The figures of debs’ fathers drifted in and out of the parties of that summer, the host whose hand you shook at the end of the reception line, the tall man with the moustache who made sure you had a drink. Fathers appear as afterthoughts in Jennifer’s effusive Tatler reports of the Season’s London gatherings: ‘I also met Mr. Stephen Twining, who was helping to make Jean and Annette’s party a success’ … ‘Her father Major Shirley was there to help entertain their friends; and of course Colonel A.E. Croker-Poole and Mr Roger Wethered were there too.’ But even if of peripheral interest to Jennifer, for whom the Season was a primarily female institution, to me, who had no father, other debutantes’ fathers were objects of envy and fascination. One deb, Joanna Priest, indeed had a father who could almost have been mine. Brigadier Robert Priest was also a career soldier in the Royal Artillery. Having survived the war he was now in command at Woolwich, the regimental headquarters, still always referred to by my mother as ‘the Shop’. One lunchtime Joanna’s friends were bussed out there for a party in the commandant’s house, forty debs in their floaty summer dresses converging on that dauntingly masculine military place. The brigadier identified his old comrade Gerald’s daughter and we talked about my father, the only time I ever met a friend from his old regiment. There were to be more unexpected loomings up and revelations. The Season by its nature created a bizarre succession of convergences, surprise realignments of old family connections as we, the new generation, were emerging. It subsisted on recurrent replayings of the past.
Most debs’ fathers kept the vestiges of military rank, even if no longer serving. In Britain in the fifties the war was still the ever-present topic. The week of presentations coincided with the premiere of Sir Michael Balcon’s epic film Dunkirk starring John Mills as a heroic British corporal leading his small band of soldiers through the German bombardment to the French beaches to await the rescue fleet of small civilian craft. To children growing up in the war the Dunkirk story remained riveting, however many times we heard it. Some of our fathers had actually been there and some had died there. Dunkirk has been described as an elegy for the last generation of the aristocratic officer class. Almost all survivors had carried the distinctive attitudes and manners of the war years over into peacetime. Still upright in their bearing as if on a parade ground, these now middle-aged men were creatures of convention, showing the emotional reticence of those long attuned to an exclusively male society bound by its own rules and its accepted code of bravery.
Many of the 1958 debs’ fathers were still living according to this wartime code of chivalry. Some had suffered horribly in battle and in prison. Stephanie Perry’s whole family – her father, mother, her older sister and the infant Stephanie – had spent four years in Stanley prison camp, Hong Kong. Margaret McKay’s father, George McKay, was captured in Greece and then transferred to the prison camp for officers at Kassel, Germany, where Douglas Bader was, for a time, a fellow prisoner. He endured a cruelly austere regime for the next four and a half years. When POW No.49 returned to England he was a barely recognisable emaciated figure, his weight having reduced to seven and a half stone. Almost all the fathers who fought in the Second World War had been shocked to lose close friends and near relations. Twenty-three peers and thirty baronets were killed on active service. Sudden deaths could thrust survivors into new responsibilities and alter the expected pattern of their lives. Andrew Cavendish, who had assumed himself to be merely the younger son of the Duke of Devonshire, heard the news while fighting at Montecatini in Italy in 1944 that his brother Billy had been killed by a sniper’s bullet, making him his father’s heir. He became 12th Duke of Devonshire on his father’s death in 1950, faced with the task of raising over £90 million pounds to pay the old duke’s death duties. It took twenty-four years. This is an extreme example, but many of the soldiers of my father’s generation had their lives reshaped by the chanciness of war.
They emerged from that long period of separation from their country and their families, fighting in Europe, Africa or in the east, to find a world completely different from the one they had expected. The Times had predicted, as far back as 1940, that the war would bring about a changed society in Britain: ‘… the new order cannot be based on the preservation of privilege, whether the privilege be that of a country, of a class, or of an individual’. And so it had turned out. War damage to their property, the scarcity of servants, the reduction of affluence as the landowning classes were financially penalised by higher taxes and a huge increase in death duties which stood at 80 per cent in 1950: these were serious setbacks but relatively technical. What was more psychologically wounding was the fact that these war heroes were not acclaimed as such, but subjected to a barrage of opprobrium and ridicule as class resentment intensified in the post-war period. The change of heart was illustrated cruelly and, to those in my mother’s milieu, shockingly when Winston Churchill, the saviour of the nation, failed to be re-elected as prime minister in the first election after the war. What they dreaded was that this was the prelude to a regime of Welfare State socialism.
The upper classes received a direct onslaught in a book called Declaration, a volume of essays by seven Angry Young Men, as they were christened by the press, and one Angry Young Woman – Doris Lessing. The Angries had been brought together by an enterprising young publisher, Tom Maschler. Declaration, published in 1957, was leftist in tone and highly critical of England. One of the contributors, film director Lindsay Anderson, compared coming back to England from abroad to going back to the nursery:
… the outside world, the dangerous world, is shut away: its sounds are muffled. Cretonne curtains are drawn, with a pretty pattern on them of the Queen and her fairy-tale Prince, riding to Westminster in a golden coach. Nanny lights the fire, and sits herself down with a nice cup of tea and yesterday’s Daily Express.
The colonel class, my father’s class, the Tory fathers of the debutantes were jeered at by John Osborne in a fiercely anti-establishment essay ‘They Call it Cricket’ in which he asks, ‘Are we going to continue to be fooled by a class of inept deceivers, are we going to go on being ruled by them?’ In his play Look Back in Anger, first performed at the Royal Court in 1956, John Osborne created a significantly poignant character in Colonel Redfern, bewildered by the impulse which has taken his well-nurtured daughter Alison to live with the left-wing ranter Jimmy Porter in a one-room flat in a large Midland town. John Osborne describes Redfern as a large handsome man of about sixty:
Forty years of being a soldier sometimes conceals the essentially gentle, kindly man underneath. Brought up to command respect, he is often slightly withdrawn and uneasy now that he finds himself in a world where his authority has lately become less and less unquestionable.
Watching the play, my heart bled for Colonel Redfern. In the course of the Season I met many Colonel Redferns, bemused and vaguely disappointed, looking for a role again, pouring another gin.
These were lost heroes, the fathers of the debutantes. This was not to say that they could not enjoy a party. Not all were as curmudgeonly as Evelyn Waugh. Once persuaded that the launching of a daughter was a duty the fathers did their best to make a pleasure of it. Pre-war party-going reflexes sprang back into activity as the fathers exerted their considerable charms, acting the soul of courtesy with dowagers, flirting with the mothers, eyeing up the girls. Well-bred men of that period now had a new role model, a comforting fantasy of sexual expertise. ‘Enter James Bond who attracts dangerous women like a highly charged magnet’ – the Daily Express ran a feature on Bond and his exotic retinue of ‘naked sirens’ in the same week in 1958 in which we made our curtseys to the Queen. James Bond was the invention of a writer of exactly the debs’ fathers’ generation and background. Ian Fleming was born in 1908, educated at Eton and Sandhurst and had had a notably good war, working in naval intelligence. The persona of James Bond was created in the vacuum that followed the tension and excitement of the war years. The character was born from that sense of loss and melancholy
. In James Bond the officer class was fighting back. The first Bond novel Casino Royale was published in 1953. It was followed by Live and Let Die in 1954, Diamonds are Forever in 1956 and From Russia with Love in 1957. In the figure of James Bond, cruel, debonair, ironic, the wartime man of courage was reworked for an age now more cynical and flashy. The redundant Colonel Redferns were transformed and glamorised into Agent 007 with his seductive accoutrements: the 1933 41/2-litre Bentley, the Morland cigarettes with a triple gold band, the Beretta automatic secreted underneath the dinner jacket. It would be exaggerating to claim that the majority of fathers saw themselves as James Bond, but there was certainly a nuance. I can say that the debs’ fathers, in the mood, were more attractive than the gaucher and less worldly-wise young men.
*
The fragmentation of the family was clear at cocktail parties, the first public events of the Season in which debs were on show with their fathers and their mothers, their stepfathers and stepmothers. At many of these parties the receiving line revealed the full complexity of post-war upper-class family relationships. One of the earliest deb cocktail parties, described in the Sketch as ‘most delightful’ (the recurring adjective for cocktail parties), was held at the House of Lords and ‘given jointly by Lady Kilmuir and Mrs. Oliver Poole for Lady Kilmuir’s god-daughter, Miss Caroline Tonge, Mr. Oliver Poole’s third daughter, Miss Marian Poole, and Mrs. Oliver Poole’s daughter by her first marriage, Miss Zara Heber-Percy’. The air of unreality was increased by the fact that Lady Kilmuir’s husband, Lord Kilmuir the Lord Chancellor, received the guests in the full dress of his office. For me it was another of the mystical convergences since I knew two of the girls in question, Marian Poole and Zara Heber-Percy, before they knew each other. Meg Poole had been in my class at Miss Ironside’s School in Kensington, a serious curly-headed child as Shakespeare-obsessed as me. She had played Helena to my Hermia in an infant production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and indeed she later became casting director at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Zara Heber-Percy and I had been at Miss Violet Ballantine’s dancing classes and had performed together in her charity dancing matinees at the Adelphi Theatre, singing the little ditty which introduced these valiant but, I fear, painfully amateur performances:
We are the pupils of Miss Ballantine,
We hope to amuse you with our song, dance and mime.
We’d rather dance for you all day,
But our mummies and our nannies say
It’s not good for us – They make a fuss.
Oliver Poole MP – Eton, Christ Church and the Life Guards – was then Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. By 1958 these two childhood friends of mine were united by Meg’s father’s remarriage to Zara’s mother. Zara was a good deb, eager, beautiful and sparkly. Meg, already training to be a stage manager, was a bad deb, recalcitrant and sulky. Here they were, like the girls in Cinderella, thrown into unexpected sisterhood.
Once past the greetings line, you were propelled, like the missile from the launcher, into an already thronging, noisy room. Cocktail parties faced the deb with an additional ordeal in that you arrived on your own, unlike dances where you came in a party with the people you had dined with. The first test was in locating somebody you knew and attaching yourself to the group in which they were, edging inwards and joining the conversation as best you could. The next test, a far more taxing one, lay in the necessity to establish a fairly quick rapport with the man most likely to invite you out to dinner. In 1958 there was no question whatsoever of a female issuing an invitation or paying for any of the evening’s expenses. The urgency of attracting a man willing to take you on to a restaurant was, for many of the girls, a serious anxiety. It would be a badge of failure to return home in a taxi when the party came to its inexorable end in the middle of the evening, just when family dinner would have reached the pudding stage. It was not that many mothers would be positively nasty. But an early return generated disappointment. Popularity with men was the whole business of the Season. Since, in general, the escorts’ level of intelligence was a good deal lower than the debs’, we made ourselves sillier in order to get through.
Cocktail parties were the phase of mutual appraisal before the Season proper. It was estimated by the social diarists that between two hundred and three hundred young men were on the regular circuit of deb parties. Who were the debs’ delights and were they in fact delightful? As we wended our way from Allegra Kent Taylor’s cocktail dance at 6 Hamilton Terrace to Raymonde Steinberg’s cocktail party at home in Portland Place to the ‘charming six o’clock’ (as Jennifer described it) for Dominie Riley-Smith in the Dorchester’s rooftop Penthouse Suite, with debs and their escorts spilling out onto the roof garden, we had plenty of opportunity to find out.
There was a little hard core of super-smooth professionals, perennial debs’ escorts now well into their thirties who had been doing the deb rounds for a decade. One was David Ashton-Bostock, a man-about-town so well practised in approach he could have been a suitor in a Noël Coward comedy. Charles MacArthur Hardy, a rich Australian with a house in Cambridgeshire, was by now so well known a fixture of the Season that gossip columns named him ‘Charles Champ’ and Woman’s Mirror ran a photographic feature illustrating his ability to extricate himself from tricky situations: ‘the Heavo’, ‘the Brush-off’, ‘the Cool Clinch’, ‘the Surprise Chin-Chin’, ‘How He Kisses a Girl if He’s Not in Love’. However, these all too experienced debs’ delights were the exception. The men we met during the Season of 1958 were fairly young, not much older than the girls, often still nineteen or twenty. Some indeed were still at school. The vast majority of the regular debs’ escorts had been to Eton, with a few Harrovians thrown in. All deb parties had contingents from Oxford or Cambridge: it was as if no other universities existed. It also goes without saying that no debs’ delight was black. Some were wonderfully polite, especially to the mothers, the most polished of the lot being David Buchan, Buchan of Auchmacoy, Chief of the Name of Buchan, recently a Captain in the Gordon Highlanders, who had presumably acquired his perfect sense of protocol as ADC to GOC in Singapore. The rowdiest and most obnoxious delights were future landowners and farmers in training at Cirencester Royal Agricultural College who ran amok together, urging one another on like the football hooligans of a future age.
Archetypal debs’ delight Charles MacArthur Hardy conversing with his hostess, Lady Lowson, at the cocktail party for her daughter Melanie
By far the largest source of debs’ partners was the army, in particular young officers of the Household Brigade regiments: the five Guards regiments consisting of the Grenadiers, the Coldstream, the Scots, Irish and Welsh; the two cavalry regiments, the Life Guards and the Royal House Guards, the latter being known as ‘the Blues’ (to those who knew). The debs’ escorts were drawn mainly from the smartest of these regiments, the Grenadiers, the Coldstream and the Blues, in which almost 10 per cent of officers were titled or were heirs to titles. Here too there was a strong bias towards Eton: at this period the Colonel of the Coldstream Guards estimated that half his officers were old Etonians. There was also a strong hereditary factor, since so many of the officers were sons of former officers in the regiment. Andrew Sinclair, himself an Old Etonian who did his National Service with the Coldstream, gives a more or less accurate picture of an inbred and indolent masculine society in his satiric novel The Breaking of Bumbo, published in 1959. At the time it was regarded as shockingly disloyal, a betrayal of his officer class, depicting as it did the fixed hierarchies and deadening routines of military life at Wellington Barracks (referred to by its inmates in quasi nursery terminology as ‘Welly B’). He brought out the childish arrogance of the spoilt young officers, ‘little scarlet gods, little bowler-hatted gentlemen’, each with their personal soldier servants, reduced by hours of boredom on officers’ mess duty to drinking far too much and taking potshots at the ducks in St James’s Park.
For many young Guards officers the Season provided the evening’s entertainment
with, at best, three cocktail parties to choose from, and later in the summer, two or three deb dances preceded by dinner parties. This entertainment was practically free, the only costs being laundered shirts and a bread-and-butter letter to your hostess. For regiments based in London, the routine was convenience itself. Once military duties ended at four, the young officers were free to have tea in barracks, take a bath and, assisted by their soldier servants, change for the evening’s events. They had hardly returned from the night’s dances when it was time to report for military duties: there were plenty of tales of hung-over brigade officers fainting with exhaustion while lining some London processional route. It is not perhaps surprising, considering the lack of variation in their lives that, as I remember them, these well-connected officers, especially the regulars, were limited in outlook, stunted in conversation. On the other hand, when these strong silent men invited us back to their barracks for lunch or drinks, there was a gorgeousness about them in their military uniform which reminded me of Lydia Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and her susceptibility to men in ‘regimentals’. In 1958 we were still susceptible.
The escorts had a kind of pecking order, as the debs did. What debs’ delights did the more ambitious mothers have their eyes on as a future son-in-law? The most obviously covetable was HRH Prince Edward George Nicholas Paul Patrick, Duke of Kent, who succeeded to the title as a child of six when his father was killed in a wartime flying accident. The young duke, seventh in succession to the throne, was now twenty-two and a lieutenant in the Royal Scots Greys. Hostesses were eager to invite him to their parties. In manner and appearance – courteous, sporting, rather chinless – he was an almost cartoon version of the perfect debs’ delight. But he remained elusive. He seemed to prefer girls rather older than we ingénues. Through the spring and early summer of 1958 he was attached to Janet Bryce, to the chagrin of the mothers. Still worse, from August onwards, there were rumours of a more serious romance with Katharine Worsley, the daughter of a Yorkshire landowner, whom he was to marry in 1961.
Last Curtsey Page 8