In that year at least forty private dances were held in London between April and July, the debutantes circulating night after night: same faces, same dance bands, more or less the same venues. The most popular places for the London dances were the Hyde Park Hotel, the Anglo-Belgian Club at 6 Belgrave Square (which had the reputation of being cheaper than the others), and the Hurlingham Club in Hammersmith, semi-rural in atmosphere, where the floodlit clubhouse with its spreading lawns and shrubberies provided the illusion – with only a small stretch of the imagination – that you were entertaining in your own small stately home.
Tommy Kinsman serenading a debutante
The elaborate mis-en-scènes of the deb dances had long been a feature of the London summer, creating sudden little crowds and bursts of colour. Looking back on her Edwardian debut Cynthia Asquith recreates for the readers of her memoirs a social London of great confidence and plenty, romantic, hierarchical:
striped awnings, linkmen with flaring torches; powdered, liveried footmen; soaring marble staircases; tiaras, smiling hostesses; azaleas in gilt baskets; white waistcoats, violins, elbows sawing the air, names on pasteboard cards, quails in aspic, macédoines, strawberries and cream, tired faces of cloakroom attendants, washed streets in blue dawns.
For her the scene was invested with a retrospective poignancy: the expectant faces of the girls thronging the ballrooms, ‘that shining dewy look of youth on all their faces, so soon to be frozen into grief by the slaughter of the First World War’. In the closeness of the city the sounds of the night’s parties reverberated from street to street. Virginia Woolf, a reluctant debutante in 1901, describes in an early essay how the noise of a nearby ball roused her from her bed in Hyde Park Gate. The ball was being held:
Not in our street – but in Queens Gate – the tall row of houses that makes a background to the Mews. The music grew so loud, so rhythmic – as the night drew on & so the London roar lessened, that I threw up my window, leant out into the cool air, & saw the illuminations which told surely from what house the music came.
Now I have been listening for an hour. The music stops – I hear the chatter, the light laughter of the women’s voices – the deeper notes of festive males. I can almost see the couples wandering out from the ballrooms to the balconies which are starred with small lamps.
The sounds and smells of the Season seemed somehow to have eaten into the very fabric of the city. ‘Though I am deeply thankful that by no terrible alchemy can I ever again be debutante, the sense of excitement is still there when I smell the acrid pot-pourri that the month of May brings to London’, wrote Violet Powell, remembering her Season in the years between the wars. Even in the 1950s, when London was in general a drab and muted city, with buildings still bomb damaged, shabby streets of peeling stucco, a little of this glamour lingered. Some summer nights you could recapture the pre-war sense of the centre of London – Mayfair, Hyde Park and Kensington – as an aristocratic neighbourhood, an intimate network of familiar faces, known surroundings. Evelyn Waugh’s diary for 1956, the year of his daughter Teresa’s coming out, describes a night of wandering from party to party: ‘Walking at 2 or 3 from Cadogan Square to Knightsbridge London was full of men in white ties strolling about.’
In its early days, when the Season was the background to family marriage treaties, a girl’s coming-out dance would, without question, be held in her own home, in one of the aristocratic London palaces. This remained the case up to the First World War. Lady Diana Cooper listed the grandees’ houses where she danced in the year of her debut in 1910: Derby, Lansdowne, Londonderry, Bridgewater, Stafford, the great town houses of the country landowners, ‘all magnificent, gilded and marbled, and not to be tampered with’, by which she meant that the reception rooms were so architecturally splendid they needed no additional decoration for a ball. Such houses were enormously extravagant to run, requiring a battalion of servants for their upkeep. Many of the houses, once closed down in the First World War for the duration, were never to reopen. Some were sold off and demolished. The old formal style of entertaining began to be eroded, overtaken by the more spontaneous and flighty ‘bright young things’ parties of the twenties. But even if less ostentatiously splendid, coming out balls in the years between the wars kept some of their old intimate atmosphere. They were still feeling like large gatherings of friends. Joyce Phipps, the writer and comedian Joyce Grenfell, came out in 1928: ‘All the parties were in private houses which was lovely. The big set balls in Bridgewater House and Crewe House were thrilling.’ Margaret Whigham, the future Duchess of Argyll, recalls in her memoirs coming out in 1930, attending a ball or a reception every night, ‘probably at Brook House, Londonderry House, Holland House, Sunderland House or Warwick House’, all grand family houses. ‘Sadly’, she adds, writing in the 1970s, ‘many of these no longer exist.’
In 1939, the year remembered with a frisson as the last of the old-time Seasons, a Season overshadowed by the onset of another devastating war, a high proportion of the dances were still being held in London private houses. Parents used their own house or they borrowed a town house from relations. The first dance of that Season was given by their mothers for Elizabeth Hely-Hutchinson and Victoria Douglas and guests danced in the first-floor drawing room of a family house, 16 Cadogan Square. Lady Astor gave a ball for her niece Dinah Brand at her own large town house, 4 St James’s Square. Lindsey Furneaux’s dance was held at 44 Cadogan Place, town house of Lady Pamela Berry, a relation of Lindsey’s parents. The Duke and Duchess of Kent attended. The debut of Ghislaine Dresselhuys, Lady Kemsley’s daughter by an earlier marriage, was at Chandos House in Queen Anne Street, the large Adam house that was the Kemsley’s London residence. The Duke and Duchess of Kent were at this ball as well.
There were two most mysterious and atmospheric dances in what now seems a phantom Season from which the partygoers have departed with the strange finality of the decorative revellers in Alain-Fournier’s novel Le Grand Meaulnes. The first was held in June 1939 and was given by Baroness Ravensdale for her niece Vivien Mosley. Vivien was the daughter of the Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley by his first wife, Lady Cynthia, who had died of peritonitis in 1933. The ball was in a beautiful dilapidated house in Regent’s Park belonging to a friend of Lady Ravensdale, Maud Allen, a dancer in the free-flowing style of Isadora Duncan. The house was known as the West Wing. That ball stayed in the minds of everyone who went to it. Old ladies now describe it as a scene of wonder which encapsulated the romantic intensity of that pre-war summer. The house had a great wild garden adjoining Regent’s Park and the dancers were able to roam out to the long grass.
In July 1939 another curiously memorable party was held at Holland House in Kensington, a marvellous Elizabethan building set in seventy acres of gardens and woods like a country manor house in London. The owners, Lord and Lady Ilchester, had lent the house to the mother of the debutante Rosalind Cubitt. It was a huge dance for more than a thousand guests including King George VI and Queen Elizabeth and Noël Coward. The long history of Holland House gave the night a special resonance. This was a house that had been at the centre of the agonising politics of the Civil Wars: the first Lord Holland was executed for his royalist sympathies. In the eighteenth century Joseph Addison had lived there and the house became a gathering place of London intellectuals and wits. By the early nineteenth century, the time of the 3rd Baron and the inveterate intriguer Lady Holland, the house was one of the great Whig palaces of power. This was where Lady Holland’s protégé Lord Byron had his first embattled meeting with his future lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, the start of a liaison that became disastrous for them both.
The Cubitt ball drew its glamour from Holland House’s historic connotations, its accretions of memory. The pre-ball dinner was held in the long library. The hosts received the guests at the top of the grand staircase. Dancing was in the formal white and gold ballroom and supper in the ‘Joshua’ room, where Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portraits of eighteenth-century grandees gazed down o
n the current Queen of England, who was wearing a white crinoline, Queen Eva of Spain weighed down with rows of pearls, and the intrepid old hostess Mrs Ronnie Greville who was now so decrepit she had to be borne in by two footmen but was still dressed to kill in diamonds and blue silk. It was a pouring wet night, rather dampening the splendour. No flirting on the terraces or walking in the formal Italian gardens below the house. Is it only with hindsight the event seems melancholy, a swell party that spelled the end of English social continuity and aristocratic confidence? A year later, in September 1940, Holland House was almost totally destroyed by German bombers. ‘Holland House, too, has gone, and I am really sorry’, the socialite politician Chips Channon recorded in his diary, adding it to the list of now shattered London houses he had once frequented with such zeal. ‘I have been thinking of that last great ball there in July 1939, with the crush, the Queen, and “the world” still aglitter.’ The remains of Holland House, that once charismatic building, now stand stranded in Kensington municipal parkland, an appropriately Byronic ruin.
By the time I came out the holding of dances in private London houses had practically ceased, as so much of their pre-war way of life had ended for the British upper classes. ‘It is sad that the houses of the great will never again open their hospitable doors,’ Chips Channon had lamented as he saw his friends close down and finally sell off their large houses, which were then often converted and divided into flats. Coinciding with the week of the final presentations came the news that Nancy Lady Astor had sold the lease of her London mansion, 35 Hill Street in Mayfair, to a property company for offices. ‘Aristocracy no longer keep up any state in London, where family houses hardly exist now’, commented Nancy Mitford in her essay in Noblesse Oblige. By 1958 deb dances in London residential houses were definitely the exception rather than the rule.
The closest that we came to recreation of old glories was the dance given for the Hon. Camilla Jessel. Camilla was the daughter of the 2nd Baron Jessel. Her mother, the former Lady Helen Maglona Vane-Tempest-Stewart, was a daughter of the notorious 7th Marquess of Londonderry, one-time Secretary of State for Air in the National Government whose possibly well-meant but absurdly naive policy of making friends with the Nazis had ruined his reputation. His widow, and Camilla’s grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Londonderry, was the hostess for the evening. History was repeating itself dramatically. Lady Londonderry had been the leading political hostess of her generation. Camilla’s ball took place at Londonderry House, the eighteenth-century house in Park Lane, opposite Hyde Park, which had been in the family since 1922 and had been the scene of Lady Londonderry’s greatest social triumphs. On 12 June 1958, this formidable grande dame was once again positioned at the top of the grand staircase where she and Ramsey MacDonald, Socialist Prime Minister of a coalition government, generally believed to be Lady Londonderry’s lover, had stationed themselves to receive guests by the hundred at her glittering pre-war political receptions.
Camilla Jessel’s coming out was a party full of nuances. There was the irony of her mother, daughter of the enthusiast appeaser of the Nazis, having married a rich Jew, the Hon. Teddy Jessel, son of the industrialist 1st Baron, to the family’s discomfiture. Camilla’s parents were divorced in 1960. There was a further oddness, endemic of the times, in the fact that Londonderry House, closed down for the war and badly damaged in the Blitz, had been leased in 1946 to the Royal Aero Club, the Londonderrys retaining only the top-floor apartment. The reception rooms were let out for entertaining. The long narrow ballroom, hung with the portraits of three successive Czars of Russia, which the Czars had themselves presented to the family, was already a familiar venue for deb dances. In effect the Dowager Duchess of Londonderry was entertaining for Camilla in a former family home, once a place of great prestige and influence, which in changed circumstances she had had to borrow back.
It was quite a party and another sort of swansong. Hosts and guests dressed sumptuously as if in celebration of the house and its history. Lady Londonderry was in pink brocade with diamonds and a diamond tiara, an absurdly heroic figure of the past, already suffering from the cancer that would kill her in April 1959. Camilla’s mother, Lady Jessel, was in scarlet and Camilla herself in a sheath dress of white lace. Of the other Londonderry daughters, Lady Margaret Vane-Tempest-Stewart wore black taffeta with diamonds and turquoises; the youngest, Viscountess Bury, was in a cream brocade dress with a wonderful tiara of emeralds and diamonds. It was a madly sophisticated party in comparison with which many subsequent deb dances seemed more like schoolgirl hops. The Spanish Ambassador and the dramatic Marquesa de Santa Cruz made an appearance, as did the Maharajah and Maharanee of Jaipur, she in a sari, rare brown faces at a 1950s London ball. There was the apparition of the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, looking more than ever like a pantomime dame in one of her many bravura confections, a voluminous black organza dress with a black spotted net veil swathed around her head and reaching to the floor. The Duke and Duchess of Sutherland took the floor together, she again in magnificent black taffeta and diamonds. There was not to be another such show-off display of grandeur. The following year Londonderry House was in the news as the scene of a rowdy and much less exclusive coming out which ended in a police raid after debs and debs’ delights hurled cushions from the ballroom down into Park Lane, pelting the waiters who rushed out to retrieve them with plates of kidney and champagne glasses, hurling bottles of gin and whisky to ‘the poor’ below and emptying out boxes of cigarettes onto a tramp, finally embarking on a verbal battle royal with the prostitutes who thronged along Park Lane in those years before street clearance and, not surprisingly, threw insults upwards towards the ‘filthy rich’. Londonderry House itself lasted very little longer. In 1962 the building was demolished as the Hilton Hotel rose on the adjoining site.
There were other London balls in lovely and eccentric places. Sally O’Rorke’s late summer dance was held at Hampton Court where her grandmother Mrs Karri-Davies had a grace-and-favour apartment. The palace was floodlit and it was a balmy evening, encouraging the debs and their partners to lose themselves in the maze across the palace lawns. Dancing took place in two panelled reception rooms decorated with yellow tulle bows and yellow roses and supper was laid out in the long orangery with an American-style milk bar which at the time was an exciting novelty. Sally, in a white net dress with silver embroidery and silver ribbon hem, looked as pretty and as doll-like as she had been when we both learned ballet from Miss Ballantine.
Sally O’Rorke at her dance at Hampton Court
The most original of the London dances of that summer was Elfrida Eden’s. Elfrida too had been a fellow pupil at Miss Ballantine’s. The dancing class was a significant place of childhood bonding before the dances proper. As little girls we would be invited to each other’s parties: I still have a photograph of Elfie at my tenth birthday tea table, eyes shining with excitement, wearing a tall clown’s party hat. Elfrida’s father, Sir Timothy, was Anthony Eden’s elder brother, an intellectual and historian, an opinionated and irascible character, author of an essay on the aristocracy entitled The Tribulations of a Baronet and an erudite two volume history of Durham, published in 1952. His wife, a great friend of my mother’s, was a chic, artistic and in her way equally imposing figure, with advanced views on child-centred education. She had founded her own school, known as Lady Eden’s School, in two large adjacent houses in Victoria Road, South Kensington. Here Lady Eden, with her second-in-command, Lady Bethune, educated 180 children, girls from four to fourteen, boys from four to eight, in an atmosphere of disciplined homeliness and creative self-expression, with a particular emphasis on dancing, Russian ballet, handicraft and painting. The little girls wore frilled check pinafores, like Kate Greenaway children. Lady Eden was very keen on frills.
The family had their own rooms in the school buildings. Elfie’s dance was, naturally, held at Lady Eden’s School. The desks, chairs and blackboards were stowed away in a pantechnicon. The classrooms were transf
ormed with flowers, fruit and fairy lights. The party had a dreamlike quality, a Lewis Carroll topsy-turviness, as if the grown-ups had illicitly moved into small children’s territory. The debs danced around the schoolrooms and sat out under illuminated trees in what was really the school playground now become a magic garden. Complex adult emotions surfaced. Elfrida, whose party after all it was, cast jealous eyes on her longed for debs’ delight, Stephen Drysdale, sitting out with Lola Wigan, the bride from the debs’ dress show. I had chosen to wear my newest and, I thought, most glamorising dance dress for the evening, a black sheath dress, very slim fitting, with blue sash. I realised with horror soon after arriving that Caroline Butler, a self-confident blonde I had somehow never liked, was wearing the same dress. The fashion clash was reported in the Evening Standard’s ‘In London Last Night’ column in the semi-satiric tone of the late fifties:
It doesn’t happen often – but at a debutante party last night I saw two girls wearing the same dress. And they saw each other.
Strip-cartoon situation. Would they go for the eyes or the throat first?
Said debutante CAROLINE BUTLER, blue-sashed in black lace: ‘We smiled amiably.’
Said debutante FIONA MacCARTHY, blue-sashed in black lace: ‘When I saw her, I wanted to go home and change.
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