1939

by Angela Lambert

  These upper-class children of the 1920s lived ordered, comfortable lives which they accepted as their birthright. Few of them knew that there was any other way to live, and those who did were not likely to be troubled by the contrast:

  It never occurred to any of us that we were privileged children. The poverty and unemployment of the 1920s and 1930s passed over our heads. Even the General Strike hardly impinged beyond the fact that we walked to school instead of going by bus. And to my eternal shame I took for granted the sight of poor children from the surrounding mews walking about in ragged, inadequate clothes and with bare feet. We measured ourselves by our far richer cousins and saw ourselves in the light of poor relations.5

  The writer, who as Ruth Magnus was a debutante in the 1930s, was unusual in coming from an intellectual Jewish family with a strong social conscience – yet even she had never questioned her privileged position.

  Whatever their parents’ generation may have endured, these children of the 1920s, the future debutantes of 1939, grew up in an enclosed world. Physically it was enclosed – by higher and thicker walls, bigger houses and larger gardens – and socially, by the battlements of class and wealth. Within this enclave, the children were guarded by literally dozens of people. First, by families whose ramifications often filled pages in Burke or Debrett. Second, by an array of servants that ranged from Nanny or Nurse, through one or more lesser nursery maids, ladies’ maids, valets, butlers and outdoor staff. A modest middle-class family – positively poor in the eyes of its rich cousins – would have had at least half a dozen servants, while at the top end of the aristocratic scale a ducal household might still rule over an almost feudal estate of several dozen servants. In 1931 there were 1.3 million women and over 78,000 men still in domestic service: an increase of 100,000 on the numbers in 1911. The Astors had thirty indoor servants at Cliveden alone in the 1930s, looking after a family of seven, though augmented by dozens of house-guests and family visitors.

  To put these figures in perspective, it is worth looking briefly at what was typical at the opposite end of the social scale.

  There undoubtedly existed a ‘culture of poverty’ in many of the slum districts of large cities and towns, where thousands … eked out a makeshift and precarious existence in which day-to-day survival took precedence over everything else. … It was a desperately precarious world, balanced for most on the knife-edge between making-do and complete destitution … where doctors on emergency calls disinfected themselves before they left their surgeries, and experienced ones carried a powerful flash-lamp on night calls to the slums, knowing that it was more than likely that their patients would have no money for the gas or electricity meter after darkness fell… and dirt, damp and vermin were common accompaniments to everyday life.6

  In 1938 the great majority of the population – 88 per cent – had incomes of less than £250 a year or £5 a week, and 31 per cent of them – very nearly a third – earned half that, £2 10s a week. The canyon drop from rich to poor can be seen in all its dizzying height from the fact that at the top there were two thousand people whose incomes averaged £43,500 a year. No wonder it gave the rich vertigo to look down upon the poor, and most of them preferred to look away. The social economist Seebohm Rowntree found in a study carried out in York in 1936 that 18 per cent of the population were ‘in poverty’,7 while a similar study in Bristol in 1937 found that 19.3 per cent of the population had ‘insufficient income’8 – meaning not enough money to meet basic needs. They did not eat enough. They were crammed into insanitary houses. Their health was poor. The worst sufferers were children.

  These depressing figures might seem irrelevant to the Season of 1939; except that the Season was enjoyed by less than 0.1 per cent of the population while the poverty described above was endured by nearly 20 per cent. The two worlds never touched, but the extreme luxury of the one cannot be seen in context without an awareness of the total wretchedness of the other.

  Back to the nurseries and the nannies of the rich.

  Every upper-class child had a nanny. A mother who insisted on looking after her own babies and toddlers would have been regarded as eccentric to the point of lunacy. Breast-feeding one’s own children was practically unknown, in spite of the fact that the belief still lingered that infants imbibed characteristics from their wet-nurse. (The Tennant family, all dark, believed that their sister Charty was fair because she was the only one to have had a blonde wet-nurse.) A mother’s time with her children was regulated by their nanny and often amounted to no more than an hour and a half a day. This tantalizing proximity yet separation must have had something to do with the way in which mothers were idolized. The daily, hourly, ever-present figure in a child’s life was Nanny.

  Mollie Acland (now Mrs Peter Tabor) lovingly conjured up that first cosy world:

  Our childhood was very sheltered and secure. We lived in two rooms, a day nursery and a night nursery, just going downstairs – changed into organdy or velvet – from 5 to 6 p.m. We also went down the back stairs in the mornings to play in the garden and park … looking after bantams, making bows and arrows, bird-nesting, etc. In the afternoon, Nanny and the Nursery maid changed into grey costumes (the rest of the time Nanny always wore white and the nursery-maids print dresses) and we went for a formal walk. (I remember the awful pinching leather gaiters !) Nan taught me to read when I was four, and then we had a governess when we were about nine … as well as a French Mam’ selle and a German Fraülein in the holidays.

  Nanny brought order, predictability, security – in a word, routine – into the lives of her charges. She tamed and disciplined them, taught them manners and, since nannies were tremendous snobs, inculcated a consciousness that they were special; and was rewarded by losing the boys at eight to prep school and the girls to either a school or a governess. But Nanny was overwhelmingly the greatest influence in the life of an upper-class child, and the first thing that they all had in common. It is easy to construct a sort of composite nanny; and, although there were wide variations on the theme, Nanny’s rules and maxims were the first unifying code buried deep in the communal memory of the upper classes. ‘Bread and butter first, then jam.’ ‘No such word as can’t.’ ‘If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.’ ‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’ ‘“She” is the cat’s mother.’ ‘Someone’s eyes are bigger than her tummy.’ And, clamping a handkerchief round the nose of a child with a cold, Big blow!’

  It is important to remember that most upper-class English girls were badly taught, because their ignorance was used as a weapon against them. It justified the emphasis on being docile, biddable, amiable – ‘Be good, sweet child, and let who will be clever’ – since poor, helpless, ignorant creatures, they couldn’t possibly manage on their own. Education is power; to be uneducated is to be helpless. The women who taught them were ever-present examples of what became of girls who did not marry. They could in due course become maiden aunts, precarious hangers-on at the fringes of the family, or they could become governesses. With the superfluity of women after the First World War, which was particularly marked in the upper classes since three times as many officers were killed as ordinary soldiers, there was no obvious employment for these women except as governesses, or teachers, or – at worst – companions to ladies older and richer than themselves.

  Not all girls educated by governesses were badly taught, and there were other sources of knowledge besides the schoolroom. Brothers, and friends of brothers, staying during the school holidays were a great source of information, and one that clever girls had always exploited. There were a few governesses who did their job brilliantly. The Hon. Priscilla Brett (now Lady Beckett) remembers one such:

  I was with a governess who actually became rather famous in our circles. She was called Cuffy, and she was a wonderful teacher. She taught us French and German, when I was in Vienna and then in Paris; and she took us to all the good museums, the opera – we had a wonderful time and I loved it. If you had
a governess like that you did terribly well. The Asquiths had this amazing woman called Miss Strachey. So the governesses could be very much better than the schools, but presumably if the governess wasn’t much good, you didn’t get much of an education.

  Yet as late as 1938 there were 365 posts for governesses notified to the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution, which means – if we assume a turnover of, say, 20 per cent a year – that there were at least 1,825 working governesses just before the war. (The war more or less finished them off: in 1945 there were only fifty-seven posts registered, ten filled, and, of the applicants, only one was under forty-five.)9

  Those who had a little capital started schools. By 1910 there were already some twenty-one girls’ public schools, teaching about 5,000 pupils. Princess Helena College (the first, originally founded under another name in 1820), Queen’s College in Harley Street (attended by several of the 1939 debutantes), Roedean, Cheltenham, Wycombe Abbey, Sherborne – the roll call is well established. They were more concerned to inculcate character – which they tended to call ‘uplift’ or ‘moral fibre’ or something suitably vague so that no girl could ever be quite sure she had it – than an academic education. Here is how a headmistress addressed her pupils at the Godolphin School:

  I believe that, with few exceptions, there is a spirit of earnest work in the school, and a growing realisation as the girls reach higher forms that school life must lead on to definite service in the larger life when school days are over … character … self control … neat smartness … good taste … school before house … the spirit of reverence …10

  and so on, in a rising tide of pseudo-spiritual fervour that smacks disturbingly of Moral Rearmament. It was Nanny’s routine and discipline all over again, this time imposed upon dozens, even a couple of hundred girls rather than just a nurseryful. The rules they were taught to obey were those they were assumed to need for adult life: first of all, the mores and conventions of the English class system, and secondly, and confusingly – in a setting where sex was never discussed – those which would render them marriageable.

  In my day and for my sex nothing but the class structure could have made possible the educational system. The schools I attended had to be Schools for Young Ladies, the parents had to be subjected to searching enquiries during the first interview, one peer’s daughter had to be acquired as a pupil and her father’s name retained on a list of patrons…. My parents, along with the parents of most of my contemporaries, had only one requirement in return for fees that would have kept their sons at Eton: that we should be turned into marriageable young ladies…. At the ink-stained desks of these schools we sat pinioned by boredom, while there took place around us what can only be described as the tittle-tattle, the merest gossip of education.11

  Boys meanwhile, the brothers of the debutantes-to-be, were also educated by ordeal, but in their cases their minds were quite well furnished. The ordeals they had to endure were those of bullying or fagging or homosexuality – which seems to have been either wildly indulged or sternly forbidden – or the public schools’ worship of prowess at games. Ignorance about sex was not their problem, rather it was ignorance about emotions: how to express them, respond to them in others, or share them with members of the opposite sex. Young English men left their expensive and snobbish public schools as ill-educated in matters of the heart as their female counterparts were in matters of the mind.

  It is tedious to keep repeating the obvious: namely, that there were exceptions. Ruth Magnus, for example, who came from an intellectual home, read avidly and was encouraged to discuss what she read and her political ideas with her parents and with her father’s erudite friends. She had a girl cousin who went to university and, furthermore, in 1912 a female cousin of her mother’s had also gone to university, which was at that time quite exceptional. As a result Ruth suffered the inevitable disillusionment during her Season of finding most of the men ‘awful – deadly dull – no conversation at all: you talked pattatee pattata.’

  However, before these two ill-equipped groups of young people were ritually propelled towards one another by the Season, there was one final stage for the girls to pass through. Many, if not most, were sent away for three to six months to a finishing school. Before this, they were young girls ; afterwards they were ready to be treated as young women. The finishing schools taught them a foreign language: usually French, surprisingly often German, occasionally Italian; gave them a light dusting of culture (‘how to tell a Manet from a Monet’, as one wrote), instilled the rudiments of feminine skills like arranging flowers, and, most important of all, introduced them to a selection of well-bred foreign girls.

  One of the debutantes of 1939 who was partly ‘finished off’ (to use the curious jargon) in Germany, has written an account of her time there. She did not attend a formal school, but lived with a family:

  In Germany I continued to study the piano, but showed no real talent, and just enjoyed being in such an entirely new atmosphere. This was 1937, and the children of the family with whom I was living were fervent members of the Hitler Youth Movement, and did their best to make me feel lazy, unhealthy and decadent. Their meetings and other outdoor activities were strenuous and repetitious, and I was not a little frightened of their much vaunted violence and tendency to bully each other into greater and greater excesses.12

  In view of the imminence of war, which should have been obvious to the parents, if not to the girls themselves, it is surprising how many debutantes continued to be sent to Germany as part of their education. It was, in one sense, very civilized – the language of Goethe, Heine and Schiller remained unchanged, even if its current users were the Hitler Youth – yet in another sense it seems naive to the point of blindness. Mary Tyser (now Mary, Lady Aldenham) went to Paris first and then to Munich:

  I stayed at school till I was nearly sixteen and then spent a year in Paris at Mlle Fauchet’s finishing school in Passy. It was very schooly, too, which was a great disappointment as I thought I had finished with lessons, but I enjoyed it there, and Mile Fauchet made old buildings, French history and culture come to life and I learned a lot – including fine sewing: cami-knickers in satin with inset lace, for example ! Then for the last three months of 1938 I was in Munich at Gräfin Cucca Harrach’s house, where I was dismayed to find that, in spite of School Certificate standard German, I could understand little of what was said to me. However, I did gather a bit about what was going on in Germany. We had watched the tanks coming back from the invasion of Czechoslovakia earlier, but none of this meant very much to me and I had no understanding of its real significance.

  The level of cultural education which was nominally supplied is spelled out more clearly in this account, by a debutante of 1938:

  They [the finishing schools] were fearfully expensive by today’s values – £120 a term [about £2,400 in 1989 money]. I had resisted the whole thing but my mother wanted me to do everything that was socially right and proper. I got caught up with some very snobby girls who were horrified later to find me working in Peter Jones. There were nine of us at the school. We learnt bridge, we did a cathedral a week and a museum a week. Wherever we went we were escorted. If you went to the hairdresser, someone sat there to make sure you weren’t assaulted or something. I found it very difficult because I had been fairly free in London. The Russian who taught us bridge had taught the Spanish royal family and constantly went on about ‘mes enfants d’Espagne’. We went to the opera but we had to leave before the last act of Faust because the ending was not considered suitable.13

  Some girls, like Lady Jean Leslie Melville, were taken on a tour of Europe instead of going to a finishing school:

  I was taken away from boarding school aged sixteen and sent abroad with a Swiss woman who took young girls to the Continent to learn languages and look at art and picture galleries, etc. I had three terms in Italy and one in France, mostly in Paris. After this I could speak French fairly well and quite a lot of Italian. I studied German at school but neve
r got very far with it.

  At the end of this rarefied period of childhood and adolescence, what had the potential debutante to offer? The great majority came from backgrounds that ensured they were well born, well heeled, well mannered and well groomed. Some of them were well read – those from intellectual homes where intelligence was prized and good libraries available – and a few were well educated. Most would have been ‘accomplished’, in the Victorian sense, with a veneer of musical and artistic ability, and most spoke at least one foreign language with tolerable fluency. The greatest difference between them and the eighteen-year-olds of today would have been that, beneath a façade of beautiful manners, they were completely unsophisticated. They had been so over-protected by nannies, governesses and their parents that most were grown-up children. Above all, they were so naive sexually that their ignorance required the protection of chaperones and the censorship of adult conversation. Lady Jean Leslie Melville again:

  It has to be remembered that things were not discussed in front of children as they are today, and children did not grow up so fast, nor did they know half of what the children nowadays know. There was no such thing as ‘teenagers’. We were schoolchildren and that was it; we wore and did what we were told and we did not stop to argue … it was not worth our while !

  An obvious consequence of this was that debutantes had a certain amount of Smalltalk but no conversation. They could exchange pleasantries about the last dance, the next dance, the present dance ; they could remark how fearfully pretty Miss x was looking (the girl whose dance it was) and how amusing the food/flowers/band leader ; they could discuss the last season’s hunting. But practically all other subjects were taboo. Each sex complains of the other’s dullness. The girls said over and over again how boring the men were. A young man who escorted many of the debutantes in 1939, attended a number of dances with his sister who had come out the previous year. Here he describes the difficulty of finding suitable topics: