The Baroness de Belabre, Juju her companion, the enigmatic Captain Lovibond and a very tall friend on the putting green at Knott Park
and The Baroness de Belabre and Mrs Poulton, her ladies’ maid, with her granddaughters Fiona and Karin MacCarthy at Seaview, Isle of Wight
My grandmother insisted we should call her Toto. She did not see herself as Granny. My grandmother’s rooms were the hub of my hotel life. They were connected through to the rooms of her long-serving Belgian companion Juju, whose real name was Miss Lorraine. Juju was as tiny as my grandmother, though stout where she was slim. A strange symbiosis existed between Toto and Juju, as much sisterly as that of an employer and a servant. There would sometimes be explosions and Juju would walk out. Where did she go I wonder? After a few days she would return to the Dorchester and their old harmonious relations would resume. But because of these irregular absences of Juju’s my grandmother, who imagined that she could never manage on her own, insisted on the insurance of a stand-in. Hence the changing population of professional ladies’ maids, genteel widows in print dresses, exiled European countesses down on their luck, all recruited from the pages of the Lady, and installed in one of the Dorchester’s small servant rooms. All were very soon found wanting and dismissed.
There were some memorably bizarre scenes at the Dorchester. The McAlpines as a family had an occult streak. Sir Robert, the chief, was said to be fey and claimed to have seen apparitions of his dead mother. My grandmother was clairvoyant. Visitors to Knott Park remembered her ensconced in a room with a pile of large glass balls which, according to one of her young nephews, gave the room ‘the air of a witches’ lair’. She had received a message from some spiritual contact telling her she was destined to die abroad with none of her kin near her. The result was she would never go abroad without my mother, who was then not allowed to stray out of Toto’s sight. While living at the Dorchester she became obsessed with investigating possible life on other planets. A mystery colleague, a shabby little woman with strange eyes, whom my mother disapproved of, was sometimes imported to help with this research. Toto could be frightening, but I loved her and admired her for her strength of will, the asperity with which she dismissed those who attempted to bully or suck up to her. When she went to the most famous hairdresser in London, Raymond (better known as Mr Teasy-Weasy), he said to her, ‘Just put yourself in my hands, my lady.’ The baroness walked out.
John Betjeman’s poem ‘Christmas’ includes a reference to:
… shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.
I was convinced as a child he was referring to my grandmother and understood as I did the fascinating details of her life there. She had a delicate stomach and when the pair of waiters wheeled in the lunch trolley, laid as for a banquet with its white tablecloths and silver-plate hotel cutlery, all she ate was shredded lettuce and a dish of semolina. Her teeth had been extracted in her girlhood by a process which she would describe in ghoulish detail as involving slamming doors and bowls to hold the blood. Her false teeth sat in a glass of bicarbonate of soda beside her on the table. It used to worry me that the waiters would be startled or embarrassed by the baroness’s dentures but no doubt they were attuned to far more outré sights. Sometimes her diet was varied with chicken broth made from black-market chickens smuggled into the Dorchester by a rather handsome raven-haired Jewess known as Mrs Snooks, a name presumably as fake as the leopard-skin coat she wore on these clandestine expeditions to Park Lane. Mrs Snooks (another visitor regarded by my mother with immense anxiety) would inveigle her way past the liftman with the suitcase she unloaded when she got to Toto’s suite. She brought out poultry, eggs and once even a banana, the very first banana I had ever seen. The chickens were seized on by Juju and boiled down to make stock on the Baby Belling she kept in her apartment. No doubt the Dorchester kitchens, by fair means or illicit, could have made some chicken soup for my grandmother. But it would not have tasted like the soup from the chickens smuggled in by Mrs Snooks.
In the background to our lives at the Dorchester loomed the clan McAlpine, the cohort of descendants of Sir Robert, solid in its maleness, denigrating to its females, still clinging together with the family cohesiveness of the Highland ancestors who migrated south to the Lowlands to seek work after the Rebellion of 1745. They were portly, three-piece suited figures, Uncle Willie, Uncle Edwin and – largest of all – the Uncle who was known as ‘Big Tom’ and seemed a little simple-minded, though nobody quite said so. These McAlpine uncles had physical traits of the albino, with white pigmentation and pink guinea pig-like eyes. They inhabited a colony of neo-Georgian red-brick houses around Henley-on-Thames where the paintings, if not quite drinking cardinals, depicted Highland cattle wandering in purple heather. It was perhaps in a spirit of rebellion that my cousin Alistair McAlpine became a serious collector of modern abstract art. In the Dorchester days the McAlpine we saw most of was my grandmother’s brother Malcolm, by this time Sir Malcolm. He had masterminded the Dorchester development and in the 1950s took up residence in one of the new suites commissioned from Oliver Messel. Uncle Malcolm was a martinet figure who would shame the hotel staff out of presumed indolence by setting an example of not using the hotel lift but walking down the nine flights of stairs and, as well as this, tramping the length of each long corridor past hundreds of hotel guests still slumbering in bed. We were taken on terrifying visits to the Adam Suite where Uncle Malcolm would go through the ritual of performing his favourite conjuring tricks. If Uncle Malcolm found it hard to be congenial to children still less cosy was his wife Aunt Maud, known to us as ‘Aunt Mud’, a woman so grimly superstitious that she forbade the hotel florists to use yellow roses or to mix red flowers with white. Reputedly she still haunts the Dorchester. Childhood fears never quite leave one. I would still find Aunt Mud intimidating if I met her as a ghost.
Politically the McAlpines were a prime example of a family who transformed themselves over a century from reforming liberals to extreme conservatives. The political cross-currents are remarkable. My great-grandfather Sir Robert had, as I have mentioned, started life in Scotland as a coal miner and a building-site labourer. It is interesting that one of his early employees on the construction site at Burnbank was Keir Hardie who was to become the first Labour MP. But Robert McAlpine’s own political allegiances were never with the working classes. He was upwardly mobile and by the 1870s had joined the Liberals. This was then the preferred party of the rising Scottish urban middle classes, in tune with my great-grandfather’s belief in self-help, local self-government and temperance reform. But with success came increasing conservatism and dependence for the firm’s contracts on the politics of power. Sir Robert McAlpine had become a staunch Tory by 1918 when his daughter Roberta, ironically enough, married the eldest son of Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George. The McAlpines had by then left their Liberal antecedents far behind. Sir Robert’s sons and grandsons were increasingly drawn into the inner circles of the Tories as the century progressed. My Uncle Edwin, a generous contributor to Tory Party funds, was ennobled in 1980, becoming Lord McAlpine of Moffat. His son Alistair, the adorer (and adored) of Margaret Thatcher, served as Treasurer of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990 and as Deputy Chairman from 1979 to 1983. He too was made a Lord, becoming Lord McAlpine of West Green in 1984. This was the first example of a father and son to be appointed to the House of Lords each in his own right. When Edwin died, his memorial service, in May 1990, took place in St Paul’s Cathedral. The huge church was almost full, with Thatcher, Carrington and others of the Tory hierarchy all lined up to do him honour. The second half of the twentieth century has seen a great acceleration in social mobility. This is obviously one of the main themes of my book. Few debutante families were unaffected by it. But as I listened to the Dean of St Paul’s delivering a eulogy about my Uncle Edwin in terms fulsome enough for a great hero of the nation I wondered if my own family experience had not been more extreme than most.
The Dorches
ter Hotel elaborately decorated by Oliver Messel for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953
The Dorchester was our viewing point for the momentous public events of the early 1950s. From the balcony of my grandmother’s suite high above Park Lane we watched the British Legion Victory Parade of 1951, when thousands upon thousands of men and women in their uniforms with their regimental banners snaked down Park Lane. On a dismal day in February 1952 we were gathered at this same vantage point to view the funeral procession for King George VI, his coffin borne on the same gun carriage that had carried the body of his father George V. The following summer my mother, sister, our nanny and many of our friends were at the Dorchester to celebrate Elizabeth II’s Coronation, staying the night before at the hotel. The Dorchester had been decorated for the Coronation by Oliver Messel at his most neo-Romantic and loomed over Park Lane like a giant tiered wedding cake. On Coronation morning I rushed down as usual early to the news-stand in the hall. With exquisite timing the papers were announcing the recent ascent of Everest by the New Zealander Edmund Hillary and the Nepalese Sherpa Tensing, a feat that was nimbly transformed in the reporting to a personal triumph for the Queen.
Fiona MacCarthy’s tenth birthday tea party at the Dorchester. Rose Dugdale’s sister Caroline sits on her right. Elfrida Eden back left
The life of the London grand hotel was by its nature versatile, able to ring the changes from funereal to celebratory, the expressions on the faces of the staff altering accordingly. As we watched the Coronation ceremony in the abbey on my grandmother’s black and white television set, the floor waiters in her suite stood to attention as we all did for the final triumphant ‘God Save the Queen’. The hotel was a kind of production line of parties, built for marking all possible occasions. For every national event celebrated at the Dorchester on a public scale there were a thousand smaller private parties held in the myriad entertaining suites. My deb dance was not in fact my first party at the Dorchester. I had held my tenth birthday party in one of the ground-floor reception rooms that face directly on the park. This was an all-girls tea party, the guests having been recruited from my day school, Miss Ironside’s, and from my dancing classes. I sat at one of the long tables, looking solemn in my birthday crown. My sister, also crowned, presided at the other. All our nannies were in attendance, supervising the waiters as they poured our tea. Seen from this distance, the formality astonishes. We were little children in the guise of grown-up people. Some of these same children would curtsey to the Queen with me in 1958. Researching this book, I revisited these rooms, now used mainly for business meetings. I noticed David Beckham with a woman companion drinking in a corner of what is now a very glitzy bar and thought how much my grandmother would have disapproved of the incursions of celebrity. However, Beckham looked magnificent to me.
The date for my dance, 10 June, selected so carefully with Jennifer’s approval, proved to be a good one. There were no rival deb dances on that night, although a super-critical deb’s mother might have judged that it followed too closely on the high profile dance given at the Dorchester by Lady Rosemary Rubens for her daughter Davina Nutting only the week before. It had been decided that my dance would be held not in the ballroom but in the two smaller Orchid and Holford Rooms and that it would be a dinner dance which meant that all the guests would meet and dine at the Dorchester at 9 p.m. instead of first being farmed out to London dinner parties. I think this plan was meant to give my dance more intimacy and individuality, harking back to my mother’s many nights of dancing and dining at the Dorchester when the hotel was new and she herself was young. The detailed organisation of the dance was in the hands of George Ronus who had worked for the hotel for more than twenty years and was now the ultra-confident managing director, adept at smoothing over the tantrums of the many Hollywood film stars who used the Dorchester as their London base, and even equal to Somerset Maugham when he complained that, at sixpence a minute, the Dorchester’s charges for its luxury suites were exorbitant. No problem was insurmountable to Swiss-born Mr Ronus, who always wore a dark-blue pin-striped suit with a waistcoat and a watch chain and could move from professional bonhomie to deference with breathtaking efficiency. I am sure he was unfazed by my grandmother’s death in the Dorchester in 1952. He was in his role of trusty family retainer as he received me and my mother in his office. I remember close discussion of the menus for the dinner and the breakfast. These were days before all-year-round availability of any food you cared to mention and there was anxious calculation about the likely ripeness of strawberries for the 10th of June.
Leonora Carrington’s short story ‘The Debutante’ is about a young girl who became so nerve-racked at the prospect of her ball that she persuaded a hyena from the zoo to take her place at it, dressed in her dress and trained to walk in her high heels. The substitution was only discovered when the debutante emitted an unaccountably strong smell. I was not worried enough at the prospect of my debut to cast around for someone or something to replace me. But I can recall a succession of small agonies, beginning with the fittings for my dress at Worth. The House of Worth, which had originally been an offshoot of Worth in Paris, had its premises in Grosvenor Street. I had sometimes been there with my grandmother whose idea of an afternoon’s entertainment was to walk around from the Dorchester to order a new dress. She would try on model after model. Then after the fitter had arrived to make adjustments to the model she had chosen, pinning up, altering waistlines, removing shoulder pads, my grandmother inevitably changed her mind and would sweep out again, back to the hotel. Perhaps it was the memory of these expeditions, which cast me into embarrassment and shame, that made me so much dislike the prolonged negotiations for my own ball dress, described in precise terms by the Tatler as ‘a dark lilac satin dress with harem skirt’. Like many of that Season’s coming out dresses this mauve satin evening gown was strapless with a boned bodice. One never felt completely confident that the bodice would stay up. The harem skirt, vaguely reminiscent of the costume of a temple dancer in La Bayadère, looked especially incongruous when worn with long white gloves.
My hair had been a further torture. Since early adolescence I had gone to my mother’s hairdresser who worked in a salon in the street next door to Harrods. This hairdresser was called Albert, pronounced not in the English but the continental fashion, and he was genuinely Parisian. Like George Ronus at the Dorchester, Albert inhabited a treacherous terrain that needed very careful management, sometimes the employee, at other times the friend. Albert had a daughter about my age. This daughter Michelle was always given Christmas presents by my mother and was occasionally invited to tea at our flat in Queen’s Gate. On the other hand my mother had no compunction in eventually leaving poor Albert for a younger and more dashing hairdresser, an Italian, who worked at another Knightsbridge salon, Aldo Bruno. She did have the grace to feel disconcerted when some months later Albert himself turned up at Aldo Bruno, put out to grass with only very aged ladies as his clientèle. At the time of my debut Albert was still in favour. I hated my weekly visits to the salon, the agony of rollers and the hours under the drier, clamped down over your head like a horrible hot helmet. Even worse was the long-winded performance of the perm. Looking back at the picture of my dance my hairstyle – high off the forehead, set in corrugated waves – seems completely inappropriate for a young girl’s debut. I look aged and stilted far beyond my years.
Their nanny Isabella Hughes with Fiona and Karin MacCarthy
It had been almost impossible arriving at a guest list that would please me and my mother and, most difficult, my nanny who was becoming an increasingly dominant figure in our house. Isa – full name Isabella Forrest Hughes – came from a Scottish family whose history revolved around the service of the rich. Her father had been a gardener on the Calder Glen estate, Blantyre. Her elder sister went into service as a ladies’ maid and Isa as a housemaid in one of the large McAlpine households in Scotland where, her talent being spotted, she had been upgraded as nanny to two small
Bishop boys, my cousins. From there she was handed on to my own mother soon after I was born, looking after me and my sister with a fiercely protective devotion, staying with us through our schooldays and right up to my debut. We had become in effect her family at a time when smaller houses, more restricted living spaces and a post-war relaxation of the old formalities meant that domestic servants were becoming much more integrated with the households in which they were employed. This was only a few years before the film The Servant, Joseph Losey’s sinister story of domestic role reversal in just the sort of Chelsea terraced house in which we ourselves lived. Even at Limerston Street there were moments when my nanny not my mother was the one in charge and Isa was relentless in her judgement of the friends from the deb scene I brought back to the house. ‘She’s not backwards in coming forwards’ she would say of a girl she had diagnosed as sexually suspect. My old nanny was particularly critical of showiness without substance, of what she termed ‘palaver’. She suspected this whole world of compulsive conversation, in which a gap of silence was tantamount to failure, and had found a good old Scots word ‘bletherer’ for many of my men. Isa was determined that no bletherer would be on my dance list. I fought hard in retaining one or two of the bletherers of whom I was, at the time, particularly fond.
The MacCarthy–Burness dance at the Dorchester. Petie and Kenneth Burness with Jennifer, Yolande MacCarthy with Fiona, just before the guests arrive
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