The curtseyers had now been separated from their sponsors who were seated in the heavily ornate Edwardian Ballroom, all pilasters, giant doorways and appallingly bad sculptures, where they were entertained with a selection of light music played by the String Band of the Irish Guards. The debutantes were corralled into an ante-chamber known as the Ball Supper Room where we sat in rows on stiff gilt chairs for what seemed hours. Looking round I recognised quite a number of the others, old connections from the intricate networks of the past: the assemblages of nannies pushing glossy baby carriages in Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park; children’s parties where we played interminable pass the parcel and suffered the often tearful disappointment of being left chairless in musical chairs; dancing classes where the little girls were taught the sailor’s hornpipe; skiing classes in Mürren, in the Bernese Oberland. Sharing such distant memories were girls linked through our age, our education, our family connections, the tribal relationships of London and the counties. Most of all we were shaped and motivated by the friendships and expectations of our mothers. By the standards of today we were appallingly naive. Sitting waiting, chatting nervously, the debutantes held tight to two small cards issued to ‘all unmarried ladies’. Evidently these cards had magic powers. The first, the white card with beige borders, bearing the mystic message TO BE PRESENTED, had to be yielded to the Lord Chamberlain on entering the ballroom where Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh sat enthroned under a crimson canopy adapted from the Imperial shamiana, redolent of the then relatively recent British rule in India. The Queen’s aunt, the Princess Royal, was also on the dais on the day I curtseyed, while the Mistress of the Robes and the Ladies in Waiting were seated behind the royal party. Having passed what was described reverently as ‘the Presence’, the second green card gave the debutante her entry to the reception in the State Rooms once her obeisance was done.
The long procession of virgins – for the vast majority of upper-class girls of seventeen were virgins in 1958 – passed in front of a young queen who not so long before had been a virgin herself. She had married Prince Philip in 1947 when she was twenty-one. From her height on the dais the Queen surveyed these serried ranks of girlish innocence, earls’ daughters, generals’ daughters, a Lord Mayor of London’s daughter, English roses from the shires, fresh-faced girls with the slight blankness of their class and inexperience. There was a softness and sweetness and also an inherited silliness of manner, a gasp in the voice, a giggle and a flutter, in these participants in what Jessica Mitford, in her book Hons and Rebels, described as ‘the specific, upper-class version of the puberty rite’.
Penny Graham and her great-grandmother the Dowager Lady North on their way to the palace
Madame Vacani training debutantes to curtsey
The first of the very last debutantes to curtsey, a tall, elegant, amusing girl called Penny Graham, daughter of the racing correspondent of the Daily Express, owed her prime position to her aged sponsor, her great-grandmother the Dowager Lady North who had not been to court since she herself had been presented to Queen Victoria. Lady North, by now in her late eighties, was decreed too frail for queuing and was spirited in early through the Entrée Entrance, a discreet side entrance of the palace. It helped that Penny’s cousin was on duty as a member of the Royal Body Guard. Penny was wearing oyster-coloured silk with a petticoat in which her heel caught in mid-curtsey, a small debacle which the Queen pretended not to notice. Four hundred girls, four hundred curtseys, each a thing of minor drama. A deep curtsey to the Queen, then three side steps to curtsey to Prince Philip, seated on the throne beside her. Did the Queen address the debutante? As I remember, she did not. The ceremony had an air of semi-sanctity, a little like a Church of England confirmation. Extract a smile out of Prince Philip and it counted as a triumph. He was seen to give a wink at the very daring deb with the Nefertiti hairstyle who was wearing a tight-fitting sheath of mauve, ruched chiffon designed by Victor Stiebel: not for Dominie Riley-Smith the standard blue wild silk. The procession of the nubile formed, dissolved, reassembled as name after name was shouted out by the Court Usher. Later, when I read Marina Warner’s Monuments and Maidens, her brilliant study of the allegory of the female form, it was easy to relate her historical account of the idolatry of virgins to my own all too personal memories of maidens processing past their monarch in 1958.
The curtsey itself was part of the mystique. It was a question of leg-lock: left knee locked behind the right knee, allowing a graceful slow descent with head erect, hands by your side. Avoidance of the wobble, definitely frowned upon, relied on exact placing of the knees and feet. The technique had been passed down through the generations of debutantes who learned it at Vacani’s School of Dancing, at 159 Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, a few blocks down from Harrods. The school was founded by Marguerite Vacani, a widow, and her sister, both professional dancers, early in the First World War. My mother learned her curtsey there. It was assumed that I too would book my session at Vacani’s. Other dancing schools might purport to teach the curtsey. But as far as the deb world went there was no substitute. Madame Vacani, as she styled herself, a squeaky voiced, effusive, highly powdered tiny lady, had made herself the high priestess of the cult. She had something of the manner of a genteel sergeant major as she trained prospective debutantes: ‘Now darlings, throw out your little chests and burst your little dresses.’ Once learned never forgotten, like bicycling or skiing. I believe I could achieve a Vacani curtsey still.
The knowledge that these were the final presentations made the occasion peculiarly poignant. Impossible to be there and not be conscious of the long line of our predecessors, going back to those late eighteenth-century ingénues led in by their powder-haired aristocratic mothers to curtsey to Queen Charlotte on her birthday feast. The scene was then relatively private and domestic. But gradually the system had been formalised. By 1837, when Queen Victoria ascended the throne, the term ‘debutante’ was in general use and young girls would be summoned to Queen Victoria’s drawing rooms, then held in St James’s Palace, to mark their entrée to society. The dress code was at this point the elaborate long white court dress with ten-foot train, mystical white veil, the ostrich feather headdress, elbow-length white gloves. The protocol surrounding presentations was strictly hierarchical. If the debutante before her was the daughter of a peer, Queen Victoria would kiss her; if the daughter of a commoner, the debutante would kiss the Queen’s proffered hand. Once successfully married, the young bride would be presented again by her mother-in-law; symbolically, when the bride returned to court to curtsey she would come in triumph, wearing her wedding dress.
Cynthia Charteris, later Lady Asquith, in the white crêpe de Chine dress, long white train and headdress of white feathers in which she was presented to King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra at the age of seventeen
Here we were then, the descendants of Lady Clodagh Anson who made her curtsey in 1898 to a by then aged Queen Victoria, a diminutive but still imposing regal figure seated on a low throne-chair that made access to her perilous: ‘… you had to make a deep curtsey to get down low enough’. To her near contemporary Lady Sybil Lubbock, mother of the writer Iris Origo, who curtseyed the next year in low-cut white chiffon on a freezing winter day:
… there was something almost Chinese about it. We were dressed like this in order to pay homage to our venerable Sovereign, who, in her youth, had looked her best with her plump white shoulders well exposed. These were our ceremonial garments, to be worn out of respect to her, no matter at what time of day or in what weather she chose to receive us.
Lady Sybil made her curtsey unsteadily, balancing her unwieldy train over one arm while the opposite hand clutched her fan, her gloves and handkerchief. It was as clear to debutantes of that early generation as it was to the girls of 1958 that palace presentation hovered on the borderline between dignity and farce.
But it had a mad, sad beauty this long chorus line of privilege. Lady Diana Manners, the future Lady Diana Cooper, pres
ented in 1911, at the second court of the new King George V, wearing an ivory brocaded crêpe de Chine dress with a cream net train sprinkled with pink rose petals and real diamond dewdrops, a tour de force of a costume she had designed herself. Vita Sackville-West, presented at court by her mother Lady Sackville, in a white satin gown with a Buckingham lace and chiffon bodice, the satin train a cloudy mass of tulle and silver bows. Betty Vacani, niece of Madame Vacani, queen-empress of the curtsey, who curtseyed herself in 1939, rose to poetic heights in her description of the scene at Buckingham Palace: ‘After the presentations, the King and Queen walked down the line of debutantes and dowagers and as they passed everyone curtsied. It looked like the wind blowing through the flowers.’
The decorative elements of the presentation ceremony masked its serious, even ruthless, raison d’être in the stratification of society. By the mid-nineteenth century the annual presentation had gradually become the key event in a formalised connection of the monarch and the court with the Season and society. Presentation acquired an important role in the regulation of society in Britain. It became a kind of bulwark, defending an elite inner circle and securing the channels to power, influence and wealth. To put it at its crudest, the curtseyers were in, the non-curtseyers excluded from the myriad royal enclosures, members’ tents and other well-defended spaces in which the well bred were separated from the riff-raff. The making of the curtsey raised the expectations of, at worst, a socially suitable marriage, since girls had few opportunities to form liaisons away from their restricted social sphere. Through the centuries, the details of presentation altered. Queen Victoria’s more sober Afternoon Drawing Rooms gave way to the ostentatious splendour of Edward VII’s late-night gatherings at Buckingham Palace, in which the debutantes were beautifully illuminated in the newly installed electric light. In the early 1920s, following a fashionable raising of the hemlines, presentation dresses were permitted to be shorter and trains reduced to eighteen inches from the heel. Debutantes of that period contended with the problem of anchoring their ostrich feather headdress on a shingle haircut. By the 1920s, too, the several miles of carriages queuing for the palace had been replaced by a long line of large black chauffeured motor cars. But such changes were minor. The systems, aims and attitudes surrounding presentations remained almost totally entrenched.
Inevitably presentations were affected by external events and political commotion. No courts were held in Britain in the First World War, the war which brought an end to several European monarchies. Evening courts and garden parties were cancelled by the Coal Strike of 1921. On 16 March 1939 news of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia ousted the Court Circular, with its report of the previous evening’s presentations, from the pages of The Times. During the Second World War presentations were once again suspended and parents were faced with great practical problems in bringing out their daughters, as Ted Jeavons comments gloomily in Anthony Powell’s novel of wartime England The Kindly Ones. By 1947, when the palace announced the revival of presentation parties, 20,000 debutantes were waiting to apply. Because of the large numbers, garden parties were organised so that debutantes could be received en masse and then, once it was realised that English summer weather could not be relied on, the ceremony moved indoors, to the Palace State Apartments. In 1951, individual presentations to King George VI, a monarch who believed in court ceremonial, revived: the ceremony had an extraordinary staying power. There were laments that the afternoon presentations lacked the glamour of the old evening courts: ‘The splendour of the 1930s had vanished for ever’, wrote a regretful Duchess of Argyll. There was less possibility of anarchy or drama: ‘Now, there were no evening courts and no ostrich feathers, no chamberpots either, or knickers falling down’, complained Philippa Pullar, a debutante presented in a calf-length pink dress in 1953. Certainly the post-war courts had lost a little of their glitter. But the eventual cessation of court curtseys is less remarkable than the fact that young girls’ presentations to the monarch continued, essentially unaltered, for so long.
Why did presentations end in 1958? For many years there had been rising criticism from within that the system was failing in its mission of upholding social exclusivity. External forces, social pressures, were seen to be eroding the sanctified relationship between God’s anointed monarchy and God’s anointed subjects. Or, in more agricultural terminology, the wheat was no longer distinguished from the chaff. In the early period of presentations when the immediate court circle was limited to just a few hundred aristocratic and landowning families, all of whom knew one another, the debutante intake was easily controlled by the Lord Chamberlain himself. His role was to root out undesirables, especially women with a less than blameless past. But from the mid-nineteenth century the system had been gradually forced to open out to include the daughters of families whose fortunes had been made in industry and commerce. For those with no inherited grasp of protocol, etiquette manuals were circulated, giving hints on the correct behaviour at court, and from 1854 Certificates of Presentation were issued. Laments that the floodgates of society had opened to arrivistes and imposters, negating the pure principles of presentation, had begun at least as early as 1861 when Queen magazine commented:
The crowning mischief, as we take it, is the way in which presentation at court is now so vulgarised, that it has lost all value and meaning as a title to social distinction. Formerly, presentations were confined to the true aristocracy of the country, the peerage, the superior landed gentry, persons of distinction in art, science and letters and the holders of offices of dignity under the Crown. … It is no longer so. Presentations are now so vulgarised that literally ANYBODY who has sufficient amount of perseverance or self-confidence may be presented. The wives of all Members of Parliament are presented and they in turn present the wives and daughters of local squires or other small magnates. There is no knowing where this is to stop.
According to David Cannadines’s study The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy the number of presentations more than doubled during the last twenty years of Queen Victoria’s reign, many of the additional debutantes being the daughters of self-made plutocrats from Britain, the Empire and the United States. In 1841, 90 per cent of women presented at court had been from the aristocratic and landowning families. By the end of the nineteenth century the proportion of debutantes from aristocratic families of ancient lineage was less than half.
Was there any point in continuing a practice so devalued? In 1957, the doyenne of society columnists, Mrs Betty Kenward, the Tatler’s ‘Jennifer’, was voicing her own doubts about whether presentations should continue, recalling in her memoirs: ‘In my humble opinion the Season was becoming rather a racket! More and more people were trying to buy their way in.’ Princess Margaret’s conclusion was similar, if more crudely expressed: ‘We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London was getting in.’ Jennifer was especially incensed by the commercialisation of the presentation ceremony by ladies who had an entrée at court, having been themselves presented as debutantes, who took fees for presenting motherless girls or girls whose mothers were disqualified from presenting their own daughters because they were divorcées or because they had not been through the ceremony themselves. ‘I knew of two peeresses and a commoner who did this very successfully for several years, and there were probably masses of others.’ They made money not only from presenting girls at court but shepherding them through the Season, introducing them to other debutantes and organising dances for them. Nor were they necessarily effective in these launchings, which were often money wasted. Jennifer remembered one poor widowed father ‘spending a fortune on a spectacular dance for his daughter, who had very few invitations in return’. The palace, sensitive to accusations of links between presentations and commercial profit, was by this time taking soundings from Jennifer and others. A friend of the Queen’s arranged to have a quiet drink with Jennifer who claims to have been open on the racketeering aspects of the Season: ‘I told her very frankly all I knew.’
The end of presentations was a symptom and a symbol of wide changes in Britain in the middle 1950s. The debacle of Suez, followed by the resignation of Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister, destabilised the country with a force that is quite difficult to describe to those who were not there. When Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal on 26 July 1956, the action signified the end of Empire for the British. It was a traumatic episode, shaming not only in the underlying political arrogance of the British government but in the bumbling hopelessness with which the crisis had been handled. Suez forced us to revalue our sense of our importance in the world: almost overnight Britain’s potency had dwindled. This crisis of confidence was also retrospective, casting doubts on the hallowed traditions and courtly prerogative of Britain’s past. It was a time when the whole standing of the monarchy was being called into question. There was public criticism of the Queen’s role in the appointment of Harold Macmillan as Eden’s successor as prime minister in preference to the expected candidate, Rab Butler. This compounded widespread doubts about the palace’s handling of the love affair between Princess Margaret and her recently divorced equerry, Group Captain Peter Townsend, in 1953. In this conflict between errant love and royal duty there were obvious echoes of the pre-war scandal of the love of Edward VII and Mrs Wallis Simpson which resulted in the King’s abdication in 1936. Since then public opinion had grown more sophisticated. Townsend’s virtual banishment to Brussels showed the palace clinging to what, in a more sexually realistic post-war Britain, appeared an outdated moral code.
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