The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age

by Juliet Nicolson

  Grand dances in private house were being revived with gusto. A ball at Londonderry House in Park Lane had been held on 18 November for two and a half thousand guests, including doctors and nurses who had worked in the temporary hospital wards of the huge town house. The powerful hostess, Edith Londonderry, flanked by the Prime Minister and the leader of the Conservative party, stood at her usual place at the top of the celebrated double staircase – so wide that four guests could climb its stairs abreast. Edith wore a voluptuous black dress and her remarkable décolletage showed off to perfection the splendour of the family jewels. Her magnificent appearance more than made up for the shortage of flowers, a reflection of the wartime absence of gardeners.

  Lady Cunard, the American wife of the shipowner Sir Bache Cunard and lover of Sir Thomas Beecham, had assumed the patronage of the Ballets Russes after the death of its pre-war promoter, the Marchioness of Ripon. On 4 December Emerald Cunard threw a fund-raising ball because, as she explained, ‘the State refuses to support opera in any shape or form in this country’. She decorated Covent Garden in crimson, violet, yellow and green. Lady Beaverbrook came dressed as a blue butterfly, but not one that the Illustrated London News correspondent felt a naturalist might easily identify. Ivor Novello, the 26-year-old Welsh entertainer, was characteristically bejewelled from head to toe and Lady Diana Cooper, at last liberated from her bath chair, although discreetly holding on to a walking stick, came as Queen Anne in a rose-coloured gown garlanded with silver ribbon.

  Those young, in love, aristocratic and keen to dance gathered at the famous underground Grafton Galleries in Piccadilly, site of the controversial pre-war Post-Impressionist exhibition, which in the evening doubled as a fashionable dancing club. The Prince of Wales was a regular. Proprieties were observed. White tie and tails were worn, and carnations were tucked into buttonholes. Nude pictures on the walls were covered with tissue paper, and no alcohol was served. The confectioner Gunter’s would supply iced coffee and a brilliant pink drink called ‘Turk’s Blood’, the innocence of the refreshments confirmed by the presence of teatime cakes and sandwiches. A favourite song, ‘I’m Just Wild about Harry’, was often requested, as was the pre-war waltz ‘Destiny’, the last song to be heard five years earlier by young uniformed men before their departure for the front. The nostalgic sound of the waltz filled the gallery as the couples competed for the length of time they could continue twirling each other round. The evening at the Grafton ended with the playing of the National Anthem. But the night was not over for those who left for Rector’s, a club in a cellar in Tottenham Court Road where decanters of whisky were on offer in the gents’ cloakroom, and powerfully sweet-smelling white face powder was piled into bowls in the ladies’. Here the band was less restrained than at the Grafton dressing up in firemen’s helmets and circling the room while blasting out sexy tunes on their trumpets.

  Dance was a recreation that all classes enjoyed. Dance halls up and down the country were attracting huge Saturday-night crowds as the saxophone blared out its foot-tapping, syncopated beat. The most spectacular of all dancing venues was to be found in London’s old Brook Green skating rink which had been turned into the largest dance hall in Europe. Nearly six thousand tickets had been sold for the opening night of the Hammersmith Palais, the low cost of entry putting the dance floor within reach of pockets unable to afford West End prices. Movers and shakers, twisters and twirlers from Ealing, Richmond, Hampstead and Bayswater came gliding into the enormous salon beneath a copy of a 2,000-year-old Chinese sign that announced you were entering ‘The Grotto of Peerless Height’.

  Inside, the hall was decorated entirely in Chinese style with hand-painted glass and lacquer panels copied from old Chinese pictures and hung all around the dance floor. Tall, black-lacquered columns, decorated with Chinese lettering signifying good luck, supported the pagoda-like structure that formed the ceiling. In the centre of the highly polished dance floor of Canadian maple was a miniature mountain, with water cascading from it on all sides although the sound of water was entirely eclipsed by the music. The two bands took up their positions at each end of the floor under two miniature temple-like structures. As soon as the band at one end stopped, the other would take up the tune.

  No one was able to resist the lure of the floor. The Daily Mail described the varied mix of participants: ‘Women dressed as men, men as women; youths in bathing drawers and kimonos, matrons moving about lumpily and breathing hard. Bald obese perspiring men. Everybody terribly serious; not a single laugh or the palest ghost of a smile.’ The floor was never empty. If you had arrived alone, a steward would find you a ‘sixpenny partner’ and off you twirled, the newly met couple happy with the arrangement, one a little richer, the other no longer clinging to the walls in solitary disappointment.

  All around the edge of the floor were little tables, designed for tea and talk, if you were able to hear your partner speak. Their primary purpose was to provide a place to flop in an exhausted heap after the exertions demanded by the music. There was no licence for alcohol, but none was needed as the intoxication provided by the dancing was considered stimulation enough.

  The Times’ personal column was filled with advertisements for dancing lessons. At the Empress Rooms in Kensington you could learn the Hawaiian glide, the tango, and, for the very energetic, there was the paso doble. The editor of the Dancing Times, Philip Richardson, became a figurehead for the dancing teachers’ profession, organising an unofficial summit meeting for teachers to discuss their determination that dance steps remain ‘correct’. They were anxious to unite against some of the outlandish exhibitionism seen on the dance floors and ‘to stamp out freak steps, particularly dips and steps in which the feet are raised high off the ground’. Tips were offered for practising the new moves at home to the accompaniment of the gramophone, in order to get the swing and sway to accord exactly with the rules of the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing. Suggestions included polishing the floor with Johnson’s powdered wax that promised to give ‘A Perfect Dancing Surface’.

  The Fulham Chronicle announced that there would be eighty dancing instructors on hand at the new Palais, and, perhaps most surprising of all, that evening dress was to be ‘optional’. During ‘learner nights’ one part of the huge floor would be roped off, as boys took one side and girls the other, the coloured heels of their dancing shoes matching the predominant colour of their dress, as they all waited their turn behind the corral. Girls took the art of dancing even more seriously than the boys, and in these post-war months the quantity of physically agile girls of dancing age outnumbered the men. Crutches and war wounds did not equip one for energetic movement.

  The pre-war animal-like movements of the turkey trot, the bunny hug and the grizzle bear had given way to a whole new repertoire of dances from America. The sound of ragtime, the dance music that had engulfed the United States and become a nation’s passion, had been led in part by the master of the art, Scott Joplin. But ragtime, along with previously popular dance routines, was on the wane. The twinkle, the jog trot, the vampire, the Missouri walk and the shimmy were all knocked sideways by the new craze for jazz. Audiences were invited to ‘rock and roll’, the phrase used in black slang to describe the act of love. The word jazz, or jass as it was originally spelled, dug further into African-American shorthand. Jass was only a short etymological beat away from jissum, and the sensual earthy music, with its insistent thump, mirrored the hip-thrusting energy of mankind’s most basic creative activity. The Victor recording label of New York explained to somewhat puzzled new audiences in their catalogue notes how ‘Out of the mass of sounds there emerge tunes, and as the music proceeds you get order out of chaos and a very satisfactory order at that: one that not merely invites you, but almost forces you to dance.’

  In England ‘jazzing’ had begun properly with the arrival in London in spring of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Although the group’s 28-year-old pianist, Henry Ragas, had died of a combination of Spanish flu and alco
holism two days before the band set sail from New York, the depleted ODJB had reached England on schedule.

  Founded in New Orleans in 1916, the all-white band that played from memory and whose voices resembled the deepest of black soul singers had opened on 7 April 1919 at the London Hippodrome. The reaction was reminiscent of a life-saving manoeuvre on a choking body. London responded. The cornettist and leader of the band, Nick La Rocca, had an uncontrollable tic in his shoulder that had made him ineligible for the draft, but on stage his erratic arm movements had the unexpected bonus of making him disturbingly attractive. According to the Tatler La Rocca moved about the stage ‘like a filleted eel about to enter the stewing pot’.

  As a singer La Rocca was artistically hooked on compulsive and constant improvisation and the audience went wild for the new phenomenon. Whenever he walked on to the stage, every person in the theatre jumped to his or her feet, clapping, thumping, stamping, whooping and cheering. On the band’s opening night at the Hippodrome, George Robey had been billed as the star. Robey was a performer who knew his worth, and was confident of his popularity with the crowds, often dressing for his act in women’s costume and teasing the theatregoers with his double entendres, as he mock-beseeched them to ‘Kindly temper your hilarity with a modicum of reserve’. The jubilant reception of the Old Dixieland Jazz Band left Robey feeling thoroughly upstaged. Seething with rage he swore he would never appear with them on the same bill again.

  But the genie was unleashed and the visiting American musicians had immediately been snapped up for a two-week engagement over Easter at the London Palladium, followed by two months at Martan’s Club in Bond Street (which promptly changed its name to the Dixie Club), then Rector’s in Tottenham Court Road, while managing to pack in several shows up in Glasgow. Standing room only was available wherever they went. The King of England wanted to see for himself what all the fuss was about. A group of lorgnette-wielding members of the nobility were invited to join George V at a special royal performance where the group was scrutinised through the wand-held lenses as if, La Rocca said, ‘there were bugs on us’. Two stamps of La Rocca’s foot and a couple of shoulder jerks, and they were delivering a resounding ‘Tiger Rag’ to an audience more accustomed to assembling for a chamber music recital. Terror in the eyes of the audience gave way to cautious approval as, to general astonishment, the dour King himself led the way in enthusiastic applause.

  The Hammersmith Palais had been quick thinking enough to book the band for their opening night in November. The response within the hall was ecstatic. The showiness of the performances with their excessive loudness, wildness and mock duelling with violin bows was irresistible. ‘Mournin’ Blues’, ‘Bluin’ the Blues’, ‘Satanic Blues’, ‘Fidgety Feet’, ‘Clarinet Marmalade’ and ‘At the Jazz Band Ball’ were among the favourite dance tunes. But it was ‘Livery Stable Blues’ and ‘Tiger Rag’, the song with 252 beats a minute and the ‘Hold that Tiger’ chorus in which the trombone imitates the roar of the beast, that proved the most popular. A variety of props and stunts added to the spectacular quality of the performance. Any combination of wood blocks, cowbells, gongs, saucepans masquerading as drums, Chinese gourds, tubular bells, tin cans, frying pans, motor horns and teddy bears swinging from cymbals could appear. British musicians would crowd around the bandstand trying to work out how so few players managed to make so much sound. Not many stood a chance of playing at the Palais in the near future: the ODJB had been engaged to play until June the following year.

  Reactions to the dance craze were mixed, especially among the upper classes. Society’s favourite magazine the Tatler was infected by the energy.

  They say the night clubs are opening up in rows and dressmakers say they’re dizzy with the orders for dance frocks that keep on porin’ in. And they just can’t have enough niggers to play jazz music and I hear they are thinkin’ of hirin’ out squads of loonies to make the mad jazz noises till there are more ships available to bring the best New York jazz musicians over.

  The press was bemused. The Star thought that La Rocca and his friends were doing their best ‘to murder music’, whilst the local newspaper, the West London Observer, considered the band’s music to be ‘the weirdest sound possible’.

  Some like the Duke of Portland yearned for the more elegant mellifluence that he associated with dances before the war, as he decried the ‘flat-footed negro antics to the discordant uproar – I will not call it music – of a braying brass band’. The Daily Mail was disturbed by the ‘jungle’ elements of the dances and of the primitive rituals of ‘negro orgies’.

  One Canon Drummond, interviewed for The Times, told the paper that in his view this modern form of dance reflected a lowering of morals and a sickness in the pulse of the country. The movement ‘seemed to him to be a most degrading condition for any part of society to get into, to encourage a dance so low, and of such low origin – the dance of low niggers in America – with every conceivable crude instrument not to make music but to make noise’. And the liturgical community were not the only body to worry about a sickness. The physical effects of such strenuous exertions were causing concern to members of the medical establishment. They worried that all this jumping about could cause permanent damage to the arrangement of the internal organs as well as placing additional strain on the already traumatised nerves of many of the population.

  Isolated pockets of the old values could still be found in the arts. Lord Richard in the Pantry was showing to packed audiences at the Criterion. The plot required his Lordship to assume the guise of butler Bloggins in his own house which post-war financial cutbacks had obliged him to let. When the ‘butler’, accustomed to servants doing everything for him, failed to get a shine on the dining-room silver because he was using boot-blacking polish, the audience fell off their seats in helpless laughter. But an appreciation of the remnants of the old ways was rapidly diminishing.

  The new dance clothes did little to reassure stick-in-the-muds. Evening dress had become as short as daywear, the swinging beads and fringes attached to the hem giving the movement of the frock an extra sexy swing, while legs were encased in sheer silk stockings which shimmered at the same time as suggesting nudity. Legs were the chief attraction and men discussed the shape of every inch of the ankles and calves on show.

  Bandeau brassieres flattened the bosom to prevent the uncomfortable agitation of the breasts while dancing. The French couturier Coco Chanel designed clothes that combined androgyny with femininity, simplicity with charm. Bright lipstick was applied to the mouth with a flamboyantly inviting flourish in front of anyone who cared to watch. The very impropriety of applying make-up in public, particularly lipstick, meant that it became the chicest thing to do.

  The Duke of Portland was extremely worried by these developments. The Duke was a man who liked everything and everyone to have its proper place. He employed a man whose sole task it was to clean the housemaids’ bicycles at Welbeck Abbey, the ducal seat in Nottinghamshire. The new order of things disturbed him. Smoking in public and ostentatious cosmetics both took a hammering. ‘It is neither becoming or attractive for an otherwise pretty and charming young woman to appear with a half-smoked cigarette hanging from her vividly painted lips and with henna-coloured nails at the end of yellow nicotine-stained fingers’. He was bemused by this new world. ‘In my youth I was taught that pearls fell from ladies’ lips but that has all been altered of late.’ Paint on the face or lips should be confined to use by ‘ladies of the stage and demi-monde’ while red-painted nails reminded him of ‘the gory fingers of a Scottish ghillie after he had gralloched a dead stag or the unwashed hands of a butcher fresh from the slaughterhouse’.

  Further changes in dressing habits included long necklaces, usually of large fake pearls, and elaborate corsages that disguised the fact that some of these young ladies were clothed in little more than a nightdress. Punch published a cartoon on 7 January 1920 showing one woman dreaming that she had got up from her bed, having been properly clot
hed for a night’s sleep, and found herself at a party where the dancers were dressed in less than her. Labels were hung on the back of dining chairs carrying a printed warning that ‘nothing farinaceous’ was to be served. Slenderness was the look essential for fashion. Meanwhile the London underground observed proprieties by refusing to carry a poster for a film showing an actress in a backless gown.

  The young Bohemians of London, who referred to their parents as ‘Old Stick’ as if they were fossils devoid of the energising blood of life, boasted a passion for the alternative. Everyday household items were put to entertainingly unconventional use. Butter was spread with razor blades, dishcloths became hairnets and tea was served in brandy glasses. The application of a drop of beaded wax applied to each eyelash, a fashion imported from Russia, helped the eye to glitter with youthful allure, though only if you managed to keep the weighted lid open. Middle-aged men were spotted in the street wearing schoolboy shorts.

  Mrs Kate Meyrick, the ex-wife of a doctor, was making a good income from the craze for dancing. For the last few years she had lived in ‘dull and dreary respectability’ in Brighton, nursing many cases of shell shock, one of whom tried to throw the maid out of the window. At the end of the war, while in London looking after one of her eight children who had caught the deadly Spanish flu, she had seen an advertisement in the paper looking for someone with ‘fifty pounds for partnership to run tea dances’. Sensing a way out of her monotonous life and an escape from the dreary doctor, she set up her club, Dalton’s, in a cramped airless basement at number 28 Leicester Square with her partner George Murray. Soon she discovered that ‘men will pay anything to be amused’.