While I was growing up in London in the fifties La would make brief and always agonised appearances, staying a night or two at the flats in Queen’s Gate and later Queen’s Gate Gardens where we lived before we moved to Chelsea. Her first husband, Hector Stewart, had died suddenly, soon after their marriage, stricken by a strange paralysis, an unkind act of God. She had then married Hector’s cousin, Lieutenant Commander Michael Stewart, her name conveniently remaining Lady Ursula Stewart. But that second marriage soon went on the rocks. By the early fifties Ursula was living with and was eventually to marry Patrick Hamilton, a writer already famous for two gripping stage thrillers, Rope and Gaslight, as well as for his novels Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude, books which conjure up a shifty, shabby low-life urban England. Patrick Hamilton himself was a contorted character, a middle-class Marxist, an alcoholic with a real-life fascination for the prostitutes he depicts so brilliantly in his novels. He was prone to suicidal depression, entering a mental hospital in the 1950s for a course of ECT. Sexually Patrick Hamilton was very problematic, claiming that his relationship with Ursula was the first time he had found real sexual satisfaction. He was certainly sadistic. La was virtually imprisoned in their house in rural Norfolk. He opposed violently any contact with her friends. Permission to travel to London was hard won. I do not think my mother ever met Patrick, but she hated him implacably. La’s stories of horror would upset her for days after. ‘That terrible man’, she would call him with, for her, an extraordinary indignation. ‘No wonder he writes such horrid plays.’ The sense of La’s suffering left a kind of aura over our cosy, regulated, two-child-and-a-nanny ballet-loving household. If I wanted an example of raw and complicated adult passion here it was.
Ursula’s novels are low-key, rather muted, not unlike Ivy Compton-Burnett’s but less obscure. The Gentlewoman, her best book, is a study in snobbery, a subtle re-creation of the claustrophobia of English family connections, the painful dependencies of the aristocratic entourage. The central character, Miss Bowlby, is a governess employed by the Rushfords of Rushford Hall, inhabiting the indistinct hinterland between the classes, not one of the servants, yet not one of the family. The book is set in the war years, close to the time of writing. There is a strong sense of the old order changing and the inevitable disintegration of England’s great houses and the aristocratic way of life they once sustained. In that sense The Gentlewoman is as much a landmark of its period as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited with the difference that Ursula herself had her roots in the doomed, beautiful houses she described.
Ingestre in Staffordshire, Lady Ursula Stewart’s family home, photographed in 1958
Rushford Hall is a version of Ingestre in Staffordshire, the grandest and most haunting Jacobean house in England, seat of the Earls of Shrewsbury, Premier Earls of England and Ireland. Ursula’s brother John lived at Ingestre, having become the 21st Earl at the age of seven in 1921, succeeding his grandfather. His and Ursula’s father, Viscount Ingestre, had died of pneumonia just before the First World War. Architecturally the house is by no means of a single period or style but a series of layerings, accretions, remakings. Behind the wondrous Jacobean façade lie rooms restored by the Victorian architect John Birch when a fire had gutted them in 1882. The north side is John Nash replaying Jacobean. The house itself holds a whole history of changing aspirations and tastes. The stone church beside the house, reputedly by Wren, is crowded out with monuments of the Chetwynds and the Talbots. There are old stables and new stables, an orangery bounded by two pedimented temples. Set within the park, landscaped to perfection by Capability Brown in the mid-eighteenth century, is a classical pavilion, itself large enough to house a whole family. Ingestre had once been a supreme expression of aristocratic confidence. But by the early 1950s the Earl’s sister, and the Marxist’s mistress, was sensitive to Ingestre’s growing melancholy. After the war, it seemed almost like a stage set, a spectacularly anachronistic place.
Lady Ursula Stewart (the writer Laura Talbot), centre, at Wilton with Mollie Maynard and Yolande MacCarthy before their marriages
The great Pembroke house of Wilton also makes its ghostly appearance in La’s novels. Her younger sister Lady Audrey was a semi-invalid who stayed at home in England with her uncle, Lord Pembroke, when her mother, by then married to an American diplomat, accompanied him on postings overseas. My own mother sometimes went with La to Wilton to see Audrey. A Wilton picture in her album for 1936 shows three young women wearing printed cotton headscarves. My Aunt Mollie, my Aunt Ursula, my mother with her adored white Sealyham, Loretta Young. It is still a sunny picture, before any of them married, not reckoning what griefs and turmoils lay ahead.
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By the end of April the London cocktail parties were coming to an end and the balls were just beginning. The Berkeley Debutante Dress Show was scheduled for 28 and 29 April. ‘Big thing recently was the Berkeley Dress Show goodness they’ve had it now but oh it was such fun’, wrote one of the models, Georgie Milner, in her diary in the hectic deb-speak of the period. The Dress Show had become an institution of the Season. It was held at the Berkeley Restaurant in Mayfair in aid of the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The debutante models were selected by Pierre Cardin, the Paris couturier, choosing a dozen girls from a pre-selected shortlist of forty-eight. Cardin would be supplying the dresses for the show. For the girls it was another testing time, a nerve-racking professional assessment of our attributes. We were like the princesses in a nursery story: who would be the fairest of us all?
The Berkeley Debutante Dress Show. The Hon. Penelope Allsopp, Georgina Milner and Gillian Gough model Cardin’s clothes
Debs not chosen to be models were given the consolation prize of selling posies to the audience at the Berkeley Debutante Dress Show
We paraded before Cardin in the drawing room of the Duke of Bedford’s house in Cheyne Row. The Duke of Bedford was becoming the showman among aristocrats, eager for any chance of publicising Woburn Abbey. He had agreed to be the compère of the show. Many of the debs had anxious mothers in attendance. Jennifer was also present and commented sternly in her Tatler column on ‘the appalling deportment of most of the girls, who walked badly and slouched along with their heads down. Surely good deportment ought to be one of the most important parts of a girl’s education, especially at their finishing schools.’ Debs’ deportment was not the only thing to be declining on the brink of the sixties: there were much worse things in prospect. We all held our breath while Pierre Cardin made his choice. With commensurate tact he selected Lady Carolyn Townshend, daughter of the Marchioness Townshend who was chairman of the committee of management for the show. He did not select Penny Graham, Mary Groves or Sally Croker-Poole, three of the debutantes who were later to become professional models. Nor was I among the chosen, more understandably. While the fortunate debutantes were led off to be given training for the catwalk by the then well-known model Bronwen Pugh, the rest of us smiled as sweetly as we could and braced ourselves for selling programmes and raffle tickets, the consolation prize for failure, a stiff upper lip being expected of a deb.
Most of us had been to dress shows with our mothers. Mine was regularly invited to Lachasse, a London couture house which specialised in very well-cut tweed. I do not remember my mother ever ordering the expensively discreet coats and skirts that were paraded before us, soft music in the background. But she certainly had her personal vendeuse, a woman adroitly balanced on the tightrope between servility and friendship, who would welcome Mrs MacCarthy and her daughter, leading us to our pre-labelled small gilt chairs. Compared with the gentility of London couture dress shows the Berkeley Debs’ Dress Show was a bit more of a bunfight, with the reject girls and mothers seated round the catwalk at small tables. The pictures suggest that we ate a hearty tea while the amateur models paraded eighty garments designed by Monsieur Cardin, who had sent over his right-hand man, André Oliver, to supervise the fittings for the show. The parade began with Cardin�
�s fuchsia cheviot suit, progressing to a woollen dress in greige, a yellow and white houndstooth organza dress, a cocktail suit in pale beige broderie anglaise. Some girls complained that the clothes made them look too elderly and certainly in retrospect they seem more suitable for a well-off Parisian widow than a girl of seventeen.
The final item was the Wedding Dress. This was the formula in most dress shows of the period. But the fact that both models and spectators were young girls presumed to be in search of husbands gave the bridal grand finale an added edge. In Zia Foxwell’s novel of the Season Borrowed Time, the question of who wears the Berkeley Dress Show wedding dress provides the central drama of fixation and betrayal. In real life Zia herself was amongst the dozen models chosen by Monsieur Cardin but she failed the final hurdle – she was not to be the bride. That honour went to Lola Wigan, students’ pin-up and face of the future with her incandescent slattern-into-angel look. In a tulle and white satin harem-skirted wedding gown the exquisite Lola sailed past us down the ramp.
CHAPTER FOUR
The London Dances
‘The first spectacular ball of the Season’, as the social diarists described it, was held on the 6th May in the Great Room at Grosvenor House. Four hundred debutantes assembled with their parents and their partners, all of us in long white ballgowns and white gloves. We dined and danced. At 10.30 a signal was given for the hundred and fifty chosen maids of honour to gather in the upper gallery. From there they made a slow descent of the curved stairway like the maidens in a Burne-Jones painting and processed down the vast ballroom trundling in a huge white cake to the March from Handel’s Judas Maccabeus. This Historic Ceremony of the Birthday Cake was a re-enactment – some might say a travesty – of the annual birthday celebration of Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, held at St James’s Palace. When the cake, with its flickering candles, was brought to a halt in front of the guest of honour, the Dowager Duchess of Northumberland, a mass curtsey was performed by the serried ranks of debutantes. They curtsied very low and rose simultaneously, having undergone a rigorous rehearsal in the morning. Though the curtsey was intended for the Duchess of Northumberland, representing the long defunct Queen Charlotte, the effect was a surreal one of hundreds of debutantes worshipping a cake. Queen Charlotte’s Ball, strangely combining the solemn and the mawkish, appeared to one later commentator as a mixture of the Nuremberg Rallies and the Dance of the Fairies in the Hall of the Mountain King.
The ball had first been held in 1925, with 181 electric candles representing the years since Queen Charlotte’s birth. Its beginnings were relatively modest. There were only thirty-one white-gowned maids of honour in 1930, the year in which Lady Diana Cooper was Dame d’Honneur and HRH Princess Beatrice cut the first slice of the cake. The atmosphere was then relatively cosy and domestic with dozens of soon-to-be-redundant nannies of the debutantes crowding the balcony of the Grosvenor House ballroom to watch their charges take part in the procession. No doubt some of them emitted a sentimental tear. The ball increased in importance in the Second World War, when the courts were suspended. Queen Charlotte’s took over the court’s role in providing the debutantes’ initiation ceremony, albeit in conditions of wartime stringency. The debs’ partners came in uniform and Queen Charlotte’s birthday cake was concocted with dried eggs. By 1944 the ball had become a kind of picnic, with guests bringing their own food and drink. Once the Great Ballroom at Grosvenor House was requisitioned as an American army headquarters, Queen Charlotte’s was shifted to a smaller ballroom and was held in two instalments. During the war Bill Savill’s orchestra began playing at Queen Charlotte’s. The bandleader himself was then in the RAF. Things changed slowly in the deb world. Bill Savill and his orchestra were still providing the dance music at Queen Charlotte’s in 1958. But there was the new thrill of the television era with Frank and Peggy Spencer and their ‘famous Television Formation Dancers’ providing the midnight cabaret.
Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball entrance ticket
Dinner menu for Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball
The girls photographed descending the stairs and making their low curtseys appear innocence personified, their noli-me-tangere attitudes intensified by the virginal white of their attire. But there was, as so often in the Season, the competitive undercurrent, the barely concealed resentment of the girls left on the sidelines towards the girls elected to the starring roles. Alas, I was listed in Jennifer’s diary as one of the debutantes ‘looking enchanting, but not lucky in the draw for the maids of honour who accompanied the cake’. It was small consolation to be invited to come forward to receive slices of the royal birthday cake to take back to my table and distribute to the guests. There were eight or ten people at each round table. Essentially these were family parties, mothers smiling and fluttering, fathers proudly claiming first dance with their daughters, young men chosen as suitable partners for a debutante at her first official appearance at a ball. The strong and silent escort style was particularly favoured: Darel Carey, David Davenport, magnificent young brigade officers, tall, dark and erect. With the terrifying heroism of the upper classes the father of the deb Lois Denny, whose mother was killed out riding on the eve of presentations, had brought his daughter to Queen Charlotte’s. ‘They are now at 21 Wellington Square, the house Mrs. Denny had taken for the Season, and with the help of friends Mr. Denny is trying to give his daughter the coming-out that her mother had planned for her’, Gladys Boyd informed her readers in the Sketch.
The maids of honour descending the grand staircase in the Grosvenor House ballroom
Queen Charlotte’s Ball was definitely a night for the tiaras, still de rigueur for married women at dances at which the royal family was present. The tiara had its origins in the celebratory garlands and wreaths made by primitive peoples, in the days before metallurgy, using plants and flowers which acquired particular emblematic meanings. There were later more elaborate metallic Greek, Etruscan, Egyptian and Scythian versions, the art of the tiara reaching its ultimate perfection in Western Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most aristocratic women in the fifties, if they did not own one, could at least lay their hands on a tiara if the occasion was grand enough. The Queen Charlotte’s Ball president, the long-serving and wonderfully dignified Dowager Lady Howard de Walden, stood goddess-like in her classical circlet of diamonds, formed like a laurel wreath. Beside her, the resplendent guest of honour, the Dowager Duchess of Northumberland, wore a tiara formed of jewelled feathers, like a headdress from some celestial poultry yard, her earrings dangling, bracelets jangling as she cut the birthday cake. Many of the mothers too were in spectacular tiaras, often borrowed from a friend or relation, or extracted just that morning from the bank vaults. The tiara, emblem of the central rite of passage from virginity to marriage, had special significance within the presentation ceremony. At the full dress evening courts in the years before the war, the mothers or female presenters of the debutantes customarily wore tiaras set with gems. A young woman’s bridal tiara bore the complex messages of the language of flowers, an example being the wild rose tiara given by her father, the Earl of Strathmore, to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon on her marriage to the future King George VI. All those glittering tiaras at Queen Charlotte’s emphasised the primitive antecedents of the Season, the garlands and wreaths of ancient ceremony, our origins as debutantes in distant initiation ritual and myth.
The Dowager Duchess of Northumberland cutting the birthday cake at Queen Charlotte’s Ball
The private dances had begun even before Queen Charlotte’s, in the panic to accommodate that year’s record number of girls making their debut. The first dance I attended was on 24 April: Mrs George Frost’s ‘small dinner dance’ for Miss Leonora Frost at the Normandie Hotel. The term ‘small dance’ originally signified a dance at which royalty would not be present, allowing a relaxation in the dress code. By 1958 the term had been adopted as a curious formula by impecunious hostesses warning their guests not to expect too much. Colonel and
Mrs George Frost need not have worried. I remember a successful and easy-going party, Leonora in spotted chiffon with a black bow at the waist. Spots were in that year, inspired by the much-photographed spotted-silk ballgown worn by Princess Margaret on her West Indian tour. The dancing at Leonora’s party at the Normandie was to Tommy Kinsman and his band. Tommy Kinsman was a fixture of the Season, having been catapulted to favour with debs’ mums after playing at the ball at Apsley House on the night in 1947 on which Princess Elizabeth’s engagement to Prince Philip had been announced. He made the most of his position, resisting the temptation to flirt with all the debutantes who milled around him but encouraging them to add their names to his ‘Debs’ Drum’, Kinsman’s trophy of his multiple successes in the Season. Unusually for 1958 the pre-war system of dance programmes was in force at Leonora’s party. Each dance was in effect pre-booked, forestalling the agony of being partnerless, but at the same time preventing freedom of manoeuvre as the evening progressed. From that evening at the Normandie I could already see that the Season would be a test of stamina and nerves.
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