by Pamela Horn
screams resounded in the brilliantly lighted square … The guests were dressed as babies in long clothes, Girl Guides, Boy Scouts, nurses. They had comforters in their mouths and carried toy boats, dolls, pails and spades. An attempt was made to take the donkeys into the house. They were led up the steps, a butler pushing them from behind. Late in the evening the crowd was scattered by the violent ringing of a fire-bell. It was only some of the Bright Young People arriving in a taxi-cab. Cocktails were served in nursery mugs, and the ‘bar’ was a babies’ pen.36
By this time, however, people were growing tired of such ‘immature, vulgar’ behaviour, as one newspaper critic put it, while another declared it was the type of conduct which ‘leads to Communism’.37 The Bystander’s correspondent also expressed irritation, declaring that when she discovered that she was expected to attend in ‘a short dress and socks’, she had jibbed, ‘because I am rather tired of “freak” parties’. She also condemned the Circus Party, which had been organised by the dress designer Norman Hartnell shortly beforehand, and which had involved live animals, as well as various sideshows and dancing to a circus orchestra: ‘the wolves looked so unhappy … I don’t think you should have live animals at parties, because animals hate being made fools of.’38 Brian Howard, meanwhile, had perpetrated what his biographer described as one of his ‘less admirable jokes’ by having several invitations ‘professionally “forged” so that he and his uninvited friends could go’ to the Circus Party.39 But once they had arrived they found it little to their liking and soon departed.
One of the last of these wild parties, held in 1931, ended in disaster. It was called a White Party because the host, a man named Sandy Baird, who held it in a big barn attached to his mother’s country house in Kent, insisted ‘on an all-white theme. A band came down from London’ and everyone attending duly wore white. However, there was a quarrel towards the end of the party involving some of the guests, and one young man drove off recklessly, with the former Elizabeth Ponsonby, now Elizabeth Pelly, as a passenger. He crashed the car and was killed, although the badly shaken Elizabeth was unhurt. It made headlines in all the newspapers, and the accident helped to ‘sober up the Bright Young People more than any amount of adult disapproval’.40
Meanwhile, Elizabeth, who had only married in 1929, was already contemplating separation from her weak and ineffectual husband, Denis Pelly. In the event she divorced him soon after, on the grounds of his adultery, with the decree nisi granted in 1933. By this time she was already drinking heavily, to her father’s despair. Indeed, as early as December 1929 Arthur Ponsonby noted in his diary, ‘Elizabeth and Denis’s affairs must necessarily darken everything and oppress us … I cannot see any way out at the moment.’41
As Patrick Balfour sourly pointed out, by the late 1920s every ‘ill-bred escapade of the younger generation’ was being attributed to the Bright Young People, even when it was carried out by some of their hangers-on. They were being judged by the ‘later and viler manifestations’ of their unorthodox behaviour rather than by their earlier displays of romantic independence.42 But by 1929 the mood within Society generally was darkening, as economic problems mounted and as the feckless conduct and rowdy drunkenness displayed by some members of the bright young set increasingly jarred with the prevailing public mood.
The End of an Era
The growing unemployment in the 1920s, while not directly affecting most members of the social elite did, nevertheless, cast a blight over their activities. Loelia Ponsonby for one found some of the extravagant events being organised increasingly unpalatable, although, as she confessed, it was she and her brother who in November 1926 had initiated the ‘bottle-party’. It was at a time when their parents were away, and the large family drawing room with its parquet floor seemed a perfect venue for a dance. But, as usual, the Ponsonbys were short of cash, so they decided to ask ‘the girls to bring the food and the men the drink’. It all worked out very well. ‘On arrival each guest was relieved of a discreet parcel which was unpacked and laid out in the dining-room.’ The novelist Michael Arlen even arrived with a dozen bottles of pink champagne. The music for dancing was provided, rather amateurishly, by the guests themselves strumming on the piano. Later there was an impromptu one-man cabaret show.43 The idea proved so successful, especially at a time of increasing austerity, that it was taken up by other hosts and hostesses. Unfortunately, as the years went by the ‘bottle parties’ became rowdier until they degenerated in some cases into drunken, drug-driven orgies. Gatecrashing became increasingly common at the larger parties, while some events ended in fights. Allanah Harper, one of the Bright Young People, who had been to school with Zita Jungman and was a close friend of Cecil Beaton, became a victim of this. She described finding herself at one of David Tennant’s parties ‘in the middle of a jealous fracas … which … resulted in my dress being practically torn off and tufts of my hair held up as trophies.’44 After that, she ‘never went to parties of this kind again’.
Beaton himself also commented on the bad manners and arrogance of some of the girls. ‘If an unfavoured young man came up to talk to them, they would sit silently staring at their baffled victim and then suddenly burst into derisive laughter.’ At country house parties, ‘their highly powered motor cars were not infrequently driven through imposing gateways, breaking stone piers and filigree of wrought iron’.45 One ‘high-spirited young lady even managed to crack the bottom of an ornamental lake’.
Against this background, the activities of the bright young set were increasingly condemned. They seemed callow, insincere, flippant and lacking a sense of moral equilibrium, at a time of mounting social distress. Loelia Ponsonby wrote of the ‘pathetic bands of hunger marchers on the streets of London’ and of rising unemployment. ‘At every lunch-party the topic cropped up and … I could not help being struck unpleasantly by the bejewelled, orchidaceous ladies and their affluent consorts smugly declaring over the caviare that there was no solution to the problem.’ She then added sharply, ‘one feels that a nobler community would have voluntarily submitted to higher taxation in order to lighten the soul-destroying poverty of more than one-and-a-half millions of their fellow countrymen.’46
Of course some elegant fancy dress parties continued to be held, such as the Mozart party arranged by David Tennant and his then wife, the actress Hermione Baddeley, on 29 April 1930. The guests wore eighteenth-century costumes and proceedings began with a recital of Mozart’s music. David Tennant himself appeared as Don Giovanni. There was dancing and Barbara Cartland considered it was ‘all highly respectable, and no one could say a word against it’.47 However, she did not mention that even this had a bizarre twist in that some of the revellers went out into Piccadilly in the early hours of the morning and came upon workmen digging up a gas pipe in the street. Cecil Beaton seized the pneumatic drill and a photograph shows the tall figure of Patrick Balfour standing on a pile of rubble beside a bemused workman. The former Elizabeth Ponsonby, now Elizabeth Pelly, was standing beside Cecil Beaton’s right arm.
Diana Mitford, the third daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale, who had married the wealthy Bryan Guinness in January 1929, claimed to have taken little part in the doings of the bright young set at this time. However, in fact the Guinnesses’ London home became the venue for one of the most notorious hoaxes perpetrated by them when, in July 1929, the notorious ‘Bruno Hat’ art exhibition was organised at a cocktail party they arranged. The idea was the brainchild of Brian Howard and had its origins in the scepticism with which many of the social elite regarded the new trend in French abstract art led by Picasso and his fellow pioneers. The ‘Hat’ works were painted by Howard on bath mats and had rope picture frames. Tom Mitford, in disguise, masqueraded as the ‘artist’, Bruno Hat. He was in a wheelchair, wearing a black suit, and sporting a black wig, drooping false moustache and dark glasses. He claimed to be of German origin and to have a poor command of English, having only arrived in England in 1919. A catalogue of the exhibition, which was part
of the spoof, was written in pretentious language by Evelyn Waugh and claimed great things for Hat’s artistic abilities. There was even a female attendant with a price list for the paintings. Howard had given them impressive titles, such as The Adoration of the Magi for a picture comprising ‘cubes, lines and splodges’.48 Some of those attending were ‘in the know’, but many were not, and it seems that one or two of the pictures were sold to people who were not in on the secret. The hoax was, however, revealed the next day by Bryan Guinness himself, who thought the joke was getting out of control. According to Bryan and Diana’s son, Jonathan, the newspapers reported it in a big way, and while most comments were friendly, at least one review ‘was rather sour and pompous’. He then added, ‘Perhaps Bryan had been wise to bring the deception to an end when he did; journalists, like the rest of us, dislike being made fools of.’49 Diana herself thought that for Brian Howard ‘the joke was not altogether a joke, and that he was inwardly disappointed not to have been discovered as an unknown master’.50
Meanwhile on the national stage events were becoming still more gloomy. The economic crisis which was to engulf the country in the 1930s began to manifest itself in the autumn of 1929. There was first of all a blow to the standing of the City of London caused by the collapse of an intricate web of companies, some fraudulent, built up by the financier Clarence Hatry and his fellow directors of the Austin Friary Trust. As a result of this, it was estimated that investors lost around £15 million and Hatry himself was subsequently sent to prison along with three fellow directors.51 According to ‘Mr. Gossip’ in the Daily Sketch, soon after Clarence Hatry’s arrest, his brother Eric was seen in the Embassy Club smoking a cigar and with a ‘procession of friends’ stopping at his table to greet him: ‘I hear that Eric Hatry during the past week has offered to make good out of his own pocket the losses of those friends of his whom he advised to invest in his brother’s companies,’ reported ‘Mr. Gossip’.52 Whether this actually happened is another matter.
Still worse was to follow, with the Wall Street Crash of late October 1929 signalling the general collapse of the American stock market. This affected not only leading socialites like Sir Arthur and Lady Colefax, who lost their life’s savings, but many others. Among them were Winston and Clementine Churchill. Winston was in the United States to secure further contracts for his writing when the collapse occurred. On his return to England early in November he told a shocked Clementine that he had lost a small fortune in the crash. As partial compensation, however, he had signed contracts for magazine articles which would earn him £40,000. As his daughter Mary wrote:
He could … keep them all by his pen and his prodigious industry, but the loss of such a capital sum was a body blow. They retreated to lick their wounds at Chartwell, where a regime of stringent economies was promulgated. As for their London life, for a year or two they either took furnished houses for a few months at a time, or, with more economy and convenience, stayed at the Goring Hotel near Victoria Station.53
To meet the crisis, Chartwell was run down to a low ebb during that winter, so that Winston’s study was the only room left open in the house, to enable him to work there at weekends. Clementine mostly stayed in London.
Beverley Nichols, too, remembered opening a newspaper and reading with horror the headline ‘Wall Street Crashes. Stocks Stumble in Frenzied Selling’. He checked his own share holdings and discovered that he had lost the equivalent of £2,000, which was about a third of his worldly wealth. ‘I had a moment of sheer panic … And then so great is the resilience of youth, that I threw the paper on the floor, said, “That’s that,” and dismissed the matter from my mind.’54
Most of those affected were unable to accept their changed fortunes so philosophically. Lady Cunard’s income was sharply reduced and although she still resolutely continued to entertain, she seems to have sold some of her high-quality pictures, partly to help finance her adored Sir Thomas Beecham’s musical ventures. She also made frequent visits to the jewellers to exchange some of the pieces she owned for stones of lesser value. Indeed the valet and later butler, Ernest King, apparently learnt through the servant grapevine that when she died in July 1948, she left an ostensibly valuable emerald necklace to her lady’s maid. Unfortunately the maid discovered that the original necklace had been substituted with mere coloured glass.55 Her clothes, too, were no longer expensive models purchased from the leading couturiers. Instead she bought ready-made garments in Shaftesbury Avenue. They were then adapted as necessary, probably by her loyal lady’s maid, Mary Gordon. When she died, her estate in Britain was valued at just under £47,000. Her friend, Loel Guinness, was appointed the sole executor, and she left her maid her wardrobe, all her silver plate ‘free of all duties’, and the sum of £1,500, again free of all death duties. The residue of the estate was to be divided equally between her daughter, Nancy, from whom she had long been estranged, and her friends Lady Diana Cooper and Robert Abdy.56
Another victim of the Wall Street Crash was the wealthy Mrs de Wichfeld, who had once employed Ernest King as her husband’s valet. She, too, was reduced to comparative poverty. According to King, when she died soon after, she was so short of cash that her funeral at the Savoy Chapel was paid for by friends, although they were later reimbursed from her estate.57
Nancy Mitford, too, was affected in that she began to take her writing career more seriously when Lord Redesdale’s shaky finances were put under greater pressure. He consequently reduced her already small allowance still further.58 Even the wealthy Edwina Mountbatten was warned that from late 1929 to mid-1931, her expenses were mounting while her investment income fell and her tax burden was also increasing. In these circumstances she was advised to sell her large London mansion, Brook House. It was to be demolished and replaced by flats, with Edwina reserving for herself a large penthouse flat overlooking Hyde Park and fitted out to the highest degree of luxury.59
Probably Noel Coward best caught the mood of the times with his lyric:
Children of the Ritz
Children of the Ritz
Sleek and civilised
Fretfully surprised
Though Mr. Molyneux has gowned us
The world is tumbling around us
Without a sou
What can we do?
We’ll soon be begging for a crust …60
In June 1932, in ironic vein, The Bystander also observed: ‘Everybody’s broke, but that depressing little fact won’t stop us going to Ascot. In clothes they see no prospect of paying for, our “lovelies” will parade each day, while we shall all eat too much, drink too much, bet too much, and talk too much.’61
In September 1931 Britain devalued its currency when it left the gold standard. This led to the value of the pound falling by a quarter, while shortly beforehand income tax had been raised from 4s 6d to 5s in the pound; there was a cut in the dole paid to the unemployed, and a reduction in the salaries of many workers in the public sector, including a cut in the pay and pensions of members of the armed forces.62 This latter led to a brief ‘mutiny’ among sailors of the North Atlantic Fleet at Invergordon. Three days later the government ‘decided to abandon parity between the pound and its existing gold reserves’, in other words, to leave the gold standard.63
In these turbulent times the once-accepted excesses of the Bright Young People seemed to have little place. Indeed, as early as July 1929 The Bystander had expressed irritation at the reckless conduct associated with their ‘freak parties’. That included the ‘Second Childhood’ event held in Rutland Gate and described by Barbara Cartland. According to The Bystander it had much annoyed the neighbours.
There is nothing very terrible in young people dressing up as infants … after all it is their own affair if they choose to don the garb of the nursery which they have left not so very long ago. What seems to have occasioned a quite understandable irritation in the hearts of the inhabitants of Rutland Gate was the fact that instead of restricting their activities to the house in which the party
was held the guests staged a sort of motor racing carnival round and round the square … to the accompaniment of shouts, yells, cat-calls and the hooting of motor horns … No one wants to be a ‘kill-joy’, but surely there is nothing funny in unseemly and untimely noise.64
However, one of the harshest condemnations of their way of life came in The People in July 1932, when Richard Norton wrote a lengthy article on ‘Those Bright Young Rotters. They Toil not but they Sin.’ Behind ‘many of the scandals of recent times’, he declared,
lurks the shadow of that futile tribe of idlers – the so-called ‘Bright Young Things’. Dominated by sex, by drink – in many cases by drugs – they toil not, but sin. They fritter away the money for which others have laboured. They talk and think drivel. Their parties are idiotic and nauseating. They burn up their youth in the flame of night clubs and cocktail parties. They break the law with impunity and expect applause for their imbecilities.65
He then went on to itemise the faults and failings he had particularly identified before concluding that ‘stupidity’ was ‘one of their greatest sins … If they had a spark of insight they would weigh up frankly the worthlessness of themselves. They are no use to anyone. The country would be much better off without them.’
A year later Patrick Balfour, who had himself once been part of the world of the Bright Young People, came to a similar, if less hard-hitting, conclusion. He acknowledged the twenties had been ‘a turbulent epoch, but vital’ when he and his fellows ‘ate … drank … were merry, for we knew that today we should die. We counted not the cost … It was our final fling … How otherwise can I recapture the recklessness, the lavishness, the carefree hospitality of the Roaring ’Twenties? … There was no particular object in anything that we did, but we were sensible of its full flavour as we did it … That irresponsible effortless zest is gone from us all.’66 Douglas Goldring, writing in 1935, took a more clinical view, arguing that the ‘Bright Young People’ had been ‘played off the stage by a new and tougher gang, who [had] found better things to do than advertising face creams’.67 In the 1930s, pleasure-seeking and party-going did, of course, continue among the social elite but it was against an increasingly sombre and threatening backdrop, both nationally and internationally. It was a way of life that was to come to an end in 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World War.
