The girls were normally seventeen years old and they’d just left school. They had led very sheltered lives, first of all in the nursery and then with their mothers chaperoning them. They were normally extremely shy – there were of course exceptions, but most were shy – and they would blush when spoken to, which I found rather fetching. Nowadays one rarely sees a girl blush. These girls didn’t have much experience of life – and found it extremely difficult to make conversation. In fact I remember one girl – who shall be nameless – and I was sitting out with her, and she had an evening bag with little silver bobbles on it, and she said to me, ‘You know, every time I can’t think of something to say, I pull one of these off.’ And I confess I replied rather brutally, ‘I’m surprised there are any left, my dear!’
It seldom crossed the minds of these shy, unformed, unconfident young women that they had any choice but to submit themselves to the social ordeal that the Season represented for almost all of them. One did it. One’s mother had done it, and one’s grandmother had done it. One’s older sisters had done it and one’s aunts had done it. They might warn against exhaustion, boredom, the embarrassment of having your dance programme unfilled (‘Fill up your own and then pretend you’re too tired to dance’), yet all accepted its inevitability. Many fathers must have been homesick, bullied and miserable as boys at prep and public school; yet when the time came, they too unquestioningly sent their own sons to face the same ordeal, often at the same schools. So it was with the mothers. They had been through the rite of passage between childhood and adulthood, and now their daughters must endure the same ritual. They were expected, somehow, to find a partner who would offer marriage. Yet, officially, no deb was permitted to be alone with a young man, however suitable. Their participation was closely monitored. In the words of Lady Jean Leslie Melville:
Debs were watched almost the whole time by chaperones and dowagers, who were quite likely to be peering through their lorgnettes and sitting on gilt chairs around the ballrooms. No deb was allowed to go out alone with a man during her first Season, on any account or any excuse whatsoever! Nowadays it is very difficult to make young girls understand this … they think it is a joke. The Season was really a method of being officially launched into Society and meeting people and of course young men: presumably with a view to marriage.
‘I never envisaged a future for myself other than as a wife and mother,’ said Ruth Magnus, one of the cleverest girls of that generation; ‘and looking back, I’m very sorry not to have gone to university. But one conformed much more, and just accepted one’s destiny. Lots of girls got engaged to get away from their home and family. I got engaged because it was the thing to do, and then managed to get myself unengaged again before the war started.’ The war overturned many debs’ expectations, sometimes for the better. ‘The war emancipated these girls. It came as a wonderful release’ was the comment of one former deb. She had a ‘good war’; she travelled widely, met glamorous, suntanned young men and ultimately married one. For other young men of that generation the war was a final release.
When war was declared, most of the young men who had partnered the pretty, blushing young girls through nights and days of extravagant frivolity turned into serving officers immediately. They had grown up deeply conscious of the fact that the generation of young men before them had been decimated. One of the escorts of the debs of 1939 spoke, in a voice full of emotion, of the effect that had: ‘This – aura – of war ; this haunting fear that there would be another one ; this haunting nightmare of the last one’. Yet he and most of his contemporaries joined up at once, expecting to be ‘gun-fodder’ like the previous generation. Ferelith Kenworthy (now Lady Hood), wrote with the same deep emotion about her escort at the Eton and Harrow match that year:
He was an Old Harrovian, and at the end of the match he disappeared on to the pitch to join in the general scrum which ensued, with top hats, straw boaters and umbrellas flying everywhere through the air. Imagine my dismay, as an eighteen-year-old, at being thus deserted by my young male escort! He did come to claim me, but I am afraid the story has a sad sequel, as he was later killed in the war, on 23 April 1943, at the Battle of Longstop Hill, in Tunisia. It was the fate of so many of our dancing partners. His name was Captain Ralph Barrie Erskine, of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He died that we might live in peace and freedom. At least six of the young men with whom I used to dance regularly were later killed in the war. So it was a very sad time to be young.
Chapter Four
Change Your Partner, Dance While You Can*
It is customary today to describe someone female who is no longer at school as a ‘young woman’, in deference to feminism, and in recognition of the worldliness and independence of today’s school-leavers. In 1939, the young products of the schoolroom who were about to embark on their debutante year would certainly have been described as ‘girls’: and most members of their society would have called them ‘gels’ and not ‘gurls’. Many of them cling to the same usage today. ‘I’m having an afternoon of bridge with the gels,’ they will say, referring to a group of people who are in their late sixties. They are uncomfortable at hearing one of their generation described as a ‘woman’ since to them the word has condescending implications, as in ‘my cleaning woman’ or ‘the little woman who makes my dresses’. In 1939 they never thought of themselves as women, and would have found the term ‘young ladies’ patronizing. Bachelor uncles ingratiated themselves by saying, ‘Now, young lady…’
They had the same problem in describing their escorts. The term ‘young man’ was also patronizing: housemaids had a ‘young man’, debutantes never. The generation before them had sometimes referred to ‘my best young man’ to indicate a favoured suitor, but by 1939 the expression had fallen into disuse. ‘Boyfriend’, whatever Sandy Wilson might think, was another word scarcely ever used. Male escorts were sometimes called ‘debs’ delights’ in 1939, but the expression was slightly pejorative: the equivalent, perhaps, of ‘hooray Henry’ in present-day speech. ‘There were certainly “debs’ delights”,’ recalls one debutante of 1939, ‘but they were not always very nice men. They were called that because they seemed to go to all the dances.’ Another corroborates that impression:
The young men who never missed a free dinner and went to everything – the ‘debs’ delights’ – had, of course, to make themselves agreeable to the hostesses and debs or they would have been dropped from the ‘List’. The young men one so hoped to see, as one struggled up the staircase to the tune of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, hardly ever turned up.
The expression must have been quite new, however, for someone who was presented just five years earlier says, ‘I never heard the expression “debs’ delight” used in those days. We used to speak of some young men (they were called “chaps” or “men”, never, never “boyfriends”) as “taxi tigers”, and later on we said as “NSIT”, not safe in taxis.’ The Americanism ‘beau’ to describe a favoured escort had also fallen into disuse by 1939, although it was common in the 1920s, and can still be heard sitting oddly upon the lips of octogenarians today.
‘Gels’ and ‘chaps’: these were innocent, friendly, sexless words to describe young people who had as yet no maturity, no separate sense of self. They were the offspring of their parents; pawns in a courtly game of nodding and smiling, backing and advancing, curtseying and holding doors open and at all times deferring to the wishes of the adult world they stood – literally – to inherit. How different, how arbitrarily, unfairly different from the child of parents advertising in the Personal column of The Times on 2 May 1939: ‘Jewish parents in Bohemia ask asylum for their boy; healthy, well-educated, age 11.’ What did he inherit?
When it comes to describing the parents of the girls and chaps who dined and danced the summer away, there is no shortage of words. Names, titles, honours, initials ; they were landowners and aristocrats, politicians and judges, soldiers and administrators, bankers and entrepreneurs. Their names could have been
found, sometimes in the identical form, over the previous centuries. They were the English upper class in microcosm.
Taking a random sample* of forty-five debutantes from those presented in 1939, one gets the following breakdown. Seventeen had fathers who were peers – that is to say, dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts or barons, men who were hereditary noblemen and members of the House of Lords. One girl’s mother was a countess and another was a baroness in her own right, though in both cases without the entitlement to a seat in the Lords. A further four girls had fathers who were baronets – a hereditary title, passed down from father to eldest son, but not carrying with it the mark of nobility or the right to sit in the Lords. Finally, there were six girls whose fathers had been knighted ; leaving just sixteen whose fathers had no title at all, and even among these their mothers often came from noble families.
In 1938 there were 750 members of the House of Lords (excluding bishops, archbishops and peers of the blood royal, as Debrett of that year called them reverently). It was not like today’s Upper House, swollen to double that number with life peers. Furthermore, in 1939 Roman Catholic peers were still listed in the index to the House of Lords in italics, to distinguish them from members of the Church of England. (This usage was the last vestige of discrimination against Catholics in the nobility. Until 1829, Catholic peers were not even allowed to take their seats in the Upper House.) They were an intimate elite, whose titles dated back centuries, occasionally six or even seven centuries, guarding their precedence jealously according to the date of their creation. If not quite as rigid as the Almanach de Gotha, it was none the less an intensely proud and self-conscious community. It would not lightly surrender the rank and lineage of its daughters.
The debutantes fall, then, into three groups. Nineteen girls had at least one parent from the hereditary nobility, with another four whose fathers were baronets. The fathers of six more were members of the knighthood. Only sixteen had fathers who were commoners and some of them were Honourables, the sons of peers. A mere handful were middle class, and they, of course, were rich.
Of the forty-five debutantes making up this sample, ten were Lady So-and-so, meaning that they were the daughters of dukes, marquesses or earls; while another nine were Honourables – the daughters of viscounts or barons. Yet even here there is an anomaly, since there was one more girl, a plain ‘Miss’ in 1939, who was destined to become a countess in her own right. Twenty, therefore, of the girls bore an outward sign of their nobility. (Not that anyone in their circle would have committed the solecism of introducing a girl as ‘the Honourable So-and-so’. Honourable was only for envelopes, just another of those tiny meaningless rules which defined you as coming within or without the magic circle.)
How did these girls’ fathers occupy themselves? Six out of the forty-five were – or had been – Members of Parliament. One debutante’s mother took over from her husband at his death, and became mp for his constituency in 1927; while another’s son eventually went on to become an mp in his turn. This startlingly high percentage – over 13 per cent – confirms the belief that the parents of those who did the Season were not merely upper class, but were in a very real and active sense powerful members of the Establishment. With nineteen fathers sitting in the House of Lords, and six in the House of Commons, twenty-five out of a notional forty-five were actively concerned with the government of the country. (Notional because, of the forty-five fathers, five had already died. So the figure is even more dramatic: twenty-five out of forty, or 62 per cent.) In addition to this, another five were jps and three more were lords-lieutenant of counties. Of the remainder, most were high-ranking army or naval officers, two were press barons, two were courtiers and one was a banker.
It is much harder to discover information about their mothers. Three or four were divorced (two of those were American) and had remarried ; the number being, if anything, surprisingly low, since their first marriages would have been under pressure of the First World War, or in its immediate aftermath. Three were dead, the daughter’s dance being given by her aunt, or her two grandmothers or, in one case, her father. The reference books divulge the mothers’ parents, where they were of the nobility, but reveal very little else about them. None had a degree. None, it is surely safe to assume, had a job, or ever contemplated working for a living – an attitude they passed on to their daughters. Born to be wives and mothers, their job was to marry well and, in due course, to marry their daughters well. Whatever skills this required, most of them managed it. Only three of the forty-five debutantes in the sample have not married in the last fifty years.
In the four months between the New Year and the beginning of the Season proper, mothers got together for a ceaseless round of meetings (known as ‘Mums’ lunches’ or ‘Mums’ teas’ or ‘Mums’ cocktail parties’) to co-ordinate the coming-out dances. The most fortunate girls were the ones whose mothers already had a wide circle of friends: dating back to their own Season ; local neighbours ; connected with their husbands’ activities as mp or country squire; or, best of all, other family members. Any of those who had sons or daughters of the right age would be rounded up to form the nucleus of each mother’s list. These lists would then be exchanged, so that already in January and February each deb would slot into a group of her contemporaries. If the girl – who at this stage was probably still at a finishing school abroad – were well connected and seemed likely to prove popular and attractive, other mothers would solicit her company to meet their own daughter; and thus girls’ lunches, teas and cocktail parties were arranged for March and April, so that they could get to know one another.
The great arbiter of dances and the ‘List’ was Lady Royds, about whom Madeleine Turnbull wrote in detail:
She was a very dominant figure in the Seasons from 1937 to 1939. Her husband had been an Admiral, and after he retired he became one of the Assistant Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police Force. (In those days, all the senior police officers in London were amateurs, not professionals as they are now.) She was built on very generous lines, and her face was deeply creased, rather like an English bulldog. But if you gazed carefully through the creases you could discern two kindly, twinkling, and very perceptive eyes. She was very, very nice ; but very formidable.
Lady Royds’ first task was to gather together the mothers of prospective debs, who might not yet know one another, so that they could plan the Season. Mothers could agree to give a joint dance; they could work out a timetable, so that dances would not coincide with other major evening occasions; and they could pinpoint whose were likely to be the most sought-after dances of the summer, and ensure that their girl was invited. There was much jostling for position. Certain dates were more favoured than others. July was a bit late for all but the grandest dances. Nor would a girl choose, if she could avoid it, to have her dance the night before, or the night after, a very spectacular ball, for fear of comparisons. Lady Royds’ tea-parties would begin in January, and within a month or six weeks the shape of the coming Season would be broadly determined.
The first Mum’s tea-party my Mother went to in January [said Madeleine Turnbull] was at Lady Royds’, and there she met Mrs Prescott Sandilands who, eleven years later, became my mother-in-law !
My elder brother was always being rung up by hostesses who literally begged him to come to their dinner-parties. He was rather grand about it all, and refused any but the most exotic or interesting invitations.
By late February the List would have been distributed, and invitations sent out to those debs who were family friends, school friends, or deemed desirable for all the usual reasons, with young men ticked off from the List to act as their partners. This meant that mothers and daughters had to invite dozens, if not hundreds, of young people whom they had never met. People unknown at the beginning of the Season had, however, become quite familiar by the end.
All this involved the mothers in a hectic whirl of activity. Dates would be pencilled in and invitations despatched, each to be listed, answered a
nd ticked off. The protocol for these invitations was rigid and invariable. Invitation cards were always embossed; always white; and the stiffer the better. Replies were always phrased in the same terms: Miss Lucy So-and-so thanks Lady So-and-so very much for her kind invitation to luncheon on such-and-such a date, and has much pleasure in accepting. Nobody would think of deviating from this formula.
The initial flurry of lunches meant that the pattern of the Season emerged very early in the year, as the ‘best’ dates were booked and caterers and dressmakers, florists and wine-merchants secured for the evening. Then the big invitation for the main dance could be ordered, written and sent out, with each deb’s mother sending and receiving hundreds.
Young men to partner the girls were the perennial problem. Once brothers and cousins and local friends and brothers’ contemporaries from school or university, regiment or City had been roped in, there was still a shortfall. This deficiency was made up, as far as possible, from private lists kept by some of the more experienced mothers who had already put previous daughters through their Season ; and also by the two or three self-appointed doyennes of the debutante world, whose knowledge of young eligibles was jealously guarded and sparingly shared.
All this demanded considerable organizational skills from the mothers. Some – like Susan Meyrick’s mother, Lady Meyrick – engaged social secretaries to handle the work. Those who did not, or were not good at it themselves, especially if they lived in the country and would not be based in London till April or even May, found their daughters very much handicapped as a result. The debs for whom the Season presented the greatest ordeal were those who embarked on it knowing almost no one. For them, the terror of the first few dances, as they entered a ballroom to find a sea of strange faces, must have been paralysing. Lady Mary Pakenham, a deb from an earlier Season, endured just such an ordeal, chiefly because her parents lived in Ireland, so her contacts before the Season had been limited. First, the dinner-party before the dance:
1939 Page 7
