1939

by Angela Lambert

  off I went to the house of some total stranger whom I would find standing in the middle of a drawing-room full of Italian furniture. A semi-circle of guests stood behind her twiddling their fingers and scraping their feet. There was generally a rather sheepish daughter pretending that the party was nothing to do with her, just a harmless whim of her mother’s, and a son who arrived very late with his hair on end, and a father who would have been jovial if he had dared. The men had little tickets given to them in the hall to say who they were going to take down to dinner, but the girls were kept in the dark until the last exciting moment when, after watching more highly prized men giving their arms elsewhere, the spottiest of all advanced unwillingly with the encouraging words, ‘It seems I’ve got to take down you.’1

  Worse was to come. That was just dinner, where with luck a deb was in the company of only about twenty people. At the dance she had to brave several hundred.

  Other debutantes may have been as shy as I was, but I don’t believe there was ever one who was more so. I used to hear my teeth chatter as I went through the hall and, when I sat out, I had to hold my knees to prevent their knocking together, keeping the other hand up to my face to conceal a muscle that ticked in my cheek.2

  In every Season there were bound to be some girls who were paralysed by shyness. The trouble is that fifty years later, most of them have forgotten it, or they think they must have exaggerated the extent of their terror. Ann Schuster (now Mrs Archie Mackenzie) has not:

  I was so frightened myself that I felt a great bond with anybody like that. I can remember beginning to smoke then, and my hands shaking – but it did give you something to do. And it was just as bad before going in to each dinner-party. Then, you’d get settled in and perhaps even have a conversation with the men on either side of you, and then suddenly it was about ten o’clock and the whole business would start up again when you went on to the dances. You had two ordeals, if you were shy, to get through. Then when you got to the dance, you had to reorientate because some of the men at the dinner-party – not many, but some – would be fairly shameless in deserting their dinner partners and meeting various girlfriends. Therefore one or two girls would be left without partners, which was very embarrassing for them. When you went to the cloakroom there would be people taking refuge there. I even remember one who had torn her dress deliberately so that she could go to the cloakroom and have it repaired.

  I found it an ordeal, meeting a lot of strangers, after having lived in the country with my friends around and my animals, suddenly having to be tidy, having all these evening dresses, and trying to sort of become a personality: a new and quite different sort of person.

  All the mothers’ machinations in the first few months of the year were designed to avoid, as far as was humanly possible, their daughters having to endure such torments as these. A few girls stood head and shoulders above the fray by reason of their beauty, their zest for it all or their unusually noble birth. The rest needed all the protection their mothers could arrange to ensure that, even if miserable, at least they had allies with whom to be miserable.

  By the late 1930s an unofficial ‘little Season’ had grown up, starting early in the New Year with Hunt Balls and other country events. The beginning of May signalled the start of the London Season; elsewhere it had already been in full swing ever since Christmas. This was especially so in 1939, because much of that summer was taken up by the royal tour of the United States and Canada. This meant that King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were out of the country from 6 May until 22 June. The presentation of debutantes at Court had thus begun as early as March, when there were three Courts – on 9, 15 and 16 March – followed by another two much later, on 12 and 13 July after the royal couple’s return.

  Edward VIII, during the brief period between his two roles as Prince of Wales and Duke of Windsor, had scarcely bothered to conceal his boredom with the elaborate formalities of presentation to the monarch. On 21 July 1936, at an afternoon reception in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, he sat looking glum and petulant while rain threatened and a procession of mackintoshed debs made their curtseys before him. When the skies finally opened, he hurried inside and let it be known that all those who had not yet reached the dais could consider themselves presented. Mothers were scandalized; daughters disappointed; but the King was relieved to have been spared the final hour or so of this tedious chore.

  After his Abdication on 11 December, the great publicity machine whose job it is to invest the monarch with super-human qualities ground to an abrupt halt, reversed, and set off again purposefully on its task of glamorizing the new King George vi and his Queen. Chips Channon, the diarist and gossip of the thirties, had recorded less than a week earlier, The Duke of York is miserable, does not want the throne, and is imploring his brother to stay/ That much was common knowledge. Chips went on to say, ‘We must keep our King, until now the most popular man the Empire has ever known; but I wonder whether his selfishness and stupidity over this muddle do not really make him unfit to govern?’3 So they did: so indeed they did.

  At first sight the new King and Queen were unpromising material. While it was true that she had charm and prettiness, a nice smile and a great desire to be liked, her husband was utterly unprepared for his role as head of a still-mighty Empire. Handicapped by a bad stutter, a nervous manner and a facial tic that betrayed tension in public, his only real asset was his sense of duty. Having once accepted that the Crown was a cup that would not pass from him, he embarked on the task of being as good a king and figurehead as his capacities allowed. By the end of his reign of just over fifteen years, he had won the love, and his wife the adoration, of his subjects.

  It must have seemed impossibly difficult at the beginning. The King and Queen had been a home-loving, even domesticated couple, with their two delightful little daughters and their small (by royal standards) house in the grounds of Windsor Park, their corgis and labradors. Since their marriage they had not cultivated, or been much taken up by, Society and they lacked a loyal circle of staunch supporters to tide them over the first difficult months. One thing, however, was certain. George VI’s accession meant a welcome return to a British social circle and the old, upper-class conventions of entertainment and hospitality. Former friends of the exiled Duke (and now Duchess) of Windsor soon found that they were exiled from social favour; whereupon most of them did a rapid Vicar of Bray, forgot their disgraced princeling and turned with the prevailing wind. Society had been dominated for two decades by rich, smart, sometimes vulgarly ostentatious and decidedly American hostesses. Now their reign, too, was over. The loosening of mores and morals which had started during the First World War and had continued through the hysterical twenties was now decisively halted. The mood of Society – emphasized by the wholesomeness of the new royal family and underscored by growing fears of war – was one of rectitude. People continued to entertain lavishly ; but it was the lavishness of old family houses with old family retainers serving traditional English food on old family silver. Chaperonage was enforced again. The sharp chic of Mainbocher was out; the delicate charm of English dressmaking was back.

  The new King and Queen learned their roles fast. George vi took lessons to overcome his stutter. They went on a successful royal tour to France in July 1938 where the Queen was dressed by Norman Hartnell and wore a truly dazzling selection of jewellery. They still made occasional mistakes. On 20 April 1938, the King sent Hitler the customary greetings telegram on the occasion of his forty-ninth birthday. He also wrote a personal letter from Balmoral that August, appealing to the German President ‘as one ex-serviceman to another’ (what touching, and misplaced, humility) to avoid the horrors of another world war. In the event, he was persuaded by Chamberlain to abandon the letter.4

  On 15 March 1939, Hitler and his armies entered Prague and proclaimed to the world that Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist. On 1 April, Hitler said, in a speech at Wilhelmshaven:

  We do not dream of waging war on other nations, subj
ect, of course, to their leaving us in peace also. … But should anyone at any time show any desire to measure his strength against ours by force, then the German people will always be in a position and ready and determined to do the same !

  At the end of this speech, most tellingly, Hitler stated: ‘There is no point in bringing about co-operation among nations, based upon permanent understanding, until this Jewish fission-fungus of peoples has been removed.’5 Three weeks later, on 20 April 1939, the King again sent a congratulatory telegram to Hitler, on his fiftieth birthday. This may have been protocol, but it was also unfortunate.

  With Society and the rituals of the Season, the King was on surer ground. In 1937 he decided – or perhaps it was the Queen who decided – that the presentation of debutantes would take place as before at an evening Court.

  The ceremony began at 9.30 p.m., and preparing for it took the whole afternoon. Most former debs still speak of the occasion with breathless, rose-tinted awe. They describe queuing in the Mall (‘and of course everyone would crowd around your car and peer in at you, sitting there in your Prince of Wales feathers’); they speak deprecatingly of their own dress (‘one must have looked absurd’) and admiringly of the dresses of others; they murmur compliments about the King and Queen (‘they smiled so kindly at every single girl’). A great beauty of the Season says, ‘When I curtseyed, the King looked down the front of my dress !’ ; while another recalls being shocked to realize that he wore a heavy layer of make-up.

  One deb gave a rollicking and wholly convincing account of her presentation, stipulating only that it should be quoted anonymously:

  Oh my God, my actual presentation. It really was hilarious because there one was, utterly dolled up, gold lamé train and all. Mother and I sat in our car, in a queue in the Mall, in the pouring rain, looking like that, I ask you. And then one got there and eventually it came to one’s turn and one’s presenter went in first and there were the King and Queen, sitting on their thrones. We had to curtsey to one, get up, walk one and a half steps, bonk bonk bonk, and then curtsey to the other. Then get up and walk backwards out of the room, doing something with the damned train. You weren’t allowed to pick it up and throw it over your arm, of course – you had to go whip, whip [here she mimed kicking the train backwards] and one practised this till one was nearly blue in the face. Anyway, trust me, I was born clumsy. I managed the King, down I went – and when I say down, I mean it was really down, it wasn’t just a bobbity-boo, you had to sink to your very ankles. Down I went, got up – I managed that – and did my bonk bonk bonk, down I went again in front of the Queen. And as I went down, I heard – I knew it – my heel break off ! It did, it did; and all my friends said, trust me.

  Another debutante wrote a very different account of her presentation ; equally accurate, but rather more serious. It is worth quoting in full because it conveys so well the atmosphere of half a century ago….

  All my life, as far back as I can remember, my Mother had promised me that she would present me at Court when I reached the age of eighteen. I wore white satin, with a white satin court train lined with palest lily-of-the-valley leaf green, and carried a bouquet of white roses and lilies-of-the-valley (my favourite flowers). I had three Prince of Wales ostrich feathers on my head, with a long silk gauze veil hanging down behind. (This dress afterwards became my ‘best’ dress and was worn for many happy occasions – such as the Royal Caledonian Ball – and I still have my Court ostrich feathers, carefully kept in a box and labelled.) My darling Mother wore cream satin and a diamond tiara and Court ostrich feathers, and looked beautiful. Our dresses were specially made for us by BETA of Knightsbridge, which no longer exists, I am afraid. My Father wore full-dress naval uniform, complete with decorations and sword, and looked splendid.

  Several friends came in to see us off, and we drove away just at 6.30 p.m. We had to drive round and round the Mall until the gates of the Palace were opened, with huge crowds staring into our cars and commenting loudly on the occupants !

  Our car was the second car to pass into the courtyard of Buckingham Palace. It was strangely quiet in there, and we could not hear the traffic at all.

  Then came a long wait, but there was plenty to watch – Beefeaters and King’s-Men-at-Arms arriving in horse-drawn carriages. At last it was time to drive up to the door. We left our evening cloaks in the car, so that we could go straight through and get seats in the Throne Room. There we sat and watched everyone arriving, and had time to admire the room itself.

  The white walls were picked out in gold, and had tapestries hanging on them. At the far end was a red canopy with the profiles of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and in front of that were the two thrones. The middle of the floor was railed off for the Diplomatic Corps and all round the walls were red plush seats. A military band in the gallery played throughout.

  It was a wonderful gathering, with the varied full-dress uniforms and decorations of the diplomatic, naval and military men present, and the beautifully dressed women. Never before had I seen so many well-dressed women gathered together, although they were almost outshone by the brilliance of the uniforms.

  Suddenly came the roll of drums, and everyone stood up for the National Anthem, as the Royal Procession entered. The King and Queen were preceded by bowing attendants, and followed by Ladies-in-Waiting. They took their places on the thrones, the Princess Royal next to the Queen and the Duchess of Gloucester next to her.

  We moved slowly down the long corridor and, at the end, handed in our cards with our names written on, while our trains were taken from over our arms and laid down by the attendants.

  Then our names were announced, in clear tones, before we made our curtseys. The Queen smiled graciously at us all. The King wore the red and gold uniform of a field marshal, and the Queen wore a gold dress with a wonderful jewelled train. After making our Court Curtseys we passed on, and lined up in the corridor, where we were joined by my Father. Thus we were able to watch everyone else paying their homage and proceeding down.

  When the last Presentation was over, the National Anthem was played, and the King and Queen proceeded slowly down the Throne Room to the Banquet Hall, smiling and inclining between rows of bowing subjects.

  Then we went down to supper, where we drank delicious iced coffee out of G.R. IV cups and ate excellent savouries off ‘Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense’ plates. We met a great many friends, and my Father introduced me to a great many people he knew. We walked about and admired the beautiful State Rooms, the paintings, and the china in cabinets, to say nothing of the wonderful uniforms !

  Eventually we went down to take our places and to hear our names called out as our cars arrived. We climbed in and drove straight to Lafayette’s to be photographed. Lafayette and other court photographers stayed open all night. We were sustained with hot coffee, but even so, were almost too tired to stand ! As we came out, there were crowds of women gathered outside to watch us. I feel very honoured to have seen the most brilliant Court in Europe.

  The value of this account is that most of it was written down just a few days after the Presentation had taken place, hence the wealth of detail. Every girl must have performed exactly the same steps, felt the same sense of occasion, and known that henceforth she was officially ‘out’.

  Many insist that the Season of 1939 was in some way special, different from other Seasons of that decade and certainly different from any that followed it. Mrs Christopher Bridge, née Dinah Brand and niece of Lady Astor, said:

  It was an extraordinary Season I think – other people will tell you this. It was a sort of – as if there was going to be – something was going to happen – there were such huge balls given. It was such a very grand Season and it always had the feeling I suppose of, this is the end of … I don’t think I was aware of it, but looking back, I think it was an extraordinary Season. Sort of before the deluge. I think the adults may have had a feeling that there were mad days and dark clouds ahead and we were going to have a wonderful time while t
he Season lasted. It was certainly the last ‘real’ Season.

  For over a year, the imminence of war must have been increasingly obvious, even if many young girls were sheltered from realizing it. The former Lady Cathleen Eliot, daughter of the Earl of St Germans, wrote, ‘Politics were not discussed in my family so it was a complete surprise when war was declared. War was not talked about at home, or within my circle of friends.’ She was not unusual. Lady Jean Leslie Melville also said, ‘I don’t remember anyone talking about the likelihood of a war.’ But parents knew ; and the unusually large number of presentations at Court that year – 1,657 – must reflect their fear that by the following year there might be no presentations, no Season and no dances.*

  Having successfully negotiated the ordeal by etiquette of presentation at Court, the other high point of the Season was the girl’s own dance. Not every girl had one. There were about 400 dances in the Season, starting gradually soon after Christmas when they were interspersed with Hunt Balls and other country events; warming up after the first Presentation on 9 March ; and reaching a climax in May and June, when there were usually two or three different balls and dances every night. There are, for instance, thirty-seven dances listed in The Times for June, and these would have been only about a third of the total number, for many people preferred not to have their private dance publicly announced. Only the most popular and significant debutantes were asked to every dance ; but all those who were spending the Season in London could have expected to receive at least three or four invitations a week.

  By the end of June the King and Queen had returned from their tour of Canada and the United States, and the press outdid itself in adulation, hailing the event in tones more appropriate to Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps or Alexander the Great’s conquest of the known world. Even Harold Nicolson likened the Queen to Cleopatra. Never, it would seem, had two people embarked on a trip so momentous, or met with such resounding success. They evoked feelings – if The Times was to be believed – little short of idolatry. Describing the procession from Waterloo Station to Buckingham Palace, an over-excited correspondent wrote: