The dance for Gabriel took place the night after we arrived. ‘V. nervous but tremendous fun’, writes Penny Graham, one of the visitors from London, in her diary. The ball was held in the two-storey hall, the central room at Beaulieu, architecturally splendid, carved, moulded and adorned with coats of arms, the spoils of war and sporting trophies which included the huge horns of an ancient Irish elk. We as house guests could spy down from windows placed along the first-floor corridor as the party gradually assembled in the hall below. Like all Anglo-Irish parties this one had a tribal vigour. The portraits of the ancestors looked down as if admiring its abandon. It ended with us going out to paddle in the river at 5.30 in the morning. Irish dances were apt to end like that.
Penny Graham’s five-year diary, including her account of Dublin Horse Show Week in 1958
The rhythm of those days of the debutantes in Ireland, peaks of frenzied activity and troughs of indolence, emerges vividly from Penny Graham’s small handwritten diary of that Dublin Horse Show Week.
August 3. ‘Sleep till lunch. Rise in jeans. Mess around and read and listen to records. Some go to caves. Tea. Put on red sack dress. Drinks with the Meath MFH.’
August 4. ‘Mess around and about. Read. Go racing with Greville*, Mark and Antony. Ages getting there. No winners. Drinks at Shelbourne. Back for dinner.’
August 5. ‘Drive off to Dublin Horse Show. Sandwiches. Stick with Jane. See John and Floyd. Televise ourselves. Come back. Change. Dinner. Stux-Ryber party. Fabulous. 100s of princes and millionaires. Frantic end at 6.30. Exhausted. Back at 7.30.
August 6. ‘Don’t wake till 12.30. Go evening racing in horse box. Gt. Fun. Don’t win. John, Floyd etc. Come back. Tell filthy stories. Antony – ug! – turns pea green.’
August 7. ‘Rise and stagger down stairs. Lunch. Go to show on slow train! Sing filthy songs. Quite fun. Don’t watch much. Eat ices with John. Come back for dinner. Play ping-pong and generally mess around.’
August 8. ‘Zia departs crack of dawn. Foul day. Misery. Put on sack coat and white hat. Horse Show. Aga Khan Cup won by England. See John and Bill. Then change at Shelbourne. Dinner at Kildare St. Club. Louth Hunt Ball. Tremendous but boiled. Bed at 6.’
August 9. ‘Rise leisurely. Dress. Horrid day. Racing at Phoenix Park. See John etc. Rather fun but no ruddy winners. Change at Shelbourne again. Dinner at Kildare St. Club. TREMENDOUS. John Browne-Swinburne, Johnny, Douglas. Oh heavens. Ends at 6.30. Bed at 7.30!’
August 10. ‘Rise exhausted for lunch. Play ping-pong frantically. Tea. Mess around. Dinner. 8 of us leap into a small car and go to cinema. Then dance on beach. Tremendous. Come back. Creep to bed.’
The diaries are fascinating in the way they resurrect a late 1950s girlish quality of heedlessness. The style too is very period. She writes in Mitfordese. Reconsidering her diary Penny Graham feels embarrassed at the emphasis she places on the boys and not the girls in the house party at Drogheda. This she attributes to ‘a mixture of years in the Convent and reading Georgette Heyer’. But surely she was showing a correct sense of priorities. Boys were in fact what a debutante was for. In its record of the details of a debutante’s totally frivolous existence in a world now so remote as to tax our credibility Penny Graham’s diary is a valuable social document.
The Dublin Horse Show, focus of the week’s events, took place at Ballsbridge. It was, and it remains, the most famous of all horse shows, not just a competition but a means of selling horses, attracting the best riders and the finest horses on the international scene. In 1958 there were more than 1,100 entries, apparently the most since 1913. The competitions took place in a vast green turfed enclosure bordered with flower beds, spectators crowded round the rails. The champion hunter in 1958 was Tenerife, a heavyweight brown gelding bred by Nat Galway-Greer, of Dunboyne, in Co. Meath. This was no surprise since Galway-Greer, a hero in horse circles, also produced the previous year’s champion, Work of Art, a hunter described by Jennifer, whose Tatler diary encompassed elite animals as well as top-class people, as ‘a beautiful mover and an outstanding horse’. The highlight of the week (mentioned in Penny Graham’s narrative) was the Aga Khan Trophy, competed for by four international jumping teams, the USA, Portugal, Ireland and Great Britain. In 1958 the British riders won the trophy which was presented by the Begum Aga Khan.
Compared with the International Horse Show at White City, which many of the debs had attended in July, the nature of the horse show in Dublin was quite different. The scene in Ireland was more concentrated, much more esoteric. This was the Anglo-Irish at devotions, the cult of the horse pushed to the extremes of quasi-religious ritual. There was the protocol of the sacred enclosures: who was and who was not invited to have lunch in the Show Pavilion; who watched the proceedings from the sanctified interior of the president’s box. There were the high priests, the executive committee, the judges and the stewards, almost all of them titled or of high military rank, descendants of the Irish landlord-breeders of the past. There was the singular costume of the votaries. Male aficionados, with their smooth brown trilbies pulled low over the brow at a rakish angle; the black-clad female judges of the ladies’ hunter classes in their bowler hats and veils to keep the flies off, grim-faced with expertise. What was special about Dublin was the mix of the native Anglo-Irish with the foreign and exotic. Masters of foreign hunts from, for example, Rome, Milan and Philadelphia came with their wives to Dublin to choose themselves new horses. It was a week of professional solemnity that also, in the evenings, turned into a wild carnival. Nightly cocktail parties held in the foreign embassies in Dublin led on to the succession of riotous hunt balls.
Debs of 1958 had a personal connection with the horse show. One of our number, the Hon. Diana Connolly-Carew, was a star performer. Diana was the daughter of Lord and Lady Carew, owners of Castletown at Celbridge, Co. Kildare, the largest house in Ireland, lauded in the Tatler as ‘possessing an estate of over 4,000 acres providing fine shooting and fishing as well as many coverts yielding foxes’. Although by the late 1950s there were signs of an emergent anti-hunting lobby there was no sense whatsoever amongst any of the horse-riding people I then mingled with that foxhunting could be cruel. Castletown was at the centre of the Anglo-Irish riding fraternity, ex-military in bias. At the meets which were held there hunting lieutenant colonels would be out in force and children received an early indoctrination. Diana saw her first meet from a pram at the age of six months, started riding at four, went out hunting at seven. Still only seventeen, in the year before her debut, Diana was appointed Joint Master of the North Kildare Hounds, making her the youngest Master of Foxhounds in the world. Her progress in the show ring had been equally precocious. She was eight when she first rode in the Dublin Horse Show and was well on the way to becoming a member of the Irish jumping team by 1958. In the equally testing human contests of the Season she had not been a natural, a shy self-conscious girl who was apt to be referred to not entirely kindly as ‘the Irish horse’. But in the Dublin show ring she seemed quite another person, authoritative, marvellous, a debutante transformed.
The Hon. Diana Connolly-Carew and her brother the Hon. Patrick Connolly-Carew
The public balls in Horse Show Week were all linked to Irish hunts: the Louth, the Tipperary, the Kildare, the Galway Blazers. Many of the men wore hunting pink which brought a heightened intensity, a touch of latent violence, to the proceedings. As the night wore on the scene became semi-orgiastic: people dancing on the tables, men and women in formal evening dress pelting one another with champagne corks and bread rolls. It was the tradition that the men became absolutely blotto and sensationally puerile. Lemon and orange peel was cast on the dance floor and doused with champagne so that the dancers lost their footing. Class victimisation broke out towards the end of the Meath Hunt Ball at the Gresham Hotel in 1958, as reported in the Daily Express. A group of drunk, determined men grabbed the assistant head waiter, Bobby Purcell, and frogmarched him towards the garden fountain. ‘His crime: he had remonstrated with
them about their hooliganism throughout the night. They grabbed him as magnums of champagne spilled to the floor and hunting horns blared the end of the dance. Everyone stood back and watched as the struggling shouting Purcell was hustled to the fountain.’ Their progress was halted by ‘a pretty 22 year old Irish Society girl’, Sarah Perry, who yelled, ‘Leave that man alone. Stop it at once you damn fools.’ Her intervention was reported under the headline SOCIETY GIRL DEFIES THE DEBS’ DELIGHTS. An attempt was made to blame the English debutante contingent, the aliens: ‘… it was just another of those disgusting English deb stunts. They come over here and ruin our hunt balls.’ But such violent behaviour was not typical of England where class confrontation at deb dances did not advance beyond a formulaic ribbing of the waiters. Manhandling was another matter, more endemic of an Ireland where widespread and bitter class warfare was part of recent history.
In that week of far too many celebrations of the horse one flushed and hectic party ran on into another. The night of the Tipperary Hunt Ball was also that of the ball at Luttrellstown Castle given by Mr and Mrs Valerian Stux-Rybar for the members of the international teams. The indefatigable Jennifer contrived to be at both, leaving the Tipperary Hunt Ball after the midnight cabaret and reaching Luttrellstown in time for the bacon and egg breakfast. Elsa Maxwell, the American society gossip columnist, ‘the hostess with the mostest’, was also at the ball. It was the first time I had seen this famous figure, America’s top party giver in the years between the wars. Born in small-town Iowa, she left school at fourteen to work as a theatre pianist. By the 1920s she had become an entertainer on a lavish scale, hiring herself out as party giver extraordinaire for high society and royalty. She gave legendary transvestite costume parties and was the inventor of scavenger hunts, a craze in the thirties. My mother would tell stories of the scavenger hunts – motorised treasure hunts which followed obscure clues – she and her friends would go out on from Knott Park.
The Kildare Hunt Club meet at Castletown, Lord and Lady Carew’s house at Celbridge, Co. Kildare
Elsa Maxwell’s enormous range of contacts provided the material for her widely syndicated gossip columns which, even by today’s standards, verged on the scurrilous. By the time of the ball at Luttrellstown La Maxwell was well into her seventies, holding court from a wheelchair, a decaying ancient glamour girl, her great mound of flesh bejewelled, her scant hair in corrugated waves. Did she and Jennifer converse? I wish I knew. The meeting of two such rival goddesses of gossip, oppositional in style, one so toughly transatlantic and flamboyant, one so English and correct, would have been as potentially explosive as a meeting between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. Maxwell’s trademark was tactlessness on a heroic scale. She had already dismissed the debs of 1958 as ‘off a production line’, not a judgement to endear her to our mothers. She had made what was reported as a ‘tempestuous outburst’ on arriving in Dublin. Elsa Maxwell was role model for the new rude women emerging in the fifties: compulsive international scene-maker Lady Docker, such fearsome female columnists as Nancy Spain.
Luttrellstown House, Co. Dublin
Luttrellstown is an astonishingly beautiful romantic Gothic castle like a backdrop to a ballet, complete with an ornamental lake, a Doric temple and a shivery sham ruin. It had been a wedding present from her father Ernest Guinness, of the banking and brewing dynasties, to Aileen, eldest of the three so called ‘Fabulous Guinness Girls’, on her first marriage to the Hon. Brinsley Plunket. Aileen, recently remarried to the Yugoslavian interior decorator Valerian Stux-Ryber, was our hostess for that night. When Penny Graham noted in her diary the ‘100s of princes and millionaires’ at Luttrellstown she was only exaggerating slightly. The Stux-Rybers entertained in the grandest postwar manner, on the cosmopolitan circuit of royalty, film stars and the very very rich. The ball that night had an atmosphere of international glamour that made most of the English country house dances look homespun. Aileen Stux-Ryber was in green and white printed chiffon with splendid emerald and diamond jewellery; the Begum Aga Khan wore a white mink stole (it was a chilly Irish evening) over a pale orchid silk sari. The members of the International Horse Show teams had come on to the ball from an official dinner given in their honour by the army at McKee Barracks, attended by the Irish Minister for Defence, and many of the officers were in uniform. There was dancing in the ornate ballroom lit by magnificent crystal chandeliers. A second dance floor had been made across the lawns, surrounded by great urns planted with pink convolvuluses and adorned with pink and yellow ribbons. The flowers for the dance had been flown in from Japan. Twice during the evening twenty or so pipers came and played outside the house before disappearing back into the trees. It was a night of immense splendour that contained a certain sadness, a mood of valediction, a little like the ball on the eve of Waterloo.
In the background lay the sense of the long tragedy of Ireland, bitterness to be intensified over the next decades, and the particular Anglo-Irish weirdness of the Guinness family itself. Our hostess Aileen Stux-Ryber with her penchant for crude practical jokes and scatological humour, apt to accost her male guests like a comic Irish servant pointing out the lavatory: ‘D’ye want to go, Surr?’ The second Guinness sister, Oonagh, who was also at the ball with Miguel Ferreras, the Cuban dress designer she had recently married in New York. For one sister to marry a bisexual designer of saturnine good looks is understandable if risky; for two sisters to do it looks like carelessness. Oonagh too had been given a house by her indulgent father, Ernest Guinness. This house, Luggala in the Wicklow mountains, had been destroyed by fire in 1956 but was rebuilt as an exact facsimile. The Guinness sisters had a whole long history of outré personal relationships, unexplained accidents, mysterious deaths of children; they lived at an extraordinary level of insouciance, charmingly, effusively neglectful of the rules of responsibility and common sense. The high-pitched horror that has lingered round the Guinness family has been maliciously captured by the writer Caroline Blackwood, daughter of Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, third of the ‘Golden Guinness Girls’. Blackwood’s short story ‘How You Love Our Lady’ and her bleakly comic novel Great Granny Webster draws on her own memories of growing up in a wildly hedonistic but fast declining Ireland, of which the ball at Luttrellstown provided a small glimpse.
William Montgomery, Master of the Eton beagles in summer 1958
Who did I dance with to the Cuban band under the floodlit cypress tree? No, not the Maharajah of Jaipur. I have explained the deb’s essential strategy to find herself a partner she could count on for the evening. I had found myself an ally the first night I got to the Waddingtons at Beaulieu. Did the emotions follow practical necessity? In any case by the night of the ball at Luttrellstown we were tightly clasped together and I felt I was in love. Bill Montgomery was so young that he had only just left Eton. I think he was related to my hostess, brought in to even up the girls and boys. The Montgomerys lived at Grey Abbey, Co. Down, an old Anglo-Irish family of landowners and clerics. I imagine Grey Abbey as a kind of northern Irish Northanger Abbey, its architecture Gothic and high-pitched, and Bill as a Jane Austen hero of the best intentions and most gentlemanly aspect. He was handsome with an early nineteenth-century finesse. We left the house party and went off on bicycles to Drogheda. We roamed over the cliffs above the sea and kissed in caves. When Christy the chauffeur came to take me to the airport for the return journey I was desolate. A few scrawled letters arrived on azure blue Grey Abbey writing paper. But we were just posh teenagers trying out the possibilities, not ready for commitment. Devotion petered out. A decade later, by which time I was writing for the Guardian and thought of myself as an acerbic left-wing critic, it seemed incredible that my first love had been the Master of the Eton Beagles. But Bill was a sweet boy.
*
I have described the decline of the English country houses as I was aware of it travelling from house party to house party in 1958. The problems were the same in Ireland only more so. Up to the 1860s the Anglo
-Irish landlords, installed in their fine houses, lived lavishly and confidently, managing the upkeep of their large estates. But since then, as Terence Dooley details in his comprehensive study The Decline of the Big House in Ireland, there had been an inexorable process of decay. From the late nineteenth century onwards Irish landlords’ disposable incomes were diminished; the Land League put pressure on the old ways of land management, transferring tracts of land from the landowners to tenants; the extravagantly sociable life of the estate-owning Anglo-Irish families was destroyed for ever by the painful upheavals of the First World War. Nor must we forget that inherent Irish doominess, a heritage of melancholy that could transform an Irish mansion all too easily into a poetic ruin. ‘All Irish houses are deeply romantic, and on the verge of disintegration even when splendid’, wrote James Lees-Milne, an expert on the species. ‘All are tragic, mournful, nostalgic. The atmosphere dead, breathless, green and dank.’ Queen Alexandra, in signing the visitors’ book at Mount Stewart, added her regal judgement, ‘A beautiful place, but damp’.
The decline of Irish houses was of course exacerbated in a way that had no English parallel by the burning of big houses during the Irish ‘Troubles’: the violent struggles for independence from 1919 to 1921, followed by two years of Civil War. It has been estimated that 199 big houses were destroyed by Irish revolutionaries in just fifteen months from January 1922 to April 1923. These events were so traumatic since often the incendiarists were personally known to the victims. They could be neighbours, employees or tenants of the landowners. The horrors and the tragedies caused some Anglo-Irish to abandon their inheritance. For example, after the shooting of the daughter of Glenstall Castle’s owner, Sir Charles Barrington, in an IRA ambush in 1921 the family left Ireland and four years later sold off the estate. The tensions of that time have been marvellously captured in William Trevor’s novel The Story of Lucy Gault.
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