Churchill, of course, was also at the ball that night, and Mollie Acland remembers him:
I ‘sat out’ – i.e. walked about – one dance with a rather blasé young would-be politician and on the terrace were Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, chatting and smoking. ‘Oh,’ said my partner, ‘look at that poor old has-been. My father says he’s still a potential trouble-maker, but he won’t get any more public life now!’ And this was in July ’39!
Back to the younger members of the family. And perhaps the youngest to attend that night was Lady Sarah’s middle sister, Lady Caroline: ‘My recollections are rather hazy as you can imagine – the sixteen-year-old sister being allowed to attend the ball and being mortified that my dress was the same colour and the same material as my sister’s but a totally different style. I can remember that they were yellow organza; hers rather décolletée and my one high at the neck with a ruffle.’ Memory is hazy. Lady Sarah is convinced that her dress was in cream satin, a quite different material from her sister’s; though she does agree that it was décolletée: so much so that her mother insisted on raising the neckline so as to cover more of her bosom. It was the most splendid of her four ballgowns from Worth, and to see her, fifty years later, rise to sketch its outline with her hands – a wide fanning movement around the shoulders to indicate the ruffle, a long smoothing gesture down the hips to demonstrate its narrowness – convinces one that it was very splendid indeed.
Lady Sarah’s closest friend was Lady Elizabeth Scott, who was of course at Blenheim that night, and who retains an almost dream-like impression of its beauty:
The dances in the country stand out in one’s mind as being the most fun of all. Blenheim and Hever in particular were wonderful: floodlighting and music and the lights in the garden and amongst trees and shrubs, making them magical, romantic and memorable. I was particularly lucky as most of my parents’ friends lived in lovely houses – which would now be known as stately homes – and we went willingly to these dances, which were exceptional parties given by people one knew. There was so much going on that summer that my parents didn’t even consider giving a ball for me! I was only seventeen and they probably decided to wait a bit. The whole summer seemed to be given up to having a good time. I was very lucky to have come out then, as I was younger than most of my friends and might easily have been kept educating for another year.
Lindsey Furneaux had had an exceptionally tiring summer, for as well as going to a good many dances she was also busy training to be a nurse at Colchester Hospital during the day:
I remember driving to Oxford to stay at Charlton with my aunt Lady Birkenhead and going to Blenheim for the dance. I was dead – really dead. I sat there collapsed over an armchair and Sacheverell Sitwell came up to me and said, ‘What would you like to do?’ and I said, ‘I’d like you to show me the pictures here.’ And he was so divine – I can’t tell you how sweet he was – and he showed me all round the house and told me all about the pictures and I didn’t dance at all, and that was heaven!
That evening – night, really, since the dance went on until dawn broke over the lake – was remarkable for many things. One was the fact that it was the last occasion in England when footmen, wearing eighteenth-century Marlborough livery, powdered their wigs. This archaic procedure was loathed by the men themselves, for powdering took hours to do and even longer to undo. The fine white powder (usually flour from the kitchen) drifted everywhere, getting under their collars and making their necks itch, and since water had been added to make it adhere, it dried solid and felt unnatural. But it was undeniably grand. It was a refinement of grandeur indeed, abandoned even for Court Balls; and it never happened in England again at a private dance.
Yes [says Anne Douglas-Scott-Montagu] I remember them all in their footmen’s uniform: knee breeches, and the Marlborough livery – I think it was blue and yellow. It was a wonderful dance, it really was. I remember dancing, dancing … masses of waltzes, in that huge room. I also remember that on all the marble statues all down the long passage to the front door, people had draped coats: fox fur stoles and capes and scarves, all draped on the statues all the way down the passage.
I also remember this enormous organ, in the room we danced in towards the library – I’m not sure what the room was called – but there was this huge room with an organ painted white and it looked exactly like an iced sugar cake, with all the candles, which were the organ pipes. And Sarah enjoyed herself enormously. She was very energetic, full of energy and enthusiasm and fun. She wasn’t at all beautiful but she was a terrific character: most amusing. Very tall and thin.
The only sad thing about that party was that halfway through it poured with rain. They’d had an outdoor floor put down, all floodlit, and some of the band were going to play outside, in the garden. But we never could dance out there, it was too wet, and everything had to be brought in.
Others who were there have forgotten the rain entirely; they only remember the magic. Rosamund Neave says, ‘Fantastic. It was fantastic. At a certain moment – at eleven o’clock or something, Sarah pressed a button and suddenly the whole of Blenheim was floodlit. Oh, fantastic!’
Few people except the victims, realized that Blenheim was the scene of a burglary that night. Lady Sarah Churchill, however, can remember it all too well:
Then of course we had the big problem at that party … that big burglary. The ball sort of rather backlashed. Quite a lot of fur coats disappeared. The cloakroom was in the present dining-room at Blenheim and all I know was that one lady went to go home and she couldn’t find her coat so she thought someone else had taken it by mistake. But then it got to be bad, with more people missing their coats and in the end – I don’t remember exactly, but the figure seventeen seems to ring a bell. The police came in – I can’t recall how it was cleared up but it was all over the headlines the next day. Somebody was definitely in there, because they’d picked out all the best coats. So it rather backlashed as a party and we were all very upset.
I remember the sun rising, the big doors open – it was five or six in the morning and we were all going to bed and everything had gone so beautifully except that, boom, all these coats were gone.
Here, finally, is Chips Channon’s bedazzled account of the ball:
In the afternoon I drove to Weston to stay with the Sitwells for the Blenheim Ball, which was stupendous. I have seen much, travelled far, and am accustomed to splendour, but there has never been anything like tonight. The palace was floodlit, and its grand baroque beauty could be seen for miles. The lakes were floodlit too and, better still, the famous terraces, they were blue and green and Tyroleans walked about singing; and although there were seven hundred people or even more, it was not in the least crowded. It was gay, young, brilliant, in short, perfection. I was loathe to leave, but did so at about 4.30 and took one last look at the baroque terraces with the lake below, and the golden statues and the great palace. Shall we ever see the like again? Is such a function not out of date? Yet it was all of the England that is supposed to be dead and is not. There were literally rivers of champagne.3
Behind such lavish displays of ancestral pride and social magnificence, the debutantes remained very young girls, anxious to please and be pleased and well able to enjoy simpler pleasures. This extract from Elizabeth Leveson-Gower’s diary of the weekend at Blenheim describes what happened after the huge, waterlogged marquee had been taken down and the house began to return to its normal weekend state (if Blenheim Palace could ever be described as normal – or, indeed, as a house):
Saturday, 8 July: Got up at 1 o’clock. Raining. Played backgammon. Went to film in Oxford by bus. Had to miss the end. Played sardines. Sunday, 9 July: Church. Played tennis. Elizabeth swam and we were all thrown into the pool in our clothes.
It sounds much like the aftermath of any other dance. Midnight strikes and the coach turns into a pumpkin. The fairy lights are taken down, the fairy-tale is over, and life goes on.
There was, however, one authentic
Cinderella figure whose elusive shadow flits in and out of the Season, occasionally glimpsed, never there for long. No one remembers her, and she cannot be found in any of the reference books through whose columns the upper class trace one another’s passage through life. Her name was Doreen Davison, and she was the protegee, that Season, of Lady St John of Bletso.
There is a studio portrait of Doreen reproduced in the Tatler for 19 July. It was taken by Paul Tanqueray, a brilliant photographer of the inter-war decades who was a precursor of Cecil Beaton and many other Society photographers. The lighting is masterly; the modelling of the face is undoubtedly flattering. Even allowing for all that, it is a handsome, brooding, intelligent face. Doreen has intense dark eyes with thick lashes; good features; and heavy but expert make-up. More than most girls of that Season, she looks mature and intriguing, a girl whom one would like to know better. Yet she has apparently vanished. No one from the debs of 1939 knows her today and not even the people who were pictured in the Bystander sitting out at her dance can remember her. One has to assume that she was the archetypal nouveau riche, whose mother (named once, and once only, as Mrs Malcolm Arbuthnot) hoped that her striking looks could lead, perhaps, to a titled husband. There could be no other reason for her parents paying – reputedly – £2,000 (£40,000 today) and then retiring from the scene for the whole summer, leaving their daughter in the plump hands of Lady St John of Bletso. For Lady St John did not do things by halves. She took a girl into her own home at Ennismore Gardens in South Kensington; lodged her, groomed her, chose her dresses, took her to mums’ lunches and girls’ teas, and with exemplary thoroughness launched her into Society … for three months. After that, the girl was on her own. Back she went to her parents, with an address book full of names and telephone numbers and half a dozen less than pristine ball dresses.
Lady St John had slipped up badly when she chose the date of Doreen’s coming-out dance. The debutantes who had been at Blenheim would have been scattered around several different house-parties afterwards, and must have exchanged their various memories of the evening as soon as they met up again at Doreen’s dance on the evening of Monday, 10 July. Doreen herself, who was not at Blenheim, had to sit and listen to them comparing notes, knowing that her own dance paled into insignificance beside the splendour of the Marlborough ball. However, Lady St John delivered the goods as far as press coverage was concerned. Both the Tatler and the Bystander carried a number of pictures of Doreen’s dance (unfortunately, in more than one case, they are the same pictures) and these show a handful of younger guests sitting out rather glumly on deckchairs, as well as rather too large a proportion of much older people. There is one of Doreen, flanked by two young guests. None of them looks vivacious. That evening is the first and last time that Doreen’s part in the Season is acknowledged by anyone. One hopes that she – like most of her contemporaries – derives some satisfaction from telling her grandchildren that she was there.
In the middle of that same week two final Courts were held on the 12th and 13th for the last of the year’s 1,657 presentations to the King and Queen. The Court on 12 July was the smarter of the two and Lady Sarah Churchill remembers her mother’s chagrin that a last-minute bout of illness forced her to make her curtsey at the second and final of the year’s five Courts, where she knew nobody. Certainly the Fourth Court included many of the crème de la crème of that year’s debutantes: Lady Elizabeth Scott, in a silver lamé dress with a train of white net edged with silver, was presented by her mother, the Duchess of Buccleuch. Elizabeth Leveson-Gower in an Empire dress of pale satin trimmed with pearls, and a matching train, was presented by her aunt, the Duchess of Sutherland. Lady Alexandra Metcalfe presented Vivien Mosley, wearing white tulle embroidered with pale gold leaf, with a gold lamé train; and Eunice Kennedy was presented by Mrs J.P.Kennedy under the auspices of the diplomatic corps in an ivory tulle crinoline. We know exactly what they all wore, because The Times printed six and a half full columns the following day, inserted by the dressmakers, giving details. Reading them is like counting sheep. White taffettà (over) … cream silk (over) … white net (oops) … pale blue chiffon (over) … enlivened all too rarely by a spectacular and endearing piece of vulgarity like the mother who wore ‘a train lined with turquoise chiffon to match her jewellery’. The Throne Room must have been a shimmering tribute to the products of the British Empire, as mothers and daughters glided and dipped, their heads bobbing with ostrich feathers, their bosoms (well, the mothers’ bosoms, at any rate: the girls wore pearls) palpitating with diamonds.
At the Fifth Court Lady Sarah Churchill and her mother, both dressed by Worth, were the lonely stars of an otherwise low-key collection of debutantes. And, with them, the last of the presentations of 1939 was over: not for a year, as most people must have assumed, but for seven years. They were suspended during the war, resumed in 1947, and discontinued for ever in 1958. The pre-war evening Courts, held at 9.30 p.m. and followed by a light buffet, were also abandoned, which meant that debs no longer wore evening dress, but day dresses with hats. The change from the elaborate, archaic uniform of Prince of Wales feathers, long train, long dress and white gloves symbolized the change in the Season itself. The days of ornate excess were over; austerity was imposed by the exigencies of the forties and fifties, and with it a recognition that the display of wealth and privilege was inappropriate in post-war Britain. There was food and petrol-rationing for the first few years, and even fashion took some time to shake off the simplicity of uniform and return, with Dior’s New Look of 1948, to full-blown, full-skirted, tight-waisted glamour.
On Friday, 14 July, there appeared in The Times a half-page advertisement with the almost incredible headline: ‘Germany Land of Hospitality’ . Germany, it said, ‘offers everything you could wish for your holiday this year’, with 2,000 miles of unique Autobahn, numerous exhibitions and festivals – including an opera festival at Munich from 29 July to 10 September – and (towards the bottom, in rather small print) Vienna, which most English people probably still thought of as being in Austria. All these pleasures could be had at a bargain price: 60 per cent reduction on rail tickets purchased outside Germany, and 40–50 per cent currency savings for people who made use of ‘travel Marks’. Southern Bavaria, the area which Hitler made his holiday base, promised ‘rest and enjoyment for everyone’.
One is aghast at the naivety, both of the German Railways Board, which placed the advertisement, and of those people who – presumably – took advantage of the proffered reductions. One is mildly aghast at The Times for accepting the advertisement. War was now seven weeks away: did people really think a holiday in Germany was desirable? Maybe they did. Chips Channon, who as an mp had no excuse for ignorance of the situation, wrote in his diary on 11 July: ‘The war seems a little more remote; perhaps it will never come; it seems less of a reality, perhaps because there is no news. …’4 Many people still believed that, if Danzig were conceded, war could be averted. They wrote letters to The Times to that effect. Britain’s pledge to Poland was not taken seriously, and few believed that the present Cabinet would honour it. As long as Churchill and Eden remained outside the Cabinet, Hitler had no reason to believe it either. The London Evening Star wrote: ‘Those who know the Nazi psychology best say that the return of Mr Churchill and Mr Eden to the Cabinet would do more than a hundred speeches to convert the Nazis to a belief in the sincerity of our intentions.’
Meanwhile men and arms continued to pour into Danzig from Germany, and the British pact with Russia in defence of neutral and independent states inched no nearer to agreement. There were no sound reasons for optimism, but people have an inveterate tendency to hope for the best. As the Tatler put it on 12 July, ‘Despite the none-too-good news from Europe the social racket still goes gaily on and quite right too, for what is the use of squealing before you are hurt?’
From mid-July onwards the London Season was winding down. The rest of the month was marked by a series of sporting events, beginning with the Eton and Har
row two-day match at Lords on 14 and 15 July. This annual event had been a feature of the debs’ summer for nearly a century. It reached its culmination in the years immediately before the First World War, when playing for one’s school and fighting for one’s country were seen as two manifestations of the same set of values. Both embodied unthinking loyalty/patriotism, team/regimental spirit; athletic/military prowess dedicated to a common cause. The Eton and Harrow match was played by clean-cut young sportsmen in symbolically pristine white (the literal opposite of the Blackshirts), embodying the traditional rivalry between England’s two top public schools.
Few debs – whatever their brothers’ past triumphs – were greatly interested in the game of cricket. The two days at Lords were largely taken up with strolling around the ground, meeting friends and relatives, or sitting in coaches on the Mound. Their clothes were, as usual, described at length in The Times. Christian Grant sums up what it was like:
It was great fun because one was still very young and of course a lot of the boys one was going out with were eighteen or so and had probably only just left either Eton or Harrow. Eton figured pretty large among the people who were around at deb dances, and one saw lots of people. At Lords you can walk all the way round the big circle, so you walked round clockwise for a bit and then you turned round and walked back anti-clockwise, so you were quite sure of seeing everybody who was there, one way or another. Unless they turned round at the same time! I don’t think, frankly, we took much notice of the cricket. I think one pretended to if one was with somebody who had been a dry-bob at Eton or had been in the Eleven or something. But I was mortified when Harrow won, because all my family was at Eton. Probably if that was happening I wasn’t allowed to watch.
1939 Page 24
