Last Curtsey

by Fiona MacCarthy

  Maxine Hodson now Lady Jenkins, whom I recently visited in the Netherlands where Sir Michael Jenkins is our Ambassador; Miss Sally Hunter now Mrs. Henry Clive; Miss Melanie Lowson, now Mrs. Charles Black who celebrated her fiftieth birthday with a party at the Berkeley the previous evening; the Hon. Teresa Pearson now the Hon. Mrs. Stopford Sackville; her cousin Miss Miranda Smiley now the Countess of Iveagh; Miss Dominie Riley-Smith now Mrs. George Courtauld; Miss Elfrida Eden now Mrs. Richard Fallowfield; Miss Zia Foxwell now Mrs. David Kruger and an authoress; Miss Alexandra Bridgewater now Lady Cotterell, the mother of four and a successful artist; Mlle. Eliane de Miramon now the Hon. Mrs. Anthony Grigg; the Hon. Annabel Hawke now the Hon. Mrs Brook; Miss Tita Norman now Lady Kindersley; Miss Georgina Scott now Lady O’Neill; Miss Tessa Prain now Mrs. Vere Fane; Miss Christine Stucley now Lady Cobbold; and Miss Antonia Palmer now Lady Christopher Thynne.

  Jennifer extended a smile of sympathy for one of the two as yet unmarried debs, ‘a successful career lady’, who had been ‘one of the prettiest debutantes and still is very attractive!’ But by and large, in terms of the conventions of the Season, the gels of 1958 had turned out well.

  The notable absentee from the reunion, but the name inevitably on everybody’s lips, was that of Sally Croker-Poole who, since the Season, had first become Lady James Crichton-Stuart and was now translated into Her Highness Princess Salima, wife of Karim, His Highness Aga Khan IV, spiritual leader of 20 million Ismaili Muslims and a man whose riches entered the realms of fantasy. One of the questions that rippled round the gathering of her one-time rivals in the ballroom was why Sally, a young woman of evidently formidable ambition, had settled in the first place for Lord James Crichton-Stuart, who though from an impeccably aristocratic Scots Catholic family, was just the younger son. It was his twin brother, the elder by a few crucial minutes, who had recently succeeded their father, becoming the 6th Marquess of Bute. Had Sally herself indeed had cold feet about the marriage, saying she was only doing it to please her mother? Had she actually been crying at her wedding in the Brompton Oratory, as one of her bridesmaids was later heard to claim? The Crichton-Stuart marriage was over two years later and was eventually annulled by the Roman Catholic church. And what of Sally’s second marriage to the Aga Khan in Paris in October 1969? She had by now become a Muslim. Did she see her new future as Begum Aga Khan a more optimistic one? They were married first in a private civil ceremony; then seven days later there was an Ismaili ritual marriage at the Aga Khan’s chateau on the Ile de la Cité, with Sally smiling bravely, swathed in a white sari. The signing of the marriage contract was accompanied by reading from the word of the prophet Mohammed, from whom the Aga Khan claimed direct descent.

  The Aga Khan and his bride, 1958 debutante Sally Croker-Poole, at the reception for Ismaili leaders at the Prince’s farm at Lassy near Paris held the day before their marriage ceremony on 28 October 1969

  Besides the Aga Khan’s Uncle Sadruddin, his brother Amyan and leaders of Ismailic communities in twenty-three countries, Lieutenant Colonel Croker-Poole, formerly of the Bengal Lancers, and Sally’s stolid brother Anthony were in attendance at the Islamic marriage: a bizarre link with Sally’s Limerston Street days and a reminder of just how far she had now travelled. Were we really debs together in those stuccoed Chelsea houses opposite to one another, slamming our two doors in concert, descending the steps in our dressmaker clothes, off to the palace, off to Ascot, off to cocktails at the Cavalry Club? Or had I merely dreamed the semi-feud between my mother and Mrs Croker-Poole? Within another decade Sally had become a legendary figure, a goddess of the jet set, ignoring her old friends if she encountered them in Bond Street, a woman removed to a completely distant sphere.

  By 1990 her marriage to the Aga Khan was over. The playboy element in his family was strong. Since the early 1980s Sally had been living with their three children in a rented house in a luxurious estate overlooking Lake Geneva. A cash settlement of around £20 million had been bestowed on her in order to keep the Aga Khan’s private life out of the divorce courts. Their divorce was to be finally made public in 1994. Sally showed a feistiness in common with other 1990s millionaire divorcées in refusing to go quietly. In 1995 she defeated the Aga Khan’s attempts through the courts to stop her selling at auction at Christie’s in Geneva the wondrous collection of jewels he had given her on grounds that these were not hers to sell, having family or religious connotations. All 261 jewels sold, bringing in a total £17.8 million. The Begum Blue diamond went way above the estimate, selling for over £5 million. This was, Mrs Croker-Poole would have reminded us, Sally’s reward for being very beautiful indeed.

  By the time of the 1958 debutante reunion, I had been away from this world for many years. The lunch party at the Vanderbilt gave me that sharp sad stab of déjà vu that one is conscious of at almost all reunions, school or university or work. The feeling is universal, equally applicable to an assembly of middle-aged women who thirty-two years earlier had curtseyed to the Queen. You look at once familiar faces and you wonder what has happened in the intervening period. I suppose it was the 1990 debs’ reunion that first gave me the idea for the writing of this book.

  It was then that it first began to dawn on me that the experiences of many of these girls I had once known was not so very different from that of other women of all classes in this country in rethinking and expanding the roles that their mothers had accepted as the norm. The ex-deb who organised the party at the Vanderbilt – Susanna Crawley – was a case in point. Her schooling had been sketchy since her father, a lawyer, did not approve of education for women. She was married early, in 1961, to Charles Swallow in whose arms we all remember her as clasped throughout the Season. Charles taught history at Harrow and became headmaster of a comprehensive school. Susanna, having had two children, took on the running of Nell Gwynn House, a large block of flats in Chelsea. She discovered her considerable skills in management. Charles resigned from his teaching job and together they embarked on an ambitious scheme to redevelop a series of redundant sheds in Shepherd’s Bush, originally built as exhibition sheds for the 1907 White City Exhibition, into a luxurious tennis club and social club with eight tennis courts, a gym, a snooker room, a beauty salon and a library. For some years the Vanderbilt Racquet Club was a fashionable success, ‘a non-stop cocktail party’ as Susanna now describes it, with Princess Diana among the regulars. At the time of the reunion – which Susanna had herself conceived and organised in all its complex detail of searching out the girls who had once been debutantes – Susanna was by no means the drifting socialite that debs were reputed to turn into, but an energetic and highly motivated 1990s London entrepreneur.

  ‘The generation of our mothers accepted they were wives and mothers and that was that’, wrote Annabel Greene (now Annabel Gooch) in a letter to me recently. ‘They were expected to do charity work of course, but not to earn money! Oh dear no!’ In the changing of attitudes from mothers’ to their daughters’ generation this question of financial reward for work was crucial as traditional boundaries between the amateur and the professional were eroded. Upper-class young women of the post-war generation were the first to accept and exploit the commercial possibilities of their historic areas of expertise – gardening, interior decoration, entertaining, organising a large household. Annabel herself, who had married into a well-known Essex family with a sense of its own dignity, had to tread carefully but managed to establish herself as a professional gardener. She became knowledgeable about temperate plants, and had the foresight to build a conservatory at her house in Essex in the years before the boom in exotic plants. Soon she was giving professional advice to other people establishing indoor gardens. She became a consultant to a wholesale importer and won a medal at the Chelsea Flower Show for her orangery in one of the show gardens. ‘All of these activities happened because I was not happy just to be a wife and mother,’ she explains.

  The horizons of what was both socially acceptable and practically possible expanded
for those who had been debs in 1958. Tessa Prain became a professional interior decorator, assistant successively to two of the most famous English twentieth-century country house designers John Fowler and David Hicks. In the early 1960s, the years when Tessa worked for him, David Hicks, who was connected by marriage to the royal family, was already greatly in demand in country-house circles for his affable blending of the classical and modern. Hicks was a populariser, an early incarnation of the modern television makeover designers, who maintained that the country-house style was achievable by anyone. All you needed was flair and ingenuity. Another of our contemporaries, Philippa Drummond, was part of the professional ‘foodie’ revolution that, again, was just beginning in the 1960s. Her recipe columns appeared in the Financial Times and Country Living and Philippa became an authority on cookery. Elfrida Eden took over the Vacani School of Dancing, where she had once been the star pupil, in the early 1980s, combining the running of the much-expanded school with her own independent career as a choreographer. The girl who had been trained in that most esoteric skill of curtseying was now making her own living passing on the technique.

  As old prejudice against opening historic houses to a paying public receded, the ex-debs of my generation were frequently drawn into plans for making great houses financially viable, generating enough income to support necessary future restoration work on buildings which were by their very nature vulnerable. Elisabeth Hyde Parker, whose coming-out dance, readers will remember, had been held at her own family home, Melford Hall, just two years before its transfer to the National Trust, married Thomas Stonor in 1966. He became the 7th Baron Camoys ten years later, inheriting Stonor, near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, the beautiful and atmospheric red-brick house important in the history of the recusants in England. The priest hole once occupied by St Edmund Campion, the Jesuit and martyr, is still there. In a sense, as a young wife, Elisabeth had gone from one problematic great house to another. Stonor in the middle 1970s was looking rather hopeless, depleted of much of its historic furniture, in need of extensive restoration. The revival of Stonor has been much of her life’s work. Beth’s special achievement has been the old kitchen garden, which she totally replanted and replanned during the 1980s. Its rose and shrub borders are interspersed with apple trees. Clipped yew trees and long home-grown box hedges give the garden the studied informality of a painting in a medieval illuminated manuscript. Great swathes of daffodils and narcissi spread out to the north of the walled garden in the spring.

  Similarly Christine Stucley took on some unexpected responsibilities when she married David Cobbold, with whom she had been very visibly in love through most of the Season of 1958. Christine has described their meeting in her memoir Board Meetings in the Bath. It was at a dance: ‘Attracted by my low-cut green dress and long hair, he had wandered over and asked, “Are you a mermaid?” “Yes,” I replied, “and I live in the sea off Hartland Point in north Devon.”’

  This was a very 1958 exchange. David Cobbold was the eldest son of Lord and Lady Cobbold and heir to Knebworth in Hertfordshire, the crazily magnificent edifice that had been in his mother’s family, the Lyttons, for five hundred years. The house, originally a relatively simple Elizabethan manor house, had been fabulously Gothicised by the Victorian writer and poseur Edward Bulwer-Lytton who had superimposed on the façade copper domes and minarets and gargoyles, and commissioned exuberant interior decorations from John Crace, a follower of Pugin. It was a demanding house to run. His parents were worn out with the problems of maintaining Knebworth and were thinking of giving it away to Hertfordshire County Council to make a university headquarters, a popular idea among owners of redundant stately homes at that time of massive university expansion. But even giving Knebworth away had proved impossible: people were frightened off by the state of the building, ‘riddled as it was with dry rot and every sort of beetle’. However, as Chryssie Cobbold writes,

  David and I were young and energetic; the sixties had seen a huge expansion in car ownership and tourism, and the idea of ‘the stately homes’ had been pioneered at Woburn, Longleat and Beaulieu. Suddenly it occurred to us that we could perhaps keep Knebworth as a home.

  In 1970 David’s parents moved into the bungalow they had for years been longing for and the young Cobbolds, with their family, moved into the all-too-daunting house.

  Like Elisabeth Camoys at Stonor, in her work for the resuscitation of Knebworth Christine Cobbold was to some extent developing existing skills. In the hope of stabilising their income, her parents Sir Dennis and the Hon. Lady Stucley had been running their enormous house in Devon, the twelfth-century Hartland Abbey, as a hotel. Their five children had been involved in this labour intensive and, by all accounts, somewhat precarious enterprise as Hartland Abbey sometimes lurched into an aristocratic Fawlty Towers. Chryssie had learned the lessons in her childhood of that old-fashioned upper class resilience. The Stucleys as a tribe had been good at buckling down. But hers and David’s energies on behalf of Knebworth proved how far Chryssie was also a woman of the modern world. Their development of the Knebworth site in Hertfordshire showed great imaginative flair: building their own exit road off the A1 to make the house and park more accessible to visitors; moving two 400-year-old tithe barns from elsewhere on the estate to make a restaurant architecturally in keeping with the house; inventing an adventure playground as an attraction for children and constructing a narrow-gauge railway line to carry passengers right around the park. They generated a whole series of attractions – jousting tournaments and Elizabethan banquets, car rallies and the large-scale rock festivals, verging on the riotous, at which bands of the calibre of Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin performed. Chryssie was involved in every detail of planning, to the extent of dressing up her whole family for the photographers in Elizabethan clothes. In 1984, once the proceeds of the Cobbolds’ sales of land in Knebworth village had been invested, producing a reliable annual income for the house and the estate, a trust was set up and the future secured for coming generations of the Lytton family. We should not forget that this success had been achieved with entrepreneurial flair that would have been denounced as embarrassingly vulgar by many of our parents’ more commercially inhibited generation.

  Lord and Lady Cobbold, the former Christine Stucley, and their children Richard, Rosina and Peter in costume for an Elizabethan joust at Knebworth

  It was part of the accepted duties of the country-house chatelaine, the lady of the manor, to take an active part in country life. There was a distinct trend among the married women I had known as debutantes towards taking public office not as their husbands’ consorts but in their own right. The Hon. Mary Bridgeman, for example, was married in 1962 to Jeremy Bayliss, an upright and very charming escort of our year who had a distinguished and high-profile career, becoming President of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and Chief Executive of the Foundation, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. They live a contented married life in Berkshire. It was Mary not her husband who became High Sheriff of that county, her appointment starting in 2005.

  Alexandra Bridgewater, who featured as a deb with her friend and cousin Georgie Milner in Tom Hustler’s double portrait, had also married young. She had met John Cotterell during the London Season at the dinner dance given by the Duke of Norfolk for his daughter Mary. They were married in 1959. John came from an old Herefordshire family, succeeding his father as 6th Baronet in 1978. With his sporting and historical interests, he has been a popular and influential figure in the county. From the late 1980s he led the campaign to keep the medieval Mappa Mundi at Hereford Cathedral and has been Vice Lord Lieutenant of Herefordshire since 1998. It would have been easy for Alexandra to accept the role of high-up county wife and mother to four children. But she developed another, indeed several other careers in parallel. She enrolled as a full-time mature student at Hereford Art College, developing her painting to a level which enabled her to have three professional London exhibitions. She pursued her fund-raising projects, es
pecially car-boot sales, with an entrepreneurial energy that lifted them far beyond the level of the conventional country ladies’ charitable works. One car-boot sale held at the Cotterells’ house, Garnons, raised £26,000 for the Samaritans. Alexandra was given the MBE for charitable services to the community and became known locally as ‘Lady Carboot’. When she became High Sheriff of Herefordshire and Worcestershire in 1992 she was the first woman to hold this office in her county. Al died of cancer in 2006. Her last communications with me came from hospital, notes written post-chemo in a very shaky hand. Seven hundred people crowded into Hereford Cathedral for her funeral, mourning a woman of great radiance and capability.

  Annabella Loudon, one of the few debs of our year en route for Oxford, makes an appearance in James Lees-Milne’s diaries for 1991. She was by this time married to Jonathan Scott, banker, art historian and Chairman of the government Export of Works of Art Committee: ‘We had the Jonathan Scotts to luncheon. She clever and formidable, a J.P. etc. He rather like Tom Bridges, slight, aquiline features, the same grim mouth … I like him.’

  James Lees-Milne had not quite got Annabella’s measure. Certainly she was a JP. She had been a JP for twenty or so years. Presiding as a magistrate was one of the traditional voluntary unpaid occupations for those who had the time and inclination for it. It was seen as a perfectly acceptable, indeed an admirable, calling for a well-off married woman. But Annabella, who had gravitated into the legal world after university, was a more than ordinary magistrate in that she had always been more interested in formulating legal policy than in implementing it in day-today court work. She chaired numerous Bench Committees and panels. She was a member of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales, a quango established by Jack Straw, from its inception in 1998, and a member of the Coulsfield Inquiry into Alternatives to Prison which reported in 2004 after spending eighteen months investigating alternatives to custody. Annabella is an admirable example of a onetime deb who survived the Season to become a power in the land.