August began with Cowes Week: the last and most picturesque of the summer’s events. Sunshine scampered and slid across the waters of the Solent, throwing patterns of light over canvas sails and highly varnished decks. The old men watched, rigid as admirals in their dark-blue reefers (some of them were admirals) while the young men showed off their speed and skill in the races, admired by girls with wind-blown hair and tossing skirts. It was a very English image to carry away from the summer of 1939, and a last escapist fling for many of those who sailed all day and danced half the night.
Mollie Acland’s father was Commodore of the Yacht Club at Seaview, on the Isle of Wight, and the children had been used to boating all their lives. Her parents had bought a big house at Seaview, to which Mollie invited some of her new friends from the Season.
When we were children, all our friends used to come and stay in July and my parents’ friends came in August. Then as we got older our friends started to come in August, and in 1939 our house was enlivened by some young men from the Season. We had a lot of servants – the house was bigger than our home in Hertfordshire – so there were plenty of staff to look after us and the guests: in fact we used to have to take on extra people for August. We had the butler, a footman, an extra footman, the cook, a kitchen maid, a between-maid or two, an under housemaid, two boatmen, two gardeners and an odd-job man called Tom, as well as the nanny and two nursery maids for my younger sisters. (The servants slept two or three to a room, somewhere at the back of the house – I never saw their bedrooms; all except for Cook, who had her own room, and my mother’s lady’s maid, who did too, and Nanny, who slept in the night nursery.) We had lots of boats there, and a staff boat for when they had time off. There were three rowing boats called Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, and sailing dinghies, and Mermaids. Ninety per cent of our time was spent sailing in August, because after Cowes Week there were the Portsmouth and Bembridge Regattas, the Ryde Regatta – lots of them, so you’d be out all day long. As well as that we swam a lot – somehow we didn’t mind the cold in those days – and had a ping-pong table in the old dining-room, where we played if it was really too wet to go out, and there were public tennis-courts.
Apart from Cowes Week, when traditionally it always blows hard – and it did – we had wonderful weather that August. Peter, now my husband, had come to stay for Cowes Week. He was in the RAFVR by that time, but he managed to come back again at the end of August, and we went to a local place to dance – a sort of nightclub, though not quite – and that’s where we fell in love.
On 2 August, a Wednesday, the House of Commons considered how long to adjourn for the summer recess. To the astonishment of many MPS (who had assumed that, in view of the gravity of the international situation, the recess would be brief) Chamberlain insisted that the adjournment should last for the usual two months* until 3 October. It was gestures such as this – whatever may have been said between diplomats at the highest level – that persuaded Germany that Britain was not serious about going to war. The only concession the Prime Minister would make was a promise that Parliament would be recalled should a situation like that of the previous September recur. Winston Churchill opposed him strongly: ‘In a funny but sad speech [he] said that we must certainly come back early, and gave many reasons including his theme song that the dictators help themselves to a country whilst we are on holiday! Speech after speech followed along those lines … all were against the pm who grinned and bore it.’1
The divided mood of the House precisely echoed that of the country. A quarter of a century earlier, on 4 August 1914, Britain had entered the First World War after Germany’s invasion of Belgium. The parallel was uncomfortably close, and it was not an anniversary that was much celebrated. In 1914 the outbreak of war had been greeted with cheering and hilarity by crowds all over Europe. Then, as now, there had been many who, right up to the last minute, had not believed it could happen. Sir Osbert Sitwell described his father’s reaction when he opened his Times in 1914 and saw that war had been declared: ‘What was that? War! War! There would not be a war; how could there be?’ In 1939 some people had the same attitude, either hopelessly blinkered by self-delusion and patriotism or simply ignorant of the inexorable march towards a confrontation that could not any longer be side-stepped. Events were now measured in days, not weeks or months, let alone the gathering force of decades. As the Spectator analysed it: ‘A week whose first four days have been marked by no accentuation of crisis is by common consent being described as a period of “lull” in international affairs.’2 Right up to the last weeks there was still optimism – and, in any case, who behaves as though international affairs were more important than packing and getting away for a summer holiday? Who spends as much time reflecting on the balance of probabilities were Germany to invade Poland as they do on deciding which swimsuit will be most becoming, and whether a raincoat is just tempting fate ? Certainly not a newly fledged debutante brimming with the social confidence instilled over the last three months, and longing to try it out – and the swimsuit – on the beaches of glamorous Le Touquet, sporty and sophisticated Deauville, chic Eden Roc, slightly passé Biarritz, or – best of all, though mostly for the international moneyed set – Monte Carlo and the casinos of the Riviera.
France was a favourite holiday destination that August: not too far away, ‘in case’, it promised good weather in which to acquire a fashionable tan, and crowds of like-minded people with whom to enjoy the sporting facilities by day and social life by night. Villas were rented all along the Mediterranean coast, and the house-parties of the previous three months simply transferred themselves several hundred miles, to a bluer sky and a more exotic landscape, with little diminution in standards of comfort or service. Sarah Norton’s mother, Lady Grantley, was very hospitable:
My mother took a villa in the south of France at St Raphaël where my father convalesced after a terrible car accident a few weeks earlier. She let me ask a lot of friends out there, and we all had a wonderful time and tried to forget about what was happening elsewhere. A number of people with whom I’d been doing the Season came down to stay – Jane Kenyon-Slaney was one, I remember – and some boys turned up as well. They hadn’t been formally invited: they just sort of appeared, and although the villa wasn’t grand, we had plenty of room for them.
There was a swimming pool at the villa, where we swam and sunbathed, and we played games, and in the evening we used to take the train to Monte Carlo. It was just like a bus in those days, with little stations right by all the villas, so you could go to the casino for the evening. We didn’t gamble, of course: (a) because we hadn’t any money, and (b) because it wasn’t thought suitable, but we would go along and watch the people who did. Night life was smartish. You’d wear a good cotton frock and sandals, with bare brown arms and legs, but not a cocktail frock, though some of the older people were in evening dress.
Sarah’s grandmother used to say, ‘Darling, the thing is one wouldn’t be seen in London after 31 July.’ The general exodus at the beginning of August took a number of people up to Scotland for the grouse shooting. Lady Elizabeth Scott went with her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, to their estate at Wanlockhead, where they entertained a large house-party throughout August.
Helen Vlasto – the deb who had alternated the nights of the Season with days spent nursing at Lambeth Infirmary – was one of many who joined a British Red Cross Society detachment, where she attended lectures in first aid, home nursing and gas warfare. For the family’s summer holiday that August her parents did what they had always done, and stayed at Frinton-on-Sea. Helen’s grandmother rented a large house there every year, to which she summoned her three children and their families. All the cousins would assemble – many of them seeming exotic and foreign, for they had made their homes in the south of France – and, together with their servants, the extended family would spend a month playing tennis and croquet together, having picnics on the beach, and arguing fiercely over dinner each evening. In 1939, underlying the relaxation of that perfect August, was the unspoken realization that this might be the last such occasion.
France – Scotland – the English seaside resorts: the debs recuperated from the exhaustion of their Season. Few people travelled farther afield, for no one knew whether petrol would be available for private use if war broke out, and people were afraid of finding themselves marooned and unable to get back to England. Indeed, this very nearly happened to Ann Schuster:
Immediately after the Season was over I went to Denmark, because my brother had married a Danish girl when I was about fifteen. I’d been out there to be bridesmaid, and loved it. So I went back in 1939 and stayed with lots of friends for about a month, and it was my Danish host – he was Minister of something – who said, ‘Look, you’ve got to get back to England.’ This was only about four or five days before war broke out, and there was no way by then. The airports were shutting down; my own parents were in Salzburg for a music festival, my brother was on holiday somewhere else. My host managed to get me on to a plane – I think he must have been Minister of Transport – and said, ‘Whatever you’re going back to, you’ve got to go, this is the last chance you’ll have, otherwise you’ll be interned here.’ It really did hit me then. I’d just been completely unthinking about it before that. We were locked into the aeroplane at Hamburg airport and not allowed to get out and it was all very – when you’re seventeen – it was all very exciting. The feeling of elation: good, something’s going to be done about it at last!
By mid-August preparations for war were going ahead feverishly. The Bystander for 9 August noted:
The August holiday season is upon us, and never before has a peace-time August seen Europe so full of armed men. The camps are crowded in every country and every road echoes to the tramp of marching men, and every blast furnace is working overtime, and the British Navy is on the high seas at full strength. It is exactly a quarter of a century almost to the day, since the Navy slipped away into the mists of the North Sea to take up its battle-station at Scapa Flow.
A week later, amid jolly pictures of country shooting-parties or of laughing groups of sun-worshippers beside Mediterranean swimming pools, the same magazine for 16 August recorded:
England’s sky last week was filled with more aeroplanes than it has ever known before. 1300 military aeroplanes, four AA divisions, ten BB squadrons and fifteen groups of the observer corps went into action last week in a mock aerial war. For three days, under a low ceiling of rain clouds, the bombers repeatedly attacked and were always observed, though not always intercepted. Civilians cooperated with a midnight-to-dawn black-out.
The newspapers, many of which had hitherto blanketed their readers in a humid fog of jingoistic bluff, finally began to use phrases like ‘imminent peril of war’. Many firms accelerated their air-raid-precaution training. A photograph in the Bystander showed a man working in the shadow of the great dome of St Paul’s to put up a framework of wire, to catch flying fragments of glass and masonry in case the unimaginable desecration should occur and St Paul’s were to be bombed. There was a run on black material with which to make black-out curtains. Shelters were issued to ticket-collectors on the Underground, in case of air-raids: strange little cabins shaped like a diving-bell with scarcely room for a man to sit underneath, which can have offered little more than psychological protection. People’s worst fears were unspoken, a terrible mixture of what they knew of the First World War and the science-fiction horrors of a war fought against civilians with gases far more poisonous than the mustard gas that had convulsed the trenches, and planes far more evil than the brave, fragile craft that had jousted gallantly in the last war. One of the young men who escorted many of the debs of 1939 said: ‘We thought that the Blitzkrieg would take place immediately and everything would be flattened and it would be a question of the survival of the fittest. It was going to be a war fought in the air, and the Army would be the gun fodder, as they were in the First World War. But we never had any doubt that we would win. Never.’
Some families were more conscious than others of the need to make urgent preparations for war. Anne Douglas-Scott-Montagu, daughter of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu (her father had died in 1929 and her mother had married Captain the Hon. Edward Pleydell-Bouverie) recalls that August:
We were all terribly serious: laying in stores, going to Red Cross things, we were all talking about evacuating, even in August. But I think that we, living on the south coast, were very conscious that we were the front line, and I think we felt – as we did throughout the war – that we might have been invaded. We had pillboxes all over the place and all the boats were laid up. Our garden goes right down to the edge of the river and has massive rhododendrons and my parents organized for all the small boats from the river to come up and be hidden away under the rhododendrons, all round the side of the lawn. We felt that, with Southampton being an important port and Portsmouth a naval base, we were very much in line for invasion: which we were. Yet I don’t remember feeling frightened at all. We were very, very patriotic – everyone was patriotic then – none of my friends were pacifists: not one. They all rushed off to join up.
Yet up in Scotland, Madeleine Turnbull was almost wholly unaware how close war was:
I remember in August ’39 – I suppose partly because I was in love – we sort of blinded ourselves and just lived for the moment. We’d taken a farmhouse up at Nethybridge, in Strathspey, and I remember this friend of mine coming to stay with us but he and I never discussed it. Extraordinary, isn’t it? Just blind: blind. It came as an awful shock when war was declared. You felt it was the end of your life. We’d been told that if it came the sky would be black with aeroplanes. It was an amazing division in all our lives; you suddenly got this awful sense, for the first time, of the uncertainty of everything. That you can never rely on anything to be as it appears to be.
One of the very few social events of August was the coming-of-age party held at Chatsworth for the Marquess of Hartington, the son and heir of the Duke of Devonshire. It took place over two days, the 15th and 16th of the month – not so much a party as a whole series of parties: ‘Thousands of people came over several days of brilliant weather, and by the end of the second day [the Duchess’s] right arm was in a sling from too much hand-shaking. ‘3 In fact Billy Hartington had been twenty-one the previous December, but because of the death of his grandfather, the ninth Duke, his twenty-first birthday celebrations had been postponed ; and by mid-August not even the great dark looming clouds of war could persuade his parents to cancel the party again. A photograph in the Bystander shows him with his brother Andrew (who became the eleventh Duke eventually), Charles Manners, the Marquess of Granby and the future tenth Duke of Rutland (and another of the great charmers of the Season), and his future brother-in-law. It was the last pre-war gathering of the clan. Shortly afterwards, Ambassador Joe Kennedy, who had never concealed his pessimism about England’s chances in a war against Germany, sent his entire family home on the ss Washington. Kathleen, whose relationship with Lord Hartington had continued to flourish in spite of opposition from her rigidly Catholic parents, was forced under protest to go too.
The atmosphere in London that August is curiously forecast in an article which Lesley Blanch wrote for Vogue. The most curious thing about it is the complete absence of any mention of the impending war. The reason for this apparent sang froid was that Vogue went to press at least six weeks before the magazine appeared, so copy for the August issue had been written in June. Its blasé tone must have struck its readers as inappropriate at the time; today it seems downright bizarre – but hindsight alters everything:
London in August. Supposedly a dead season, a closed book and an arid waste. When ‘they’ are on holiday; when ‘their’ blinds are drawn; when the town assumes a sullen, brooding air, becalmed between seasons. There is time to think; space to walk; air to breathe. Time to catch up. … For some, time to try out new joints like the Willoughby, a slap-up, full-dress affair, with swing music and a black band. Or the crazily frescoed Nuthouse in Greek Street with a raffish, bottle party, dress-as-you-please atmosphere, where things hot up about 2 a.m. This month, there is that admirable pianist George Shearing and early in September there will be a new burlesque show. … There are concerts, with the Proms in full blast and new works such as Vaughan Williams’ Variations of Dives and Lazarus, Sir Arnold Bax’s 7th Symphony, and Arthur Bliss’s Piano Concerto. And in London now is the moment to see all those excellent plays which are still running, but which will, by September, give place to others … Gielgud at The Globe with The Cherry Orchard, Rebecca and Les Parents Terribles, Weep for the Spring ; Binnie Hale’s Intimate Revue … plays and more plays, and all eyes focused on Noël Coward’s return in his new season at the Phoenix. New films, such as Bette Davis’ Carlotta in Juarez or Ray Bolger in The Wizard of Oz.
Not until November did Vogue catch up with the fact that Britain was at war, with an article called glumly, ‘British Designers Adapt Themselves to War Conditions’.
The Bystander, on the other hand, began a series called ‘Women in Uniform’ at the end of June, and every week for the next two or three months it highlighted a different branch of women’s war work: the Red Cross (showing training, anti-gas lectures and fire-drill), the National Women’s Air Reserve, which trained women as ferry and ambulance pilots, ground engineers and wireless operators, the Auxiliary Territorial Service (the ATS), the Women’s Land Army, ARP (air-raid precautions), fany (the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), and so on. Although the women pictured ‘doing their stuff’ in these various services were largely middle-and more than middle-aged, before very long there would be an influx of debs who, like the rest of their contemporaries, hastened to enlist in whatever branch of war work seemed most useful and congenial.
The Tatler was slower to react to the imminence of war, choosing instead to show snazzy pictures of its readers in far-flung holiday resorts with an elegant partner on one hand and a cocktail in the other. The Tatler called the international crisis ‘the current spot of bother’ and hoped it would all soon blow over.
Churchill, too, was on holiday. He had gone to France to paint, and was staying with Jacques and Consuelo Balsan at Dreux, together with an artist friend called Paul Maze. Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s biographer, recorded:
A telegram reached them, warning that Hitler might invade Poland at any moment. What had been Churchill’s reaction? Paul Maze took his pre-war diary from his bookshelf:
‘“They are strong, I tell you, they are strong,” Churchill said. Then his jaw clenched his large cigar, and I felt the determination in his will.
“Ah,” he said, “with it all, we shall have him.” ‘4
The genius of Churchill – who at this stage of late August was still not in the Cabinet ; indeed, had not been a Cabinet member since being Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924 to 1929 – was that he mirrored the attitudes and responses of the English people. Mollie Acland’s description of how she and her friends felt about Hitler just before war broke out reflects exactly the determination that Churchill articulated ; though in recalling her emotions fifty years later, she unwittingly reverted to the language of teenage years:
By then we were totally and absolutely conscious that war was imminent. We just wondered, is it coming tomorrow or the next day? My uncle said, ‘The Germans will just wait till the harvest is in and then they’ll march on Poland’ – and he was absolutely right.
I wasn’t a bit frightened – it never occurred to us that we could lose. There was a gallant mood among people then. It wasn’t a depressing time at all, and I don’t remember even thinking of it as ‘a last fling’. I think we wanted to kill Hitler. … I think it was as simple as that. Obviously we didn’t know about the full horrors of the Holocaust, but many of us knew Jewish refugee families and we thought that Hitler was a very bad man and ought to be out of the way before he conquered the world. I think we were totally prepared to die for that.
It’s quite important that people who were born after the war should realize what a heck of an awful thing Hitler did. It wasn’t only the Jews – it was all of France, and the Low Countries ; Czechoslovakia and Poland – he was a megalomaniac, and if he’d got hold of the A-Bomb he’d have destroyed the world.
Since 12 August a British and French military mission had been in Moscow for further protracted talks. By the middle of the month The Times reported confidently that the talks ‘seem to be making good progress, and their work invites the assurance that there will be no big delay in completion of “the peace front” by the inclusion of Russia.’ Meanwhile, German-Polish relations had reached a point of nerve-racking tension, with incidents occurring daily right along the frontier, and not just in Danzig.
On 20 August, however, The Times carried the astounding news that a German-Soviet non-aggression pact had been agreed, and on 23 August it was formally signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov. Some people remember the announcement of this shattering new development most clearly of all.
The German-Soviet pact destroyed the last frail thread of hope for peace, and from all over Europe people were cobbling together whatever arrangements they could make to get home to England. Even staying in the Balsans’ idyllic château near Dreux, Churchill had been conscious of ‘the deep apprehension brooding over all’,5 and in the end his anxiety led him to cut short his holiday and return to England on 22 August. In the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Chamberlain announced a formal Treaty of Alliance with Poland. It was signed on 25 August, and there was no more talk of ‘concessions’ to Germany. Churchill personally telephoned the Polish Ambassador in London, who told him that he was completely satisfied with the support he was receiving’.
From now on, it could only be a matter of days. One young man from that Season recalls,
When Ribbentrop’s agreement was announced I knew that was a fatal day. By then everyone was doing ARP work and learning things like bandaging, somebody was coming in once a week to teach us about gas – everyone expected there would be a gas attack, though in fact it never came – and first aid, and arrangements were being made to take in evacuees from the London slums. One tried to be calm about the whole thing: that was the form. My mother would have disapproved of anyone getting too excited.
On 24 August Parliament was recalled. Chips Channon’s diary recorded the mood of the House:
I watched the other Members come in and meet one another. They all looked well, many were bronzed. At 2.45 the House met and soon the Prime Minister rose. He spoke in well-modulated phrases and was clear and admirable, but with little passion or emotion. … The House was calm, bored, even irritated, at having its holiday cut short by Hitler.
… Certainly tonight London is quiet and almost indifferent to what may happen. There is a frightening calm.6
The calm sense of inevitability was not universal. For many debs, this confirmation that the unthinkable was about to happen brought a cold sense of fear. Their brothers and cousins and dancing partners and boyfriends were the ones who would have to lay down their lives to stop Hitler. Dinah Brand (now Mrs Bridge) remembers the moment when realization first hit her:
I was up in Yorkshire and there was a lot of chat about how this is really it and then I heard over the megaphone at the race meeting people being called up to their regiments and that gave me a tremendous sort of shiver – a shock, that it was happening. And yet, in a sort of way, being so young, you just didn’t realize what it would involve. … it was exciting and yet terrifying.
Priscilla Brett (now Lady Beckett), was also at York races that August, staying with her future parents-in-law, and she too remembers people being called to their regiments over the tannoy: ‘There was a great sense of drama: we hadn’t the foggiest idea what it would be like. In a way we thought it would be much more dreadful than it was, because of the memories of the last war, and the horrors of that.’ Ronnie Kershaw was one of the young men called up at that time and, far from being apprehensive, he greeted his call-up with delight – or so, at any rate, it seems to him now:
I was called up in August, and I was very, very pleased. I didn’t like the job I was doing very much, so it was a great relief. I was made a 2nd Lieutenant at about 10/6d a day: so there I was in the Army. At the end of August I went to camp and then after camp I didn’t have any more leave. But right up until the end of July I think most people hadn’t believed there was going to be a war. They didn’t really think that Hitler would risk it against England. They never thought he would be mad enough – they thought something would happen to prevent it. That was my view as well: but I soon changed it !
Christian Grant had known throughout the summer that war was imminent:
What gave me the greatest clue that something terrible was expected was that the grown-ups – our parents’ generation – were so frightfully nice to us; and we sort of knew that they were giving us a particularly wonderful, beautiful summer because they knew more than we knew. It didn’t oppress or frighten one, because at that age one has no concept of what a war is. One certainly didn’t appreciate that all the young men one was dancing with were going to be killed. Of my men friends, my young men friends, twenty-two of them joined up on the same day, when war started, and at the end of the war only two were alive. And one was a mental wreck and the other was on crutches. And that was the whole of my gang. En bloc, my gang was slaughtered.
In the last few days of August people were hastening back from their holidays. For those who had been abroad, this was often a considerable problem. Sarah Norton’s mother packed up their villa at St Raphaël with scarcely an hour’s notice:
We’d all been trying to forget what was happening, and had mostly succeeded in having a wonderful time – and then when things really were getting a bit tricky my mother suddenly decided that we had to leave immediately. We were in my father’s car with my parents and my brother and one other person who wanted a lift and then suddenly lots of other people turned up, begging for lifts, but there was nothing we could do – there was no more room in the car. My mother was quite calm about it all but there was no nonsense: she said, in half an hour we’ll leave, and we did. I hadn’t even had time to change out of my shorts, so I arrived at the Ritz in Paris still wearing them, but my mother said, ‘Don’t worry, dear, nobody’11 notice your shorts.’ The next problem was getting on to a boat to cross the Channel, but we managed that and my brother Johnnie and I were sent straight up to Scotland.
Now there was nothing to be done except wait. Rosamund Neave said:
People knew it was going to happen yet they couldn’t grasp it and couldn’t do anything about it, so it was a very static time … becalmed … almost like a stillness over the whole country. My mother was beginning to put things away in trunks and to lay in supplies. She bought masses of tea and masses of vests, for some reason. People were coming down from Scotland and back from their holidays. It was a very strange time.
August came to an end, and so did twenty-one years of peace.