London Season means a convergence of débutantes on the town houses of relatives. With us, the only London branch of a widely extended family, our house is permanently a cross between metropolitan hotel, clearing station, and left-luggage office for our kinsfolk.
Her guests were strewn around on twin beds, studio couch, spare bunks, a rather uncomfortable bed chair, four inflatable mattresses originally bought for camping. The article suggests well the rather ramshackle quality of upper-class living arrangements at the time. I remember wandering into the main bedroom of a flat in Brompton Road taken for the Season and spotting, in a chaotic heap of ball dresses and underclothes, the family tiara on the floor.
Preparations for the Season had gone on for several months before the presentations. The crucial decision was the date for the deb’s dance, where it would be held and who indeed was paying for it, a tense question in what were felt to be financially stringent times. Did all debs have to have a dance? A few girls did in fact achieve a perfectly successful Season, being asked to all the parties, without giving their own dances, notably Penny Graham, first of the debs to curtsey. But this was a route only for the brave, for girls with great reserves of personality and contacts. For the vast majority of debs the dance acted as the underpinning of their Season, a focus of activity and an essential bargaining point since it was the tacit understanding that girls you invited to your dance would ask you back.
In the old days of the Season the girl making her debut was the sole star of the evening, the centre of the ritual, an upper-class equivalent of Queen of the May. This was becoming less usual with the advent of two-hostess or even three-hostess debutante dances in which families combined, sharing the expenses. There could be as many as four debutantes coming out together. Of 118 coming out dances pre-announced by Jennifer in her Tatler preview of the 1958 Season, 43 were shared. The sharers might be sisters or sisters-in-law combining to launch two debutante cousins. Some of these joint hostesses were, if not relations, old friends. But, with the curious randomness of Seasons in the fifties, some pairings were more like a marriage of convenience between mothers who were not necessarily compatible, introduced to one another by helpful mutual acquaintances. My mother’s partner in this enterprise had been produced for her by Helen Vincent. Lady Vincent, daughter of the First World War commander Field Marshal Sir William Robert Robertson, was an old but not, I think, a very understanding friend. The friend of this friend, Petie Burness, was a tiny, dark, vivacious woman whose sister, Patricia Medina, was a minor film star who had started her career as a teenage actress in British pre-war movies before going to Hollywood with her then husband the actor Richard Greene, Robin Hood in the TV series in the fifties. Petie was a little film starry herself. My mother, who could be uncharacteristically catty about Petie, complained that she was never parted from her mink, and indeed there was a day of reckoning in Harrods when animal rights campaigners moved in on her with spray guns. The Burnesses were richer and more showy than my mother who, though hardly Bohemian, considered herself arty. Petie’s husband, Kenneth, was a shipping magnate and a member of Lloyd’s. Their lavish house on the corner of Cadogan Square had a balcony-terrace overlooking the square gardens on which drinks were served in summer. It was a mismatch in that the Burness’s style of life and level of expenditure was not really compatible with ours.
Whatever her misgivings my mother was not one to renege on her commitments. The MacCarthy–Burness (or Burness–MacCarthy) dance was to take place at the Dorchester in June. The fixing of the date for so important an investment in a daughter’s future could not be left to chance. London and country dances within reach of London were held in the three months from May to July. This space could get congested with dances overlapping, sometimes two or three a night. Dances in more distant areas of England – for instance Shropshire, Yorkshire and Northumberland – were scheduled for late July and August. Irish dances were centred around the early August Dublin Horse Show; Scottish balls coincided with the shooting in August and September. More London dances were held in the so-called ‘Little Season’ which began in early October and straggled through the autumn. If humanly possible a clash must be avoided with another daughter’s debut, and especially an event of obvious glamour and extravagance which might siphon off your own most hoped for guests. This planning could be nerve-wracking and there were many pitfalls, some resulting in embarrassing apologies in The Times explaining that because of unforeseen circumstances the date of an already-announced dance had now been changed.
The cannier mothers consulted Betty Kenward, ‘Jennifer’, who had been the Tatler’s social diarist since 1944 and who, fourteen years later, was an astonishing repository of knowledge of the working networks of the upper class. An upright, beautifully coiffed and elegantly austere figure, dedicated to upholding proper standards of behaviour in a world in which they seemed in imminent decline, Jennifer took it upon herself to regulate the Season, keeping a careful ledger of dance dates already booked and bestowing the free dates on grateful mothers, resembling the goddess with the cornucopia. Like Vacani’s curtsey lessons a solemn consultation between prospective dance-givers and Jennifer was a staple of the Season, part of the mystique. I think my mother was secretly a bit in awe of Jennifer, although joking about her trademark strings of pearls and velvet Alice bands. She and Petie returned from their afternoon audience in the Tatler offices, having been allotted 10 June for the dance at the Dorchester, with evident relief.
The next thing to organise was the coming-out photograph. Every debutante I ever knew had had one done and indeed you can find these nubile young girls’ portraits still standing on the sofa tables and grand pianos of 1958 debs now of pensionable age. As well as being private celebrations of a daughter’s entrée to society these formal studio portraits had a public function. Portraits of the best-looking and/or bestconnected girls would be selected by the social editors of the magazines Tatler and Queen to illustrate their February previews of the coming Season, establishing a kind of pecking order amongst the debutantes-to-be. In tone the enterprise was strangely close to that of Spotlight, the illustrated casting directory for the theatrical profession, an upper-class version of ‘pick your starlet’. Vital statistics were not given but implied as, for example, in the caption to the portrait of Penelope Riches given a full page in the Sketch, the third of the London social magazines, competitor of Queen and Tatler, which was soon to be defunct:
Betty Kenward, the social diarist Jennifer, with her son at a London wedding in the 1950s
Penelope Riches is the lovely daughter of Mr and Mrs Edward Riches, of Cadogan Gardens, who also have a place near Canterbury in Kent. Miss Riches has the perfect model-girl figure, and great grace and poise. It is her ambition to become a model and rise to the dizzy heights of stardom in this profession, in which the top girls rival the stars of stage and screen. Her curtsey should be perfect.
Alexandra Bridgewater and her cousin Georgina Milner photographed by Tom Hustler
It is interesting to see in this write-up the incipient signs of celebrity culture which would in the end engulf the debs.
The portraits themselves mark a turning point. The old names of the established society photographers – Madame Yevonde, A.V. Swaebe, Bassano and Lenare, who had photographed many of our mothers – were still in evidence in 1958. The majority of portraits were still the conventional head and shoulders shots of girls in pearls, girls in off-the-shoulder satin dresses, girls perched on brocade sofas with a glimpse of a family heirloom or a heavy gilt-framed painting in the background. But there was a growing tendency towards the more romantic flamboyant stagey image showing the influence of the widely circulated velvet-mantled portrait of the Queen painted by Pietro Annigoni in 1954. F.G. Goodman’s photographic portrait of Georgina Montagu-Douglas-Scott, debutante niece of the Duchess of Gloucester, a sacrificial virgin in a grandiosely melancholic landscape, certainly has the Annigoni touch.
Lola Wigan, whose portrait by Tony Armstrong-
Jones was used on the cover of Queen magazine. It challenged the conventional twinset-and-pearls image of the debutante, setting a new style of society portraiture in 1958
Younger photographers were gradually taking over from the famous interwar portraitists of society and royalty. Dorothy Wilding’s Bond Street studio employed a staff of around forty in the late 1930s and extended over several floors. The portrait Wilding took of Henrietta Tiarks, 1957 Deb of the Year, was in effect a swansong. In 1958 she sold her studio to her twenty-four-year-old assistant, Tom Hustler, for a mere £3,000. Hustler introduced a quirkier, almost surrealist approach to debutante photography as in his double portraits of the two cousins Georgina Milner and Alexandra Bridgewater, relations and rivals in their year of coming out. These are beautiful, witty, slightly unnerving studies in ambivalence.
The other rising star of society photography was Tony Armstrong-Jones. He too was in his twenties. His portrait of Lola Wigan, the cover picture for Queen magazine’s February issue ‘FIRST NEWS OF THE 1958 SEASON’, was a breakthrough in two senses, bringing a new informality to society photography and redefining the image of the debutante. Armstrong-Jones photographed Lola not in a twinset, not even in a choker, but with a suggestive stretch of naked shoulder. Quite possibly the deb was naked to the waist. He invested her with a sweetness and a nonchalance, a Reluctant Debutante in beautiful reality. Here in 1958 is a face of the sixties, the vulnerable but self-determined waif, a girl of the style soon to be popularised by Jean Shrimpton, the most famous model of the time. Within weeks of the Queen cover, Lola Wigan was a debutante cult figure. The Evening Standard reported: ‘Miss Lola Wigan, a rare, exquisite deb with Pre-Raphaelite face and cascading hair, was told that Polish students had posted her photograph (by Tony Armstrong-Jones) on the walls of an art school in Warsaw.’
There were mutterings among the debs’ mothers that Lola, although she came from nowhere, had a good chance of becoming the next Deb of the Year.
The February publication of the list of dances and girls’ portraits made it possible for mothers to check through and assess the competition, pinpointing the main dances and most glamorous of debs. The followers of form now came into their element. If the illustrated previews of the Season resembled a casting directory they also had overtones familiar to the horse-racing fraternity to which so many families of the debutantes belonged. In that sense we were all promising young fillies, to be pondered over, prodded, trained up and made the most of. The Season was put over as ‘having fun’, sheer pleasure. But right from the beginning we felt a sense of duty to, so to speak, our trainers, as if England expected us to do our best.
Margaret Whigham, later Duchess of Argyll, Deb of the Year in 1930
Predictions began early over who would be ‘Top Deb’, seen at all the smartest parties clasped in the arms of the most eligible men. Though coming-out had originally been an internal affair, with little personal publicity directed at the debutante, the scene had altered greatly in the brasher 1930s. Much to the horror of the old-guard aristocracy debs became newsworthy. The first of these was Margaret Whigham, later Duchess of Argyll, acclaimed Deb of the Year in 1930 amidst rumours that her wealthy Scots-American father had financed a considerable publicity campaign. Other highly publicised debs of that same year were Lady Bridget Poulett, sister of Earl Poulett, and Rose Bingham who was to become the Countess of Warwick. As Margaret Whigham saw it, ‘We seemed to fill the gap between the picture postcard beauties of World War I and the star models, such as Barbara Goalen and Fiona Campbell-Walter, after World War II.’ On this rise to semi-stardom she admitted she had had assistance from friends who were newspaper gossip columnists: ‘Don’, the Marquis of Donegal, Viscount Castlerosse, Tom Driberg, originator of the William Hickey column. For the first time the debutante became a household name with a physical persona recognisable enough for the angular and slender Margaret Whigham to appear in numerous newspaper cartoons:
… they usually made me baleful looking, with large sunken eyes and a square jaw jutting out from an elongated neck. I was regarded as a trend-setter, and was apparently the first girl to wear pearl-coloured nail varnish that was luminous at night.
Through the decades Debs of the Year had come and gone, with no one quite approaching Margaret Whigham’s brittle notoriety. In 1957 the consensus of opinion had settled fairly early on Henrietta Tiarks, daughter of an international banker Henry Tiarks, a director of Henry Schroder and a member of the Dollar Exports Council. Henrietta’s grandfather F.C. Tiarks, Governor of the Bank of England, was embroiled in the Anglo-German Fellowship set up in 1934 to foster contacts with Germany. This fellowship was in effect a channel for Nazi propaganda. But such family embarrassments were never mentioned, perhaps barely even thought of, as Henrietta’s Season went from strength to strength. The sleek-haired, slightly slit-eyed and Oriental-looking beauty pictured sitting with her mother at Queen Charlotte’s Ball; Henrietta at a dance at Claridge’s, half smiling, with Prince Alexander Romanoff sitting at her feet. As Deb of the Year, Henrietta had been classic: her Season in London had been followed the next year by a second triumph in New York. Henrietta was destined to be Marchioness of Tavistock, then Duchess of Bedford. Who had the stamina to succeed her in 1958?
Henrietta Tiarks, Deb of the Year in 1957, at a ball at Claridge’s with Prince Alexander Romanoff and (far left) Charles MacArthur Hardy
In our year the winner of the Top Deb contest was less obvious. Though Lola Wigan looked the part she was naturally reticent and had no pushing mother in the background. The names of a number of alternative contenders began to be bandied about with a slight air of desperation. The Sketch alighted on Miranda Smiley whose dance was to be held at her grandmother’s house, Parham Park in Sussex: ‘Miss Miranda Smiley might well prove to be “deb of the year”. She is endowed with great good looks, is studying the piano and is really talented.’ The fact that she also played the piano accordion was noted as a further bonus point. Elfrida Eden, niece of the former Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, was another possibility put forward by the Sketch: ‘She is well in the running for the title of “debutante of the year”.’ But it was pointed out that Elfrida had her own, rather different ambitions. She had her mind set on becoming a professional ballet dancer. Elfrida, who had trained with George Goncharov and also studied with Vera Volkova, is pictured en pointe in her tutu, performing a solo from Swan Lake at a charity matinee. The photograph is captioned A DEBUTANTE ON HER TOES.
Four other debutantes were picked out as strong contenders by the Evening Standard. Mary (‘Minnie’) d’Erlanger, daughter of the newly knighted Sir Gerard d’Erlanger, Chairman of BOAC, was said to start with the advantage of knowing the Duke of Kent through her sister; in addition her face photographed well. Georgina Ward, daughter of George Ward MP, the Secretary of State for Air, was described as an attractive girl who aimed to be an actress, having won medals for monologues and lyrics. The Duke of Windsor, a close friend of her uncle the Earl of Dudley, was likely to be at her Dorchester dance. Zia Foxwell, whose mother Lady Edith was married to the film director Ivan Foxwell, was also in the running. She was sharing her dance with Georgina Montagu-Douglas-Scott, the Duchess of Gloucester’s niece. Melanie Lowson, described as ‘a strawberry blonde with a passion for stamp collecting’, had the advantage of a mother, Lady Lowson, who was the most successful Lady Mayoress that London had had for a decade. But in spite of famous fathers, lavish dances, royal connections, none of these girls succeeded to the title. They were all passed at the post, as we shall see, by a country girl called Sally, a relative outsider with an intrepidly ambitious mother, Mrs Arthur Croker-Poole.
In any case by 1958 the title itself had become a bit déclassé. Like other aspects of the Season it was being diminished by ridicule and satire. Later in the summer an amateur play, The Deb of the Year, a comedy whodunnit written by Lady Aylwen was performed to a fashionable audience at the Scala theatre in aid of the NSPCC. Lady Aylwen, not content with appearing in the p
rime part of the debutante named Lola, cast herself in a lesser role as well. The novelist Denise Robins, in a cap and frilly apron, played Germaine, the French maid.
The role of the ingénue Lady Davina Delville was acted, tongue in cheek, by a previous year’s debutante Marika Hopkinson. The part of the murderer was taken by Charles MacArthur Hardy, described in the Evening Standard as ‘that large, handsome and superannuated deb’s escort now laughingly known to his friends as “the Clive Brook of Green Street”’. Clive Brook had appeared in such popular successes as Gioconda Smile and The Count of Clérambord. In this star part of the murderer, Charles MacArthur Hardy, the epitome of smoothness, parodied himself and effectively sent up the London Season. The villain was unmasked in the Ritz in Paris. The critic in Queen magazine may have complained of cruelty to audience in the theatrical disaster of the upper classes playing the upper classes. But according to the Standard ‘the audience howled’ in its appreciation.
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In the early weeks of 1958 our mothers were working hard at circulating. In mid-February, Gladys Boyd, the Sketch’s social editor, reported:
There is little more than a month to go till the Presentation Parties in mid-March and the mothers of all the debutantes (of whom there is a record number this year) are now having the time of their lives making all the detailed preparations to give the girls the time of their lives! It’s a most exacting and tiring job; some mothers love it, some loathe it; but I think the majority of them enjoy the gay lunches and small dinner parties which they give to meet each other and generally plan for the Season as carefully as if it were a season of International Opera or a Festival of Britain.
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