I was always very shy and conscious that I didn’t move in the grandest of circles. On top of that, I didn’t have brothers, so getting partners was always rather an anxiety. In spite of that I enjoyed some of the dances enormously. It’s an interesting thing to have done – I saw another side of life – and people were never snobbish, never; just friendly and giggly and rather fun. I got to know quite a few people, including some men, but nobody I really broke my heart over.
Mary was one of the girls – there must have been many – who resented the constant chaperonage.
One just didn’t ‘go too far’ – I wouldn’t have dreamt of it – yet this business of being supervised everywhere was taken to ridiculous lengths. I remember at eighteen arranging to meet a friend from Heathfield, where I’d been to school. We met at Charing Cross and then went next door to Lyons’ Corner House. To my horror, when I looked around, I saw one of our maids sitting at another table. My mother had sent her to chaperone me … I was furious. But more than that: it actually made me rather frightened. One had heard of the white slave traffic, and that sort of supervision made you feel that it must be a real threat. In fact, nobody ever laid a finger on me, and I never heard of it happening.
If, at worst, the need for a chaperone to guard against nameless predators was frightening, even at its best it was often absurd. Mollie Acland recalls being invited to a small but very elegant dance at which – for once – chaperones were not present:
My mother was hesitant about letting me go, but she sent me in our car (a very ancient Rolls with a ladder up to the roof) with our head chauffeur Moore and strict instructions that he must bring me home.
Well, at about 4a.m. Peter (now my husband) remembered that he had to go to work next day, so we went to find Moore and Peter told him he was going to walk me home. Moore was very firm. ‘Her Ladyship instructed me to bring you back, so get in, Miss Mollie.’ I said, ‘Oh Moore, it’s only a few hundred yards … let me just walk home this time.’ Moore said, ‘You’ll stick to the pavement then?’ ‘Oh yes/ So Peter and I walked home to Upper Grosvenor Street, not even arm-in-arm, with Moore following behind at a snail’s pace with the headlights full on all the way !
Not for a moment was a girl allowed to be alone. Anne Douglas-Scott-Montagu recalls the horror that greeted her announcement that she had travelled to a party by bus:
That’s something which my cousin Barbara and I laugh about now. Her mother had organized some party in a big house just off South Audley Street that they’d rented, I think just for the Season. So I found my way there by bus – I used to go everywhere by bus during the day, because I had quite a small allowance and my mother was very, very careful about money. And when I arrived at the door, Lady Wharncliffe said to me, ‘But who’s brought you?’ And I said, ‘Oh, nobody’s brought me.’ So she said, ‘You came alone? In a taxi?’ So I said, ‘No, no I didn’t … I came on the bus.’ And she was even more horrified … to think that my mother could have let me come alone on a bus across London, to their house … she didn’t think that was at all the form. And yet I didn’t resent that a bit. I never thought it was odd.
Apart from being the peak of the house-party season, mid-June was also a time when most sporting events seemed to take place. The International Horse Show had opened on 15 June, and continued for the next ten days. The London Grass Court Championships began at Queen’s on 19 June, to be followed shortly by Wimbledon. The RAF Rifle Meeting began on the same day, at Bisley. The two-day race meeting at Sandown Park was imminent, as was the first Test Match against the West Indies at Lords.
Ascot provided a great excuse for house-parties – at Cliveden especially – but they happened every weekend throughout the summer. They were the fétes champêtres of the Season. There must have been something pre-ternaturally beautiful about the great houses and gardens of England then as, full-blown, like a carefully tended rose at the very height of summer, they trembled on the edge of the moment when they would fade and decay. Roses were lovelier then … old varieties grafted on to old stock; not yet rendered garish or unperfumed by crossing with too many hybrids. Gardeners were still plentiful, with six or eight at least to look after the gardens of private houses ; and in the midst of the grand gardens lay the great country houses, also poised on the brink of change. Today, many no longer exist; while many more have been converted into schools, old people’s homes or time-share properties.
House-parties were given for a number of reasons apart from straightforward hospitality. They were a way of asserting the intimacy of a group of friends, or of deciding whether to admit a new member. They could be used to throw two people together for longer than just an evening, affording them a better opportunity to get to know each other. They could even be used to test the social skills of a new girl. She might be very presentable across a dinner-table or in the familiar setting of a dance, but would she – or, for that matter, he – stand up to scrutiny over a whole weekend ? Were clothes, manners, even sporting prowess up to scratch? But most often a house-party was simply an opportunity to get away to the country after the rigours of a week in London.
In spite of this, the conventions that governed it were still narrow. Rhoda Walker-Heneage-Vivian has vivid memories of those weekends:
Oh yes, they were enormous fun. People arrived by car with lots of luggage as we had to change for dinner every night (three different dresses) and needed tennis things, etc. The proverbial huge breakfast under silver dish-covers was served, and then something planned for the morning – usually walks to somewhere or a trip into the nearest town. After lunch (again huge, with a starter, hot meat, cold meats, pudding and cheese … heaven knows where we put it all!) we played tennis or croquet or swam in someone’s pool or rode someone’s horses. Dinner was formal, with seating arrangements, taking turns for a seat by one’s host (the girl’s father) and after dinner billiards, gossip over the coffee cups (no dirt!) or indoor games. Sometimes we’d dance to records. One game we played was called Truths and consisted of awkward questions being asked, which you were sworn to answer truthfully! Bed at about 11p.m. There was corridor-creeping – in my case only once, when I recall lying in a sort of Madame Récamier pose on the divan and talking until 3a.m. to a charming man in the Hussars who groped occasionally round the bosom area and I thought I was being very daring!
During the Season we had three big house-parties in Wales for Easter and Whitsun, spent lying on the beach, mostly. We also organized Scavenger Hunts and roped in local friends. These were motorized treasure hunts with an almost impossible list of objects to find in pairs and get home first. I remember borrowing a policeman’s helmet and catching a live wasp in a match box and wildly searching for a tabby cat. There were more house parties in July and August when the Season ended, until war stopped it all.
One unchanging feature of country-house parties was an institution simply called The Game. It had certainly been around in the last decade of Victoria’s reign, made popular by the fiendish mental agility of the Souls, that unusual set of late-Victorian aristocrats. The Game (pronounced as though it were all one word, like M’tutor – Th’Game) had no other name and no rigid rules. Lady Anne Fitzroy (now Lady Anne Mackenzie) describes the version she used to play:
You have two teams in separate rooms and each team must select a subject for every member of the other team: let’s say about eight. Then you all sit round in one room, and one by one your opponents are taken aside and their subject is whispered to them, and they have to act it. If their team guesses it correctly, they get a point, and at the end the one with the most points wins. There are variations, like whether you are allowed to use standard gestures to indicate whether you are acting out the title of a book (both hands exposed, palms upwards) or a film (hand turns imaginary projector beside head). It could vary from the easy to the almost impossible – from Gone with the Wind to Full Fathom Five, depending how skilled the players were.
Certain families had games which were peculiar to themselves,
which they always played and which they made their guests play.
These indoor games, a hangover from the Victorian and Edwardian craze for esoteric acting games or elaborate word games, were a favourite pastime at country-house parties; though Lord Haig recalls that he eventually got bored with them:
We usually played those sort of games when we were staying with the Buccleuchs. I was always very bad at it because you had to be a bit inventive. You’d all be sitting round and you had to think of the name of a painter beginning with A and all that sort of thing; or else there were acting games – a sort of glorified charades. When I was younger I played Sardines and Murder, but one had slightly matured into less boisterous games – after all, in 19391 was twenty-one – past the Sardine age!
I remember a lot of large, marvellous weekend parties in those days, with people like the Moynes and the Buccleuchs. Not so much as part of the deb scene – it was a way of being in touch with a lot of the political figures. I saw quite a lot of Philip Sassoon at that time, and had interesting weekends at Trent and Lympne with people like Churchill and Eden and Morrison sitting round the table discussing the difficult problems which faced the country at that time. Probably there wouldn’t have been many young girls there. But those happened with great regularity, and of course it was all backed up with marvellous breakfasts and footmen and every comfort ; lovely games of tennis – idyllic places to live in. But it absolutely depended on having a large retinue of servants. … It’s gone out now, I think.
It certainly has. Who could now afford the splendour that Lord Boothby describes at Lympne ?
all set against a background of mingled luxury, simplicity and informality, brilliantly contrived. The beautifully proportioned red brick house, the blue bathing pool surrounded by such a profusion of lilies that the scent at night became almost overpowering, the flamingoes and ducks, the banks of exquisite flowers in the drawing room, the red carnation and the cocktail on one’s dressing-table before dinner, were each and all perfect of their kind.12
Debs had to observe certain rigid conventions before they might accept an invitation to a weekend away. Sarah Norton, who was very beautiful and popular, was invited to many that summer:
Country-house weekends were very important and one did them regularly. The hostess always had to write to your mother first, asking if she could invite you. Lots of us would go – there would be fourteen, eighteen or sometimes even more in the party. I remember Michael Astor inviting me to Cliveden, and I had to say no, I can’t, not unless your mother writes to my mother. At Cliveden in the summer we used to take out the boats or play tennis; swimming pools didn’t really exist much. In the evenings we used to play games – especially The Game. We also played Murder and Sardines. There were slips of paper and you all drew one and if you were the murderer you didn’t tell anyone. Then you all went off and disappeared and hid in cupboards or under beds or behind curtains and then the murderer struck and somebody was the detective and had to discover who the murderer was; and he – the murderer – was the only person who was allowed to lie. Sardines was a great excuse for flirting – though we were incredibly circumspect. Sex was something we didn’t understand at all.
A number of these weekends were organized around a dance, since a few debs chose not to give their coming-out parties in London, but at their own homes in the country. Sonia Denison has hazy memories of one of the best dances that summer:
I was staying in a house-party, I can’t now remember where, but it was all arranged for one of the most wonderful balls in an enormous house – that I can remember well – miles and miles of passages. What normally happened is that your mother would send you with a maid, and she would unpack for you and look after you. Then you would go up and change for dinner, and your dress – perhaps tulle, or a satin dress with a great skirt – would be laid out for you. Then there’d be an enormous dinner-party at about half-past eight. The actual dance would start about eleven, with people arriving from other house-parties all around. The dance would go on until all hours – four or five in the morning, with everyone marvellously dressed. We did wear lovely clothes. There’d be two bands, and more wonderful food, and no chaperones – not in the country – the people we were staying with looked after us.
Those were the summer parties ; in the winter things were less formal, in Susan Meyrick’s experience: ‘I went to the country-house parties for the Hunt Balls, usually in Northamptonshire or Gloucestershire. After the ball we usually went to the meet next morning. It was all much more relaxed – the men would wear dinner jackets ; dinner was at 8 p.m. and we did not get up very early in the morning!’ One weekend right at the end of the summer, when the official Season was over, remains Mollie Acland’s outstanding memory of that year:
Our summer home was at Seaview, Isle of Wight. We needed young men for the house-party and also to sail and crew in the regattas. So I asked my favourite from the Season, Peter Tabor, to join us there with his younger brother for the last week in August. One evening we went to a party at Bern-bridge – I was wearing my black and white taffeta dress – and there on the beach we decided we were definitely meant for each other. But that’s another story … starting 9 December, 1939, and still going strong!
As Lord Haig pointed out, the servants were the sine qua non of this lavish hospitality. They were the worker bees who made things hum. Many of the young people of the time insist that their servants were well treated and had good lives – ‘better than working in a factory or a shop, certainly’. It is clear from their accounts that they were often devoted to their family servants ; but, however friendly the relationship between servants and children, they were not, and never could be, friends. An unbridgeable social chasm lay between them. Friendship demands equality, and servants and masters, though they were mutually dependent, were never equal.
The helplessness of people used to being waited on hand and foot is extraordinary. One young man, on first living by himself in London, said to his mother: ‘But who will turn down my bed for me, or answer the telephone when it rings?’ He literally could not imagine doing these things for himself.
Some of the debs were beginning to feel uneasy about the difference between their lives and that of the servants who looked after them. Ann Schuster, although only seventeen at the time, was one:
I do remember feeling guilty about our huge staff at home. My mother had her personal maid ; I had a personal maid to look after my clothes who was my age, and I used to feel terribly guilty when she said, ‘What are you going to wear?’ and then, ‘Ooh, isn’t it lovely?’ and I knew she’d never been to a dance. I think a social conscience was just beginning to arise. I did have one sweet boyfriend who was very badly off and really did come along for the evenings just to get a meal. He was about the only one who didn’t have a car, and used to whistle along on buses, and I think he gave me very much the other point of view. I saw this world and it was tough. But otherwise, one had led such a sheltered life – none of my grandchildren or even children could ever believe that I could be so sheltered.
The size of the establishments kept by upper-class families varied according to their wealth and the size and number of their houses. There cannot be anyone in Britain today, with the exception perhaps of two or three royal households, who lives in the style of dozens of the great families in 1939, while those same great families now maintain hardly a quarter – often a tenth – as many servants as they did fifty years ago. Between the wars only some 5 per cent of private households had a resident domestic at all ; but the families whose daughters were presented at Court would certainly have fallen within that 5 per cent. For them, even those with a relatively modest middle-class background, half a dozen servants would have been considered the minimum necessary to run a house. The basic six would have been a cook-housekeeper, a nanny or, later, a governess, a couple of housemaids, probably a ladies’ maid, and a chauffeur/handyman. No lady expected to do her own housework, and few knew how to, let alone how to cook. The famil
ies from which the debs were drawn would have had between eight and a dozen servants as a rule – even if this subjected them to personal hardship. In Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934), Lady Brenda Last says,
Do you know how much it costs just to live here? We should be quite rich if it wasn’t for that. As it is we support fifteen servants indoors, besides gardeners and carpenters and a night-watchman and all the people at the farm and odd little men constantly popping in to wind the clock and cook the accounts and clean the moat….
The great aristocratic households were run by many more people. Lady Astor’s personal maid, Rose Harrison, gives a table showing the hierarchy of staff kept at the Astors’ five houses and it totals 127. Even allowing for the fact that servants’ wages were low in those days (hence the increasing difficulty of hiring them), the cost of feeding, housing, paying and buying uniforms for all these people was immense. Yet in some respects Lady Astor could be mean. She took on Rose as her maid in 1928 at a salary of £75 a year. Six years later Rose – who had discovered by that time that the job was for eighteen hours a day, seven days a week – asked for a rise, and was given an extra £5 a year. Stung by this – for it amounted to 3d a day – she never asked again; and was never offered an increase in her remaining twenty-six years of service.
Similarly, Chatsworth – one of several houses belonging to the Duke of Devonshire – was still run in 1939 by a staff of over fifty, of whom forty lived on the premises. Here too wages were not generous. A housekeeper earned between £100 and £140 a year, depending on the size of the house she had to run (this would be £2,000-£2,800 in today’s money); a housemaid between £35 and £45 (£700-£900 would be the modern equivalent). While it is true that all their living expenses were paid for them, living in the house had a number of disadvantages. It was almost impossible for servants to have a truly private life. Love-affairs and marriages among servants were discouraged, so although they sometimes happened nevertheless, it was in the face of opposition, and they were forced to keep their relationships secret. The Duchess of Devonshire writes about the 1930s in the household she married into in 1941:
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