In the evenings we danced, driving miles and miles to do so, the young men in their kilts, since this was indeed the Highlands, the girls in their long dresses. With an absolutely unflagging energy the Douglas Miller house party attended the Hot Air Ball at Brechin; the Angus Ball; and finally the Perth Balls, held during the week of the Perth Races at the end of September, bringing the Scottish Season to its official end. By the time I left for London I’d acquired an unexpected but, as it turned out, redundant talent: I had actually got quite good at reels.
*
Autumn was in the air. The Times was running features on dressing fashionably ‘against the wind and rain’ and suggesting easy recipes for cooking pheasant. By the end of September the debs were reassembling in a London in which, during their absence on the grouse moors, racial tensions had erupted into clashes with the police. The Queen too was returning to London from Balmoral. Preparations were in train for the State Visit in October of the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Professor Theodor Heuss, the first German state visit since 1907 when the Kaiser visited King Edward VII at Windsor Castle. Heuss’s state visit was felt by many to be premature, at a time when memories of battle and Blitz were raw. Through the autumn up to Christmas the debs’ coming-out dances went inexorably on. In that year of record-breaking applications to curtsey there was also an unprecedented number of deb dances scheduled for the so-called ‘Little Season’. More than thirty were announced for dates from 1 October to 17 December, most of them in London. For many of the debs, as they now describe it, the return to London for the ‘Little Season’ was not a happy time, but a period of anticlimax and anxiety. It was now half a year since they had made their curtseys. Just how long could one keep dancing? Some debs’ parents were expecting a return on their investment. In such a conventional and circumscribed society, in which most girls’ education had been minimal and in which a career was ridiculed as dowdy, what could the future hold?
An early marriage was an easy solution to the problem. The first engagement amongst debs of 1958 was that of Nicolette Harrison, daughter of a Lloyd’s underwriter, whose betrothal to the Marquess of Londonderry was announced with what seemed almost indecent speed, only ten days after her presentation. Nicolette’s future history developed into a form of tragedy peculiar to its age, as I shall be suggesting in a later chapter. But for the moment her destiny looked settled. She was married in May at Wilton Parish Church, photographed a little later as the radiant young bride at a party held to introduce her to the Londonderry estate staff and the tenants. For Nicolette the marriage market aspects of the Season were now of course superfluous. The marchioness left the debs to their devices, tore up her invitations and was rarely seen again.
It did not even have to be a thoroughgoing marriage. Mere engagement provided a valid form of life after the Season. Once announced in The Times, a deb’s engagement burgeoned into a full-time occupation in itself, involving the compilation of the wedding list at Harrods and the General Trading Company, decisions on the details of the wedding ceremony and the reception, the choosing of bridesmaids and discussion of their dresses, their headdresses, their shoes. Of our year, one of the first engagements announced on 29 July, was that of the Countess Carolyn Czernin, the girl whose sexual knowingness had so unnerved me at the beginning of the Season. However, her engagement was cancelled just weeks later by a second, much bleaker, announcement in The Times, releasing her once again upon the market. Another early engagement, that of Margaret Hamilton to the Hon. Matthew Beaumont, ended satisfactorily – in deb terms – with her wedding in Brompton Oratory in the spring of 1959, attended by several of her still single fellow debutantes.
In fact the vast majority of debs ended that Season not married, not engaged and with little idea of how to occupy their lives. Charity work was the most obvious of the options. ‘It is most interesting now to see the debutantes of last year blossoming out into the Committee Chairmen and hostesses at charity ball parties.’ Gladys Boyd’s approving comments in the Sketch on the charitable debs of 1957 suggested that these should be the role models for us. Jennifer in the Tatler noted with approval 1958 debs helping with tombolas and raising money for the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Aid Association, always a favourite with the upper classes. There but for the grace of God go I. My own single venture into charity work during the Season had not been an encouragement. Having spent a whole morning on Sailors’ Day standing near the Law Courts rattling a collection tin, one of thirty girls recruited by a deb’s stepmum, the small, bustling Lady Coldstream, I received a little note from the King George’s Fund for Sailors: ‘You will be interested to know that your tin contained £1 3s 11d.’ This confirmed me in my view that the true beneficiaries of charitable work were less the undoubtedly deserving soldiers, sailors, airmen, gentlefolk and so on, more the unemployed debutantes whose empty hours it filled.
Could a deb get a job? Well yes and no. According to the arcane regulations of employment laid down by many of the parents of the debs, a girl could work but only if the job was not demanding or indeed even averagely remunerative. Modelling was approved of since it was not only extremely lowly paid but was regarded (incorrectly) as somehow rather jolly, an extension of the Berkeley Debutante Dress Show. Working in a florist with the kudos of say Pulbrook and Gould was considered as absolutely fine and would stand the deb in good stead in supervising the flowers in the lovely country mansion to which it was expected she’d eventually gravitate. Working in an antique furniture shop was similarly seen to have its uses for the future. Even cutting sandwiches was regarded as permissable, according to what now seems a preposterous scale of values, so long as sandwich-making took place somewhere socially acceptable. Fortnum’s Soda Fountain was at that time almost wholly staffed by ex-debutantes.
I missed the Little Season. I refused all invitations for the autumn with an alibi so cast iron and convincing I too might have been marrying a 9th marquess or an 11th earl: ‘Lady Hayter’s daughter Teresa goes up to Oxford this term as does her friend Miss Fiona MacCarthy, and both are much looking forward to their studies there.’ So the Sketch informed its readers. We were not the sole defecters. A drift away from the Season was beginning. By 1958, for women in Britain in general as well as for the girls of my own privileged – or not so privileged? – subsection of society aspirations were enlarging and greater opportunities of self-fulfilment were gradually opening out. Many of my debutante contemporaries were starting to feel critical of the conventional pattern of existence passed down from mother to daughter, the cycle of coming out, engagement, marriage, childbearing, then launching one’s own daughters, the system repeating itself in perpetuity. It has sometimes seemed to me that the official end of curtseys helped to concentrate the mind on the kind of futures we actually wanted. There was a definite breaking of the mould. Often, and sometimes painfully, this entailed rejection of the cultural values and formality of manners in which we had been reared.
I can illustrate this best with the story of the debutante determined to go to university whose mother had insisted she should wear a hat for her interview at Somerville. The girl, Auriol Stevens, had intuited that hats, necessary for debs’ luncheons or for presentation day, were unlikely to improve her chances with the dons at Somerville, at the time a highly academic all-female Oxford college. Auriol’s mother dropped her at the gates and she deposited the hat surreptitiously at the Porters’ Lodge. She got the place at Somerville, and indeed went on to a career of great intellectual glory, ending up as editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement. The story of Auriol and the abandoned hat is symbolic of the rejection of old standards of decorum as the traditional English deb died out. It also reminds us that the impetus for change, the urge to reinvent themselves amongst the girls who curtseyed, came not – certainly not – from the debs’ mothers but from the girls themselves.
CHAPTER NINE
What Happened to the Season?
In late 1958, the year that curtseys ended, the profess
ionals whose livelihood and status depended on the debutantes began a rearguard action. In the Tatler Jennifer, the doyenne of social columnists, took up the defence:
I want to say how heartily sick I am of reading (ever since it was announced from Buckingham Palace that there would be no more Royal presentation parties) such statements as ‘Death of the débutante’ – ‘No more débutantes’ – ‘The end of the débutantes’ seasons’. This is rubbish. There are just as many debutantes coming out in 1959 as in any previous year. The dropping of the presentation parties has made no difference, and the season promises to be as gay as ever.
There was in fact only a very slight reduction in the number of deb dances previewed in the Tatler: 99 in 1959, as against 117 in 1958. The deb Season continued more or less in its old format over the next few years. Later attempts were made, and are occasionally still made, to revive it. But its nature had been changed fundamentally by the palace’s decision to end the presentations. With the ending of the link between the Queen and the virgin daughters of her well-bred subjects, in a solemn ceremony of initiation not dissimilar to a laying on of hands, the Season lost what element of gravity it had pretended to, and descended into pointlessness. Its spiritual centre had now gone.
The end of presentations meant a larger role for Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball as the Season’s important opening event. Debs still took lessons at Vacani’s School of Dancing in the curtsey to be made to the ball president. Curtseying remained a technique considered to be useful, along with arranging flowers and making soufflés. A 1959 deb told me that as well as curtseying she was taught at Vacani’s how to pick up the train of the long dress she was wearing and loop it round her forearm, a skill she might possibly be needing in the future. But even Queen Charlotte’s was less formal than it used to be, treated with less reverence as the Season itself began to loosen up. Barbara Griggs reported in her Evening Standard column in 1959: ‘Symptomatic of a less-inhibited, freer (and – should we say – more democratic?) social whirl, a Chelsea note is beginning to be perceptible.’ Belinda Bellville, well-known designer of debs’ ball gowns in a picturesque quasi-Edwardian style, is quoted as saying, with a touch of bitterness: ‘These debs are rather a gay lot this year – black stockings and a rather Chelsea-look and much more fashion conscious – not nearly as worried about waists and full skirts as they used to be.’ By the time that joints were being smoked at Queen Charlotte’s the traditionalists were lamenting the demise of Lady Hamond-Graeme (‘dear Lady Ham-’n-Eggs’ as she was known on the deb circuit), a ball president of disciplinarian rigour who had ruled the debs’ behaviour with an iron rod.
For Chelsea debs in their black stockings the old set patterns of coming out were now appearing discredited and boring: ‘rent-a-crowd dancing to Tommy Kinsman’. No one wanted staid old dances at the Hyde Park any more. Deb dances now needed to include a surprise element. In 1960 Diane Taylor held a South Seas coming out in the quasi-Polynesian decor of the new Beachcomber Restaurant at the Mayfair Hotel, where real macaws sat in imitation palm trees. Sarah Rashleigh Belcher, Virginia Campbell-Johnson and Melanie Hadden were still more enterprising in hiring London Zoo where the roaring of the lions and the yells of the hyenas provided a bizarre accompaniment to the sweet-talking of the debs and the delights. My sister Karin rejected the family duty of a deb dance at the Dorchester in favour of a dance on a boat on the Thames with a steel band playing as it chugged along to Greenwich. The waiters wore the by now fashionable matelot-stripe jerseys. In 1960 Candida Betjeman’s coming out took place in a barn on a farm at Duxford, Berkshire. Candida was the daughter of the poet John Betjeman, himself an adorer of the debutante sub-species:
Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,
Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun.
The guests arrived at the party in pony carts, led by Candida’s mother, the Hon. Mrs Betjeman, daughter of the late Field-Marshal Lord Chetwode and herself a considerable horsewoman, driving a skewbald mare to a four-wheeled wagonette. Instead of dinner jackets the men wore open-necked shirts and tweed jackets, the girls loose V-neck jumpers and candy-stripe skirts. This was what might be called an alternative deb dance, more a fête champêtre, at the beginning of a whole decade of alternatives in which the more traditional modes of coming out were beginning to look like an embarrassment.
At the opposite end of the spectrum to the barn dance were the balls which purported to be given for a daughter’s coming out but were more of an occasion for a grand spectacular. The most lavish of the balls of 1963 was given by Lady Ashcombe, daughter of Viscountess Kemsley, at the Kemsleys’ eighteenth-century mansion in Buckinghamshire. Though ostensibly a dance for Tana Alexander, Lady Ashcombe’s debutante daughter, it was really a party for the jet set and the no longer youthful international royalty, including Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco. ‘There were over 800 guests, but most of them had been debs and debs’ delights many many years earlier’, recalled the designer Adam Pollock who had been commissioned to transform the 150 foot ballroom at Dropmore into a baroque Roman piazza:
… architecturally correct, but everything covered in gold foil dripping with diamonds and brown varnish. A swagged and ragged white silk ceiling was hung with, I think, twenty four jewelled chandeliers. In the corners were grottoes of the elements, each with four ten foot statues holding up the rocky vaults … only slightly camp.
All this was enormously more sophisticated than the rose trellises and fountains that constituted decor at the dances I went to in 1958. Lady Ashcombe’s ball was quite another sort of party, more stagey, more mouvementé. In a way it set the pace for the mind-blowing effects of illusion and psychedelia found at the smartest parties by the middle 1960s. Pollock himself went on to design one of the first of those big psychedelic parties of the sixties. Charles Spencer Churchill gave the party in an empty house in Regent’s Park with ‘masses of projected quickly changing abstract and Rauschenbergy slides on the blank walls’.
If we accept that by 1958 the English debutante was dying, what exactly had contributed to her demise? Besides the edict of the Queen that put an end to curtseys there were several other factors. The first, and most crucial, was the ongoing erosion of the exclusive and relatively small social grouping known as High Society within which the debutante system was invented and by which it had been nurtured. High Society stood for an acknowledged social leadership based on meaningful political power, titled rank and wealth and land. The American philosopher and Anglophile Ralph Waldo Emerson estimated High Society as containing around 70,000 people when he first visited England in 1833. This exclusivity had lasted up to the First World War and, after a fashion, had continued right through the 1930s. But in his 1962 investigation of the running of the country, The Anatomy of Britain, Anthony Sampson raised the question of how far, with a large class of post-war new rich, the old aristocracy was losing ground. Sampson noted that in newspaper gossip columns by the early sixties the worlds of the new millionaires and old aristocrats could be seen to be colliding: breeding had become less newsworthy than money and success. Sampson’s socially sensitive antennae detected a new pattern: ‘The two worlds of aristocracy and plutocracy overlap in the “Season” – the succession of private dances and balls given between April and July, which serve as the marriage market for richer children.’ Debutantes, so far as they continued to exist, included girls that our own mothers with their listings and address books and strict sense of the old networks would have looked on as impostors. If they could afford it anyone could have a Season. The criterion for inclusion was now not birth but wealth.
Tana Alexander’s coming out dance at Dropmore in 1963, with spectacular decor by Adam Pollock
Lady Rosemary Muir at Lady Ashcombe’s ball at Dropmore, transformed into a Roman piazza for the night
There was the growing feeling that the upper class itself was getting seedy. In the early 1960s a succession of sex scandals erupted, involving well-known members of the ruling cla
sses and the aristocracy. John Profumo, then Minister for War in Macmillan’s cabinet, had been considered one of the most brilliant of his generation of politicians before he was forced to resign from the Cabinet in June 1963 for lying to the House of Commons over his affair with the call girl Christine Keeler. Profumo’s brazen denial of any ‘impropriety whatsoever’ in his ‘acquaintanceship with Miss Keeler’ created a distrust by extension of Britain’s entire ruling elite. As wild rumours accumulated through that summer of nude swimming parties, masked men at whipping sessions, a Cabinet Minister dressed in bondage gear, and other up-to-then unmentionable forms of orgy, the old Tory confidence in preaching morality to the lower classes was forever undermined. The toffs were now revealed as no better than they should be, as many people claimed to have suspected all along. Less than a month after Lord Denning’s report into the Profumo affair in all its lurid ramifications of immoral earnings, unlawful abortions and risks to the national security, Macmillan resigned, ostensibly for health reasons, and the way was paved for Labour’s 1964 election victory.
The Profumo affair sabotaged what remained of automatic respect towards the upper classes. Even more directly damaging to the reputation of the debutante was the long-running and, to the public, riveting divorce case brought by the Duke of Argyll against his wife. The proceedings were brought to a conclusion in May 1963, that summer of the scandals, when the duke was granted a decree of divorce on grounds of the duchess’s adultery. The duchess had, as I have previously mentioned, been Deb of the Year in 1930, a young woman of such fame at the time of her first marriage to the American playboy Charles Sweeny that Cole Porter had hymned her in the song ‘You’re the Top’:
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