It is customary today to describe someone female who is no longer at school as a ‘young woman’, in deference to feminism, and in recognition of the worldliness and independence of today’s school-leavers. In 1939, the young products of the schoolroom who were about to embark on their debutante year would certainly have been described as ‘girls’: and most members of their society would have called them ‘gels’ and not ‘gurls’. Many of them cling to the same usage today. ‘I’m having an afternoon of bridge with the gels,’ they will say, referring to a group of people who are in their late sixties. They are uncomfortable at hearing one of their generation described as a ‘woman’ since to them the word has condescending implications, as in ‘my cleaning woman’ or ‘the little woman who makes my dresses’. In 1939 they never thought of themselves as women, and would have found the term ‘young ladies’ patronizing. Bachelor uncles ingratiated themselves by saying, ‘Now, young lady…’
They had the same problem in describing their escorts. The term ‘young man’ was also patronizing: housemaids had a ‘young man’, debutantes never. The generation before them had sometimes referred to ‘my best young man’ to indicate a favoured suitor, but by 1939 the expression had fallen into disuse. ‘Boyfriend’, whatever Sandy Wilson might think, was another word scarcely ever used. Male escorts were sometimes called ‘debs’ delights’ in 1939, but the expression was slightly pejorative: the equivalent, perhaps, of ‘hooray Henry’ in present-day speech. ‘There were certainly “debs’ delights”,’ recalls one debutante of 1939, ‘but they were not always very nice men. They were called that because they seemed to go to all the dances.’ Another corroborates that impression:
The young men who never missed a free dinner and went to everything – the ‘debs’ delights’ – had, of course, to make themselves agreeable to the hostesses and debs or they would have been dropped from the ‘List’. The young men one so hoped to see, as one struggled up the staircase to the tune of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, hardly ever turned up.
‘Gels’ and ‘chaps’: these were innocent, friendly, sexless words to describe young people who had as yet no maturity, no separate sense of self. They were the offspring of their parents; pawns in a courtly game of nodding and smiling, backing and advancing, curtseying and holding doors open and at all times deferring to the wishes of the adult world they stood – literally – to inherit. How different, how arbitrarily, unfairly different from the child of parents advertising in the Personal column of The Times on 2 May 1939: ‘Jewish parents in Bohemia ask asylum for their boy; healthy, well-educated, age 11.’ What did he inherit?
When it comes to describing the parents of the girls and chaps who dined and danced the summer away, there is no shortage of words. Names, titles, honours, initials ; they were landowners and aristocrats, politicians and judges, soldiers and administrators, bankers and entrepreneurs. Their names could have been found, sometimes in the identical form, over the previous centuries. They were the English upper class in microcosm.
Taking a random sample* of forty-five debutantes from those presented in 1939, one gets the following breakdown. Seventeen had fathers who were peers – that is to say, dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts or barons, men who were hereditary noblemen and members of the House of Lords. One girl’s mother was a countess and another was a baroness in her own right, though in both cases without the entitlement to a seat in the Lords. A further four girls had fathers who were baronets – a hereditary title, passed down from father to eldest son, but not carrying with it the mark of nobility or the right to sit in the Lords. Finally, there were six girls whose fathers had been knighted ; leaving just sixteen whose fathers had no title at all, and even among these their mothers often came from noble families.
In 1938 there were 750 members of the House of Lords (excluding bishops, archbishops and peers of the blood royal, as Debrett of that year called them reverently). It was not like today’s Upper House, swollen to double that number with life peers. Furthermore, in 1939 Roman Catholic peers were still listed in the index to the House of Lords in italics, to distinguish them from members of the Church of England. (This usage was the last vestige of discrimination against Catholics in the nobility. Until 1829, Catholic peers were not even allowed to take their seats in the Upper House.) They were an intimate elite, whose titles dated back centuries, occasionally six or even seven centuries, guarding their precedence jealously according to the date of their creation. If not quite as rigid as the Almanach de Gotha, it was none the less an intensely proud and self-conscious community. It would not lightly surrender the rank and lineage of its daughters.
The debutantes fall, then, into three groups. Nineteen girls had at least one parent from the hereditary nobility, with another four whose fathers were baronets. The fathers of six more were members of the knighthood. Only sixteen had fathers who were commoners and some of them were Honourables, the sons of peers. A mere handful were middle class, and they, of course, were rich.
Of the forty-five debutantes making up this sample, ten were Lady So-and-so, meaning that they were the daughters of dukes, marquesses or earls; while another nine were Honourables – the daughters of viscounts or barons. Yet even here there is an anomaly, since there was one more girl, a plain ‘Miss’ in 1939, who was destined to become a countess in her own right. Twenty, therefore, of the girls bore an outward sign of their nobility. (Not that anyone in their circle would have committed the solecism of introducing a girl as ‘the Honourable So-and-so’. Honourable was only for envelopes, just another of those tiny meaningless rules which defined you as coming within or without the magic circle.)
How did these girls’ fathers occupy themselves? Six out of the forty-five were – or had been – Members of Parliament. One debutante’s mother took over from her husband at his death, and became mp for his constituency in 1927; while another’s son eventually went on to become an mp in his turn. This startlingly high percentage – over 13 per cent – confirms the belief that the parents of those who did the Season were not merely upper class, but were in a very real and active sense powerful members of the Establishment. With nineteen fathers sitting in the House of Lords, and six in the House of Commons, twenty-five out of a notional forty-five were actively concerned with the government of the country. (Notional because, of the forty-five fathers, five had already died. So the figure is even more dramatic: twenty-five out of forty, or 62 per cent.) In addition to this, another five were jps and three more were lords-lieutenant of counties. Of the remainder, most were high-ranking army or naval officers, two were press barons, two were courtiers and one was a banker.
It is much harder to discover information about their mothers. Three or four were divorced (two of those were American) and had remarried ; the number being, if anything, surprisingly low, since their first marriages would have been under pressure of the First World War, or in its immediate aftermath. Three were dead, the daughter’s dance being given by her aunt, or her two grandmothers or, in one case, her father. The reference books divulge the mothers’ parents, where they were of the nobility, but reveal very little else about them. None had a degree. None, it is surely safe to assume, had a job, or ever contemplated working for a living – an attitude they passed on to their daughters. Born to be wives and mothers, their job was to marry well and, in due course, to marry their daughters well. Whatever skills this required, most of them managed it. Only three of the forty-five debutantes in the sample have not married in the last fifty years.
In the four months between the New Year and the beginning of the Season proper, mothers got together for a ceaseless round of meetings (known as ‘Mums’ lunches’ or ‘Mums’ teas’ or ‘Mums’ cocktail parties’) to co-ordinate the coming-out dances. The most fortunate girls were the ones whose mothers already had a wide circle of friends: dating back to their own Season ; local neighbours ; connected with their husbands’ activities as mp or country squire; or, best of all, other family members. Any of those who had sons or daughters of the right age would be rounded up to form the nucleus of each mother’s list. These lists would then be exchanged, so that already in January and February each deb would slot into a group of her contemporaries. If the girl – who at this stage was probably still at a finishing school abroad – were well connected and seemed likely to prove popular and attractive, other mothers would solicit her company to meet their own daughter; and thus girls’ lunches, teas and cocktail parties were arranged for March and April, so that they could get to know one another.
The great arbiter of dances and the ‘List’ was Lady Royds, about whom Madeleine Turnbull wrote in detail:
She was a very dominant figure in the Seasons from 1937 to 1939. Her husband had been an Admiral, and after he retired he became one of the Assistant Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police Force. (In those days, all the senior police officers in London were amateurs, not professionals as they are now.) She was built on very generous lines, and her face was deeply creased, rather like an English bulldog. But if you gazed carefully through the creases you could discern two kindly, twinkling, and very perceptive eyes. She was very, very nice ; but very formidable.
Lady Royds’ first task was to gather together the mothers of prospective debs, who might not yet know one another, so that they could plan the Season. Mothers could agree to give a joint dance; they could work out a timetable, so that dances would not coincide with other major evening occasions; and they could pinpoint whose were likely to be the most sought-after dances of the summer, and ensure that their girl was invited. There was much jostling for position. Certain dates were more favoured than others. July was a bit late for all but the grandest dances. Nor would a girl choose, if she could avoid it, to have her dance the night before, or the night after, a very spectacular ball, for fear of comparisons. Lady Royds’ tea-parties would begin in January, and within a month or six weeks the shape of the coming Season would be broadly determined.
The first Mum’s tea-party my Mother went to in January [said Madeleine Turnbull] was at Lady Royds’, and there she met Mrs Prescott Sandilands who, eleven years later, became my mother-in-law !
My elder brother was always being rung up by hostesses who literally begged him to come to their dinner-parties. He was rather grand about it all, and refused any but the most exotic or interesting invitations.
By late February the List would have been distributed, and invitations sent out to those debs who were family friends, school friends, or deemed desirable for all the usual reasons, with young men ticked off from the List to act as their partners. This meant that mothers and daughters had to invite dozens, if not hundreds, of young people whom they had never met. People unknown at the beginning of the Season had, however, become quite familiar by the end.
All this involved the mothers in a hectic whirl of activity. Dates would be pencilled in and invitations despatched, each to be listed, answered and ticked off. The protocol for these invitations was rigid and invariable. Invitation cards were always embossed; always white; and the stiffer the better. Replies were always phrased in the same terms: Miss Lucy So-and-so thanks Lady So-and-so very much for her kind invitation to luncheon on such-and-such a date, and has much pleasure in accepting. Nobody would think of deviating from this formula.
The initial flurry of lunches meant that the pattern of the Season emerged very early in the year, as the ‘best’ dates were booked and caterers and dressmakers, florists and wine-merchants secured for the evening. Then the big invitation for the main dance could be ordered, written and sent out, with each deb’s mother sending and receiving hundreds.
Young men to partner the girls were the perennial problem. Once brothers and cousins and local friends and brothers’ contemporaries from school or university, regiment or City had been roped in, there was still a shortfall. This deficiency was made up, as far as possible, from private lists kept by some of the more experienced mothers who had already put previous daughters through their Season ; and also by the two or three self-appointed doyennes of the debutante world, whose knowledge of young eligibles was jealously guarded and sparingly shared.
All this demanded considerable organizational skills from the mothers. Some – like Susan Meyrick’s mother, Lady Meyrick – engaged social secretaries to handle the work. Those who did not, or were not good at it themselves, especially if they lived in the country and would not be based in London till April or even May, found their daughters very much handicapped as a result. The debs for whom the Season presented the greatest ordeal were those who embarked on it knowing almost no one. For them, the terror of the first few dances, as they entered a ballroom to find a sea of strange faces, must have been paralysing. Lady Mary Pakenham, a deb from an earlier Season, endured just such an ordeal, chiefly because her parents lived in Ireland, so her contacts before the Season had been limited. First, the dinner-party before the dance:
off I went to the house of some total stranger whom I would find standing in the middle of a drawing-room full of Italian furniture. A semi-circle of guests stood behind her twiddling their fingers and scraping their feet. There was generally a rather sheepish daughter pretending that the party was nothing to do with her, just a harmless whim of her mother’s, and a son who arrived very late with his hair on end, and a father who would have been jovial if he had dared. The men had little tickets given to them in the hall to say who they were going to take down to dinner, but the girls were kept in the dark until the last exciting moment when, after watching more highly prized men giving their arms elsewhere, the spottiest of all advanced unwillingly with the encouraging words, ‘It seems I’ve got to take down you.’1
Worse was to come. That was just dinner, where with luck a deb was in the company of only about twenty people. At the dance she had to brave several hundred.
Other debutantes may have been as shy as I was, but I don’t believe there was ever one who was more so. I used to hear my teeth chatter as I went through the hall and, when I sat out, I had to hold my knees to prevent their knocking together, keeping the other hand up to my face to conceal a muscle that ticked in my cheek.2
In every Season there were bound to be some girls who were paralysed by shyness. The trouble is that fifty years later, most of them have forgotten it, or they think they must have exaggerated the extent of their terror. Ann Schuster (now Mrs Archie Mackenzie) has not:
I was so frightened myself that I felt a great bond with anybody like that. I can remember beginning to smoke then, and my hands shaking – but it did give you something to do. And it was just as bad before going in to each dinner-party. Then, you’d get settled in and perhaps even have a conversation with the men on either side of you, and then suddenly it was about ten o’clock and the whole business would start up again when you went on to the dances. You had two ordeals, if you were shy, to get through. Then when you got to the dance, you had to reorientate because some of the men at the dinner-party – not many, but some – would be fairly shameless in deserting their dinner partners and meeting various girlfriends. Therefore one or two girls would be left without partners, which was very embarrassing for them. When you went to the cloakroom there would be people taking refuge there. I even remember one who had torn her dress deliberately so that she could go to the cloakroom and have it repaired.
I found it an ordeal, meeting a lot of strangers, after having lived in the country with my friends around and my animals, suddenly having to be tidy, having all these evening dresses, and trying to sort of become a personality: a new and quite different sort of person.
All the mothers’ machinations in the first few months of the year were designed to avoid, as far as was humanly possible, their daughters having to endure such torments as these. A few girls stood head and shoulders above the fray by reason of their beauty, their zest for it all or their unusually noble birth. The rest needed all the protection their mothers could arrange to ensure that, even if miserable, at least they had allies with whom to be miserable.
By the late 1930s an unofficial ‘little Season’ had grown up, starting early in the New Year with Hunt Balls and other country events. The beginning of May signalled the start of the London Season; elsewhere it had already been in full swing ever since Christmas. This was especially so in 1939, because much of that summer was taken up by the royal tour of the United States and Canada. This meant that King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were out of the country from 6 May until 22 June. The presentation of debutantes at Court had thus begun as early as March, when there were three Courts – on 9, 15 and 16 March – followed by another two much later, on 12 and 13 July after the royal couple’s return.
Edward VIII, during the brief period between his two roles as Prince of Wales and Duke of Windsor, had scarcely bothered to conceal his boredom with the elaborate formalities of presentation to the monarch. On 21 July 1936, at an afternoon reception in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, he sat looking glum and petulant while rain threatened and a procession of mackintoshed debs made their curtseys before him. When the skies finally opened, he hurried inside and let it be known that all those who had not yet reached the dais could consider themselves presented. Mothers were scandalized; daughters disappointed; but the King was relieved to have been spared the final hour or so of this tedious chore.
After his Abdication on 11 December, the great publicity machine whose job it is to invest the monarch with super-human qualities ground to an abrupt halt, reversed, and set off again purposefully on its task of glamorizing the new King George vi and his Queen. Chips Channon, the diarist and gossip of the thirties, had recorded less than a week earlier, The Duke of York is miserable, does not want the throne, and is imploring his brother to stay/ That much was common knowledge. Chips went on to say, ‘We must keep our King, until now the most popular man the Empire has ever known; but I wonder whether his selfishness and stupidity over this muddle do not really make him unfit to govern?’3 So they did: so indeed they did.
At first sight the new King and Queen were unpromising material. While it was true that she had charm and prettiness, a nice smile and a great desire to be liked, her husband was utterly unprepared for his role as head of a still-mighty Empire. Handicapped by a bad stutter, a nervous manner and a facial tic that betrayed tension in public, his only real asset was his sense of duty. Having once accepted that the Crown was a cup that would not pass from him, he embarked on the task of being as good a king and figurehead as his capacities allowed. By the end of his reign of just over fifteen years, he had won the love, and his wife the adoration, of his subjects.
It must have seemed impossibly difficult at the beginning. The King and Queen had been a home-loving, even domesticated couple, with their two delightful little daughters and their small (by royal standards) house in the grounds of Windsor Park, their corgis and labradors. Since their marriage they had not cultivated, or been much taken up by, Society and they lacked a loyal circle of staunch supporters to tide them over the first difficult months. One thing, however, was certain. George VI’s accession meant a welcome return to a British social circle and the old, upper-class conventions of entertainment and hospitality. Former friends of the exiled Duke (and now Duchess) of Windsor soon found that they were exiled from social favour; whereupon most of them did a rapid Vicar of Bray, forgot their disgraced princeling and turned with the prevailing wind. Society had been dominated for two decades by rich, smart, sometimes vulgarly ostentatious and decidedly American hostesses. Now their reign, too, was over. The loosening of mores and morals which had started during the First World War and had continued through the hysterical twenties was now decisively halted. The mood of Society – emphasized by the wholesomeness of the new royal family and underscored by growing fears of war – was one of rectitude. People continued to entertain lavishly ; but it was the lavishness of old family houses with old family retainers serving traditional English food on old family silver. Chaperonage was enforced again. The sharp chic of Mainbocher was out; the delicate charm of English dressmaking was back.
The new King and Queen learned their roles fast. George vi took lessons to overcome his stutter. They went on a successful royal tour to France in July 1938 where the Queen was dressed by Norman Hartnell and wore a truly dazzling selection of jewellery. They still made occasional mistakes. On 20 April 1938, the King sent Hitler the customary greetings telegram on the occasion of his forty-ninth birthday. He also wrote a personal letter from Balmoral that August, appealing to the German President ‘as one ex-serviceman to another’ (what touching, and misplaced, humility) to avoid the horrors of another world war. In the event, he was persuaded by Chamberlain to abandon the letter.4
On 15 March 1939, Hitler and his armies entered Prague and proclaimed to the world that Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist. On 1 April, Hitler said, in a speech at Wilhelmshaven:
We do not dream of waging war on other nations, subject, of course, to their leaving us in peace also. … But should anyone at any time show any desire to measure his strength against ours by force, then the German people will always be in a position and ready and determined to do the same !
At the end of this speech, most tellingly, Hitler stated: ‘There is no point in bringing about co-operation among nations, based upon permanent understanding, until this Jewish fission-fungus of peoples has been removed.’5 Three weeks later, on 20 April 1939, the King again sent a congratulatory telegram to Hitler, on his fiftieth birthday. This may have been protocol, but it was also unfortunate.
The ceremony began at 9.30 p.m., and preparing for it took the whole afternoon. Most former debs still speak of the occasion with breathless, rose-tinted awe. They describe queuing in the Mall (‘and of course everyone would crowd around your car and peer in at you, sitting there in your Prince of Wales feathers’); they speak deprecatingly of their own dress (‘one must have looked absurd’) and admiringly of the dresses of others; they murmur compliments about the King and Queen (‘they smiled so kindly at every single girl’). A great beauty of the Season says, ‘When I curtseyed, the King looked down the front of my dress !’ ; while another recalls being shocked to realize that he wore a heavy layer of make-up.
One deb gave a rollicking and wholly convincing account of her presentation, stipulating only that it should be quoted anonymously:
Oh my God, my actual presentation. It really was hilarious because there one was, utterly dolled up, gold lamé train and all. Mother and I sat in our car, in a queue in the Mall, in the pouring rain, looking like that, I ask you. And then one got there and eventually it came to one’s turn and one’s presenter went in first and there were the King and Queen, sitting on their thrones. We had to curtsey to one, get up, walk one and a half steps, bonk bonk bonk, and then curtsey to the other. Then get up and walk backwards out of the room, doing something with the damned train. You weren’t allowed to pick it up and throw it over your arm, of course – you had to go whip, whip [here she mimed kicking the train backwards] and one practised this till one was nearly blue in the face. Anyway, trust me, I was born clumsy. I managed the King, down I went – and when I say down, I mean it was really down, it wasn’t just a bobbity-boo, you had to sink to your very ankles. Down I went, got up – I managed that – and did my bonk bonk bonk, down I went again in front of the Queen. And as I went down, I heard – I knew it – my heel break off ! It did, it did; and all my friends said, trust me.
Another debutante wrote a very different account of her presentation ; equally accurate, but rather more serious. It is worth quoting in full because it conveys so well the atmosphere of half a century ago….
All my life, as far back as I can remember, my Mother had promised me that she would present me at Court when I reached the age of eighteen. I wore white satin, with a white satin court train lined with palest lily-of-the-valley leaf green, and carried a bouquet of white roses and lilies-of-the-valley (my favourite flowers). I had three Prince of Wales ostrich feathers on my head, with a long silk gauze veil hanging down behind. (This dress afterwards became my ‘best’ dress and was worn for many happy occasions – such as the Royal Caledonian Ball – and I still have my Court ostrich feathers, carefully kept in a box and labelled.) My darling Mother wore cream satin and a diamond tiara and Court ostrich feathers, and looked beautiful. Our dresses were specially made for us by BETA of Knightsbridge, which no longer exists, I am afraid. My Father wore full-dress naval uniform, complete with decorations and sword, and looked splendid.
Several friends came in to see us off, and we drove away just at 6.30 p.m. We had to drive round and round the Mall until the gates of the Palace were opened, with huge crowds staring into our cars and commenting loudly on the occupants !
Our car was the second car to pass into the courtyard of Buckingham Palace. It was strangely quiet in there, and we could not hear the traffic at all.
Then came a long wait, but there was plenty to watch – Beefeaters and King’s-Men-at-Arms arriving in horse-drawn carriages. At last it was time to drive up to the door. We left our evening cloaks in the car, so that we could go straight through and get seats in the Throne Room. There we sat and watched everyone arriving, and had time to admire the room itself.
The white walls were picked out in gold, and had tapestries hanging on them. At the far end was a red canopy with the profiles of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and in front of that were the two thrones. The middle of the floor was railed off for the Diplomatic Corps and all round the walls were red plush seats. A military band in the gallery played throughout.
It was a wonderful gathering, with the varied full-dress uniforms and decorations of the diplomatic, naval and military men present, and the beautifully dressed women. Never before had I seen so many well-dressed women gathered together, although they were almost outshone by the brilliance of the uniforms.
Suddenly came the roll of drums, and everyone stood up for the National Anthem, as the Royal Procession entered. The King and Queen were preceded by bowing attendants, and followed by Ladies-in-Waiting. They took their places on the thrones, the Princess Royal next to the Queen and the Duchess of Gloucester next to her.
We moved slowly down the long corridor and, at the end, handed in our cards with our names written on, while our trains were taken from over our arms and laid down by the attendants.
Then our names were announced, in clear tones, before we made our curtseys. The Queen smiled graciously at us all. The King wore the red and gold uniform of a field marshal, and the Queen wore a gold dress with a wonderful jewelled train. After making our Court Curtseys we passed on, and lined up in the corridor, where we were joined by my Father. Thus we were able to watch everyone else paying their homage and proceeding down.
When the last Presentation was over, the National Anthem was played, and the King and Queen proceeded slowly down the Throne Room to the Banquet Hall, smiling and inclining between rows of bowing subjects.
Then we went down to supper, where we drank delicious iced coffee out of G.R. IV cups and ate excellent savouries off ‘Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense’ plates. We met a great many friends, and my Father introduced me to a great many people he knew. We walked about and admired the beautiful State Rooms, the paintings, and the china in cabinets, to say nothing of the wonderful uniforms !
Eventually we went down to take our places and to hear our names called out as our cars arrived. We climbed in and drove straight to Lafayette’s to be photographed. Lafayette and other court photographers stayed open all night. We were sustained with hot coffee, but even so, were almost too tired to stand ! As we came out, there were crowds of women gathered outside to watch us. I feel very honoured to have seen the most brilliant Court in Europe.
The value of this account is that most of it was written down just a few days after the Presentation had taken place, hence the wealth of detail. Every girl must have performed exactly the same steps, felt the same sense of occasion, and known that henceforth she was officially ‘out’.
Many insist that the Season of 1939 was in some way special, different from other Seasons of that decade and certainly different from any that followed it. Mrs Christopher Bridge, née Dinah Brand and niece of Lady Astor, said:
It was an extraordinary Season I think – other people will tell you this. It was a sort of – as if there was going to be – something was going to happen – there were such huge balls given. It was such a very grand Season and it always had the feeling I suppose of, this is the end of … I don’t think I was aware of it, but looking back, I think it was an extraordinary Season. Sort of before the deluge. I think the adults may have had a feeling that there were mad days and dark clouds ahead and we were going to have a wonderful time while the Season lasted. It was certainly the last ‘real’ Season.
For over a year, the imminence of war must have been increasingly obvious, even if many young girls were sheltered from realizing it. The former Lady Cathleen Eliot, daughter of the Earl of St Germans, wrote, ‘Politics were not discussed in my family so it was a complete surprise when war was declared. War was not talked about at home, or within my circle of friends.’ She was not unusual. Lady Jean Leslie Melville also said, ‘I don’t remember anyone talking about the likelihood of a war.’ But parents knew ; and the unusually large number of presentations at Court that year – 1,657 – must reflect their fear that by the following year there might be no presentations, no Season and no dances.*
Having successfully negotiated the ordeal by etiquette of presentation at Court, the other high point of the Season was the girl’s own dance. Not every girl had one. There were about 400 dances in the Season, starting gradually soon after Christmas when they were interspersed with Hunt Balls and other country events; warming up after the first Presentation on 9 March ; and reaching a climax in May and June, when there were usually two or three different balls and dances every night. There are, for instance, thirty-seven dances listed in The Times for June, and these would have been only about a third of the total number, for many people preferred not to have their private dance publicly announced. Only the most popular and significant debutantes were asked to every dance ; but all those who were spending the Season in London could have expected to receive at least three or four invitations a week.
By the end of June the King and Queen had returned from their tour of Canada and the United States, and the press outdid itself in adulation, hailing the event in tones more appropriate to Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps or Alexander the Great’s conquest of the known world. Even Harold Nicolson likened the Queen to Cleopatra. Never, it would seem, had two people embarked on a trip so momentous, or met with such resounding success. They evoked feelings – if The Times was to be believed – little short of idolatry. Describing the procession from Waterloo Station to Buckingham Palace, an over-excited correspondent wrote:
It was, one felt, a processional route all too short for so memorable an occasion – but compressed into it were the heartfelt affection and enthusiasm of a whole nation. At the station barriers, and at every accessible spot which the royal carriage would pass, people had been content to wait for hours – and to feel themselves amply rewarded by seeing the procession for a few fleeting moments. They carried away with them an unforgettable picture – the King, a quiet, happy smile lighting up his face as he raised his hand again and again to the salute in answer to the plaudits of the crowd; the Queen, a gracious, charming figure, smiling too, but undoubtedly profoundly moved.6
Country Life matched this in patriotic fervour and outdid The Times in conferring not only popularity but a kind of spiritual radiance upon the royal couple:
That their welcome was fanned into triumphant flame is due to the genius of the King and Queen for establishing, in a quite remarkable way, what can only be described as direct psychological contact with millions of individuals – a contact that was at once simple and mystic. Naturally as it comes to the King and Queen to emanate that happiness that is Heaven’s gift to them, to do so unremittingly for such a period betokens spiritual resources no less remarkable than the physical stamina required.7
The royal publicity machine had done its work. In just two and a half years the inconvenient memory of Edward VIII, described by Harold Nicolson as ‘a wizened little boy’, had been effaced. George VI and Queen Elizabeth were now firmly enthroned. With their country on the verge of war every patriotic symbol was needed: above all, that of the monarchy.
Three weeks after their return, the final Courts were held at Buckingham Palace, closely followed, as usual, by royal garden-parties. By then it was mid-July, and few could fail to realize that the war would happen within a few weeks, at best months. In spite of this, says Anthony Loch,
I do not remember that the impending war was a common topic of conversation with the girls, which tended to be on a frivolous or banal level. In moments of relaxation, people preferred not to think too much about the possibility of war. You might say that it was a case of ‘regardless of their fate the little victims play’.
The end of the Season saw the gulf between the debs and the young men who were their contemporaries widen dramatically. Most of the girls still did not realize the gravity of the situation. But the men knew; and were conscious of the huge areas of unshared experience that were about to open up. One of the young men said,