Last Curtsey

by Fiona MacCarthy

  Six runners up to the duke as top escorts were featured in the Sketch at the beginning of the Season: these were the twenty-six-year-old Duke of Atholl, whose father had been killed in the war in Italy, and who had succeeded to the ancient Scottish title in 1957; twenty-eight-year-old Prince Alexander Romanoff, of the Czarist Russian family, said to be ‘a good dancer, and on most hostesses’ lists of escorts’; Jeremy Thornton, stepson of Sir John Johnson Bt., ‘a keen dancer, but a keener rider to hounds’. The debonair-looking young Jeremy was doing National Service, stationed with the Blues at Windsor. Paul Goudime, ‘a gay companion’ – the term ‘gay’ having as yet no homosexual connotation – was soon to go to Cambridge to read Science: his chief hobbies were shooting and motoring. The Hon. Michael Spring Rice was introduced as the twenty-three-year-old younger brother of Lord Monteagle of Brandon: ‘A popular escort, he is gay and an excellent dancer.’ Educated at Harrow, he was making banking his career. The last of the Sketch’s selection was Peter Tapsell, described as ‘a brilliant young man of twenty eight – a budding politician of great promise’. He strikes one as already rather different from the rest in that his school was Tonbridge, not Eton or Harrow, and his Oxford college, where he took a first-class degree in modern history, was Merton, not the much more fashionable Christ Church. Peter Tapsell, born in Hove to a father whose regiment was an obscure one – the 39th Central India Horse – was to have a successful career as a Conservative MP. His first marriage was to the Hon. Cecilia Hawke, daughter of the 9th Baron Hawke. Peter Tapsell, who was eventually knighted and remains one of the longest serving of MPs, is a very good example of the easy infiltration of the deb scene by a non-aristocratic but plausible young man of ambition and intelligence.

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  A cruel joke was perpetrated on a notoriously pushing deb’s mother, Mrs Arthur Croker-Poole, who had only recently adopted the double-barrelled surname, presumably hoping it would add extra gravitas to the family and better the prospects of her daughter Sally. She had previously been contented to be known as Mrs Poole. Their neighbours in the country called the family ‘the Frogponds’. There was something about Mrs Croker-Poole’s all too blatant social climbing that tempted people to send her up. A mischievous acquaintance, Peter Walwyn, telephoned pretending to be an Evening Standard journalist. He told her he had just heard the news that her daughter Sally was engaged to the Duke of Kent. Unlikely as this was, Mrs Croker-Poole believed the story and, according to one witness of the hoax, ‘went into paroxysms of excitement’. The story is a very good example of the sadistic humour of the upper classes and also a reflection of Mrs Croker-Poole’s limitless ambitions for her daughter, ambitions which seemed at first sight unrealistic but in the end achieved their object. Since the Croker-Pooles lived opposite my mother’s house in Limerston Street we watched fascinated at the unfolding of what often seemed like a Restoration satire of social manoeuvring and sexual bartering.

  The Croker-Pooles were an Indian Army family. Sally’s father, a lieutenant colonel, had returned to England in 1947 when Independence came. He now had a rather menial but very hush-hush job, said to be in the fingerprints department at Scotland Yard. Colonel Croker-Poole and Sally’s brother Anthony, a plump, amiable but less than sparkling figure, were kept largely in the background, though Anthony had a walk-on role from time to time as Sally’s stooge. Even before Sally came out, Mrs Croker-Poole perfected her technique of keeping out the competition. The autumn before the Season, Penny Graham, a strikingly attractive girl, had been invited to the Croker-Pooles’ house in Berkshire for the weekend. She had only been there a few hours when her hostess summarily dismissed her, producing the excuse that one of the men had cancelled, making the numbers uneven. This proved to be untrue, but Penny was packed off back to London in the train. Another fellow-debutante and old family friend, Auriol Stevens, was given similar treatment at the cocktail party given for Sally at the Cavalry Club. Auriol, a tall, willowy, auburn-haired girl who, much to Mrs Croker-Poole’s alarm, had brains as well as beauty, having passed her Oxford entrance, was whisked away from any eligible men and introduced to the elderly aunts and doting grandparents who sat around the fringes of debs’ parties. Almost fifty years later Auriol still remembers Mrs Croker-Poole with hatred: ‘She was my enemy.’ At the end of a girl’s luncheon party at her London house, Mrs Croker-Poole took the other debs aside for a confidential conversation in the bedroom: ‘Please be kind to Sally. The Season will be hard for her. She’s just so beautiful!’ Sally herself is the enigma of these stories. What was she really feeling? She seemed to go along with her mother’s machinations. She had put herself over in the Season’s early weeks as a simple healthy country girl, describing herself proudly as the owner of three horses. But the Season was to change her. Sally was destined to acquire a lot more horses after her eventual marriage to the Aga Khan.

  Beyond the aspirations of their mothers, what were the hopes and expectations of the debs themselves? An obvious answer can be found in the romantic novel Borrowed Time written by Zia Foxwell, one of the ‘top debs’ of 1958. The setting and the characters are recognisable. Her hero is Harry, 4th Baron Wrightson, aged twenty-two and ‘at the top of every deb’s mum’s list for the past four years’. As Zia describes him ‘his tall athletic physique, dark saturnine features and heavy lidded eyes lent him an air of dangerousness which most women found irresistible. His title was also an advantage, as was his adequate income – not that he was very rich.’ Harry Wrightson was due to take possession of the family estates, inherited from his grandfather, in three years’ time. Meanwhile he was living in ‘a decent bachelor pad in a good part of London’. He drove a red Austin Healey, wore a Cartier watch and ‘impeccably tailored shoes’. He was reputed to be terribly fast and at the top of the list of NSITs. The novel culminated in a, for its time, quite explicit sex scene as the 4th Lord Wrightson makes love to the virgin Deb of the Year: ‘He felt the shivers of desire run over her as all the while he stroked her soft skin.’ This was the stuff of our most simple fantasies.

  But by then there were other elements encroaching. The working-class hero loomed on the horizon in series of films of northern realism made in the late 1950s in gritty black and white. Our metropolitan debuts coincided with Room at the Top, the film based on the novel by Bradford-born John Braine and set in a small town in Yorkshire. In this classic of 1950s upward mobility the rampantly opportunistic Joe Lambton seduces and marries the local tycoon’s daughter while carrying on a passionate affair with an unhappily married older woman. For me at least the uncouth glamour of Joe Lambton as played by Laurence Harvey undermined the effete charm of the debs’ delights.

  There was also Look Back in Anger’s Jimmy Porter, the scourge of old-time England and seducer of its daughters. I saw the play in its original English Stage Company production at the Royal Court with Kenneth Haigh as Jimmy Porter, Mary Ure as Alison. I was with Susannah York the actress, who was then at RADA. Susie was living with us at Limerston Street, one of the theatrical PGs my theatre-loving mother favoured. It was another of those random friend-of-friend arrangements. Susie’s mother was a crony of my Aunt Cynthia’s. Two upper-class girls together, we sat huddled in our seats, watching transfixed as the curtain rose not on a drawing room with tall French windows, which we were so used to in West End comedies, but a scruffy and untidy one-room flat in the provinces. Left of stage was not a chintz sofa but an ironing board on which the beleaguered Alison is toiling while Jimmy lays into the appalling bourgeois values that had nurtured her – and us. Kenneth Tynan, reviewing the play in the Observer, called it the best young play of the decade, lauding its political courage and emotional power. He said he doubted if he could love anybody who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. People sometimes say that this was Kenneth Tynan at his silliest. But was it so ridiculous? I know I felt the same. At the time, to the late teenagers we were, the play seemed alarming and amazingly exciting in its fierce iconoclasm, its hints of sadomasochistic sexual relationshi
ps, its glorification of real life and raw emotion in contrast to pernicious conventionality. Osborne’s play stayed in my mind, providing an unsettling perspective on the Season. It was one of those works of art that shaped a generation. In a way Look Back in Anger was to alter my whole life.

  The narrowness of education available to upper-class girls in those days now seems positively startling. The thinking – such as it was – was that educating a daughter to the level considered necessary for a son was unnecessary, unjustifiably expensive and indeed might prove positively harmful, overtaxing the brain of a girl destined for marriage, bringing up her children, running a household and finding time for a moderate amount of charitable work. The boarding schools most favoured by the mothers of the debs – Heathfield, Southover Manor, St Mary’s Ascot, Downe House – operated a relatively languorous routine, producing boy-mad girls with no sense of urgency, in contrast to the tightly packed curriculum and energetic sporting activities of Cheltenham, Roedean or my own school, Wycombe Abbey, geared to the production of good citizens. In the deb world, I soon discovered, motivation was suspect and ‘How frightfully brainy!’ was a pejorative response. It dawned upon me then that this was a society dictated by an automatic separation of the sexes into merely functional, decorative women and ruminating and decisive men, symbolised by the way the women departed en masse at the end of dinner leaving the men to their politics and port. At a dinner party one night in Woking I was taken to task by my host, a stockbroker I think, for commenting on the Torrington by-election, recently won by the Liberal candidate, Mark Bonham-Carter. It was made only too clear that my opinions were not wanted. Debutantes don’t have opinions. Only four of the full-time debs of 1958 – Auriol Stevens, Teresa Hayter, Annabella Loudon and myself – had places at university that autumn. We were known in the gossip columns, with a hint of disapproval, as ‘the blue-stocking debs’.

  In the fifties women’s role was almost totally subservient. In my early teens I read avidly if anxiously a manual of instruction compiled by my favourite novelist Noel Streatfeild. It was called The Years of Grace and directed specifically to ‘growing up girls at that difficult age’. Beside hints on how to behave at parties, how to train as a secretary, how to make yourself attractive to the opposite sex, there are chapters on such sports as tennis, riding, skating, swimming with the overall advice ‘Every girl ought to love sport, but if she wants to be nice and adorable and completely feminine, she will let men win ALWAYS.’ Debs were in a no-win situation, only more so. We were taught to give in gracefully to a set of circumstances in which men only inherited their family estates and women very rarely had control of their finances. My widowed mother went through regular humiliating rituals of asking for handouts from the McAlpine family office where her inheritance was held for her in trust. In a world in which marriage was still regarded as a girl’s sole fulfilment, indeed a social duty, success in effect meant surrendering our separate identities. A married woman took the name of her husband. Even her Christian name would disappear. We were branded, like sheep, as the possessions of our husbands. For example, at the party held to celebrate Frances Sweeny’s engagement to the Duke of Rutland, the Tatler noted the number of ‘young marrieds’: Mr and Mrs Billy Abel Smith, Mr and Mrs Robin Stormonth Darling, Mr and Mrs Jocelyn Stevens, ‘… both very bronzed just back from a wonderful holiday in the Bahamas’. Fifty years later we imagine women to be liberated; but there are people who address me as Mrs David Mellor even now.

  Group photograph taken after the marriage of Lady Mary Maitland and the Hon. Robert Biddulph in April 1958

  At the beginning of the Season how did we see it ending? Put before us as an example of the conventional ideal scenario was Lady Mary Maitland, older sister of our fellow-debutante Anne Maitland, whose marriage to the Hon. Robert Biddulph, elder son of Lord and Lady Biddulph, was pictured in the magazines in early April. The wedding had taken place at St Margaret’s, Westminster, an obvious place for a standard grand wedding of this kind featuring the same hymns, same prayers, a similar small body of family retainers past and present mingling with the guests. The bride herself is the archetypal English deb, light brown haired, slim, pretty, with an innocent sweet face, in her white silk faille wedding dress with pearl embroidered bodice of guipure lace. The skirt of the wedding dress fans out into a train. The bridegroom, the Hon. Robin, wears the traditional black tail coat, mole grey waistcoat and striped trousers, white carnation in his buttonhole. Ten bridesmaids attend them, six adult and four children, all in delphinium blue organza. The little bridesmaids clutch their bouquets. It is a formal but a rather homely scene, the expected female ritual that follows presentation. The carefully posed photographs exude a kind of certainty that Lady Anne and Lady Elizabeth, the bride’s sisters, will soon themselves be brides. Except for the fact that presentations had now ended the pattern promised to replicate itself perpetually.

  But was this really what we wanted? Some debs had started wondering. Such fixed ideals of marriage were being destabilised by 1958. It was not only the long-running Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend saga, revived in the very week of presentations, when they were reported as having spent three hours together at Clarence House, 876 days after their forced parting. Princess Margaret was now aged twenty-seven. The banished suitor, forty-three, was said to be looking thin and worn: according to the Daily Express ‘his grey suit hung on him’. The Queen, absent in Holland, was reported to be irked by Captain Townsend’s reappearance. Meanwhile the runaway lovers Dominic Elwes and ex-deb Tessa Kennedy, another notorious couple of the period, were discovered in Havana in a state of penury, hoping that their family would forgive and forget. I remember the reverberations in deb circles when Elfrida Eden’s older sister Amelia fell in love with Giovanni Borelli, a handsome burly Italian ferryman and married him ‘to exchange the endless bustle of life in London for a home on the lovely little island of Ischia’, as the Sketch had told us. All at once our visions of a white wedding to the son of a lord at St Margaret’s, Westminster fell away. Romance with a ferryman in Ischia was somehow seeming a lot more up to date. When asked by a reporter about her marriage plans, one of my contemporaries, the Hon. Penny Allsopp, ‘a sparkling girl in a waist-length necklace’, said, ‘Debs don’t expect to find husbands during the Season – gracious no. What they do is make a lot of friends they can go and see when they are married so they don’t have to see too much of their husbands.’ By 1958, even in the deb world, a conventional marriage was losing its allure.

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  Apart from what I absorbed from novels my own view of marriage in action was primitive. The absence of a father meant I had no grasp of the day-to-dayness of it. From my observation, from a distance, of the marriages of my mother’s many women friends it seemed that they fell disappointingly short of the sense of sexual ecstasy my reading of fiction (so avid that I once set myself on fire reading Charlotte Brontë by the gas fire in the nursery) had led me to expect. As children we were taken on visits round the comfortable country houses of Aunt Tommy, Aunt Dora and the rest, staying a few days, falling into the predictable routines of mornings in the morning room, a wander round the village followed by a restorative late morning Dubonnet for the adults before taking the dogs out for walks around the fields on routes so well-trodden that even the dogs, it seemed to me, showed signs of boredom. Husbands and wives led largely separate lives, the colonels and the majors married to my mothers’ friends spending their mornings in ramshackle apartments at the back of the building known as the estate office or otherwise taking refuge in the library. Both these areas in households where the rules were kept to strictly, even if unspoken, were understood to be the male preserves. Uncle Gerry roared with fury when he found me in his library, the little girl fingering the big leather-bound volumes. The men emerged for lunchtime drinks, sometimes already – as was obvious even to a watchful child – a bit the worse for wear. The drinking culture was pervasive in English country houses in the mid-twentieth century and the whi
sky bottle in the library posed a constant threat to marriages otherwise reasonably loyal and affectionate, as my mother was often to lament.

  Was this really the best that one could hope for, after the long drawn out rituals of marriage? The engagement announcement in The Times, the flood of congratulatory letters to one’s mother, the infinite preparations for the wedding, the fittings for the dress, the arrangement of the bouquets, the car to the church, the long walk down the aisle, the return to the reception, the display of wedding presents, shooting sticks, silver gilt pheasants, cut-glass decanters, Royal Worcester game casseroles, table mats with hunting prints. These conventional wedding presents had symbolic value. These were artefacts selected to sustain a way of life assumed to be the only valid one, the seal of approval and the blessing for the future handed down from one generation to another. To me at eighteen, at the beginning of the Season, it looked like a disappointment – but perhaps it could be worse.

  My favourite aunt, Aunt Ursula, was our family example of marital disaster, the awful fate to be avoided at all costs. Lady Ursula Chetwynd-Talbot (‘La’ as her friends called her), daughter of Viscount Ingestre and granddaughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, had been one of mother’s oldest, closest friends. Tall, angular Aunt Ursula, perilously shy and hysterically witty, was the only really literary person in our orbit. She was my heroine because, in spite of an attempt to reduce her very prominent Shrewsbury nose by plastic surgery, she still closely resembled Virginia Woolf. I had been given a signed copy of the first edition of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own for my tenth birthday by my one intellectual cousin Tommy Bishop and it had become my Bible, giving me an intimation of another kind of life, new worlds of female fellow feeling and intellectual rigour. I sensed that in words I could find my own way out. My Aunt Ursula was a professional writer who, if not of the calibre of Woolf, had had several novels published in the 1950s, using the pseudonym Laura Talbot. They are novels of class, critical and edgy, set in the fading aristocratic world she knew. The most successful are The Gentlewoman and The Last of the Tenants. She also wrote short stories and radio plays.