The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age

by Juliet Nicolson

  Women readers of the Sketch were invited to visit Madame Barrie’s corset shop at 72 Baker Street where a new model of stays called ‘Joie de Vivre’ was on sale which promised to give ‘a new figure as well as hope to numberless women’. Madame Barrie cautioned her customers to remember that ‘there is nothing so unbecoming as a figure which is flat where the stick-outs ought to be and stick-outs where the flat should be’. The Joie de Vivre was adaptable for wear on the golf links, the hockey field or in the ballroom, and came garlanded with ‘wee silk roses and forget-me-nots’.

  In the early December edition of Vogue a helpful Christmas present list was divided by category. A debutante would undoubtedly enjoy a blue Moroccan writing case, inspiring even the most exhausted partygoer to write her thank-you letters promptly. The hostess would be delighted to receive an afternoon tea set or a cake basket, and Vogue could guarantee a husband’s gratitude for a cigarette case complete with matches, a bridge set or a new Austin Sunbeam, in which he might invite house guests to join him on a motor tour of his extensive country estate.

  Meanwhile the Savoy Hotel, within easy reach of the jewellers of Bond Street, had offered a Christmas shopping service to its discerning and busy clientele, employing a Cambridge undergraduate to choose individually appropriate gifts. Her brief from one guest included a must-have pair of emerald earrings costing £700. Another departing guest left his toothbrush in his room but sent the shopping service department a telegram with instructions for the safe return of the brush.

  The Lady magazine was always ready with suggestions for those readers who might have a little spare time on their hands while the servants were busy preparing the Christmas feast. For example a Christmas table might be transformed ‘by a scarlet linen cloth with a strip of wide lace insertion let in down the centre, and underneath a piece of bright green satin showing through the lace’. Small sprigs of holly would complete the look. If this did not appeal, why not join in the Lady’s own mince pie competition? Sybil in the Lady’s editorial office would be glad to consider all entries. A prize of a guinea would be awarded to the one that in Sybil’s opinion proved the most succulent.

  Meanwhile Vogue had not forgotten the lady of the house who had suffered financially in the war and had been left with a reduced domestic staff. She would surely find a vacuum cleaner useful as well as an artificial fuchsia plant to brighten her mood in her new circumstances. For the literary friend Vogue recommended Virginia Woolf’s interesting essay on Kew Gardens as well as a special edition in a gold cover of T. S. Eliot’s new volume of poetry. Well-off consumers could reassure themselves that the less fortunate were not forgotten over the festive period when they read in the society pages that the Duchess of Albany (wearing black satin and a large black hat with touches of gold) had opened the Christmas sale for the Crippled Children’s Homes, in association with the Children’s Union of the Waifs and Strays Society. Sometimes life seemed little different from before the war. The rich remained rich and the poor and disabled had little hope of change.

  However, for the readers of the Lady small but troubling differences in post-war behaviour had not gone unnoticed. The magazine regretted for instance the demise of the excellent traditional St George and the Dragon sketches that children would perform on village porches in exchange for a few pence before ‘we were plunged into the Great War’. Nowadays, the children simply contented themselves with singing a carol or two at the door, and the Lady tutted that ‘these young folk take little pride in their efforts and it is hard to deny that they are out to snatch coppers the quickest and easiest way.’ The children may have been forgiven a little cynicism of their own if they had been aware that owing to the unavailability of the male version, Queen Mary’s Hospital in the East End had this year received a visit from Mother Christmas.

  A week before Christmas, on 18 December, there was a national tragedy. A pre-Christmas trip to Paris planned by the flying hero of the summer, Sir John Alcock, was a light skip in comparison with the marathon journey he had made earlier in the year. He had agreed to deliver a new amphibian plane in time for a demonstration at an aeronautical show in Paris, but there was thick fog in France that day and twenty-five miles from Rouen Alcock lost his bearings. The farmer in whose field the plane crash-landed was able to identify the dead pilot only from an engraving on his diamond-studded wrist-watch. The whole world was shocked. ‘Alcock’s death was a true sacrifice for humanity,’ said his friend and former co-pilot Arthur Brown on hearing of Alcock’s death.

  Talk both in and out of the retail trade was of another tragic accident. In October 1918 Coco Chanel’s lover Boy Capel had married a widowed English aristocrat, Lady Diana Wyndham, who became pregnant with his child. But the child was not to grow up knowing her father. Capel was killed in a motor accident four days before the 1919 Christmas and left an emptiness and sadness in Chanel from which, at the age of 37, she did not expect to recover. She knew she was now quite incapable of happiness on a personal level. Her work became all consuming.

  Christmas was not turning out to be the flawless holiday of prewar memory, but the ritual of a Sandringham Christmas, an occasion that had always been observed with tradition and opulence, remained quite unchanged. It starred as usual one of the upper servants disguised as the royal family’s personal Father Christmas in a red coat, black patent leather boots and a flowing white beard, followed by dinner where sweet-smelling roses filled silver bowls, and scarlet crackers were scattered along the crystal-glittering table. The festival to celebrate the birth of the Saviour resembled, according to the Prince of Wales, ‘Dickens in a Cartier setting’. But none of this luxury did anything to dispel the feelings of panic and despair that occupied the Prince of Wales at the thought of his imminent separation from his girlfriend.

  Freda Dudley Ward, the slight, elegant daughter of a lace manufacturer, was married to a Liberal Member of Parliament. She was hardly suitable girlfriend material for the future King. Cynthia Asquith called her a ‘pretty little fluff’. But in the spring of 1919 David had fallen deeply in love with her. Freda was funny, laughed at his jokes and teased him. She discouraged his tremendous smoking habit, but played tennis and golf, and danced beautifully. Her high childish voice hid her intelligence and she encouraged him to read although he was not always familiar with the authors she suggested he try. ‘Who is this woman Bront?’ he asked her, wholly oblivious of the literary output of the Haworth sisters. Her husband thought it quite a compliment that his wife was involved with the heir to the throne and for as long as Freda remained married to Mr Dudley Ward, the Prince could remain secure in the knowledge that she could not marry anyone else. The question of his commitment following a divorce would have changed all that.

  However, a second overseas tour, this time to Australia, taking him ten thousand miles away from her for seven months, was scheduled for March. He wanted desperately to get out of it. On Christmas Day, still clearly under the influence of his visit to the New World, he wrote to his private secretary, Godfrey Thomas: ‘A sort of hopelessly lost feeling has come over me and I think I’m going kind of mad!’ In a tone of distraught finality, he continued: ‘How I loathe my job now and all this “press puffed” empty “succe’s”. I feel I’m through with it and long and long to die.’ Thomas wrote back urging the Prince to take more care of himself, to smoke and drink less and to rest more. But secretly Thomas was worried about the fragile state of his boss’s mind.

  Meanwhile in London at the Savoy Hotel the Christmas menu included bear from Finland, snails from France, caviar from Russia and Scottish plovers’ eggs at a guinea each - all designed to illustrate the eighteenth-century gourmet and politician Brillat-Savarin’s dictum that ‘Beasts feed, Man eats, but only the man of intelligence and perceptiveness really dines.’ For those who lived lives remote from the extravagant surroundings of the Savoy Hotel, the simple gathering of relations reunited round a table set for tea, with jam tarts and a huge currant cake in the centre, was enough.

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p; On New Year’s Eve a huge crowd gathered at midnight at St Paul’s to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and there was hardly a uniform in sight, a great contrast from the same occasion the year before. But amid this atmosphere of determined jollity a discordant paragraph had appeared on Christmas Eve in the Sketch. Suggesting that it was time to call an end to the refusal to face unhappiness and to the denial of loss, an editorial seemed to beckon its readers towards some admission of grief:

  The happiest people at Christmas are those who open their hearts instead of resolutely shutting them; a tear or two for the memory of a friend who has passed, a dear face missing from the table and the fireside will do you no harm. You will be happier for your moment of sorrowful reflection.

  In one of its final editions of the year, the Sketch continued in a tone of undisguised disillusionment:

  The year 1919 which began with such glowing anticipation has not been much fun after all. The genuine rejoicings of November 1918 degenerated into the machine-made festivities of the summer.

  The Saturday Review wrote of its fear for the future at the end of this first full year of peace: ‘crushing taxation, impossible cost of living and an unseemly scuffle for jobs will probably drive many of our best men under thirty to push off and seek a newer world.’ And Vogue detected a new tendency towards restraint. Immediately after the war the first reaction had been to ‘eat, drink and be merry’. However, in the final month of 1919 the magazine felt ‘a different spirit has begun to prevail’: the post-Christmas sensibility was one in which ‘We are beginning to face the facts instead of trying to forget them.’

  The country seemed to be in a new, more honest if chastened mood.

  12

  Yearning

  Early Spring 1920

  The overcrowded London streets were still full of figures in khaki and the Government had begun to worry that the sight of uniform might be an unhelpful reminder of things best forgotten. An official instruction was issued for the removal of all military buttons, badges and shoulder straps from service dress. London’s clubs and hotels provided a sanctuary for men who were beginning to remember the war with nostalgia. Some missed the heightened sense of awareness brought by the single-mindedness of war. It was as if some previous intervening darkness had thinned to reveal an insight into what really mattered in life. Although they remained silent on the subject, returning soldiers found they missed the friendships they had made almost more than they had missed their own families. Siegfried Sassoon said that every survivor would be ‘everlastingly differentiated from everyone except his fellow soldiers’. Elderly men let off steam from deep within the red leather armchairs of London’s smoking rooms, still arguing over the question of war debts and reparations, and discussing what the Allies would eventually do with the captive Kaiser.

  Elsewhere conversations were full of a resolve to put the past behind them. Kensitas cigarettes were running an advertisement in the papers showing an officer and his wife smoking and relaxing together. The officer is confirming his wife’s evident mood. ‘You’ve seen it through. You don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to think about it.’ Women like Barbara Cartland, now 19 years old and embarking on what she suspected might be a life-long search for romance, made it her habit never to ask any of her many soldier friends about the war. ‘We were young, the sun was shining, there was music to dance to, what more could anyone want?’ she explained.

  Although the military trench coats known as ‘The British Warm’, designed for officers as protection from the freezing winters of northern India, remained hugely popular, new fashions for men began to emerge. Timepieces strapped on to wrists became all the rage. They had been worn during the war by those engaged in aerial combat; now civilians adopted the fashion. A government allowance had been allocated for all demobbed servicemen, including thirty shillings for a suit and a further thirty for a decent overcoat. The Tailor and Cutter magazine confirmed that ‘A man cannot make love unless he is wearing a coat cut within half a mile of Piccadilly’, and the cloth cutters and seamstresses noticed a change of physique in their clients. According to the magazine, discharged soldiers had developed ‘quite a different attitude of figure’ in their upper body and arms which the magazine attributed to ‘the drill, physical exercise and open air life’.

  The Savoy had started 1920 with a bang, or as the Tatler put it, ‘the season’s simply biffed in’. Travel agents made plans for a record summer of expeditions to Europe and sent out alluring prospectuses. Opportunists predicted that the cost of living in Germany would soon drop and wondered if one day it might be an attractive place to settle. While the bereaved continued to make expeditions to the battlefields, seeking evidence of death in the place where their loved ones had fallen, London was one of the most popular places to visit for fun, particularly for Americans. Lucy Duff Gordon, who was herself planning to leave New York for Paris, was not surprised by the sudden activity all around her.

  Everyone was restless; people wanted to be in any place except the one where they happened to be. Old men and women who had lived all their lives in small towns in the Middle West sold their houses and came to New York, city dwellers went to the country, or took sea voyages. Young people went to victory balls, danced all night, got hilariously drunk and went to bed in somebody else’s house.

  Bookings at the Savoy were coming in faster than they had for years. The hotel forecourt was full of bicycles chained to the railings by their Gold Flake-smoking lady riders, and old customers were returning to the cocktail bar with relief to find that despite the official introduction of prohibition across the Atlantic on 17 January, teetotal barman Harry Craddock was in splendid form, shaking with gusto his newly invented martini, the White Lady, in the newly established American Bar. Harry reckoned to mix a thousand drinks in five hours.

  But as the new American legislation to criminalise alcohol took effect there was a direct reminder from God of the wisdom of the alcohol ban. On 15 January a colossal molasses storage tank on the Boston waterfront burst open with no warning. The tank contained two million gallons of the glutinous brown liquid that on fermentation produced ethanol, the purest form of alcohol. The safety bolts in the tank had never been properly tested and a gigantic toffee-coloured wave measuring fifteen feet high and one hundred and sixty feet wide and travelling at a speed of thirty-five miles per hour rolled though the city engulfing everything and everyone in its sugary path. The steel girders of the Boston Elevated Railway buckled under its own weight, buildings came crashing down. Eyes, ears, mouths and noses were filled with the sweet-smelling sludge, and twenty-one people were killed and a hundred and fifty injured.

  No such sign from above had appeared in England, however, to endorse Nancy Astor’s best efforts to educate the British in the iniquities of drink. Nancy had painful experience of the matter, having been married first time round to an alcoholic. Her only concession to the needs of her bibulous house-guests was to allow the Cliveden butler to offer them a small glass of Dubonnet.

  But exquisite excess was the way of the Savoy. The food there was back to its exotic pre-war standards. One guest with a discerning palate ordered woodcock, bécasse au fumé, a dish in which small slithers were lifted from the breast of the bird and flambéed in brandy at the table. But the guest had no desire to eat the finished thing. He was not hungry. He simply liked to indulge himself in watching the preparation process. A taste for the hitherto little requested frogs’ legs and snails had developed in those men who had spent much of the preceding four years in France. Strawberries were a delicacy that provided a problem for one financially stretched guest who, at twenty-five shillings a dozen, treated himself by ordering a single fruit. More outlandish dishes were not always recognised. A plump haggis found itself despatched by a foreign maid to join the shelves of soap in the hotel laundry in Clapham.

  The hotel remained under the management of its pre-war figure of authority and optimism, London’s grandest and favourite honorary butler, Sir George Reeves
Smith. He had recently been honoured by the Hotels and Restaurants Association with a silver cigar box for his wartime services to the catering trade, and for the unflagging maintenance of a hotel of the very highest standards. For Reeves Smith the comfort of his guests had always been his paramount consideration. Even after the rare unfortunate experience at the hotel guests invariably came back to stay. Reeves Smith had never forgotten the gratitude of the impresario Charles Frohman after he became stuck in one of the new high-speed lifts, stationary and alone between floors for several hours before being rescued. Frohman’s gratitude arose, he said, from being given the first holiday he had spent in years. Frohman had been a passenger on the Lusitania and Reeves Smith continued to miss him.

  Reeves Smith never overlooked the smallest detail. Returning lady guests were made aware of the special affection in which the hotel held them by the sight of a posy of their favourite flowers next to their plate as they sat down to dinner. Male guests who had survived the war but were missing an arm were given special consideration as Reeves Smith had made a small but significant change to the hotel ‘facilities’. He had arranged for a row of nail brushes to be fixed to the wall just above the basins in the Gentlemen’s washrooms. The surviving hand could be placed beneath the brush and cleansed without a second hand being necessary to hold the brush. All the staff mourned one post-war casualty. Ernest, the hotel goldfish whose party tricks included the ability to leapfrog over a floating cork, eventually succumbed to the avalanche of cigar ash that was carelessly tapped into his tank.