Up to 1957, the traditional Buckingham Palace summer rituals of debutante presentations, garden parties and Royal Ascot continued according to the reassuring pattern. In personal terms the royal family had had an easy ride. But the days of automatic deference were ending. Behind the scenes there was anxiety, rising to horrified indignation as press criticism of the Queen and her courtiers, up to then off limits, became uninhibited veering towards rude. One of the earliest snipers at the royals was Malcolm Muggeridge, left-wing journalist and professional iconoclast. In an article in the New Statesman in September 1955 he launched into a diatribe of disloyalty, maintaining that the British people were secretly sick of the sight of the royal family and the ingratiating publicity surrounding them. Muggeridge suggested that another sycophantic photograph ‘… will be more than they can bear … The Queen Mother, Nanny Lightbody, Group Captain Townsend, the whole show is utterly out of hand’.
More considered, more incisive and dramatically effective, in the strangely neurotic aftermath of Suez, was an article by Lord Altrincham, soon to renounce his title and resurface as respected historian John Grigg. His inflammatory article appeared in August 1957 in an issue of the National and English Review, a small-circulation journal which Altrincham then edited, devoted to discussion of the ‘future of the monarchy’. With a candour that some readers saw as tantamount to treachery his article belaboured the complacency and frowsiness of the British monarchy, insulated as it was from social challenges of the modern world. Altrincham in full flood was a formidable opponent:
‘Crawfie’, Sir Henry Marten, the London Season, the racecourse, the grouse-moor, canasta and the occasional royal tour – all this would not have been good enough for Elizabeth I! It says much for the Queen that she has not been incapacitated for her job by this woefully inadequate training. She has dignity, a sense of duty, and (so far as we can judge) goodness of heart – all serious assets. But will she have the wisdom and give her children an education very different from her own? Will she, above all, see to it that Prince Charles is equipped with all the knowledge he can absorb without injury to his health, and that he mixes during his formative years with children who will one day be bus drivers, doctors, engineers, etc. – not merely with future land-owners or stockbrokers? These are crucial questions.
So they proved.
Altrincham reserved particular venom for the debutantes, accusing the Queen herself and Princess Margaret of bearing the ‘debutante stamp’ imposed by their narrow education by ‘Crawfie’, the royal family’s pet name for Marion Crawford, the princesses’ Scottish governess who remained their chief companion and confidante into their adulthood. He ridiculed the Queen’s style of ingénue prissiness, describing her stilted public speeches as ‘… “a pain in the neck”. Like her mother, she appears to be unable to string even a few sentences together without a written text.’ He poured scorn on the Queen’s entourage which he identified as ‘almost without exception the “tweedy” sort’: plus-foured aristocratic landowners and their ladies. The royal household had remained ‘a tight little enclave of British ladies and gentlemen’, embarrassingly white-skinned at a time when it was essential for the monarchy to be cementing good relations with the multi-racial countries of the Commonwealth. What he saw as the court’s ‘social lopsidedness’ was emphasised by the blatant social selectiveness of palace presentations, outdated rituals which Altrincham suggested should have been ‘quietly discontinued in 1945’. In Altrincham’s vision of a ‘truly classless and Commonwealth Court’, the only people who deserved to be presented to the monarch were those who had positively earned the right.
It is probable that, even without Lord Altrincham, debutante presentations would have been discontinued. Stung by criticism, the royal family could be seen to be making valiant efforts to get out and meet the people. On the very day that I and my fellow debs assembled at the palace to curtsey to the Queen the Court Circular records that Princess Margaret, attended by her lady-in-waiting, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, was opening a pensioners’ club in Camberwell. It was generally believed in the deb world that Prince Philip had been the prime mover in the ending of the curtseys as part of his sometimes desperate mission to modernise the court and make it more accessible by, for instance, introducing a regular series of luncheon parties to which a social mix of guests would be invited. According to a court source quoted in Sarah Bradford’s biography Elizabeth, the Queen had planned to do away with debutante presentations in 1957 but ‘she carried on with them for one more year just to show that she wasn’t going to bow to Altrincham’. At a time when controversy about the British monarchy flared up with unexpected intensity the largely unwitting English debutantes provided a convenient public sacrifice.
The announcement came from the Lord Chamberlain’s office on 14 November 1957. The following year was the last in which presentation parties would be held. The Lord Chamberlain provided discreet words of explanation:
… for some time – in fact since 1954 – the Queen has had in mind the general pattern of official entertaining at Buckingham Palace, including the problem of Presentation Parties and certain anomalies to which they give rise. Her Majesty felt reluctant to bring these to an end because of the pleasure they appear to give to a number of young people and the increasing applications for them. These applications have now risen until it has become necessary either to add to the number of these parties or to seek some other solution.
Because of her many other engagements the Queen was said to be unable to increase the number of presentation parties. She therefore planned to substitute additional garden parties, ‘which will have the effect of increasing the number of persons invited to Buckingham Palace, both from the United Kingdom and all other parts of the Commonwealth’.
Reactions to the Lord Chamberlain’s announcement were mixed. The social diarist Jennifer records in her memoirs the ‘great consternation’ caused among future debutante mothers and sponsors at the news they were about to be cast out of the palace. She was telephoned constantly by press reporters for her reaction and comments, which she claims she steadfastly refused to give. In my own milieu of debs’ mothers and their progeny, a social strata not given to stringent analysis, the response to the announcement was puzzled and a little bit aggrieved. We felt a close personal connection with the royal family, perhaps all the more so because we had been together through the war. Those old enough had listened to, and been uplifted by, the young Princess Elizabeth’s wartime broadcasts to the children of England. We identified closely with the day-today lives of the royal children as related by ‘Crawfie’ in The Little Princesses, the first (and very controversial) instance of a royal employee telling her own story. Girls of my generation almost knew that book by heart. My sister and I had been dressed in those identical check tweed winter coats with little velvet collars, like the ones worn by Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose. When King George VI died, I, then a child of twelve, wore a black armband through the period of court mourning. It was a strong emotional association. When news reached us of the end of presentations there was a feeling that the Queen, on whom we had thought we could count, had now abandoned us. For many fathers it was simply further proof that the country they had fought for was going to the dogs.
However, a Times leader gave cautious approval, seeing the end of presentations as the inevitable result of post-war social changes:
… the present age is one of transition in the sense that the traditional barriers of class have broken down. It has long ceased to be true that the court is the centre of an aristocracy, the members of which form a clearly recognizable section of the community.
Formal advantages deriving from the presentation no longer exist. The selection of the privileged few has become increasingly difficult and even invidious. The abandonment of a custom that has largely lost its contemporary value is sensible. However, it should not be taken as an encouragement by those who press for a more and more democratic court.
Fiona and K
arin MacCarthy with a schoolfriend Starr Ankersimmons in Kensington Gardens all wearing Little Princess coats
The Times leader writer argued that the idea of the Queen bringing herself ‘down to the level of her ordinary citizens is absurd and illogical’.
The popular press, whose gossip columns then depended to an extent that now seems almost unbelievable on the doings of the debutante world, were vociferous in their laments for the passing of presentations. Both Paul Tanfield in the Daily Mail and William Hickey in the Daily Express gave the news extensive coverage, Hickey wallowing in sentiment as he described the pre-war glory days for debutantes waiting outside the palace in their cars sustained by champagne, brandy or pâté sandwiches: ‘One girl had drunk so much champagne that when she went to curtsey to the King and Queen she fell down flat on her face.’ For Hickey this was the end of a certain sort of Englishness: ‘Now something of the exclusiveness and glamour will have disappeared for ever.’ There was general acceptance that the end of presentations threatened the viability of the London social Season. It had been the set piece of the curtsey to the monarch, the ratification of the young girls’ entrée to society, that provided the Season with its central raison d’être.
In 1958, as the final presentations approached, foreign commentators took up the theme. INNOCENT DAZZLE ON HUMDRUM LIFE – US REGRET AT DECISION ran a headline in the New York Herald Tribune whose reporter argued that presentations ‘made up part of the ordered, stately, and majestic cavalcade of royal life which the British people look on with so much personal pride, no matter what they think about it’. There was regret for the loss of ‘gorgeous pomp’.
In the last week the Daily Express launched a competition for an ‘Epitaph for a Deb’ to be sent in on a postcard with a 2½ d stamp. The winning entry, by Miss Stout of York, was sadly undistinguished:
A sparkling debutante lies here.
Daddy found her very dear.
The runner up was more succinct: ‘Oh Deb where is thy fling?’
On 13 March 1958 the William Hickey gossip column was reporting that ‘Deb decorum – acquired at considerable cost in the most exclusive finishing schools – is already beginning to crack at the seams. I hear that there is a gentle-voiced but oh so grim tug of war at most debutante tea parties.’ In the press and in private, speculation had been mounting as to who would be the last of the last debs, the final debutante to curtsey. Harriet Nares, described in the Express as ‘a dainty honey blonde’, said her friends had been told of quiet dim corners in the palace in which they could hide in order to arrive strategically late for the line-up for the curtsey. There were stories of money being offered by one deb to another for an exchange of seats in the antechamber in which they waited to be summoned to the Presence. Presentation was still being regarded by traditionalists as ‘a symbol of loyalty and humble duty’ but among the ranks of the girls to be presented less ladylike instincts were breaking through.
In accounts of the end of presentations pride of place as last curtseyer has often been accorded to the blonde and buxom Lovice Ullein-Reviczky, eighteen-year-old daughter of a former Hungarian diplomat. It is Lovice’s image, walking through the palace courtyard flanked by her sponsors, Frederic Bennett, Tory MP for Torquay, and his wife, in her fur tippet, that has acted as a kind of summing up for many people of the true significance of that strange day. It is a lonely image, with an edge of fallen glory. But in fact Lovice Ullein-Reviczky was not the last of the debs but rather the last deb to arrive at the Palace, her sponsor having been unavoidably detained at the House of Commons.
The genuine last deb to curtsey was a girl called Judy Grinling and, in the best traditions of the Girls’ Crystal school stories we all devoured in childhood, she did not achieve this glory by jostling for position. Her triumph was a matter of her niceness and her luck in simply finding herself on the last gilt chair of the last row. And even then her position was not entirely certain: the debs could have been summoned from the other end. Judy Grinling, who later confessed to a reporter that her eventual curtsey had been ‘a little wobbly’, was not from a traditional aristocratic family but the daughter of a sculptor, Anthony Gibbons Grinling, who was also a director of W. A. Gilbey, the wine and spirit firm owned by his family. Judy herself was living in France, learning the language and intending to return there soon after she had curtsied. She was casual about the Season, although planning a dance in London later in the summer, nor was she very interested in her sudden accidental prominence as final debutante. Her mother told a reporter: ‘I don’t think she has any idea of what a Very Important Person she is.’ She resisted invitations to give press interviews or to be photographed in her presentation clothes, making a single exception for the American Life magazine which was covering this turning point in English history. Judy Grinling had the streak of self-determination which in a period of dawning feminism would affect all social classes, the deb classes among them. For what The Times defined as an age of transition Judy Grinling was a very good example of the emergent transitional deb.
There was a dawning feeling by 1958 that the conventional cycle of coming out, courtship and marriage was not the be-all-and-end-all it had by and large appeared to our mothers’ generation. A certain superiority about the Season was becoming de rigueur in the circles which I knew. In the week working up to the final presentations the Evening Standard ran a series entitled ‘Goodbye to the Debs’ by Jocasta Innes, herself an upper-class girl who had become a successful journalist. The first of these deb interviewees, Philippa Drummond, posed in her Chelsea house with her black poodle, maintained that her main interest was art and that she would probably work in an art gallery after the Season (‘of which’ commented Innes ‘she takes a more detached view than most debs’). The next girl to be featured, Priscilla Hunter, a stock-broker’s daughter, had spent six months living in a French family and taking a course at the Sorbonne instead of the traditional finishing school. Her ambition was now to work her way to America as a nurse.
How had this change of attitude arisen? One clear external influence was William Douglas-Home’s popular West End comedy The Reluctant Debutante. In his autobiography William Douglas-Home gives an account of a conversation held on Ashridge Golf Course with his friend George Bishop of the Daily Telegraph about the new play he was writing, as then unnamed:
‘What’s the new play about?’ he asked me, studying the line of his putt.
‘It’s about a country girl who doesn’t like the London Season,’ I said.
‘The Reluctant Debutante,’ he said, half to himself, as he stooped over his ball.
The play opened at the Cambridge Theatre on 24 May 1955, the action taking place in a flat off Eaton Square, a flat rented for the Season by Jimmy and Sheila Broadbent, superficially silly but ferociously ambitious mother of Jane, the reluctant debutante. Jane’s suitor David Hoylake-Johnston, a charmer of dubious reputation, is steadily discouraged by her mother until it emerges, in the final scene, that the sudden death of his great uncle has transformed him into the Duke of Positano. All dukes are desirable in Mrs Broadbent’s view of things and in the volte-face of the final curtain she is pursuing him with gushing invitations to dinner with her daughter. The deb was played by Anna Massey, daughter of actor and producer Raymond Massey and actress Adrienne Allen. Her uncle Vincent Massey was then Governor General of Canada. This, her first professional engagement, coincided with her own debutante Season, a peculiar example of drama mirroring reality. To the many debs-to-be who giggled through a plot in which true romantic love triumphs over snobbery the fact that the star actress herself had made her curtsey gave the play an extra twist: Anna was one of us. I had my own brief moment of Anna Massey glory, having partnered the future reluctant debutante in a performance of ‘In Your Easter Bonnet’ from Easter Parade. This was in the charity matinée put on by Miss Violet Ballantine, whose dancing school we both attended. I, aged nine, was the gauche clumsy imitation Judy Garland to Anna’s much more polished Fred Astaire.
Lovice Ullein-Reviczky, the last of the debs to arrive at the palace
Judy Grinling, the last deb to curtsey to the Queen in the final year of presentations
William Douglas-Home’s play, an efficient if unsubtle comedy of manners, raked over all the clichés of debutante life: the rival chitter-chatter mothers; the weary father groaning about the expense and the late nights; the caddish debs’ delights; the double-barrelled names. It was not that the Season’s silliness or even its venality had never been admitted, but it rated as a private, relatively inbred joke. William Douglas-Home’s play, later turned into a movie by Vincente Minnelli with Kay Kendall and Rex Harrison, made the family secret embarrassingly public. What could a deb do now except plead reluctance? Even the most inwardly ambitious girls were claiming to be doing the Season on sufferance by 1958.
Last Curtsey Page 3