The plight of the Jews in Germany was worsening daily. Not for nothing did desperate parents offer their children, through the columns of The Times, to any stranger who would give them a safe house. This advertisement for example, taken from The Times in early May, is typical of scores that appeared regularly throughout the summer: ‘Permit desired from Jew or Gentile for my daughter (15, German Jewess) which would enable her to do useful work. Experienced in looking after children; speaks English; well educated. Edith Sigall, Leipzig, Germany.’ There is poignant appeal in the words ‘my daughter’ rather than just ‘German Jewess’. A mother sending her child into the unknown, fearing never to see her again but hoping that the child, at any rate, might survive and even do ‘useful work’.
That first week in May a new law had been enacted in Germany whereby Jews would not be permitted to occupy flats in a building which also housed Aryan tenants. In addition, Jewish families were not allowed to occupy homes ‘disproportionately large in relation to their numbers’, a useful phrase that meant whatever the authorities wanted it to mean. The authorities could force Jewish houseowners to ‘modify’ their properties, and to sublet the space thus made available to other Jews. The Jewish community was being squeezed and segregated ; forced into an easily identifiable ghetto. These facts were reported blandly and with little editorial comment in the British press.
Is it unreasonable to wish that some of the debs – carefree, pampered creatures – had concerned themselves with the persecution of Jews and other minorities in Nazi Germany ? Many young people fifty years later care desperately what happens to the starving and the persecuted in other countries. The answer is that so did some of the debs; those in particular whose eyes had been opened by a visit to Germany. Margaret Clifton-Brown (now the Dowager Lady Amherst of Hackney) had been in Vienna during the Anschluss ; she had seen Hitler, and understood what he represented. She felt tremendous anxiety about the war which she had no doubt was coming, and soon; and about her own ability to face it. She feared for the Jews. Sarah Norton was another who had no illusions about what the Nazis meant to do to the Jews, though she could not have foreseen the finality of their solution.
I had been sent to Germany to learn German and ‘be finished’. I hated the Germans and everything about their country except the people I lived with. Certainly I was conscious of the political situation: it was all around me, affecting everything. I could see the Stormtroopers on the streets, telling everyone to say Heil Hitler ! I was conscious of the persecution of the Jews, and most angered by it. Anti-Nazi families were frightened of their own children, who were being indoctrinated by the Hitler Youth movement and would inform against their parents. The Graf and Gräfin I lived with didn’t dare speak freely in front of their own son.
The English families most conscious of Jewish persecution were, of course, those who were Jewish themselves. Ann Schuster remembers a number of Jewish musicians who came to stay on their way to more permanent homes in Switzerland and America, and her father’s growing fears about the future:
Two or three years before the war he used to come back from Vienna in a state of terrible apprehension. We had servants in those days and they would stand in the dining-room and he couldn’t bear anybody behind his chair. My mother used to have to arrange for the butler to stay out of the room, because he couldn’t bear it – anyone. … He was working for Rothschild then, and he had seen his boss (I forget now which Rothschild it was) forced by the Nazis to scrub the streets. Vienna in fact was worse in those days than Berlin.
The rest of my generation – nearly all the girls I knew here – went to Munich when they were sixteen or seventeen: it was the thing to do then. But my father wouldn’t let me. I didn’t understand why, really. Eventually he himself had to stop working out there and then he concentrated on trying to make people realize the dangers that were building up. He even went to see Churchill, who agreed with him, but was powerless.
I think there were a lot of quite powerful people in England, the Redesdales being the most obvious, who were really committed to, were admirers of, Hitler and his regime and would go out of their way to meet any Nazi socially because they were rather splendid, to their way of thinking. I think a lot of the English upper class were inclined that way; and the rest – well, they weren’t very politically minded. People like my mother, who would just say, oh, it’ll be all right in the end; and if we do have a war it’ll be over very quickly and, you know, Bob (my father), you’re making too much of it all.
And yet, the extraordinary thing is that I, personally, never encountered any anti-Semitism at all. And nor did another friend, Naomi Rothschild, or one or two others. Perhaps it just wasn’t among the young. Perhaps I never met it because my mother was fairly choosy about what families she met and what lunches I got involved in. But I was never conscious of this at all. And yet it was definitely there.
Anti-Semitism was, and still is, prevalent among the British upper classes, albeit less overtly today than it was in 1939. To outsiders, people either deny their own anti-Semitism or seem genuinely unaware of it. At most they may accept that they were ‘condescending’ towards the Jews, and add that they felt ‘a bit sorry for those in Germany’. One otherwise delightful man said he would not have dreamed of marrying a girl who was Jewish: ‘I didn’t like their attitude and their manners and, anyway, one always thought of what they would look like in twenty years’ time. I do know one – a charming man, but an obvious Jew in appearance and oh, what is it about him? – well, he’s got mannerisms and he thinks and talks rather a lot about money.’
The aristocracy in particular was obsessed with questions about the extent to which its blue blood was permeated by Jewish blood. Loelia, former Duchess of Westminster, recalled her ducal husband’s prurient fascination with the subject:
Benny [as she called Bendor, the second Duke] was usually excessively careless about his belongings and left his valuables lying about anywhere, but he used to lock up one book with elaborate secrecy. This was called The Jews’ Who’s Who, and it purported to tell the exact quantity of Jewish blood coursing through the veins of the aristocratic families of England. According to Benny, the Jews themselves, not liking to be revealed in their true colours, had tried to suppress this interesting publication and his copy was the only one that had escaped some great holocaust.5
Mollie Acland, now Mrs Peter Tabor, has written a convincing and candid description of how her kind felt about the Jews. It is notable for its lack of malice as much as for the unconscious prejudice it reveals. Yet she did not think of herself as anti-Semitic ; nor was she, by upper-class standards.
About the Jews: we knew that Hitler had concentration camps – there was a very good film called Pimpernel Smith with Leslie Howard, about an Englishman helping internees to escape – but not the full extent and horror, which actually didn’t really get going until the war. We knew Jews were emigrating as fast as they could, and though we weren’t anti-Semitic as such, Jewish people were ‘different’. They had funny noses and funny names which they anglicized, but very often became very, very rich. We enjoyed The House of Rothschild with George Arliss, but our Divinity lessons had taught us that the Jews weren’t good news for Jesus. I can’t remember any deb who would have admitted, let alone been proud to admit, her Jewish faith.
Precisely the same tone of voice can be heard in a report by a Times correspondent from Shanghai, where in May 2,000 Jewish refugees arrived from Europe, to add to the 8,000 already there. The man from The Times had been aboard one of the Jewish refugee ships, and his article describing their plight begins:
‘I sell you this camera. Yes? Only eight pounds. Yes?’ The would-be salesman is a scrubby little Jew, 22 years old, who needs a shave. … He was summarily put in a concentration camp at the time of what he calls the November Action. This morning he showed me, with a sort of furtive pride, a certificate of dismissal stating that ‘der Jude Hans Pringheim’ served in the S. Concentration Camp till February 3, 1939. �
�I sell you this camera for seven pounds. Yes?’ The little Jew told me that an emigrant is allowed to take exactly 10 marks out of the country, less than a pound.
The writer is not unsympathetic to the refugee. (He buys the camera, at any rate.) But the unconscious language of anti-Semitism, which he takes for granted his readers share, is ingrained in his description; along with a profound unconsciousness of the significance of Sachsenhausen concentration camp from which Hans Pringheim has fortunately been discharged. Nor does his article mention that Sir Victor Sassoon had recently made a desperate plea for help for the Jewish refugees in Shanghai, pointing out that the cost of feeding them had now by the most stringent economies been reduced to 3d per person a day, but that if more homes could not be provided, many new arrivals would have to sleep in the streets. By the end of 1939 there were to be nearly 30,000 Jewish refugees in China. And yet, as one deb wrote, The plight of European Jews was a topic of casual conversation only.’
Anti-Semitism was not entirely universal. Some people were openly prejudiced against Jews (including many writers in the thirties, such as Pound and Eliot); others were appalled by such an attitude. One deb of that year, who came from a family at the very heart of the British Establishment, said vehemently:
People said things then that could never be said now, like, what would you do if your daughter married a Jew? That’s something nobody could ever say now – at least, I sincerely hope not. But the upper classes then were anti-Semitic. But in my group we were none of us anti-Semitic. It froze me instantly. It made me so furious: when people used expressions like ‘Jew-boy’. And I must say that when stories percolated through from Germany about Jews being made to scrub the streets – well, I think that horrified everybody. But people don’t like facing things, you know, and they didn’t face it nearly enough. But everybody wanted to avoid a war, and I think that was the fatal thing. People just, you know, hoped for the best.
Meanwhile, hoping for the best, ignorant of the worst, the Season rushed on, and with it the dances. At weekends people took off for the country. There were sporting events to be enjoyed, fresh air to be breathed, sleep to be caught up on, and for those who still hankered for the society of their peers, there were country-house weekends. By Monday everyone would be back in London.
On Monday, 8 May, Lady Craigmyle gave a dance for her daughter the Hon. Ruth Shaw – and, perhaps because it was held at Claridge’s, a relatively public venue, she took the precaution of inserting a notice in the Court Circular of The Times (the Court Circular was the senior prefects’ noticeboard) warning guests that those who had not received admission cards must bring their invitations: presumably to guard against gatecrashers.
At the same time, a few hundred yards away at 6 Stanhope Gate, Sonia Denison and Rosemary Beale-Browne – best friends then, as now – were sharing their coming-out dance. An unusual feature of this one was that, as Rosemary’s mother had died in 1933 and she was the only child, she was brought out by her father. He was very popular among the other debs’ mothers, who could rarely persuade their husbands to come with them on the endless round of dinner-parties and dances, so there was always a shortage of older men. The Brigadier-General, who chaperoned his daughter conscientiously, was always greatly in demand to take lone mothers in to dinner.
Sonia Denison (now Mrs Heathcoat-Amory) remembers the relief of coming out after having been cooped up in a boarding school she did not enjoy:
I think I’d been rather spoiled at home, with a governess, and I disliked going to school. We didn’t work very hard – there was no standard at all: we weren’t really taught at school. Ridiculous. So my dance – it was lovely. I had a wonderful dress … blue with white spots – such lovely clothes. I never wore them again. They were made into cushions, I think, in the end. Whereas my grandsons and granddaughters – they live a different life. They’re very capable, very intelligent, and unspoilt.
The main dance that week was given the following evening, 9 May, by Viscountess Astor for her niece, Dinah Brand. Dinah’s mother had been one of the five remarkable Langhorne sisters from Virginia. In 1904, two of them – Nancy and her favourite and nearest sister, Phyllis – travelled to England in search, among other things, of more satisfactory husbands. Americans were popular in Edward VIII’s time, and the two of them took Society by storm. Phyllis duly married an Englishman, Bob Brand, and Dinah was one of their three children. When Phyllis died of pneumonia in 1937, Lady Astor took on much of the responsibility for these three, and it was under her auspices that Dinah came out in 1939. Her aunt, being a divorced woman, could not present her personally at Court, but she did everything else, bringing Dinah to live with her during the summer weeks in the Astors’ splendid London house. It was a generous gesture, for Nancy was by then an active and hard-working MP, and, having abandoned her support for Chamberlain and appeasement, was now implacably opposed to Hitler. But she found time from her political commitments to give a wonderful dance for her niece at 4 St James’s Square. Dinah recalls:
Oh, such beauty ! The rooms, the flowers, the dancing, the music – you were on air ! I remember all the flurry and excitement beforehand – wonderful flowers brought up from Cliveden – there were gardenia trees in full bloom all round the ballroom, and the smell was unbelievable. And the excitement: one felt one was it. First the excitement of my dress, which was made by Victor Stiebel at Jacqmar; I remember going to a couple of fittings with my aunt Nancy, to Victor Stiebel himself. It was tiers and tiers of silk and chiffon in different blues, and cost £19. I wore it to all the other big dances that summer, and then the war came, and I never wore it again: except that I found it years later, and it had survived amazingly well, and still fitted me. With it I wore a pearl necklace and tiny diamond earrings … it was not done for unmarried girls to wear a lot of jewellery, though of course all the mothers sat round in their tiaras keeping an eye out. There was a sort of security in that, even though we used to play them up a bit.
First we had dinner, served by footmen all in livery and white gloves. I sat next to the Duke of Gloucester. Then at about ten the guests started arriving for the dance – I remember them coming up these wonderful shallow stairs, and being received by me and my aunt. Ambrose’s band played – all the hit tunes – ‘Cheek to Cheek’ – all the favourite tunes of that summer – ‘Anything Goes’. I had a wonderful time, it being my ball, and the house looked so beautiful. I went back to it only the other day, and could hardly believe it possible today that such a huge house was actually lived in.
It was an extraordinary summer because of the undercurrents of doom and gloom ahead and all of us having a wild time. The men knew what was coming – they were already beginning to get involved in the Army ; they knew that war was on top of us and we had very little time left. It was the last whirl before the storm, though I don’t think many debs were aware of that – we were simply out to have the best time possible.
When you’re young you don’t even want to think about war coming – it’s even quite exciting, in a terrible sort of way – but we were very protected. My father knew of course, but he’d only say, ‘There’s going to be trouble.’ But, as for us, we just sailed along in a cloud – until we were thrown into it hook, line and sinker. We were in it up to the eyes.
It was an extraordinary year – the end of an era. One minute we were all aglow and aglitter and the next we were pitched into the cauldron.
However magical the previous night’s dance may have been, there was never time to savour it, for there was almost always another the next day. The dance given for Helen Hoare and Mary Tyser on 10 May must have been in complete contrast to Dinah Brand’s. Lady Astor’s style of lavish and confident hospitality ran on practised wheels oiled by perfectly trained servants, accustomed to the rich, famous, powerful and beautiful. They had waited upon everyone from Hollywood film stars to British politicians meeting at Cliveden or St James’s Square to plan and influence the course of history. The young people invited for weekends a
t Cliveden were usually the most vivacious and intelligent of their age group.
By comparison, Helen Hoare and Mary Tyser were unsophisticated country girls. Helen’s only contact with a glittering social circle would have been through her aunt, the Marchioness of Londonderry – another great political hostess of the twenties and thirties. Helen had studied in France and also in Germany, where she had been arrested in Munich for photographing a sign outside a greengrocer’s shop that said ‘No Jews allowed’. But although she came to her Season with some political awareness, she admits that socially she was very naive:
I hadn’t been to many dances before – the Season had only just begun – and I remember being rather frightened before my own got going. I wore my only really smart dress, a white ballgown from Worth that my godmother had given me, and just a little touch of lipstick and powder. No rouge. No eyeshadow. I seem to remember that the dinner-party beforehand was at Londonderry House: not that I knew any of the young men. But people were very kind; I was good at dancing; and in the end I know I enjoyed it. Apart from that the Season made very little impression on me. I just remember seeing lots and lots of other people’s beautiful houses.
Mary Tyser (now Lady Aldenham) was only seventeen and started the Season straight from boarding school. She had led a life sheltered even by the standards of her contemporaries, for her father, who was old enough to be her grandfather, had brought her up according to strict Victorian principles of young womanhood. She was never allowed to go anywhere alone and certainly not to a nightclub ; she usually wore no make-up; no jewellery; for all these things would have horrified him. But during the Season her father remained at the family’s country house in Essex, while Mary and her mother took the Lumleys’ house at 39 Eaton Square (‘Oh, on the small side of the square …’ she remembers a snobbish neighbour at lunch saying to her mother).
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