The prominent students, those of fame and notoriety, were overwhelmingly public school, by acquired mannerism if not fact. They sprawled on the lawn of Peckwater Quad, went to ‘balls’ and parties, frequented exclusive clubs like the Gridiron Club and, even more select, the Bullingdon Club.
She castigates herself for her ‘unthinking’ acceptance of the ‘bourgeois system of values’ and indeed for going to far too many parties: Teresa had been seen attending sixty-four parties in fifty-six days during her first Oxford term. Why does Teresa give no account of her ritual curtsey to the Queen in this otherwise candid confessional? Why no mortified description of Queen Charlotte’s, the Berkeley Debutante Dress Show, her own dance at Mercers’ Hall amidst the Canalettos and beneath the crystal chandeliers? For, I think, the self-same reason she does not include any reference to her appearance, dressed in pinky-purple silk and carrying a bouquet, in the retinue of bridesmaids that followed me down the aisle on my first marriage, in the chapel at New College where her father was the Warden. Sir William made the speech afterwards at the reception in the college hall. For people unfamiliar with such arcane scenes there is no way of describing them. Some things are just too thoroughly, mysteriously bourgeois to be included in an exposé of the bourgeoisie.
Teresa Hayter (far right) with Karin MacCarthy and Sarah Friedberger, bridesmaids at Fiona MacCarthy’s wedding to Ian White-Thomson in New College Chapel, Oxford in 1961
Teresa left Oxford, as I did, in 1961. She has always been an inveterate traveller. Born in Shanghai, at nursery school in Washington, at primary school in London and then Paris: her peripatetic diplomatic childhood had given her the taste for being on the move. In the early 1960s she was in New York. She lived for a time with a taxi driver whose father was a vermin extinguisher by trade and a member of the Communist Party. She describes in her memoirs the exhilaration of driving every morning in the taxi from the Bronx into Manhattan ‘under and over an astonishing series of bridges’. She then spent a year in Asia, which was really the start of her political awareness. Five long journeys that she made at this stage in the east – Hong Kong, Japan, China, Cambodia, and through India – brought her closely in touch with the social problems and the underlying politics of the so-called underdeveloped countries. Each one, as she explains ‘put me a stage further on the road to becoming a revolutionary’.
In 1968 Teresa was back in Oxford, taking a B. Phil, a postgraduate degree in economics. This was the year of the student rebellion that brought Paris to a standstill, of protests and sit-ins in many universities and colleges in Britain. She found an Oxford completely changed from the politically complacent place she had remembered. Activism was in the air. All students were affected. She wrote: ‘I am convinced that by then it was impossible for any student to ignore Marxist ideas.’ 1968 was the year of what I can only describe as her conversion: ‘… this second Oxford period finally turned me into a revolutionary’.
Teresa’s transformation from debutante to Marxist has baffled, in some cases infuriated, many former friends. The response, especially amongst ex-debs who knew her, has been to ridicule a volte-face so extreme they cannot quite accept that it is serious or even genuine. This is not the way I feel. Teresa’s total change in outlook of course reminds me strongly of the quasi-religious conversion of William Morris, whose biography I wrote. Morris, in the 1880s, turned his back on his own comfortable middle class to join the revolutionary Socialist Democratic Federation. In the case of Teresa I am conscious of a similar almost total cut-off between her old life and her new. We are still friends. But I, although leftist in my politics, am nowhere near a Marxist. And I have to accept that a part of Teresa has now been lost to me. She has written many books, closely argued and provocative, on aid, world poverty, environmental exploitation, global piracy. She was closely involved in protests against the partial closure of the Rover Group’s car plant at Cowley in 1988 which caused a substantial rise in local unemployment. From 1993 she was active in the campaign to close the immigration detention centre at Campsfield. Her most recent book Open Borders puts the case against immigration controls. Could this possibly have been the girl who held a record for Oxford party-going, let alone my bridesmaid? I have come to admire her decades of tenacity and to respect her fierce integrity.
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The last two stories are of girls with whom I have a double link. As well as having curtseyed in 1958, Nicolette Harrison and Rose Dugdale were my more or less contemporaries at Miss Ironside’s School. A full account of that marvellously idiosyncratic educational establishment, in some ways behind the times but in many ways ahead of them, has been given by Miss Ironside’s great-niece, Virginia Ironside, in her memoir Janey and Me: Growing Up with My Mother. Suffice it to say here that the school had been founded in the years between the wars by the highly principled daughter of an Aberdeen doctor who had taken a Froebel teachers’ training course and was progressive in her views of education. Rene was emphatically the headmistress, tall and upright with her hair swept up into a bun, backed up by her rounder, more domestic sister Nellie who was in charge of the housekeeping. The school building was a large stuccoed house in Elvaston Place, South Kensington, into which the 150 pupils were crammed with only three lavatories and a basement dining room to which we descended to eat our frugal lunches sitting on long oak benches at oak tables – a little like the children in a workhouse, although the pupils of Miss Ironside came in fact from highly cultured homes.
Although she looked and often was intimidating, Rene was in some ways a free spirit. She had a great respect for individuality: her ruling principle was ‘We must protect the child’. It was a school in which there was no uniform and children were encouraged to address staff by their Christian names or affectionate nicknames such as ‘Snorks’ for the maths teacher Miss Norcross, ‘Focky’ for the infant class teacher Mrs Fox. It was assumed that we would concentrate in lessons and enjoy what we were learning. There was lots of tuition in italic handwriting using broad-nibbed calligraphic pens, one of Rene’s specialities, and classes in Dalcroze Eurhythmics, for which we wore floaty pseudo-Grecian tunics. The music mistress, Mrs Kelvin, had been a concert pianist in her native Austria. There was very little science in Miss Ironside’s curriculum and, as my sister has reminded me, no religious instruction. She remains to this day uncertain what the Resurrection actually was.
Word must have got around the London theatrical-artistic coteries that Miss Ironside’s was a good school to send your children to. Rene’s nephews Robin and Christopher Ironside were both well known in the art world, Robin as a neo-Romantic painter and gallery curator who was Deputy Director at the Tate under John Rothenstein, Christopher as a brilliantly versatile designer recently recruited to teach life drawing at the newly revitalised Royal College of Art. The children at Miss Ironside’s were also fortunate in being taught by Christopher whose services, his daughter Virginia assumes, had been extracted in lieu of payment of fees for her own attendance at the school. The arty children flocked in. The three daughters of Sir Hugh and Lady Casson; Juliet, the daughter of John Mills and Mary Hayley Bell; Susan and Tessa Price, daughters of Dennis Price who starred as the charismatic poet in the film The Bad Lord Byron soon after I arrived at Miss Ironside’s school. There was Tracy Pelissier, stepdaughter of Carol Reed, famous producer of the films The Fallen Idol and The Third Man, and Harriet Devine, daughter of George Devine, recently appointed Director of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court. Jane Birkin was to arrive a little later on. This was the context – talented, theatrical, original, a little wayward – in which Nicolette Harrison and Rose Dugdale received their early years of education.
Nicolette was in the form beneath me at Miss Ironside’s. Even then I registered her as a particularly beautiful child, blonde haired with the delicate Pre-Raphaelite good looks that were to come back into fashion in the sixties. She could have been an angel painted by Burne-Jones. Her best friend at the school was Tracy Pelissier. Tracy’s mother was the
well-known socialite and actress Penelope Dudley Ward, known to her intimates as Pempy; her grandmother Freda Dudley Ward had been the Duke of Windsor’s close companion before Mrs Simpson arrived on the scene. Tracy came from a racy and sophisticated world. Where Nicolette was so blonde, Tracy was a dark little girl, very striking, rather sallow. At Miss Ironside’s School the two of them were quite inseparable, feared by the other children, forming a conspiracy of knowingness. If a classmate told them she was going to the cinema Nicolette would sneer at her: ‘How frightfully common.’ Every morning Virginia Ironside dreaded being picked up by Sir Carol’s limousine, on what sounds like a superior version of a school run, since she knew that Nicolette and Tracy were waiting in the back seat to torment her while the driver made his leisurely way through the streets of South Kensington. A cruel little pair.
Nico was sixteen when she met the Marquess of Londonderry, introduced by his sister Lady Annabel Birley. The publicity that followed the announcement of their engagement in 1958, so soon after Nico had curtseyed to the Queen, brought reminders of the young Lord Londonderry’s earlier notoriety. In 1957 Londonderry had supported Lord Altrincham’s onslaught on the monarchy, attacking in a letter published in the New Statesman the ‘toothpaste smiles’ and ‘deplorable taste in clothes’ of the royal family. It should not be forgotten that Lord Londonderry’s elder sister Lady Jane Vane-Tempest-Stewart had been one of the maids of honour who attended the Queen at her coronation. The Londonderrys as a family have had a special penchant for social contradictions. As reported by the Daily Express, the defiantly unconventional young marquess, who had run a jazz band – the Eton Five – while still at school, had refused to give his fiancée an engagement ring. Nicolette had been accommodating: she didn’t like rings anyway. Such a symbolic disregard for the conventions suited the mildly rebellious spirit of the times. The beautiful, original young pair were seized on by the press as examples of a new unstuffy aristocracy, reported to have celebrated their engagement dining quietly à deux at a Chinese restaurant in Brompton Road.
That dream was over within another decade. The Londonderrys had two daughters, Lady Sophia and Lady Cosima. In September 1969 Nicolette had a son, Tristan Alexander, who was assumed to be heir to the Londonderry title, growing up as little Viscount Castlereagh. Alastair Londonderry claimed that the baby was not his. Blood tests confirmed his contention and showed that the actual father was the singer and jazz musician Georgie Fame. In the sixties Georgie Fame, born Clive Powell, was at the height of his popularity, performing with his band the Blue Flames at the Flamingo and scoring three number-one hit singles in the decade. Ironically, in this family tale of many ironies, it was Lord Londonderry’s sister Lady Annabel who first drew the marchioness’s attention to the rock star. She recalls in her memoirs Annabel: An Unconventional Life how she was sitting at home sometime in 1964 watching Top of the Pops on television and was so struck by the good looks of the young singer whose record had reached the number-one slot she immediately rang Nico to tell her to switch on the programme. ‘She was just in time to catch the end of Georgie Fame singing “Yeh, Yeh” and she was star struck.’
Nico’s story does not finish well. In 1970 the Londonderry marriage ended in divorce on grounds of her adultery with ‘the pop singer’ Georgie Fame, discretion being exercised in respect of adultery committed by Lord Londonderry. Tristan had been stripped of his title and eventually became a recording engineer and guitarist with his rightful father’s band, the Blue Flames. In 1972 she and Georgie Fame were married at Marylebone registry office, she still looking like an angel. They were mobbed when they emerged by the singer’s screaming fans. They attempted to live quietly and they had another son together. But by the 1990s Nico was suffering from clinical depression. She died after what was officially termed ‘a fall from Clifton Suspension Bridge’.
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Though Nico and Tracy, that impenetrable duo, linger a little dubiously in the memories of the past pupils of Miss Ironside, no one ever speaks ill of Rose Dugdale. She is generally remembered as warm-hearted and original. One old friend recalls Rose’s scathing wit: ‘she was very very funny’. Another speaks of Rose as ‘the highlight’ of her school years. Virginia Ironside voiced the feelings of the majority: ‘Everyone adored this generous, clever and dashing millionaire’s daughter, who was life and laughter.’ Rose Dugdale’s former English teacher, Jillian Staynes, saw that she had a potential streak of anarchy: for instance, when rebuked for cheating Rose was unrepentant saying, ‘Well, I don’t see why not.’ But such unusual early independence of thought is not sufficient to explain the whole of Rose’s later history. The lasting mystery to everyone who knew her is how this clever boisterous child, whose attitude to life was so sturdily irreverent, ever became serious about the IRA.
Nicolette Powell, the former Marchioness of Lodonderry, after her marriage at Marylebone Register Office to the singer Georgie Fame in 1972
My own connection with the Dugdales was a close one since for a time I was best friends with Rose’s older sister Caroline who is seated in the place of honour on my right in the picture of my tenth birthday tea party at the Dorchester. The Dugdales took me out on memorable treats: I watched Margot Fonteyn dance in Cinderella from the family box at Covent Garden. Reciprocal nursery teas were a feature of our childhood and I was quite often dropped off by my nanny at the Dugdales’ house in St Leonard’s Terrace, alongside Chelsea Hospital. We would meet again on Sundays at morning service in the Chelsea Pensioners’ chapel, the two Dugdale sisters and their little brother James dressed in what was a family uniform of navy-blue wool coats and navy berets. For musical afternoon performances at Rene’s, the girls wore identical white broderie anglaise dresses, their long hair beribboned and beautifully brushed. They looked like sisters in a Renoir painting. They played duets together, a critical Mrs Dugdale looking on. On one Christmas-time visit to their house I remember being amazed at being told the children had to reach the age of ten before being allowed to decorate the Christmas tree. It seemed to me the Dugdale house was one of daunting rules and regulations laid down by Rose and Caroline’s mother, Carol Dugdale, a large imperious woman whose family had made its fortune out of soap in Liverpool and whose previous husband was John Mosley, Oswald Mosley’s brother. My mother was as terrified of Mrs Dugdale as I was, so totally unbending did she seem.
Children’s fancy dress party given by Rose Dugdale, in front row, second from left. Karin MacCarthy sits fourth from left, wearing one of the bridesmaids’ dresses from our mother’s wedding
The family was a rich one. Rose’s father, Eric Dugdale, was a Lloyd’s underwriter and the owner of a six-hundred-acre estate near Axminster in Devon. Rose’s friends who were invited to stay at Yarty Farm have recollections of a farmhouse smartened up to the extent of being ‘ludicrously overdone’, with immaculate grounds, a gravel drive, shiny limousines, a dressage ring in which the children practised on their ponies and a highly structured educational routine in force in Devon as it had been in London. Dugdale children were brought up to improve the shining hour. Rose was sent abroad to ‘finish’ before she did the Season. She curtseyed, as we did, in 1958 although her dance, at the River Club, was not held until 1959. She was by then showing signs of reluctance at involving herself in such a full-scale coming out as her sister Caroline had undergone. She resisted going to deb tea parties and only agreed at the last moment, under what one imagines was huge pressure from her mother, to have a dance at all. According to the later legend of Rose Dugdale the fact that she had her deb dance on a Sunday, an almost unheard of day for dances in the Season, was an early sign of revolutionary tendencies. In fact there was a simpler explanation: all the weekday slots for dances had by this time been booked up.
Rose Dugdale in male disguise, having successfully infiltrated the Oxford Union in the early 1960s
Rose arrived at St Anne’s College in Oxford in the autumn of 1959 to read philosophy, politics and economics. I was by then myself at Oxford
but saw little of her. She was gaining a certain notoriety by the way she was said to be swaggering around wearing men’s shirts and trousers and by the reported squalor of her room, a pile-up of filthy coffee cups, cigarette ends, discarded garments, mountains of old books and newspapers. A reversal of her mother’s ultra-orderly environment. The rumours were that Rose was getting very odd. There were press reports and pictures of Rose Dugdale and a friend from her college having gatecrashed the Oxford Union, wearing men’s clothes and wigs. This was a protest against the all-male union’s refusal to let in women members. They sat amongst the men in the debating hall for two hours without being recognised. The subsequent publicity was gratifying proof of the power of such protests. Oxford saw the beginning of what the newspapers were later to revel in describing as ex-debutante Rose Dugdale’s ‘lunge to the left’.
In the early 1970s Rose’s increasingly reckless political activities and the bitter rift with her family became public. Like Teresa Hayter, Rose Dugdale had been radicalised by the student protests of 1968, and again like Teresa she had visited and been inspired by the revolutionary Cuba of that time. She held a master’s degree in philosophy from Mount Holyoke women’s college in Massachusetts, having submitted a thesis on Wittgenstein. But by 1972 Rose had abandoned her academic and government advisory career as an economist, sold her Chelsea house and was living in a flat in Tottenham, north London, with her lover Walter Heaton, an ex-Guardsman and shop steward who was married with two daughters and who had been in prison for a number of minor criminal offences, ranging from burglary to fraudulent consumption of electricity and obstruction of the police. Rose had cashed in her share of the family syndicate at Lloyd’s, estimated at around £150,000, distributing the proceeds – over £50,000 in 1972 and 1973 alone – amongst the north London poor and to Wally’s ex-wife with rather random generosity. She and Wally ran the Tottenham Claimants’ Union from a corner shop in Broad Lane. Through their work for civil rights they had developed a shared interest in the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and visited Ulster together several times.
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