Last Curtsey
Page 14
Eton itself was in line for a debunking in a novel by an Old Etonian David Benedictus. His book The Fourth of June, a black comedy of school life and English mores, was published in 1962. Far from glorifying the old school, Benedictus revealed Eton as an ugly and squalid environment, a secret society of snobbery and cruelty, violence and torture, in which the physically weak and socially unacceptable boys are routinely victimised. The Fourth of June celebrations, in the presence of royalty, necessitate a frantic cover-up by the authorities of near-fatal injuries caused by the sadistic beating of the stunted, ugly Scarfe, a ‘guinea pig’ pupil from a grammar school. Scarfe recovers but his spirit has been broken. Benedictus’s novel was an insider’s exposé of an inbred system of education by which these traditions of callous superiority passed on from father to son within Etonian families in perpetuity unless drastic changes were to be made. The Fourth of June attacked, by extension, the moral cowardice of the rulers of the nation. The novel ends with the procession of boats and Eton fireworks. The set piece head of the Queen explodes into a showering of rockets before it literally falls apart.
Benedictus’s novel now seems a bit jejune. But like The Breaking of Bumbo and My Friend Judas, bitter-sweet social comedies by Benedictus’s Eton contemporary Andrew Sinclair, it was symptomatic of a time in which Eton’s esoteric customs and language – by which Absence is a roll-call for the pupils present – began to seem less than enchanting to the outside world. Eton’s academic reputation was to be more seriously challenged by another old Etonian, Professor Francis Sherlock, in Simon Raven’s compendium The Old School. Sherlock, an Eton Colleger or ‘tug’ (Eton code for a scholar) of the post-war generation, was highly critical of the cult of ignorance prevailing at the school: ‘We openly and constantly repudiated the exercise of the mind, skimped and scamped our school work, blackguarded literature and the arts.’ The professor derided the system by which scholarships or exhibitions at Cambridge and Oxford were ‘tied’ or limited to Old Etonians, arguing that this could only drag their value down. Henry Blofeld tells us in his memoirs that, because he had had a cycling accident, King’s College, Cambridge, admitted him ‘on trust’ from Eton in the 1950s. He had not taken an entrance exam at all.
In The Old School Simon Raven, himself an Old Carthusian, attacked the superficial, self-protective manner of the public-school boy as it appeared to him when he arrived at Cambridge:
… it seemed to me that most public school boys were pretty easy to get on with, no matter how disagreeable they were at bottom, because they were all conversant with a code of manners that forbade awkward questions, was rich in soothing euphemisms and neat formulae for evading crucial issues, and ensured that in no case whatever should public school men break ranks if threatened or attacked by aliens or renegades (for deserters we certainly had) – by socialists, intellectuals or just plain yobs in the street.
The lack of imagination seemed to him in retrospect especially horrific. There was a barrier in understanding: ‘… what we, as public school or ex-public school men, found moving or amusing, was often to others false, irrelevant or cruel’.
I had been brought up to think the best of Eton. Uncle Terry often flaunted his blue striped OE tie. A favourite story in our household was one about the box at the Eton and Harrow cricket match at Lords. There were three public-school boys, a lady, and no chairs. The Etonian called out ‘Fetch a chair for the lady’, the Wykhamist fetched it, the Harrovian sat down in it, the joke being that Etonians are by nature commanding, Wykhamists biddable and Harrovians uncouth. I was attuned to admire Etonians’ glamour. But I became distinctly less pro-Eton after my experiences at the Fourth of June. I had gone in a small party, three recent Old Etonians – Paul and Miles and Peter – with three debs as their companions. Our function was quite clear to me: to spend the day standing around admiring male sporting prowess, three debs like attendant maidens at a medieval joust. Vistas opened out of myself in years to come at cricket matches, polo matches, three day events, smiling, clapping and encouraging in endless, only slightly varied repetitions of this scene, the role in which Camilla Parker Bowles would prove so adept, offering congratulations, holding out the silver cup. The crunch came when my escort, the sandy haired and dapper Old Etonian Miles Eastwood, not a man of great stature, physical or intellectual, referred to three of us as ‘the tiny girls’. Tiny girls indeed! The incident was trivial but to me it had the force of revelation. On the Fourth of June at Eton I became a feminist.
*
My coming out dance was a week later. The choice of place – the Dorchester – was inevitable. All McAlpine family events took place at the Dorchester or ‘the Dorch’ as we called it. My mother’s own wedding reception had been held there in 1937. As a child I had been taken to innumerable family lunches, christenings and weddings in the hotel my grandfather’s contracting firm had constructed and which the McAlpine family still owned. All through my childhood my grandmother, the Baroness de Belabre, lived there with her companion and a fast-changing entourage of ladies’ maids. My grandmother was notoriously exacting. With its vast luxurious spaces, its bedroom floors and ballrooms, its retinue of deferential doormen, maids and pageboys, florists, waiters who wheeled in your meals and then reappeared to wheel out the empty dishes, the Dorchester was almost a world within a world. Relatively speaking the McAlpines were new money. The wealth of our family had been created in the early twentieth century, too late for the McAlpines to have acquired a town palace like those of the old-time aristocracy. But the Dorchester Hotel was in its way palatial. The hotel was our own peculiar approximation of a London stately home.
The building of the Dorchester on its Park Lane site directly opposite Hyde Park involved the demolition of the mid-nineteenth century Dorchester House, a spectacular town mansion purpose-designed by the architect Louis Vulliamy for the wealthy connoisseur Robert Holford to display his considerable collection of paintings. It was in the face of public protest that this lavish and dramatic classical edifice, conceived as a work of art itself, was razed to the ground in 1929 and its great art collection sold off. Just before the demolition there had been a final ball, which was later referred to as Resurrection Morning. Some of the guests were people from the country who had not been to London for so long that people were surprised to see them still alive. On the night of the ball the once grandiose house was semi-derelict, the carpets and most of the furniture had been removed already and great swags of green leaves were festooned around the walls to disguise the patches left where the pictures had once hung.
Rattled by criticism of the demolition, unusual in those pre-conservation movement days, McAlpines went to great lengths to accentuate the positive. The Dorchester was to be a marvel among modern grand hotels, an eight-storey concrete edifice faced with terrazzo slabs of cement and crushed marble, polished to a pale gold surface that glinted in the sun. The eighty salons and three hundred bedrooms all had their en suite bathrooms which, as was pointed out, was a distinct improvement on four bathrooms for the whole of the old Dorchester House. There was a multi-mirrored ballroom, an open-sided Terrace Restaurant with views across the park, a Grill Room and Sherry Bar whose hispanic decor had been personally approved by the Spanish King Alfonso, an acquaintance of the very grand head waiter, Mr Charles. The Dorchester was built for a new age of high-speed travel, drinking, dancing, pleasure in surroundings of ultimate extravagance.
In a way it seems a curiously hedonistic project for a family so work driven as the McAlpines were. As a young bricklayer in Lanarkshire, the future Sir Robert McAlpine would rise at four a.m. to achieve his personal target of 2,000 bricks a day; in later life he still kept a strict eye on progress on the McAlpine building sites, turning up in his dark suit, brandishing his rolled umbrella, laying into any employees he suspected of slacking. This intimidating figure was known amongst his labourers as ‘the Umbrella man’. McAlpine policy was to guard the mainly Irish building workers from distraction. ‘Never let Paddy come off the m
ixer’ was the motto among the partners of the firm. The family background was strictly Presbyterian. Robert’s first wife, Agnes Hepburn, was the daughter of a stonemason who was an elder of his local church. The young couple met at church, both being teachers in the Sunday School. There was a McAlpine tradition of austerity. Sir Robert was teetotal for most of his early life and later became a vegetarian. The partners of the firm sternly discouraged drinking amongst McAlpine employees. Nevertheless this was the family that built what it proudly described as ‘the most Modern and Beautiful Hotel in the World’, an extravaganza using 140,000 square feet of polished marble, 160 miles of cable, 20 miles of pipes, 20,000 cork slabs (for soundproofing), 50,000 tons of gravel and sand, 2,000 miles of steel rods, 2,500 doors and half an acre of glass. In autumn 1930 this outrageously sophisticated building was rising at the rate of a floor every week. An inaugural lunch – a so-called ‘House Warming’ – was held in the ballroom on 18 April 1931 to encourage London’s social elite and diplomatic fraternity to make use of the Dorchester’s glamorous facilities. My mother’s and my grandmother’s names are amongst the 1,700 people on the guest list. An original short story – ‘A Young Man Comes to London’ – was commissioned from Michael Arlen, author of the fashionable novel The Green Hat. I still have my mother’s copy of Arlen’s wistful Mayfair romance written for the Dorchester, its zigzag Art Deco binding coloured soft grey and pink.
The clan McAlpine
Sir Robert McAlpine in the centre of the group with his daughter Agnes on the right. Alfred, Malcolm and Granville are in the bottom row; Sir Robert McAlpine watching the construction of Wembley Stadium in 1924
Sir Robert McAlpine and his daughter Agnes, the Baroness de Belabre, on his yacht the Naida
The planning of my dance at the Dorchester was by no means a straightforward commercial transaction. It was not like hiring the Hyde Park Hotel. There was just so much family history involved. For me the whole vast building was suffused with childhood memories, imprinted with the personalities of my McAlpine relations, in particular my grandmother. Though small in stature she was very imperious indeed. I can see her now in what she called her ‘coat of many colours’, a beautifully soft and hairy cashmere plaid, laying down the law to her companions and grandchildren and especially my mother whom she terrorised with her instructions, not even allowing her to drive a car. Agnes, the baroness, was the oldest daughter of Sir Robert, one of eleven of his surviving children, two others having died in infancy. After the death of her father’s second wife and after her own divorce, she had acted as his hostess, living with him at Knott Park, his indescribably ugly country mansion at Oxshott in Surrey, and cruising around the Mediterranean on his yacht, the Naida. My mother’s own coming-out ball had been held at Knott Park on 15 June 1925. The day after the dance for 150 guests Sir Robert entertained all his employees. There were sports with prizes presented by the baroness. The marquee was in use again for 400 for supper. The scene was very feudal. The great contractor and his daughter with the exotic title had a good working relationship. It always seemed to me a pity that there was a ban on women in the boardroom of the McAlpine family firm. My formidable grandmother could have made as valid a contribution to the company as any of Sir Robert’s many sons.
I can just remember the Dorchester in wartime. Sir Robert was then dead and my grandmother had moved into a suite on the seventh floor. The hotel from then on was her home. We were evacuated to the Dorchester in 1944 once a bomb had destroyed a house in Queen’s Gate, Kensington, close to the block of flats in which we were then living. After my father’s death the year before, my mother had been desperate to return to London to resume what little remained of her old life. But this could not have been worse timing since Hitler’s V-1s or flying bombs were just beginning. That night of the near miss I was woken up by the bombing to find my bed had become a mound of shattered glass. The Dorchester was said to be impervious to bombs because of its reinforced concrete structure. It was widely believed that any bomb that hit the building would just bounce off again, presumably exploding over in Hyde Park. Was this true, I sometimes wonder, or masterly publicity? A number of government ministers moved into the reputed safety of the Dorchester, among them Lord Halifax, Duff Cooper, Oliver Lyttelton and even the Air Chief of Staff, Lord Portal. Once American forces joined the war the American Commander, General Eisenhower, having first tried out Claridge’s, transferred to the Dorchester, occupying what is now the Eisenhower Suite on the first floor. He preferred the decor of the Dorchester to that of Claridge’s, where he had objected to the ‘whorehouse pink’ colour scheme of the bedroom and a black and gold sitting room that reminded him of ‘a goddamned funeral parlour’. He found the Dorchester was more streamlined, shiny and reassuringly American.
The Dorchester had its own peculiar wartime nightlife. Some of the most famous society hostesses, evicted from their own homes, carried on their competitive grand style entertaining as best they could in the hotel. When Emerald, Lady Cunard’s house in Grosvenor Square was damaged by bombs she took refuge in the Dorchester, moving into a suite with her own French antique furniture and objets d’art. Lady Sybil Colefax resurrected her pre-war dinner parties – known familiarly as Lady Colefax’s ‘ordinaries’ – at the Dorchester. For a typical ‘ordinary’ she assembled T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, Arthur Waley, Cyril Connolly and the ‘Brains Trust’ regular Professor Joad. Not everyone at these dinners was pleased to get a bill for 10s 6d the morning after, a charge which Lady Colefax put down to the exigencies of the war. Margaret Whigham, Deb of the Year in 1930, was another wartime resident. She was by this time married to Charles Sweeny and her son Brian was born there. When she discovered her husband was being repeatedly unfaithful she did not leave the Dorchester but simply took her own suite on another floor. The tempting loucheness of hotel life evidently suited her. Thomas Adès’s opera Powder Her Face, with its brilliant libretto by Philip Hensher, is based on the imagined later life of Margaret Whigham, after she became the Duchess of Argyll. The scenes are set in a succcession of hotel rooms occupied by the pleasure-loving duchess. These are places where room service has no limitations.
A child of four was unaware of such overtones of scandal. But I did appreciate the marvellous surrealism of those war years at the Dorchester. The once decorous hotel had an air of improvisation. The official air-raid shelter was in the basement kitchen and in the cubicles of the ladies’ Turkish baths and the gymnasium. But, as more London bomb refugees piled in, additional mattresses were strewn right down the corridors. People were sleeping all over the ballroom. The Dorchester was bursting at the seams. It was an extraordinary mélange of humanity, women in negligées, men still in their uniforms, over-excited chaos. Later I came upon Cecil Beaton’s account of wartime dining at the Dorchester: ‘What a mixed crew we are! Cabinet ministers and their self-consciously respectable wives; hatchet-jawed, iron-grey brigadiers; calf-like airmen off duty; tarts on duty, actresses … déclassé society people, cheap musicians and motor-car agents.’
The normal social demarcations were suspended. I recognised the scene.
Like Kay Thompson’s Eloise at the Plaza I grew up as a hotel child, making the complex geography of the Dorchester my own, stalking around the vast green and gold foyer with its news-stand and a balcony terrace where the more sedate residents sat at little desks and wrote their letters on the writing paper headed ‘The Dorchester Hotel’. From this balcony, which wound right around the entrance hall, I could spy on the comings and goings of guests with their piles of leather suitcases and hatboxes being carried through by porters to the lifts. The most important would get a special greeting from the manager. I liked exploring the huge-pillared lounge with its oriental lacquer chests and squashy sofas where tea was served with tiny sandwiches and Fullers’ Walnut Cake. I would play in the lifts, getting out at every floor, no doubt to the intense annoyance of the liftman. From the top floor I discovered a little secret doorway that led up to the roof. On a good day yo
u could see for miles across Hyde Park to Kensington Gardens. The scope for entertaining myself seemed almost endless. From my grandmother’s suite I enjoyed ringing for room service. The page boys who would answer especially intrigued me. They must have been recruited for their dwarfish stature since some of them seemed almost as small as me. This luxury world had its own intense reality. I understood the hierarchy of the hotel and the smooth-running rhythms of its day focused on the sacred rites of breakfast, luncheon, tea, the cocktail hour, dinner and dancing, by which time the tables would be set again for breakfast the next morning. Where Kay Thompson’s Eloise would say ‘My mother knows the Owner’, my own great-grandfather Sir Robert McAlpine was the owner. In my more bumptious moments I could be persuaded that I owned the Dorchester myself.