Last Curtsey

by Fiona MacCarthy

As far as the girls went the guest list was a minefield since I had already used up most of my own quota of sixty or so girls by inviting those whose dances I had already either been to or accepted. No room at the Dorchester for debs who would be holding far-flung county dances later in the summer or indeed for girls with whom I had recently made friends. This caused me such anxieties I went so far as to send out some laborious letters of apology instead of invitations to, for instance, a deb whose August dance was in Northumberland. She was very sweet natured and she asked me anyway.

  As the day approached my mother showed signs of a new panic. It has always been mysterious to me why, with all the McAlpine millions in the background, my mother had so little disposable income, but this is perhaps explained by the deeply entrenched view of this primitively patriarchal family that women were so incompetent with money they were better off without it. Female money was put into complicated trusts. I am also rather puzzled about why my mother was evidently being charged full price for a coming-out dance at her own family hotel. Had the deferential Mr Ronus not allowed a discount to the baroness’s daughter? Whatever the financial arrangements they were clearly becoming a nightmare to my mother. By early June so tormented did she become about the prospect of not being able to pay the Dorchester account she decided she must sell some of her jewellery. Her diamond clips were selected as the sacrifice. We took a taxi from Chelsea to her usual jeweller, Richard Ogden in Burlington Arcade, the two clips in their little leather case in Mummy’s handbag. The jewels were examined in a discreet inner office, sums were named in a hushed tone. I found the whole episode desperately worrying. The deal done, we left the clips and took another taxi. It did not occur to my mother that, in these circumstances, it might have been more appropriate to travel home by bus.

  Every little girl would like to be

  The fairy on the Christmas tree –

  High above the party

  Dressed in white

  Shining in the candlelight.

  This is what we used to sing at Miss Ballantine’s, pointing our toes in our little white tulle tutus. The downside of my dance at the Dorchester was that I was not the only fairy on the tree. But at least there was just one other fairy not the two or even three at some economy deb dances. And at least Jenny Burness and I were reasonably friendly, unlike two famously incompatible debutantes who scowled and snarled at one another through their shared dance at the Hyde Park Hotel.

  The MacCarthy–Burness dance going with a swing

  The details of the evening are still clear in my mind. It was a coming together, in that familiar setting, of my childhood past and an already fleeting present of myself as debutante. I had carefully arranged the seating plan to place myself between two handsome debs’ delights, both of whom would have rated high on Isa’s list of bletherers and the debs’ mothers’ blacklists of NSITs. The bandleader Ian Stewart, ineffably distinguished with his silver grey hair and his exquisite ex-RAF moustache, began to play the piano – ‘Cheek to Cheek’, ‘Night and Day’, ‘These Foolish Things’, the period tunes we had known since we were children. Easy-going upper-class emotion. Everyone joined in. The party started moving. Later in the evening came the stronger rhythms of Russ Henderson and his West Indians, a brief glance of recognition in that summer of 1958 towards the multiculturalism just beginning as immigrants arrived in London from Africa and the Caribbean. ‘Coloured folk’, my mother called them, patronising though well meaning. Few London balls that summer were without a newly fashionable calypso band. We also had a fortune teller. Estelle, professional clairvoyant, who set up her little booth at the Dorchester. This small, stooped, croaky voiced old woman had been telling young girls’ fortunes, she assured us, since Edward VII was on the throne. She examined our hands through a magnifying glass and gazed into a crystal ball. Over the decades Estelle had learned to speak to please, tailoring her predictions to old-time society’s conventional expectations. Every deb at my dance was told she would be married within the next two years.

  *

  This was the summer in which the musical My Fair Lady came to London, starring Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway as the lovable cockney rascal of a dustman. The show had opened in New York two years earlier. My Fair Lady became the craze of my deb summer. Many of us had been at the Gala performance whose Chairman Lady Dalrymple-Champneys, Deputy Chairman Mrs Reynolds-Veitch and committee of predominantly double-barrelled names were just the sort of people George Bernard Shaw was satirising as the Eynsford-Hills in Pygmalion, the play on which the musical was based. Jennifer, who went to both the preview and first night, said she could easily have seen it three nights running. I must have seen the musical six or seven times. Night after night debs and debs’ delights made up parties to go to My Fair Lady, starting with drinks at the Cavalry Club, winding up with after-theatre supper at the Savoy. Desperate pleas for tickets were made in the Personal Column of The Times and seats were sold on the black market at racketeering prices. What was the attraction? Not just the sumptuous Cecil Beaton costumes, nor the infinitely hummable Lerner and Loewe music – ‘I could have danced all night’ being especially appealing to a debutante. Not even the thrill of recognising an ex-deb, Fiona Sprot, in the Ascot Gavotte chorus. I think the popularity of My Fair Lady sprang from something deeper: the sense of insecurity amongst the upper classes in the later 1950s. Shaw’s plot hinges upon the transformation of the flower girl. Can she be groomed to pass in high society? Her triumph shows the upper classes to be gullible. Those who clapped and cheered the musical in 1958 saw this less as a critique, more as a comfort and a reassurance for the future – as if Bernard Shaw, by mocking it, affirmed the status quo.

  In mid-June we assembled for our own Ascot Gavotte. Royal Ascot was held over four days, from the 17th to 20th of June. We had been through the hurdle of applying for entrance tickets for the Royal Enclosure from Her Majesty’s Representative at the Ascot Office in St James’s Palace. As with applications for presentations the rules were elaborate, each application needing the signature of a sponsor who had been granted vouchers for the Royal Enclosure on at least four occasions in recent years, unless the applicant was personally known to the Queen’s Representative. This vetting was surely an unreliable method of preventing a woman of doubtful virtue from straying into the vicinity of our gracious Queen. It gave an aura of exclusivity to the enclosure in which, on the first day of the Royal Ascot racing, 7,000 chosen people in their stipulated livery – day dress with hats for ladies, morning dress or service dress for gentlemen – huddled under their umbrellas. It had rained the previous week for Trooping the Colour, drenching the Queen as she rode in her birthday procession on Horse Guards Parade. Now it was wet again for Royal Ascot. It had so far been a deluging June.

  The top debs had been snapped as they left their homes for Ascot. Melanie Lowson in her dazzling white dress printed with blue carnations and her cornflower-blue hat. Davina Nutting in an off-the-peg beige cotton trapeze which had cost £6. Amazing! Any triviality of deb life was then newsworthy. Debs were still the celebrities in 1958. But for how much longer? Beyond the Royal Enclosure the crowds massed behind the railings gaped through at the parade of the beautifully dressed and over-privileged. This was class confrontation as dramatic as a scene in a Lindsay Anderson film. Such social demarcations were already fragile. A commentator in Queen magazine lamented that ‘Discipline has declined in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot’, observing that women were now brazenly going to the rails and placing their own bets and that men were daring to appear without their bowler hats. Exclusivity was ending and only the real diehards could regret it as one sort of overdressing gave way to another and Royal Ascot became a parade ground for a colourful elite with quite another set of values. The signs were that very soon celebrities and self-publicists, television personalities, Euro trash and wives of footballers would be breaking in.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Country Dances

  1958 was a terribly wet Season. Floods f
ollowed the heavy June rainfall. By 1 July the town centre of Market Harborough, in the heart of hunting country, was reported to have turned into a lake. On 2 July Henley Royal Regatta opened in a downpour. The Tatler published a full-page photograph of rows of empty deckchairs on the banks of the river in the Steward’s Enclosure. The implied moral was never say die.

  The Thames’s most social regatta suggests sunshine, parasols and gay summer fashions. The reality is a British July. This scene of desolation shows what the rain did to Henley on the first day. But the British are used to holding their outdoor entertainments with mud underfoot, and though the banks never became fit for high heels the regatta went on regardless.

  It was an end of Empire scene, heroic and yet hopeless. In the deluge, aged members of Henley’s exclusive Leander Club, in their salmon-pink ties, their matching socks and blazers, caps rammed on their heads like Lewis Carroll’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee, looked more and more absurd.

  There were many scenes that summer of a rather desperate insouciance in the face of adversity. Drinks parties in the garden were quickly shunted indoors, village cricket matches were called off and marquees erected for deb dances became waterlogged as the night wore on. As Jennifer reported of the ‘lovely ball’ held at the Hurlingham Club by the Dowager Countess of Lauderdale for her granddaughters Lady Anne Maitland and the Hon. Diana Connolly-Carew, ‘Like so many evenings this summer it was raining, so guests could not stroll about the floodlit grounds in Hurlingham (though, as I left, I did see one intrepid couple slowly walking about under a large umbrella!). Hence the ballroom was perhaps gayer than usual and always full of energetic young dancers.’ What gave Jennifer her inviolable reputation as the trusted confidante of the upper classes was just this ability to make the best of things. She upheld stable values – resourcefulness and cheerfulness, residual nobility – in an increasingly uncertain world.

  Even now old debs remember, with a kind of smiling courage, the night that the rains came to ruin their deb dance. For the men it was quite different. With their traditional affinity for water it could be said the debs’ delights were in their element. In a famous episode of 1955 a twenty-one-year-old Oxford undergraduate, the Hon. Richard Bigham, Master of Nairne, son of Baroness Nairne (a peeress in her own right), made a bet at a deb’s dance at the Savoy that he would swim the Thames. An admiring gathering of debs in their summery evening dresses watched him as he stripped to his underpants and swam through the strong current from the Embankment to the South Bank. Osbert Lancaster based one of his Pocket Cartoons on the episode, showing two moustached old clubmen standing by the river, one saying to the other, ‘In my young days a gentleman swam the Thames fully dressed or not at all.’ In deb circles immersion of their fellow guests in water was an accepted amusement, a symbolic ritual of upper-class inclusiveness, enjoyed both by the perpetrators and the victims. For young men about London one of the main pleasures of attending dances at the Anglo-Belgian Club in Belgrave Square was the likelihood of a drenching in the fountain. At dances in the country, where the scope was greater, being flung into the lake or dunked in a dank fishpool was part of the whole gentlemanly sport of mobbing up. As I remember that summer the popping of champagne corks made a bizarre cacophony with the yells and splashes of debs’ delights being forcibly heaved into the swimming pool. Nothing malevolent or savage: in the code of our upbringing this was all good fun.

  Of the 118 dances in the Tatler’s preview listing for 1958, 70 were in the country, the majority scheduled for June and July when country-house gardens could be expected to be at their best. Besides balls in country houses there were a number of midsummer dances in riverside hotels and clubs such as the Café de Paris at Bray, the Guards Boat Club at Maidenhead and Phyllis Court at Henley-on-Thames where as well as dancing there was punting on the river and flirting in the swing seats on the lawns. Debs’ mothers carefully synchronised their dances with the Season’s events in the locality: there was a clutch of dances in the south-western Home Counties in the week of Royal Ascot; dances around Henley at the time of the Regatta; dances in Sussex in the last days of July coinciding with Cowdray Park Polo week and the racing at Goodwood, the traditional finale of the London summer Season, attended by the Queen. No one would have been seen dead in London after Goodwood. It was still as if Wilde’s Lady Bracknell were in charge.

  Bucolic scene at Belinda Bucknill and Sara Barnett’s dance in Windsor Forest

  The dances with most kudos were the ones held in a debutante’s own house in the country, a stately home which had been in her family through the generations. The legendary example was the great ball held at Blenheim Palace on 7 July 1939, in that final Season before the Second World War. It was given by the Duchess of Marlborough for her seventeen-year-old daughter, Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill. Lady Sarah’s grandmother Madame Jacques Balsan, formerly the American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt who had married the future 9th Duke of Marlborough, was amongst the thousand or so guests. Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden were to be seen deep in conversation together on the terrace. The wonder of the evening, as described by many of the participants, has to be seen in context as a kind of final flowering of country-house luxuriance, almost a throwback to Edwardian ways of doing things. Blenheim Palace was decorated throughout with malmaisons, colossal pink carnations grown by the estate gardeners especially for the ball. The footmen, in their scarlet Marlborough livery and knee breeches, wore powdered wigs; apparently the last time that powdered wigs were seen at an English private ball. Guests waltzed in Vanbrugh’s long library. The formal terraces with their classical ornamentations were beautifully illuminated for the evening, as was the famous lake. A dance floor had been put up in the garden but torrents of rain halfway through the ball meant that plans for outdoor dancing had to be abandoned, in 1939 as so frequently in 1958. But the ball at Blenheim remained a kind of symbol of perfection in the minds of many of my parents’ generation. Chips Channon was, as usual, the most gushing, writing in his diary:

  I have seen much, travelled far, and am accustomed to splendour, but there has never been anything like tonight. The Palace was floodlit, and its grand baroque beauty could be seen for miles … I was loathe to leave, but did so at about 4.30 and took one last look at the Baroque terraces with the lake below, and the golden statues and the great palace. Shall we ever see the like again?

  No post-war balls were on the scale of that night of spectacular extravagance at Blenheim where, according to Channon, ‘there were literally rivers of champagne’. No one quite had the stomach – or indeed the funds – for such conspicuous consumption in an age of continuing post-war austerity. But some 1958 dances, though less lavish, followed the old formula. These were aristocratic English families with long and complex genealogies entertaining for their daughters in historic English country homes. Carolyn Townshend’s ball was at Raynham Hall, the red-brick mansion built for her ancestor Sir Roger Townshend by William Edge (or perhaps Inigo Jones), an exquisite small stately home described by Nikolaus Pevsner in his Buildings of England as ‘the paramount house of its date in Norfolk’, with a wonderful interior designed for the famous second Viscount, ‘Turnip’ Townshend, by William Kent. Bramham Park, West Yorkshire, was the setting for Marcia Lane Fox’s debut. The house was built in 1698 by Robert Benson, 1st Lord Bingley, who spent thirty years developing its French-style pleasure gardens. Bramham had been in the Lane Fox family ever since. Katherine Courtenay’s coming out took place at Powderham Castle, the medieval stronghold built by her ancestors, the Earls of Devon, and set in an ancient deer park alongside the estuary of the River Exe. Family continuity, romance of ancient lineage, beauty of old buildings even when a bit decaying: these were invitations to be angled for and vied for by the upwardly mobile debs’ mothers of our year.

  Bramham Park, West Yorkshire, where Marcia Lane Fox’s coming out ball was held

  One of the most successful summer dances of that Season was Miranda Smiley’s, held at Parham Park in Sussex, one of
the finest Elizabethan houses in the country, a grey stone building set in its own great estate and deer park on the edge of the South Downs. With its gables and its turrets, its unassuming, very English architectural rightness, Parham is a house that William Morris would have loved. The house was floodlit for the evening. As they drove up the drive towards the entrance court the guests could see the deer silhouetted in the park. Everything about the evening radiated ancient history: the panelled reception rooms hung with ancestral portraits, the mouldings and the carvings, period furniture and tapestries. A long buffet had been set out down the whole length of the Elizabethan banqueting hall. A large marquee for dancing had been built out from one side of the house. For non-dancers, bridge tables and a chessboard were laid out in the Great Chamber which contained a vast four poster with embroidered hangings reputed (like so many beds in England) to have been used by Queen Elizabeth I. A second smaller dance floor had been erected in the garden and guests wandered out through the pleasure grounds and orchards to continue dancing under a cedar tree. In the distance beyond the house stood the small grey stone church of St Peter, dating back to the twelfth century. In this church the private pew kept for the family showed clearly the inter-dependence of the church and local landowner. The private pew was even equipped with its own fireplace, to keep the aristocrats warm while the rector gave his sermons. The whole scene was, or appeared to be, a glorious amalgam of time-honoured traditions, long centuries of quintessential Englishness.

  Miranda Smiley on the night of her dance at Parham Park

  Except that the Pearsons, Miranda Smiley’s grandparents, only came to Parham in 1922. The house and its 3,733-acre estate had been purchased for his second son, Clive Pearson, by the 1st Lord Cowdray, the entrepreneur who had made a fortune from the family engineering firm S. Pearson and Sons. He bought Parham from the 17th Baroness Zouche of Haryngworth whose ancestors had lived there since 1598. The house was then dilapidated, without water, drains or electricity; the roof leaked badly; previous owners had made crass alterations to the structure. By the time Clive Pearson and his wife, Alicia, acquired Parham, most of the original furnishings, family paintings and armour in the house had been dispersed. Through a process of gradual and careful restoration over several decades the house was returned to its original architectural pattern. All the panelling had been removed, repaired and put back in place. The plaster ceilings, friezes and heraldic decorations had been redesigned and restored in the early 1930s. The house, more or less empty when Lord Cowdray purchased it, had filled up slowly with the pictures, antique furniture, needlework and hangings collected astutely and knowledgeably by the Pearsons, many of which had historical connections with the house. A large collection of portraits, mainly of people associated with Parham, was acquired from Lady Zouche and augmented by portraits that belonged to Alicia Pearson’s family, the Brabournes. The Pearsons also built up a library at Parham, reflecting Clive’s own interests in history and topography, Alicia’s in natural history and heraldry: the revival of Parham was not so much a pastiche of an Elizabethan building as a superlatively convincing reconstruction carried out with all the taste and money that the mid-twentieth century could supply. Few people at Miranda’s dance would have been conscious that Parham had not been in her family for many centuries.