1939
Page 10
Morals, like manners, were different then: and not only among the upper classes. One of the most startling details, to a modern eye, comes from the regular advertisements in The Times Personal column announcing that valuable items of jewellery had been handed in to the police, and asking their owners to come and claim them. On a single day the Metropolitan Police announced under found: a diamond and pearl bracelet; a cine camera (a rare and expensive luxury); a diamond and sapphire flexible bracelet; and a diamond ring. One does not know, of course, who handed them in ; but at a time when £3 or £4 a week was a normal working wage, and when a modest diamond ring cost £40, such honesty seems quite remarkable. It must also be pointed out, however, that in another day’s Personal column the Chancellor of the Exchequer duly acknowledged receipt of £3 4s 9d conscience money, or about £65 at today’s values. The fact that it is not a lot is immaterial: how long is it since conscience money insertions appeared in The Times at all?
The next night there was another dance – there was always another dance, if not several. On 3 May Lady Meyrick gave what is described in The Times as a ‘small dance’ for Miss Susan Meyrick at 6 Stanhope Gate. These premises also housed the famous Gunter’s Tearooms, where everyone went for leisurely teas in splendid surroundings. Gunter’s was an institution, a favourite meeting place for country godmothers, half-term schoolchildren, bachelor uncles or budding romances. It was owned by Searcy’s, the caterers, who also owned 23 Knightsbridge (it is Agriculture House today), and both were popular for deb dances. The Meyrick dance cannot have been very small, since no fewer than twenty-seven hostesses gave dinner parties beforehand. In fact, Susan Meyrick (now Mrs Peter Green) estimates that there were about 300 guests, who would have included, besides her own contemporaries, many friends of her parents’ generation, among them the invariable rows of chaperones watching over the girls. (The chaperones were known irreverently by the debs as ‘the dowagers on the touch line’.)
We had dinner at Claridge’s first – a party of about twelve of us – and there was one young man whom I was very keen on, called Rodney Wilkinson, though actually being about ten years older than me he seemed very grown up. Later on he became a pilot in the Battle of Britain, and was killed. Then the dance itself. I wore a cream-coloured dress from Jacqmar, made of the most marvellous material. We had those prehistoric dance cards with all the numbers, and the men had to fill in their names – if you were rather shy, as I was, it nearly killed you – wondering if all your numbers would be filled up and hoping you’d get someone you really liked for the supper dance (that was usually number 8 or 9) because then you could stay with them for a good long time while you ate supper, at about midnight or one o’clock. On the invitation it gave the time for the dance, usually about 9 p.m. to 3 a.m.; and after that, if you could give your mother the slip, you’d go on to a nightclub. The dance would end with everyone letting their hair down a bit, probably doing the Conga all round the room, and then you’d go home and pretend to go to bed, but actually you slipped out and went off to, say, the Embassy Club, where Edmundo Ros had this marvellous Latin-American band. That was frightfully daring.
Having one’s own dance wasn’t a tremendous ordeal – though it probably was for my mother. She loathed and hated the whole thing … hated the sitting around.
It does seem another world. The war ended it all. Nothing ever went back to being quite the same again.
The next day, 4 May, Rosamund Neave had her coming-out dance. She was the sister of Airey Neave, who was later to make a sensational escape from Colditz. Rosamund was not quite eighteen, but despite being comparatively young she was in many ways an ideal deb, relaxed, cheerful, excellent company, and she already had hosts of friends. First her mother gave a dinner dance at the Ladies’ Carlton Club, and at ten o’clock those fifty guests were joined by another 350 or so from all the other dinners, for the start of the main dance. Marius B. Winter’s band played ‘You Couldn’t Be Cuter’ and – appropriately, as it turned out – ‘Love Walked In’. (Rosamund married one of the young men at her dinner, Tony Sheppard, just six days after war was declared.) The dance ended with the Palais Glide and the Lambeth Walk – the current craze from the musical Me and My Girl by Lupino Lane, which had opened in 1937. (The King and Queen had gone to see it the previous evening.)
My mother had been presented and had had a Season and all the other mothers during my Season were people she’d known then, as a girl, and so that’s how it went: from generation to generation. The great thing as far as I was concerned was that you got asked to these weekend house parties all over England, which was frightfully good for one. You played indoor games in the evenings, and tennis – very self-conscious-making if you didn’t have good legs – and after a Season you found you could cope with any situation, whatever it might be.
It is easy to give the impression that the Season was simply a round of almost indistinguishable evenings, as one deb after another held the spotlight wearing her best dress, spending between £600 and £1,000 of her father’s money (more, for a truly spectacular dance), and then joined the swarm of other butterflies who dipped and swung through banks of hothouse flowers for the brief summer. A few of the more serious debs were studying or working – a tiny proportion, it is true, but there were some art students, music students, even two girls who were studying ballet. For the others there were plenty of hours to be filled during the day.
Most girls, however late they might have come home, would be up again by nine – ten at the latest. Sonia Denison (now Mrs Heathcoat-Amory) remembers that:
Our parents were very strict. I always had to be up for breakfast next morning, if I was in London. That was the discipline. It was bad, slovenly, to lie in bed all morning. We had to get up, even if we’d got home at three or four o’clock the night before, we still had to be up for a nine o’clock breakfast. Then they’d say, if you’re tired you can’t go out.
This must have meant that popular girls like Sonia got through the Season somehow on five or six hours’ sleep a night ; while the men – at any rate those who were working, or at Oxford or Cambridge, or in the Army – had even less.
Earl Haig, who was an undergraduate at Christ Church at the time, remembers that a group of men would drive down to London for a ball ; dance ; often go on to a nightclub ; drive back up to Oxford ; and only just have time to change out of white tie into undergraduate flannels before heading for a tutorial or lecture. (This may have been the origin of the notorious ‘45 Club’, open to members of Oxford or Cambridge who had driven from Piccadilly Circus back to their college at either university in less than three-quarters of an hour. True, it would have been easier in the dawn hours, and on the relatively traffic-free roads of the late thirties, but it must still have been a hazardous journey.) Such an occasion might explain the story which appeared in The Times in May, describing a car accident on the outskirts of Cambridge early one morning. The passengers, Lord Granby (the present Duke of Rutland), Lord Andrew Cavendish (the present Duke of Devonshire) and Mr Mark Howard, were in a car which struck a telegraph pole and overturned, and they were all slightly injured. The telegraph pole was broken. ‘The car was travelling from London, where’, commented the report, deadpan, ‘it was understood the men had been attending a party.’
The Hon. Sarah Norton, now The Hon. Mrs Baring, was presented in 1938, but like many debs attended the big social events of 1939 as well:
It seems to me amazing now that we managed to keep going night after night. And it wasn’t just dances – there were lunches as well, almost every day. We weren’t ever allowed to dress in a sloppy way. For instance, you always wore white gloves to go out to lunch – always. I was allowed to have lunch without a chaperone as long as the young man had asked my mother first whether he might invite me. After lunch we used to go to Keith Prowse in Bond Street and listen to records – they had these cubicles where you could listen for hours, and nobody seemed to mind if you didn’t buy anything, so we all congregated there in the aft
ernoons.
There were dress fittings as well; hats and shoes to be bought; hair appointments; tea-parties – it was a wholly self-indulgent life. Some were aware of it at the time; most, with hindsight, feel guilty. Sarah Norton says, ‘We were spoilt brats, and when I look back on it I’m ashamed that we had this minute, privileged society and everybody else was either working or suffering. I think that’s why I was pleased, in a sense, when the war came: it meant that I could do something useful at last.’
Another deb of the 1939 Season remembers a slightly different routine to her days. She was Rhoda Walker-Heneage-Vivian, one of three daughters of Admiral Walker-Heneage-Vivian. The family lived at Clyne Castle in Wales, but also had a town house at 8 Hyde Park Gardens – huge, superb, with a ballroom. There the family would spend the summer months.
My days fell into a pattern. Getting up at about 10 a.m., writing letters (you always thanked the hostess for the previous night’s dance) and then doing the flowers. These came three times a week from our home in Wales by train, in huge boxes. Ann [one of her sisters] and I hated this chore and usually ended up by ramming them bad-temperedly into vases and dashing out. We had a lovely butler called Martin who would sometimes help us out. His wife was Cook, aided by a kitchen maid. The mornings were spent window-shopping – usually walking up Oxford Street as far as Bond Street and meeting friends in Selfridges for ice-cream sodas. I had little money – a monthly allowance of £20 to buy accessories – but my father paid for dresses and shoes. I haunted Selfridges’ Bargain Basement, Galeries Lafayette and Marks and Spencers. … Then came lunch-parties with other debs, then a lot of cinema-going, and the evening dinner and dances. Twice I went to a film premiere with a young man alone (normally this was never allowed). One of these was Wuthering Heights, and the other was Gone With the Wind, and my escort was Ronnie Howard, son of the late Leslie Howard. This was allowed … but straight home afterwards.
As the Season got into its stride and girls began to make friends, they would often arrange to meet for lunch. Ann Schuster remembers these relaxed, light-hearted occasions, which were a relief amid the formality of the rest of the Season’s events:
They weren’t organized – we didn’t have these awful things that our mothers used to do, the mothers’ lunches: no, you’d just have said, perhaps the night before, let’s get together and talk about this … some funny thing that had happened … and you’d get together, six or eight of you, and have a sandwich at somebody’s house. It was all very informal and we discussed hairdressers, compared lipstick (Revlon is the name that sort of sticks in my mind) and scent and pinched things from our mothers’ dressing tables. It was all part of trying to learn how to be sophisticated – that was what we all wanted to be. Sophistication was the ultimate: knowing how to put on a veneer.
Most girls would end the afternoon at about five and come home to try and get an hour’s sleep before starting to get ready. Those who had been to the hairdresser that day would have a quick bath, followed by another pause if it was deodorant day, because ‘The only anti-perspirant was Odo-ro-no which took twenty minutes to dry and lasted a week. (Shop girls and typists almost invariably smelt of BO.)’ If debutantes expected one application of Odo-ro-no to suffice through a week of strenuous dances, some of them must surely have smelt of BO too. There were also a couple of products available for removing what an advertisement delicately calls ‘unwanted hair’. It was called Bellin’s Wonderstoen and – according to an advertisement in Vogue – all a girl had to do was ‘just rotate this dainty little disc over the skin and the embarrassment of unwanted hair vanishes like magic, instantly. It never fails. Wonderstoen is sure, harmless and odourless. Facial size 5/6 or de luxe size for arms and legs 13/6.’ Another product, Veet, was described by the makers as ‘a dainty white cream that leaves the skin soft and velvety-smooth without a trace of ugly bristly stubble like the razor leaves’. This one made no claims to being odourless. One suspects that most young women simply borrowed a razor to achieve the desired daintiness.
The use of cosmetics varied according to the strictness of parents. Some girls wore no make-up at all. There was a wide range of cosmetics for those who chose to use them. Yardleys were famous by the late thirties for their beautiful sculpted boxes whose lids were embossed with a bee on a flower (designed by Reco Capey), and these continued to be the hallmark of Yardley products for the next twenty-five years. They offered eye shadow (mostly in safe English pale blues and greys) at 2s, cream rouge at 2s 6d, loose powder in boxes veiled with fine gauze to stop it flying about, at 3s 6d, lipstick at 3s and 5s 6d. These prices, if multiplied to allow for inflation, are exactly comparable with the cost of the same products today, although young women have become far more skilled in the art of make-up, and most start using it well before the age of seventeen or eighteen. Boots offered a range of skin-care products, including something mysteriously called ‘muscle oil’ for 2s 6d. For the mothers, Harriet Hubbard Ayer offered Luxuria, which is described in the same glowing terms of hyperbole and fantasy that are found advertising anti-ageing products today. Hope springs eternal.
Made up, dressed up, complete with evening bag and evening cape or fur wrap, the girls and their mothers set out. They usually assembled at the dinner hostess’s house at about eight o’clock for drinks (sherry or an orange juice for the debs, a cocktail for their mothers) before sitting down to eat. Most dances began at ten, but it was not considered advisable to arrive too punctually (perhaps because the most eager and least sophisticated young men would arrive first, and no deb wanted to find her dance card filled up by them) so the flood of guests did not start until some half hour later. By eleven o’clock the dance would be in full swing ; between midnight and 1a.m. supper was served ; by 2 a.m. the first guests were starting to leave; and by four or five in the morning the dance would be on its last legs. ‘When we got back from a dance [says Mollie Acland] Mummy’s maid ‘Rawly’ [Christina Blanche Rawlings] would always be waiting up for her, and usually Ellis the butler too, If we were at home in the country, Nan would always be up to see me to bed.’
The Season did not consist entirely of entertainments centred around the debutantes. There were very many charity events. In early May alone, the Docklands Ball at the Dorchester raised money for the Dockland Settlements ; the Wendy Dance was held in aid of the Wendy Society ; the England Ball was organized by the Council for the Preservation of Rural England; there were balls for the Blind, dinners for the English Speaking Union and the Gardeners’ Benevolent Institution and the Friends of the Poor, and lots, lots more – all of them worthy, fund-raising events that enabled the wealthy and privileged to don evening dress and spend an agreeable evening among their own kind in the certainty that they were doing good. Few debs would have attended these: at least, not willingly.
Then there were private dinner-parties, which provided more opportunities for those who held the reins of power to meet socially and subtly, imperceptibly to exchange information and exert influence, while at the same time ensuring that power remained within their own charmed circle. These occasions were all but invisible except to those who took part, and their effectiveness was all the greater for it. Nothing need be written down, nothing voted upon, but a discreet conversation before dinner, a word in the right ear while relaxing over a glass of port or brandy before joining the ladies, could have far-reaching consequences.
What, for example, were Ambassador Joe Kennedy’s real thoughts when the King and Queen came to dine at the American Embassy two nights before they set sail for their tour of Canada and the United States? The guests included some glittering members of the British aristocracy (among them, significantly, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire), as well as all nine Kennedy children – gathered around the same dinner table for the first time in two years. Doubtless the Ambassador was anxious to underline his family’s meteoric rise through the ranks of British Society, though this was due far more to the charm and vivacity of his elder daughter Kathleen (always known as �
�Kick’) than to his own warm feelings for Britain. Secretly, Joe Kennedy was convinced that Germany would win the coming war. Mollie Acland says robustly, ‘We hated the Kennedys ! – though Eunice was attractive. But they were all anti-Brit and yet pleased to the point of crawling when they were asked to Windsor.’ Rose Kennedy was scarcely a prepossessing figure. One deb who knew the whole family well, and liked its younger members, described Rose as ‘a dreadful simpering idiot’. Chips Channon, who met her on another occasion, was equally unimpressed: ‘She is an uninteresting little body, though pleasant and extraordinarily young-looking to be the mother of nine. She has an unpleasant voice, and says little of interest.’ But he found in her at least one redeeming feature: ‘She too keeps a diary, and I always like people who keep diaries; they are not as others ; at least not quite.’4
On 6 May the King and Queen set off on the start of their seven-week tour of Canada and the United States, going by train to Portsmouth with Queen Mary and the two princesses, as well as most of the other immediate members of the royal family, who said their goodbyes aboard the Empress of Australia. ‘I have my handkerchief,’ the little Princess Margaret was reported to have said, to which her thirteen-year-old sister added stoutly, ‘To wave, not to cry.’
That same weekend, over in Bavaria, Unity Mitford had arrived at Berchtesgarten from her flat in Munich (from which a wealthy Jewish family had been summarily evicted to enable her to occupy it) to spend the weekend with Hitler. A newspaper photograph shows them taking tea together. Hitler, unsmiling, looks overweight and menacing while Unity – also overweight, also unsmiling – seems ill at ease in the presence of her hero. One can read too much into a split-second image. Perhaps when the photographer had gone they relaxed and smiled and went on talking eagerly about Germany’s glorious future; but in that split second she looks like a fat intimidated Fräulein and he looks brutish and coarse. They must both have known that Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun, was infuriated by the presence of ‘that English Valkyrie’. She would not pose a threat for very much longer.