It was a lovely social occasion, the Fourth of June with the fireworks. My brother and I were extremely fortunate in the housemaster who took over the house in the summer of ’33. Hubert Hartley and Grizel Hartley have never been surpassed and probably never will be surpassed as a married couple giving their all to the boys in their house. They had a big house overlooking the field with a big garden full of lupins and irises and on the Fourth of June they’d have a huge lunch party for boys in the house and parents ; and also for boys who’d recently left. In ’39 I’d left four years before – I’d been captain of the house. It would have been a great meeting of old friends and the old Eton place, old Eton faces, absence, nostalgia, the fireworks – oh, I think it’s a great family occasion, unique in its way. It’s the best club in the world, and if the club is having a beano, you don’t want to miss it.
Lady Anne Fitzroy, whose father had succeeded unexpectedly to the dukedom of Grafton in 1936, remembers attending the Fourth of June many times because her younger brother was at the school.
It was a family do really. You took a picnic lunch and had it wherever the car was parked – on some playing field – or, if it was wet, in the boy’s study. If you were intellectual you could go and hear the boys declaiming in Latin and Greek. Then after lunch there was the cricket match, and you walked round meeting endless people who were all doing the same thing. That went on till about 5 o’clock. Then you had tea in the boy’s room, and after tea there was the Procession of Boats, between about 6 and 7 o’clock. Then you had a picnic supper, preferably on the banks of the river – so there was lots of preparation needed, doing two picnics for about ten people. Then there were fireworks in the evening until about ten or eleven at night. They’ve stopped the fireworks now, I think, which seems a shame.
‘Harrow may be more clever, Rugby may make more row, But we’ll row for ever Steady from stroke to bow And nothing in life shall sever The chain that is round us now.’
June was also the most crowded month for dances, two or three every weekday evening. One of the first that month was given by the Hon. Lady Bailey for her third daughter, Noreen (now Countess Raben).
I’d just spent two years in a French boarding school, I was meant to go to Austria and learn German as well but then Hitler walked in and that put a stop to that. Even Paris got filled up with Germans; I noticed them sleeping and sitting around in cafés and I didn’t like that at all. Having been away so long meant that most of my girlfriends were long-ago childhood chums, and I had to rely on my older sister to produce the young men. I borrowed hers, really.
I think I wore a mauve and white dress from Jean Patou, and I remember that the Duchess of Gloucester was there, and oh my hat ! old Lady Oxford and Asquith making a frightful nuisance of herself – my Mama said she didn’t remember asking her. But it was all rather fun – very, very nice – especially having it in our own house at 38 Bryanston Square. The only bad thing I remember about the evening was Barbara McNeill being driven there by someone and being involved in a car crash, so she arrived with a cut forehead.
Apart from that it was a very happy occasion, and not so very frivolous. Just great fun.
She may have felt she knew few of her contemporaries but, all the same, Noreen Bailey was at the dance a couple of nights later which Lady Joseph gave for her two daughters, Rosamond and Cynthia. The familiar surroundings of 6 Stanhope Gate had been turned into an English country garden for the occasion, with banks of hydrangeas and delphiniums: a herbaceous border recreated just for one night. Cynthia, now Mrs Peter Dean, remembers that all their staff came up from the country for the occasion, including her nanny, whose job it was to iron the girls’ multi-layered ballgowns.
On 8 June, memorial services were held at four different naval bases – Portsmouth, Devonport, Chatham and Birkenhead – for the ninety-nine men who had died in the Thetis. Their bodies were mostly buried at sea. St Martin’s in the Fields was also crowded with mourners. Deaths like theirs still seemed outside the normal course of events, and people were shocked and indignant. Meanwhile, less remarked, the St Louis, the Liesel and half a dozen other refugee ships sailed on, desperate for some port that would let them anchor and disembark their unwanted, human, Jewish cargo. Other ships, in the light of their experience, were now unwilling to leave Germany, so that even those Jews who had managed to secure their release from concentration camps, and obtain the necessary papers and visas, could not escape.
To suggest that the debs should have known about these horrors, and should have done something to alleviate them, is asking a great deal of teenage girls ; but in answer to the question, could the debs and their young partners have known what was going on, the answer must be unequivocal. Yes. Here is a memory from a very different milieu:
Surely anyone who knew what Hitler was doing, at home and abroad, must see that he was a unique epitome of all evils? I cannot help, even today, doubting the sincerity – or, if not the sincerity, the basic intelligence – of those with power and influence then who did not know what was happening inside Germany, and the fate in store for the rest of us should it be allowed to overflow. How did we, ordinary, uneducated working-class people, in a depressed town in a depressed area, half an hour’s bus ride from Jarrow, know about concentration camps, about the final solution to the problem of inferior races, about the occupation of Europe, tomorrow the world? Well, you could read about it in the Left Book Club editions, in some papers, notably the News Chronicle, the Daily Worker, the Herald, the New Statesman – all of which I studied in the reading room of the library. You could always turn to Mein Kampf where Hitler’s plans and policies are given in detail.2
The Season’s next big dance was that given by Baroness Ravensdale, the eldest daughter of Lord Curzon, for her niece Vivien Mosley. Held on 8 June, this was one of the memorable parties of the Season. Its setting was romantic, melancholy, haunted, as Vivien (now the Hon. Mrs Forbes Adam) recalled:
It was held in a most peculiar house in Regent’s Park that belonged to Maud Allen, the dancer. It was known as the West Wing, and it was … not ruined, exactly, but abandoned; not lived in. In her heyday Maud Allen had been a predecessor of Isadora Duncan, doing the same kind of dancing – all free spirit of the earth – and at the height of her popularity she had bought this house. But by 1939 she was well over sixty, and the house was very ramshackley, but rather beautiful. It had the most wonderful garden. Well, Maud Allen was a friend of my aunt, so she lent us this house. I don’t think there was ever another dance like that. And the Duke and Duchess of Kent were at the dance – they had dinner with my aunt, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, beforehand. They had been married four years earlier and the Duchess – my God, she was dazzling. Wonderful, wonderful.
Priscilla Brett, a great friend of Vivien, remembers dawn the next morning, as the party ended: ‘I remember walking in the Park in the daybreak, walking across Regent’s Park at about five o’clock in the morning … that was wonderful. That was special.’
Vivien’s mother, Lady Cynthia, had died of peritonitis in 1933, and in 1936 her father, Sir Oswald Mosley, had married Diana Mitford. This strong cast of characters formed the background to her childhood and adolescence and made Vivien a forthright and unusual young woman. She was intelligent, well informed and took a lively interest in politics, without sharing her father’s Fascist views. Already at the age of eighteen she was linked with families which – for good or ill – were among the most powerful in the country ; she had travelled in France and Germany ; and she had a circle of friends who were remarkable – at least among the debutantes – for their intelligence. Vivien would never have sat glumly on the sidelines at a dance waiting for her card to be filled up ; indeed, she much preferred talking to dancing, and her chief memory of 6 Stanhope Gate is the peace and quiet of its sixth floor, to which she and her like-minded friends used to retreat, away from the band and the critical eyes of chaperones, to talk politics and speculate about the coming war. Why, in that case, did she agree to d
o the Season at all?
It was automatic. Everybody one knew a year older had done it and at the time one thought everybody was going to be doing it that year and so on. … In fact they weren’t but that wasn’t realized at the time. Meeting new friends certainly wasn’t my intention; I had plenty already. In the end I did it just for the fun of it. But it was a most self-indulgent, invalid life, and I think, not everybody, but some of us were extremely aware of it and a bit ashamed of it. Not too ashamed, otherwise you couldn’t have done it. You stayed in bed till twelve – got up – just managed to get to a girls’ lunch party – perhaps a dress fitting in the afternoon – and so on and round you went, following the same pattern day after day. It was very jolly – I’m not denying it. Certainly I enjoyed it.
My friends were not typical debs at all. They were good liberal girls with, sort of, intellectual minds, and they used to get so fed up with all the nonsense, they’d disappear for ages, sorting the world out, and then they’d forget the passage of time and God Save the King would be played – it always was, in those days, at the end of a dance – and then they’d come tottering down from the upper floors and there would be all the old dowagers having an absolute fit, but all they’d actually been doing was talking – serious-minded people putting the world to rights. But these were people who came from political families and had been brought up with that and were much more interested in it than in the endless chitchat. In that sense it was almost like doing a few months at university. You’d argue your ideas with somebody else, only in between times you’d have to break it up to go down and do your stuff. I daresay we were interested in a very naive manner – we were only eighteen, which these days is very adult but in those days was not. And we weren’t lascivious, either. There were a certain number of young men – not the ones who went to dances night after night ; others, who occasionally went to parties – who would find it more rewarding to talk to someone away from the hubbub.
Who were the members of this unlikely intelligentsia amid the hubbub of the London Season? They formed a group so small and exclusive that many other debs remain to this day unaware that it even existed. Its members talk about it reluctantly; partly perhaps because, like most groups, its identity is more clearly defined in retrospect than it seemed at the time ; partly because its preoccupations were so much at variance with the prevailing ethos of the Season.
Certainly during the late 1930s there was a group known as ‘the Liberal girls’, most of whom would have denied that they ‘did’ the Season in any real sense at all. They included Laura Bonham-Carter, who later married Jo Grimond, and her sister Cressida, who sat at dances and knitted to show her contempt for it all. They were clever, unconventional girls, whose male friends were clever and unconventional too. Many of them were left-wing, sometimes to the point of Communism. Coming from ‘good’ families, or being friendly with girls who did, these young men occasionally appeared at deb dances, making the chaperones nervous. To most debs’ mothers, a Communist might as well have had horns and a tail, so dangerous and exotic did he seem. They were men like Simon Asquith, Ben Nicholson or Ivan Moffat, and the trio of friends that comprised Philip Toynbee, Jasper Ridley and Esmond Romilly – the renegade ex-public schoolboy who had captivated Jessica Mitford before going off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Such people, who questioned the assumptions of their parents and were sensitive to the social changes taking place, were aware of the anomalies – even the absurdity – of the rituals their coming out attempted to perpetuate. Shiela Grant Duff – another rebel – analysed it thus:
And so the struggle between my two worlds was engaged. The world I was moving towards won hands down through most of that summer, for life with Douglas [Jay] and his Oxford friends was, I hoped, the ‘real world’ outside the confines, artificialities and conventions of ‘the Season’ which, as much against the grain for my mother as for me, I was supposed to be having that year. The contrast was exposed, sharply and rather cynically, on the evening I was presented at Court. My grandmother had lent us her Rolls-Royce and her men-servants and my mother and I were sitting in that long cortège which assembles for such occasions in the Mall, dressed in our ostrich feathers and trains. Suddenly Douglas appeared in his macintosh and tennis shoes and jumped in to sit on the little seat between us and the glass panel which divided us from the chauffeur and footman. Perfectly trained, they never even turned their heads, and on that occasion Douglas had only cheered up the long and boring wait and not destroyed the glitter and glamour of Court. … When later, as a journalist, I attended royal ceremonies in Belgrade and Bucharest with considerable detachment, I was glad that I had joined ‘the real world’.3
Although she agreed to be presented, Shiela Grant Duff refused to be ‘brought out’ through the Season’s interminable dances – one of just a tiny handful of aristocratic girls who turned their backs on the Season.
Its tyranny was such that only the most defiant girls dared defy it, as Jessica Mitford explained:
Now must follow, as inevitably as the sun rises, but never sets, on the British Empire, my first London season. There was no real alternative. College was out – impossible to qualify. What was going to happen next? The season might turn out to be fun. After all, one was bound to meet literally hundreds of people; among them there must be a few kindred souls, a few people of my own age also looking for a way out of their own particular fortress.4
Even Jessica could not escape what she calls ‘the specific, upper-class version of the puberty rite’. In the end, she found it interminably boring:
Endless successions of flower-banked ballrooms filled with very young men and women, resembling uniformly processed market produce at its approximate peak, with here and there an overripe or underripe exception…. Smooth, fair, guileless faces, radiating the health bestowed by innumerable fresh-air-filled upbringings in innumerable country houses ; straight or snub features bearing ample evidence of years of rather more than adequate protein and fat consumption. … Opening gambits were generally restricted to two or three subjects: ‘D’you do much riding?’ ‘Do you get up to Scotland much ?’ ‘Care for night-clubs?’ Since, in my case, a truthful reply to any of the three happened to be in the negative, keeping the conversation going usually proved to be uphill work.5
Jessica Mitford proves that, in 1935 at least, it was possible, even for a debutante, to know what was really happening in Germany. That year, The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror was published.
The Brown Book detailed and documented as much as was then known of the revolting cruelties to which the Jews were being subjected in Germany. It contained actual photographs of the bruised and bleeding victims of Nazi sadism, and related in horrifying detail how the new anti-Semitic laws were working out in practice. My parents maintained that the book was Communist-inspired, and that anyway the Jews had brought all this trouble on themselves, apparently by the mere fact of their existence.6
There seem to have been no debs as bold or as open-minded as Jessica in the Season of 1939, but some would have seemed politically unconventional. They included, besides Vivien Mosley, the Hon. Priscilla Brett, the daughter of Viscount Esher ; Rosalind Cubitt – furious at being described in the popular press as ‘Deb of the Year’, a title she despised and disclaimed – and the Hon. Sarah Norton. Priscilla Brett, known by her friends as ‘Pinkie’, analyses what made them different:
Intelligence was not generally sought after in young men. Only, I think, by my little lot. We were all people who liked books and music. Intelligent people rather than not very intelligent people. I don’t think we were typical – I or the rest of my friends. Our group weren’t all debs, for a start, and not all the same age. Quite a lot were older, and certainly one or two were what they then called highbrows. There was a number of much older young men, who used to go to dances because it was rather fun, there was all that frightfully delicious food, and it was very glamorous. The Asquith girls were very much my old friends. They had this amazing governess call
ed Miss Strachey, by whom they were very well educated. And then there were the men like Philip Toynbee, Ben Nicholson, Simon Asquith – he was extraordinary – who went to dances even though they were all older. But that didn’t mean they were part of the Season. But we were very much in a sort of liberal establishment. My father was a Liberal, and all my friends were Communists – just to complicate matters. Philip was definitely Communist … but then again, one wondered how serious he was. But on the whole we were very left. We discussed politics a great deal among ourselves. We all had a feeling that there was going to be a war. It was fairly obvious that it was getting nearer and nearer. I was actually rather a pacifist, unlike everybody else. Most of us were very anti-Munich, but I hated the idea of war altogether.
The last vignette from this unlikely group portrays the chameleon-like figure of Philip Toynbee as he flitted between several worlds:
Philip [writes Jessica Mitford] was our only link, if rather a disreputable one, with the now-estranged world of London society. Although a member of the Communist Party, he still found time to take in a good number of debutante dances during the London season, and he would regale us with accounts of these.
‘Couldn’t you take along a little paper bag and bring us back some of the delicious food?’ we urged. But the most he brought back were bits of juicy gossip about my family and former friends, and stories of what was being said about us.7
Apart from the coming-out dances which now succeeded each other in nightly uniformity – ‘salmon and strawberries; strawberries and salmon’, as one deb recalled with a weary sigh – there were other parties, too, as the Season approached its peak. What can the rest of London have thought, as taxis and private cars disgorged their passengers, to sparkle and giggle briefly outside a hotel or private house before disappearing into the brightly lit, musical mêlée within? Girls barely out of school, their long skirts held delicately above the dusty pavement, escorted by pink-faced young men in starched shirts and tails under the watchful eye of tiara-ed mothers – what did ordinary working people make of such conspicuous consumption? The Hon. Anne Douglas-Scott-Montagu (now Lady Chichester) retains a guilty image from that indulgent summer of:
1939 Page 15
