The emotional reverberations of the Troubles lingered. The ebullience of the Anglo-Irish landowners was ended. The memoirs of the Irish peer Lord Castletown, written in the early 1920s, dwell regretfully on the ‘most cheery shooting parties’ of his youth at Strattan, which combined ‘the best of sport and the best of claret’; hearty gatherings at Castle Bernard ‘one of the cheeriest houses in Ireland, where many a practical joke was played’; the heart-warming conviviality of well-remembered house parties at Glenart ‘with its two kind hosts, great woodcock, shooting and high pheasants’. These joys made a stark contrast to the muted atmosphere of a much-changed Ireland of the years after the Troubles: ‘Alas! Those jolly days are over, and many of those kind hosts have gone west, never to be replaced, and the lovely old houses are sold or shut up or burnt.’
By the late 1950s, when I first went to Ireland, the plight of the vast old Irish country houses was all too evidently worse than that of their counterparts in England. Southern Ireland had no equivalent to the National Trust in offering a safety net for historically or architecturally important Irish houses threatened with demolition. Nor could Ireland provide a ready audience for owners prepared to open houses to the public. There was still a residue of social divisiveness, resentment of the landowners. Ireland had no aspirational middle class. The particular dilemma of the remnants of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy was sensitively stated by Elizabeth Bowen in her book Bowen’s Court, an account of the house built in the eighteenth century by her family near Kildorrery, Co. Cork. She felt a deep devotion for this house which also features in her novel The Last September. She provides a clear-eyed, though affectionate, analysis of the self-destructive nature of the Irish gentry into which she had been born: ‘… its isolations, what might be called its outlandishness, makes Anglo-Irish society microcosmic’. Their social isolation had made the Anglo-Irish unusually dependent on the property they owned, attached with a great passion of possessiveness to their ramifications of house, garden, farms and fields, their animals, their children. But in a modern world such degrees of isolation were not practically sustainable. By 1959 Bowen’s Court was sold and soon afterwards demolished. This was a common story. The 1988 exhibition Vanishing Houses of Ireland was a melancholy record of some five hundred Irish houses, some of poignant beauty, lost in the course of the twentieth century.
In summer 1959, the year after the Season, I was back in Dublin for a re-run of the Horse Show. This time I was staying with Rosemary FitzGerald who, as attentive readers will remember, had escaped from the Season in some boredom and dismay. Rosemary lived at Borris, Co. Carlow, with her mother who had been married first to the Marquess of Kildare, Rosemary’s father, and secondly to Lieutenant-Colonel Archibald Macalpine Downie. Mrs Macalpine Downie, now on her own again, had retreated to the house of her forebears, the princely Gaelic dynasty of McMorrough Kavanagh. Borris is an enormous and architecturally complicated house, originally built in the eighteenth century around the ancient tower house of the McMorrough Kavanaghs, partially destroyed in the 1798 Rebellion, rebuilt in early nineteenth century Tudoresque with a wonderful decorative classical interior. Its accretions of period and personality made Borris a peculiarly fascinating place.
Borris House, Co. Carlow
In the mid-eighteenth century, before its restoration, it was part of the story of the ‘ladies of Llangollen’, the two cross-dressing women friends Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. Lady Eleanor was kept a virtual prisoner at Borris after they first attempted to run away together until, one night, she managed to escape and the ladies eventually set up house in Wales, objects of curiosity and speculation. A century later Borris was inherited by Arthur McMorrough Kavanagh who, in spite of the misfortune of having been born with only the stumps of arms and legs, lived a formidably energetic life, riding, fishing, shooting, travelling in Russia, Persia and India, returning to become MP for Co. Carlow and a member of the Irish Privy Council. There are many pleasing stories about the limbless Kavanagh, apparently a man not just of great courage but endearing innocence. The best concerns the visit he made to Lady de Vesci at Abbeyleix in Co. Laois. Arriving at the station he said, ‘It is extraordinary. I have not been here for over ten years and yet the stationmaster still recognised me.’
In his early nineteenth century travelogue The Beauties of Ireland J.N. Brewer made the comment that ‘the estate of Borris would appear to be formed by the hand of nature for the site of a baronial mansion’, citing the rich woodlands, the River Barrow flowing on the edge of the estate, the picturesque mountain stream, the Blackstairs mountains forming a background vista of unusual grandeur. ‘Convenience’, wrote Brewer, ‘in this noble residence, is carefully blended with ornament.’ To me too, when I first saw it, Borris seemed a kind of beau-ideal of Irish country houses. Except that by the 1950s it was becoming a little desolate. With its hundreds of rooms, its chapel and its library, the gardens, the outlying estate, Borris needed an army of servants and specialist workers to sustain it. There had once, for example, been four masons all called Kelly. But the expert Kellys were now dead and gone. Finances were not easily talked about in those days, money being a hidden subject much like sex, but even I could sense that finances at Borris were at constant crisis point. According to Terence Dooley’s detailed survey of Irish country houses Rosemary’s grandfather Arthur McMorrough Kavanagh left assets of only £23,000 when he died in 1953. As far as one could tell there was very little left. Rosemary’s mother appeared to be receiving little in the way of support from her two ex-husbands. The dashing Marquess of Kildare, who had taken up flying, was setting up an aviation company in Dublin. Colonel Macalpine Downie had converted an old Brixham trawler into a twelve-berth luxury cruiser running between Oban and the Western Isles. These were typical of the hit-or-miss occupations to which the aristocracy resorted in the years after the war. Rosemary’s mother was certainly not without resourcefulness. She made a little money training and selling horses. Indeed in retrospect one can feel only admiration for her courage in bringing up her family alone in that vast acreage. At least at Borris no mushrooms were growing on the drawing-room ceiling as apparently they were at Rossmore Park. But the house, for all its beauty, felt too huge, a little tragic, on the edge of decrepitude.
This was not the histrionic Irish narrative of Caroline Blackwood’s Great Granny Webster. Life at Borris was much closer to the quietly declining Anglo-Irish life as described by Molly Keane in her novels, those brilliant black comedies based in the minutiae of keeping up appearances while the whole fabric of society disintegrates. If you keep on hunting, fishing, shooting in their proper seasons you scarcely notice the money pouring quietly away. Molly Keane had been born in Co. Kildare and was a friend of the family at Borris. In the novel Good Behaviour the central character of Aroon St Charles is based loosely but recognisably on Rosemary. The child pushed into horsiness. The young girl, ‘fiercely shy’, arriving at the unknown house party. The relief to find a partner, albeit an old drunk one. The horror and humiliation when even he disappears, leaving her stranded. The protracted nightmare of the rowdy, lecherous Dublin Hunt Balls.
Lady Rosemary FitzGerald, a prizewinner in the childrens’ pony competition at the Dublin Spring Show, with her mother Mrs Macalpine Downie
Lady Rosemary FitzGerald and Fiona MacCarthy at the Dublin Horse Show in 1959. Rosemary’s sister, Lady Nesta FitzGerald, is on far left
Rosemary was defiantly anti-deb, almost pathologically opposed to good behaviour. That summer in Dublin she used me as her ally. She had been brought up in the Anglo-Irish horse riding elite, hard training and competitive. She could have been another Diana Connolly-Carew. But when we went to the horse show it was with groans and jibes. We mooched about together in a partnership of dissidence, not looking at the riders but discussing Samuel Beckett and W.B. Yeats. A picture in her album shows the two of us together in a group of horsey girls, one of them her sister Nesta. We stand out from the others as self-consciously superior non-performe
rs. Rosemary in her caption calls us ‘amicable strangers’. I was a bona fide stranger at the horse show. Rosemary had come to count herself a stranger too.
Why had Rosemary been so resistant to the Season? I find it very difficult to write of Rosemary. Even for a professional biographer – perhaps especially for a biographer? – there are inhibitions in attempting to account for the feelings and behaviour of someone who is still a dearest friend. I look at the pictures: Rosemary at a debs’ tea party early in the Season, sitting at a table exchanging desultory girlish chatter, looking ill at ease in her new-that-morning André Bernard hairdo. No one wanted her address since no dance was in the offing. Rosemary outside the palace, coming to make her curtsey, swathed in her blue silk dress and that awful flower-pot hat. I listen to her stories. One night she had reluctantly agreed to meet another deb, an old school friend Gina Ward, at a cocktail party at the House of Lords. She arrived. No sign of Gina. She knew no one. She was bored and miserable, making anguished conversation to a mass of total strangers. After an hour she left. She had failed to diagnose that she had arrived at the wrong party, this one being no worse an ordeal than the rest.
Part of the problem was that Rosemary, in practical terms, was ill equipped for the rigours of the Season. Her only dress, she now claims, was the one she was presented in. Besides, ‘skirts were short that year and mine were long’. But there was obviously more to it than that. One can partly explain her resistance to the Season as a symptom of the time that we grew up in. We were on the edge of a new decade of rebellion and questioning in which even the children of the entrenched upper classes began to challenge the social conventions. Those were to be the years of dropping out and hippydom, student protests and feminist agendas. Rosemary was a 1960s girl unhappily in 1958 debs’ clothing. She could not take the Season’s rampant silliness and she understood the way in which it could corrupt. Having fun? What to some debutantes was ‘fabulous’, ‘tremendous’ could appear the exact opposite to others who still look back to that Season with a deep enduring horror after what is now almost half a century.
* Greville Howard, still an Eton schoolboy, now transformed into Baron Howard of Castle Rising.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Scottish Balls
For debutantes coming out in 1958, Scotland was the last stop, the absolutely final fling. There was separatism between Scotland and England in the matter of curtseys, as in so much else, and the very last curtseys to the Queen were made in Scotland by Scottish debutantes at a ceremony in the Throne Room at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh on 3 July. The ceremonial was different in that both presenters and presented made a curtsey. The mothers or female sponsors curtseyed first and then the daughters, adding up to a grand total of more than six hundred curtseys. The final Scottish debutante to ‘pass the Presence’ was Miss Fiona Macrae who lived in Edinburgh and was presented by Mrs David MacIntyre. Outside in the palace quadrangle light music, played under the colonnade by the Band of the 1st Battalion the Black Watch, wafted up to the Throne Room on that long and somewhat arduous summer afternoon.
The Duke of Edinburgh was back in his titular city seated beside a Queen who was dressed for the late afternoon presentation ceremony in a full-skirted dress of primrose yellow lace with matching straw hat. She wore a diamond brooch and four strands of pearls. The Duchess of Devonshire, the Countess of Errol and Mrs Alexander Abel Smith were in attendance. So was the High Constable of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Hereditary High Constable and the Hereditary Standard Bearer. The Queen’s Bodyguard, the Royal Company of Archers, carried longbows with ferocious little bundles of arrows thrust into their belts.
There was a primitivism about the presentations at Holyroodhouse which made Buckingham Palace seem almost easygoing. Scotland in the 1950s was still a feudal country of intense conservatism. The landowners were enduring in what seemed very much the pre-war manner in their great baronial houses set in huge estates attended by a still forelock-tugging house staff and estate staff, gardeners and gamekeepers. The rural population had remained relatively static, centred on these tracts of land which provided its employment. The sense of tribal loyalties was strong. The Season in Scotland was another world away from coming out in England. As the social commentator Nigel Dempster recollected it ‘the Scottish Season was always very grand, with the Perth races and the eightsome reels’. My own memories are mainly very vivid visual ones of a solid and solemn but also garish place. Those fantastically turreted Scottish baronial castles seen across broad vistas rising from the murky hills; their warlike entrance halls hung with antique weaponry, stags’ heads and curiously interlocking sets of antlers; the surprise of seeing tartan used not just for clothing but as decor, lengths and lengths of it covering the sofas, draped across the walls. Most of all what I remember are vast distances between the houses in which the debutantes were staying and those we were dining in or dancing in, and the terror – more acute than it had ever been in England – about how, having arrived in some strange castle down many miles of driveway, I would ever get back home.
Some of the Scottish debs who curtseyed to the Queen at Holyroodhouse had already been in London for the southern Season. There the Scottish debs, like say the Irish debs or the girls from East Anglia, were easily identifiable. Though most of them had other friends, there were tribal ties between them and they would stick together in a jam. They were out in full force for the Royal Caledonian Ball, annual gathering point for social Scots in London, held in mid-May at Grosvenor House. This was a Scottish ball in all the formal splendour of Highland evening dress: kilt worn with black broadcloth jacket for the men; for the ladies, full-length dresses with clan tartan sashes draped across the breast and pinned with a large round brooch on the left shoulder. It was further stipulated that tiaras, orders and decorations should be worn. The 10th Duke of Atholl, the eligible bachelor high on the lists of mothers of the Scottish debs, led the dancers for the set reels down the same processional staircase the girls had descended to make their massed curtseys at Queen Charlotte’s Ball. The Caledonian Ball was organised according to strict rules both of dress and of performance. It had the beautiful exuberance, the balletic satisfaction, of Scottish dancing properly performed. For the Scottish debutantes it had served as a rehearsal for the formal balls in Scotland later in the year.
The 110th Royal Caledonian Ball held at Grosvenor House in May 1958. Leading the dancers down for the set reels: the young Duke of Atholl, one of the top deb escorts of 1958, with Lady Malvina Murray, Captain John and Lady Gillian Anderson, Major David Butter and Serena Murray
1958 deb Lady Carolyn Townshend with Alastair MacInnes of the Cameron Highlanders
Early in August the debs were on the move again, some stopping for the dances in Northumberland en route. I was, at a guess, amongst thirty or forty debs from England who attended at least some of the Scottish balls. The crucial date that dominated all departures and arrivals was, as always in the Season, an important sporting fixture: the beginning of the grouse shooting season on the 12th August, the so-called ‘Glorious Twelfth’. Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister, was reported as among the first to travel north, photographed in the plus fours worn with brogues and heavy knee socks and carrying the shooting stick that became the political cartoonists’ stock in trade. The Queen too had embarked from Southampton on the royal yacht Britannia, and was heading for north Scotland for a tour around the Isles. Cheering crowds were there to greet her at Fort William. She proceeded to Balmoral where the royal family habitually gathered to spend the summer holiday. Jennifer reported in the Tatler for 27 August: ‘Much of London’s social life has moved to Scotland, where grouse shooting opened very quietly on the Twelfth as birds are scarce this year owing to the bad weather during the nesting season.’ The birds had suffered from the downpours as the debs had. All the same, Jennifer tells us, on opening day at Quaich in Invernessshire, Viscount Bearsted, his two brothers and a party of friends shot 901/2 brace while the Earl of Inchcape and
his party of five guns bagged 62 brace over Glenfernate. In 1958 sporting activities were sacrosanct. Three or four years later, in an age sharpened by satire, it would become impossible for grouse-shooting exploits to be reported in such non-ironic terms.
Coming out dances in Scotland were all held in private houses. In this ultra-traditional landowning society, where the home was very often literally a castle, it would have crossed no one’s mind to hold a dance in a hotel. As in England the young guests who did not live nearby were allotted out to house parties. Some debs from the South were in Scotland already, staying with their families in rented shooting lodges or, in greater comfort, at Gleneagles, the luxury hotel in Perthshire. Gleneagles had been built in French chateau-style in 1924 by the Caledonian Railway Company who equipped the hotel with its own station. It was advertised as a ‘Riviera in the Highlands’ but really it was more of a Scottish Dorchester with two famous eighteen-hole golf courses attached. The hotel was only open in the summer months. The same English, continental and especially American families returned to Gleneagles year after year for the golfing and the shooting, the tennis and the putting, the swimming pool, the squash court and the table tennis, then considered the essential components of an all-ages summer holiday at a period when people were still satisfied with fairly simple pleasures. The fathers stayed at Gleneagles for the days when they had no invitations to the grouse moors. The debs from England used it as a rest home between dances. I think it was the mothers who lost out at Gleneagles with little occupation besides having their hair done and varnishing their nails.
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