Last Curtsey
Page 4
The Reluctant Debutante with its original cast including Anna Massey as the debutante and Celia Johnson as her mother
In the history of debutantes one often finds an element of disbelief, an urge towards self-parody. Lady Diana Manners, arriving at the palace in 1911 to make her double curtsey to King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, recollected that the courtiers had been ‘very alarming and martinettish – they shoo you and pull you back and speak to you as a wet dog’. Photographs of the artist Leonora Carrington in her train and ostrich feathers awaiting presentation to King George V in 1934 were a source of fascination when circulated around her surrealist friends. Closer to our own last curtseys, Emma Tennent describes her 1955 debut as a scene from a pantomime: you stood for ‘a split second in front of the Royal Family on the dais, before dropping down to perform what looked, from the rear, very like the laying of an egg’.
Its solemnity betrayed even by its own insiders, what hope of remaining respect towards a ceremony already pronounced by the Lord Chamberlain as obsolete? The age of full-blown satire and irreverence would not arrive till the early 1960s, but the satiric possibilities of the end of palace curtseys were already irresistible. Any tone of respect towards the toffs was banished in such knockabout features as that in the Evening Standard headed ‘SQUASHY’ BELCHER OF ROEDEAN MEETS THE QUEEN. Sarah Belcher’s father was said to be a heart surgeon. Unusually young to curtsey, at sixteen, she had been fast-forwarded in that final year of applications and was on an exeat from school. The Standard showed one picture of ‘Squashy’, her Roedean nickname, in school uniform and one in the ‘fabulously expensive’ floral presentation dress made for her in Paris. With the case of ‘Squashy’ Belcher all vestiges of dignity surrounding presentation vanished in a puff of smoke.
After the ceremony I was ushered into the Green Dining Room with a group of other girls, swirling in in our silk dresses and our little feather hats to be reunited with our parents and our sponsors and mull over, in relentless detail, the afternoon’s events. We stood and we sipped tea and munched the traditional post-curtsey chocolate cake provided by the palace, not just debs but greedy teenagers in a country in which food rationing had only ended in 1954. For the more mischievous of the debs there was now the ceremony of the Pinching of the Teaspoons, a project made only slightly less daring by the fact the teaspoons were the property of the palace caterers and not the Queen herself. The chat was inevitably of cocktail parties, dances. There was also the conversation-stopping news that the Norfolk debutante Lois Denny’s mother had been killed on the hunting field on the very eve of presentations. She had just taken a house in London for the Season. Debutantes had their particular tragedies.
I do not think I am falsely recalling a sense of the momentous alongside all the frippery. We may not have taken it to a logical conclusion: we were of course by definition four hundred silly girls. But at some instinctive level I feel we understood that the end of presentations signified a formal end to high society and that as English debutantes we were a dying breed.
CHAPTER TWO
Preparations for the Season
Only a small proportion of the 1,441 debutantes presented at Buckingham Palace in 1958 stayed on in London to do the Season proper. Many debs ‘up from the country’ (as my Chelsea-based mother would have put it, in slightly pejorative tone) returned whence they had come after delivering their curtsey. One of these, Angela Carler, told the Evening Standard, ‘Riding’s my hobby. Mummy is Master of the North Warwickshire Hounds.’ The bevy of foreign debutantes presented to the Queen by the wives of their respective ambassadors – for instance the US, Belgium, Italy, with the largest contingent from France – almost all dispersed after the ceremony. The hard core of mainly English debutantes who spent the next four months giving and attending parties and the random succession of events that made up the London Season amounted to little more than two hundred: in her 1958 preview ‘Brilliant Vista of the Last Royal Season’ Jennifer lists 231 debutante participants and even within this total there were girls who came and went. For the remaining stalwarts based in London, whose non-stop social activities and would-be witticisms provided a whole summer’s gossip column fodder, the Season amounted to a full-time job.
Who were these girls? We were a very motley collection compared with the closed society of debutantes in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the aristocratic and landowning families converged on London for the Season, balls were held and marriage contracts between the children of wealthy and powerful dynasties were hammered out. Of 168 girls listed by Jennifer as giving dances in 1958 only 17 are daughters of the peerage and therefore irrefutably (this time to quote my nanny) ‘out of the top drawer’. Seven daughters of earls and marquesses are listed: Lady Caroline Acheson, Lady Katherine Courtenay, Lady Fiona Crichton-Stuart, Lady Anne Maitland, Lady Teresa Onslow, Lady Davina Pepys and Lady Carolyn Townshend. It was a sign of the times that Anne Maitland, daughter of Viscount Maitland who was killed in action in 1943, had been upgraded to the rank of earl’s daughter after his death. It was also symptomatic of that period of growing casualness towards the London Season in the higher echelons of the aristocracy that the coming out ball at Arundel Castle for Lady Mary Fitzalan-Howard, the Duke of Norfolk’s second daughter, had been held over to the following year, when she would share it with her younger sister, Sarah, and her older sister, Lady Anne, whose twenty-first birthday it would by then be. In 1958 Lady Mary would make do with a small dinner dance. Lady Rosemary FitzGerald, granddaughter of the Duke of Leinster, Ireland’s premier duke, unwillingly attended a few debutante tea parties and struggled through her own cocktail party at the Cavalry Club, before defecting from the Season altogether, setting off for travels in the USA.
Lady Rosemary FitzGerald (right) with a fellow debutante outside the palace on presentation day
The Hon. Penelope Allsopp
Jennifer lists ten debutantes with the title of the Hon., which marked them out as daughters of viscounts or of barons: Penelope Allsopp, Mary Bridgeman, Diana Connolly-Carew, Eliza Guinness, Annabel Hawke, Camilla Jessel, Marilyn Kearley, Gail Mitchell-Thomson, Teresa Pearson, Elizabeth Sidney. By no means all these girls were of ancient lineage. Several were descended from the new commercial aristocracy that began to be created in the nineteenth century, gradually intermarrying with the old landowning elite. The Hon. Eliza Guinness came from the famous brewing family originally ennobled by Disraeli: Eliza’s dance was to be given by her grandmother, the Countess of Iveagh. The Hon. Penelope Allsopp was descended from Henry Allsopp, another brewer, a relatively modest self-made man created Baron Hindlip by Lord Salisbury in 1886. The Hon. Teresa Pearson’s great-grandfather Weetman Pearson was an entrepreneur of energy and vision, an engineering contractor on a global scale whose elevation to the peerage as Lord Cowdray in 1910 was by no means universally approved. The title inherited by the 2nd Baron Jessel of Westminster, father of the debutante the Hon. Camilla Jessel, dated back only as far as 1924. Lord Jessel had married into the Londonderry family and Camilla’s grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Londonderry, was to be the hostess at Camilla’s ball at Londonderry House. The father of the Hon. Gail Mitchell-Thomson was technically speaking even more of an arriviste since his title of Baron Selsdon of Croydon, a place itself a little suspect in smart circles, was bestowed as recently as 1934. Decades of political appointments to the peerage, as well as frequent intermarriage with commoners, had turned the British aristocracy into a hybrid. By 1958, contrary to many outsiders’ expectations, little of the blood of my contemporary debutantes could be described as truly blue. This is not to say the Season was a free for all. There were still operable grounds for social exclusion. But these were a matter of language, style and manner rather than the dynastic claims of aristocracy and land.
In that post-war decade of rapid social transition, as the debutante connection with monarchy and aristocracy loosened, my own family background was typically mixed. My mother’s grandfather Robert M
cAlpine was a prodigious example of the self-made man. Born into a mining family in Lanarkshire, he worked as a bricklayer before founding the building and contracting firm that became Sir Robert McAlpine & Sons. He was made a baronet in recognition of his ‘continuous and patriotic service’ soon after the armistice of 1918. McAlpines had been farsighted in developing new techniques of concrete construction and my great-grandfather became a well-known public figure, popularly known as ‘Concrete Bob’. Sir Robert’s daughter Agnes, my mother’s mother, had married a French diplomat, the Baron de Belabre, a tall, distinguished, rather dilettante figure who had been French Consul at Dover and at Newcastle, was an amateur painter and had written a history of Rhodes. The marriage only lasted for ten years. The baron was unfaithful. My mother was apt to be impatient with my grandmother’s intolerance of his vicissitudes, maintaining that she ought to have accepted he was French.
Socially speaking my mother had married a little bit beneath her. In 1937 Yolande Yorke Fradin de Belabre, the girl whose name reminded gossip columnists of the heroine of a medieval French romance, married Gerald MacCarthy, eldest son of a Sherborne country doctor of Irish extraction and his wife, Florence, a diminutive Irishwoman known as Flo. My father was a regular soldier in the Royal Artillery, a regiment of marginal social acceptability. But what my father may have lacked in fashionable credentials was compensated for by good looks, affability and charm. He was a dashing, gregarious figure known as ‘Bang Bang’, the name by which he first appears in my mother’s voluminous photograph albums. He was a wonderful ballroom dancer, a proficient rider and polo player: in almost all the pictures my father is either on or near a horse. His ebullience balanced my mother’s much more reticent nature; as they say, he brought her out of herself. My father, by then a lieutenant colonel, was killed in 1943, only weeks after sailing from Glasgow to join his regiment in the offensive against Rommel’s army in Tunisia. He perished in the desert, in a random scenario of ambushes and sandstorms. His death was recorded as ‘date unknown’. My widowed mother had suitors but she did not remarry. No one ever measured up to my father she would say.
Fiona MacCarthy with her grandfather, the Baron de Belabre, at Bridport
The marriage of Captain Gerald MacCarthy and Yolande de Belabre at St George’s Hanover Square on 6 April 1937
My credentials for the Season were in one sense unimpressive. Neither by birth or fortune (for in spite of the McAlpines my mother was hard up) was I up there with the grandest of the debs. But my right to do the Season was never, I think, questioned by my mother, by myself or anyone I ever met. As a family we were positioned in the fluid territory between the upper middle classes and the aristocracy: one of my mother’s half sisters was married to Sir Edward Naylor-Leyland, Edward VII’s godson. Of my mother’s own god-daughters, one married David Stuart, Viscount Stuart of Findhorn, another is the present Duchess of Devonshire. My mother was not snobbish or particularly socially ambitious for her daughters, her great enthusiasm was for ballet and the theatre. My younger sister was already training as a dancer and our household was more like that of the stage-mad children in Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes than a social forcing house. But the Season was somehow built into the equation, a matter of conventions and connections so deep-rooted that no one really bothered to discuss it. It was the assumption that in the interval between leaving school and taking up my place at Oxford I’d be dancing, having fun, making friends, acquiring ‘beaux’ (as my mother’s generation optimistically described them). In my mother’s circles the debutante Season was simply something that one did.
Gerald MacCarthy in India in 1937 with his chestnut Arab horse Mistral, winner of many cups
Fiona MacCarthy with her mother in her Schiaparelli parrot dress;
MacCarthy with her father at home on his last leave in 1942
Historically, the London Season began and ended with large-scale arrivals and departures: the movements of whole households from the country to the town house in late spring and back to the country in late July or August as the shooting season started and, in the heat of summer, London itself became less salubrious. In her memoir Hons and Rebels Jessica Mitford describes the removal in the 1920s of the large family, servants and household effects (including wax-wrapped packages of home-baked bread) from their house in the Cotswolds to their seven-storey town house in Rutland Gate as ‘resembling the evacuation of a small army’. By 1958, by which time the majority of these enormous aristocratic town houses had been given up, the Season was not so logistically complex but its formal vestiges remained in the announcements in The Times Court Circular appearing from early March onwards. For example, on 3 March:
Lord and Lady Rollo and the Hon. Helen Rollo will be at 24 Hilton Street SW (telephone Sloane 4111*) from April 23 for the Season.
The family of the 13th Baron Rollo had arrived from Perthshire.
Major R.A. and Lady Rosemary Rubens and Miss Davina Nutting will be at 11 Cadogan Court, Draycott Avenue, sw3 (telephone Kensington 2821) from today until August 31.
The grave tone of these Times announcements suggests an event of national importance. On 1 April the Court Circular informed its readers:
Lady St. John of Bletso has left 1 Herbert Crescent and her future permanent address is 8 Lennox Gardens, sw1 (telephone Kensington 6537).
Lady St. John was the most notorious of the Season’s paid chaperones, launching her own little group of debutantes each Season, so the notice of her changed location was essential to trade.
From the point of view of social cachet it mattered greatly where you lived. Over the centuries the different areas of London had acquired their own identity and status. By the interwar period, according to Jessica Mitford, their social character seemed ‘as fixed as if it had been determined by some inimitable law of the Universe’. Mayfair was the chosen place of the very rich and fashionable; more artistic, literary and bohemian people gravitated towards Chelsea ‘or even Bloomsbury’. Hampstead, Hammersmith or St John’s Wood were ‘predominantly middle class’. Meanwhile the ‘run-of-the-mill squires, knights, baronets and barons’ were colonising Kensington, Paddington, Marylebone and Pimlico.
By 1958 Mitford’s analysis was still in broad terms valid, though, crippled as they were by high levels of taxation in the post-war period, few upper-class families could afford to live in Mayfair and the boundaries of social acceptability were necessarily spreading out and out. The further reaches of Chelsea and Fulham were no longer considered socially beyond the pale. In this my mother’s situation was typical again. The address printed on our deep-blue printed writing paper was 66 Limerston Street, Chelsea sw10. The postcode sw10 was only just becoming viable in upper-class circles, where every nuance counted and the self-appointed arbiters could be ferocious in sorting the genuinely upper class from the socially spurious: a few years earlier the only acceptable sw postcodes were sw1, sw3 or (at a pinch) sw7. The term Chelsea was barely accurate for a street beyond the bend of King’s Road in what was technically World’s End, a working-class area then in the early stages of being gentrified. My mother had bought the white stucco terraced house, a handsome house with possibilities though still a little shabby, for £5,000 from the maverick politician and horse racing fanatic Woodrow Wyatt just the year before my Season. For my younger sister Karin and myself it was an extra thrilling purchase in that Woodrow Wyatt shared the house with his then mistress Lady Moorea Hastings, daughter of the Earl of Huntingdon, whom he was soon to marry. This, to us, breathtakingly glamorous slim blonde was referred to in the family as ‘Lady-Moorea-in-the-basement’. The whole idea of mistresses in basements was a new one, opening out vistas of possibility.
For a debutante Season Limerston Street was adequate. The house had a good-sized first-floor drawing room, with tall windows opening out onto a balcony. Downstairs there was a library that ran through to the dining room overlooking a small garden at the back. My mother slept on the top floor. My sister and I had our bedrooms on the second floor. Isa
, our Scottish nanny, had replaced Lady Moorea in the basement. If the house was not grand scale it was not dramatically different in feel or in facilities from the London living places of many other debs. Apart from the few ostentatiously rich and, in my mother’s view, therefore somewhat suspect families (‘My dear, you should just see the Renoir in the dining room!’) many debutantes emerged in their presentation finery from just this sort of relatively modest Chelsea terrace house or South Kensington mansion block apartment. Tiny, cramped mews houses converted from the dwellings of the former grooms and coachmen had also become popular. Few debutante families had live-in servants. The daily would arrive for a few hours each weekday morning. Quite often these houses or flats would be rented for the Season, hence The Times’s announcements of the debutante’s arrival. Sometimes just a room would be begged from a relation or a friend of the deb’s mother and a weekly rate for board would be negotiated: in the make-do-and-mend upper-class life in that post-war period there was nothing shaming in taking in paying guests (or, as they were termed, ‘PGs’). A few days after the 1958 presentations The Times ran a quasi-humorous article by one of these all-welcoming hostesses who could have been Anthony Powell’s Lady Molly. The piece was titled FAMILY CHARING CROSS.