Country House Society

by Pamela Horn

  But there was a growing number for whom the need to earn cash was the main motivation for their commercial activity. At the beginning of the 1920s Nellie Romilly, Clementine Churchill’s sister, found herself in difficult financial circumstances, with a ‘severely war-wounded husband and two small children’. To help provide for them all, she proposed to open a hat shop. At the end of January 1921 she had found suitable premises for the shop and her brother-in-law, Winston Churchill, agreed to lend her £500, so that she could start her business. A little later, when Nellie was still ‘beset by worries’ he assured her that he would help her to solve them.70

  Similar financial pressures affected Barbara Cartland. Her father was killed in May 1917, leaving his wife and children in very poor circumstances. In 1919 Barbara’s resourceful mother transferred herself and her family from their Edgbaston home to South Kensington, where she opened a wool shop. At the same time, by carefully limiting their outgoings, she was able to give her daughter a modest London Season. Barbara herself earned a little by drawing menu cards for parties. Later, like some of her contemporaries, she opened a hat shop which she called ‘Barbara’. But it soon proved a failure and had to be sold. She then began to write gossip paragraphs for the Daily Express and was befriended by its proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook. He in turn introduced her to some of his influential friends and acquaintances. In 1923 she published her first novel, Jigsaw, which she claimed enjoyed successful publicity because it was written ‘by a socialite who worked’. It earned her the respectable sum of £200, and from that point it was as a writer that she was to earn her living. Eventually she was to publish 723 books, the vast majority of them romantic fiction.71

  Shortage of cash also encouraged Nancy Mitford to take up journalism. Her first contributions took the form of anonymous paragraphs of gossip in one of the Society magazines. She boasted that she had once managed to pay for her train fare to stay with a friend in Scotland ‘by photographing the party for Tatler’. Later she had occasional signed articles accepted by Vogue, such as ‘The Shooting Party: Some Hints for the Woman Guest. By the Hon. Nancy Mitford.’ In March 1929 she told a friend how much money she had made from articles, ‘£22 since Christmas’. Later she claimed to be making £4 4s a week by writing articles and hoped that this would soon enable her to be self-supporting. ‘I regard financial independence as almost the sum of human happiness.’72 In 1930 she was commissioned to write a weekly column for The Lady, at five guineas a week. The magazine had been started by her maternal grandfather in the 1880s. ‘To celebrate this I went out today & bought myself a divine coral tiara’, she reported. As Selina Hastings points out, in her character as ‘The Lady’ Nancy attended the Chelsea Flower Show, the Fourth of June at Eton, the Aldershot Tattoo, and a number of other events. As she told her friend, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, they were ‘sending me to everything free, the Opera, the Shakespeare festival at Stratford, etc. I think I shall get lots of fun out of it.’ With the need to earn money, however, ‘always before her’, and forced to stay in the family home at Swinbrook in Oxfordshire, once the London Season was over, she began to write her first novel. Highland Fling was published in March 1931, and although it attracted little press coverage, it enabled Nancy to earn £90.73 Earlier The Lady had also given her the opportunity to make money in a more unusual way, by selling some of her clothes. These, like those of other members of the family, were made by Gladys, Lady Redesdale’s lady’s maid, and all Nancy had to pay for was the material. She answered an advertisement by a doctor’s wife in The Lady seeking to purchase suitable second-hand clothes. Nancy was able to sell some of her surplus garments for more than they had cost her, while the doctor’s wife, impressed by their superior quality and price, ‘kept asking for more’.74

  Financial motives may have lain behind the many other titled women who ventured into journalism and whose work was castigated by Beverley Nichols. At the time he was himself working in Fleet Street and he wrote critically of the

  astonishing array of obscure countesses, viscountesses and, if the worst came to the worst, wives of baronets, all pontificating with monotonous regularity on the problems of the hour. It mattered not at all that these ladies were, in many cases, barely literate, and that the ideas they were supposed to originate had been put into their empty heads by some member of the reporting staff. The public could not be expected to know that. All they knew was that here was the Countess of X proclaiming to nearly a million readers that the ‘modern girl’ was this, that or the other.75

  Helen Hardinge was among those who took up her pen, writing an article for Vogue on ‘The Child at Home’, in which she pointed out that in the modern nursery the timetable for ‘sleep time’ and ‘meal hours’ was strictly observed. Her correspondence at this time with her mother suggested that in reality she depended heavily on her children’s nanny for their daily care and training.76

  The contents of journals like The Tatler, The Bystander and Vogue confirmed the involvement of many socialites in the fashion trade. In 1927, for example, Vogue mentioned that Olga, Lady Egerton, was the English director of design for the House of Paul Caret of Paris. In London there was Lady Bingham’s chic shop, ‘Rose Bertin’, which was ‘becoming as smart for dresses as it has always been for hats’, while Princess Poutiatine had a ‘charming hat shop’ called ‘Chapka’. But it was Lady Victor Paget’s ‘intimate shop in an old Georgian house in Grafton Street’ that Vogue singled out for special praise. Here Lady Victor herself was almost always present and customers were ‘apt to find nearly everybody else as well’. It was ‘distinguished for its chic and smartness’, with the proprietress herself selecting her gowns and often modelling them as well, as photographs in Vogue confirmed.77 Patrick Balfour, too, was impressed by Lady Victor’s ‘acumen and … capacity for hard work’. Unlike a number of her less dedicated competitors, she was able to build up a successful business, whereas those who were ‘simply playing’ at running a shop ‘soon grew tired of the game’ or found that ‘friends, though they might be the best buyers, were not the best payers’.78 A few women, including the strikingly beautiful Paula Gellibrand, became successful mannequins, and paved the way for other girls, like Nancy Beaton, Cecil Beaton’s sister, to model clothes in Vogue.79

  A remunerative option for a small number of women, like Lady Diana Cooper, was the endorsement of cosmetics or similar products. Patrick Balfour noted that, a few years before, the manufacturers of face creams and the like had found it hard to persuade Society women to advertise their wares. They were not tempted even by the offering of ‘large sums’. But by the end of the 1920s, debutantes were keenly competing ‘for this honour’. The motive was not simply financial. They also revelled in the publicity it brought. ‘She who is invited to advertise “Pond’s” [face cream] has a definite “score” over her less solicited contemporaries.’80

  On a broader basis, as Patrick Balfour also pointed out, while the menfolk had separated their business interests from their social life, their wives and daughters had no such scruples. They took advantage of the chance to bring the two together for their own profit. Accordingly, they resolutely brought ‘trade into Society’. That included conducting business transactions over the luncheon table, perhaps while working on a commission basis for firms hoping to benefit from their social connections and their skill in identifying potential American customers or ‘socially ambitious suburbans’. He then added, rather ruefully,

  Formerly Society was held to be a force in politics; now it is a force only in the retail trade. The two are inextricably intertwined. You can hardly go to a party but what somebody tries to sell you something or to decorate your house … Moreover the most enterprising among the ordinary traders, instead of complaining of the blacklegs of Mayfair, now recognise that Mayfair is a business asset. They encourage social celebrities to superintend their various departments and pay commission to others for the introduction of custom.81

  Another innovation was the adopting of acting as a career by
members of the social elite. Lady Diana Cooper had been a pioneer in this when she starred in her first film, The Great Adventure, in 1922. Soon after she embarked on a lucrative theatrical career, appearing in Max Reinhardt’s spectacle, The Miracle. For this she earned a great deal of money, touring not only in Britain and, more particularly, the United States of America but elsewhere in Europe. Then there were the Ruthven twins, who took on various stage roles, including appearing in Alice in Wonderland at the Golders Green Hippodrome during January 1927.82 Other stage-struck girls included Brenda Dean Paul and Elizabeth Ponsonby who were to gain greater notoriety as leading members of the ‘Bright Young People’ of the 1920s, rather than for their acting abilities. Diana Churchill, Winston and Clementine’s eldest daughter, also aspired to go on the stage at one time and even studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. But she lacked talent and after a time gave up the idea of acting. In the following decade her sister was to nurture similar stage ambitions, to her mother’s evident exasperation. She wrote wearily to a friend that in her opinion neither girl had ‘the slightest talent or even aptitude’ for acting and it was strange that they should have ‘this passionate wish to go on the stage’.83

  Brenda Dean Paul, a baronet’s daughter, was only sixteen when in 1923 she took lessons at the Nancy Price School of acting near to her London home, before moving on briefly to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Act.84 From there she began to tour in repertory during 1924 and 1925, without much success. At that point she formed a relationship with an artist whom she identified only as ‘W’ in her reminiscences. He was ten years her senior and the affair ended in 1927. Brenda then went to Berlin on a vague belief that she had been promised a screen test; there she stayed for three weeks, sampling the bohemian night life of the German capital, before returning to England. As nothing had come of her prospective film career she decided to go to Paris. There she was introduced to cocaine and soon became addicted. On her return to London she took her place as a leader of the ‘bright young things’, acquiring a reputation as ‘a voluptuous girl’ with ‘plenty of sex appeal’. She had a series of lovers, before suffering a miscarriage or an abortion in 1931. After this she became very ill and for the rest of the 1930s she experienced years of poor health brought about by her drug addiction and her chaotic lifestyle.85 As early as November 1931 she received seven summonses for offences against the Dangerous Drugs Act, but managed to escape prison. Instead she was put on probation for three years and went to a nursing home. But the many efforts made to cure her addiction all failed. Even in the 1950s she was still appearing in court for drugs offences and was also making sporadic efforts to revive her stage career. When she was found dead in her Kensington High Street flat in July 1959, it was widely suspected that a drugs overdose was the cause, although the official verdict was that she had died from a heart complaint.86

  Elizabeth Ponsonby, too, learnt the rudiments of acting at a London drama school when she was in her late teens, at the end of the First World War. She then joined the Nottingham Repertory, but failed to make a mark. At first she obstinately refused to accept that she had little hope of a stage career and continued instead to hover on the fringes of the professional theatre. She came forward as a leader of the ‘Bright Young People’ in 1924, when her father became a minister in the first, short-lived, Labour government. His appointment opened up West End opportunities for his daughter and she took various jobs in a revue, as a model, and as a walk-on role in the theatre, for which she was apparently paid £5 a week. But most of all she enjoyed the publicity she gained as a result of the extravagant pranks in which she was involved, to the distress of her highly respectable parents.87

  At the same time other, more solid, career opportunities were opening up for women in such new spheres as interior decorating and garden design. Three names stand out in this connection, namely Syrie Maugham, the estranged wife of the novelist W. Somerset Maugham, Lady Colefax in interior decorating, and Norah Lindsay, also separated from her husband, in garden design. For both Sibyl Colefax and Norah Lindsay, it was financial necessity that drove them to take up a business career, while for Syrie Maugham her work provided some compensation for her unhappy married life, as well as yielding a useful additional income. Syrie’s marriage eventually ended in divorce in 1929.

  Prior to 1914 little attention was paid to interior decorating as a career in Britain, unlike the situation in the United States of America. In this country, therefore, Syrie Maugham was to be a pioneer. Already in April 1919, two years into her marriage, Vogue was featuring photographs of brightly painted chests and tables she had decorated and which were available at her shop, called ‘Syrie’, in Baker Street. Other decorated and painted furniture was also available there. She had opened the shop with a capital of £400 raised partly from her own resources and partly with the help of friends. The business flourished and by 1922 had become firmly established.88 Two years later she moved to larger premises at the corner of Grosvenor Square. Syrie proved an astute businesswoman and was always ready to use her own home to promote sales, to supplement her shop. According to Somerset Maugham himself, she was happy to sell furniture from her drawing room, a policy which he, perhaps not unnaturally, resented.

  However, it was in 1927, when she moved to a new house in King’s Road, Chelsea, that she made her greatest impact. There some art deco furniture was combined with a concentration on white, including white walls and lambskin carpets. ‘With the strength of a typhoon she blew all colour before her,’ declared Cecil Beaton. To that end she ‘bleached, pickled or scraped every piece of furniture in sight’.89 She held a house-warming party for friends in the summer of 1927 but, with an eye to commercial possibilities, she also invited a member of Vogue’s staff, among others. The latter obligingly commented not only on the party’s great success but upon the ‘picture of Mrs Maugham’s white room – white lilies, white peonies, white-shaded lights, and the lovely pale face of our hostess … in sharp contrast as she talked to the two dark negroes who sang their spirituals so wonderfully’, as part of the entertainment.90

  Syrie’s house in Chelsea, as well as her villa at Le Touquet in France, which was completed in 1926 and where the white theme was also adopted, thus became what one writer has described as ‘society showrooms for her wares’. The fact that she was an agreeable hostess as well as a good businesswoman helped her to obtain commissions from clients in Britain and in the United States, most of whom were attracted by her signature theme of white. At the same time she began to open shops in America, the first of them in Chicago in 1926. Others soon followed in New York, Palm Beach and Los Angeles. For much of the 1920s Syrie spent six months of each year in London and the remaining six months in America, interspersed with visits to France.91

  Mrs Maugham was comfortably off, and she pursued her business career energetically for reasons of personal satisfaction and to support her daughter, Liza, rather than from real financial necessity. That was not true of Lady Colefax. Her home in King’s Road, Chelsea, had always been admired for its elegance and impeccable taste, avoiding any appearance of clutter. Even her critics conceded that. For much of her married life, up to the early 1920s, she had always been comfortably off, relying on her husband’s income as a patents lawyer to bring in the substantial sum of around £20,000 a year. However, with the downturn in trade in the 1920s this became problematic, and the situation was made worse by the fact that Sir Arthur Colefax’s increasing deafness made it impossible for him to continue with his legal practice. In 1928, therefore, Sibyl found herself with a small income and many outgoings. She decided she must turn her amateur talent for interior decorating to commercial use. To this end she took a room on the first floor of a friend’s property in Bruton Street where she worked initially in collaboration with the antique dealers, Stair and Andrew.92 At first she operated on a one-person basis, ‘undertaking all the visiting, the measuring … climbing ladders, supervising plumbing’ and carrying out a host of other tasks from nine in the morning
until six or seven at night. Then in 1929 came a further severe blow. Her elder son, Peter, who was working in the United States and who had invested the Colefaxes’ limited savings on the American stock market, found it was all lost in the Wall Street Crash of October in that year.93