1939

by Angela Lambert

  It was, one felt, a processional route all too short for so memorable an occasion – but compressed into it were the heartfelt affection and enthusiasm of a whole nation. At the station barriers, and at every accessible spot which the royal carriage would pass, people had been content to wait for hours – and to feel themselves amply rewarded by seeing the procession for a few fleeting moments. They carried away with them an unforgettable picture – the King, a quiet, happy smile lighting up his face as he raised his hand again and again to the salute in answer to the plaudits of the crowd; the Queen, a gracious, charming figure, smiling too, but undoubtedly profoundly moved.6

  Country Life matched this in patriotic fervour and outdid The Times in conferring not only popularity but a kind of spiritual radiance upon the royal couple:

  That their welcome was fanned into triumphant flame is due to the genius of the King and Queen for establishing, in a quite remarkable way, what can only be described as direct psychological contact with millions of individuals – a contact that was at once simple and mystic. Naturally as it comes to the King and Queen to emanate that happiness that is Heaven’s gift to them, to do so unremittingly for such a period betokens spiritual resources no less remarkable than the physical stamina required.7

  The royal publicity machine had done its work. In just two and a half years the inconvenient memory of Edward VIII, described by Harold Nicolson as ‘a wizened little boy’, had been effaced. George VI and Queen Elizabeth were now firmly enthroned. With their country on the verge of war every patriotic symbol was needed: above all, that of the monarchy.

  Three weeks after their return, the final Courts were held at Buckingham Palace, closely followed, as usual, by royal garden-parties. By then it was mid-July, and few could fail to realize that the war would happen within a few weeks, at best months. In spite of this, says Anthony Loch,

  I do not remember that the impending war was a common topic of conversation with the girls, which tended to be on a frivolous or banal level. In moments of relaxation, people preferred not to think too much about the possibility of war. You might say that it was a case of ‘regardless of their fate the little victims play’.

  The end of the Season saw the gulf between the debs and the young men who were their contemporaries widen dramatically. Most of the girls still did not realize the gravity of the situation. But the men knew; and were conscious of the huge areas of unshared experience that were about to open up. One of the young men said,

  I was very well aware that war might be just round the corner. I joined the Territorial Army the day after I left school. Most of the young men of my generation were convinced there was going to be a war. We had all been to public schools, we had all been in the Officers’ Training Corps for the very reason that we were going to flock to the colours singing patriotic songs when the time came. The girls in general were not so aware. They had had sheltered lives and these matters were not discussed in front of them. During the Season we did not talk about the forthcoming war to our dancing partners. We wanted them to enjoy themselves and we wanted to enjoy ourselves. From the male point of view, it was very much an atmosphere of ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’. But we never had any doubt that we would win. Never. [Was this propaganda, or was it patriotism?] It was patriotism in the sense of duty. It was natural. Anything else would be unthinkable.

  Part Two

  That Unspeakable Summer

  Prologue

  On 15 March 1939 Germany invaded Czechoslovakia at 6 a.m. It had long been expected, once the Sudetenland had been annexed, and resistance was hopeless. Anthony Eden, the former Foreign Secretary who had resigned the previous year over Chamberlain’s attempts at rapprochement with Mussolini, said, ‘We are heading for a universal tragedy which is going to engulf us all.’ The British government made no official protest but in the eyes of much of the press and, increasingly, of the public, appeasement was seen to have failed.

  Behind the scenes, within the government a radical change of heart was taking place. Many Conservatives were beginning to urge conscription, particularly in view of the growing threat to Poland. Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary on 17 March, ‘The feeling in the lobbies is that Chamberlain will either have to go or completely reverse his policy.’ On 31 March, when Chamberlain was to make a statement in the House of Commons, Nicolson recorded the scene:

  Chamberlain arrives looking gaunt and ill. The skin above his high cheekbones is parchment yellow. He drops wearily into his place. David Margesson proposes the adjournment and the P.M. rises. He begins by saying that we believe in negotiation and do not trust in rumours. He then gets to the centre of his statement, namely that if Poland is attacked we shall declare war. That is greeted with cheers from every side. He reads his statement very slowly with a bent grey head. It is most impressive.1

  Chamberlain’s words were unequivocal:

  I now have to inform the House that … in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence … His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all the support in their power.2

  A poll in the News Chronicle showed that just over 50 per cent of those questioned still supported the policy of appeasement – a testimony to people’s unquenchable optimism. But the government had changed course.

  On 7 April – Good Friday – Italy invaded Albania. ‘The terrible inevitability of war has descended upon us’ wrote Chips Channon in his diary that night.3 From that Easter weekend onwards, the only question was when? How soon?

  On 27 April the government announced its plans for a Compulsory Military Training Bill, affecting some 200,000 men between the ages of twenty and twenty-one.

  On 28 April, Hitler addressed the Reichstag for two and a half hours. His speech was ostensibly a reply to Roosevelt’s message calling for assurances that Germany and Italy would not attack independent nations. (He had listed no fewer than thirty-one, including Poland.)

  In spite of superficial assurances of Germany’s continued friendship towards Britain, Hitler said:

  I am now compelled to state that the policy of England is now both unofficially and officially leaving no doubt about the fact that such a conviction [i.e. that a war between England and Germany would never again be possible] is no longer shared in London, and that, on the contrary, the opinion prevails there that no matter in what conflict Germany should some day be entangled Great Britain would always have to take her stand against Germany. Thus a war against Germans is taken for granted in that country…

  Since England today, both by the press and unofficially, upholds the view that Germany should be opposed under all circumstances, and confirms this by the policy of encirclement known to us, the basis for the Naval Treaty has been removed.4

  In a private conversation with the Rumanian Foreign Minister, Grigore Gafencu, Hitler’s real attitude emerged nakedly and characteristically. Their meeting was described to Harold Nicolson and recorded in the latter’s diary for 23 April:

  [Hitler] had spoken quite calmly at first but when he touched on ideology he began to scream. He had spent the whole time abusing this country. He had complained that there was no British statesman of sufficient magnitude or vision to agree with him to divide the world between them…. All that he wanted was that we should not thwart his destiny in Eastern Europe. It was at this stage that he began to scream. He said that it was grotesque to imagine that he wanted to invade Holland or Belgium. The only small countries he wanted to dominate were those of the East…. He said that if war came we might be able to destroy three German towns, but that he would destroy every single British town.5

  There could no longer be any real hope of avoiding war with Germany: hence that ‘unspeakable’ summer.

  Chapter Five

  The Last Four Months of Peace: May

  There has always been something wonderfully democratic about the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. Anyone can submit a painting, and in 1939 10,565 people did
so. The selection process is rapid and – apart from the right of Royal Academicians to have up to six works hung – necessarily random. In the few seconds during which each work of art passes before the eyes of the selection panel, many quite good pictures are chosen and some better ones rejected; many bad ones are excluded, and some accepted. The artists range from distressingly mawkish Sunday painters (whose works are usually the first to sell, being cheap and often small) to a few geniuses – though they are rare and their works nearly always remain unsold.

  Kenneth Clark, then Director of the National Gallery, had described the Royal Academy in 1935 as ‘a period piece’. He went on, ‘We must remember that in so far as the future of art depends on popular esteem or approval, the Royal Academy still holds a very much higher place than all the other cliques or fashions of art which a critical minority are prepared to accept.’1 The Summer Exhibition did not pretend to display the new, the adventurous or even the best of British art. It was – and is – reassuring precisely because it showed what the British like to paint, and what they like to buy: flower studies, green country landscapes, domestic interiors, views from the studio window. That particular year, though, even Country Life admitted, ‘The standard is not very high and the style is not very modern but at any rate there are fewer lapses than usual and fewer fashionable portraits without any artistic merit.’2

  London’s other art galleries were providing a catholic selection of modern art. Picasso’s Guernica had been shown in two different places: at the New Burlington, where it attracted 3,000 visitors, and at the White-chapel, where – interestingly – four times as many people came to look at it. There was a Cézanne exhibition at the Rosenberg and Helft Gallery, to mark the centenary of his birth, and Monet was on show at Tooth’s. Wildenstein had an exhibition of recent French pictures called ‘Paris 1938’, Reid and Lefevre were showing English and French painting under the title ‘Entente Cordiale’; and the London Gallery had ‘Living Art in England’, a show mounted in aid of Czech, German and Jewish artist refugees. From the early thirties, the rise of National Socialism and, simultaneously, the rise of an art of propaganda that might be called Aryan Brutalism had driven many artists out of their own countries. Some had settled in London, within walking distance of a group of British artists living in Hampstead who called themselves Unit One: artists like Moore, Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Paul Nash, whose work tended towards surrealism or abstraction. They were joined in 1934 by Walter Gropius from Germany, the architect who founded the Bauhaus; Moholy-Nagy from Hungary and Naum Gabo from Russia in 1935, and Piet Mondrian from Holland in 1938.

  Private View day was anything but democratic. Traditionally, it took place on the Friday before the first Monday in May ; in 1939 this was 28 April. The exhibition then opened to the public the following Monday, 1 May, and remained open until 7 August.

  The Times next day listed the names of seventy-three Society visitors, almost all women (men got in under the guise of escorting one of the women), the list being headed by the name of Mrs Neville Chamberlain. She was ‘an early-morning visitor, wearing a leaf-green ensemble…. Pink carnations were fastened to her coat.’ The costume of each one of the sixty-three women is laboriously described. It seems a pointless exercise, tedious to all but the wearer, and hardly even complimentary to her, since not a word of praise is bestowed. It is simply a recitation: ‘a cornflower-blue flowered toque with a printed crêpe dress’; ‘black with a silver fox fur and a toque of multi-coloured flowers’; ‘printed crêpe in fuchsia colourings’ – a social convention fossilized into unreadability. On every major social occasion that summer, the same catalogue was repeated: for Ascot, Goodwood, Henley, even the Chelsea Flower Show.

  On 1 May the International Opera Season at Covent Garden also opened under the direction of Sir Thomas Beecham, adorned by a glittering selection of opera singers whose very names make mouth-watering reading. The debs, had they wished (and few of them did wish – or had the time), could have heard Richard Tauber in Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, Eva Turner in Puccini’s Turandot (in which Jussi Björling made his London debut) or Gigli in Tosca, besides a small Wagnerian selection – for in England, unlike Germany, a composer’s music was thought to be of universal appeal, even Wagner’s.

  Also on 1 May, The Times announced that over 2,000 men per day had enlisted in the Territorial Army during April, and that the total number of applications for the first three weeks of the month was greater than for the whole of 1936.

  Never mind; the Season was now under way – and it started well, with two large dances that must have had the debs and their escorts shuttling between them all night. The first was for Miss Lindsey Furneaux, and was held at 44 Cadogan Place, the town house of Lady Pamela Berry, who, as a relation of Lindsey’s parents, gave the dance together with the Countess of Birkenhead. Lindsey, now Mrs Carrick-Smith, recalls that it was ‘an absolutely marvellous dance’, from which a few, isolated incidents stand out in her memory:

  For some reason my strongest image from that evening is of my darling aunt Margaret Birkenhead, who was dancing with Neville Ford. He was about 6 foot 5, and as they turned her nose hit the button of his white shirt front and bled all over it !

  I wore the most wonderful dress from Victor Stiebel that Pamela and Sheila [the Countess of Birkenhead] had given to me – pink tulle with bumblebees tangled up in it all over the place. And my feet were hurting me so much that I called to our butler – his name was Sheridan – and I said, ‘Sherry, can you keep these for me?’ and I took my shoes off and he put them into the pockets of his tail coat, one in the left and one in the right, and there they remained.

  Lindsey’s sister, less than two years her senior, was reading Modern Languages at Somerville College, Oxford, and their parents had decided that Lindsey, despite the fact that she was training to be a nurse at Colchester General Hospital, should ‘do’ the Season that year. ‘I had a very small Morris Ten at the time,’ she remembers, ‘and I used to drive down to London or into the country for dances ; drive back home to Essex ; get up very early in the morning to exercise my horses – riding one and leading the other – and then go off and spend the day nursing. I think I was so tired most of the time I hardly knew what I was doing. Luckily I was very strong.’ Tiredness is a recurring theme in the debs’ accounts of that summer. Many of them also point out what very good training it was for the war, when there were to be many sleepless nights.

  The Daily Mail’s columnist, Charles Graves, wrote approvingly about Lindsey Furneaux’s coming-out:

  The dance which the Duke and Duchess of Kent attended was first class. The debs this year are at least as well dressed as anyone else, and it seems no longer to be an advantage to be a sophisticated young married woman. Somehow they must have persuaded their mothers and fathers to let them be dressed by Schiaparelli and Molyneux. Altogether I think it’s safe to say that the debs are going to have a more attractive Season than any of their predecessors, except those who came out in 1919. For when a chap is Army-minded, he pays real attention to girls at dances. … But when he is merely sports-minded he is inclined to lean up against the champagne bar, and talk of his golf handicap or shooting or horses to other chaps.3

  In fact, there were still plenty of the latter around, the boring, idle chaps up from the country who attended the dances for food and drink and even perhaps an heiress.

  The other deb dance that night was given for Guinevere Brodrick by her mother, Viscountess Dunsford. Lady Dunsford was an unconventional figure. She was rumoured to have been a showgirl until she met and married the American multi-millionaire, George J.Gould. They had a son and two daughters (of whom Guinevere was one). Preferring the splendors of an English title, she later married Lord Dunsford. His family name was Brodrick, and the new Lady Dunsford immediately changed all the children’s surnames and even had the effrontery to make them ‘Hons’, although as they were not Viscount Dunsford’s children they were not entitled to the honour. Then she set out to conquer t
he London social scene.

  Guinevere’s dance was held in the lovely house that used to belong to the financier, Clarence Hatry, which had been specially decorated for the occasion with lemon trees in fruit. A deb who was there that night remembers Guinevere as ‘a sort of moving light – she was absolutely lovely, and everybody sort of rushed round her like bees round a honey pot. And she had an extraordinary pushy Mum. At Guini’s coming-out dance, she was in slinky black satin and Lady Dunsford was in white tulle and baby blue bows. Unforgettable.’ At this stage in the Season the male guests were still wearing white tie rather than uniform; white tie and the invariable white gloves, lest their hands should leave stains on the girls’ delicate dresses. That night Jack Harris and his band played all the latest American dance tunes and it was generally agreed that it was a lovely dance for a girl who was described by many of her contemporaries as ‘very lovely and charming: but she had such a sad life

  The following night Mrs Charles Hambro gave a dance for her two step-daughters, Cynthia and Diana. Diana, now Lady Gibson-Watt, was not an altogether willing debutante:

  It meant absolutely nothing to me – it made no impact on my life whatsoever, and I would have hated my daughters to do the Season. I wanted to be a concert pianist, so I had my sights set on higher things. I enjoyed moments of it, of course. The trouble was, I adored dancing, but being six foot tall I could never find tall enough partners. That was all I cared about: if they were taller than me and could dance. There weren’t very many of those, and I certainly didn’t meet one single young man I could possibly have wanted to marry. And of course nobody slept around in those days … well, only a very, very few. It wasn’t chiefly because of the fear of pregnancy: you were brought up to believe it was wrong. And you did believe it.