By the sixties the once coherent structures of the deb world had been further dissipated by the growth of hippydom. There was the picturesque and in the end ill-fated exodus in gypsy caravans by the hippy children of the upper classes, hoping to find the good life in the West Country or in Wales. One of these disaffected deb escorts was Sir Mark Palmer, whose father, the 4th Baronet, had been killed in action in 1941, the year when Mark was born, and whose mother was a lady in waiting to the Queen. I remember being partnered by Mark Palmer at one of those London dances. Was it at the Anglo-Belgian Club or the Hyde Park Hotel? This was before he was transformed into ‘the King hippie’, as Penelope Betjeman described him, deeply disapproving of the way he and his friends cut out the knees of their jeans and the elbows of their jerseys to make themselves look as unkempt as they could. Mark Palmer was at Oxford, got sent down for drugs and
… started this gypsy thing of getting caravans and horses and getting lots of girls and boys together who wanted to lead that sort of dropout life. They went all over England. They went down to Cornwall and he was beaten up in Padstow because he rather stole the thunder from the Padstow ’Obby dance, with his pretty debs and caravans.
The Hon. Mrs Betjeman, somewhat misguidedly, went on to stay at Palmer’s later commune in Montgomeryshire:
They had an old gypsy doing fencing on their smallholding. I can’t describe the squalor, I CANNOT describe the squalor. The next morning I realised there was a large hole in the wall of my bedroom which was covered up by a piece of old carpet on the outside. And their great theory at the time was that you must never never spend one moment doing any housework, it was an absolute waste of time. The gypsy took me aside and complained of the dirt and the mess!
The story is told in Bevis Hillier’s definitive biography of John Betjeman. This particular debs’ mother was relieved that her daughter Candida had not settled for Mark Palmer, as had at one time been a possibility. But in such conditions of social anarchy all ideas of hand-picking a husband for your daughter, let alone vetting escorts for their likely good behaviour in a taxi, were becoming utterly irrelevant.
In 1958 Britain was on the edge of feminism. Women’s achievements were beginning to be singled out and recognised. In that summer of our dances a Women of the Year luncheon was held at the Savoy, attended by over seven hundred women including the artist Dame Laura Knight, the ballerina Beryl Grey, Marjorie Marriott, Matron of the Middlesex Hospital, the Salvation Army leader Colonel Mary Booth, the Holloway bus conductress Mrs Waymark, a signal that Women of the Year were not just middle class. There was also Joyce Grenfell, the comedian and writer, who (as Joyce Phipps) had curtseyed to Queen Mary in 1928 and therefore could be seen to bear another kind of message: that of upper-class women’s potential in the world. In autumn 1958, the first year in which the State Opening of Parliament was televised, four women were among the fourteen new peers created under the Life Peerages Bill, the first women ever to take their places in the House of Lords. These were Baroness Swanborough, founder of the WVS, Baroness Elliott of Harwood, Baroness Ravensdale of Kedleston and Baroness Wootton of Abinger.
There was increasingly vociferous debate over the next few years on what it meant to be a woman, on how women could break through the traditional social mores that circumscribed their lives. In 1963 the first widely influential study of contemporary women’s discontents, The Feminine Mystique, was published. The author, Betty Friedan, drew on a series of interviews with American graduate wives to explode the myth of the happy housewife, maintaining that millions of women in the United States were surviving on tranquillisers, leading lives that felt empty and unfulfilled. I covered Friedan’s first visit to Britain for the Guardian. Her controversial study was followed in 1970 by Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch which within my own circle was to have an even stronger impact. The Female Eunuch, a trenchantly argued, often wildly funny book, dealt less with the problems of American suburban housewives, more with the social and sexual dilemmas we knew from our own often bitter experience. I cannot claim that every deb I knew had read The Female Eunuch, though I treasure the story told me by a friend of how she travelled through France sharing a night-sleeper with her husband, she reading Germaine Greer, he snoring up above. By the end of the journey, she had dismissed her husband from her heart, arriving in the end at a handsome divorce settlement. But even if most daughters of the upper class baulked at signing up as bona fide feminists – and feminism certainly had its wilder shores – no woman of my generation could be unaffected by the prospect of expanding possibilities that became so potent a feeling in the air.
The final act of destruction to the debutante Season was the end of virginity. The whole cycle had its basis in ideals of the virgin: the queen’s benison, the courtship, the engagement and the wedding, leading up to the ritual deflowering on the marriage bed. By the early 1960s there were many fewer virgins. To put it candidly there were now simply not enough virgins to go round. Partly this was the result of the now easily available contraceptive pill which allowed a single girl to make her own decisions about intercourse without the fear of pregnancy that I have described as paralysing sexual activity in 1958. The ending of virginity also came from an attitude of mind much altered from the secrecy and mystery surrounding sex throughout our teenage years when my own clandestine source of information had been my mother’s copy of Marie Stopes’s Radiant Motherhood. The widely publicised trial of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover for obscenity in 1959 released into the public domain words and actions that had up to then been hushed and furtive: as fucks, cunts, and anal intercourse became a part of everyday vocabulary there seemed less to fear in the sexual acts themselves.
The poet Philip Larkin set the year in which sexual intercourse began as 1963. I would put it two years earlier. In 1961 the Oxford Union held its Chastity Debate in which the Earl of Longford, Esther Pedlar of St. Hilda’s, and A.S. Neill, headmaster of the (to some) alarmingly permissive Summerhill School, considered the question ‘That the Christian ideal of chastity is outmoded.’ And in 1961 my group of female Oxford friends at Lady Margaret Hall met together and agreed that in the previous vacation we had all gone down like ninepins. When it actually happened, after all the fuss surrounding it, the loss of our virginity seemed such a little thing. My mother made a token objection when, engaged but not yet married, I proposed to go on holiday in Wales with my fiancé. But she knew the game was up and she quite quickly acquiesced.
Poster for the Oxford Union Chastity Debate in 1961
Things changed in and around my mother’s house in Chelsea as that mobile symbol of 1960s irresponsibility – the Bubble car – began careering round our bend in the King’s Road. In my teenage years King’s Road was quite an ordinary shopping street with butchers, grocers, fishmongers, a Timothy White’s, Sidney Smith the drapers and Beeton’s the baker where you could buy potato cakes still warm from the griddle and scrumptious Chelsea buns. At the bottom of Limerston Street, Ted-in-the-Shed, an old-time London trader, sold us our fruit and veg with lots of winking innuendo in the Carry On film mode. But gradually these normal shops, and even Ted, were ousted by boutique after boutique, the wildest of which came to colonise World’s End. We could hardly believe our eyes when Granny Takes a Trip opened just around the corner from our Limerston Street house in 1965. Granny was an antique clothes shop, psychedelic in its concept and startling in its decor, which changed from day to day. The tour de force was the Dodge car belonging to the owner, John Pearse, which he had sawn in half and welded to the shop front instead of the glass window, an act of subversiveness which was reported back to us by Isa, our old nanny, in some alarm. Like I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, a similarly mickey-taking retro fashion shop in Portobello Road, Granny Takes a Trip specialised in the reconstituted military jackets, Boer War helmets, the equipment of old British militarism that entranced the pop world of the sixties. This was the same love-and-loathe-the-Empire feeling that inspired the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper
’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. If Isa had been shocked by Granny Takes a Trip she would have been still more so (had she lived to see it) by SEX, the punk shop opened in the seventies by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols, on that same curve of the King’s Road. The gay-bar cowboys in their Stetsons, nude from the waist down; the torn up Union Jack with the Sex Pistols logo superimposed; the Queen with a safety pin stuck through her lip. The shock images of SEX were our old world deconstructed. As King’s Road itself transformed, the links with the old innocent life of the deb dances grew ever more remote.
My sister Karin had paid only minimal attention to her coming out in 1960. She was training as an actress and a dancer and had already had her first professional engagements as a Sherman Fisher girl in the pantomime Aladdin at Streatham Hill and as a dancer in Gillian Lynne’s cabarets on New Year’s Eve at the Cumberland Hotel. She also had a boyfriend, not a debs’ delight, but a boy on the fringes of the Chelsea Set. Peter Stansbury was very young, with an appealing fallen angel look. He dressed in the King’s Road uniform of nicely faded tight blue jeans, Cuban heels and pretty coloured shirts. Peter had artistic aspirations and played the classical guitar. He lived with his mother in a rather gloomy Earl’s Court mansion block. He and Karin spent many hours together in the Troubadour café on Fulham Road. When they felt they could afford an evening out they went not to the Berkeley but the Café des Artistes with its check gingham tablecloths and sputtering red candles. Otherwise it was the Bistro d’Agran where they tried to forget about the filthy kitchens which no modern health inspector would possibly have passed. In what was meant to be her Season Karin did go to deb dances, often insinuating Peter, but she could not face the house parties. Her style of life that summer was less the conventional ingénue debutante, more the self directed and sexually sophisticated Chelsea Bird, as defined in Virginia Ironside’s evocative 1964 novel of that title. My sister really had no need for coming out. Ironically enough her first breakthrough as an actress was taking over the part Anna Massey had been playing in The Right Honourable Gentleman, the dramatisation of the Charles Dilke scandal. It seemed as if our family was destined to be haunted by the reluctant debutante.
Karin MacCarthy photographed in her coming-out year in 1960, looking more Chelsea Set than debutante
As the sixties wore on the Limerston Street household came more and more to resemble a theatrical lodging house. It has to be said that things got out of hand. One of the PGs, tended fondly by my mother, was the actor Robert Lloyd whose long run in the Peter Brook production of Marat/Sade was followed by a stint in the Theatre of Cruelty. My mother’s theory was that all this had, not surprisingly, turned Robert slightly mad. Another PG was Petronella Barker, daughter of the comedians Eric Barker and Pearl Hackney. Peta, who had been at the Central School with Karin, was herself a wonderful comic actress, memorable as Phoebe in the National Theatre As You Like It and in the Feydeau farce A Flea in Her Ear. Anthony Hopkins was also in the National Theatre Company, then based at the Old Vic, and they had formed a relationship which was often stormy, exacerbated by his drinking. One night at Limerston Street, where Peta’s room was in the basement, there was a violent scene. My mother and Karin, woken up by frenzied screaming, both rushed out of the front door and saw Tony running down the street. Peta had meanwhile emerged from the basement, in a state of near-hysteria, maintaining that Tony was trying to kill her. The story was that he had sat on her head, attempting to smother her. Certainly the cane bedhead, of a twirly design then popular in Chelsea, which I remember buying with my mother at Peter Jones, was showing signs of damage. The episode was reported to the police and my mother set off indignantly to the Old Vic to take the matter up with the National Theatre management. As a landlady she cared about the welfare of her lodgers. No action was taken. Tony Hopkins and Peta married in September 1967. But the marriage was short-lived.
I often think about the transformation of my mother from fairly conventional lieutenant colonel’s widow to the ruler of this risqué, unpredictable lodging house in Chelsea. The theatrical connections are easily explicable. The world of theatre was the one she had longed for for herself. It was also, I think, that she was making up for her obedient, repressed McAlpine upbringing. She loved young people, even trippy Phena, who secreted in her Limerston Street cupboard a considerable stash of LSD. Was my mother never afraid of being busted? I suppose she took a chance on it. Her life had opened out in ways that at last made her contented. She had never been exactly keen on debs.
*
Social pundits agreed that 1958 had been the last good year for debutantes. By the mid 1960s, by which time the socialists were back in power, the elegant, exclusive deb Season as we knew it was in terminal decline. Drugs took over from drinking at deb parties. Dress standards declined sharply. Where in 1958 traditionalists lamented the growing tendency for men to wear dinner jackets at deb dances instead of white tie and tails, dinner jackets were themselves becoming rarer by the middle 1960s. People turned up at deb dances in whatever they happened to have on. There was an enormous rise in promiscuity. Nigel Dempster, self-appointed expert on debutante virginity, who had estimated in 1958 that only 5 per cent of girls doing the Season had ever slept with anyone, reversed his estimate for 1965, finding only 5 per cent of debutantes were still virgins. The number of coming-out parties, in their hundreds in their heyday in the 1950s, twenty years later had reduced to a mere trickle. In 1974 only nineteen cocktail parties and twenty-four dances were pre-announced in Queen by Jennifer. By 1975 she had stopped listing private dances altogether. In that same year doubts were raised about the continued viability of Queen Charlotte’s Ball now that ticket sales were so much slowing down. The last Queen Charlotte’s was in 1976. In 1977 the writer Margaret Pringle asked the Marchioness of Tavistock who, as Henrietta Tiarks, had been Deb of the Year in 1957, whether she would want her daughter to be a deb today. Henrietta replied:
The answer is that it would not work anymore, it would be meaningless. You cannot go to disco parties, wear make-up, smoke and go out with boyfriends before the age of seventeen and then be a deb. … The deb era has gone.
There were some valiant attempts to resuscitate the Season. Peter Townend, Jennifer’s successor as the Tatler’s social editor, saw it as his mission to prolong the social system that had dominated England for so long. Townend, an obsessively meticulous man, had started his professional life as archivist for his local Wolverhampton council before editing Burke’s Peerage. He was in a position to keep records of ex-debutante mothers who now themselves had daughters of an age to make their debuts and would write to them or telephone to offer his assistance. Up to a point his persistence was effective. Some of the debs of 1958 have described how Peter Townend brought them together in organising dances for their own daughters in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He also kept a list and held an annual party at Raffles for his approved debs’ escorts. But even Peter Townend’s near religious fervour in preserving what he saw as the system’s ancient purity was not enough to stem the tide of social change. Even Townend had to recognise that England’s once highly stratified society had changed into a relative free for all in which the credentials for inclusion were no longer those of lineage but celebrity and glamour. Nicholas Coleridge analysed these changes in the address he gave at Townend’s memorial service:
His social pages, which once championed the Winter Ball, the White Knight’s Ball and the Rose Ball, were soon contaminated, as he saw it, by funkier, more egalitarian parties, at which the Honourable Fenella Sporran cavorted with rock stars, and many of the young men at the raves found no place on Peter’s respectable list. The social stars were no longer the Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire, but supermodels and self-publicists and entrepreneurs.
Attempts made, from 1989, to revive Queen Charlotte’s Ball fizzled out a few years later. The bored and bolshy teenage girls, who turned up for their curtsey rehearsals in Doc Martens, refused to take seriously the once-solemn proces
sional rituals. The final straw came when Queen Charlotte’s was featured in Hello! with Angela Rippon seated at the central table. By the year 2000, as debutantes mutated into ‘celebutantes’, the Season was a shadow of its former self.
CHAPTER TEN
What Happened to the Debs?
Ex-debutantes of 1958 photographed by Terry O’Neill for a ‘Last of the Debs’ feature in the Sunday Telegraph in 1993. From left, standing: Holly Eley (formerly Urquhart), Penny Graham, Lady Kindersley (formerly Tita Norman). Seated, Zia Kruger (Foxwell), Annette Bradshaw, Susanna Swallow (Crawley), Melanie Black (Lowson), Elfrida Fallowfield (Eden)
In June 1990 a reunion of the debs who had curtseyed in 1958 was held at the Vanderbilt Racquet Club in Kensington. Of the 231 girls on Jennifer’s original list of debutantes published in the Tatler 46 came to the luncheon. Some could not be traced. Some refused the invitation, one ex-deb explaining piteously she had got too fat. Four of us were dead. Of these 46 ex-debs, now on the verge of fifty, 44 were married, a high proportion (well over half) to men I remembered, sometimes only too clearly, from the deb-dance circuit. Jennifer, who was of course invited to the party and whose attitude to the debutantes was still in her old age proprietorial and exacting, looked around her with some satisfaction, noting the most impressive transformations:
Last Curtsey Page 25