A Year to Remember

by Alec Waugh

  A classic example of timeliness was provided that very autumn by Noël Coward’s play ‘Cavalcade’. In his autobiography Present Indicative he has described how in the autumn of 1930 while he was acting in ‘Private Lives’, he got the idea for a spectacular production at the Coliseum. He planned to start it with scenes from the Second Empire. Then in Foyle’s book shop he found some bound volumes of Black and White and the Illustrated London News. In the first volume was a full-page picture of a troop-ship leaving for the Boer War. He recalled the tunes of the hour – Dolly Grey, Blue Bell, Soldiers of the Queen. In a flash – it was ‘sheer luck’ he said – the full and changed idea came to him. England from New Year’s Eve 1899 to New Year’s Eve 1930. He sought the advice of G. B. Stern who, being several years older than himself had a more vivid memory of the Boer War atmosphere, and to whom he dedicated the published play. He visualised a play, threaded on a string of the popular songs, and a woman somewhat like his own mother and … and this was the key point – like a million others – ‘ordinary, kind and unobtrusively brave, capable of deep suffering and incapable of cheap complaint.’ Into this woman’s mouth he was to put the final curtain speech that would express the beliefs and faith of the millions like herself, a speech that is now part of the theatre’s heritage:

  Let’s couple the future of England with the past of England; the glories and victories that are over, and the sorrows that are over too. Let’s drink to our sons who made part of the pattern, and to our hearts that died with them. Let’s drink to the spirit of gallantry and courage that made a strange heaven out of unbelievable hell, and let’s drink to the hope that one day this country of ours which we love so much will find dignity and greatness and peace again.

  The play was clear in his mind, but he left the writing of it until the New York run of ‘Private Lives’ was over. That was not till the beginning of May and when he did begin, he found himself concerned as much as anything with the technical problems of insuring that there was never more than a thirty second pause between any of its three and twenty scenes. There was indeed on the first night a moment of terrifying suspense when the engineers reported that one of the lifts had stuck and that it would take two hours to repair it. Luckily the experts were, once again, at fault.

  The rehearsals started in September. When my mother saw it she felt that she was seeing the whole of her life passing before her eyes. Everything was there. The troop-ship sailing to South Africa, the funeral of Queen Victoria, a young couple are making love on the boat-deck of a liner – a sudden searchlight plays on the liner’s name. It is Titanic. There was Armistice Night in Piccadilly Circus. The Times critic called it, ‘as comprehensive as Frith’s Derby Day with an abounding vitality of its own.’ In detail it was meticulously accurate. There was for instance, a scene in the East End in the summer of 1906. A newsboy carries a placard ‘another Hayward century!’ Only a small part of the audience would be likely to remember that in 1906, a summer of steady sunshine, Tom Hayward, the Surrey and England cricketer broke all records by compiling thirteen centuries, but for those who did remember, that unobtrusive placard gave the scene a vivid actuality. For other members of the audience, there must have been similar flashes of recall. It must have been obvious during the rehearsals that ‘Cavalcade’ was going to be a great success, but no one could have foreseen that its opening on October 12 would coincide with an almost hysterical wave of national enthusiasm.

  After the first night’s final curtain, Noël Coward said, ‘I hope that this play has made you feel that in spite of the troublesome times we are living in, it is still pretty exciting to be English.’ The King and Queen’s presence on the second night set on it the imprimatur of Royal Benediction, like the State visit to a Cathedral to return thanks for a victory upon the battlefield.

  In Present Indicative Noël Coward complains that it was regarded ‘as a patriotic appeal rather than a play …’ It was being distorted. He could, he wrote, have stayed on in England, and ‘cashed in on all the tin-pot glory’ but he felt it would be better for him to go abroad.

  There have been so many financial crises since 1931, particularly since the second war, that it is difficult for any one now in his thirties to realise how intense a feeling of national rebirth there was during that autumn. It was very little less strong than the feeling of dedication that the country had after the evacuation at Dunkirk. People were so anxious to help their country that they lined up in queues to pay their taxes. Very stringent measures were adopted to meet the crisis. All official salaries were cut and no one grumbled. The sacrifices were made with pride. There was no feeling of gloom, of being reduced to sackcloth and ashes. There was an air of jubilation. In the autumn of 1940 J. B. Priestley in one of the Sunday night broadcasts that did so much to raise the country’s spirits, said, ‘If we have to live in a fortress, let us have fun in our fortress. Let us have the theatre, let us have music, let us have radio plays.’

  There was the same spirit in England in the autumn of 1931.

  During my three weeks at Chagford I had been conscious of this mounting exhilaration. I was acutely aware of it when I returned to my flat in Chelsea. There was a sense everywhere of homecoming, of wanderers returning, with everybody feeling, ‘Well, now we are back here, we’ve done our duty. We’ve stopped taking pounds out of the country. We are going to “Buy British”; we are going to be economical. We are going to see how much fun we can have in our country, in our own homes.’

  I got back from Chagford a week before Polling Day. The temper of the country can be gauged by the leaders in The Times and the political cartoons in Punch. Ramsay Macdonald was asking for a doctor’s mandate, he was appealing to the country to be allowed to continue his work. There was a Punch cartoon for Everybody’s Flag Day with the ‘Buy British’ slogan. The National Government was shown as the Protector of Britannia and her Lion. The Labour members who had refused to join Macdonald were shown as traitors, who had put their party before their country. The issue of Punch before the election had a ‘Country First’ cartoon. Macdonald was presenting the national party lion with the words, ‘Let’s see to it that he gets the Lion’s share.’ The Times on the eve of the election wrote, ‘Never before has the British democracy been called upon to take a decision which in a single day will preserve or destroy the value of British currency and the solidity of British credit.’

  Polling Day was on October 27. Never before has a Parliamentary party suffered a greater defeat than Labour did on that cold and foggy day. The National party was in with a majority of over five hundred. All the old Labour leaders were out, except Stafford Cripps. ‘The country,’ said The Times, ‘delivered judgment in no uncertain terms on the men who ran away,’ continuing, ‘if only the National spirit which won it can be preserved then indeed the event of October 27 will give the nation such a chance as most people deemed impossible in mid-September.’ My mother wrote jubilantly in her diary, ‘wonderful return of National Government.’ Punch in a cartoon called ‘The Splendid Sword’ showed John Bull by his anvil handing to Macdonald a sword marked ‘national majority’ and saying, ‘The best job I’ve ever done, I feel sure that you can be trusted to use it well.’

  The morale of the country touched its highest peak for thirteen years.

  There was a corollary to this election of which few of us recognised the significance. It drove Sir Oswald Mosley into the wilderness. During the Spring he had launched his New Party and entered a dozen candidates for election. A weekly paper Action under the editorship of Harold Nicolson publicised his policies. Not one of his candidates was elected: the circulation of Action dropped from 165,000 copies a week to 16,000 a week and at the end of the year the publication was discontinued.

  The story of the New Party has been told in Harold Nicolson’s diaries and in Sir Oswald Mosley’s autobiography. Mosley was unlucky; he not only lacked the gift of timeliness but time worked against him. At the very moment when he had planned to launch his party he was attacked by a c
ombination of pleurisy and pneumonia, a very serious illness before the discovery of antibiotics. He could not be present at the opening meeting, and the Labour colleague whom he had relied upon to take his place, changed his mind at the last moment. During the early summer Winston Churchill was trying to enlist him under his banner as one of the ‘Tough Tories’. He was still ‘in the picture’, but the financial crisis robbed his campaign of relevance. He was in fact in the position of ‘ineffective isolation’, against which his father-in-law warned him. ‘Fate,’ he said, in his autobiography ‘confronted me with the dilemma of becoming a comfortable colleague in a journey to disaster or a lone challenger to a political world which was bringing ruin to my country.’ He decided to found the British Union of Fascists on the German and Italian model, and eight years later was committed to gaol, without trial, as a potential menace to his country’s safety.

  His campaign ended in complete failure, but it was far from obvious during the 1950s that that would happen. England was very conscious of the Fascist danger. No one could be sure that a situation might not arrive when he and his lieutenants would seize power. It had happened in Italy and Germany. During the end of the decade it had appeared to be happening in Spain. His attacks on Communism made some people wonder whether Fascism might not be superior to Communism. He represented a danger of which Englishmen were conscious during the seven years before the outbreak of the second war; and all this started in the early winter of 1931.

  XIII

  The five weeks that I spent in London before and after the election were as good as any that I can remember. I did no writing. I was resolved to make up for my months of industrious absence and see as much of my friends as I could. One of the people I was most anxious to see was Betty Askwith. I asked her and Theodora Benson to a theatre, with Alan Pryce-Jones to meet them. We dined at my flat first. We went to Priestley’s ‘The Good Companions’ returning to my flat afterwards, finding the fire still alive, banking it high with coal, and sitting in front of it on cushions. It was an evening that had for me a memorable and unexpected quality of charm. It is a misfortune for a man not to have a sister. It prevents him from meeting girls in a relaxed, family atmosphere. He meets only the girls with whom he is or is likely to become emotionally involved. A man who has a sister, sees girls about the place all the time; he sees them off parade. Berta Ruck told me that she could always recognise the man who had not had a sister. In addition to that in my case, an early and ill-fated marriage had cut me off from the debutantes I should have met had I been a young man about town in his early twenties. I had usually got involved with women a little older than myself. Either married women, or with the bohemian type that I met in Chelsea studios; Betty Askwith and Theodora Benson were almost the first two youngish girls – of what I suppose one has to call a society standing – whom I met on equal terms. Betty was to tell me later that that evening had a special quality for her too; it was the first time that she had been to a man’s flat unchaperoned.

  ‘I was surprised you were allowed to come,’ I said. ‘Was there any discussion?’

  She shook her head. ‘I suppose that my mother realised I was old enough to know what was right for me.’

  It was the first time too, that I was to see Theodora in the company of a man by whom she was likely to find herself attracted. She and Alan Pryce-Jones found themselves on easy terms immediately. They laughed at the same things and when soon afterwards he needed to ask a female to lunch to meet my brother (not the easiest assignment) he chose her. She was quite different in Alan’s company from what she had been with her conventional neighbours, from what she had been when I had tea with her and Betty, and also from what she had been at the Lobster Quadrille party where there had been no one ‘special’ for her. Her eyes were bright now and her voice had a wider range of tones. She was a highly delectable commodity. Betty, on the other hand, was very much the same, except that because she was having an amusing time, she was a little but only a very little more animated than she had been at the celebration party.

  Alan and Theodora maintained the bulk of the conversation. They were both quick witted, they were both elegant and vibrant and they were having a good time throwing the ball back to one another. They were meeting for the first time; they were both thinking, ‘Is this going to amount to something. It would be amusing if it did.’ I let myself slide out of the conversation, letting myself try to picture the kind of life that lay ahead for these two girls. Both of them had been born under auspicious stars; the daughters of noblemen, they were not rich but they were to be spared many of the petty inconveniences that fret the existence of so many young women whose fathers have only what they earn, and who stand or fall by what they can make of their opportunities. Both were extremely talented. It was impossible to tell yet how talented or how strong the resolve would be to exploit those talents to the full. They were not ambitious, in the sense that they needed to push their way into the front; they were already in the front by birth. But the parable of the talents was real for them. They wanted to make the most of what they had.

  How would it all work out? I could appreciate what a vivid, vivacious, many-coloured personality Theodora’s was. She glittered on the surface. It was hard not to believe that she should be pursued by men; she had a giving nature. She might marry young, but if she did, it was hard to believe that she would remain rooted within one alliance. There would be lovers, there might be divorces. She had also been born at an unlucky time. The 20s was a period in which there was talk of ‘superfluous women’. Norman Davey in 1923 published a novel, Good Hunting which he dedicated to the 2,341,207 superfluous women. For girls like Theodora and Betty the problem was that so many of the men from whom they could have taken their choice of husbands had been slaughtered on the Somme and at Paschendaele. There was a lack of men in their early thirties – the best age at that time for an English girl in her early twenties. It might well be that Theodora would not marry young; that she would have love affairs and marry late.

  As it turned out, up to a point that was what did happen. She had many love affairs, but she did not marry.

  At that time I knew nothing of her writing. I did not know how much of Lobster Quadrille was hers and how much was Betty’s; but I had a suspicion that the lighter, the more flashing parts were hers. I presumed that before long they would acquire separate identities, that the divergent differences between them would grow more marked, that they would find it impossible to combine. I knew nothing either of Betty’s writing. But I could sense that hers was a quieter, deeper nature. She had told me that she had written poetry. I fancied that as in writing she would be as different from Theodora in love. I did not think that she had the temperament for the passade as Theodora had: she would not make on the majority of men the instantaneous impression that Theodora was making now on Alan; but the men she did attract she would attract a lot. She would need a durable relationship. She would be looking for the man who could give her that. I remembered that swift flicker I had felt on our first meeting. ‘You might be that man,’ I told myself.

  The weeks following the election which were supposed to be a time of solid retrenchment, were for me an animated period. It was over a year since I had spent any length of time in London. I was anxious to see the friends whom I had missed. My diary is dark with pencilled engagements for this and the other party. I had not yet taken up golf but I played squash two or three times a week to keep myself in training. A number of New Yorkers came across. Katherine Brush and her husband Bob Winans in particular. I gave a small dinner party for them. As Peters was still staying in my flat – he was planning to move into Albany and his set was not ready yet – I invited him to join us. ‘Why not bring this new girl of yours.’ I had not seen her yet, but I had not formed a favourable impression of her. One day when I was proposing to spend the night at Underhill, I had asked Peters if he would like to bring her to my flat. He was delighted and they shared my room which had a large double bed. On the bookshelves of
the room were two photographs of females. I returned next morning to find the photographs placed face downwards on the mantelpiece. Not a courteous act. My first impression was confirmed during my dinner party. She was far from being unattractive. She was neat, trim, redhaired. But she was absolutely silent. She made no attempt to contribute to the evening’s liveliness. ‘I hope he doesn’t marry her,’ I thought. He did.

  Somerset Maugham was over for a visit; as was his custom in the autumn. November is a bad month in the South of France. I had a very small party for him. Patrick Balfour, Marda Vanne who had acted in the English production of ‘Rain’, and Elizabeth Montagu, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu’s daughter, who was making my heart beat a little faster at that time.