Last Curtsey
Page 22
The Scottish Season lasted on right through August and September. One of the private dances which was typical of Scotland in 1958 was given for Tessa Prain and Ann Carington Smith at the Prains’ own home, Mugdrum, near Newburgh in Fife, a long seventeenth-century house in a wonderful position overlooking the River Tay with farming land around. Tessa was a smiling vivacious debutante, a good skier and enthusiastic huntress, riding out with the Fife Foxhounds. She had been in London for the Season returning north to make her curtsey at Holyroodhouse. Her father was a member of Her Majesty’s Bodyguard in Scotland. A piper of the Black Watch played outside as guests arrived at Mugdrum for Tessa’s dance. There was a blue and white striped marquee, built out for dancing, and a small outdoor dance floor with a beer and iced coffee bar on the terrace that looked over the river. An iced coffee bar was high sophistication for Scotland at the time as was the decor of aquariums and fishing nets and lobster pots. It was a balmy late summer night with a full moon. There is a sense of time-warp in Jennifer’s account of it: ‘Tessa, dark and pretty, with exceptionally good manners, looked enchanting in a long full-skirted dress of sea green faille. Ann, who is fair, wore a beautiful white crinoline of lace and chiffon. Her young sister Miss Rose Carington Smith, who was home for the holidays, was allowed to come to the dance.’ Good manners, lace crinolines, parental permissions: deb dances in the sixties would never be like this.
Holly Urquhart’s coming out ball took place much further north, at Craigston Castle near Turriff, north of Aberdeen. Her ancestor John Urquhart had completed the rebuilding of Craigston in 1607, a spectacularly simple double tower house with two side wings. Another ancestor, Sir Thomas Urquhart, is famous as translator of the first three books of Rabelais and as author of the idiosyncratic treatise Ekskubalauron, known as The Jewel, published in 1651. The family antecedents were intellectual and literary. The receiving group at Holly’s coming out – handsome father, soignée mother, golden-haired young daughter in a white dress like the girl in a Winterhalter portrait – appears as an ideal aristocratic Scottish family. But, like so many other family group pictures of that unsettled period, it was not as conventional as it first appears. The proud father, Bruce Urquhart, holder of what Holly now describes as ‘semi-Socialist views’, differed from the usual pattern of the Scottish laird in that he held a salaried job as a forester which helped to sustain his ‘small, quite poor but very productive estate’. He was not available for grouse shooting on weekdays because he was at work. Holly’s mother, more of a London socialite, friend of the Vogue journalist-photographer Lee Miller, was still slowly adjusting to the differently arduous demands of life in the north of Scotland in that post-war period. The early spring weeks she spent in London for her daughter’s presentation, living in a rented houseboat on the Thames, had been a temporary return to the metropolitan life she had now left. Holly herself in fact had found the Season of very little relevance. To a girl who had lived in Rome and already acquired the Italian lover who followed her to Britain, the debs appeared a bit naive and the young men very callow. She got through the months in London by renting a room in a Catholic girls’ club, working in an art gallery, enduring the pre-dance dinner parties (she needed to eat somewhere) and taking the bus back to the Catholic club, avoiding all the dances except those being given by friends of her mother’s where her absence would be spotted. In these circumstances Holly’s return to the ancestral castle in north Scotland, a scene in which her role was to play the lovely ingénue, had a certain underlying piquancy.
Tessa Prain and Ann Carington Smith before their dance at Mugdrum in Fife;
Dancers at Tessa Prain and Ann Carington Smith’s ball
Holly Urquhart with her parents before her dance at Craigston Castle
What gave the Scottish coming-out balls their special character? First of all, very often, the splendour of the setting. Craigston Castle is a place of beautiful complexity, sturdy and yet evanescent, like one of those dream buildings in a late nineteenth-century etching by Sir David Young Cameron. No need to bring in the decorators for a ball. In this and other Scottish castles the architecture was itself the decor, a constant entertainment of corbellings and gables, parapets and archways, grotesque carvings and gargoyle water spouts. At Scottish dances, compared with coming out in England, there tended to be more of a social mix in that local people, tenants and estate workers might be asked to join the dancing in the marquee after dinner. This custom belonged to the still-present feudal tradition, the concept of the largesse of the laird. At most private balls conventional ballroom dances alternated with the simpler of the Scottish country dances, for instance the Dashing White Sergeant and the Eightsome. As one Scottish deb remembers ‘the bands were usually execrable, when attempting anything other than the Scottish Country stuff’.
The private coming out dances had been neatly slotted into the larger framework of the Scottish social calendar: the Highland Games and, adjuncts to the games, the Highland Summer Balls. The main balls were held in Skye and Oban, Inverness and Perth. At these daunting assemblies the age level was higher and the protocol was stricter than at dances in debutantes’ own homes. For the balls in Skye long dresses for the women were compulsory. At all balls in the Highlands – Perth and further north – the men who were entitled to be kilted wore their kilts with sporrans and diamond-pattern knee socks, making a brilliantly vivid scene. However Fife, being a kingdom, had special regulations and if anyone were ignorant or careless enough to come to a ball in Fife wearing a kilt, he would be fined £5.
The Highland Balls were formal programmed dances. We were given little cards with ‘Engagement’ slots from 1 to 20 waiting to be filled. For the Scottish debs the reels, of course, were second nature: Tessa Prain, for instance, claimed to have started Scottish dancing almost as soon as she could walk. But, for visiting debs from England, Scottish dances in themselves could be a source of terror: we were expected to take part in complicated sequences such as those in Hamilton House where a wrong move could upset the whole pattern of the ballroom. For debs more used to foxtrotting at the Savoy the Scottish balls necessitated learning a new language. Anxious hostesses would sometimes coach the debs in Scottish dancing in case our incompetence disgraced her house party. How to flirt while dancing reels? This was again a new experience: no cheek-to-cheek endearments, no smooching in the shadows. Eye contact was all.
Highland Ball programme
If the debutante Season in England could be tiring, Scotland was exhaustion of quite another order as I am reminded by a note on my old programme for the Perth Ball. This gives official warning that the Supper Room Service will be closing at 5.15 a.m. Back home perhaps by 6.00 and your host would be reminding you the party for the grouse shoot would be leaving in three hours.
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I had lived in Scotland already, conscious of and awestruck by its overwhelming maleness even as a child. Towards the end of the war we had spent a spring and summer at Fort George, living in a house just outside the walls of the massive artillery fortifications built by the English after the 1745 uprising as a defence against the threat from the Highlands and especially the Jacobites. The great grey fortress-town was built on land jutting west into the Moray Firth at Ardersier, eleven miles north of Inverness. Fort George is enormously powerful and grim. The military presence was a still large one in 1945, in what was then the depot of the Seaforth Highlanders. The children, in that wartime house of many children, a house allotted to Fort George’s second in command, would sit on the wall in a row to watch the soldiers marching past towards the station with their bagpipes and drums.
It must, I think, have been appallingly depressing to my mother, widowed less than two years before, to spend that long summer in close proximity to such a powerhouse of war as Fort George with its bastions and firing steps, its ordnance stores and the Grand Magazine constructed to be capable of holding 2,500 barrels of powder. Such an emphasis on gunfire cannot have been a comfort to a young Royal Artillery war widow. But my
mother was endemically stoical. The large house, Cromal Lodge, was shared between three families: three mothers, my own mother and her friends Mollie Maynard and Barbara Buchanan; three nannies, our own Isa, Nanny MacLeod from the Highlands and the unfortunately named Nanny Smelling, victim of inevitable stink bombs from small boys. The eight children rampaged around together. In such set-ups in the country it was usual for the children to lead almost independent existences, finding their own amusements, racing through the bluebell woods, thronging past the stable with the carter and his horses, taking the narrow lane that led down to the shingle beach which, once the tide went out, opened out into a dank expanse of muddy sand. On VE Day in early May 1945 we gazed transfixed at a big bonfire on the hillside celebrating Germany’s final capitulation. Three months later another, even larger bonfire, was lit on the ramparts of the fort itself to mark the Japanese surrender, and Emperor Hirohito was burned in effigy. An extra excitement for the children was the fireworks, the first fireworks we had ever seen.
One wet summer afternoon the little gang of wartime children had decided we should play at doctors and nurses up in one of the second-floor bedrooms of the Lodge. I, one of the youngest and more passive, was designated patient, stripped and put to bed to await examination by the doctor. The then eight-year-old Andrew Buchanan was designated doctor, attended by small nurses and assistants, his brother, his sisters, a whole entourage of children. The examination was so thorough and so public it provoked my first infant intimations of sex. Little Andrew, the doctor, who succeeded to his father’s baronetcy, is now, through one of those magic transformations, Sir Andrew Buchanan, Lord Lieutenant of Nottingham, a figure of considerable official gravitas, the Queen’s representative in the county. I have never quite dared tell him of his key role in my burgeoning sexual awareness in a remote Highland lodge at the end of the Second World War.
When I returned to Scotland as an almost grown-up woman it was to stay in a house party at Rowallan. Rowallan Castle is near Kilmarnock in South Ayrshire. I took the night sleeper from King’s Cross, getting off at Ayr and finally arriving at the castle around breakfast time. The porridge was still hot on the mahogany sideboard and the house party assembled. The men were deep in talk about politics. This was an austere high-minded Scots-liberal household. Lady Rowallan’s brother was Jo Grimond, then leader of the Liberal Party whose prospects were thought to be in the ascendant since Mark Bonham Carter’s surprise victory at Torrington. Lord Rowallan was at the time Chief Scout of the British Commonwealth and Empire, often photographed at international scout gatherings. He was a very tall, almost a godlike figure, his appearance bringing a touch of ancient drama to the camp-fire choruses. Lord Rowallan was a man who attracted, indeed demanded, veneration. In July of 1958, he had been installed as Knight of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle in St Giles’s Cathedral. This was shortly before my visit to Rowallan. Impressive as he was in public life, his domestic persona was a little bit unbending. Sitting next to him at dinner I remember as an ordeal. The Chief Scout was not an easy conversationalist.
As so often at these parties it was the house itself that made the most impression. Rowallan Castle was the first important Scottish country mansion by the Scottish Arts and Crafts architect Sir Robert Lorimer. Its first occupant was the then rising young politician Cameron Corbett, later to be enobled as the 1st Lord Rowallan, who had entered Parliament as Liberal member for the Tradeston division of Glasgow. His wife, Alice, was from the Polson family whose fortune had been made from Brown & Polson cornflour. The resplendent new quasi-medieval castle intended as a marriage gift to Alice from her mother was completed, in somewhat reduced form, as her memorial after Alice’s early death in 1902. Rowallan Castle is marvellously sited on a hill with views to the coast and Ailsa Craig in the far distance. It was built not as pastiche but in what then seemed a valid recreation of Scottish baronial style. The towers and the gables, the great entrance hall with a high-vaulted stone stairway rising to the left, give an initial impression of ancientness. The coat of arms above the doorway includes a crow and the motto Deus Pascit Corvus, God feeds the crows or corbies, a medievalist pun on the family name Corbett. But Rowallan is also an early modern building, like William Morris’s Red House in its fluency of planning, in the way in which one room flows through into another. Rowallan is an open-plan castle, a masterpiece of optimism, air and light. When later I wrote a biography of Morris, Rowallan Castle became a kind of reference point, a prime example of the kind of architecture he inspired: architecture that gave old techniques of construction and craftsmanship a new validity; buildings so settled in, so rooted in, their landscapes one could simply not imagine they had ever not been there.
Rowallan Castle in South Ayrshire
Rowallan became another reference point later, in the early 1960s, when the Hon. Arthur Corbett, the Rowallans’ eldest surviving son and heir, abandoned Eleanor, the wife from a well-bred Scottish military family who had by then borne him four children, to pursue April Ashley, the transvestite model and nightclub performer, an equivocally glamorous figure of the time. April Ashley, born a boy and registered as George Jamieson, was brought up in Liverpool and sent to sea as a deck boy, emerging as a star performer in the drag act at Le Carrousel in Paris. Here he was talent-spotted by Salvador Dali who proposed painting him naked as Hermaphroditos. By the time that Arthur Corbett was courting April Ashley, she had undergone a sex-change operation in Casablanca involving removal of the testes, surgery on the outer genitalia and construction of a vagina, and changed her name by deed poll. Lord Rowallan, by now promoted from Chief Scout to Governor of Tasmania, is reported to have written to his son from hospital, where he was being treated for cancer of the throat, on the eve of Arthur’s marriage to April Ashley entreating him to come to his senses. Arthur’s younger brother Bobby, more in the spirit of the enterprise, sent a telegram reading ‘Congratulations – can I be a bridesmaid?’
With its backdrop of nightclub drifters, Soho criminals, freak shows and idiotic toffs the April Ashley affair continued irresistibly through the 1960s, staple subject matter of the News of the World, linked mysteriously to the larger scandal of Profumo, until the marriage was annulled in November 1969 on grounds that April Ashley was still legally a man. Sociologically the episode shows the increased merging in the 1960s of the traditional classes with what my Uncle Justin would have designated riff-raff. Emotionally, for old men brought up with solemn attitudes to manliness and service to their country, ideals of stability, this was a testing time. What price Chief Scouts, let alone Knights of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, in a world not just of wildly fluctuating moral values but a world become so scientifically adept that the manly body itself could be reshaped?
Dodavoe, the shooting lodge at Glen Prosen, Kirriemuir
There was little premeditation in the Season. You took what fate allotted you. By and large you went where you were asked once your mother had approved it: ‘Oh, that would be nice, darling.’ You packed your leather suitcase, put your shoes into their shoebags, and again you trundled off. Towards the end of September I was staying in a shooting lodge right over on the other side of Scotland from Rowallan, at Kirriemuir near Forfar in Strathmore, Queen Mother country. Dodavoe, the main house, had been rented for the shooting by the mother of a deb’s delight called Robert Douglas Miller. He had invited a group of trusty friends, many with similarly complicated names: George Bathurst Norman, Tony Seth-Smith, Ian Stewart-Brown. An equal number of girls were in the party, among them George’s sister Victoria Bathurst Norman, Allegra Kent Taylor, Davina Windley. Seven brides for seven brothers, or something of the sort. The young people were housed in a building called the Bothy, a house of rudimentary facilities perhaps originally built for the servants or the ghillies. The girls and the young men had separate dormitories, the demarcation between sexes being rigidly adhered to except when a formal raid was carried out with the purpose of sewing up the men’s pyjama trousers or su
spending a wet sponge on a string above the pillow, one of many girlish wheezes dreamed up by Victoria and her great friend Davina, alias ‘Daveegs’. I must say I regretted this strict sexual segregation, feeling by now a bit susceptible to one of the house party, Paddy Colquhoun, whose deep seductive voice reminded me of Frank Sinatra groaning out ‘Begin the Beguine’.
Grouse shooting in the Highlands: the transporter for the guns
Quite early in the morning the men would go out shooting, mustering each other in a self-important way. There were almost no women among the guns in those days. You were made to feel privileged if asked to be a beater. Otherwise it was merely picnic basket duty, meeting up with the shooters at some prearranged spot en plein air in the heather or in some shack or little cottage, always mildewy and cold, to which those fabulous cane picnic hampers would have been transported in a shooting brake. For people with no image of these now surely obsolete items of equipment I should explain they were rectangular baskets in red-brown lacquered wicker with buckled leather closures and carrying handles on each side. They contained knives, forks, spoons, Bakelite plates, Thermos flasks and food containers, all with their allotted places, packed neatly in two tiers. During the sixties it became a kind of fashion in anti-establishment novels, films and plays to use the shooting parties of the British aristocracy as a metaphor for the frenzy of slaughter in the First World War. I have often found that parallel a crude one. But there was indeed a quasi-military precision in the organisation of the lorries for the beaters, the truck for the guns and shot, the truck for the dead birds. And I have to admit that the ritual of bearing in the shooters’ picnic baskets did make me feel a little like a maiden on a battlefield proffering the victuals to the brave.