1939

by Angela Lambert

  I think my mother enjoyed the dances more than I did: she had a wonderful time and couldn’t understand why I was so unhappy. But lots of those very grand dances were agony for me – not one familiar face among the rows of boring young men whom I didn’t want to dance with and who certainly didn’t seem to want to dance with me, tongue-tied as I was with shyness. Not that most of them had a great deal to say for themselves.

  Sometimes I just hated every minute of it and longed to get away, and it would be my mother who begged to stay on and I who was trying to persuade her to leave ! My own dance was quite an ordeal … having to stand at the top of the stairs (we’d borrowed Mrs Sassoon’s lovely house at 2 Albert Gate, opposite the French Embassy) – standing there for at least an hour, shaking hands with all these arriving guests, none of whom I knew.

  Being poor did not matter in the least, as long as you came from a good family. Blood was considered far more important than money. Madeleine Turnbull, who came out in 1937, said emphatically:

  It was infinitely more prestigious to come of a family of ancient lineage and be poor as church mice than to be jumped up and enormously rich; so the latter were secretly scorned.

  Being a debutante didn’t have to be expensive. I think I was given £100 for the whole Season but I had to buy all my clothes with that. But then you could buy the most super evening dress for about £4.50. Quite a lot of people didn’t give a dance – we didn’t, because my parents couldn’t really afford it – but we gave cocktail parties, and it really didn’t cost much in the end. You see the whole thing was linked up with this feeling that money wasn’t the main thing. It was more – well – either you were accepted or you weren’t accepted. So in fact the girls who ostentatiously flaunted the fact that they had a lot of money were doing themselves a grave disservice. Far from making them more popular or more accepted, it did the reverse. People just slightly laughed behind their backs.

  I think it was because, during the First World War, there’d been war profiteers who made a lot of money out of the war, and it was still too close for people to change their ideas. New money was a bit suspect, I think, because of that.

  On the other hand if the daughters fitted in, weren’t brash or difficult and didn’t stick their necks out – well then, nobody would have minded them.

  Christian Grant (now Mrs John Miller) was a Scottish debutante, whose childhood had been one of the utmost austerity; first because of her father’s rigid attitudes about money, and then, after his death when she was ten, because a bungled will left her mother to manage on a pittance. Her father had been Sir Arthur Grant of Monymusk, tenth Baronet; but in spite of an ancestral castle and a retinue of servants, his six children had spent their early years in terror of his displeasure (he beat them all, even the girls): ‘Once I was thrashed for waiting outside the dining-room door to eat the scraps that came out from a grown-up dinner party; my father saw me and, thinking I had been eavesdropping, beat me instantly, without giving me time to explain that I was there only because I was hungry.’ The same economy was practised when it came to their clothes, and – apart from one good dress to wear in front of visitors – the younger children never had anything new:

  My nearest sister and I, at the tail end of the family, had to wear whatever fitted us. This was all right when the handed-down boy’s garment was a kilt, but not so good when it was grey flannel trousers or striped football socks brought back from a boarding school in England. Rough hand-knitted jerseys, their snagged stitches cascading from neck to hem, were gathered around our small waists by large dog collars, the brass labels of which proclaimed our names to be Rover or Thunder or Trust. … On our feet, in winter, we wore heavy black boots made by the village shoemaker, their soles almost solid with nails; in summer, unless the weather was particularly bad, we went barefoot. … My brothers, who during the day looked more untidy than the village children, came down to dinner in immaculately pressed scarlet kilts, lace-edged shirts and velvet jackets, the silver buttons of which were embossed with our family crest.6

  This strange combination of thin gruel and double cream – harsh deprivation side-by-side with ancestral pride – was familiar to the upper classes, and certainly no one would have thought any worse of Christian Grant for being a deb on a very small allowance. On the contrary, she was greatly admired by her contemporaries, one of whom said that with her original dress sense and tremendous flair, Christian always looked wonderful. What mattered was the hereditary title and castle; the nannies and cooks and maids and governesses; the formal manners over candle-lit dinner-tables ; the knowledge of shooting and fishing.

  When it came to bringing out her daughter, Lady Grant looked for another mother with whom she could share, and halve, the cost of a dance. And so Christian joined up with a girl she barely knew – Ann Schuster – and the two held their dance at 6 Stanhope Gate: a setting that must by then have been very familiar to most of their guests. Christian remembers in detail the ritual of getting ready:

  Most girls went to the hairdresser before a dance, especially their own, but as I was hard up by the standards of those days – I had £10 a month, which had to cover everything – I just washed my hair in the bath and pinned it up with Kirbigrips. I did wear make-up – Max Factor’s pancake base! – and lipstick, and pale pink nail varnish. The dress I wore was the one I’d been presented in: pink brocade with little silver flowers all over it. It didn’t take very long to get ready – I was eighteen and I had a healthy bloom. We met for the dinner-party at about eight or eight-thirty. I would have perhaps one sherry before the meal, and then lashings of champagne with it – champagne night after night, yet I never remember anyone getting in the least drunk. I suppose because we all rushed about and danced it off.

  My own dance was more fun than any other, mainly because it was such a lovely feeling to know that you were giving all your friends a nice evening. And I was lucky: I knew just about everybody who came. They were all real friends – from school and so on – and not just people who’d been asked out of duty. I was furious when they played Auld Lang Syne at the end of the dance – I just didn’t want it to stop.

  Christian summed up rapturously the feelings of a deb at the beginning of the Season:

  Being suddenly catapulted into this fairytale world where everything was champagne and flowers, strawberries and cream, it was deliriously marvellous. Having been brought up to believe that one was plain and stupid and uninteresting and everything, suddenly to have admirers and be told that one was fanciable – it was lovely, glorious. I remember going on the bus down Park Lane one wonderful May morning and looking out, and all London was rather like today, absolutely golden, with the sun shining, and I remember thinking – it’s marvellous, life is wonderful, and these two wonderful young men are in love with me. It was just lovely.

  For all her light-hearted romanticism, Christian became more daring as the Season wore on. Ann Schuster became a great friend, and remembers their conspiratorial discovery:

  Well, Christian said, you miss all the fun if you go to bed at the end of the evening. You tuck your mother up, and then you slip out and you’ve arranged to meet somebody. So you go, either to a nightclub (and I thought, nightclub? No!). But there were all sorts of things that people did which were fun, like going to Richmond Park at dawn, and wandering through the park in your evening dress ; and Covent Garden of course, strolling through the market ; and then the odd nightclub. But I mostly did outdoor things, all tremendously innocent….

  The following week was marked by two of the highlights of the London Season besides, of course, the dances … never forget the dances: there were always at least ten a week, sometimes even more. Ten dances a week for thirteen weeks, up till the beginning of August, as well as the Oxford Commemoration and Cambridge May Balls, and regimental dances, and dances for Hurlingham and Ascot and Goodwood and Henley and charity; yacht-club dances and Cowes Week dances – all summer long, dances and more dances. Next, however, on Tuesday, 16 May, came
the start of the Chelsea Flower Show.

  The Royal Horticultural Society had held its annual show in the grounds of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea only since 1913, and it did not become an essential element of the Season until after the First World War. Before then, it had been something of a specialists’ occasion for learned horticulturalists and enthusiastic amateur gardeners – including, of course, the owners and their head gardeners from the great country estates. In the 1920s it first began to blossom as a social event, and by 1939 a well-established order of precedence had developed over the four days of the Show. It always opened on a Tuesday, inaugurated by a visit from the royal family, most of whom were keen, if theoretical, gardeners. The King and Queen did not attend in 1939 (they were stuck in fog in an ice field somewhere outside Quebec), but Queen Mary was there, and so were the Kents, the Gloucesters and Princess Alice. Lady Sybil Phipps and her daughter Clare made the opening morning, but it was not a great occasion for debutantes: too cold and wet, too early in the day, and over-crowded with the older generation.

  Once royalty had been shown round, the Private View occupied the rest of the morning; but although this meant, in principle, that it was reserved for Fellows of the Royal Horticultural Society, in practice the humbler Fellows were unlikely to turn up on the day traditionally attended by the aristocracy and country gentry. On the first afternoon the President’s Tea-Party was held in his Tent: another occasion cherished by the social elite, when fertilization and cross-pollination and the merits of newer varieties of upstart flowers could be intricately debated. It was only on the last three days, when admission was cheaper, that ordinary members of the public came.

  The days of spreading Edwardian lawns were already receding, those times when special flat leather ‘horse boots’ had been on sale at the Show, so that the huge lawn-mowers and rollers pulled by one or even two horses could create a perfectly smooth surface, not pockmarked by the horses’ hooves.

  The week of the 1939 Flower Show suffered catastrophic weather. In a mainly dry month of average temperatures, the wettest days by far exactly coincided with the Show, which was buffeted by strong winds and torrential rain. But the displays, protected by two giant marquees, were magnificent and the crowds undeterred. The rock gardens were so realistic that a pair of wild ducks settled on one of the rock pools and feasted on the surrounding vegetation. It was to be the last Show for eight years. Once war had begun, the Royal Horticultural Society devoted most of its resources to instructing people how to grow their own vegetables and aid the war effort.

  The following evening, on 17 May, the twelfth annual birthday ball in aid of Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital took place at Grosvenor House, attended by nearly 1,400 people. Lady Howard de Walden had arranged the first Queen Charlotte’s Ball in 1927, and ran it virtually single-handed until the war, and then again after it until her retirement. ‘She used to preside over it like a sergeant-major and all those children [i.e. the debs] really jumped to attention when she appeared. Having had six children of her own, she had a great thing about birth and babies.’ Her lifelong interest in medicine and health also stemmed from the time, during the First World War, when she had run a hospital in Alexandria; but the Ball was always in aid of Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital. All those connected with it donated their services free ; Jacksons of Piccadilly gave the giant cake, and each year a different cosmetic company would provide presents for all the Maids-in-Waiting (debutantes from previous years) and this year’s Maids of Honour. The Guards of Honour were the favoured girls who actually dragged the cake into the ballroom, and as they had to be slim and elegant as well as reasonably strong, this was regarded as a great honour. Their present, in 1939, was a bottle of scent by Schiaparelli, attached to a cyclamen-coloured satin pincushion. (The colour suggests that the scent may have been ‘Shocking’, which came wrapped in bright pink packaging – hence the description ‘shocking pink’ – in which case one hopes the girls did not all wear it at once, since it is a powerfully sweet, heady scent.)

  The views of the debs themselves on this ritual varied. ‘Pretty damned absurd,’ one called it.

  Absolutely idiotic. One just had to giggle one’s way through it, because it was absurd. Or at least I did – all my friends did. I think there were some girls who were over-awed and thought it was all rather marvellous. I thought it was idiotic but it wasn’t really, looking back, because it did raise an enormous amount of money: so that in a sense it was worth doing. It still felt pretty stupid, and it was ‘mobbed up’ even then – tremendously – by young men throwing fire-crackers and all that sort of thing. Getting obstreperous, throwing bread rolls. But Queen Charlotte’s was all started by that remarkable, redoubtable lady, Lady Howard de Walden. She organized all that, and was the sort of doyenne of the Season.

  The morning would have been spent rehearsing the elaborate ceremonies under the stern eye of Lady Howard de Walden herself. If 228 girls are to sweep in pairs down two staircases and curtsey in twos to the Guest of Honour and a cake, it has to be done with military precision, otherwise laughter – whether caused by nerves or by the comic spectacle they presented – could ruin the effect.

  The cake was decorated with 195 candles, representing the number of years since Queen Charlotte’s birth. (She was of course the first patron of the hospital.) The candles, unfortunately, were electric, not real. The royal personage who was Guest of Honour each year had to be descended from Queen Charlotte, but was never a reigning queen. (This might have implied that Queen Charlotte’s Ball was usurping the role properly played by presentation at Court.) In 1939 the Guest of Honour was Princess Helena Victoria, the sixty-nine-year-old granddaughter of Queen Victoria. The quaint formalities surrounding the cake were accompanied by the music of Handel’s ‘Judas Maccabeus’, and were said to be derived from the original Queen Charlotte’s favourite birthday ritual.

  On the same night, also at Grosvenor House, the National Association for Local Government Officers gave a dance for 250 of their counterparts from Scandinavia. Imagination boggles at what some misdirected Norwegian local council official would have made of the scene, had he by chance found himself in the main ballroom and come upon nearly 250 eighteen-year-old girls dressed in pure white, discreetly jewelled, nervously awaiting their great moment. Initial relief, that the occasion was to be graced by a larger number of attractive young women than the invitation had led him to suspect, and gratitude to his hosts for having provided partners for himself and every single one of his Scandinavian colleagues would have been followed by incredulity as he observed them sink into deep curtseys in front of a gigantic, many-candled cake.

  Absurd it may have been, but lots of the debutantes were thrilled by it all. So was the Daily Mail, whose breathless diarist informed the paper’s readers that the 1939 debs were the prettiest and most aristocratic for years. It redeemed itself however with a touching description of the nannies who watched their former charges from the balcony overlooking the main ballroom:

  Hundreds of nannies settled like a flock of starlings on the balcony of the big banqueting hall at Grosvenor House just when the procession was about to begin. They looked earnest and protective, waiting anxiously, with their eyes glued to their girls, though one or two dashed over to give their last words of encouragement and a final pat before the ceremony began.7

  Surprisingly, this was not the last Queen Charlotte’s Ball for the next five years. It carried on during the war, though its date was later moved to December and the cake was made with dried eggs, the young men wore uniform and the debs’ dresses were bought with coupons.

  Marigold Charrington, whose dance came next on 18 May, remembers chiefly being worried about whether anyone would dance with her:

  I was frightfully anxious about whether anyone would want to dance with me. It mattered that you could talk. I remember an aunt of mine sending a note down the dinner-table to a young niece saying, ‘Talk, you loon,’ and of course she never spoke again. But you were not allowed to
talk about money or the food or domestics.

  This was the main point of the dinner-parties: to ensure that the girls (some of whom, certainly at this stage of the Season, might otherwise have known nobody at all) were supplied with at least two guaranteed partners. ‘The young men were in honour bound – and did honour it. Usually they did have to, however much they disliked, however much they thought she was simply hideous, dance with the girl beside them at dinner. Even if she was boss-eyed and the size of a hippopotamus. It was, so to speak, singing for your supper.’ Not that this would ever have been a problem for Vivien Mosley, who made that remark. Through family connections and her brother’s Etonian friends, she had a wide circle of male acquaintances even before the Season began. But for girls up from the depths of the country whose social circle was local and limited, it was a godsend to know you would not have to ‘sit out’ every single dance – the ultimate humiliation.

  What were they really like, the young men who were such an essential component of every Season; and why did they always seem to be in short supply?

  The truth is, they were not in short supply: only the desirable ones were. Men were desirable, in the words of one former deb, ‘if they were good dancers, good looking and amusing to talk to’. In the eyes of debs’ mothers, it was even more important that they should come from good families. ‘Good’, of course, meant aristocratic. Mollie Acland, whose mother used to bring her knitting to dances, says, ‘I could always tell what sort of chap I was dancing with by her expression – smiles for rich young lordlings, down to positive frowns for penniless subalterns !’ Lady Cathleen Eliot (now Hudson) remembers another kind of popularity: