July started badly. It rained. For 3, 4 and 5 July, Evelyn Waugh’s diary recorded ‘Continuous rain’ and, on 6 July, ‘More rain.’1 This meant that the hundredth Henley Royal Regatta, which opened on 3 July, was a pretty miserable affair for all but the most dedicated rowing enthusiasts. One such was Tom Vickers, a young bachelor living in digs in Ebury Street and working at the Colonial Office. He attended many deb parties that summer – he was especially popular because he was a good dancer and delighted in waltzing. A great friend of Rosamund Neave and her family, he soon found other invitations coming in. His name began to crop up on other mothers’ lists, he enjoyed the dances, and found that the main disadvantage of the Season was the very large laundry bills incurred in washing and starching all those white shirts.
Rowing had been his passion, both at school and university, so Henley was a welcome break from a demanding London life:
I went to Henley in 1939 for two reasons. One is that the King’s College Boat Club were able to send a full eight to row at Henley that year, whereas the previous year [his final year at Cambridge] we could only send a four. The other reason was that my twin brother was still at Trinity, Oxford, and he was going to be rowing in the Trinity second eight. As far as I remember I went on my own, because I still regarded myself as more part of the rowing fraternity than the London Season. I wanted to be able to watch the rowing, to retire to the Angel – the pub just by Henley Bridge – with my King’s friends. I was more interested in doing that than in having girls and their mums tagging on. I think they would have been in the way.
Henley was then, and still is, dominated by the Stewards and Leander. It’s essentially a male event. The old boys like to come out if they’ve got an Oxford or a Cambridge Blue. Of course … you want to put on your Blue cap or you want to wear your Leander tie and your Leander socks – it’s not really a Society event. I mean, there are no top hats at Henley: the emphasis is quite different. So for Henley I would have worn my King’s first-boat blazer and a King’s tie and a King’s cap probably; I mean, I would have worn what was expected. You were only entitled to wear the blazer or the cap or the tie if you had actually got it. It showed you were a rowing man.
The tie of all ties during Henley week comes from membership of the Leander Club. To aspire to that, a man has to have rowed in a winning event at Henley, or rowed in a boat that went head of the river at Oxford or Cambridge. It is an honour granted to few, and those few celebrate it, wearing a particularly bright salmon pink, in Leander’s pretty Edwardian club house beside Henley Bridge. To this day, fifty years later, no women are allowed to row at Henley. It is, as Tom Vickers said, a very male event.
There were of course some debutantes there: what would Henley have been without its quota of girls in pretty frocks (rather damp and drooping frocks that year) even if they were sweetly ignorant about who was racing and who had won? Lady Elizabeth Scott was there with Lord Haig and Katharine Ormsby-Gore, photographed by the Tatler in an elegant group. Christian Grant was there, ‘mainly because my future husband, who was then a sort of boyfriend, had been in the eight at Eton and so was passionate about rowing’. The weather prevented any really good times – in both senses of the word – for the wind was too strong for the boats and the rain too heavy for the debs. Most people sheltered in one of the many club tents as soon as they decently could, and the ‘wet-bobs’ Ascot’ was a bit of a wash-out. A pity: for it was not only the centenary year, but very possibly the last Henley for some years.
Increasingly, as month succeeded tense month in the summer of 1939, leaving less hope that war could be averted, people took part in the Season with the unspoken fear that each event could be the last; or, at any rate, their last. The young men who rowed at Henley, or watched others row, were mostly training for war by July. Many of the girls had embarked on some sort of preparation, nursing with the Red Cross perhaps. For almost a year people had convinced themselves that Munich had worked; but as the Polish crisis deepened it became clear to anyone who was at all politically informed, and especially to those with access to Establishment sources, that this time there was to be no way out. The stratagems put forward to placate Hitler were increasingly dishonourable. In early July there was a flurry of correspondence in The Times from people claiming that it was not worth starting another world war over Danzig. Better to annex its 400,000 citizens for Germany (most of them were German anyway). But Lloyd George had predicted twenty years earlier that Danzig and the Polish Corridor would trigger the next war, and he was right. Whatever the justice of the territorial boundaries redrawn by the Versailles agreement, Poland was always the weakest link. The only thing Munich had achieved – perhaps the only thing it could ever have hoped to achieve – was a year’s breathing space, during which Britain could partly remedy the dangerous arms imbalance between herself and Germany.
Lord Hood describes the attitudes that resulted from this sense of fatalism:
One was hoping against hope that it could be avoided, as it was at the time of Munich, and I don’t think the young realized what mobilization and all that would mean. But there was nothing they could do about it – there was nothing I could have done about it – and so I went on with my work and my ordinary play. It was a matter for governments to try and negotiate, and for the armed forces to get as well prepared as possible. I don’t see anything unreasonable or wrong about the Season going on. In fact I think it would have been looked upon as panicking if it hadn’t. And so we went on living the way we normally did. It didn’t harm anybody.
I think by then everyone must have realized that war was imminent; but if you were out on an agreeable party you didn’t think too much about it. There you were, you were having a good time, and that was enough for the evening.
Lord Haig reflects on the realities as they seemed at the time:
I couldn’t say now whether most of the girls knew much about the likelihood of war but certainly I think most of the young men were only too aware of it. We’d been let off at the time of Munich when we were already expecting to be called up and sent off so it was a year’s grace really. But the realities of it were only too clear and one knew what one was going to have to do. The difference was that one wasn’t expecting this highly mechanized sort of war. One was being brought up in the aftermath of the trench war, the static war, and really wasn’t expecting the Blitzkrieg. As for what was happening to the Jews in Germany, at the time, the short answer is that we just didn’t know. I believe there was an occasional touch of anti-Semitism among the upper classes – among certain people you saw signs of it – but I certainly don’t think that even they would have countenanced what was happening, if they’d known about it.
And so the last month of the last Season of peace carried on much as usual. Lady Kemsley gave a splendid dance for Ghislaine Dresselhuys, her daughter by a first marriage to an American. It was held at Chandos House, which was at that time the Kemsleys’ London house. It was a beautiful Adam house in Queen Anne Street, one of the few such houses in London then remaining in private hands. (Its history since then has been chequered. It changed hands several times after the war, was for some time the premises of the Royal Society of Medicine, and in 1988 was sold yet again.)
The dance was given royal status by the presence of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. It was attended by two other duchesses as well, besides a glittering array of all the most sought-after debs of the Season and all the most distinguished young men. The music was by Nat Gonella and his Georgians, a new dance band whose music was closer to jazz than the usual popular songs to which the debs danced night after night. Ghislaine was a poised, beautiful and therefore much envied deb, and at this late stage of the Season it was necessary to produce some fairly startling element to a dance if it were to stand out from the nightly procession of all the other dances. Even salmon and champagne and Tubby Clayton pall eventually; but Nat Gonella livened things up considerably, and the sophisticated young guests who thronged Chandos House that evening welcomed music they could swing to.
The hesitant girls, awkward in their new ball dresses, who had ventured into their first dances at the beginning of May were now poised, almost blasé. Going to nightclubs now became a daring and frequent pastime. The smartest and most fashionable of all the clubs was the 400. Situated in Leicester Square, it was the mecca for London’s chic night life and thus the mecca for debs. One of the men who escorted many of the 1939 debs recaptures the clandestine excitement all this entailed:
The great trick was when the chaperone was upstairs playing bridge – there was usually a separate room provided for them, where they had their own champagne and could play bridge or talk – the trick was to say to the pretty girl, let’s nip off to a night club, this dance is rather boring, don’t you think? And she would say, yes, actually. I’ve never been to a night club. So one would say, well, where would you like to go? Would you like to go to the Astor, the 400, the Orchid Room, the Milroy, and so on? And she would select the club. One would take her to the night club and have a few dances in close proximity in semi-darkness, and then return to the ball in time to deliver the girl to the waiting chaperone who felt she’d been doing her duty all along. This was considered very dashing and was quite innocent. There were, I suppose, a few cases where it was not innocent; but generally it was a question of having a dance, tightly entwined, and a few kisses in the taxi coming back.
But it was quite expensive. You had to be a member, and the annual subscription was between ten shillings and a pound a year. For a young man who may have had three or four pounds a week, that could be too much.
Several young men of that year confirm this. One who was already earning his own living as a junior civil servant, says ruefully, ‘I never had the money to go on to the 400 after a dance, although that was where a lot of my friends would congregate. They would go from one dance to another and end up at the 400 – but that was going to be a pretty expensive evening by the time you were finished. Drinks and taxis and everything.’
Ronnie Kershaw was a favourite escort in 1939 and one of his great attractions must have been his passion for the 400 Club.
The 400 was something on its own. It was the best place – I think it was the greatest place ever. There will never be another one. Mr Rossi was the head waiter. He always got you a table if he knew you. Then there was the fat man who played the piano: Tim Clayton. The atmosphere there was absolutely incredible. I went there an awful lot, with various people. It didn’t cost a great deal. If you were in the Army you seemed to be allowed to do things at a very cheap rate … it can’t have been more than a fiver at the most: maybe not as much.
You didn’t go there to meet other people, in fact a great many went there not to be seen! It was so dark, it was quite difficult to see where anyone was. The atmosphere of that place was something indescribable.
The girls were – or it suited them to be – sweetly unaware of the expense involved. Anne Douglas-Scott-Montagu, now Lady Chichester, adored the 400, although her trips there did not become frequent until during the war, when it was a favourite haunt for people on a brief leave in London. ‘We always went dancing at the 400, which was great. We’d sometimes have dinner there, and then dance through to the early hours of the morning. But I’ve no idea what they cost – I never paid, so I wouldn’t know. Poor young men: I suppose they had to pay, but I’ve no idea what they cost. I don’t remember even thinking about it.’
The Earl of Cromer, then Rowley Errington, also relished the night life that London’s clubs and restaurants offered, at prices which, in retrospect, seem startlingly low.
The form very much was that if you were going to a dance later on you might take a girl to the theatre first, or dinner or something – it was all very cheap. None of us had much money. Well … a few did, but the majority didn’t. You could take a girl out to dinner and the theatre then a nightclub for well under a fiver, even in the money of those days. But even so, you didn’t do it too often because, obviously, you didn’t have the cash. And of course it was absolutely out of the question that the girls should ever pay. But the restaurateurs, they all knew the structure and they encouraged the young people to go in the hope that later on, if they’d got the money, they’d come there to spend it. It was purely commercial, but they were nice about it, too.
His favourite place was the Café de Paris:
It was downstairs in the basement of a building in New Coventry Street. The floor wasn’t very big – only about 30 feet square: almost a club within a club, except that you didn’t have to belong to it. It was run by a man called Pilsner, who welcomed the young. Then the favourite place after that was the 400, which had a sort of reputation all of its own – I mean a nice, happy reputation. Then there was Ciro’s, which had a dance floor made of glass, with lights shining through: that was in Orange Street. Then there was another one called the Florida, just off Berkeley Square, which had a revolving floor – quite a novelty in those days. I don’t remember any really sordid ones – I mean with telephones between the tables, where you could pick up a girl. You read about that sort of thing happening in Paris or New York but not in London, no. You went there with your girl. No pick-ups.
Yet here is quite a different point of view from Lord Hood, also a popular young man that year, though far too preoccupied with work to qualify as a ‘debs’ delight’. He had started doing the round of deb dances in 1932, so by 1939 the Season had to offer either a very splendid ball or a dance given by very close friends for him to find it amusing.
It was certainly considered ‘fast’ for a debutante to go to a nightclub, because the chaperone would not have been around. In any case, I couldn’t have afforded it. I was fairly impecunious and saw no reason to go. I went out and had a very good dinner and then I went on to the dance and after that I wanted to go home to bed, as I had to work the next day. So I don’t recall ever having gone to a nightclub. There were of course the rather grand, rich young men who could, and did it, and thought it amusing and, you know, rather audacious and smart and so forth – I didn’t; and there were a great many like me.
That was the men’s point of view. For most of the girls a visit to a nightclub was nothing short of rapture. It was daring, delicious, a chance to be alone with a favourite young man, and thus forbidden and flattering. There were still, of course, many debs who obeyed their mothers’ strict injunction not, ever, in any circumstances, no matter how attractive or safe, to venture into a nightclub. Mollie Acland says, ruefully, ‘Nightclubs were not merely fast: they were absolutely forbidden your first Season.’ So she did not go. Lady Cathleen Eliot (now Lady Cathleen Hudson) was also forbidden to go to nightclubs by her mother, but she went all the same – not least because her mother took an unconventional view of her duties as a chaperone, tending to consider them at an end when she had dropped her daughter off at the beginning of each week:
She was a pilot with her own aeroplane and deposited me in London (Northolt) on Monday and collected me on Saturday, leaving strict instructions that I was not to go to nightclubs. But most of the debs did in fact go to them – it was only considered slightly fast – and I went to the 400 a few times, since that was the smart place to go.
This was the practical view taken by another very aristocratic deb: ‘Yes, it was thought fast for a deb to go to a nightclub, but we went all the same. The most fashionable was the 400, though the Paradise, the Suivi and the Nuthouse were also popular, and the Florida.’ The mothers were obviously fighting a losing battle, though Mary Tyser (now Lady Aldenham) remembers her mother’s disapproval: ‘I remember her commenting on one or two girls who were known to have done so [i.e. gone to nightclubs] and unfortunately I never thought of evading my chaperone: I was far too gauche and childish, I suppose. Anyhow I never went to a nightclub in 1939.’ Lady Elizabeth Montagu Douglas Scott, now the Duchess of Northumberland, said:
Not many girls could go to nightclubs as they were too strictly chaperoned, but I have to admit that from about halfway through the summer I did slip away quite often, but would return before the end of the dance and was only caught twice! This was probably because my mother would leave a ball quite early and go off to a nightclub, so I would have to enquire at the entrance whether she was there or not! My favourite place was the 400, so we would go there first and find out from charming Mr Rossi – who knew everyone – and he would welcome one in or warn one if there was danger! Then we could go elsewhere – such as the Café de Paris or the Florida. The 400 was, definitely a part of life then and all through the war and into the fifties. It had a wonderful band with a lovely huge fat brilliant pianist and leader.
The five or six nightclubs mentioned were only those most frequented by the debs, but London had dozens, many of which thrived all through the war – the Nest (known as ‘London’s Harlem’ because of its black band and its jazz), the Blue Lagoon, the Midnight Room, Hatchett’s, the Hungaria, the Berkeley, Quaglino’s – all of them, say the habituées of those years, much more fun than anything London can offer today.
Why were the chaperones so adamant in forbidding nightclubs? A smooch in a dimly lit (but overcrowded) room, a cocktail or two, surely …? The answer is that nightclubs were, they believed, hot-houses for people who were having – or about to have – an affair. Deb dances were all romance and prettiness, luxury and display and invigilated courting. But nightclubs were dark and secret places, their gloom pierced only by arabesques of cigarette smoke and the stimulating or melancholy music of jazz and the blues. They were, in a word, for sex: that untried and uncontrollable quality that all debs yearned to know more about.
Although the Season – like Jane Austen’s novels – was based on sex, it was never mentioned. In the eyes of the mothers marriage came first. They all believed implicitly in the unwritten upper-class code, that only when marriage had produced a son and heir to safeguard the family property could a woman begin to think of making her own sexual choices. Married women were allowed a good deal of freedom in conducting affairs; and, indeed, the chaperones should not be thought of as stout, ageing ladies for whom sex was a thing of the past. Most of them were still comparatively young – certainly in their forties, or, in a few cases, their thirties – and several were themselves engaged in more or less public affairs with someone else’s husband. But that was different. They had married; established a household (or, just as likely, inherited one); and given birth to children who would ensure that the line continued. After that, if their marriages were less than happy, they were free to look elsewhere. But the debs were different, and their virginity had to be cherished. It was thought – by the mothers – to be the most valuable commodity they possessed. Few of the girls questioned this assumption and, if any did, there was also the fear of pregnancy to restrain them. ‘Every time you went to bed with a man you took your life in your hands,’ said one former deb, speaking more of her wartime escapades than her year as a deb.
Sex and nightclubs were both dangerous, forbidden territory, best left to the grown-ups, and in consequence oh, so desirable!
There were of course some girls mature enough to ignore or flout these conventions. In any group of several hundred marriageable young women – or even the hundred who represented the inner circle of debs – there are bound to be some who do not conform. They may have been highly sexed; they may have been natural rebels; they may have been seduced at some stage of childhood or adolescence; they may, best of all, have been in love. But the majority, the very great majority, observed the conventions. It is significant, perhaps, that one debutante’s first reaction to enquiries about the behaviour of her generation was to say that, certainly, the debutantes were all – as she was herself – entirely innocent and virginal. However, the enquiry made her wonder, after all these years, and she discussed it with her cousin:
She was a 1938 deb, and a very ‘go-ahead’ and well-informed person, in the adventurous set and very social. She told me I must have been very naive to have thought that, on the whole, the debs were an innocent lot. Apparently that was not at all the case, either in ’38 or ’39! It would seem I must have been a real country cousin to have thought it quite dashing to see the dawn in at the 400 Club and not in the boyfriend’s flat!
Ursula Wyndham, who was a few years older than the debs of 1939 but moved in the same family circles, said matter-of-factly, ‘There were always some who did and some who didn’t. But most didn’t.’ This is confirmed by the debs themselves. Lady Cathleen Eliot says: ‘Very few girls went “the whole hog”, as the expression was in 1939, but I knew of one or two who had to disappear for a few months. Having chaperones helped to keep one on the straight and narrow, but occasionally one could give them the slip. I was very seldom chaperoned but much too frightened to do anything too naughty.’
‘Naughty’ – how revealing that childish word is of the docile attitude of a good daughter. Vivien Mosley calls it ‘getting up to mischief, a slightly racier term.
Some of the girls did – though I can’t imagine how, with all those poor wretched chaperones sitting around – but they did manage to get up to mischief. One knew exactly who they were, and exactly what they were up to, and exactly where they were up to it. Nobody thought any the worse of them for it – not among their own contemporaries; there was no censoriousness about it all. In any age, whether it’s called permissive or puritanical, there are some who will and some who won’t.
Rhoda Walker-Heneage-Vivian puts it much more emphatically:
I really think we were pure as the driven snow – unless it is just that I was an innocent. I can recall no scandal or spicy gossip, but perhaps it just never came my way. I think our parents were still Victorian in manner – mine certainly were – and, although the maids got into trouble, it just never happened ‘above stairs’. There was a great deal of chaperoning at all the dinners and dances, and really no place to get away from watchful eyes; and the disgrace and shame which any hanky-panky would arouse was just not worth it. I imagine the debs’ delights were brought up to think of us as untouchables anyway.
I remember at the age of fifteen years getting a card out of a slot machine on Mumbles Pier at Swansea telling me ‘I was fond of the opposite sex’ and feeling hot with shame. The word ‘sex’ was what threw me – it was never even said in our household!
All that changed during the war, however, when protected young girls suddenly became self-reliant young women with important jobs to do. Then, she goes on, ‘Wartime was a different kettle of fish and I had a splendid one – falling in and out of love with regular precision, to the horror of my father, who eventually when my husband asked if he might marry me said, “She’ll never stick to you – I give it two years.” I wish he could see us after forty-seven years of joy.’
Even the most beautiful and worldly girls, though they may have been the most ardently pursued, were not necessarily caught. They found themselves in a double bind, which for young women who were more physically mature, or more independent-minded, would have been intolerable. The predicament was that their parents required them to be untouched; but they were worldly enough to know that the men preferred them to be sexy. Elizabeth Lowry-Corry summed it up:
It was definitely our mothers’ intention that we should remain virgins until we married – and not just because they were old-fashioned and prim, but because many of them were also very Christian. And from our point of view, quite apart from the general pressure on virtue, you might very well have a baby: and that was quite a consideration: that would have been damaging. But the trouble is, that men like sexy women. And so the women who were sexier were likely to ‘go a little way’, and in due course that might lead to ‘going all the way’. So your mother had the idea that a man wanted you to be a virgin, but the men didn’t always seem to think so. It was all very confusing.
Sarah Norton (mentioned by many escorts of 1939 as one of the loveliest debs in Society) says today,
Sex was something we didn’t understand at all. I was never told about it by my mother and, even though I was brought up on a farm, I never associated it with humans. I thought if you held hands for too long you’d get pregnant! Later on I knew that it was all right to be given a discreet kiss by a man labelled on the mums’ list as ‘NSIT’: not safe in taxis. We knew what the more daring girls were doing. They were the ones who usually went out into the shrubbery at dances and these girls had a ‘reputation’ because the boys always talked. We were amused by it and always giggling, but as far as I was concerned it was all much too frightening for me to do it. I remember saying about one girl, ‘The trouble with her is, she’s crossed the Rubicon.’ However, these incidents never – as far as I know – resulted in pregnancy.
You were supposed to go to the marriage bed as a virgin. There was no such thing as birth-control so if a girl got pregnant, she married almost immediately. I don’t remember ever hearing the word ‘abortion’ mentioned. If a girl did have a ‘reputation’, then when she got engaged his parents wouldn’t be very happy about it. Not that we were in any way frustrated – quite the opposite: we were having a very good time.
Anthony Loch has reflected on this innocence among young women who were, in many other respects, thoroughly poised and sophisticated, and concludes:
As regards morals, girls were not so knowing as nowadays, having been spared television and films with a high sex content. Even a good-night kiss tended to be a hasty rather than a torrid business, and not even a matter of course. I do not suggest that debutantes were not aware of the facts of life, and no doubt in some cases had been able to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover on the sly, but the plain fact is that the pill had not been invented and drugs in one form or another were not common currency. It was even rare to see a girl clearly the worse for drink. As for the young men, whatever they did about sex, the debs were not an accepted target for serious business.
The girls may have been having a very good time: but what about the men? Only one man who was around during that Season has mentioned the obvious expedient – keeping a mistress – and he evidently took it for granted that you would keep her in Paris, which must have added to the already considerable expense. So this was a solution open to few. It is true that, if the girls were younger than their years in 1939 – at least by today’s standards – so too were the men. They were only recently schoolboys, and may often have been closer to homosexual adventures than to marriage. But many more seem to have found the friendship and camaraderie of university or regiment a fulfilling, if platonic, substitute for sexual relationships. Lord Haig confirms this:
The awful thing is that I think a lot of the young men in those days were not terribly interested in the opposite sex. One had the feelings and had relationships and so on but not in any practising way – not outgoing at all. One was simply so taken up with serious problems – you know, of life, and responsibility – and my great relaxation and fun were always horses; so that the physical thing … well … Obviously one was enchanted by the whole aesthetics of it – the marvellous dinner-parties and lovely bands and lights and so on, all going on in lovely houses; aesthetically, the dances were a wonderful experience that you couldn’t but absorb with the greatest enjoyment. But as for the debs: they were just a sort of great mass of sweet young ladies. The beauty of the dance convention was that you were always handing them on to someone else! I’m no authority on what their sex life was like and what they did, but I would think there was very little cohabitation between the sexes. Certainly for my generation that was so. It made the whole thing very unreal. And then, apart from anything else, on top of all these deb dances I was doing my Finals and also playing polo in the Oxford University team round all the tournaments. So all that burned one’s energies out a bit!
Lord Hood also found that relationships tended to happen within the context of a group, and for two people to pair up as a couple was fairly unusual:
The idea of attaching yourself to one person has developed recently but it didn’t apply so much then, I wouldn’t have thought. You probably knew a group of people particularly well, and you went in a group to a dinner-party and then you went on to the dance. But it was considered rather unusual – and indeed the mother would probably disapprove of her daughter always dancing with the same young man.
Dinah Brand also retained the impression that it would be unusual for a girl to confine herself to just one partner:
Quite a lot of girls had several people around, and they would be flirting with five or six, probably. I think it was more fun in that way. You were seen with a lot of different young men, without that terrific emotional commitment which is quite hard work for a young girl: besides which there was always the risk that she was going to be the loser. They might go off with someone else. For us, it didn’t usually get so involved – although at times, of course, there were terrific upsets and tears. But mostly you may have thought you were madly in love, but it hadn’t got the same deep emotional thing, and not the physical pull at all. But on the whole you just met loads of people and emerged with far more friends than when you went in. That included men, too – you certainly made male friends, in the platonic sense, and you kept them for years.
There were, inevitably, a number of young men who were predatory. Did they pester the virginal debs? Or did they concentrate on those desirable commodities, the very few girls with a reputation for being fast? Basil Kenworthy thought they did. ‘In general, yes. The news would get around that so-and-so is easy. But to be fair, the girls, the majority of whom were virtuous, were respected by the young men, because they were so innocent. But their innocence sometimes made them rather boring. The fast ones were more amusing.’ Nevertheless, the girls were not allowed by their mothers to forget that, in the end, making a good marriage was the underlying aim of the Season, and the imminence of war as well as the fairy-tale atmosphere of the dances resulted in some very early engagements. Basil Kenworthy is quite unequivocal about this:
These very rapid engagements which took place between couples who had only been acquainted for a few weeks largely took place because of the romantic surroundings. Here you had a girl who had been produced from the hot-house for the debutante season; she had expensive clothes, sometimes good jewellery, she had always been to the hairdresser on the day of the ball, usually the young men had had too much to drink and there was romantic music, everyone felt good, they were unaware of any depression outside in the world, or disaster – for the time being it was a ball. And I think that had a big effect. Sometimes they fell in love and sometimes they thought they fell in love.
The other big category was that of people marrying girls who lived in the property next door. I think that happened in many cases; but of course they had known the girls from babyhood, the parents approved, obviously it would be an advantageous marriage as well as a marriage for love. And finally, there were gold-diggers of both sexes.
Elizabeth Lowry-Corry talked eloquently of the paradox created for girls who had been brought up to believe implicitly that they must marry well – someone of their own kind – yet whose adolescent longings made them dream of marrying for passionate love:
I think we were both very worldly and yet unworldly, in that we wanted to marry within our own class, it seemed important to us and we were conscious of class; but at the same time we wanted to have a great passion. I can’t think where those tremendously romantic ideas came from, but we certainly had them. Being beautiful was terribly important. My mother was extraordinarily beautiful, and my brothers were very good-looking, so I didn’t see myself standing beside some undistinguished-looking chap. Your eye has got to be caught, to trigger this passion we were all looking for.
Some couples did fall in love. Everyone from 1939 remembers Lord Andrew Cavendish (now the Duke of Devonshire) and Deborah Mitford. She had come out the year before; she was attractive in the unmistakable Mitford fashion, with piquant, witty expressions offset by classic English country looks, while he was the beau idéal: tall, dark and handsome with that air of detachment that would be called indifference in all but the aristocracy. But the main thing that was memorable about them was that they were so obviously, romantically, appropriately in love. They suited each other so well, they looked so right together. They were, says one deb wistfully, ‘the most romantic couple I’ve ever seen – very young and obviously hopelessly in love. They were so ethereally and beautifully dressed and they were so much in love and I wasn’t a bit jealous, I just thought it was beautiful.’ Another recalls seeing Debo draped wearily at the foot of a long flight of stairs in the hall of some great house. ‘What are you doing, Debo?’ she asked. ‘Oh, same as usual,’ sighed Debo; ‘waiting for Andrew.’ It is such a trivial exchange – why should she have remembered it? Perhaps because Debo Mitford epitomized what every girl would have liked to be. She was lovely to look at, popular, well connected, wonderful company – and she had found a man whom she loved and who was highly eligible.
Those two did not marry until 1941, but several debs married almost as soon as war broke out. One was Margaret Clifton-Brown, one of the great beauties of the Season, whose father was mp for Newbury. She had known her husband-to-be all her life but, as he was nine years older than she was, their relationship was neighbourly until the Season began. Then, inspired perhaps by the attention which other men were always paying her as much as by the sight of the gawky country cygnet suddenly transformed upon the picturesque lake of the Season into a swan, he fell in love with her. Their feelings for each other progressed so rapidly that by August they had become engaged.
We decided to get married when he was posted back from Liverpool to Windsor. He rang me up and said, ‘Come over,’ and I went and he proposed and I accepted. Then I had to get home on a train with no lights, hoping no one would attack me, and I was so excited and happy that I went to the wrong station and had to go to a policeman, who took me home in a police car. I got married in a flurry ten days before war broke out – I didn’t get anything new except a veil. There wasn’t time. I was ridiculously young. We had six months together – longer than we’d expected; he thought he would be sent abroad immediately – and then he went away and I didn’t see him again for four and a half years.
Rosamund Neave was another deb who married in a rush as war broke out. Her future husband also lived locally; she too had known him for years; but it was not until the night of her own dance, very early in the Season, that they began to fall in love. For her the Season was heaven after that: the most wonderful background to their relationship, ensuring that they would see each other often while their commitment to each other gradually developed and became a certainty. They married six days after the outbreak of war.
The women who were debs in 1939 consider themselves fortunate to have been spared the sexual pressures that their daughters and, even more, their granddaughters have had to learn to cope with. Young men were rarely importunate. If a girl had a reputation for being ‘naughty’ or even ‘wicked’ (to use their own terminology) she might find herself being propositioned – and she might accept. Her contemporaries would be curious, might even in an odd way envy her, but they were not censorious. The innocent girls were protected by their innocence, and very rarely had to ward off the demands of an over-heated young man. This was not only true within their own class. Lady Cathleen Eliot remembers with incredulity that all during the war she used to hitch lifts back from London in the small hours of the morning with lorry drivers, and nobody ever made sexual approaches to her. ‘There I would be, done up to the nines in evening dress, dripping with diamonds – well, not exactly dripping, but I did have a lovely pair of chandelier diamond earrings that I had inherited – and none of them ever laid a finger on me. Quite the reverse: they used to share their sandwiches with me. You couldn’t risk that today.’
Rosamund Neave recalls her outrage on the one occasion when a young man overstepped the mark:
This was at a very well-known country house where I had gone to stay for the weekend. A young man came into my room and said, ‘You know this is it. You know this is it. You know I want to sleep with you.’ I got very frightened because my hair was in curlers and so I said, ‘No, I’m not going to sleep with you and I do not like you, will you please go away.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ll go away if you meet me tomorrow morning, outside this house …’ And so the next morning, early, when the housemaid came in I said, ‘Would you please tell your mistress that I wish to go home; I’m not feeling very well.’ And so that’s how I got out of it.
But this incident is exceptional. By and large, debs were allowed to refuse any sexual advances.
The summer was now reaching its climax: sporting, social and political. Wimbledon was well into its second week, and a dull, wet week it was. Even the men’s singles final sounds boring, in the account in The Times: ‘Somehow we had a touch of Edgar Allan Poe in the Centre Court: the unfathomable Riggs deliberately finished off his man by slow torture, and if it was of absorbing interest to students of stroke and strategy, those who like a dash of blood and sawdust with their tennis went out to tea.’
The deb dances continued, with the prospect of four outstanding ones in the country to round off the three last months of nightly froth and sparkle. On 5 July – the night after the American Independence Day Ball at the Dorchester, at which the Kennedy family headed the cast – there were three dances. Rhoda Walker-Heneage-Vivian, the bright girl from a castle in Wales who had done the Season on what was, relatively, a shoe-string, describes hers:
It set my father back £600, which was a vast sum in those days. [Today’s equivalent would be £12,000.] I wore the best of my seven evening dresses: an ice-blue satin one, with a brocade evening coat. Seven dresses sounds an awful lot, but it was nothing, compared with some debs. The dance was heaven … the first time I had been the most important person … and I carried a huge bouquet of stephanotis and wore long white gloves.
On the same evening, Margaret Clifton-Brown’s mother gave a small dance for her (‘only about 300 people’) which she says she did not enjoy at all. It was marred by the fact that the man who was very soon to be her husband was not given leave by his regiment to be there:
By the end of June, early July, people were making the most of what they deemed to be their last hours on earth. Because of the awful slaughter in the First World War, a lot of the men thought the same thing was about to happen to them.
My parents were elderly, and one had to try to keep any worries away from them. So the dance went ahead, even though by then an awful lot of people were training hard and – like my friend – couldn’t get away for the dances. So my wonderful slinky silver lamé dress by Norman Hartnell was a bit wasted.
I’d done the Season mainly because it was my parents’ wish, although I would have liked to take up nursing, and still wish I’d done so. I didn’t get a chance to nurse during the war because by then I was already married and my son was born at the end of 1940. So I spent the war trying to run this rather wet and boggy farm in Norfolk. It was very quiet and dull and lonely, although I had great support from all the kindness of the village people.
Our son was four and a half years old before his father saw him, and although as time went on they came to love each other their first year together was very difficult as they were both so jealous of each other.
But that’s leaping ahead a long way. The Season: to me, after my experiences in Austria, it all seemed unreal. One had to suppress that feeling and just keep going as long as possible. One didn’t want to seem to panic. But I suppose, if I’m honest, I didn’t really enjoy the Season. I hadn’t got my heart in it. It was all so artificial – a frivolous waste of time.
The second of the three great dances which took place in July, in the closing weeks of the Season, was held the following evening, Thursday the 6th, for Rosalind Cubitt. It was a very good dance and – with over a thousand guests – a very crowded dance. But the thing that made it remarkable, that everyone remembers with elegiac clarity, was its setting: Holland House. This great house, the first part of which was built at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but much added to during the passing years, was like a country house in the middle of Kensington, with grounds so vast that Lord Ilchester, its owner, held pheasant shoots there. The house features over and over again in the political and social history of the last three centuries. It was a centre of intrigue during the war between the Cavaliers and Roundheads – the first Earl of Holland lost his head for his ultimate loyalty to the royal cause – and was for a time a meeting place for Dr Johnson’s circle, since Joseph Addison lived there for some years. The lovely and fascinating Lady Holland made it a great Whig centre at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was a house redolent with history; and its own history ended violently in 1942, when it was bombed to destruction by the Luftwaffe. Ros Cubitt’s coming out ball, attended by English and Spanish royalty, was thus its last great social occasion; and the beauty of the house has been preserved, like a still from some great historical film like the Russian War and Peace, in the minds of the guests who were there on 6 July 1939.
Other dances blur in the memory. Most debs – though not all – remember their own dance; the rest have merged into a composite patchwork of flowers, dance cards, chaperones on hired gilt chairs surrounding the dance floor, and lavish quantities of food and champagne. The three dances, however, that stand out clearly as the epitome of that extravagant summer – the last and wildest waltz of an élite that took its pre-eminence for granted – were those at Sutton Place, Holland House and Blenheim Palace. Coincidence decreed that they should all take place within the span of a week; nothing quite like them would ever be seen again. Some girls sensed it, even then. One was Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, now the Countess of Sutherland:
I think I felt life like that couldn’t and perhaps shouldn’t go on – this tremendously rich life; these extreme privileges. One knew that the ability of people to give these beautiful dances in great houses with wonderful gardens and lovely flood-lighting – one knew that must change. Perhaps one didn’t enjoy them quite so much at the time – in any case, the grand dances weren’t in fact as much fun as the smaller ones – but I knew that one would look back on it all with great nostalgia. It was obvious that something was going to happen, and I just felt it couldn’t… it must finish.
For Rosalind Cubitt herself, the dance should have been the climax of a brilliant Season. In fact, as she says, ‘I remember very little about it, as I had very bad ‘flu and was doped to the hilt!’ This may be why Rosalind did not accompany her parents to the dinner-party given beforehand by the Earl and Countess of Ilchester (who had lent Holland House for the dance), which was attended by the King and Queen. The presence of royalty, the brilliance of the dinner, she herself the focus of the evening – all this would have presented an ordeal even to a girl as poised as Rosalind. But when the girl was half-dead with ‘flu and only kept on her feet with large doses of medicine to control the fever, it was clearly an impossibility. So Rosalind dined instead with her best friend Sonia Denison, at an intimate and undemanding dinner-party given by Sonia’s mother and Brigadier-General Beale-Browne, and arrived at Holland House just before ten o’clock, as the dance was beginning. Sonia stayed next to her throughout the evening, as Lady Chichester remembers: ‘I can still see the big staircase, and Ros standing with Sonia at the bottom of the stairs. It was a lovely party, but I have a sort of memory of it being very, very crowded. I don’t know how many they invited, but it was more I think than the house should have had.’ Lord Cromer, who was also there, says the same: ‘It was most beautifully done – it was magnificent – but my chief recollection is that it was enormously crowded. It was a goliath sort of dance – there must have been over a thousand people present – enormous. And that didn’t necessarily make dances more fun; on the contrary.
Of all the dances given that summer, Holland House was the only one that Lord Cathcart attended, and the sight of the house as he arrived made a lasting impression upon him: ‘I remember coming away from a dinner-party and turning in at those magnificent gates off Kensington High Street and going down the drive to Holland House which stood there, splendidly floodlit.’
Any dance at which the King and Queen were present was always glittering. Women had to wear tiaras, for example, men wore decorations, everyone was on their best behaviour. There was an extra frisson given by their presence at this particular ball, for Rosalind was the daughter of Sonia Cubitt, who was herself the younger daughter of Mrs Keppel, the celebrated last mistress of Edwarci VII. Mrs Keppel had understood perfectly the conventions of behaviour in her role, and had been careful never to embarrass Queen Alexandra. All the same, it was regarded as a striking act of tolerance on the part of George vi to attend a dance given by the daughter of his grandfather’s mistress. Christian Grant certainly remembers people talking about it:
It was rather special, because there was that slight aura of naughtiness about it – Mrs Keppel having been Edward VII’s mistress and the Royal Family being there. We all thought it was rather broad-minded and nice of them to accept the situation, but it did make it a bit conspiratorial and glamorous.
Lord Hood was another who went to Holland House that night. 1939 was the seventh Season that he had taken part in; and by this time, although he received dozens of invitations, he went to very few dances:
I was working quite hard by then, so I never stayed very late, and probably went more to the kind of dance where not just the very young were present, but also the middle-aged, which I found more amusing. I remember particularly going to Holland House, because I’d never been there before: and of course, never went there again, because it was blitzed. It stretched right down to Kensington High Street and I don’t know how far north. It had a big park in those days, and a red brick Jacobean house full of a lot of very lovely things. The best way I can describe it is by saying that it was just like a country house in London. Before the war, when the monarch dined out, the men might well have been asked to wear knee breeches; though I’m sure we didn’t wear breeches for the Holland House dance. The card would have said, ‘To have the honour of meeting their Majesties the King and Queen’ – or something like that – and then, ‘Dancing, 10p.m. Decorations.’
The Ilchesters had invited the King and Queen to dine, so they were already there before the rest came, and then the hostess – in this case Mrs Cubitt – would ask friends to give dinner parties. I dined, I remember quite well, with a strange lady called Mrs Corrigan. She had taken Lady Ward’s house, Dudley House. Why Lady Ward let it I can’t think; she didn’t need to; but anyway Mrs Corrigan paid some huge sum for the house for the Season, and I remember dining there. I remember driving in her car to the party, and there was the most terrible queue of traffic, as you can imagine, trying to get there.
The same traffic delayed the Queen of Spain, who had not been invited to dine, and so she arrived very late. Lady Ilchester had given up waiting by the entrance to receive her, and when word came that the Queen of Spain was at the door, she had to struggle through the crowd of guests to try and get there in time to meet her. In the end they met in a passage, and there was a flurry of mutual apologies, with Lady Ilchester going, ‘I’m so sorry Ma’am that I wasn’t at the door to meet you’ and the Queen of Spain saying, ‘I shouldn’t worry about that… it’s all the fault of the traffic …’ I remember the scene very well.
That was not the only faux pas of the evening. Another occurred when Lindsey Furneaux, in the crush of people on the dance floor, somehow collided with the Queen: ‘I was being whirled around by some chap and I knocked her over! I think it was me that was responsible – in fact I’m sure it was.’ Lord Haig describes the relaxed atmosphere of these parties: ‘The King and Queen were both very unstiff about everything. King George vi enjoyed his social life and he wasn’t at all rigid about things. Formality had broken down a lot since King George v and they – the King and Queen – had encouraged everyone to let go in order to adjust to the realities of the time. They knew that all this stiffness and stuffiness wasn’t really what mattered. They started out in a very democratic sort of way to change it.’ The royal couple made a great impression on Lord Savile:
I remember the Queen coming down the staircase at Holland House looking like a Winterhalter – perfectly wonderful. That was at one o’clock when they were leaving to go home.
I also remember for some reason that it was the last ball that Mrs Ronnie Greville ever attended. She’d been very ill, but the Queen said to her, ‘You can come – you can!’ and so she did. John Fox-Strangways wheeled her into dinner, but then she went home afterwards.
They had Ambrose and his band of fourteen musicians playing that night, all the best dance tunes of that year – Cole Porter and so on. And there was a Sir Roger de Coverley, led by Lady Ilchester. The ladies wore tiaras, and I, because I didn’t have any orders or decorations, wore a carnation. But then, I was only twenty. We don’t belong to the same world today….
Finally, here is a contrasting description from someone who, despite her fragile beauty and aristocratic background, found that crowded, competitive evening an ordeal – Lady Elizabeth Scott, now the Duchess of Northumberland: ‘My recollection is of a nightmare – finding myself swept along in a milling mass of strangers – separated even from my parents. As soon as I found them (by which time I was nearly in tears) I begged to be taken home!’
Everyone agrees that dance tunes were much better than they are today: easier to dance to, more romantic and with ‘much nicer words’. Naturally, different tunes have special significance for different people, but the ones that were named over and over again include ‘Deep Purple’, ‘Jeepers Creepers’, ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, ‘You’re the Tops’, ‘Dancing Cheek to Cheek’, ‘Tiger Rag’, ‘I Like New York in June’, ‘The Lady is a Tramp’, ‘Change Partners’, ‘The Umbrella Man’, ‘Night and Day’, ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, ‘Hold Tight’, ‘Three Little Fishes’, ‘Miss Otis Regrets’, ‘A Foggy Day’, ‘Oh Play to Me’, ‘Gipsy’, ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’, ‘One Night of Love’, ‘Remember Me’, ‘Popcorn Man’, ‘Begin the Beguine’ . .. and so on and on and swirling, twirling, spinning, swooping on. ‘The Big Apple’ was a jazz number of the day, and many dances ended with that or with a mad gallop before the National Anthem, so that the younger guests could let their hair down for the last dance before being rounded up by the chaperones and taken home to bed.
The same bands played night after night. Ambrose was the smartest name to secure for a coming-out dance, but Carroll Gibbons and the Savoy Orpheans were also popular, and after these two came Jack Jackson, Tommy Kinsman, Tubby Clayton, Henry Hall, Geoffrey Howard, Geraldo, Harry Roy, and others forgotten now but much loved then. In addition, nightclub bands could sometimes be coaxed out for the evening to play at a deb dance: men like Tiny Tim Clayton and his Whispering 400 Band, Roy Fox and his band from the Monsignor, and Ken (Snakehips) Johnson, the black bandleader who played at the Café de Paris (and was killed there when a bomb fell on it in 1941). They were kindly, even fatherly figures, who knew many of the debs and their escorts by name and would sometimes be deputed by the mothers to ensure that a daughter did not stay out too long. Ann Schuster (now Mrs Archie Mackenzie) recalls visiting one favourite night spot when she was only just seventeen and still very new to the Season:
My mother had allowed me to go to the Berkeley on my own as a very great treat with a young man who was only just eighteen: in fact I think the occasion might have been his birthday. He was a neighbour and I’d known him ever since I was a child. However, behind my back she’d gone to see the maître d’hôtel – an Italian called Ferraro who knew all the mothers, and took a fatherly interest in everybody – and she had asked him to keep an eye on me and make sure I didn’t stay too late. So, to my dismay and shame, at midnight he came over and tapped my boyfriend on the shoulder and said, ‘I’m sorry, Sir, but it’s time now’ – and he actually saw us into the taxi and made sure everything was all right.
Nice men – great dance bands – memorable tunes, as is proved by the fact that their titles, fifty years later, still set off a hum in the mind.
There was one final, crowning dance to come: an event which, like the last spectacular setpiece at a firework display, illuminates the dark sky and creates magic and wonder for even the most jaded spectators. It was the great ball given on 7 July by the Duchess of Marlborough at Blenheim Palace for her daughter, Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill. The Blenheim Ball still has the power to make people’s eyes light up, fifty years later. It was huge, it was floodlit, it was Society’s last great extravagance before the coming of war. Invitations to this ball were avidly – desperately – sought after. Girls would fake illness rather than admit they had not been asked. ‘Everyone who was anyone’ – in that phrase riddled with elitism, the more so because it is unconscious – came to the Blenheim Ball. Exaggeration is impossible; hyperbole pales beside the ancestral splendour of this, the greatest social event of the summer of 1939.
Lady Sarah was a magnificent-looking young woman, as her photograph from that time shows: magnificent, rather than pretty. She was very tall and slim, with long slender legs; not a bit embarrassed by her height, she was high-spirited, energetic and bold. She had a typically Churchillian face, with large blue eyes and a pursed mouth: and she too was, she says, a complete innocent:
We had not been brought up like children are today. We literally never saw other children. We lived in a house called Lodesby House in Leicestershire and in those days it was sort of frowned on for us to see other children – it wasn’t for snobbish reasons, but in case we caught measles or any other disease. So we never saw anyone except maybe our own relations, a few cousins: nobody else.
She had been ‘finished’ in Paris, at a small and very exclusive establishment run by a Madame d’Aunay, which she attended with her friend Lady Elizabeth Scott. Because of this they had missed the ‘little Season’ – the chatty lunches at which girls got to know one another, made friends and found a niche among the bewildering variety of strange faces. Lady Sarah arrived in London from Paris in mid-May and was catapulted straight into the Astorian splendour of Dinah Brand’s dance at 6 St James’s Square. The veneer of sophistication which Paris had given her, helped by a wardrobe of magnificent ball dresses chosen for her at Worth by her grandmother, Mme Jacques Balsan (Consuelo, the American heiress whose first husband had been the ninth Duke of Marlborough), made her seem outwardly formidable.
Her social pre-eminence ensured that she was in demand for every dance, and at dinner-parties would always be given the best seat at the best table, according to strict rules of placement.
The dinners before dances were rather boring because one always sat next to practically the same people. Being a duke’s daughter, it was done in order of precedence, so usually whoever was on either side of me had a girlfriend below the salt and I had a boyfriend below the salt, so one was never sitting with anybody one wanted to be with. I used to vary between Prince Frederick of Prussia (who’s now dead); the present Lord Salisbury, who was the Hon. Robert Cecil; Billy Hartington (who’s dead); and Rowley Errington – Lord Cromer. I used to guess my seat, and most times I wasn’t very far out. I got switched around sometimes, it changed a little – but very little.
It was hard for her dinner and dancing partners to realize that this tall, aristocratic, wealthy girl was, underneath, much like any other seventeen-year-old. Her childhood had been even more sheltered than most of her contemporaries’ for she had never been to school and emotionally she was still completely immature. ‘We weren’t like seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds at all – more like today’s twelve-year-olds. Our relationships were very innocent, absolutely. Totally innocent relationships: like you might find between a boy and a girl aged twelve and thirteen today – or even probably younger, because they’re so sophisticated. My granddaughter aged seven knows much more than I did at seventeen.’ In the course of the Season she developed a warm affection for Mark Howard. Four years older and very good-looking, he had already left Trinity College, Cambridge, and was serving in the Coldstream Guards. The eldest of three sons, he would, had he lived, have inherited Castle Howard. He was killed in action in 1944. He was at her dance on 7 July, but Lady Sarah cannot have been able to spare him much attention for she was the focus and the raison d’être of the great Blenheim Ball.
Preparations for it had lasted throughout the preceding week:
I remember the preamble to it … the work by the electricians because the house was going to be floodlit; all the work with the tent going up in the garden – there were all sorts of things going on, and all that took about a week.
On the night of the dance we had a band playing outside on the lawn, y’see. And I remember the arcade rooms all being emptied of their furniture because we had a supper-party down there. And I remember also the gardeners were told to grow malmaisons – great masses of pink malmaisons were all over the house. I don’t think they grow malmaisons any more, I don’t think there’s a market for them, they’re too expensive. Great big pink carnations: they were huge. So apart from the electricians and the workmen there were all the gardeners as well running about getting the flowers arranged….
Blenheim Palace was filled with relatives and some of the more privileged guests who were staying the night. Vast as it is, the house was so crowded that Elizabeth Leveson-Gower remembers having to share a room with Lady Mairi Stewart. House-parties were held at all the neighbouring houses as well, and few if any of the hundreds of guests who thronged the great house and its park would have returned to London that night. The ball was not only – not even mainly – for the younger generation. Politicians, diplomats, members of the far-flung Marlborough family down to the remotest cousins were all there. Lady Sarah’s grandmother travelled from France to attend.
In 1939 I went to Blenheim with anxious forebodings, for the international horizon was dark. At dinner, sitting next to Monsieur Corbin, the popular French Ambassador, I found it difficult to share the diplomatic detachment his conversation maintained. Yet at that same dinner, at my grand-daughter’s table, was one of the sons of the German Crown Prince, whom, I was told, Winston had suggested using as a perfect counterfoil to Nazism under Hitler. Monsieur Corbin, the perfect diplomat, avoided such issues, preferring a personal topic. … I suffered the same unease that had afflicted me once in Russia when, surrounded by the glittering splendour of the Czar’s Court, I sensed impending disaster. For again, in this brilliant scene at Blenheim, I sensed the end of an era. … But on that evening, the scene was still gay, and my pleasure great in meeting so many old friends. I supped with Winston and Anthony Eden and wandered out to the lovely terraces Marlborough had built before his death. With their formal lines and classic ornaments, they were the right setting for so imposing a monument as Blenheim Palace.2
Churchill, of course, was also at the ball that night, and Mollie Acland remembers him:
I ‘sat out’ – i.e. walked about – one dance with a rather blasé young would-be politician and on the terrace were Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, chatting and smoking. ‘Oh,’ said my partner, ‘look at that poor old has-been. My father says he’s still a potential trouble-maker, but he won’t get any more public life now!’ And this was in July ’39!
Back to the younger members of the family. And perhaps the youngest to attend that night was Lady Sarah’s middle sister, Lady Caroline: ‘My recollections are rather hazy as you can imagine – the sixteen-year-old sister being allowed to attend the ball and being mortified that my dress was the same colour and the same material as my sister’s but a totally different style. I can remember that they were yellow organza; hers rather décolletée and my one high at the neck with a ruffle.’ Memory is hazy. Lady Sarah is convinced that her dress was in cream satin, a quite different material from her sister’s; though she does agree that it was décolletée: so much so that her mother insisted on raising the neckline so as to cover more of her bosom. It was the most splendid of her four ballgowns from Worth, and to see her, fifty years later, rise to sketch its outline with her hands – a wide fanning movement around the shoulders to indicate the ruffle, a long smoothing gesture down the hips to demonstrate its narrowness – convinces one that it was very splendid indeed.
Lady Sarah’s closest friend was Lady Elizabeth Scott, who was of course at Blenheim that night, and who retains an almost dream-like impression of its beauty:
The dances in the country stand out in one’s mind as being the most fun of all. Blenheim and Hever in particular were wonderful: floodlighting and music and the lights in the garden and amongst trees and shrubs, making them magical, romantic and memorable. I was particularly lucky as most of my parents’ friends lived in lovely houses – which would now be known as stately homes – and we went willingly to these dances, which were exceptional parties given by people one knew. There was so much going on that summer that my parents didn’t even consider giving a ball for me! I was only seventeen and they probably decided to wait a bit. The whole summer seemed to be given up to having a good time. I was very lucky to have come out then, as I was younger than most of my friends and might easily have been kept educating for another year.
Lindsey Furneaux had had an exceptionally tiring summer, for as well as going to a good many dances she was also busy training to be a nurse at Colchester Hospital during the day:
I remember driving to Oxford to stay at Charlton with my aunt Lady Birkenhead and going to Blenheim for the dance. I was dead – really dead. I sat there collapsed over an armchair and Sacheverell Sitwell came up to me and said, ‘What would you like to do?’ and I said, ‘I’d like you to show me the pictures here.’ And he was so divine – I can’t tell you how sweet he was – and he showed me all round the house and told me all about the pictures and I didn’t dance at all, and that was heaven!
That evening – night, really, since the dance went on until dawn broke over the lake – was remarkable for many things. One was the fact that it was the last occasion in England when footmen, wearing eighteenth-century Marlborough livery, powdered their wigs. This archaic procedure was loathed by the men themselves, for powdering took hours to do and even longer to undo. The fine white powder (usually flour from the kitchen) drifted everywhere, getting under their collars and making their necks itch, and since water had been added to make it adhere, it dried solid and felt unnatural. But it was undeniably grand. It was a refinement of grandeur indeed, abandoned even for Court Balls; and it never happened in England again at a private dance.
Yes [says Anne Douglas-Scott-Montagu] I remember them all in their footmen’s uniform: knee breeches, and the Marlborough livery – I think it was blue and yellow. It was a wonderful dance, it really was. I remember dancing, dancing … masses of waltzes, in that huge room. I also remember that on all the marble statues all down the long passage to the front door, people had draped coats: fox fur stoles and capes and scarves, all draped on the statues all the way down the passage.
I also remember this enormous organ, in the room we danced in towards the library – I’m not sure what the room was called – but there was this huge room with an organ painted white and it looked exactly like an iced sugar cake, with all the candles, which were the organ pipes. And Sarah enjoyed herself enormously. She was very energetic, full of energy and enthusiasm and fun. She wasn’t at all beautiful but she was a terrific character: most amusing. Very tall and thin.
The only sad thing about that party was that halfway through it poured with rain. They’d had an outdoor floor put down, all floodlit, and some of the band were going to play outside, in the garden. But we never could dance out there, it was too wet, and everything had to be brought in.
Others who were there have forgotten the rain entirely; they only remember the magic. Rosamund Neave says, ‘Fantastic. It was fantastic. At a certain moment – at eleven o’clock or something, Sarah pressed a button and suddenly the whole of Blenheim was floodlit. Oh, fantastic!’
Few people except the victims, realized that Blenheim was the scene of a burglary that night. Lady Sarah Churchill, however, can remember it all too well:
Then of course we had the big problem at that party … that big burglary. The ball sort of rather backlashed. Quite a lot of fur coats disappeared. The cloakroom was in the present dining-room at Blenheim and all I know was that one lady went to go home and she couldn’t find her coat so she thought someone else had taken it by mistake. But then it got to be bad, with more people missing their coats and in the end – I don’t remember exactly, but the figure seventeen seems to ring a bell. The police came in – I can’t recall how it was cleared up but it was all over the headlines the next day. Somebody was definitely in there, because they’d picked out all the best coats. So it rather backlashed as a party and we were all very upset.
I remember the sun rising, the big doors open – it was five or six in the morning and we were all going to bed and everything had gone so beautifully except that, boom, all these coats were gone.
Here, finally, is Chips Channon’s bedazzled account of the ball:
In the afternoon I drove to Weston to stay with the Sitwells for the Blenheim Ball, which was stupendous. I have seen much, travelled far, and am accustomed to splendour, but there has never been anything like tonight. The palace was floodlit, and its grand baroque beauty could be seen for miles. The lakes were floodlit too and, better still, the famous terraces, they were blue and green and Tyroleans walked about singing; and although there were seven hundred people or even more, it was not in the least crowded. It was gay, young, brilliant, in short, perfection. I was loathe to leave, but did so at about 4.30 and took one last look at the baroque terraces with the lake below, and the golden statues and the great palace. Shall we ever see the like again? Is such a function not out of date? Yet it was all of the England that is supposed to be dead and is not. There were literally rivers of champagne.3
Behind such lavish displays of ancestral pride and social magnificence, the debutantes remained very young girls, anxious to please and be pleased and well able to enjoy simpler pleasures. This extract from Elizabeth Leveson-Gower’s diary of the weekend at Blenheim describes what happened after the huge, waterlogged marquee had been taken down and the house began to return to its normal weekend state (if Blenheim Palace could ever be described as normal – or, indeed, as a house):
Saturday, 8 July: Got up at 1 o’clock. Raining. Played backgammon. Went to film in Oxford by bus. Had to miss the end. Played sardines. Sunday, 9 July: Church. Played tennis. Elizabeth swam and we were all thrown into the pool in our clothes.
It sounds much like the aftermath of any other dance. Midnight strikes and the coach turns into a pumpkin. The fairy lights are taken down, the fairy-tale is over, and life goes on.
There was, however, one authentic Cinderella figure whose elusive shadow flits in and out of the Season, occasionally glimpsed, never there for long. No one remembers her, and she cannot be found in any of the reference books through whose columns the upper class trace one another’s passage through life. Her name was Doreen Davison, and she was the protegee, that Season, of Lady St John of Bletso.
There is a studio portrait of Doreen reproduced in the Tatler for 19 July. It was taken by Paul Tanqueray, a brilliant photographer of the inter-war decades who was a precursor of Cecil Beaton and many other Society photographers. The lighting is masterly; the modelling of the face is undoubtedly flattering. Even allowing for all that, it is a handsome, brooding, intelligent face. Doreen has intense dark eyes with thick lashes; good features; and heavy but expert make-up. More than most girls of that Season, she looks mature and intriguing, a girl whom one would like to know better. Yet she has apparently vanished. No one from the debs of 1939 knows her today and not even the people who were pictured in the Bystander sitting out at her dance can remember her. One has to assume that she was the archetypal nouveau riche, whose mother (named once, and once only, as Mrs Malcolm Arbuthnot) hoped that her striking looks could lead, perhaps, to a titled husband. There could be no other reason for her parents paying – reputedly – £2,000 (£40,000 today) and then retiring from the scene for the whole summer, leaving their daughter in the plump hands of Lady St John of Bletso. For Lady St John did not do things by halves. She took a girl into her own home at Ennismore Gardens in South Kensington; lodged her, groomed her, chose her dresses, took her to mums’ lunches and girls’ teas, and with exemplary thoroughness launched her into Society … for three months. After that, the girl was on her own. Back she went to her parents, with an address book full of names and telephone numbers and half a dozen less than pristine ball dresses.
Lady St John had slipped up badly when she chose the date of Doreen’s coming-out dance. The debutantes who had been at Blenheim would have been scattered around several different house-parties afterwards, and must have exchanged their various memories of the evening as soon as they met up again at Doreen’s dance on the evening of Monday, 10 July. Doreen herself, who was not at Blenheim, had to sit and listen to them comparing notes, knowing that her own dance paled into insignificance beside the splendour of the Marlborough ball. However, Lady St John delivered the goods as far as press coverage was concerned. Both the Tatler and the Bystander carried a number of pictures of Doreen’s dance (unfortunately, in more than one case, they are the same pictures) and these show a handful of younger guests sitting out rather glumly on deckchairs, as well as rather too large a proportion of much older people. There is one of Doreen, flanked by two young guests. None of them looks vivacious. That evening is the first and last time that Doreen’s part in the Season is acknowledged by anyone. One hopes that she – like most of her contemporaries – derives some satisfaction from telling her grandchildren that she was there.
In the middle of that same week two final Courts were held on the 12th and 13th for the last of the year’s 1,657 presentations to the King and Queen. The Court on 12 July was the smarter of the two and Lady Sarah Churchill remembers her mother’s chagrin that a last-minute bout of illness forced her to make her curtsey at the second and final of the year’s five Courts, where she knew nobody. Certainly the Fourth Court included many of the crème de la crème of that year’s debutantes: Lady Elizabeth Scott, in a silver lamé dress with a train of white net edged with silver, was presented by her mother, the Duchess of Buccleuch. Elizabeth Leveson-Gower in an Empire dress of pale satin trimmed with pearls, and a matching train, was presented by her aunt, the Duchess of Sutherland. Lady Alexandra Metcalfe presented Vivien Mosley, wearing white tulle embroidered with pale gold leaf, with a gold lamé train; and Eunice Kennedy was presented by Mrs J.P.Kennedy under the auspices of the diplomatic corps in an ivory tulle crinoline. We know exactly what they all wore, because The Times printed six and a half full columns the following day, inserted by the dressmakers, giving details. Reading them is like counting sheep. White taffettà (over) … cream silk (over) … white net (oops) … pale blue chiffon (over) … enlivened all too rarely by a spectacular and endearing piece of vulgarity like the mother who wore ‘a train lined with turquoise chiffon to match her jewellery’. The Throne Room must have been a shimmering tribute to the products of the British Empire, as mothers and daughters glided and dipped, their heads bobbing with ostrich feathers, their bosoms (well, the mothers’ bosoms, at any rate: the girls wore pearls) palpitating with diamonds.
At the Fifth Court Lady Sarah Churchill and her mother, both dressed by Worth, were the lonely stars of an otherwise low-key collection of debutantes. And, with them, the last of the presentations of 1939 was over: not for a year, as most people must have assumed, but for seven years. They were suspended during the war, resumed in 1947, and discontinued for ever in 1958. The pre-war evening Courts, held at 9.30 p.m. and followed by a light buffet, were also abandoned, which meant that debs no longer wore evening dress, but day dresses with hats. The change from the elaborate, archaic uniform of Prince of Wales feathers, long train, long dress and white gloves symbolized the change in the Season itself. The days of ornate excess were over; austerity was imposed by the exigencies of the forties and fifties, and with it a recognition that the display of wealth and privilege was inappropriate in post-war Britain. There was food and petrol-rationing for the first few years, and even fashion took some time to shake off the simplicity of uniform and return, with Dior’s New Look of 1948, to full-blown, full-skirted, tight-waisted glamour.
On Friday, 14 July, there appeared in The Times a half-page advertisement with the almost incredible headline: ‘Germany Land of Hospitality’ . Germany, it said, ‘offers everything you could wish for your holiday this year’, with 2,000 miles of unique Autobahn, numerous exhibitions and festivals – including an opera festival at Munich from 29 July to 10 September – and (towards the bottom, in rather small print) Vienna, which most English people probably still thought of as being in Austria. All these pleasures could be had at a bargain price: 60 per cent reduction on rail tickets purchased outside Germany, and 40–50 per cent currency savings for people who made use of ‘travel Marks’. Southern Bavaria, the area which Hitler made his holiday base, promised ‘rest and enjoyment for everyone’.
One is aghast at the naivety, both of the German Railways Board, which placed the advertisement, and of those people who – presumably – took advantage of the proffered reductions. One is mildly aghast at The Times for accepting the advertisement. War was now seven weeks away: did people really think a holiday in Germany was desirable? Maybe they did. Chips Channon, who as an mp had no excuse for ignorance of the situation, wrote in his diary on 11 July: ‘The war seems a little more remote; perhaps it will never come; it seems less of a reality, perhaps because there is no news. …’4 Many people still believed that, if Danzig were conceded, war could be averted. They wrote letters to The Times to that effect. Britain’s pledge to Poland was not taken seriously, and few believed that the present Cabinet would honour it. As long as Churchill and Eden remained outside the Cabinet, Hitler had no reason to believe it either. The London Evening Star wrote: ‘Those who know the Nazi psychology best say that the return of Mr Churchill and Mr Eden to the Cabinet would do more than a hundred speeches to convert the Nazis to a belief in the sincerity of our intentions.’
Meanwhile men and arms continued to pour into Danzig from Germany, and the British pact with Russia in defence of neutral and independent states inched no nearer to agreement. There were no sound reasons for optimism, but people have an inveterate tendency to hope for the best. As the Tatler put it on 12 July, ‘Despite the none-too-good news from Europe the social racket still goes gaily on and quite right too, for what is the use of squealing before you are hurt?’
From mid-July onwards the London Season was winding down. The rest of the month was marked by a series of sporting events, beginning with the Eton and Harrow two-day match at Lords on 14 and 15 July. This annual event had been a feature of the debs’ summer for nearly a century. It reached its culmination in the years immediately before the First World War, when playing for one’s school and fighting for one’s country were seen as two manifestations of the same set of values. Both embodied unthinking loyalty/patriotism, team/regimental spirit; athletic/military prowess dedicated to a common cause. The Eton and Harrow match was played by clean-cut young sportsmen in symbolically pristine white (the literal opposite of the Blackshirts), embodying the traditional rivalry between England’s two top public schools.
Few debs – whatever their brothers’ past triumphs – were greatly interested in the game of cricket. The two days at Lords were largely taken up with strolling around the ground, meeting friends and relatives, or sitting in coaches on the Mound. Their clothes were, as usual, described at length in The Times. Christian Grant sums up what it was like:
It was great fun because one was still very young and of course a lot of the boys one was going out with were eighteen or so and had probably only just left either Eton or Harrow. Eton figured pretty large among the people who were around at deb dances, and one saw lots of people. At Lords you can walk all the way round the big circle, so you walked round clockwise for a bit and then you turned round and walked back anti-clockwise, so you were quite sure of seeing everybody who was there, one way or another. Unless they turned round at the same time! I don’t think, frankly, we took much notice of the cricket. I think one pretended to if one was with somebody who had been a dry-bob at Eton or had been in the Eleven or something. But I was mortified when Harrow won, because all my family was at Eton. Probably if that was happening I wasn’t allowed to watch.
Elizabeth Leveson-Gower and Eunice Kennedy nearly did not get there at all. They had arranged to go to the match together, so Elizabeth picked Eunice up after lunch and drove her to Eton College by mistake. The school must have been as empty as the Marie Celeste, but they found someone to explain to two embarrassed girls that the Eton and Harrow match took place at Lords. Gamely they drove there, and arrived in the late afternoon. They took refuge in Billy Harrington’s box to watch the last hour of the first day’s play.
Marigold Charrington, who also went, recalls the mad frenzy that Harrow’s victory the following day provoked: ‘It was a very exciting day and at the end everybody just went mad. They all rushed on to the pitch, throwing their hats into the air, and it was an extraordinary and really a wonderful sight.’ Not everyone viewed it quite so indulgently. Baroness Ravensdale, who was there with her niece, Vivien Mosley, called it:
A most disgusting riot and shambles. It was not mere top-hat bashing: middle-aged men rushed in and were bestial and savage in their onslaughts on boys and older youths alike; one small boy was badly hurt and was carried off; the savagery shown was sickening, even trying to debag people! Eyes, teeth and noses risked being smashed.5
The reason for this near-riot was that, in 1939, Harrow won for the first time in thirty years. The player chiefly responsible for this great victory was one E. Crutchley, who scored the only century (he made 115 in Harrow’s first innings) and whose father had been equally instrumental in securing the school’s last victory in 1909. It is precisely the sort of demonstration of continuity and skill handed down from father to son that the English love, especially when it happens in a context that unites two of their ruling passions; and Crutchley was wildly feted at the ball in honour of the match at the Hurlingham Club that night.
The account by The Times’ cricket correspondent is so rapturous and so unlike any sports report that might be written today that it is worth quoting at some length:
The drought is over, the Arctic night is past, the chains are burst, the clouds have lifted from the Hill – no metaphor can do justice to the feeling of long-deferred satisfaction with which lovers of cricket in general and of this match in particular saw Harrow beat Eton on Saturday by eight wickets.
… Thirty years is a long time, and the last Harrow victories are brilliantly associated with the names of Crutchley and Anson and Cowley. History repeats itself, and it is pleasant to imagine, at least in two of these cases, Hamilcars impressing on their infant Hannibals the necessity for undying hostility and ultimate vengeance upon the ancient foe.
… It was to be and was, as the old lady said when she married the footman: that, and the fact that the match is now alive again must be Eton’s present consolation.
… Nothing short of an air-raid could stop Harrow’s serene advance to the land of their 30-year-old dreams.
… Harrow cheers were now the shout of them that triumph, the song of them that intend shortly to feast without stint or misgiving. Lithgow (the Harrow captain) was chaired to the pavilion in the traditional manner, in which there may be little comfort to the limbs but surely an abundance of glory to the soul. The customary scenes of enthusiasm and hat-smashing, honoured by time but not perhaps by much else, followed, and the heroes of the drama had to take their calls. … Then the lowing herd wound slowly o’er the lea, and soon nothing remained on the scene of Harrow’s splendid and deserved success save a raffle of old school ties and what, 48 hours earlier, had been new school hats.
It is a wonderful piece of writing, and – with its references to everything from Hannibal to air-raids – entirely characteristic of its time.
The Season was now on its last legs as far as dancing was concerned, though some of the major sporting events were yet to come. Fewer than half a dozen dances were listed for the next three weeks, and of these the main one was Gavin Astor’s coming-of-age at Hever Castle on 18 July. The previous evening, however, saw one final pastoral entertainment which rounded off the summer typically and gloriously. It was given for Barbara McNeill, a charming and popular blue-eyed English blonde and everything a deb ought to be, who showed when the war came that she was made for much more than just the adornment of Society. Her mother, Mrs John Dewar, lived near East Grinstead in Sussex, in a beautiful house with spacious grounds called Dutton Homestall. Barbara’s step-father was very rich, and the party was a suitably extravagant climax to three months of gaiety. Mollie Acland was flattered to be invited, as the guests were – for once – mainly those who were genuinely friends of Barbara or her mother, and not just names plucked from a list. ‘There weren’t many debs or young men and it was very sophisticated. I remember sofas and lying-down chairs with white satin cushions and masses of caviar.’ Elizabeth Leveson-Gower was there, too; and dined with the Dewars beforehand. ‘Great fun,’ she recorded in her diary; ‘garden floodlit and woods too. Everything looked beautiful and there was iced fruit on the tables.’ She, like most of the guests, finally got home at five-thirty next morning. A week later she was already aboard the Empress of Britain en route for Canada, where her uncle’s ocean-going yacht with its crew of twenty-seven was waiting.
Although she was one of the earliest debs to leave, the holiday migration was beginning. People were anxious to get to the sun and seaside as quickly as possible, just in case … The Times prefaced its list of those who had taken grouse moors for the (shooting) season with the glum words:
The state of world affairs and their uncertainty has had a serious effect on the letting of grouse moors and deer forests in Scotland during the early part of the year-. It is expected that quite a number of moors which have failed to find tenants will be shot over by the proprietors. It is certain that there will be fewer Americans than usual out on the Twelfth. The counter-attraction of their own World’s Fair and the uncertainty of the European situation are responsible.
The country still did not know what it wanted. As late as July the Daily Express carried a daily banner on its masthead that proclaimed ‘THERE WILL BE NO WAR IN EUROPE THIS YEAR OR NEXT’. Those who were politically aware (whose number seldom included the debs) ranged from one extreme across to the other: epitomized by members of the Mitford family, whose opinions shaded from deep red to brightest blue, right through the spectrum to Fascist black. Their memoirs make interesting reading. The Hon. Lady Mosley (then wife, now widow of Sir Oswald Mosley, the charismatic leader of the British Union of Fascists) writes in hers:
In July 1939 M. had an immense meeting and demonstration for peace in the Exhibition Hall at Earls Court. It was the culmination of several months’ campaign all over the country. Tom [her brother], hoping for peace but seeing that war was probable, had joined a territorial regiment, the Queen’s Westminsters. He gave the fascist salute as M. marched up the hall, and this was reported in one of the newspapers with a comment implying that an officer in the army could not at the same time be a follower of Sir Oswald Mosley. Tom’s Colonel strongly upheld him and said he was not going to be deprived of one of his best officers; no more was heard of this nonsense.6
In complete contrast, here is Jessica Mitford – by then the wife of Esmond Romilly. Although both held extreme socialist views, they were not members of the Communist Party. ‘The Bermondsey Labour Party was much more to our liking. At the monthly meetings … vigorous discussions would take place on the important political events of the day. … Fund-raising campaigns for milk for Spanish orphans or for aid to Hitler’s Jewish victims were planned and carried out.’7 On one occasion, at a Labour Party parade, several members of the family found themselves at the same meeting, though on opposite sides:
We had been warned that the Blackshirts might try to disrupt the parade, and sure enough there were groups of them lying in wait at several points along the way. Armed with rubber truncheons and knuckle-dusters, they leaped out from behind buildings; there were several brief battles in which the Blackshirts were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the Bermondsey men. Once I caught sight of two familiar, tall, blonde figures: Boud [Unity] and Diana, waving Swastika flags. I shook my fist at them in the Red Front salute.…8
But such issues, passionately felt, were only a microcosm of the great concerns preoccupying the statesmen of Europe. A statement by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons earlier in July had promised unconditionally that Britain would support Poland against German aggression: ‘We have guaranteed to give our assistance to Poland in the case of a clear threat to her independence, which she considers it vital to resist with her national forces, and we are firmly resolved to carry out this undertaking.’9 In spite of this crystal-clear expression of support, the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, reported back a few days later that Hitler was convinced that England would never fight over Danzig. Henderson reiterated to the Under-Secretary at the German Foreign Office, Baron von Weizsäcker, that ‘if Germany by unilateral action at Danzig in any form compelled the Poles to resist, Britain would at once come to their assistance. … His Majesty’s Government could never be reproached this time, as they had been in 1914, of not having made their position clear beyond all doubt. If Herr Hitler wanted war, he knew exactly how he could bring it about.’10 That was on 15 July. Two weeks later the British Ambassador in Warsaw, Sir Howard Kennard, sent a telegram to Halifax in which he expressed concern that:
intensive official propaganda is now being conducted in Germany demonstrating the necessity of an isolated war against Poland without any British or French intervention. This, coupled with the notices which have been sent to German reservists who are to be called up during the second fortnight in August, was somewhat ominous. … in East Prussia, reservists up to 58 years old were being called up.11
That ‘somewhat’ is a wonderful piece of diplomatic sang froid.
By the end of July the official Season was over. In its final week there had been four days’ racing at Goodwood, held in fine weather which brought out a last display of debs and their mothers in bright summer frocks, a last round of house-parties before people dispersed for their summer holidays. The railways were standing by for record crowds determined to make the most of the brilliant holiday weather that had been forecast. Sailing enthusiasts headed towards Cowes. Meanwhile negotiations with Moscow dragged on, both sides curiously half-hearted. By now the war of nerves had gone on for so long that, instead of being at breaking-point, most people were oddly relaxed. The weather was good, their holidays were booked – some, presumably, in Germany – there was a widespread illusion that events would stand still for the time being while they enjoyed themselves. Hitler was on holiday in Berchtesgarten; Chamberlain was about to leave London for a fishing trip in Scotland. A curious stillness fell, much like the last weeks of that July a quarter of a century previously, when in just the same brilliant weather the country had idled unbelievingly towards the outbreak of war. In 1939, though, there was to be another month of peace.
For the debs, three months of what one of them called ‘hardly real days’ had passed, leaving them much more than three months older and more sophisticated – even those who were reluctant or terrified to start with. Christian Grant’s feelings at the outset of her Season were quoted above (p. 86–7). Here is how she looks back on that summer:
The moment that, for me, crystallizes the state of being eighteen that year was a marvellous moment when I had wandered away from one of those wonderful country-house dances with a young man. We were in a state of happy reciprocal love and we found ourselves in the most beautiful wood and some birds were singing – they must have been nightingales, I suppose, because it was at night – and in the distance we could see the lights of the party and hear the music of the band. We were terribly innocent, and we just sort of kissed each other in a very chaste way and I remember then thinking, this is the most magical thing. One was in this beautiful wood with the birds and the music in the distance with somebody one loves. It was a very nice time while it lasted.
It is impossible to begrudge happiness like that; and, for Christian in particular, the war was to bring at least as much suffering. Mary Tyser, now Lady Aldenham, speaks for them all when she says:
I can’t remember any one thing that stands out from that summer, but maybe the broadcast by Neville Chamberlain of the declaration of war made the most difference to my life. Nothing was ever the same again afterwards.