in August and was helping in the office in Dorchester. I got home one afternoon from the office and was out in a boat on the lake. The butler came to say I was wanted on the telephone, so thinking it was a beau, I ran like mad and out of breath picked up the phone to hear a voice say, ‘Digby, you have been called up. Report as soon as possible to the Barracks in Dorchester.’ That was three or four days before the war started.
I arrived to find that I was meant to feed about twenty Tommies in a gym that had been made over into a cookhouse mess, but no food. I was to go into town to get food. Having been used to four or five courses at home even if it was just the family, I went out and got a mass of food and the Tommies seemed delighted. No wonder! A few days later, I was called in and was asked what all the bills were! I then discovered that in the evenings they should just have had something like bread, cheese and tea.
Although Minterne, my home, was only ten miles from Dorchester, I wasn’t allowed to go home. I was billeted in an attic near the railway station. There was a window in the ceiling which they hadn’t been able to blackout, so I wasn’t allowed to turn on any lights! Luckily, I was only there ten days before going to Bovingdon Camp.
The sheltered privileged life I had known disappeared with a bang! But because of the strict discipline with which we had been brought up, I didn’t find it too difficult to adjust.
Lady Cathleen Eliot worked in a convalescent home, where she had to cook for eighty people. ‘It was very good experience,’ she says drily. It was near Sir Archibald Mclndoe’s East Grinstead Hospital where, in a pioneering unit, he rebuilt the faces of young airmen whose features had melted when their planes crashed or caught fire. His techniques of skin grafting enabled many people to resume normal lives who otherwise would have had to withdraw behind masks and closed curtains. Part of the job of rehabilitating these young men lay in teaching them to confront ordinary people – for although the techniques of plastic surgery were making huge advances, they were very far from perfect. Lady Cathleen used to take these young convalescents with their still-raw faces to the theatre, or to the West End for dinner and dancing. It must have been an ordeal for her, too.
Barbara McNeill, the deb whose dance at Dutton Homestall was one of the very last of the Season, also worked at East Grinstead, nursing in the uniform of the Red Cross. It was while she was there that – by the lottery of billeting – she re-encountered Michael Astor, with whom she had danced and chatted casually during the Season. With the urgency that often characterized such wartime relationships, they married just two months later. Theirs was one of the marriages that was not to last.
One of the hardest things to comprehend about these years is how much fun people still managed to have. It was perfectly possible to have a job that was dirty or nasty – like factory work – or harrowing, like nursing, or physically gruelling, like being a Landgirl; and yet at the end of the day to change into what were called ‘gladrags’ and revert to a world of glamour and gaiety. The girls – most of whom were still, after all, under twenty – would drink and dance half the night away before returning at dawn to go back on duty. Anne Douglas-Scott-Montagu – hard at work with the Red Cross – played hard too:
We had a good deal of fun in the war. It’s no good pretending we didn’t. People would come back on leave and they’d ring up frightfully late in the evening, you might be going to bed, and they’d say, ‘I’ve just got back – come out with me.’ And you’d get dressed again. Get out of bed, put all your make-up on, and off you’d go. Dinner at the Berkeley was one of the places, or sometimes dinner at the 400, dancing through till the early hours of the morning.
And of course eating out was very cheap during the war. Five shillings was the maximum you could pay, and they never allowed a table charge. You were allowed to pay for a roll and butter, I think, extra to the five shillings, and coffee ; but otherwise five shillings was the maximum you could spend in a restaurant on any sort of meal. Amazing what they produced for that, too. This went on all through the war, all through the bombing. Oh yes, you got up in the morning; but I didn’t have to be in my Red Cross office in Wilton Crescent till half-past nine unless there was some sort of an emergency, and half-past nine is not so early. So I used to go off on my bicycle to work, having been dancing till perhaps four in the morning. It’s amazing what you can do when you’re only eighteen !
In this respect the Second World War was very like the First. Soldiers home on leave packed a frenzied whirl of West End night life into their brief respite from fighting. The 400 Club and the Embassy were as popular as they had been during the Season; only now the young crowd that thronged there had suddenly grown much older, more independent and worldly-wise. Inevitably, sexual standards were relaxed, and not just because chaperones disappeared as war arrived. People who knew they might never see each other again often saw little point in waiting for a wedding night that might never happen. The young women no longer felt themselves to be children, subject to their parents’ discipline and rules. The work they were doing – sometimes paid work – made them separate individuals, people in their own right, and as such they made their own decisions about whether or not to sleep with the men they loved.
A great meeting place in those days for a drink before dinner was the old Berkeley [says Christian Grant]. It’s now been pulled down and turned into offices, but it used to be opposite the Ritz, on the corner by a tube station that has also now disappeared but used to be called Down Street. One met in a sort of funny long passage, it wasn’t like a proper room but just a long bar where all the before-dinner drinks went on and everyone sat around talking and being jolly. Everyone used to head there at six o’clock and you could be certain of meeting friends there.
Knowing that it was sure to be full of people dizzy with cocktails and laughter and the latest gossip, it was here that Airey Neave – Rosamund’s brother – arrived after his sensational escape from Colditz. Christian Grant remembers:
Suddenly the door from the street burst open and in came Airey Neave. The only way I can describe it is to say that it was like in old pantomimes when the devil used to shoot up through a trap door from underneath the stage in a puff of smoke … well, he came in like that. None of us even knew he had escaped, and his arrival had the same sort of explosive quality. You can imagine: he’d just got back to England – and the whole room just erupted in amazement and joy that he’d just sort of walked in.
Ronnie Kershaw remembers the 400 Club as a haven from the war:
We went to the 400 rather a lot, right through to 1942/3. It did very well, the 400 – kept up the feel of the old place. And the girls, too: they managed to look glamorous, in spite of clothing coupons, right through the war.’ Lord Cromer too was struck by the sudden changes at that time:
In the first year of the war there were no parties as such, but people were looking for amusement and gaiety and so on, but in a different kind of way – by going to nightclubs or what have you. It was a very gay time. And it suddenly became much more sophisticated – particularly the girls, who were no longer sheltered children just out of the schoolroom. They were working with the war effort, in the wrns or in aircraft factories or whatever.
Working in an aircraft factory is precisely what Christian Grant was doing. Her family home in Scotland had been scheduled as an auxiliary hospital, but after six months during which she sat there and nothing happened, she got bored waiting for patients who never arrived:
So I thought, I must get where the action is, and so I came down to London and got a job in an aircraft factory, making heavy bombers. The factory was on a direct Underground line to Piccadilly, and so one left one’s factory bench, still in dungarees, and was instantly in the Ritz bar – well, in half an hour – so it was all very jolly. Until everybody started getting killed.
Marigold Charrington had done some Red Cross training before war began, so she went to nurse at Basingstoke Hospital, near her parents’ home.
We had a lot of the casualties from Dunkirk. They were brought straight there with terrific burns, so there I was at eighteen, really flung into it. We coped – how did we cope? – because we had to; and we’d been trained just to carry on. But in any case we were so busy, there wasn’t any time to think about how you felt. After all, it was much worse for the men. I remember hearing that my cousin, Christopher Jeffreys, had been killed at Dunkirk, and we were all overwhelmed. A neighbour said, ‘Marigold, you musn’t take things so hard: you must try not to mind so much.’ But you did. I don’t think you talked about it nearly as much as people do nowadays – in fact I don’t think I talked at all – but how could you not mind? I always minded.
No wonder that, as Madeleine Turnbull said, ‘You got a terrific sense of the insecurity of life. The Blitz did that too, because places you’d been dancing in would suddenly disappear.’
One of the most traumatic casualties of the Blitz was the Café de Paris, which was bombed on the night of 8 March 1941. It was crowded with people enjoying themselves, confident that no bomb could penetrate 80 feet underground. They were wrong. Just before ten o’clock, when the dance floor was packed and every table was taken, a 501b land-mine came through the ceiling and blew up right in front of the rostrum where Snakehips Johnson’s band was in full swing. Snakehips was killed, as were thirty-three other people, and over a hundred people were wounded. Helen Vlasto was nursing in Gosport at the time, but she heard news of the bombing:
There was much said at the time of ghoulish grovelling among the dead and wounded by opportunists looting jewellery and evening bags by candle-light. I can just remember thinking of all those ethereal, perfectly brought up and turned out young people cut down while enjoying a romantic evening out in all their finery. There were touching announcements in the Deaths column in The Times: ‘died in all her glory’ and the like.
People can adapt to anything, especially when they are young, and in the Blitz, they even managed to adapt to the threat of bombs: and to find ingenious ways to deal with their worst fears. Anne Douglas-Scott-Montagu had a horror of being disfigured by flying glass:
I was living in lodgings in somebody’s flat in Cadogan Square and I had a very long French window at the end of my bed. So for quite a long time I had an extra mattress on top of the bed, which I’d propped up on four enormous Monarch polish tins to raise it off the floor; and I put another mattress under the bed and slept on that quite happily for a very long time. I wasn’t, sort of, I don’t think I was frightened of bombs, but I was frightened of the glass.
It is a tribute to the courage of these young women (one cannot any longer call them girls) that they overcame a lifetime’s conditioning as creatures of leisure and luxury, for whom a day’s hunting was hard work and a night’s dancing was exhausting, and threw themselves with efficiency and zest into the real rigours of war work. As we have seen, Lady Cathleen Eliot – who could not boil an egg and would scarcely have known how to make toast without a kitchen maid to cut the bread and Nanny to hand her the toasting fork – cooked for eighty people. Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, whose uncle did not know how many rooms his house had – indeed, who hardly knew how many houses he lived in – worked as a paid laboratory technician (donating all her wages to the hospital at the end of the war). Their upbringings, which had cramped them in so many ways, forcing them into a mould in accordance with their parents’ expectations and the limited role which their class allocated to women, stood them in good stead in one respect. It gave them a clear-cut sense of duty. Armed with little more than this – no practical experience, few ordinary everyday skills, little knowledge of dealing with people outside their own kind – the former debs embarked upon war work with fervour and dedication – and delight.
It was a liberation [says one], it set me free. If it hadn’t been for the war I would never have had the chance to find out what I could do – or the satisfaction of doing it. It sounds wicked to say it, but the war was a godsend to me. I never really came alive during the Season, which was a disappointment because it was something I’d wanted to do ; but the war made me come alive, all right. Never looked back. I’ve worked all my life since then, been all over the world and met people, run my own business – I could never have done that without the war. We all lived our own lives terrifically after that.
It comes as the greatest surprise to learn that, despite this evidence that the young women of 1940 were more capable of taking on responsibility than they had ever been credited with, nevertheless the dauntless mothers of the next batch of debutantes managed to organize a Season in the first year of the war. It was not like the last Season of peace – but then, nothing ever was – but it was a Season nevertheless. Perhaps the second greatest surprise is to find Mary Churchill, Churchill’s younger daughter, cropping up as one of the debs that year. In spite of the fact that her father was First Lord of the Admiralty, and she herself had been serving in the Red Cross and WVS and was about to join the ATS; in spite of all this, Mary Churchill curtseyed to the cake at Queen Charlotte’s Ball that year. Esmé Harmsworth (now Lady Cromer) remembers the occasion vividly:
Queen Charlotte’s Ball was held in the great room at Grosvenor House as was customary. The debs, all dressed in white, processed down the stairs to curtsey to Lady Hamond-Graeme (Lady Ham ‘n’ Eggs) and the cake, then dispersing to their separate dinner-tables to dine. Just after we were all seated, a sudden hush swept through the room. Mary Churchill rose to her feet and ran to greet her father with a hug ; at the same time everyone stood, clapped and cheered: for it was the very evening that Winston Churchill became Prime Minister.
The Season was truncated, of course – though not, apparently, as much as had been expected. Esmé Harms worth again:
Menus for dinners and dances were still no problem. Strawberries were plentiful as was champagne and smoked salmon ; cream was still obtainable. Restaurants still produced excellent food, if possibly with less to choose from. By 1941 there was a deterioration, much less on the menus, with ever increasing shortages as war continued. There were some charity dinner dances in London and a few small country dances as well, though nothing as large or as grand as in 1939. Nevertheless, we all wore our best ball dresses. The men, of course, looked far smarter in their ‘blues’ than they ever did in tails. ‘Blues’ was the evening dress for the Household Brigade. Others wore green, dark red or whatever, but they all looked splendid. There were also far more men available as partners, most being stationed in England and in training for the rigours to come, and therefore quite eager for a dance or any form of party or diversion.
After Dunkirk in June 1940, small parties continued. Dinners in private houses or restaurants would be followed by a visit to a nightclub or two … chiefly the 400 and then the Nuthouse.
The war, which had already begun to affect the freedom allowed to young women, even altered the conditions surrounding debutantes of seventeen or eighteen emerging for their first Season:
Chaperones had become completely outdated and, from the beginning of the war, were suddenly considered unnecessary. As time went on groups became smaller, a foursome, and then just a couple, as a girl would be escorted out alone by an admirer. But there was a new limitation. Petrol was in short supply, so any mileage outside London had to be carefully worked out. Rationing came a little later: five gallons for an eight-horse-power car per month. Later in the war there was none at all for the private motorist.
Even newly emerged, seventeen- or eighteen-year-old debs were not exempt from the desire, and in due course the necessity, to do war work: ‘For myself, I had two jobs that year. The first was working in the canteen at the Beaver Club (which was a club for Canadian soldiers) as a washer-up ; then subsequently as a filing clerk in the prisoner-of-war department at St James’s Palace. The latter was vastly preferable, for washing up endless mustard pots after dancing the night away was really no cure for a hangover.’ Like the debs of 1939, Esmé Harmsworth too is nostalgic for her youthful Season: though it must have been a strange, double life she lived, swinging between glamour and drudgery, party-going and danger, the soft lights of the dance floor and the searchlights in the skies:
We still wore long dresses on our evenings out, and sometimes just picked up our skirts and ran in our dancing shoes over broken glass to find a safer refuge like the underground ballroom at the Mayfair Hotel from the perils of the Mirabelle with its glass ceiling, while a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square and the scene was lit by searchlights. We were young and carefree and romance filled the air in spite of all the dangers. There was no seeking greater security in a squalid London tube shelter for us when the bombs fell.
But the war, when it was over, had put an end to the Season in its original form. The young women who grew up in the 1930s had tasted freedom and, while it might be tarter and stronger than champagne and strawberries, they had acquired it and could not forget it.
The post-war years of austerity and rationing changed Society, too. Once again, as had happened after the First World War, families found themselves impoverished by the deaths of their sons, the draining away of money in death duties and taxes, and the gradual decay of great houses whose upkeep many could no longer afford. Equally significant, the Labour governments further undermined the automatic link between ownership of ancestral property and the right to rule. The upper class still existed, but it was no longer a ruling class. This does not mean that its influence and patronage disappeared altogether: it had not then and it has not today. But the process, begun in the 1920s and 1930s in the aftermath of the First World War, whereby the middle class gradually infiltrated and then monopolized the formerly exclusive and controlling Establishment of the upper class, continued after the Second World War, too. This transfer of power from the landed classes to what became known as the new meritocracy meant that, in due course, the Season was little more than a fiction, a stylized aping of the past. When the monarch was no longer a source of patronage, requiring the ambitious to flock to Court to seek his favour, and the aristocracy no longer controlled other great offices, one of the main attractions to the annual gathering in London lost its magnetic pull.
Viewed from the perspective of half a century later, the last Season of peace seems remote and fantastical. Its few months could almost be likened to the jewel-encrusted minuets performed by the denizens of Versailles before the French Revolution. The debutantes of 1939 were the last to inherit a world whose extravagance and luxury were not questioned and needed no justification, a world in which the privilege they were born to was taken for granted.
Court presentations ended in 1958, Queen Charlotte’s Ball in 1976 (though plans are under way for it to be revived in 1989). One hundred and seventy-two girls ‘came out’ in 1988; but the words ‘debutante’ and ‘coming out’ no longer have any real meaning. These young women are not being launched into Society, for most of today’s eighteen-year-olds have been enjoying a catholic and unsupervised social life since their early teens. There is still a number of girls – a small number – brought up in the country who have gone to boarding school and whose social life has been neglected. Perhaps they are too timid, or their parents too strict, to enjoy the freedom of their contemporaries, and now they need to meet young men in some socially approved forum. One gossip columnist said recently that the Season was still ‘a very superior dating agency’; and the shy and unsophisticated will always need a bit of a shove into the adult world.
Society – and the word no longer refers exclusively to the upper classes – barely notices the so-called debutantes of the 1980s. No great occasion marks their launching, extravagant parties have become a rarity (there was only one in 1988), and they curtsey neither to the monarch nor even to a cake. Those who do decide to marry will choose their own partners and need pay no more attention to their parents’ views and ambitions on the matter than any other girl ; though a title still has certain attractions. Whereas the nuances of family and lineage have lost much of their significance, snobbery will always exist. Few except the titled themselves any longer know the difference between one degree of ladyship and another. A fourteenth marchioness and the wife of a loyal Tory back-bencher rewarded with a knighthood are today much of a muchness, if the latter’s accent passes scrutiny.
The obsessional curiosity and hero-worship that used to be focused upon the comings and goings of the aristocracy have all but vanished. Even in the gossip columns they now rub shoulders with stars of show business and errant sportsmen or entrepreneurs. Their sexual peccadilloes receive widespread publicity, where once they were sheltered within the bastions of their own kind. Money and celebrity now command the adulation once accorded to rank. When did the public last queue to see a Society bride emerge resplendent from St Margaret’s, Westminster, or stand on chairs to catch a glimpse of some well-born beauty?
Instinctive deference to the upper classes has gone ; the ability to afford retinues of servants has all but vanished, along with the desire to serve. Many of those who do still keep staff employ Portuguese, Spanish or Filipino couples. If they have English servants, these tend to be aged – sometimes in their seventies or even eighties. Nannies are usually very young girls who expect luxurious perks like a ‘nursery car’, who may call their employers by their Christian names and who often eat with the family. Governesses are extinct.
In half a century the world that the debutantes of 1939 were brought up and brought out to expect has changed – yet their world has not changed beyond recognition. They have kept many links with their past, inherited both material and personal attributes from their parents. Most still live in beautiful houses lined with fine old furniture and family portraits. Beyond their walls stretch ordered English gardens edged with herbaceous borders and lawns of that particular lustre which takes decades, if not centuries, to achieve. Now in their late sixties, these women have known grief and experienced problems, but seldom poverty. Their manners remain formal, their courtesy is immaculate and kind, their voices are confident. They still support the Conservative Party, though some may have reservations about Mrs Thatcher’s version, and prefer that of Macmillan, or Home, or Butler. They read The Times or the Daily Telegraph, although a few are thinking of switching to the Independent. They sent their children to public schools and have helped, where necessary, to ensure that their grandchildren were educated privately, too. They have learned to cook and make beds – tasks that would have been unthinkable when they were young – but few have to do these jobs daily. Most keep at least one or two staff and the great families still keep great establishments.
The world around them has changed: many believe for the better. In the 1960s when their daughters were growing up, some defied their mothers’ hopes by refusing to be presented. They do not disapprove of this. Those who have granddaughters reaching adulthood in the 1980s often spoke proudly of the universities and colleges they were attending or the professions they planned to enter. Not one referred to a granddaughter who would be ‘coming out’. The bitterest regret of many debs of 1939 is that they never went on to higher education – but they were given no choice in the matter, for a clever girl was a ‘blue-stocking’ and who would marry her? Their strongest criticism of today’s young is that they have such deplorable manners: no consideration; never write thank-you letters ; no deference to their elders ; don’t lower their voices or their radios or give up a seat. Their greatest worry concerns the widespread use of drugs. They do not necessarily deplore the sexual freedom of today’s generation. On the contrary, some expressed relief, almost envy, and more than one had come to the conclusion (based on their own or their contemporaries’ experience) that virgin marriages were not a good thing.
Many became nostalgic when recalling their Season but few were sentimental. They are glad they were there, glad they had it, but realistic and hardly even regretful that the world of their parents has gone. Its gradual disappearance over the last fifty years began for them during the war – but that same war that set them free also freed the people upon whose acceptance of a lowly station in life the privileges and comfort of the upper class had depended. J.B.Priestley, in one of his immensely popular wartime broadcasts, said in 1940 that England was fighting, ‘not so that we can go back to anything: there’s nothing that really worked that we can go back to’. The aim was for ‘new and better homes, real homes, a decent chance at last’.
The last half-century has seen – said one aristocrat, who did not wish to be quoted by name – nothing less than a social revolution.
The Second World War completely altered our way of life: we’ve lived very simply since then. Of course I regret it in some ways. In 1939 we lived on a magic carpet. One gave orders then – to staff, people in shops – and people carried them out, for your pleasure and comfort. Now, we have to try and fit in with their convenience. In those days before the war there was nothing wrong with being a playboy; it didn’t matter if you enjoyed yourself and did little else. Today, one’s conscience simply wouldn’t allow it. Values were correct then, but standards left a lot to be desired. We had very good servants, totally loyal – yet they weren’t pampered. They slept in awful conditions. I have three pairs of hands to look after me today, and they’re wonderful; but they expect their own television, telephone, and they live in great comfort.
But I don’t think the loss of that old Society has meant the loss of anything very valuable or important. It was very vapid, you know ; arrogant and vapid. Now, there’s been a levelling down. I have friends today in all walks of life – fifty years ago that would have been impossible. Today we’re all classless. There’s snobbery, of course; there’ll always be snobbery; we’re all snobs. But it used to be said that the English loved a lord ; today it would be truer to say that the English love a pop star !
It is a warm summer evening. A figure in her late sixties is strolling through a garden ebullient with flowers. Two large dogs amble after her, flopping down to pant each time she stops. She carries a pair of secateurs with which she deadheads the flowers into a trug, and she bends down occasionally to pull out a weed. A tall old copper beech and spreading cedar throw slanting shadows across the lawn. She wears soft, comfortable clothes and although her bearing is firm and upright she does look, at this moment, as though she might be talking to herself.
Across the wide lawns an old house basks in the last of the sunshine. French windows open on to a stone-flagged terrace, where a group of people sitting on scrolled cast-iron seats is gathered around a tray of drinks. Below them, a wide, shallow flight of steps leads down to the lawn. A young girl, bare-armed and bare-legged, calls out, ‘Shall I bring you a drink, Granny, or are you going to join us?’ Her grandmother beckons, and the girl runs to her across the cool, springy grass.
‘You know, Sophie, I expect you’re right about us. We were ignorant and selfish and spoilt; we saw nothing wrong in idleness. But I tell you this. We did our trivial things in the most satisfactory way !’