No, I do not come out well from this account. It is clear from the tone of the reporting that although debs were still news they were regarded as ridiculous, particularly debs who answered to the name Fiona, the girl in Julian Slade’s musical Salad Days. The English upper classes remained, in a way, riveting but their arrogance and insularity now seemed absurd. No one who lived through it could forget the double thinking of that period, the debunking beginning but the snobbery remaining. It was an age of peculiar transition. We were almost but not quite at the end of deference.
*
By 1958 the norm was for deb dances to be held in big London hotels rather than private houses. With ingenuity and vast expenditure some variation and personalisation was possible even in hotels. For the dance for Georgina Ward given by her uncle, the Earl of Dudley, at the Dorchester, the architect Sir Hugh Casson had designed a Regency-style setting, turning the hotel ballroom into an approximation of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton with artificial palm trees and striped awnings and a pair of giant Regency blackamoors guarding the entrance. The first guest to arrive was Tony Armstrong-Jones, then in his role of smart bohemian photographer, habitually travelling to parties on his motorbike. A ridiculous number of dukes were at this party: Kent, Atholl, Buccleuch, Devonshire and Westminster. The Evening Standard judged Gina’s debut as ‘the most dazzling Debrett conscious party of the year’.
A few days earlier a fantasy garden had been made in the ballroom at Claridge’s for the dance Mr and Mrs Jack Steinberg gave for their daughter Raymonde. The room was hung with a blue silk canopy. The walls were lined with pink silk and hung with white trellises. Pink flowers and ivy leaves were festooned around the room, creating an impression of a medieval bower. Towards dawn the lighting changed and day broke above the dancers. The dance was reputed to have cost £5,000. This, then, was entertaining on a very lavish scale. Raymonde’s father was Jack Steinberg, textile magnate, Chairman of Horrockses Fashions, though Raymonde was dressed for her debut not by Horrockses but Hardy Amies. Her mother, the sharp and vivacious ‘Baby’ Steinberg, born Hannah Anne Wolfson, was the daughter of Solomon Wolfson and sister of Isaac Wolfson of the Great Universal Stores. The great storekeeper himself was at the party: the Standard reported that: ‘He beamed over his cigar at guests Charlestoning to Paul Adams’s band.’ In spite of what, in deb circles, were the triple no-go areas of Jewishness, trade and an almost embarrassing amount of wealth all debs’ mums wanted their daughters to be at Raymonde’s ball. There was not a deb in London who refused the invitation. The drivingly ambitious ‘Baby’ Steinberg had assembled as her dinner party hostesses the mothers of all the year’s top debs – the Hon. Lady Lowson, Lady Edith Foxwell, Lady George Scott, Lady Jessel, Lady Rosemary Rubens, Davina Nutting’s mother – as well as Lady Lewisham, the socialite the gossip columns loved to hate, who lived up to her wicked fairy reputation by sweeping in in long red velvet with a satin train. It has to be said that on this evening of her debut the debutante herself was outshone by her mother, looking like a Grecian statue in a draped white dress by Balmain. This was one of the hazards of the Season. Raymonde suffered more than most. In contrast to the mother’s brittle elegance the daughter was sweet natured, very shy and rather plump. Underneath the social chatter there was kindness and a fellow feeling among debs and I think we all felt the pain of Raymonde’s patent failure to live up to her mother’s quite colossal expectations. Raymonde was the poor little princess in our midst.
Certainly there were high points. But the Season developed according to a formula that as it wore on became a bit monotonous. We late teenage girls turned into blasé dowagers complaining at the prospect of yet another dance in the Hyde Park Hotel. These balls were almost always preceded by a dinner party held somewhere else in London, in a private house, a restaurant or a hotel. Dinner parties would be given by close friends or relations of the dance hostess. Opinions differed as to whether the giving of these parties was an honour or a burden. They could certainly make quite a big hole in the budget for the Season. Some bargaining went on over the composition of these parties, one of the more vivacious of the year’s top debs being offered as a counterweight to a tongue-tied country girl likely to prove a problem around the dinner table. Discreet attention would be paid to the dinner hostess’s own choice in debs’ delights. A 1958 deb, Sonia York, has kept her meticulous records of that Season. Her diagrams and notes on pre-dance dinner parties suggest that generally they consisted of ten people: middle-aged host and hostess, four debs and four young men. When Sonia dined with the Hyde Parkers at the Hyde Park Hotel – where else could the Hyde Parkers hold a dinner party? – she was in the place of honour on Sir Richard H P’s right. Another dinner was evidently not so satisfactory. She makes a note complaining that the party included ‘two very common men’.
What did we eat at these dinners? Hotel menus in those days were still unreconstructed. High society expected an anglicised version of elegant French food. A typical pre-dance menu served in 1958 at the Hyde Park was composed as follows:
Prawn Cocktail
Noisettes d’Agneau Zingara
Haricots Verts au Beurre
Pommes Nouvelles Persillées
Fraises Refraîchies
Crème Chantilly
Café Moka
Hotel menus were still being written in French, the legacy of Escoffier, with the notable exception of prawn cocktail, an import from America. The debs’ favourite prawn cocktail – a silver coupe of shredded lettuce, peeled prawns in mayonnaise combined with Heinz tomato ketchup and Tabasco, a few prawns in their shells sitting on the top for garnish – has lived on in my conciousness as the inevitable prelude to the ball.
The recommended menus for hostesses at home were just as bland and boring. Helen Burke in the Tatler suggested the following easy-to-prepare menu for a pre-dance dinner:
Consommé Olga
Crêpes de Crème de Volaille
(stuffed pancakes made with young boiling chickens which,
she mentions helpfully, were an economic option)
Pilaff de Riz
Salade de Fruits au Kirsch
The drabness and pretentiousness of post-war formal menus reminds one that it was not long since the British felt they were lucky to have any food at all. The offal queue was a by no means distant memory. My mother, already under the influence of Elizabeth David, whose cookery books were beginning to encourage a new exoticism in the kitchens of King’s Road, tried to introduce a Mediterranean zing to the menus she and Isa concocted for our own deb dinner parties. But, as I remember, her gazpacho and the rather outré Parmesan ice-cream wafers she invented were less than a success with the debs and especially their escorts whose tastes in food remained stalwartly conventional.
Waiting at table for these pre-dance dinner parties posed a problem for the hostess. Only mothers on the ‘Baby’ Steinberg level had a residential staff. The desperate solution was for the father and mother of the deb to do their own waiting, whisking in and out of the kitchen like a substandard Fanny and Johnny Craddock, the famous TV cooking duo of the time. Agonised with embarrassment I sat through just such a scene in a deb’s parents’ flat in Lower Sloane Street. The hiring of outside staff also had its hazards. My mother, through an agency, took on an unknown butler for one of our dinner parties, first to serve the drinks and then to wait at table. For a party of this size, the dining room was small. The mahogany table was at its full extension, leaving little circulation space between the dining chairs and wall. As the main course was being served, the butler started staggering, colliding with the furniture, slurping the wine onto the table as he poured it, misjudging the distance between vegetables and plates. It was as clear to us as it was to a panic-stricken Isa in the kitchen that our butler had been gulping down the gin between exiting and entering the dining room and was now becoming very drunk indeed. He knew that he was failing us, muttering excuses about his broken glasses. My mother was nice to him, sending him home early. In a way
I think we felt responsible for the fiasco. Those who employ unknown butlers have only themselves to blame. I cannot now remember how we solved the butler problem. Not all our deb dinner parties were so farcical. But in our household as in others there was a sense of struggle, a reflection of the general struggle of the upper classes to sustain a way of life for which the underlying practical facilities were ceasing to exist.
The dinner party host and hostess took their party of young people on to the dance. This was the old-time system with the hostess in the historic role of chaperone, making sure her girls were not left stranded without partners and responsible for seeing that she got them safely home. By 1958 the system was not working. The hostess could not be bothered or she had her own agenda. The host might have a duty dance and then head off for the bar. A deb was more or less left to work out her own strategy. At least part of every dinner party was expended in weighing up the possibilities for the evening ahead, hoping you could find a debs’ delight responsive enough to see you through at least the first part of the evening. There was always the danger that on reaching the hotel the young men you’d met at dinner would simply drift away. Deb dances could be far from pleasurable. They were often occasions of extreme anxiety. One deb of our year used to make herself sick regularly before dances; presumably she suffered from bulimia. All our grooming and our training had prepared us not to be a wallflower. It was wallflowerdom, public sexual rejection, that was seen as the misfortune almost worse than death. No one wanted to join, if they could possibly avoid it, the gaggle of girls in the fortunately spacious ladies’ lavatories, partnerless but desperately trying to be brave, forming small female support groups – girls from Dorset, debs from Norfolk – gossiping and chattering before, at the earliest acceptable hour, around 1.30 in the morning, taking their ignominious taxis home.
Almost any man seemed better than no man. This was the Season’s ultimate tyranny. The candidly pejorative descriptions of her partners in Sonia York’s detailed records of the dances, which range from ‘drunk’ to ‘ghastly’, show the practical hazards that a deb was up against. I learned early on to steer clear of an especially obnoxious group of Chelsea smoothies known as the Rawlings Street Gang. Gatecrashing was rife. It was too easy for a man dressed correctly, looking confident, to time his arrival to coincide with that of the dinner party guests and skirt round the receiving line. The mother’s vetting processes proved totally inadequate in eradicating the impostors and the creeps. My contemporary debs remember the group of good-looking young Italian waiters who successfully pretended they were princes and ‘turned up all over the place’. But there were sweet amenable young men to be found by those with patience. My saviour from many a deb’s nightmare situation was Nicky Branch, an amiable young stockbroker, comfortably chubby, a favourite with mothers, who was asked to all the dances. Nicky Branch and I came to a convenient arrangement. We would be each other’s No 2, in effect a reserve partner, dancing together and sitting out together until such time as a potential No 1 girl or man came into view.
These were late late nights. London dances, starting at 10.00 or 10.30, went on till 4.00 or 5.00 a.m., energy levels kept going by gargantuan breakfasts of bacon, eggs and mushrooms, chipolatas, grilled tomato, tea or coffee, toast, rolls and marmalade. By no means everybody stayed at the dances until the bitter end. There was a fashion to set off for an alternative breakfast at London Airport. Air travel still had glamour in 1958. We would head off to Heathrow in an excited cavalcade of MG sports cars and old bangers. There was also a craze for going on to the Hammersmith Palais de Danse and mingling with the London couples of all classes who took ballroom dancing seriously. So sheltered were our lives that things like this seemed fun. Quite often we would slip off with a partner to a nightclub: the Blue Angel, where Noël Harrison often gave the cabaret, or the Condor, a black hole in Wardour Street where couples entwined on big leather-covered benches. Some debs were actually forbidden by their mothers to leave the public arena of a dance and go on to a nightclub, the last vestige of a chaperonage system which had still been more or less de rigueur in the years between the wars. My own mother, however, was relaxed about nightclubs. She had always loved the dancing. A night out at the 400 with my Uncle Terry, her regular escort in the years of her widowhood, was her idea of the best possible good time.
Going on to a nightclub made a late night even longer. Regularly I would go to bed at six and get up at twelve, exhausted, with only enough vigour to set off to the hairdresser before making the difficult decision of what I should wear for the next evening’s events. Over the years I have often asked myself how a girl so hyper-educated as me got through a London Season so uncritically. Why was I not driven mad by its vacuity? One reason was sheer tiredness. I was, we all were, automatons, drifting mindlessly from party to party. The other, obviously, was the sudden discovery of sex.
The dancing itself was easy. It was almost second nature, it had been central to our culture for so long. Every deb, I am sure, had been sent to dancing classes from the age of four or five. At Miss Ballantine’s Dancing School in Herbert Crescent we learned ballet, tap and ‘limbering’, a kind of gymnastics for which we wore our liberty bodices and blue Viyella knickers. We were encouraged to put the stories of our own lives into dancing. The most extreme example of this was when Miss Ballantine asked us all to dance the rather terrifying narrative of the arrival of a burglar in Victoria Heber-Percy’s bedroom while the child was in her bed. Victoria herself danced it, then the rest of the class danced it. Was this some eccentric post-war form of therapy? A popular class, and one with the most bearing on the Season, was the mixed sexes class called ‘etiquette’. For this we wore our party frocks while the little boys were dressed in satin or velvet trousers and white shirts. The girls were seated on gilt chairs, their ankles crossed. The boys approached us, made a low bow from the waist and invited us to dance. It was an infant training in approach and invitation, a mating game in miniature, eliciting a chorus of fond ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from the rows of nannies who were watching their charges, sitting ranged around the room.
Georgina Milner dancing
Children’s parties, pony club dances, the self-conscious interchanges between girls at boarding school and boys from neighbouring public schools imported for the evening to waltz, foxtrot and quickstep while the headmistress looked on. The children from our background had never not been dancing. By the time we reached the Season’s pseudo-sophistication the debs had become the living incarnation of the Noël Coward song ‘Dance Little Lady’:
Though you’re only seventeen
Far too much of life you’ve seen,
Syncopated child.
Already we were experts at the strange stiff swaying mode of dancing to slow tunes, leaning just slightly backwards, shoulders kept immobile, the right arm stretching downwards, male and female fingers amorously linked. We had experienced the pleasures of the dance as a drug, what Noël Coward described as ‘insane music in your brain’, as soft romantic tunes gave way to jiving and the Charleston. 1958 was the year of the great jive. The end of the evening exploded into anarchy, the drunken tribal gallop of ‘D’ye Ken John Peel’, the mad exhilaration of the conga snaking through the grand hotel, from the ballroom to the River Room and on towards the terrace, up the stairs and down the lobbies. The conga was a crazy ostentatious chain of privilege, every dancer clinging to the dancer just ahead as if lives depended on it. The hotel waiters would look on, either envious or cynical but never, of course, attempting to join in.
Fiona MacCarthy with a now-forgotten escort at Dominie Riley-Smith’s ball at Claridge’s
The dancing was fine; it was the sex that was the worry. The dilemma for the debs was that here they were dressed up, at considerable expense, to be desirable but were not permitted to give in to the male passions they aroused. Why did we accept the taboo on intercourse? Why did the great majority of debutantes end the Season as they had begun it, technically virgins? This in spite of the f
act that a great deal of what was then termed ‘heavy petting’ was allowed, the onus being on the girls to set the limit. Protracted French kissing and caressing of a breast, even a bared one, was quite happily permitted as was the purposeful massaging of the upper thigh. But an escort’s hand that strayed too far into forbidden areas between the legs was removed decisively by the debs, as if in unison. How had we reached consensus as to where to draw the line?
It was simply an accepted truth that nice girls didn’t. The ethics of the question remained totally mysterious since, in any serious sense, sex was not discussed. There was no sex education at Wycombe Abbey School. Indeed in 1958 there was no sex education anywhere. Between mothers and daughters in my milieu, apart from a few token generalised warnings, likely to have done more harm than good, the basic mechanics let alone the morals of sexual relations stayed shrouded in a blanket of embarrassment. All we gathered was that there were good women we should emulate, contented wives and mothers, smiling protectors of the status quo, on the lines of the Queen Mother whom the debs’ mums all adored, as opposed to streamlined, cruel-lipped, overtly sexy women of whom the prime example, in their eyes, was Wallis Simpson, a temptress, an American of doubtful sexual habits who had led the King astray.
Aware of her own inadequacy, at the beginning of the Season, in warning me of possible perils ahead, my mother had passed the job on to Uncle Terry, her close companion in those post-war years. Terry Beddard was a tall, pink faced, balding man, a charmer. An Old Etonian, he appears in his contemporary Cyril Connolly’s autobiographical Enemies of Promise, described admiringly as a ‘Byronic youth’. In middle years he had become less Byronic but retained considerable glory as a champion fencer, specialising in the épée, who had represented Britain at the 1948 London Olympic Games. To the small girls we then were, the sight of Uncle Terry, masked and all in white, leaping down the piste and brandishing his giant sword, alien but still familiar, was a wonderfully terrifying sight. His ordinary, unsporting life was not so marvellous. He had long parted from his wife, Ursula, and his two young sons. He ran a small interior decorating business in Sloane Street. Sometimes, on our way to Peter Jones, my mother and I would call in to visit Terry, descending on his rather dark and unconvincing lower ground floor showroom displaying curtain poles and chintz. There were never any clients. Even then I had the sense this was a doubtful enterprise.
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