There has always been something wonderfully democratic about the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. Anyone can submit a painting, and in 1939 10,565 people did so. The selection process is rapid and – apart from the right of Royal Academicians to have up to six works hung – necessarily random. In the few seconds during which each work of art passes before the eyes of the selection panel, many quite good pictures are chosen and some better ones rejected; many bad ones are excluded, and some accepted. The artists range from distressingly mawkish Sunday painters (whose works are usually the first to sell, being cheap and often small) to a few geniuses – though they are rare and their works nearly always remain unsold.
Kenneth Clark, then Director of the National Gallery, had described the Royal Academy in 1935 as ‘a period piece’. He went on, ‘We must remember that in so far as the future of art depends on popular esteem or approval, the Royal Academy still holds a very much higher place than all the other cliques or fashions of art which a critical minority are prepared to accept.’1 The Summer Exhibition did not pretend to display the new, the adventurous or even the best of British art. It was – and is – reassuring precisely because it showed what the British like to paint, and what they like to buy: flower studies, green country landscapes, domestic interiors, views from the studio window. That particular year, though, even Country Life admitted, ‘The standard is not very high and the style is not very modern but at any rate there are fewer lapses than usual and fewer fashionable portraits without any artistic merit.’2
London’s other art galleries were providing a catholic selection of modern art. Picasso’s Guernica had been shown in two different places: at the New Burlington, where it attracted 3,000 visitors, and at the White-chapel, where – interestingly – four times as many people came to look at it. There was a Cézanne exhibition at the Rosenberg and Helft Gallery, to mark the centenary of his birth, and Monet was on show at Tooth’s. Wildenstein had an exhibition of recent French pictures called ‘Paris 1938’, Reid and Lefevre were showing English and French painting under the title ‘Entente Cordiale’; and the London Gallery had ‘Living Art in England’, a show mounted in aid of Czech, German and Jewish artist refugees. From the early thirties, the rise of National Socialism and, simultaneously, the rise of an art of propaganda that might be called Aryan Brutalism had driven many artists out of their own countries. Some had settled in London, within walking distance of a group of British artists living in Hampstead who called themselves Unit One: artists like Moore, Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Paul Nash, whose work tended towards surrealism or abstraction. They were joined in 1934 by Walter Gropius from Germany, the architect who founded the Bauhaus; Moholy-Nagy from Hungary and Naum Gabo from Russia in 1935, and Piet Mondrian from Holland in 1938.
Private View day was anything but democratic. Traditionally, it took place on the Friday before the first Monday in May ; in 1939 this was 28 April. The exhibition then opened to the public the following Monday, 1 May, and remained open until 7 August.
The Times next day listed the names of seventy-three Society visitors, almost all women (men got in under the guise of escorting one of the women), the list being headed by the name of Mrs Neville Chamberlain. She was ‘an early-morning visitor, wearing a leaf-green ensemble…. Pink carnations were fastened to her coat.’ The costume of each one of the sixty-three women is laboriously described. It seems a pointless exercise, tedious to all but the wearer, and hardly even complimentary to her, since not a word of praise is bestowed. It is simply a recitation: ‘a cornflower-blue flowered toque with a printed crêpe dress’; ‘black with a silver fox fur and a toque of multi-coloured flowers’; ‘printed crêpe in fuchsia colourings’ – a social convention fossilized into unreadability. On every major social occasion that summer, the same catalogue was repeated: for Ascot, Goodwood, Henley, even the Chelsea Flower Show.
On 1 May the International Opera Season at Covent Garden also opened under the direction of Sir Thomas Beecham, adorned by a glittering selection of opera singers whose very names make mouth-watering reading. The debs, had they wished (and few of them did wish – or had the time), could have heard Richard Tauber in Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, Eva Turner in Puccini’s Turandot (in which Jussi Björling made his London debut) or Gigli in Tosca, besides a small Wagnerian selection – for in England, unlike Germany, a composer’s music was thought to be of universal appeal, even Wagner’s.
Also on 1 May, The Times announced that over 2,000 men per day had enlisted in the Territorial Army during April, and that the total number of applications for the first three weeks of the month was greater than for the whole of 1936.
Never mind; the Season was now under way – and it started well, with two large dances that must have had the debs and their escorts shuttling between them all night. The first was for Miss Lindsey Furneaux, and was held at 44 Cadogan Place, the town house of Lady Pamela Berry, who, as a relation of Lindsey’s parents, gave the dance together with the Countess of Birkenhead. Lindsey, now Mrs Carrick-Smith, recalls that it was ‘an absolutely marvellous dance’, from which a few, isolated incidents stand out in her memory:
For some reason my strongest image from that evening is of my darling aunt Margaret Birkenhead, who was dancing with Neville Ford. He was about 6 foot 5, and as they turned her nose hit the button of his white shirt front and bled all over it !
I wore the most wonderful dress from Victor Stiebel that Pamela and Sheila [the Countess of Birkenhead] had given to me – pink tulle with bumblebees tangled up in it all over the place. And my feet were hurting me so much that I called to our butler – his name was Sheridan – and I said, ‘Sherry, can you keep these for me?’ and I took my shoes off and he put them into the pockets of his tail coat, one in the left and one in the right, and there they remained.
Lindsey’s sister, less than two years her senior, was reading Modern Languages at Somerville College, Oxford, and their parents had decided that Lindsey, despite the fact that she was training to be a nurse at Colchester General Hospital, should ‘do’ the Season that year. ‘I had a very small Morris Ten at the time,’ she remembers, ‘and I used to drive down to London or into the country for dances ; drive back home to Essex ; get up very early in the morning to exercise my horses – riding one and leading the other – and then go off and spend the day nursing. I think I was so tired most of the time I hardly knew what I was doing. Luckily I was very strong.’ Tiredness is a recurring theme in the debs’ accounts of that summer. Many of them also point out what very good training it was for the war, when there were to be many sleepless nights.
The Daily Mail’s columnist, Charles Graves, wrote approvingly about Lindsey Furneaux’s coming-out:
The dance which the Duke and Duchess of Kent attended was first class. The debs this year are at least as well dressed as anyone else, and it seems no longer to be an advantage to be a sophisticated young married woman. Somehow they must have persuaded their mothers and fathers to let them be dressed by Schiaparelli and Molyneux. Altogether I think it’s safe to say that the debs are going to have a more attractive Season than any of their predecessors, except those who came out in 1919. For when a chap is Army-minded, he pays real attention to girls at dances. … But when he is merely sports-minded he is inclined to lean up against the champagne bar, and talk of his golf handicap or shooting or horses to other chaps.3
In fact, there were still plenty of the latter around, the boring, idle chaps up from the country who attended the dances for food and drink and even perhaps an heiress.
The other deb dance that night was given for Guinevere Brodrick by her mother, Viscountess Dunsford. Lady Dunsford was an unconventional figure. She was rumoured to have been a showgirl until she met and married the American multi-millionaire, George J.Gould. They had a son and two daughters (of whom Guinevere was one). Preferring the splendors of an English title, she later married Lord Dunsford. His family name was Brodrick, and the new Lady Dunsford immediately changed all the children’s surnames and even had the effrontery to make them ‘Hons’, although as they were not Viscount Dunsford’s children they were not entitled to the honour. Then she set out to conquer the London social scene.
Guinevere’s dance was held in the lovely house that used to belong to the financier, Clarence Hatry, which had been specially decorated for the occasion with lemon trees in fruit. A deb who was there that night remembers Guinevere as ‘a sort of moving light – she was absolutely lovely, and everybody sort of rushed round her like bees round a honey pot. And she had an extraordinary pushy Mum. At Guini’s coming-out dance, she was in slinky black satin and Lady Dunsford was in white tulle and baby blue bows. Unforgettable.’ At this stage in the Season the male guests were still wearing white tie rather than uniform; white tie and the invariable white gloves, lest their hands should leave stains on the girls’ delicate dresses. That night Jack Harris and his band played all the latest American dance tunes and it was generally agreed that it was a lovely dance for a girl who was described by many of her contemporaries as ‘very lovely and charming: but she had such a sad life
The following night Mrs Charles Hambro gave a dance for her two step-daughters, Cynthia and Diana. Diana, now Lady Gibson-Watt, was not an altogether willing debutante:
It meant absolutely nothing to me – it made no impact on my life whatsoever, and I would have hated my daughters to do the Season. I wanted to be a concert pianist, so I had my sights set on higher things. I enjoyed moments of it, of course. The trouble was, I adored dancing, but being six foot tall I could never find tall enough partners. That was all I cared about: if they were taller than me and could dance. There weren’t very many of those, and I certainly didn’t meet one single young man I could possibly have wanted to marry. And of course nobody slept around in those days … well, only a very, very few. It wasn’t chiefly because of the fear of pregnancy: you were brought up to believe it was wrong. And you did believe it.
Morals, like manners, were different then: and not only among the upper classes. One of the most startling details, to a modern eye, comes from the regular advertisements in The Times Personal column announcing that valuable items of jewellery had been handed in to the police, and asking their owners to come and claim them. On a single day the Metropolitan Police announced under found: a diamond and pearl bracelet; a cine camera (a rare and expensive luxury); a diamond and sapphire flexible bracelet; and a diamond ring. One does not know, of course, who handed them in ; but at a time when £3 or £4 a week was a normal working wage, and when a modest diamond ring cost £40, such honesty seems quite remarkable. It must also be pointed out, however, that in another day’s Personal column the Chancellor of the Exchequer duly acknowledged receipt of £3 4s 9d conscience money, or about £65 at today’s values. The fact that it is not a lot is immaterial: how long is it since conscience money insertions appeared in The Times at all?
The next night there was another dance – there was always another dance, if not several. On 3 May Lady Meyrick gave what is described in The Times as a ‘small dance’ for Miss Susan Meyrick at 6 Stanhope Gate. These premises also housed the famous Gunter’s Tearooms, where everyone went for leisurely teas in splendid surroundings. Gunter’s was an institution, a favourite meeting place for country godmothers, half-term schoolchildren, bachelor uncles or budding romances. It was owned by Searcy’s, the caterers, who also owned 23 Knightsbridge (it is Agriculture House today), and both were popular for deb dances. The Meyrick dance cannot have been very small, since no fewer than twenty-seven hostesses gave dinner parties beforehand. In fact, Susan Meyrick (now Mrs Peter Green) estimates that there were about 300 guests, who would have included, besides her own contemporaries, many friends of her parents’ generation, among them the invariable rows of chaperones watching over the girls. (The chaperones were known irreverently by the debs as ‘the dowagers on the touch line’.)
We had dinner at Claridge’s first – a party of about twelve of us – and there was one young man whom I was very keen on, called Rodney Wilkinson, though actually being about ten years older than me he seemed very grown up. Later on he became a pilot in the Battle of Britain, and was killed. Then the dance itself. I wore a cream-coloured dress from Jacqmar, made of the most marvellous material. We had those prehistoric dance cards with all the numbers, and the men had to fill in their names – if you were rather shy, as I was, it nearly killed you – wondering if all your numbers would be filled up and hoping you’d get someone you really liked for the supper dance (that was usually number 8 or 9) because then you could stay with them for a good long time while you ate supper, at about midnight or one o’clock. On the invitation it gave the time for the dance, usually about 9 p.m. to 3 a.m.; and after that, if you could give your mother the slip, you’d go on to a nightclub. The dance would end with everyone letting their hair down a bit, probably doing the Conga all round the room, and then you’d go home and pretend to go to bed, but actually you slipped out and went off to, say, the Embassy Club, where Edmundo Ros had this marvellous Latin-American band. That was frightfully daring.
Having one’s own dance wasn’t a tremendous ordeal – though it probably was for my mother. She loathed and hated the whole thing … hated the sitting around.
It does seem another world. The war ended it all. Nothing ever went back to being quite the same again.
The next day, 4 May, Rosamund Neave had her coming-out dance. She was the sister of Airey Neave, who was later to make a sensational escape from Colditz. Rosamund was not quite eighteen, but despite being comparatively young she was in many ways an ideal deb, relaxed, cheerful, excellent company, and she already had hosts of friends. First her mother gave a dinner dance at the Ladies’ Carlton Club, and at ten o’clock those fifty guests were joined by another 350 or so from all the other dinners, for the start of the main dance. Marius B. Winter’s band played ‘You Couldn’t Be Cuter’ and – appropriately, as it turned out – ‘Love Walked In’. (Rosamund married one of the young men at her dinner, Tony Sheppard, just six days after war was declared.) The dance ended with the Palais Glide and the Lambeth Walk – the current craze from the musical Me and My Girl by Lupino Lane, which had opened in 1937. (The King and Queen had gone to see it the previous evening.)
My mother had been presented and had had a Season and all the other mothers during my Season were people she’d known then, as a girl, and so that’s how it went: from generation to generation. The great thing as far as I was concerned was that you got asked to these weekend house parties all over England, which was frightfully good for one. You played indoor games in the evenings, and tennis – very self-conscious-making if you didn’t have good legs – and after a Season you found you could cope with any situation, whatever it might be.
It is easy to give the impression that the Season was simply a round of almost indistinguishable evenings, as one deb after another held the spotlight wearing her best dress, spending between £600 and £1,000 of her father’s money (more, for a truly spectacular dance), and then joined the swarm of other butterflies who dipped and swung through banks of hothouse flowers for the brief summer. A few of the more serious debs were studying or working – a tiny proportion, it is true, but there were some art students, music students, even two girls who were studying ballet. For the others there were plenty of hours to be filled during the day.
Most girls, however late they might have come home, would be up again by nine – ten at the latest. Sonia Denison (now Mrs Heathcoat-Amory) remembers that:
Our parents were very strict. I always had to be up for breakfast next morning, if I was in London. That was the discipline. It was bad, slovenly, to lie in bed all morning. We had to get up, even if we’d got home at three or four o’clock the night before, we still had to be up for a nine o’clock breakfast. Then they’d say, if you’re tired you can’t go out.
This must have meant that popular girls like Sonia got through the Season somehow on five or six hours’ sleep a night ; while the men – at any rate those who were working, or at Oxford or Cambridge, or in the Army – had even less.
Earl Haig, who was an undergraduate at Christ Church at the time, remembers that a group of men would drive down to London for a ball ; dance ; often go on to a nightclub ; drive back up to Oxford ; and only just have time to change out of white tie into undergraduate flannels before heading for a tutorial or lecture. (This may have been the origin of the notorious ‘45 Club’, open to members of Oxford or Cambridge who had driven from Piccadilly Circus back to their college at either university in less than three-quarters of an hour. True, it would have been easier in the dawn hours, and on the relatively traffic-free roads of the late thirties, but it must still have been a hazardous journey.) Such an occasion might explain the story which appeared in The Times in May, describing a car accident on the outskirts of Cambridge early one morning. The passengers, Lord Granby (the present Duke of Rutland), Lord Andrew Cavendish (the present Duke of Devonshire) and Mr Mark Howard, were in a car which struck a telegraph pole and overturned, and they were all slightly injured. The telegraph pole was broken. ‘The car was travelling from London, where’, commented the report, deadpan, ‘it was understood the men had been attending a party.’
The Hon. Sarah Norton, now The Hon. Mrs Baring, was presented in 1938, but like many debs attended the big social events of 1939 as well:
It seems to me amazing now that we managed to keep going night after night. And it wasn’t just dances – there were lunches as well, almost every day. We weren’t ever allowed to dress in a sloppy way. For instance, you always wore white gloves to go out to lunch – always. I was allowed to have lunch without a chaperone as long as the young man had asked my mother first whether he might invite me. After lunch we used to go to Keith Prowse in Bond Street and listen to records – they had these cubicles where you could listen for hours, and nobody seemed to mind if you didn’t buy anything, so we all congregated there in the afternoons.
There were dress fittings as well; hats and shoes to be bought; hair appointments; tea-parties – it was a wholly self-indulgent life. Some were aware of it at the time; most, with hindsight, feel guilty. Sarah Norton says, ‘We were spoilt brats, and when I look back on it I’m ashamed that we had this minute, privileged society and everybody else was either working or suffering. I think that’s why I was pleased, in a sense, when the war came: it meant that I could do something useful at last.’
Another deb of the 1939 Season remembers a slightly different routine to her days. She was Rhoda Walker-Heneage-Vivian, one of three daughters of Admiral Walker-Heneage-Vivian. The family lived at Clyne Castle in Wales, but also had a town house at 8 Hyde Park Gardens – huge, superb, with a ballroom. There the family would spend the summer months.
My days fell into a pattern. Getting up at about 10 a.m., writing letters (you always thanked the hostess for the previous night’s dance) and then doing the flowers. These came three times a week from our home in Wales by train, in huge boxes. Ann [one of her sisters] and I hated this chore and usually ended up by ramming them bad-temperedly into vases and dashing out. We had a lovely butler called Martin who would sometimes help us out. His wife was Cook, aided by a kitchen maid. The mornings were spent window-shopping – usually walking up Oxford Street as far as Bond Street and meeting friends in Selfridges for ice-cream sodas. I had little money – a monthly allowance of £20 to buy accessories – but my father paid for dresses and shoes. I haunted Selfridges’ Bargain Basement, Galeries Lafayette and Marks and Spencers. … Then came lunch-parties with other debs, then a lot of cinema-going, and the evening dinner and dances. Twice I went to a film premiere with a young man alone (normally this was never allowed). One of these was Wuthering Heights, and the other was Gone With the Wind, and my escort was Ronnie Howard, son of the late Leslie Howard. This was allowed … but straight home afterwards.
As the Season got into its stride and girls began to make friends, they would often arrange to meet for lunch. Ann Schuster remembers these relaxed, light-hearted occasions, which were a relief amid the formality of the rest of the Season’s events:
They weren’t organized – we didn’t have these awful things that our mothers used to do, the mothers’ lunches: no, you’d just have said, perhaps the night before, let’s get together and talk about this … some funny thing that had happened … and you’d get together, six or eight of you, and have a sandwich at somebody’s house. It was all very informal and we discussed hairdressers, compared lipstick (Revlon is the name that sort of sticks in my mind) and scent and pinched things from our mothers’ dressing tables. It was all part of trying to learn how to be sophisticated – that was what we all wanted to be. Sophistication was the ultimate: knowing how to put on a veneer.
Most girls would end the afternoon at about five and come home to try and get an hour’s sleep before starting to get ready. Those who had been to the hairdresser that day would have a quick bath, followed by another pause if it was deodorant day, because ‘The only anti-perspirant was Odo-ro-no which took twenty minutes to dry and lasted a week. (Shop girls and typists almost invariably smelt of BO.)’ If debutantes expected one application of Odo-ro-no to suffice through a week of strenuous dances, some of them must surely have smelt of BO too. There were also a couple of products available for removing what an advertisement delicately calls ‘unwanted hair’. It was called Bellin’s Wonderstoen and – according to an advertisement in Vogue – all a girl had to do was ‘just rotate this dainty little disc over the skin and the embarrassment of unwanted hair vanishes like magic, instantly. It never fails. Wonderstoen is sure, harmless and odourless. Facial size 5/6 or de luxe size for arms and legs 13/6.’ Another product, Veet, was described by the makers as ‘a dainty white cream that leaves the skin soft and velvety-smooth without a trace of ugly bristly stubble like the razor leaves’. This one made no claims to being odourless. One suspects that most young women simply borrowed a razor to achieve the desired daintiness.
The use of cosmetics varied according to the strictness of parents. Some girls wore no make-up at all. There was a wide range of cosmetics for those who chose to use them. Yardleys were famous by the late thirties for their beautiful sculpted boxes whose lids were embossed with a bee on a flower (designed by Reco Capey), and these continued to be the hallmark of Yardley products for the next twenty-five years. They offered eye shadow (mostly in safe English pale blues and greys) at 2s, cream rouge at 2s 6d, loose powder in boxes veiled with fine gauze to stop it flying about, at 3s 6d, lipstick at 3s and 5s 6d. These prices, if multiplied to allow for inflation, are exactly comparable with the cost of the same products today, although young women have become far more skilled in the art of make-up, and most start using it well before the age of seventeen or eighteen. Boots offered a range of skin-care products, including something mysteriously called ‘muscle oil’ for 2s 6d. For the mothers, Harriet Hubbard Ayer offered Luxuria, which is described in the same glowing terms of hyperbole and fantasy that are found advertising anti-ageing products today. Hope springs eternal.
Made up, dressed up, complete with evening bag and evening cape or fur wrap, the girls and their mothers set out. They usually assembled at the dinner hostess’s house at about eight o’clock for drinks (sherry or an orange juice for the debs, a cocktail for their mothers) before sitting down to eat. Most dances began at ten, but it was not considered advisable to arrive too punctually (perhaps because the most eager and least sophisticated young men would arrive first, and no deb wanted to find her dance card filled up by them) so the flood of guests did not start until some half hour later. By eleven o’clock the dance would be in full swing ; between midnight and 1a.m. supper was served ; by 2 a.m. the first guests were starting to leave; and by four or five in the morning the dance would be on its last legs. ‘When we got back from a dance [says Mollie Acland] Mummy’s maid ‘Rawly’ [Christina Blanche Rawlings] would always be waiting up for her, and usually Ellis the butler too, If we were at home in the country, Nan would always be up to see me to bed.’
The Season did not consist entirely of entertainments centred around the debutantes. There were very many charity events. In early May alone, the Docklands Ball at the Dorchester raised money for the Dockland Settlements ; the Wendy Dance was held in aid of the Wendy Society ; the England Ball was organized by the Council for the Preservation of Rural England; there were balls for the Blind, dinners for the English Speaking Union and the Gardeners’ Benevolent Institution and the Friends of the Poor, and lots, lots more – all of them worthy, fund-raising events that enabled the wealthy and privileged to don evening dress and spend an agreeable evening among their own kind in the certainty that they were doing good. Few debs would have attended these: at least, not willingly.
Then there were private dinner-parties, which provided more opportunities for those who held the reins of power to meet socially and subtly, imperceptibly to exchange information and exert influence, while at the same time ensuring that power remained within their own charmed circle. These occasions were all but invisible except to those who took part, and their effectiveness was all the greater for it. Nothing need be written down, nothing voted upon, but a discreet conversation before dinner, a word in the right ear while relaxing over a glass of port or brandy before joining the ladies, could have far-reaching consequences.
What, for example, were Ambassador Joe Kennedy’s real thoughts when the King and Queen came to dine at the American Embassy two nights before they set sail for their tour of Canada and the United States? The guests included some glittering members of the British aristocracy (among them, significantly, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire), as well as all nine Kennedy children – gathered around the same dinner table for the first time in two years. Doubtless the Ambassador was anxious to underline his family’s meteoric rise through the ranks of British Society, though this was due far more to the charm and vivacity of his elder daughter Kathleen (always known as ‘Kick’) than to his own warm feelings for Britain. Secretly, Joe Kennedy was convinced that Germany would win the coming war. Mollie Acland says robustly, ‘We hated the Kennedys ! – though Eunice was attractive. But they were all anti-Brit and yet pleased to the point of crawling when they were asked to Windsor.’ Rose Kennedy was scarcely a prepossessing figure. One deb who knew the whole family well, and liked its younger members, described Rose as ‘a dreadful simpering idiot’. Chips Channon, who met her on another occasion, was equally unimpressed: ‘She is an uninteresting little body, though pleasant and extraordinarily young-looking to be the mother of nine. She has an unpleasant voice, and says little of interest.’ But he found in her at least one redeeming feature: ‘She too keeps a diary, and I always like people who keep diaries; they are not as others ; at least not quite.’4
On 6 May the King and Queen set off on the start of their seven-week tour of Canada and the United States, going by train to Portsmouth with Queen Mary and the two princesses, as well as most of the other immediate members of the royal family, who said their goodbyes aboard the Empress of Australia. ‘I have my handkerchief,’ the little Princess Margaret was reported to have said, to which her thirteen-year-old sister added stoutly, ‘To wave, not to cry.’
That same weekend, over in Bavaria, Unity Mitford had arrived at Berchtesgarten from her flat in Munich (from which a wealthy Jewish family had been summarily evicted to enable her to occupy it) to spend the weekend with Hitler. A newspaper photograph shows them taking tea together. Hitler, unsmiling, looks overweight and menacing while Unity – also overweight, also unsmiling – seems ill at ease in the presence of her hero. One can read too much into a split-second image. Perhaps when the photographer had gone they relaxed and smiled and went on talking eagerly about Germany’s glorious future; but in that split second she looks like a fat intimidated Fräulein and he looks brutish and coarse. They must both have known that Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun, was infuriated by the presence of ‘that English Valkyrie’. She would not pose a threat for very much longer.
The plight of the Jews in Germany was worsening daily. Not for nothing did desperate parents offer their children, through the columns of The Times, to any stranger who would give them a safe house. This advertisement for example, taken from The Times in early May, is typical of scores that appeared regularly throughout the summer: ‘Permit desired from Jew or Gentile for my daughter (15, German Jewess) which would enable her to do useful work. Experienced in looking after children; speaks English; well educated. Edith Sigall, Leipzig, Germany.’ There is poignant appeal in the words ‘my daughter’ rather than just ‘German Jewess’. A mother sending her child into the unknown, fearing never to see her again but hoping that the child, at any rate, might survive and even do ‘useful work’.
That first week in May a new law had been enacted in Germany whereby Jews would not be permitted to occupy flats in a building which also housed Aryan tenants. In addition, Jewish families were not allowed to occupy homes ‘disproportionately large in relation to their numbers’, a useful phrase that meant whatever the authorities wanted it to mean. The authorities could force Jewish houseowners to ‘modify’ their properties, and to sublet the space thus made available to other Jews. The Jewish community was being squeezed and segregated ; forced into an easily identifiable ghetto. These facts were reported blandly and with little editorial comment in the British press.
Is it unreasonable to wish that some of the debs – carefree, pampered creatures – had concerned themselves with the persecution of Jews and other minorities in Nazi Germany ? Many young people fifty years later care desperately what happens to the starving and the persecuted in other countries. The answer is that so did some of the debs; those in particular whose eyes had been opened by a visit to Germany. Margaret Clifton-Brown (now the Dowager Lady Amherst of Hackney) had been in Vienna during the Anschluss ; she had seen Hitler, and understood what he represented. She felt tremendous anxiety about the war which she had no doubt was coming, and soon; and about her own ability to face it. She feared for the Jews. Sarah Norton was another who had no illusions about what the Nazis meant to do to the Jews, though she could not have foreseen the finality of their solution.
I had been sent to Germany to learn German and ‘be finished’. I hated the Germans and everything about their country except the people I lived with. Certainly I was conscious of the political situation: it was all around me, affecting everything. I could see the Stormtroopers on the streets, telling everyone to say Heil Hitler ! I was conscious of the persecution of the Jews, and most angered by it. Anti-Nazi families were frightened of their own children, who were being indoctrinated by the Hitler Youth movement and would inform against their parents. The Graf and Gräfin I lived with didn’t dare speak freely in front of their own son.
The English families most conscious of Jewish persecution were, of course, those who were Jewish themselves. Ann Schuster remembers a number of Jewish musicians who came to stay on their way to more permanent homes in Switzerland and America, and her father’s growing fears about the future:
Two or three years before the war he used to come back from Vienna in a state of terrible apprehension. We had servants in those days and they would stand in the dining-room and he couldn’t bear anybody behind his chair. My mother used to have to arrange for the butler to stay out of the room, because he couldn’t bear it – anyone. … He was working for Rothschild then, and he had seen his boss (I forget now which Rothschild it was) forced by the Nazis to scrub the streets. Vienna in fact was worse in those days than Berlin.
The rest of my generation – nearly all the girls I knew here – went to Munich when they were sixteen or seventeen: it was the thing to do then. But my father wouldn’t let me. I didn’t understand why, really. Eventually he himself had to stop working out there and then he concentrated on trying to make people realize the dangers that were building up. He even went to see Churchill, who agreed with him, but was powerless.
I think there were a lot of quite powerful people in England, the Redesdales being the most obvious, who were really committed to, were admirers of, Hitler and his regime and would go out of their way to meet any Nazi socially because they were rather splendid, to their way of thinking. I think a lot of the English upper class were inclined that way; and the rest – well, they weren’t very politically minded. People like my mother, who would just say, oh, it’ll be all right in the end; and if we do have a war it’ll be over very quickly and, you know, Bob (my father), you’re making too much of it all.
And yet, the extraordinary thing is that I, personally, never encountered any anti-Semitism at all. And nor did another friend, Naomi Rothschild, or one or two others. Perhaps it just wasn’t among the young. Perhaps I never met it because my mother was fairly choosy about what families she met and what lunches I got involved in. But I was never conscious of this at all. And yet it was definitely there.
Anti-Semitism was, and still is, prevalent among the British upper classes, albeit less overtly today than it was in 1939. To outsiders, people either deny their own anti-Semitism or seem genuinely unaware of it. At most they may accept that they were ‘condescending’ towards the Jews, and add that they felt ‘a bit sorry for those in Germany’. One otherwise delightful man said he would not have dreamed of marrying a girl who was Jewish: ‘I didn’t like their attitude and their manners and, anyway, one always thought of what they would look like in twenty years’ time. I do know one – a charming man, but an obvious Jew in appearance and oh, what is it about him? – well, he’s got mannerisms and he thinks and talks rather a lot about money.’
The aristocracy in particular was obsessed with questions about the extent to which its blue blood was permeated by Jewish blood. Loelia, former Duchess of Westminster, recalled her ducal husband’s prurient fascination with the subject:
Benny [as she called Bendor, the second Duke] was usually excessively careless about his belongings and left his valuables lying about anywhere, but he used to lock up one book with elaborate secrecy. This was called The Jews’ Who’s Who, and it purported to tell the exact quantity of Jewish blood coursing through the veins of the aristocratic families of England. According to Benny, the Jews themselves, not liking to be revealed in their true colours, had tried to suppress this interesting publication and his copy was the only one that had escaped some great holocaust.5
Mollie Acland, now Mrs Peter Tabor, has written a convincing and candid description of how her kind felt about the Jews. It is notable for its lack of malice as much as for the unconscious prejudice it reveals. Yet she did not think of herself as anti-Semitic ; nor was she, by upper-class standards.
About the Jews: we knew that Hitler had concentration camps – there was a very good film called Pimpernel Smith with Leslie Howard, about an Englishman helping internees to escape – but not the full extent and horror, which actually didn’t really get going until the war. We knew Jews were emigrating as fast as they could, and though we weren’t anti-Semitic as such, Jewish people were ‘different’. They had funny noses and funny names which they anglicized, but very often became very, very rich. We enjoyed The House of Rothschild with George Arliss, but our Divinity lessons had taught us that the Jews weren’t good news for Jesus. I can’t remember any deb who would have admitted, let alone been proud to admit, her Jewish faith.
Precisely the same tone of voice can be heard in a report by a Times correspondent from Shanghai, where in May 2,000 Jewish refugees arrived from Europe, to add to the 8,000 already there. The man from The Times had been aboard one of the Jewish refugee ships, and his article describing their plight begins:
‘I sell you this camera. Yes? Only eight pounds. Yes?’ The would-be salesman is a scrubby little Jew, 22 years old, who needs a shave. … He was summarily put in a concentration camp at the time of what he calls the November Action. This morning he showed me, with a sort of furtive pride, a certificate of dismissal stating that ‘der Jude Hans Pringheim’ served in the S. Concentration Camp till February 3, 1939. ‘I sell you this camera for seven pounds. Yes?’ The little Jew told me that an emigrant is allowed to take exactly 10 marks out of the country, less than a pound.
The writer is not unsympathetic to the refugee. (He buys the camera, at any rate.) But the unconscious language of anti-Semitism, which he takes for granted his readers share, is ingrained in his description; along with a profound unconsciousness of the significance of Sachsenhausen concentration camp from which Hans Pringheim has fortunately been discharged. Nor does his article mention that Sir Victor Sassoon had recently made a desperate plea for help for the Jewish refugees in Shanghai, pointing out that the cost of feeding them had now by the most stringent economies been reduced to 3d per person a day, but that if more homes could not be provided, many new arrivals would have to sleep in the streets. By the end of 1939 there were to be nearly 30,000 Jewish refugees in China. And yet, as one deb wrote, The plight of European Jews was a topic of casual conversation only.’
Anti-Semitism was not entirely universal. Some people were openly prejudiced against Jews (including many writers in the thirties, such as Pound and Eliot); others were appalled by such an attitude. One deb of that year, who came from a family at the very heart of the British Establishment, said vehemently:
People said things then that could never be said now, like, what would you do if your daughter married a Jew? That’s something nobody could ever say now – at least, I sincerely hope not. But the upper classes then were anti-Semitic. But in my group we were none of us anti-Semitic. It froze me instantly. It made me so furious: when people used expressions like ‘Jew-boy’. And I must say that when stories percolated through from Germany about Jews being made to scrub the streets – well, I think that horrified everybody. But people don’t like facing things, you know, and they didn’t face it nearly enough. But everybody wanted to avoid a war, and I think that was the fatal thing. People just, you know, hoped for the best.
Meanwhile, hoping for the best, ignorant of the worst, the Season rushed on, and with it the dances. At weekends people took off for the country. There were sporting events to be enjoyed, fresh air to be breathed, sleep to be caught up on, and for those who still hankered for the society of their peers, there were country-house weekends. By Monday everyone would be back in London.
On Monday, 8 May, Lady Craigmyle gave a dance for her daughter the Hon. Ruth Shaw – and, perhaps because it was held at Claridge’s, a relatively public venue, she took the precaution of inserting a notice in the Court Circular of The Times (the Court Circular was the senior prefects’ noticeboard) warning guests that those who had not received admission cards must bring their invitations: presumably to guard against gatecrashers.
At the same time, a few hundred yards away at 6 Stanhope Gate, Sonia Denison and Rosemary Beale-Browne – best friends then, as now – were sharing their coming-out dance. An unusual feature of this one was that, as Rosemary’s mother had died in 1933 and she was the only child, she was brought out by her father. He was very popular among the other debs’ mothers, who could rarely persuade their husbands to come with them on the endless round of dinner-parties and dances, so there was always a shortage of older men. The Brigadier-General, who chaperoned his daughter conscientiously, was always greatly in demand to take lone mothers in to dinner.
Sonia Denison (now Mrs Heathcoat-Amory) remembers the relief of coming out after having been cooped up in a boarding school she did not enjoy:
I think I’d been rather spoiled at home, with a governess, and I disliked going to school. We didn’t work very hard – there was no standard at all: we weren’t really taught at school. Ridiculous. So my dance – it was lovely. I had a wonderful dress … blue with white spots – such lovely clothes. I never wore them again. They were made into cushions, I think, in the end. Whereas my grandsons and granddaughters – they live a different life. They’re very capable, very intelligent, and unspoilt.
The main dance that week was given the following evening, 9 May, by Viscountess Astor for her niece, Dinah Brand. Dinah’s mother had been one of the five remarkable Langhorne sisters from Virginia. In 1904, two of them – Nancy and her favourite and nearest sister, Phyllis – travelled to England in search, among other things, of more satisfactory husbands. Americans were popular in Edward VIII’s time, and the two of them took Society by storm. Phyllis duly married an Englishman, Bob Brand, and Dinah was one of their three children. When Phyllis died of pneumonia in 1937, Lady Astor took on much of the responsibility for these three, and it was under her auspices that Dinah came out in 1939. Her aunt, being a divorced woman, could not present her personally at Court, but she did everything else, bringing Dinah to live with her during the summer weeks in the Astors’ splendid London house. It was a generous gesture, for Nancy was by then an active and hard-working MP, and, having abandoned her support for Chamberlain and appeasement, was now implacably opposed to Hitler. But she found time from her political commitments to give a wonderful dance for her niece at 4 St James’s Square. Dinah recalls:
Oh, such beauty ! The rooms, the flowers, the dancing, the music – you were on air ! I remember all the flurry and excitement beforehand – wonderful flowers brought up from Cliveden – there were gardenia trees in full bloom all round the ballroom, and the smell was unbelievable. And the excitement: one felt one was it. First the excitement of my dress, which was made by Victor Stiebel at Jacqmar; I remember going to a couple of fittings with my aunt Nancy, to Victor Stiebel himself. It was tiers and tiers of silk and chiffon in different blues, and cost £19. I wore it to all the other big dances that summer, and then the war came, and I never wore it again: except that I found it years later, and it had survived amazingly well, and still fitted me. With it I wore a pearl necklace and tiny diamond earrings … it was not done for unmarried girls to wear a lot of jewellery, though of course all the mothers sat round in their tiaras keeping an eye out. There was a sort of security in that, even though we used to play them up a bit.
First we had dinner, served by footmen all in livery and white gloves. I sat next to the Duke of Gloucester. Then at about ten the guests started arriving for the dance – I remember them coming up these wonderful shallow stairs, and being received by me and my aunt. Ambrose’s band played – all the hit tunes – ‘Cheek to Cheek’ – all the favourite tunes of that summer – ‘Anything Goes’. I had a wonderful time, it being my ball, and the house looked so beautiful. I went back to it only the other day, and could hardly believe it possible today that such a huge house was actually lived in.
It was an extraordinary summer because of the undercurrents of doom and gloom ahead and all of us having a wild time. The men knew what was coming – they were already beginning to get involved in the Army ; they knew that war was on top of us and we had very little time left. It was the last whirl before the storm, though I don’t think many debs were aware of that – we were simply out to have the best time possible.
When you’re young you don’t even want to think about war coming – it’s even quite exciting, in a terrible sort of way – but we were very protected. My father knew of course, but he’d only say, ‘There’s going to be trouble.’ But, as for us, we just sailed along in a cloud – until we were thrown into it hook, line and sinker. We were in it up to the eyes.
It was an extraordinary year – the end of an era. One minute we were all aglow and aglitter and the next we were pitched into the cauldron.
However magical the previous night’s dance may have been, there was never time to savour it, for there was almost always another the next day. The dance given for Helen Hoare and Mary Tyser on 10 May must have been in complete contrast to Dinah Brand’s. Lady Astor’s style of lavish and confident hospitality ran on practised wheels oiled by perfectly trained servants, accustomed to the rich, famous, powerful and beautiful. They had waited upon everyone from Hollywood film stars to British politicians meeting at Cliveden or St James’s Square to plan and influence the course of history. The young people invited for weekends at Cliveden were usually the most vivacious and intelligent of their age group.
By comparison, Helen Hoare and Mary Tyser were unsophisticated country girls. Helen’s only contact with a glittering social circle would have been through her aunt, the Marchioness of Londonderry – another great political hostess of the twenties and thirties. Helen had studied in France and also in Germany, where she had been arrested in Munich for photographing a sign outside a greengrocer’s shop that said ‘No Jews allowed’. But although she came to her Season with some political awareness, she admits that socially she was very naive:
I hadn’t been to many dances before – the Season had only just begun – and I remember being rather frightened before my own got going. I wore my only really smart dress, a white ballgown from Worth that my godmother had given me, and just a little touch of lipstick and powder. No rouge. No eyeshadow. I seem to remember that the dinner-party beforehand was at Londonderry House: not that I knew any of the young men. But people were very kind; I was good at dancing; and in the end I know I enjoyed it. Apart from that the Season made very little impression on me. I just remember seeing lots and lots of other people’s beautiful houses.
Mary Tyser (now Lady Aldenham) was only seventeen and started the Season straight from boarding school. She had led a life sheltered even by the standards of her contemporaries, for her father, who was old enough to be her grandfather, had brought her up according to strict Victorian principles of young womanhood. She was never allowed to go anywhere alone and certainly not to a nightclub ; she usually wore no make-up; no jewellery; for all these things would have horrified him. But during the Season her father remained at the family’s country house in Essex, while Mary and her mother took the Lumleys’ house at 39 Eaton Square (‘Oh, on the small side of the square …’ she remembers a snobbish neighbour at lunch saying to her mother).
I think my mother enjoyed the dances more than I did: she had a wonderful time and couldn’t understand why I was so unhappy. But lots of those very grand dances were agony for me – not one familiar face among the rows of boring young men whom I didn’t want to dance with and who certainly didn’t seem to want to dance with me, tongue-tied as I was with shyness. Not that most of them had a great deal to say for themselves.
Sometimes I just hated every minute of it and longed to get away, and it would be my mother who begged to stay on and I who was trying to persuade her to leave ! My own dance was quite an ordeal … having to stand at the top of the stairs (we’d borrowed Mrs Sassoon’s lovely house at 2 Albert Gate, opposite the French Embassy) – standing there for at least an hour, shaking hands with all these arriving guests, none of whom I knew.
Being poor did not matter in the least, as long as you came from a good family. Blood was considered far more important than money. Madeleine Turnbull, who came out in 1937, said emphatically:
It was infinitely more prestigious to come of a family of ancient lineage and be poor as church mice than to be jumped up and enormously rich; so the latter were secretly scorned.
Being a debutante didn’t have to be expensive. I think I was given £100 for the whole Season but I had to buy all my clothes with that. But then you could buy the most super evening dress for about £4.50. Quite a lot of people didn’t give a dance – we didn’t, because my parents couldn’t really afford it – but we gave cocktail parties, and it really didn’t cost much in the end. You see the whole thing was linked up with this feeling that money wasn’t the main thing. It was more – well – either you were accepted or you weren’t accepted. So in fact the girls who ostentatiously flaunted the fact that they had a lot of money were doing themselves a grave disservice. Far from making them more popular or more accepted, it did the reverse. People just slightly laughed behind their backs.
I think it was because, during the First World War, there’d been war profiteers who made a lot of money out of the war, and it was still too close for people to change their ideas. New money was a bit suspect, I think, because of that.
On the other hand if the daughters fitted in, weren’t brash or difficult and didn’t stick their necks out – well then, nobody would have minded them.
Christian Grant (now Mrs John Miller) was a Scottish debutante, whose childhood had been one of the utmost austerity; first because of her father’s rigid attitudes about money, and then, after his death when she was ten, because a bungled will left her mother to manage on a pittance. Her father had been Sir Arthur Grant of Monymusk, tenth Baronet; but in spite of an ancestral castle and a retinue of servants, his six children had spent their early years in terror of his displeasure (he beat them all, even the girls): ‘Once I was thrashed for waiting outside the dining-room door to eat the scraps that came out from a grown-up dinner party; my father saw me and, thinking I had been eavesdropping, beat me instantly, without giving me time to explain that I was there only because I was hungry.’ The same economy was practised when it came to their clothes, and – apart from one good dress to wear in front of visitors – the younger children never had anything new:
My nearest sister and I, at the tail end of the family, had to wear whatever fitted us. This was all right when the handed-down boy’s garment was a kilt, but not so good when it was grey flannel trousers or striped football socks brought back from a boarding school in England. Rough hand-knitted jerseys, their snagged stitches cascading from neck to hem, were gathered around our small waists by large dog collars, the brass labels of which proclaimed our names to be Rover or Thunder or Trust. … On our feet, in winter, we wore heavy black boots made by the village shoemaker, their soles almost solid with nails; in summer, unless the weather was particularly bad, we went barefoot. … My brothers, who during the day looked more untidy than the village children, came down to dinner in immaculately pressed scarlet kilts, lace-edged shirts and velvet jackets, the silver buttons of which were embossed with our family crest.6
This strange combination of thin gruel and double cream – harsh deprivation side-by-side with ancestral pride – was familiar to the upper classes, and certainly no one would have thought any worse of Christian Grant for being a deb on a very small allowance. On the contrary, she was greatly admired by her contemporaries, one of whom said that with her original dress sense and tremendous flair, Christian always looked wonderful. What mattered was the hereditary title and castle; the nannies and cooks and maids and governesses; the formal manners over candle-lit dinner-tables ; the knowledge of shooting and fishing.
When it came to bringing out her daughter, Lady Grant looked for another mother with whom she could share, and halve, the cost of a dance. And so Christian joined up with a girl she barely knew – Ann Schuster – and the two held their dance at 6 Stanhope Gate: a setting that must by then have been very familiar to most of their guests. Christian remembers in detail the ritual of getting ready:
Most girls went to the hairdresser before a dance, especially their own, but as I was hard up by the standards of those days – I had £10 a month, which had to cover everything – I just washed my hair in the bath and pinned it up with Kirbigrips. I did wear make-up – Max Factor’s pancake base! – and lipstick, and pale pink nail varnish. The dress I wore was the one I’d been presented in: pink brocade with little silver flowers all over it. It didn’t take very long to get ready – I was eighteen and I had a healthy bloom. We met for the dinner-party at about eight or eight-thirty. I would have perhaps one sherry before the meal, and then lashings of champagne with it – champagne night after night, yet I never remember anyone getting in the least drunk. I suppose because we all rushed about and danced it off.
My own dance was more fun than any other, mainly because it was such a lovely feeling to know that you were giving all your friends a nice evening. And I was lucky: I knew just about everybody who came. They were all real friends – from school and so on – and not just people who’d been asked out of duty. I was furious when they played Auld Lang Syne at the end of the dance – I just didn’t want it to stop.
Christian summed up rapturously the feelings of a deb at the beginning of the Season:
Being suddenly catapulted into this fairytale world where everything was champagne and flowers, strawberries and cream, it was deliriously marvellous. Having been brought up to believe that one was plain and stupid and uninteresting and everything, suddenly to have admirers and be told that one was fanciable – it was lovely, glorious. I remember going on the bus down Park Lane one wonderful May morning and looking out, and all London was rather like today, absolutely golden, with the sun shining, and I remember thinking – it’s marvellous, life is wonderful, and these two wonderful young men are in love with me. It was just lovely.
For all her light-hearted romanticism, Christian became more daring as the Season wore on. Ann Schuster became a great friend, and remembers their conspiratorial discovery:
Well, Christian said, you miss all the fun if you go to bed at the end of the evening. You tuck your mother up, and then you slip out and you’ve arranged to meet somebody. So you go, either to a nightclub (and I thought, nightclub? No!). But there were all sorts of things that people did which were fun, like going to Richmond Park at dawn, and wandering through the park in your evening dress ; and Covent Garden of course, strolling through the market ; and then the odd nightclub. But I mostly did outdoor things, all tremendously innocent….
The following week was marked by two of the highlights of the London Season besides, of course, the dances … never forget the dances: there were always at least ten a week, sometimes even more. Ten dances a week for thirteen weeks, up till the beginning of August, as well as the Oxford Commemoration and Cambridge May Balls, and regimental dances, and dances for Hurlingham and Ascot and Goodwood and Henley and charity; yacht-club dances and Cowes Week dances – all summer long, dances and more dances. Next, however, on Tuesday, 16 May, came the start of the Chelsea Flower Show.
The Royal Horticultural Society had held its annual show in the grounds of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea only since 1913, and it did not become an essential element of the Season until after the First World War. Before then, it had been something of a specialists’ occasion for learned horticulturalists and enthusiastic amateur gardeners – including, of course, the owners and their head gardeners from the great country estates. In the 1920s it first began to blossom as a social event, and by 1939 a well-established order of precedence had developed over the four days of the Show. It always opened on a Tuesday, inaugurated by a visit from the royal family, most of whom were keen, if theoretical, gardeners. The King and Queen did not attend in 1939 (they were stuck in fog in an ice field somewhere outside Quebec), but Queen Mary was there, and so were the Kents, the Gloucesters and Princess Alice. Lady Sybil Phipps and her daughter Clare made the opening morning, but it was not a great occasion for debutantes: too cold and wet, too early in the day, and over-crowded with the older generation.
Once royalty had been shown round, the Private View occupied the rest of the morning; but although this meant, in principle, that it was reserved for Fellows of the Royal Horticultural Society, in practice the humbler Fellows were unlikely to turn up on the day traditionally attended by the aristocracy and country gentry. On the first afternoon the President’s Tea-Party was held in his Tent: another occasion cherished by the social elite, when fertilization and cross-pollination and the merits of newer varieties of upstart flowers could be intricately debated. It was only on the last three days, when admission was cheaper, that ordinary members of the public came.
The days of spreading Edwardian lawns were already receding, those times when special flat leather ‘horse boots’ had been on sale at the Show, so that the huge lawn-mowers and rollers pulled by one or even two horses could create a perfectly smooth surface, not pockmarked by the horses’ hooves.
The week of the 1939 Flower Show suffered catastrophic weather. In a mainly dry month of average temperatures, the wettest days by far exactly coincided with the Show, which was buffeted by strong winds and torrential rain. But the displays, protected by two giant marquees, were magnificent and the crowds undeterred. The rock gardens were so realistic that a pair of wild ducks settled on one of the rock pools and feasted on the surrounding vegetation. It was to be the last Show for eight years. Once war had begun, the Royal Horticultural Society devoted most of its resources to instructing people how to grow their own vegetables and aid the war effort.
The following evening, on 17 May, the twelfth annual birthday ball in aid of Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital took place at Grosvenor House, attended by nearly 1,400 people. Lady Howard de Walden had arranged the first Queen Charlotte’s Ball in 1927, and ran it virtually single-handed until the war, and then again after it until her retirement. ‘She used to preside over it like a sergeant-major and all those children [i.e. the debs] really jumped to attention when she appeared. Having had six children of her own, she had a great thing about birth and babies.’ Her lifelong interest in medicine and health also stemmed from the time, during the First World War, when she had run a hospital in Alexandria; but the Ball was always in aid of Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital. All those connected with it donated their services free ; Jacksons of Piccadilly gave the giant cake, and each year a different cosmetic company would provide presents for all the Maids-in-Waiting (debutantes from previous years) and this year’s Maids of Honour. The Guards of Honour were the favoured girls who actually dragged the cake into the ballroom, and as they had to be slim and elegant as well as reasonably strong, this was regarded as a great honour. Their present, in 1939, was a bottle of scent by Schiaparelli, attached to a cyclamen-coloured satin pincushion. (The colour suggests that the scent may have been ‘Shocking’, which came wrapped in bright pink packaging – hence the description ‘shocking pink’ – in which case one hopes the girls did not all wear it at once, since it is a powerfully sweet, heady scent.)
The views of the debs themselves on this ritual varied. ‘Pretty damned absurd,’ one called it.
Absolutely idiotic. One just had to giggle one’s way through it, because it was absurd. Or at least I did – all my friends did. I think there were some girls who were over-awed and thought it was all rather marvellous. I thought it was idiotic but it wasn’t really, looking back, because it did raise an enormous amount of money: so that in a sense it was worth doing. It still felt pretty stupid, and it was ‘mobbed up’ even then – tremendously – by young men throwing fire-crackers and all that sort of thing. Getting obstreperous, throwing bread rolls. But Queen Charlotte’s was all started by that remarkable, redoubtable lady, Lady Howard de Walden. She organized all that, and was the sort of doyenne of the Season.
The morning would have been spent rehearsing the elaborate ceremonies under the stern eye of Lady Howard de Walden herself. If 228 girls are to sweep in pairs down two staircases and curtsey in twos to the Guest of Honour and a cake, it has to be done with military precision, otherwise laughter – whether caused by nerves or by the comic spectacle they presented – could ruin the effect.
The cake was decorated with 195 candles, representing the number of years since Queen Charlotte’s birth. (She was of course the first patron of the hospital.) The candles, unfortunately, were electric, not real. The royal personage who was Guest of Honour each year had to be descended from Queen Charlotte, but was never a reigning queen. (This might have implied that Queen Charlotte’s Ball was usurping the role properly played by presentation at Court.) In 1939 the Guest of Honour was Princess Helena Victoria, the sixty-nine-year-old granddaughter of Queen Victoria. The quaint formalities surrounding the cake were accompanied by the music of Handel’s ‘Judas Maccabeus’, and were said to be derived from the original Queen Charlotte’s favourite birthday ritual.
On the same night, also at Grosvenor House, the National Association for Local Government Officers gave a dance for 250 of their counterparts from Scandinavia. Imagination boggles at what some misdirected Norwegian local council official would have made of the scene, had he by chance found himself in the main ballroom and come upon nearly 250 eighteen-year-old girls dressed in pure white, discreetly jewelled, nervously awaiting their great moment. Initial relief, that the occasion was to be graced by a larger number of attractive young women than the invitation had led him to suspect, and gratitude to his hosts for having provided partners for himself and every single one of his Scandinavian colleagues would have been followed by incredulity as he observed them sink into deep curtseys in front of a gigantic, many-candled cake.
Absurd it may have been, but lots of the debutantes were thrilled by it all. So was the Daily Mail, whose breathless diarist informed the paper’s readers that the 1939 debs were the prettiest and most aristocratic for years. It redeemed itself however with a touching description of the nannies who watched their former charges from the balcony overlooking the main ballroom:
Hundreds of nannies settled like a flock of starlings on the balcony of the big banqueting hall at Grosvenor House just when the procession was about to begin. They looked earnest and protective, waiting anxiously, with their eyes glued to their girls, though one or two dashed over to give their last words of encouragement and a final pat before the ceremony began.7
Surprisingly, this was not the last Queen Charlotte’s Ball for the next five years. It carried on during the war, though its date was later moved to December and the cake was made with dried eggs, the young men wore uniform and the debs’ dresses were bought with coupons.
Marigold Charrington, whose dance came next on 18 May, remembers chiefly being worried about whether anyone would dance with her:
I was frightfully anxious about whether anyone would want to dance with me. It mattered that you could talk. I remember an aunt of mine sending a note down the dinner-table to a young niece saying, ‘Talk, you loon,’ and of course she never spoke again. But you were not allowed to talk about money or the food or domestics.
This was the main point of the dinner-parties: to ensure that the girls (some of whom, certainly at this stage of the Season, might otherwise have known nobody at all) were supplied with at least two guaranteed partners. ‘The young men were in honour bound – and did honour it. Usually they did have to, however much they disliked, however much they thought she was simply hideous, dance with the girl beside them at dinner. Even if she was boss-eyed and the size of a hippopotamus. It was, so to speak, singing for your supper.’ Not that this would ever have been a problem for Vivien Mosley, who made that remark. Through family connections and her brother’s Etonian friends, she had a wide circle of male acquaintances even before the Season began. But for girls up from the depths of the country whose social circle was local and limited, it was a godsend to know you would not have to ‘sit out’ every single dance – the ultimate humiliation.
What were they really like, the young men who were such an essential component of every Season; and why did they always seem to be in short supply?
The truth is, they were not in short supply: only the desirable ones were. Men were desirable, in the words of one former deb, ‘if they were good dancers, good looking and amusing to talk to’. In the eyes of debs’ mothers, it was even more important that they should come from good families. ‘Good’, of course, meant aristocratic. Mollie Acland, whose mother used to bring her knitting to dances, says, ‘I could always tell what sort of chap I was dancing with by her expression – smiles for rich young lordlings, down to positive frowns for penniless subalterns !’ Lady Cathleen Eliot (now Hudson) remembers another kind of popularity:
It came from aristocratic birth, being photogenic, and most of all from the glossy magazines of that time. The male ‘leading lights’ of the year were Valerian Douro, now Duke of Wellington; Charles Manners, who was then Granby and is now Rutland – those two were both extremely good-looking – and Hugh Fraser, the younger brother of Lord Lovat.
Other names that were mentioned again and again were those of Dawyck Haig (who had been Earl Haig since he was ten years old, which caused him a good many problems at prep school) ; ‘Rowley’ Errington, later the Earl of Cromer, who was popular not only because he was titled but because he was tremendously funny as well; Charlie Linlithgow’s twin brother (now Lord Glendevon) ; Tony Loughborough (the late Earl of Rosslyn); Alan Cathcart, who had succeeded to the earldom aged eight; Martyn Beckett (who had succeeded to his father’s baronetcy in 1937); Billy Hartington and his brother Andrew Cavendish. These last three were already deeply engrossed in the young women they were later to marry. Over a span of fifty years one must take it on trust that all these young men were charming and attractive ; what cannot be disputed is that they all, without exception, came from aristocratic families, and most of them, if not already titled, would be eventually.
Several former debs also mentioned the names of some notable eccentrics: young men who were memorable for being different: Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk (whose very name gave him a head start) ; Ben Nicholson (not the painter – a namesake) ; Simon Asquith ; Ivan Moffatt ; and Philip Toynbee. The last two would certainly be appalled at finding themselves listed among the young men of the 1939 Season, and one suspects that they were remembered chiefly because their political views differed so startlingly from those of their fellows.
There could never be enough ‘rich young lordlings’ to go round, and next in the popularity stakes came younger sons – victims of primogeniture, in Waugh’s phrase – who would not themselves inherit a title (though the war upset a lot of people’s expectations) but would provide entry to a noble family. The girls themselves could always be charmed by a man who was witty (which implies intelligence as well) and a good dancer – whatever their mothers might have to say about his prospects. But all these categories together could not amount to more than about a hundred young men: and this when even the elite among the girls amounted to four times that number. The rest, brought in to provide dancing partners, were described over and over again – after fifty years the memory still rankles – as spoilt, conventional and dull. They were the ‘debs’ delights’: the chinless wonders of the time. In spite of this, the impression of a shortfall persists. Mollie Acland stresses:
The first thing to remember is that there were never enough: if for a dinner-party you had to fall back on a seventeen-year-old or a forty-year-old, that was a failure. The ideal age was twenty-three, but twenty-one to twenty-seven was good. They certainly enjoyed the food – dinner, supper and breakfast! – but also I think, like us, actually enjoyed just meeting other young. Don’t forget that public schools were still single sex, so for both boys and girls it was a first chance of limited freedom with the opposite sex.
Nobody expected the debs to work, and the very few who did found the summer a gruelling experience. Many of the men, on the other hand, did have jobs. The largest proportion were in the Army. ‘My clearest recollections are of the many, many young men with whom I danced who were killed in the war. We were all so young. Almost all, if not in the Regular Army by June, were in the Territorials or the RNVR or RAFVR.’ One of the debs escorts concurs: ‘Most of the young men who were on the List came from the landed gentry, the aristocracy, the civil service and the armed forces.’ He was himself eighteen at the start of the 1939 Season: was he willing to be involved in all this ?
Up to a point, yes. I was young and I enjoyed the company of pretty girls. I enjoyed my wine and food, and one was usually given a good dinner first, and then the whole party went on to the dance, wherever it was, and between midnight and two o’clock there was usually a very good supper served, with champagne. Later on there would be breakfast: eggs and bacon and kedgeree, and more champagne. But I was not prepared to do it every single night of the Season, otherwise one would have had no sleep. Then, the morning after the dance, one would send flowers – not to the girl, but to her mother, who had been the hostess. This was partly courtesy, and partly looked upon as an investment !
In addition to the men from the armed forces, there was a surprisingly large number of medical students. It was an infallible way of getting a free meal, and for young medical students or law students who did not have generous allowances from their parents, the endless supply of free salmon and strawberries was a godsend. Helen Vlasto, who was nursing as well as being a deb that year, recalls:
My husband, who had just come down from Cambridge and was a medical student at the London Hospital, tells me that on their ‘Mess’ noticeboard, the names of hostesses and whereabouts of deb dances were displayed for anyone who cared to do so to make use of. Few could afford the travel, and by no means all had the right dress for such occasions. He did attend one or two, but I think found the whole world somewhat unreal, when he was treating the poor and the sick of London’s East End!
Rhoda Walker-Heneage-Vivian remembers them too:
Apart from the Army and Navy men and a sprinkling of stockbrokers, there were also several medical students (particularly from St George’s Hospital: perhaps because it was so central). They used to go straight into the wards from the dances having stocked up on the huge breakfasts provided in the early hours. My husband has reminded me of the practice of the dance hostesses of sending cards to Regimental Messes (usually the Guards) for officers to sign their names if they wished for invitations to the various dances. Even so, it was always a bit of a headache scraping up enough men to go round the dinner-parties and all sorts of ghastly cousins were pressed into service and ignored by Ann and me.
Brothers made up the shortfall, even if they were only seventeen and sometimes still at public school. But one deb’s brother is another deb’s partner, and the fact that the girl was doing a Season virtually guaranteed the suitability of her brother.
Even allowing for the men from the Army and Navy, the undergraduates, the medical students and a smattering from the professions, this still left a large number who did hardly any work at all. Lady Cathleen Eliot, the niece of the Duke of Beaufort, remembers many such:
The young men of 1939 were often heirs to big estates learning in a most relaxed way to take over from their fathers. They spent their time hunting and shooting and fishing, and going to deb dances and getting free dinners on the way. Even the ones who were soldiers seemed to have a lot of leave, and hunted at least twice a week. It was considered common to work in the City or in trade.
Their lives cannot have been too demanding, and certainly left them plenty of time for the Season. For a man ‘in the forefront of the debs’ delightery’, to borrow one scathing expression, this idleness was an advantage:
There was only a nucleus who either wanted or were able to literally dance the nights away five darn nights a week. So they went round and round and round and round, and I suppose they did get nobbled up in the end. But, you know, there were a lot who, other than in the most exceptional circumstances – like a great friend or a sister – would have died rather than attend a deb dance. And don’t forget, it wasn’t just the dances – there was Ascot and Henley and so on, and the whole shabang, the whole mobaroo moved round those as well: all just drifting round in the same galère.
One deb’s brother, co-opted to dinner and dances, now says, ‘I found all the Seasons fun and not in any way a “social duty”. During my time manners – good manners – were a sine qua non, although there were lapses by the occasional young man. It was also taken for granted that one dressed on all occasions in meticulous fashion, from head to toe.’ Anthony Loch adds a telling detail: ‘Since it was more economical to send white waistcoats to the laundry rather than the dry-cleaners, I found myself the possessor of something like a dozen.’
Everyone is unanimous about the good manners of young men and women in Society in those last days before the War. One of the men who escorted many of the 1939 debs strikes a wistful note:
In my view, by the time of the 1939 Season, courtesy and etiquette had reached the highest level since 1913 and 1914. I think the survivors of the First World War were so shocked at what had happened, that first of all they let themselves go in the 1920s as a relief; but gradually it all began to come back m the 30s. I think there was a great nostalgia and yearning for Edwardian times, when we thought we were safe, we thought we were on top of the world; when living was gracious and people entertained, people still gave house parties and could afford to. And I think it was part of this yearning that created this climate for good manners, courtesy and consideration. Manners began to deteriorate as soon as the war broke out. Everyone was in a hurry. But I think manners today – which are absolutely appalling – are so bad because people are selfish. They just don’t care about others.
He clearly has in mind two quite different aspects of good manners. There is conventional courtesy – the obligation to dance with your neighbours at dinner, or to send flowers and a thank-you letter to your hostess the next day. But he also has in mind a more profound sort of manners, the manners of the heart: a rare and unselfish consideration for other people. Vivien Mosley made exactly the same point, but she sees it rather differently:
All the men had beautifully superimposed manners. They knew how to behave impeccably and they were certainly well turned out. But on another level, I would not say that their manners were innately beautiful – by which I mean being sensitive to the person you’re dealing with. I certainly don’t think that applied. Whereas today people’s manners are much worse – absolutely unpardonable, some of them. On both levels.
What, then – if they all had perfect manners – made a young man undesirable ? Apart from the usual things like being boring or unattractive (which were much more serious handicaps in the case of the girls), men who were sexually predatory were disapproved of – particularly by the mothers. Lady Royds’ List marked these off with the initials NSIT (not safe in taxis), to which the debs added a further category, MTF (must touch flesh). However, knowing that a man was NSIT added a certain frisson to his company … and sometimes a certain disappointment. If one of these ‘taxi tigers’ didn’t pounce, the girl was left thinking, ‘Well, what’s wrong with me?’ So taxi tigers were quite an intriguing species, though the ubiquitous chaperones rarely gave them a chance to pursue their prey unobserved. They could sometimes entice one of the braver girls to a nightclub and in the taxi on the way there or, more likely, on the way back hope for a kiss and a cuddle; but never, or only very seldom, did it amount to anything more.
One is left with the obvious conclusion that the least desirable young men were the dull ones – especially if they were conceited as well. The worst offenders seem to have been the very young Guards officers: ‘We thought they were frightfully stupid and unsophisticated and dreary.’ Remarkably few of the men seem to have been good dancers; indeed, one former deb said bitterly, ‘Good ? Most of them were atrocious – atrocious –’
An awful lot of us that year loved waltzing more than anything else, Viennese waltzing, and one used to stand there with that silly programme and one used to absolutely pray and wait and look around saying, I do hope, I do hope … Well, there were about half a dozen real dab hands, and one simply didn’t care, they could come up to one’s knee and be covered in warts or anything – but if they could waltz well, I mean, one was so pleased.
The ritual of the dance cards still survived, although both sexes found it archaic. One man who was in attendance during the last two Seasons of the decade recalled how it worked:
The girl had the dance programme with a pencil attached on the end of a cord, and a young man would go round and say to a girl he liked the look of, ‘Are you free to dance the 12th?’ (which might be a waltz, or it might be a two-step) and the pretty girls normally had all their programmes filled up. The ones who were not pretty, I’m afraid, indulged in a certain amount of subterfuge, and it was not unknown for a girl to fill in her own programme, so that she would not lose face with her mother or her chaperone. She would say, ‘I’m tired, I’m sitting this dance out.’
Mary Pollock (now Mrs D’Oyly) tells the story of what she did when faced with an almost-empty dance card:
There was one dreadful evening at 6 Stanhope Gate when hardly anybody asked me to dance. I think I had two names on my card. I sat there feeling so awful – kept going off to the loo – coming back – still nobody – so in the end I rang up my parents. It was late, and they’d gone to bed but my father who was a frightfully kind man said, ‘Don’t worry – I’ll be at the door in half an hour.’ Just after, a young man came up to me and said, ‘Excuse me, I’ve noticed that you don’t seem to have had many dances: will you come and dance with me?’ I had to tell him that I was leaving in half an hour, but anyhow we danced for the rest of the evening, and I got to know him quite well. Next day he came to call on me. He became a good friend – no, I didn’t marry him !
It is good to be reminded that the young could be spontaneously kind to one another.
Lord Cromer remembers the gamesmanship, as he calls it, attached to dance cards:
As far as the young men were concerned, a lot of them were very shy. The one thing you didn’t want to. do was to be left on your own. Of course it was always easier for the boys because at a party they could always go to the bar and have a drink. If a girl wasn’t asked to dance then I think she had a very miserable time. At private parties, programmes were universal, and there was a great deal of gamesmanship in it. If a girl was pretty and much sought after, then you would say, have you a spare dance? And she would say, oh, I can manage number eleven and you knew perfectly well she’d made it up. It was all part of the sort of mating – well, not mating, that’s too strong a word – dating ploy. It was a private piece of paper. A girl kept her programme, and only a very persistent young man would say, I want to see it. Now, having promised you number eleven she was honour bound to dance with you – if she was still there. But the party might have broken up. She couldn’t though, say, ‘I’ve forgotten’. That was bad.
A man might be conscious that he had been rejected ; but for a girl a half-empty programme was a disaster. It was public humiliation to be seen sitting like a wallflower at the edge of the room while others danced. One deb remembers vividly:
People used to gather in the entrance of the ballroom and you used to start off looking quite confident and then you’d start to look slightly worried and then you’d sort of look round and you’d look at your card as if someone had let you down, and hopefully someone would come and ask you to dance. And then there was the other thing: you used to go to the bar and pretend someone was getting you a drink. It was a tragedy if your programme wasn’t filled. I never used to go and spend time in the cloakroom. You’d never get asked to dance there.
A young man who liked dancing was rated above one who was a good talker. Most of the debs positively expected to be bored in conversation. They were advised not to be too interesting themselves, in case it intimidated the men, and certainly not to display signs of intellectual prowess. ‘My mother said to me, “Darling, boys don’t like bookish girls.”’ says Sarah Norton – which must have been frustrating for her, since she was rather well read. Elizabeth Lowry-Corry had exactly the same experience:
Setting the world to rights was not really one of my subjects, but I was in a way already becoming an intellectual. I had studied music in Dresden; I’d read a great many books by this time, and I think if I’d been able to talk about these kind of things, it would have been fine. But in fact none of the chaps I knew, or most of the girls either, believed in that line of country at all. And my father hated talking to intelligent girls. He didn’t like it if you came out with anything, really. Perhaps one may have tried to say something, but it fell flat. So all this made conversation very difficult.
Even Priscilla Brett, who moved among an unusually bright and articulate young crowd, experienced the same problems as soon as she left the company of her close friends: ‘At the dinner-table, if you were put next to a stranger, the difficulty was to keep the thing going without saying anything very interesting, because that wasn’t done.’ This remembered range of topics conjures up an image of a young man who expects to hold forth and a young girl who expects to have to listen: ‘Most of them liked telling you about their regiments, or their horses, or their hunting prowess, or their plans for the future; and occasionally their sad stories of disappointments with other girls.’ Lady Cathleen Eliot was even more unlucky:
The main conversation that I remember was how many dances you were going to that week; which of last night’s two or three were you at; and were you going to so-and-so’s tomorrow! A few of the men were of course intelligent, and that made them good conversationalists, but on the whole they were dull. I was lucky enough to be a good talker, helped by the fact that my mother had a pilot’s licence and used to fly me up and down to London from the country, which made me popular with the men. The war and politics were not talked about among my friends, so I thought that hunting, house parties and parties would go on ad infinitum until perhaps one day I would get married. I think debs at that time were very parochial and xenophobic, mostly because they’d had such a sheltered upbringing.
One senses that the young people for whose benefit the Season was so elaborately stage-managed were often scarcely more than children and, for all their beautiful manners, underneath that façade they were ill at ease, inexperienced and – especially the men – quite unprepared for emotional contact with the opposite sex. Prep and public schools ensured that, for ten years or more, boys had almost no knowledge of girls outside their immediate family. At the same time they were often indoctrinated with the belief that it was unmanly to show their feelings – not triumph or disappointment or pride, not tenderness or affection, and, above all, never a chink of vulnerability. Small boys despatched sobbing to prep school at the age of seven or eight, frightened and homesick in their scratchy new uniforms, came home after one or two terms with the concept of the stiff upper lip already firmly lodged in their minds. Tears and teddy bears were laughed to scorn and bullying was endemic. ‘From the age of eight I slept with a knife under my pillow, ‘ said one good-looking scion of the aristocracy. Adolescent sexuality took the form of torrid love-affairs with other boys or, more sinisterly, the organized brutality of caning. Boys were at a further disadvantage in that many of them were not allowed to betray signs of affection at home, either, and were much more subject to discipline than girls. Boys from aristocratic families usually referred to their fathers by their title at all times, except to their face, when they might say ‘Papa’ or ‘Pater’. Boys in their teens could be ordered around by any passing uncle or cousin – ‘Go and change your shoes before your father sees you’ – and only the bravest or most devoted mother would demur.
By the time boys emerged from the public-school system at the age of eighteen, the worst of them had been rendered unimaginative and insensitive to the feelings of others, while even the best had learned all too effectively how to hide their feelings. Some never overcame this. Many Englishmen direct their strongest emotions towards their horse, their car, their club, their regiment or even their old school. Madeleine Turnbull looks back sympathetically at the gauche young men of her generation: ‘Public school certainly bashed an awful lot of emotion out of them, these terribly up-tight young men who had it all sort of bottled in and couldn’t express it. It was terribly sad. While boarding schools for the girls were just the opposite … hothouses of expectation and romantic ideas!’ Girls might dream of love and aristocratic elopements as portrayed in the historical novels of Margaret Irwin or Georgette Heyer, but they never doubted that sex before marriage was taboo. ‘I think I was kissed twice before I met my future husband,’ said one, who is not untypical.
And so the young enacted, night after night, a formalized ritual of meeting, conversing and dancing in the most luxurious surroundings, while mutual misunderstanding and confusion were disguised by a set of social conventions from which few deviated. The miracle is that so many did have fun and most of them found marriage partners.
If failure at last night’s dance, and growing apprehension at the prospect of the next, was the dominant thought, each night would have become an obstacle course between the Scylla of the chaperones and the Charybdis of the debs’ delights.
Two days after Queen Charlotte’s Ball, on 19 May, came a dance that risked breaking some at least of the bounds of convention. It was given by Lady Twysden at 6 Stanhope Gate, and was unusual in that it was not only a coming-out dance for her daughter Betty, but also a coming-of-age party for Betty’s older brother, Sir Anthony Twysden, and younger brother Michael Blake. Betty was greatly in demand as a deb because of her two elder brothers, one of whom was a very good dancer. ‘The other’, says Betty, now Mrs Morton, ‘danced like a large Labrador puppy !’ It was mainly the boys who had insisted that this was not going to be the usual deb dance. In the receiving line at the top of the double staircase at 6 Stanhope Gate, Betty and her two brothers stood in a row with their mother to welcome guests, Anthony clutching a large bouquet of cauliflowers and carrots which someone had sent him from Moyses Stevens !
Our party was frowned on by some of the stumer Mums who considered it shocking that we had a black band to play. Mother had been apprehensive but we assured her that Snakehips Johnson was marvellous, though I do remember her looking a bit taken aback when he arrived in his swallowtail coat and bowed over her hand. Some of the Mums took one look and carted their daughters off home. But I shall never forget the picture of Snakehips and his band leading all the little debs and their escorts in a whooping conga up one side of the double staircase and down the other side. The Mums were horrified but we thought it was tremendous fun.
The weekend was fun as well, with polo at Hurlingham and Ranelagh and next week’s Derby to look forward to.
Fun in England, at any rate ; in Poland a small but ominous incident occurred on the morning of Sunday, 21 May. Three Polish officials had driven to a village called Kalthof, on the Prussian-Danzig frontier, to investigate reported disturbances. Shots fired from their car, apparently by the chauffeur, killed a Danzig citizen of German birth. In the highly charged border atmosphere of the time, it was precisely the kind of incendiary gesture the Poles most feared, calculated to provide propaganda for the Germans. The area was a tinder-box; one man’s death could have been the spark. But, for the time being, a sharp protest was the only apparent result.
The following week was dominated by the Epsom summer meeting, and was not an ideal week for dances. The last race at Epsom was run at 5 p.m., which meant a rush to travel back to London and change for the evening. Experienced mothers marked down Epsom week – like Ascot – as one to avoid, so that, although there were five dances, they were all relatively minor. The two highlights of the week were the Derby on Wednesday afternoon and the Oaks on Friday. The course was in excellent condition, the going should be perfect, and the weather was beautiful. The Hon. Anne Douglas-Scott-Montagu remembers when her cousins, Lord and Lady Wharncliffe,
took a double-decker red London bus. It was lined up somewhere on the Derby course and we had this wonderful party with a fantastic lunch, champagne, all spread out downstairs in the bus, and we all sat upstairs. I remember Diana and Barbara Stuart-Wortley, whose party it was – and that was one of the unusual, rather nice things I remember doing.
Blue Peter was favourite for the Derby, Galatea II for the Oaks. In the event, both duly won, Blue Peter by four lengths. He was a popular winner, being the Earl of Roseberry’s first success in the Derby (the previous Earl had won it three times) and the huge crowd attracted by glorious sunshine cheered his victory ecstatically.
Many debs were racing enthusiasts, having been born and brought up with horses, and would have attended Epsom not just for the fashion parade which accompanied every one of its four days, but also because they were genuinely knowledgeable and interested in the racing. Surprisingly perhaps, they were allowed a discreet bet – two shillings slipped to an escort could be placed with a bookie, and it all added to the afternoon’s excitement.
Marigold Charrington was one who was well informed about racing and horses: ‘Racing was part of our life – my parents’ too – and we were knowledgeable about form and so on. In fact I went to see the horses far more than the people ! Though of course one had to dress up – a different outfit for each day: new hat, new dress. Not bags and shoes – we made them do. It was a lovely week – wonderful weather.’ But, although the dresses and hats were once again faithfully reported in The Times, Epsom as a fashion event was definitely less important than Ascot. Although both the Derby and the Oaks dated back 160 years, and Epsom was firmly rooted in the Season, it was classless in its appeal. Less exclusive than Ascot – with its Royal Enclosure and rigid rules about who might or might not be admitted – it had long been a national rather than a Society occasion. The Derby is democracy writ large; and the upper classes have always had their doubts about democracy. Hoipolloi make the oligarchy nervous.
Racing has always had a special fascination for the aristocracy. Selective breeding, the tracing of bloodlines down several generations, the inheritance of certain characteristics from sire to foal; the mitigating of the faults of one line by introducing a mare whose strengths will compensate – these mirror, in safely equine form, the obsession with blood that is crucial to the aristocracy’s good opinion of itself. The English thoroughbred is lineage made visible. The use of racing slang to express approval of a woman is no accident. Besides enabling an Englishman to pay a compliment without feeling self-conscious, it conveys in terms that all around him perfectly comprehend the overriding importance of pure blood. So a girl can be called a ‘fine-looking filly’, ‘a goer’ or ‘a stayer’ with a ‘mane’ of hair; while the closer her legs approach to the narrow fragility of a race-horse’s, the more they are likely to be admired. Lady Sarah Churchill recognized this quite explicitly: ‘I used to say to my mother, “You know, we’re just like fillies at a race track, we’re being wandered around for sale to the highest bidder.” Y’know, like horse sales. She used to be furious: “Don’t talk such nonsense !”’
Two other events on Derby Day made news. The first was the King’s Empire Day message broadcast from Winnipeg and relayed to listeners all over the world, including 1,200 guests at the Empire Day dinner in Grosvenor House. The speech was anodyne, as such speeches must be: what can a monarch say to several hundred million people that will offend no one? And so they heard ‘deeply moving experience … the march of progress … striving to restore standards … not in power or wealth alone …’. Speaking directly to young listeners, the King concluded: ‘It is true, and I deplore it deeply, that the skies are overcast in more than one quarter at the present time. Do not on that account lose heart. Life is a great adventure, and every one of you can be a pioneer blazing by thought and service a trail to better things.’
On the same day, a British military mission arrived in Poland; the Cabinet passed a plan for concerted action between Britain, France and Soviet Russia in case any one of the three was attacked; and a sale at Christie’s in aid of Lord Baldwin’s Fund for Refugees raised £15,647. Many of the paintings and objets d’art were either given or purchased by Jews. The fund now totalled £481,646. It included £60 which was the proceeds of a dance given by the Whitechapel and Stepney Street Traders’ Protection Association.
Friday, 26 May was the night of the Royal Caledonian Ball. This was the annual event which gave Scottish members of Society an opportunity to show off their reels. Men wore full evening tartan, women white evening dress, sashed with the family tartan, it being the only occasion in the year when it was considered correct to wear full tartan outside Scotland. Taking part in the reels was by invitation, and the dancers rehearsed assiduously beforehand. For Christian Grant it was one of the highlights of her Season:
The Caledonian Ball was basically for charity, but it was real fun. It was usually organized by a group of ‘senior’ mothers from Scotland, of whom my mother qualified as one that year. It was held in Grosvenor House, being the biggest ballroom they could find in London. It started off with simple set reels. One had to be invited to take part, and if one wasn’t, it would have been a pretty good disaster … it was rather an important thing, if one came from Scotland. So all the young girls from Scotland were paired up with all the most dashing or eligible young men from Scotland – because, of course, one qualification was that you had to be able to dress yourself up in tartan. All the men wore the regulation kilt and the girls white dresses with their family tartan draped round them as a sash and fastened on the shoulder with a silver brooch with your family crest. It must have been quite a spectacle, seen from the balcony at Grosvenor House. It was sort of Scotland’s night out in London, and great fun for anyone who had connections with Scotland.
May had been a portentous month. Tension was increasing in Poland, and the British military mission sent to Warsaw, ostensibly to confer with officers of the Polish General Staff about military aspects of the Anglo-Polish agreement, in actuality, had been briefed to find out the truth about the number of border incidents, and to try and cool matters down. This was impossible, since Hitler deliberately exaggerated the incidents – many of them caused by German agents provocateurs in the first place – so as to stir up patriotic ardour in Germany. In Spain the Civil War had officially ended on 19 May, but general mobilization had been called for. After some weeks of tentative negotiations – was Britain to hug the Russian bear or gingerly accept its paw?, in Chips Channon’s metaphor – the Anglo-Russian pact seemed on the point of being concluded.
In London, evacuation plans were being drawn up. Over two million copies of a pamphlet explaining who was entitled to be evacuated, and how it would be done, were delivered by post to households in central London and eleven boroughs. It was stressed that evacuation was entirely voluntary, although ‘a grave responsibility would rest on parents and guardians who nevertheless kept their children in London’. A Civil Defence Bill, debated in Parliament throughout May, was organizing blackout facilities and air-raid shelters. Even the advertisements cashed in on the ominous mood of the moment. ‘You Must Be Prepared for Home Defence – Lay in a Store of Ovaltine Now!’ ran one headline. The advertisement went on: ‘It is not only a wise precaution but conforms to the advice given by the authorities to housewives to lay in a reserve against possible emergencies. 1/ld, l/10d, 3/3d per tin.’
By this time some debs had already begun to prepare for the ordeal that had to come. Lady Brigid Guinness and the Hon. Aedgyth Acton were two who trained in first aid with the Red Cross during the summer of 1939. Others embarked on a practical nursing training, managing somehow to combine the rigours of hospital life with the contrasting – but still gruelling – rigours of the Season. One such was Helen Long, née Vlasto:
The hospital to which I was assigned was Lambeth Infirmary – at that time full of terminal cases, and patients for whom there was little or no hope of recovery. Evacuation of other patients to alternative or country-based hospitals had already taken place, so close to war were we by then.
A very diffident eighteen-year-old, I spent my days at Lambeth Infirmary and my nights at various West End hotels or private houses, attending deb dances. The contrasting scenes invalidated each other, and I felt I was living a double, and somewhat unworthy life. Only the hot and scented baths taken between my day and night life enabled me to replenish the energy required for both, and to face them with equanimity.8
Meanwhile, it was the Bank Holiday weekend. No rain had fallen since the washout of the Chelsea Flower Show, and although temperatures had been about average until now, Whit Monday was brilliantly hot and sunny. Parents and debs dispersed to their country homes, or one another’s, for the long weekend, while the rest of the country lazed happily in thousands of deckchairs in hundreds of parks and on miles of beaches. London bus and train stations were packed solid with queues of people determined to see the sea. The banks of the Thames were crowded with picnickers. Thousands went to watch cricket at Lords; thousands more to see the panda at London zoo or the lions at Chessington. Hampstead had its traditional Whit Monday fair, and ice-cream and whelk sellers, gypsies and fortune tellers, pickpockets and big dippers had a field day. Central London was practically empty, and museums showed unusually low attendance figures. It was a day for making the most of the present. The past threw long shadows, and the future did not bear thinking about.