1939 Read online

  Another infallible indicator of gentle birth was holding one’s coming-out dance at home: be it London house or country seat. More than thirty debutantes on The Times’ list (not necessarily the ones with titled mothers) gave dances at home. Even in 1939 there was some residual snobbery about entertaining in a public place. Times had changed since the nineteenth century, when every aristocratic family had a mansion in London where they could entertain several hundred guests. Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, Marquess Curzon’s youngest daughter, recalls with something like disbelief today that when she was a little girl, in the years just before the First World War, she and her friends would play games in their parents’ ballrooms. After that war, very many of those great houses were sold ; a private ballroom became a rarity; and all except the very richest were forced to hold coming-out dances in hotels, or in one of the remaining large houses, like 16 Bruton Street, that were owned by caterers and hired out for the evening. By far the most popular single venue for debs’ dances was 6 Stanhope Gate, a house bordering Park Lane upon whose site the Playboy Club used to stand. In those days it was owned by Searcy’s, the large catering company, who ran it as Gunter’s Tearooms during the day and a ballroom in the evenings. Of those 103 dances listed in The Times’ diary for the Season, no fewer than 11 were held at 6 Stanhope Gate. After that, the most fashionable place for one’s dance was Claridge’s, followed by the Hyde Park Hotel, the Dorchester and the Berkeley.

  The cost of these parties was astronomical. The food and drink alone would have cost about 30 shillings a head, or £1.50, to say nothing of the cost of massed banks of flowers, a fashionable dance band, and evening dresses for the debutante, her mother and her sisters. All this meant that a dance which cost under £1,000 was a modest affair: yet in those days £1,000 would have been a very generous annual salary for a professional man, and wealth undreamed of for anyone from the working class.

  A dance given at home would have been marginally less expensive and had much more social cachet: ‘The refinement of private-house entertainment was of a different order. It was much less vulgar than a public place like a hotel, because you couldn’t buy your way in.’ Once a hotel dance was under way, any couple who sported the appropriate clothes and voices could stroll in from the street and gatecrash, as many did. No gatecrashers, however, could have strolled unnoticed into Mary Windsor-Clive’s dance at 15 Hyde Park Gardens, or that of Rhoda Walker-Heneage-Vivian a few doors down at Number 8, for the family retainers would have asked them politely to produce an invitation or leave. Therein lay the prestige: giving a dance in one’s own house, among one’s own furniture and paintings and servants, was the clearest possible proof that the girl was a ‘real’ deb, emerging to take her rightful position in a society which knew her parents and had noticed the social stepping-stones that had brought her to this point.

  Since the Season was expensive, exhausting and a social ordeal for all but the most poised, why did anyone – parents or daughters – submit to it? Setting aside for a moment its real purpose, to introduce eligible young people to one another in a safe and enjoyable setting, what other function might it fulfil? Certainly most of the debutantes, and their escorts, claim fifty years later that it was fun. They usually go on to qualify this by saying that it was extremely tiring. During the height of the Season, from late April until the end of July, a debutante would need all her youth and stamina.

  Lady Turnbull’s daughter Madeleine, who had been a deb a couple of years earlier, remembers:

  There were far more dances than in post-war days; four or five a week at least, and very often one went to more than one dance a night. Then there were countless fork luncheon and drink parties. It was all quite hard work! – especially if one had to go to two or three luncheon parties on the same day – and partook of a course at each!

  A girl and her mother, or some other chaperone, would rarely get home before two in the morning; only to rise again by nine or ten o’clock – ‘because it was inconsiderate to the servants to keep them waiting when one’s bed had to be made and the bedroom tidied’. However frivolous dancing and making conversation may be considered, they can be quite taxing, particularly to young people who know they are constantly being evaluated, both by their contemporaries and by the older generation. Chaperones – usually mothers – sat around the room and watched like hawks. Rosamund Neave (now Mrs Tony Sheppard) remembers that well:

  There was a lot of snobbery about and people were angling for the best match. You saw the chaperones and the dowagers in their tiaras looking through their lorgnettes to see if somebody was pretty or not and whether they thought she would be a nice person for their son or her cousin’s friend or whoever it was. There was always a certain amount of that. It meant that some of the girls were very keen to be asked by Lord So-and-So to dance. My mother always got frightfully excited and would ask, ‘Who did you meet did you say, darling? Oh, Lord Halifax’s son. Oh yes, of course, very nice, yes.’ So Mummy was slightly snobby but I wasn’t interested in all that; I just wanted to have fun.

  Faces were scrutinized for everything from family likeness to the presence (or, more likely, absence) of make-up. Clothes were criticized: where from? who made it? how much did it cost? is it new – altered – borrowed – passed down? Girls lived in fear of being caught out in a solecism like having a strap showing or – nightmare – a knicker elastic giving way. Everyone carried a chain of tiny gold safety-pins hidden away in her evening purse, in case energetic dancing called for immediate repairs, and cloakroom ladies had needle and cotton to stitch up snagged hems. Young girls – many of them over-protected and little more than children – were very much aware that they were on show ; that ‘coming out’ meant (as it does in quite a different context today) submitting oneself to public scrutiny. It is too crude to liken it to a cattle market; circling the paddock before a race would be more appropriate.

  The Season, then, was a forum in which to see and be seen by perhaps two thousand people, of whom several hundred were contemporaries of both sexes, and the remainder were parents, family, friends. It was a forum which gave a girl a chance to prove herself and make her mark in a few short months, knowing that whatever impression she created might remain for the rest of her life. Could such a formidable exposure of oneself possibly be called an enjoyable experience ?

  For those debutantes who were poised, pretty and beautifully turned out, yes, it must have been enjoyable – a game, a nightly parade which would be exhilarating to those who knew they were among the front runners. A young woman recently liberated from school or finishing school could well have revelled in the attention that suddenly focused upon her, after years of Nanny saying primly, ‘Nobody’s going to be looking at you, dear!’ Suddenly all that had changed. Seamstresses knelt at her feet with pins between their lips, adjusting her hem or smoothing her seams ; milliners set wide-brimmed picture hats or witty little confections cleverly askew at just the angle to accentuate her cheekbones; her parents and her sisters frowned and judged and finally approved. Goodness, it must have been intoxicating … for some.

  But for the girls who knew themselves to be less well endowed with a pretty face, a slender figure, a generous papa and an understanding mother, it must have been like stumbling dazzled into a spotlight. The girl with bad skin; the fat girl; the one who had not outgrown her clumsiness or mastered her shyness ; the girl whose mother had no dress sense or whose father was penny-pinching; above all, the girl who knew that she did not fit into the social milieu to which her parents aspired – for these girls it must have been a daily and nightly ordeal, three or four months of it, that they dreaded in advance and loathed when it happened. Interviews with ex-debs (none of whom admits to having been in this position of social ignominy herself) suggest that a number of girls did indeed hate their Season:

  There were always some girls crying in the Ladies; and a few who would spend practically the entire evening there. Some girls were definitely cold-shouldered by the others ; mostly because th
ey lacked personality and confidence and just couldn’t carry it off. That’s why it was such a good training. You had to learn to be snubbed – you had to learn how to cope with not being a big social success, not getting all the gorgeous young men. If you hadn’t got the polish, you soon learned. Otherwise you’d spend the evening talking to the cloakroom attendant. There was a lot of cruelty and a lot of competitiveness, and that meant a lot of humiliation. Some girls suffered agonies. Some of the mothers had no idea what they were exposing their girls to. They just wanted them to have a good time. There’s a sort of gallantry – almost a heroism – about the upper crust, and these girls didn’t want to fail their mothers.

  The Season was, and was meant to be, a social testing ground. It taught very young girls – much younger, in terms of worldliness, than today’s sophisticated eighteen-year-olds – how to behave gracefully in a crowd of strangers. It taught them how to make conversation, even if much of it was frivolous. It taught them discipline: a discipline that stood some of them in very good stead during the years that followed. ‘It was an endurance test,’ said one deb, who nevertheless adored her Season, ‘a real ordeal.’ It taught good manners, in the widest sense of the word ; not merely how to enter and leave a room unselfconsciously, bestowing your hellos and goodbyes with charm and warmth (which is harder than it may sound), but how to deal with the ‘difficult customers’ . Every dance had its quota of awkward young men and lecherous uncles, jealous mothers and crotchety chaperones, unhappy or exhausted young women. At its best, the Season taught a schoolgirl, cosseted and over-protected, how to handle all these situations with tact.

  We were being groomed for a role. It was a tough little world too. The system gave you a little more polish and you emerged with a little more grace, a little more cynicism.

  To be frank, it either made you or broke you. If anything was the proper training ground for a lifetime as the wife of an ambassador or some such role then this was the best there was. You had to be able to remain sure of yourself, keep up conversation with people who bored you, and physically cope with an unending round of new faces, new situations and learning that other girls and some men aren’t always kind – and how to cope with the chilly, ambitious and ruthless real world away from home.5

  The Season must have been a testing ground for parents, too. How had their girl turned out? How was the son and heir shaping up? How were they doing, as custodians of the family name, the houses, the land? Had they got rid of the Rubens or the Gainsborough to make ends meet? Could they still manage to put on a good show for their daughter’s coming-out dance? These questions would have been more discreetly murmured, but everyone was interested to see how well their contemporaries had survived the years of agricultural depresssion and the roller-coaster stock markets of the turn of the decade.

  For the British upper classes were changing, and the Season was the perfect opportunity to judge who was most affected by these changes. The upper, upper echelons of the aristocracy remained the same: the Devonshires, the Marlboroughs, the Northumberlands and Westminsters – they were not feeling the pinch. But people a few rungs lower down felt it. Within three years of the ending of the First World War, a quarter of the land in the country – some six million acres – had changed ownership. The slaughter of the sons of the nobility during the war; the agricultural depression which preceded it for several decades ; the introduction of death duties – all these had drained capital, not fatally, but perceptibly.

  The rich were still rich – extremely rich. In 1938 the top 0.4 per cent of families earned nearly 12 per cent of the income for the entire population: and, inevitably, most of their wealth came from unearned income rather than salary. Or, to put it another way, by 1936 the top 1 per cent of wealth-owners (as distinct from earners) held 56 per cent of the nation’s wealth. The remaining 44 per cent was shared out between the other 99 per cent of the population. But the most relevant fact about extreme wealth is that it is determined very largely by inheritance. Most very rich people were born rich, they married rich, and they died rich. Aristocrats did not make money by their own efforts ; but they guarded and increased what their forefathers had amassed. This was done by careful deployment of one’s assets. Money was surrounded by pallisades of accountants and stockbrokers, trustees and tax experts and financial advisers ; property by farm managers who were expert in administering large estates and stockmen who knew about pedigree herds and trainers who knew about racehorses ; possessions by picture and furniture dealers who valued and advised in the buying and – more rarely, in those days – selling of works of art. Was a man who took such care of his property likely to leave his daughter to the mercies of any glamorous adventurer?

  The family was of prime importance, for it preserved the bloodline, to which the upper classes attached an almost mystic significance, and which they believed explained their innate superiority. In its purest sense, it can be seen in the reverence accorded to royal lineage, based on the notion of the divine right of kings. This was perhaps the origin of the belief that the bloodline is an almost sacred inheritance, to be guarded and revered, not tainted by common stock. The blue blood of the nobility was a metaphor that they themselves took very seriously.*

  The pursuit of wealth was the pursuit of status, not merely for oneself but for one’s family. In the last resort the ultimate motivation was a dynastic one: to found a family, to endow them splendidly enough to last for ever, and to enjoy a vicarious eternal life in the seed of one’s loins.6

  Now that wealth was no longer concentrated in the hands of the landed aristocracy, but distributed around a larger – and widening – class of industrialists, financiers and entrepreneurs, it was all the more important that old wealth should control the appropriate setting within which to assess and perhaps ally itself with the young generation of the newly wealthy.

  This change in the location of wealth had happened gradually over the previous hundred years. The Industrial Revolution and the rise of technology and communications created a new class of millionaires: families like the Tennants, whose fortune was based originally on a process for making better starch. At a time when laundresses starched acres of table linen, bed linen, cotton petticoats, servants’ uniforms and so on, a better starch could be the starting point for a business empire, augmented later on by shrewd investment in mining, railways and banking. Thus Charles Tennant – later Sir Charles Tennant, Bart – made not just himself but all his descendants wealthy, and saw his daughters marry into the aristocracy, while his son entered the peerage and was created Baron Glenconner. Such rich and powerful families simply could not be dismissed for being ‘in trade’. If the first generation was in trade, the second was in Society and the third (if not sooner) was in Debrett.

  These new rich families were gradually assimilated by the old aristocracy. After the First World War, yet newer families sprang up whose wealth commanded respect. They too wished to enter the Establishment (a word not used in this sense until the 1960s to describe the class that holds power in government and the City, and also controls social conventions of behaviour and modes of thought) ; the Establishment needed them. Where better to size up their manners and suitability than during the rigours of the Season?

  The English upper classes determined and monopolized the desirable canons of taste and standards of behaviour and this – class consciousness, in a word, or, more crudely, class snobbery – was the source of their power. No other class ever had the confidence to challenge it, and none created an alternative. If the upper classes pursued a way of life based on country estates and London clubs, on grouse-shooting and hunting during the winter months and dancing and racing during the summer – why then, so would the aspiring upper classes. The new Victorian millionaires moved out of their northern industrial cities, the places which had made them what they were and had made them rich, to settle their families on huge country estates. Their children were schooled in manners and accents that must have been very different from their parents’. The
y tried to forget, and to persuade others to forget, that they owed all they had to trade.

  In the twentieth century this pattern was made easier by the enforced sale of land by the aristocracy and country gentry. The land that the new rich bought was the very same land the old rich had owned. They thus acquired, almost by osmosis, the one thing that money could not buy: ancestry. What they actually bought was merely the appearance (it could not be the reality) of continuity; the illusion of a rooted, continuous bloodline. The hold that the upper classes were able to maintain over people richer (in some cases) and with more energy and newer ideas than themselves was based on tradition and custom, on family trees that could be traced back for generations. The very same attributes in Europe intimidate rich Americans today. For all their money and vigour, they cannot match the history.