1939
Page 1
1939: THE LAST SEASON OF PEACE
Angela Lambert
Contents
Acknowledgements
Part One: The Girls from the Stately Homes of England
1 Becoming a Deb is a Difficult Matter: Who Did the Season, and Why?
2 I’ve Been to London to Look at the Queen
3 The Childhood of the Debs: Preparing to Be a Beautiful Lady
4 Change Your Partner, Dance While You Can
Part Two: That Unspeakable Summer
Prologue
5 The Last Four Months of Peace: May
6 The Last Three Months of Peace: June
7 The Last Two Months of Peace: July
8 The Last Month of Peace: August
Part Three: The War: Real Phoney and Aftermath
9 This Country Is at War with Germany
10 An Excellent Introduction for Life ?
Appendix: Slang Expressions Current in 1939
Select Bibliography
References
Part One
The Girls from the Stately Homes of England
Chapter One
Becoming a Deb is a Difficult Matter: Who Did the Season, and Why ?
They were called Guinevere and Georgina and Ghislaine and June, the debutantes of 1939; Patty and Betty and Dorothy and Nan. One of them, an unfortunate girl for reasons quite apart from her name, was called Doreen. There were, as the Daily Mail’s gossip column pointed out on 19 May in its account of Queen Charlotte’s Ball, a number of unusual names that year: Osla, Lilita, Quenelda, Yolanda, Merelina, Isalina, Freydis, Magdalen and Colin were just a few of them – names that might have featured in a debutante parody of T.S.Eliot’s The Naming of Cats, if debs read poetry, or wrote parodies. There were names redolent of the thirties, like Pearl and Susan (which they pronounced ‘Syoosan’) and Anthea and Jean, Rhoda and Joan and Audrey and Muriel. There were, as always among the English upper classes, names like Elizabeth, Mary, Diana, Sarah. They had double-barrelled surnames like Bowes-Lyon, Leveson-Gower (pronounced ‘Looson-Gore’, and woe betide anyone who did not know it), Spencer-Churchill and Windsor-Clive: names that, to the initiated, immediately conjured up titles, country seats and many thousands of acres. Ten of them bore titles, and so did about a third of their mothers, especially if one includes Hons.
So who were they, the debutantes of 1939?
All of them were born in the years immediately after the end of the First World War. Seventeen was the earliest age at which a girl might be presented, eighteen was more usual, so this was the generation of the early 1920s. They had grown up never knowing anything but peace, although their parents were deeply scarred by war.
They nearly all shared the same background: that of the English upper classes. They were aristocrats, or landed gentry, or at the very least they came from families who had been wealthy and established for a couple of generations. Few of them were Roman Catholic, almost none was Jewish. The girls who did not share this background of wealth, land or title (preferably all three) were the unfortunates.
The word ‘snob’ has changed its meaning in the last fifty years. It used to mean someone looking up; it has come to mean someone looking down, defined in the OED Supplement (1986) as ‘One who despises those who are considered inferior in rank, attainment or taste’1 – particularly, in the English class system, rank. In the older meaning of the word, the English upper classes had no need for snobbery. They constituted an elite which believed itself to be uniquely fitted to rule, whether as builders of the Empire, members of both Houses of Parliament or landowners. The class war which raged in the 1930s scarcely troubled them. Born to superiority, possessed of the looks that they believed resulted from many generations of breeding (they always cited racehorses to prove their point) and the taste that came from living with beautiful things bequeathed by their forebears, they were not snobbish. It hardly ever occurred to them that anyone else could matter. They valued beautiful manners among their own kind. To everyone else they were polite – because ‘a gentleman is never rude unintentionally’.
In time, however, it became possible for a socially ambitious mother and a very rich father to buy their daughter’s way into the Season. They could pay a lady to sponsor their child, present her at Court and hold a dance for her. It was well known that the Countess of Clancarty and Lady St John of Bletso, for instance, charged around £2,000 to bring a girl out. Discreet advertisements would appear in The Times: ‘Peeress would chaperone debutante – every advantage’, followed by a box number. Here is how one deb of that era remembers these two:
Old Lady Clancarty was a bit of a mystery. She was rather a battle-axe, and rumour had it that she had been the Earl’s cook before he married her. Her face was set in those hardened lines that develop on women’s faces if they have to work all their lives, so perhaps it was true that she had been his housekeeper, or something of the sort. She wasn’t unpleasant, just very uncommunicative. She had a hatchet jaw and always looked tense. However, despite all this, Alma Le Poer Trench [Lady Clancarty’s daughter] and her two brothers were all tall, charming and good-looking, so I suspect they may have been the offspring of the first marriage. It was very hard luck on the girls who had to resort to paid presenters: not that people were unkind to them, I think, but just that they must have felt so out of place. I remember one afternoon in 1939 we ran into Lady Clancarty at Hurlingham, and as we walked along a path with her and Alma, one of her poor, unattractive, clumsy-looking protégées, a girl with a north-country accent, trailed along behind. I remember trying to chat her up, but it was such hard going that I soon gave up.
Lady St John of Bletso was quite the opposite, except that she too was enigmatic. I remember sitting next to her round her fireside at Ennismore Gardens after dinner one night, trying to read what was behind that self-satisfied face and wondering what it was like to be brought out by her. She was small and doll-like. Her blonded hair and enamelled skin gave her an impenetrable appearance, and she hardly bothered to speak to any of us.
One of Lady St John’s protégées that Season (they were known disparagingly as ‘the Bletsoes’ or ‘one of the Blets’) was a girl called Doreen Davison. Twenty years later – even though presentation at Court had ended in 1958 – Lady St John was still sponsoring debutantes, parents still subjecting daughters to social humiliation (for of course everyone knew) in the hope that they might encounter an impoverished peer whose family fortunes had dwindled to the point where he was prepared to marry a girl whose parents were recently rich. It had worked, after all, for several generations of American heiresses. Occasionally it still worked. One ex-deb said,
There were perhaps half a dozen mamas each Season who were rich (very rich!), nouveaux riches, and were on the prowl to find very eligible but perhaps impecunious husbands for their daughters. One very aggressive one had two daughters and a son for whom she, triumphantly, found members of the aristocracy. One is now a countess, another married a baronet of long lineage, and one of her granddaughters is married to a duke!
Parents paid £2,000, not simply so that their daughter could curtsey to the King and Queen, but in the hope that she would be one of the lucky few who married well. Some of these daughters of nouveaux riches, social-climbing parents rose to the challenge and even enjoyed it; for others, as Vivien Mosley (now Mrs Forbes Adams) recalls, it was a dreadful experience:
I think it was complete and unadulterated hell for a great many of them and it was wicked and cruel of their parents to do it. But I do think there was another lot who simply revelled in it, and were actually only too delighted to be pushed. But I was aware that there was a nucleus of girls who obviously had an absolutely beastly time, didn’t want to be in that position and were just being forced to, for what even in those days seemed to me to be abs
olutely ludicrous motives. I remember one or two who actually wept; but besides them there were a lot who spent time in the Ladies. Though even there, some of them were having an awfully jolly time – they just thought, well, fish my mother, if she’s making me do this and I’m not being frightfully successful, then I’ll go and have a good time in the Ladies’ loo with my chum! And they did: and Mum or the chaperone was left sitting on her gold chair looking agonized about where her daughter was because she wasn’t being swept round the floor.
The parents’ motives weren’t just the hope that their daughter would get a good husband – although some did – but to move into a world that they, the parents, couldn’t have got their girl in amongst. The girls for whom it didn’t work were the ones who didn’t want that. But they knew there was an awful lot on their back – it was costing a fortune – they were disappointing their parents’ high hopes – absolute torture.
Marrying well was the raison d’être of the Season. One of the debs escorts said bluntly: ‘The Season was invented by the match-making mothers to put their daughters into the marriage market, and to get the biggest catch possible, preferably a millionaire duke. It was the mothers who invented and perpetuated the Season.’ Many of the debs of 1939 disagree, preferring not to define it so blatantly. Nicholas Mosley (now Lord Ravensdale) put it thus: ‘The run-up to war during 1939 coincided with what was known as the “coming out” of my sister Vivien: this was the complex of rituals by which eighteen-year-old girls were initiated into membership of the upper-class tribe.’2
‘Ritual’, ‘initiate’, ‘tribe’ – the English upper classes, like any other closed social system, preserved their exclusivity by means of customs, codes and language which few outsiders could emulate. These social rituals began long before a girl was presented at Court. From cradle to christening, from nursery to schoolroom, from holidays to finishing school, the fledgling debutante of 1939 had already taken part in a series of rigidly prescribed social conventions that had changed little over the last hundred years. It was because, in a sense, the parvenues were entering this world eighteen years after the other debs – who had inhabited it since birth – that they faced such an ordeal. Lady Cathleen Eliot said: ‘Family was essential; and to debs from good families the rest simply didn’t count. They would be ignored. You know: somebody looks at you and you just look at them expressionless and your eyes move on. Like that.’
The Times used to be called the noticeboard of the upper classes and in its columns, preferably listed under the Court Circular, births and christenings were announced in an unvarying formula. ‘The Hon. Mrs So-and-so has given birth to a daughter at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital’ (or some exclusive nursing home) would be followed a few weeks later by ‘Princess Helena Victoria [or some other exalted personage] stood sponsor to Major and the Hon. Mrs So-and-so’s infant daughter, who was christened at —— church. The Bishop of x officiated and the child was named Elizabeth Frances Laetitia. In addition to Princess Helena Victoria the godparents were …’. Details of the christening robe would follow, mentioning that it was of Brussels or Honiton lace and perhaps referring to previous occasions when it had been used. These announcements launched the baby girl upon her preordained path. Her names would be those of her most important godmother, her mother or one of her grandmothers, and perhaps her wealthiest maiden aunt. Her godparents would have been selected with an eye to the status they could bestow upon the baby.
After this she retreated into anonymity for some years. Her care was handed over to a nanny, preferably one who had been with the family for a long time, ideally having nursed her mother as well; and one or more nursery maids. Between 1921 and 1939 there were still between a quarter and half a million nannies in England and Wales, and about one and a quarter million domestic servants remained in 1939. Nannies were often rampant snobs, and they instilled an acute awareness of the details of English upper-class behaviour into their young charges:
It took many years for an outsider to master the complex, subtle distinctions, the nuances of accent, attitude, behaviour and misbehaviour, which went into, indeed go into, that living, changing thing, English upper-class snobbism. And Nannies were outsiders. Suddenly they found themselves thrown into a world in which the very air was electric with snobbery. As a result, they had to invent snobbish distinctions…. nice (that is upper-class) children never whisper, have white knicker linings, and Chilprufe next to the skin. Vulgar children (always vulgar, it was common to say common) said Hip, hip, hooray; ‘we’ said Hurrah.3
Jessica Mitford, in her autobiography Hons and Rebels, conveys exactly the same impression of a closed world:
Swinbrook [the house built by her father for his family] had many aspects of a fortress or citadel of mediaeval times. From the point of view of its inmates it was self-contained in the sense that it was neither necessary nor, generally, possible to leave the premises for any of the normal human pursuits…. From the point of view of outsiders, entry, in the rather unlikely event that they might seek it, was an impossibility. According to my father, outsiders included not only Huns, Frogs, Americans, blacks and all other foreigners, but also other people’s children … in fact, the whole teeming population of the earth’s surface….
Unity, Debo and I were thrown much on our own resources. As a lost tribe, separated from its fellow men, gradually develops distinctive characteristics of language, behaviour, outlook, so we developed idiosyncrasies that would no doubt have made us seem a little eccentric to other children of our age. Even for England, in those far-off days of the middle ‘twenties, ours was not exactly a conventional upbringing.4
Of course, Jessica Mitford may be exaggerating the foibles of her upbringing, just as her family is an exaggerated version of the English upper class. But the tribal nature of such an upbringing, its narrowness, its ritualistic behaviour, and the codes according to which it lived and spoke and ate and played, were real enough.
This world opened up more for girls when it became normal practice to send daughters to school, sometimes even to boarding school, as had long been the case with their brothers. Girls need not be clever, but they must be ‘agreeable’: that ubiquitous upper-class word that meant, in the case of a child, nicely mannered and not a show-off. Other accomplishments were far more important than cleverness. All country children rode and hunted, and girls as well as boys were expected to be ‘plucky’ on the hunting field. Skiing was not yet a universal pastime, but playing a decent game of tennis was considered essential. Both sexes would have gone to dancing classes from an early age, probably about six or seven years old, while more recently Madame Vacani or Miss Ballantine would have drilled them in the art of the full Court curtsey. This tricky manoeuvre entailed crooking one knee behind the other and sinking to the floor as low as you could go while keeping your back straight and ensuring that you could get up again in the same graceful movement. It was as difficult as it sounds and everyone dreaded falling over – though there is no record of anyone actually having done so. The last and still the most important attribute of the aspiring debutante was to be pretty. It would be nice if she were witty as well – no, not witty exactly, but amusing: the grown-up equivalent of being agreeable as a child. The fathers would describe a lively, good-humoured girl as amusing; the mothers would call her charming; and her contemporaries would say ‘she’s great fun’.
It is extremely difficult to estimate precisely how many girls were presented in 1939, and how many of those ‘did’ the Season thoroughly, going to dances and parties almost every night and attending the major social events. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office lists 1,657 ‘general circle’ presentations in 1939, with an additional 175 from the Diplomatic Corps. But of the former number, a high proportion – more than a third – were women being re-presented upon marriage, or when they changed their style (meaning that they, or their husbands, took a different title). If one assumes that between 900 and 1,000 of the ‘general circle’ presentations were young girls ‘coming out’ –
being presented for the first time – this gives a number at least three times higher than the number doing the Season twenty-five or thirty years later. But in 1939, as so many of the debutantes of that year have stressed, it was taken for granted that everybody from ‘the right sort of families’ came out. Girls had no choice.
From that total of 900 or a thousand girls, only about one-third wanted, or could afford, to do the Season in the full sense. Many were simply presented, and then went straight back home to the country and carried on their normal lives, attending a few local dances perhaps, but otherwise taking no part in the round of the summer’s events. In a few other cases, girls did the Season, but without being presented. Lady Cathleen Eliot, daughter of the sixth Earl of St Germans, was – rather surprisingly – one such. She was never presented at Court (‘too expensive’, she says); but her name and picture were frequently in Society magazines, and although she did not have a dance of her own, she was invited to most of the Season’s parties – her title ensured that.
One hundred and three girls announced their dances in The Times’ weekly Social column ; but here again these were not the only dances given or even the grandest ones. Thus one can only make an informed guess ; and on this basis it is probable that between 200 and 400 girls took part in a ceaseless social whirl that can have left them no time for anything else. Among these was an inner circle of about a hundred girls who, in the absence of a single, outstanding ‘Deb of the Year’ (a concept invented by the media), would all have been popular, attractive, well bred and (mostly) rich. Inevitably, it is with that one hundred that this book mainly deals. Most of the rest flared briefly, like fireworks, in one moment of glory, and then vanished again.
There were 228 debutantes at Queen Charlotte’s Ball at Grosvenor House on 17 May, and five duchesses: of Marlborough, Buccleuch, Montrose, Grafton and Sutherland. Because of this unusual plethora of duchesses, guests were asked to wear tiaras, white gloves and decorations. ‘In this way we expect to get people to dress up again and get away from their present gas-mask mood,’ said the Daily Mail’s diarist Neronically. Analysis of nearly half of them – the 103 debs whose names featured in The Times’ list of the Season’s dances – shows that 37 had titled mothers or sponsors. A great many debs were presented not by their own mothers, but by their most well-connected female relative. This was not the same thing as having a paid presenter: far from it. Viscountess Astor, for example, gave a dance for her niece Dinah Brand: in this case because Dinah’s mother, the former Phyllis Langhorne, had died in 1937. A girl might be sponsored by her grandmother or, like Lady Mary Pratt, by both her grandmothers: her mother, the Countess of Brecknock, was Lady-in-Waiting to the Duchess of Kent, which probably left little time for the rigours of a deb’s mother’s social round. Of these 103 debs, at least 42 had parents listed in Who’s Who, while in the case of another 14 the family was listed. All titled people were automatically included in Who’s Who, while Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage made no pretence of valuing merit or achievement. A title was all that was required, or some family connection, however remote, with a title. One of the most anxious chores for girls not born into the ‘upper crust’ must have been the hours spent poring over Burke and Debrett to ensure that they knew by heart the ramifications of the family trees of all dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and barons. If they aspired to marry into the peerage they would have to learn by rote what other girls had imbibed at Nanny’s knee, or from their parents’ gossip.