1939

by Angela Lambert

  It came from aristocratic birth, being photogenic, and most of all from the glossy magazines of that time. The male ‘leading lights’ of the year were Valerian Douro, now Duke of Wellington; Charles Manners, who was then Granby and is now Rutland – those two were both extremely good-looking – and Hugh Fraser, the younger brother of Lord Lovat.

  Other names that were mentioned again and again were those of Dawyck Haig (who had been Earl Haig since he was ten years old, which caused him a good many problems at prep school) ; ‘Rowley’ Errington, later the Earl of Cromer, who was popular not only because he was titled but because he was tremendously funny as well; Charlie Linlithgow’s twin brother (now Lord Glendevon) ; Tony Loughborough (the late Earl of Rosslyn); Alan Cathcart, who had succeeded to the earldom aged eight; Martyn Beckett (who had succeeded to his father’s baronetcy in 1937); Billy Hartington and his brother Andrew Cavendish. These last three were already deeply engrossed in the young women they were later to marry. Over a span of fifty years one must take it on trust that all these young men were charming and attractive ; what cannot be disputed is that they all, without exception, came from aristocratic families, and most of them, if not already titled, would be eventually.

  Several former debs also mentioned the names of some notable eccentrics: young men who were memorable for being different: Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk (whose very name gave him a head start) ; Ben Nicholson (not the painter – a namesake) ; Simon Asquith ; Ivan Moffatt ; and Philip Toynbee. The last two would certainly be appalled at finding themselves listed among the young men of the 1939 Season, and one suspects that they were remembered chiefly because their political views differed so startlingly from those of their fellows.

  There could never be enough ‘rich young lordlings’ to go round, and next in the popularity stakes came younger sons – victims of primogeniture, in Waugh’s phrase – who would not themselves inherit a title (though the war upset a lot of people’s expectations) but would provide entry to a noble family. The girls themselves could always be charmed by a man who was witty (which implies intelligence as well) and a good dancer – whatever their mothers might have to say about his prospects. But all these categories together could not amount to more than about a hundred young men: and this when even the elite among the girls amounted to four times that number. The rest, brought in to provide dancing partners, were described over and over again – after fifty years the memory still rankles – as spoilt, conventional and dull. They were the ‘debs’ delights’: the chinless wonders of the time. In spite of this, the impression of a shortfall persists. Mollie Acland stresses:

  The first thing to remember is that there were never enough: if for a dinner-party you had to fall back on a seventeen-year-old or a forty-year-old, that was a failure. The ideal age was twenty-three, but twenty-one to twenty-seven was good. They certainly enjoyed the food – dinner, supper and breakfast! – but also I think, like us, actually enjoyed just meeting other young. Don’t forget that public schools were still single sex, so for both boys and girls it was a first chance of limited freedom with the opposite sex.

  Nobody expected the debs to work, and the very few who did found the summer a gruelling experience. Many of the men, on the other hand, did have jobs. The largest proportion were in the Army. ‘My clearest recollections are of the many, many young men with whom I danced who were killed in the war. We were all so young. Almost all, if not in the Regular Army by June, were in the Territorials or the RNVR or RAFVR.’ One of the debs escorts concurs: ‘Most of the young men who were on the List came from the landed gentry, the aristocracy, the civil service and the armed forces.’ He was himself eighteen at the start of the 1939 Season: was he willing to be involved in all this ?

  Up to a point, yes. I was young and I enjoyed the company of pretty girls. I enjoyed my wine and food, and one was usually given a good dinner first, and then the whole party went on to the dance, wherever it was, and between midnight and two o’clock there was usually a very good supper served, with champagne. Later on there would be breakfast: eggs and bacon and kedgeree, and more champagne. But I was not prepared to do it every single night of the Season, otherwise one would have had no sleep. Then, the morning after the dance, one would send flowers – not to the girl, but to her mother, who had been the hostess. This was partly courtesy, and partly looked upon as an investment !

  In addition to the men from the armed forces, there was a surprisingly large number of medical students. It was an infallible way of getting a free meal, and for young medical students or law students who did not have generous allowances from their parents, the endless supply of free salmon and strawberries was a godsend. Helen Vlasto, who was nursing as well as being a deb that year, recalls:

  My husband, who had just come down from Cambridge and was a medical student at the London Hospital, tells me that on their ‘Mess’ noticeboard, the names of hostesses and whereabouts of deb dances were displayed for anyone who cared to do so to make use of. Few could afford the travel, and by no means all had the right dress for such occasions. He did attend one or two, but I think found the whole world somewhat unreal, when he was treating the poor and the sick of London’s East End!

  Rhoda Walker-Heneage-Vivian remembers them too:

  Apart from the Army and Navy men and a sprinkling of stockbrokers, there were also several medical students (particularly from St George’s Hospital: perhaps because it was so central). They used to go straight into the wards from the dances having stocked up on the huge breakfasts provided in the early hours. My husband has reminded me of the practice of the dance hostesses of sending cards to Regimental Messes (usually the Guards) for officers to sign their names if they wished for invitations to the various dances. Even so, it was always a bit of a headache scraping up enough men to go round the dinner-parties and all sorts of ghastly cousins were pressed into service and ignored by Ann and me.

  Brothers made up the shortfall, even if they were only seventeen and sometimes still at public school. But one deb’s brother is another deb’s partner, and the fact that the girl was doing a Season virtually guaranteed the suitability of her brother.

  Even allowing for the men from the Army and Navy, the undergraduates, the medical students and a smattering from the professions, this still left a large number who did hardly any work at all. Lady Cathleen Eliot, the niece of the Duke of Beaufort, remembers many such:

  The young men of 1939 were often heirs to big estates learning in a most relaxed way to take over from their fathers. They spent their time hunting and shooting and fishing, and going to deb dances and getting free dinners on the way. Even the ones who were soldiers seemed to have a lot of leave, and hunted at least twice a week. It was considered common to work in the City or in trade.

  Their lives cannot have been too demanding, and certainly left them plenty of time for the Season. For a man ‘in the forefront of the debs’ delightery’, to borrow one scathing expression, this idleness was an advantage:

  There was only a nucleus who either wanted or were able to literally dance the nights away five darn nights a week. So they went round and round and round and round, and I suppose they did get nobbled up in the end. But, you know, there were a lot who, other than in the most exceptional circumstances – like a great friend or a sister – would have died rather than attend a deb dance. And don’t forget, it wasn’t just the dances – there was Ascot and Henley and so on, and the whole shabang, the whole mobaroo moved round those as well: all just drifting round in the same galère.

  One deb’s brother, co-opted to dinner and dances, now says, ‘I found all the Seasons fun and not in any way a “social duty”. During my time manners – good manners – were a sine qua non, although there were lapses by the occasional young man. It was also taken for granted that one dressed on all occasions in meticulous fashion, from head to toe.’ Anthony Loch adds a telling detail: ‘Since it was more economical to send white waistcoats to the laundry rather than the dry-cleaners, I found myself th
e possessor of something like a dozen.’

  Everyone is unanimous about the good manners of young men and women in Society in those last days before the War. One of the men who escorted many of the 1939 debs strikes a wistful note:

  In my view, by the time of the 1939 Season, courtesy and etiquette had reached the highest level since 1913 and 1914. I think the survivors of the First World War were so shocked at what had happened, that first of all they let themselves go in the 1920s as a relief; but gradually it all began to come back m the 30s. I think there was a great nostalgia and yearning for Edwardian times, when we thought we were safe, we thought we were on top of the world; when living was gracious and people entertained, people still gave house parties and could afford to. And I think it was part of this yearning that created this climate for good manners, courtesy and consideration. Manners began to deteriorate as soon as the war broke out. Everyone was in a hurry. But I think manners today – which are absolutely appalling – are so bad because people are selfish. They just don’t care about others.

  He clearly has in mind two quite different aspects of good manners. There is conventional courtesy – the obligation to dance with your neighbours at dinner, or to send flowers and a thank-you letter to your hostess the next day. But he also has in mind a more profound sort of manners, the manners of the heart: a rare and unselfish consideration for other people. Vivien Mosley made exactly the same point, but she sees it rather differently:

  All the men had beautifully superimposed manners. They knew how to behave impeccably and they were certainly well turned out. But on another level, I would not say that their manners were innately beautiful – by which I mean being sensitive to the person you’re dealing with. I certainly don’t think that applied. Whereas today people’s manners are much worse – absolutely unpardonable, some of them. On both levels.

  What, then – if they all had perfect manners – made a young man undesirable ? Apart from the usual things like being boring or unattractive (which were much more serious handicaps in the case of the girls), men who were sexually predatory were disapproved of – particularly by the mothers. Lady Royds’ List marked these off with the initials NSIT (not safe in taxis), to which the debs added a further category, MTF (must touch flesh). However, knowing that a man was NSIT added a certain frisson to his company … and sometimes a certain disappointment. If one of these ‘taxi tigers’ didn’t pounce, the girl was left thinking, ‘Well, what’s wrong with me?’ So taxi tigers were quite an intriguing species, though the ubiquitous chaperones rarely gave them a chance to pursue their prey unobserved. They could sometimes entice one of the braver girls to a nightclub and in the taxi on the way there or, more likely, on the way back hope for a kiss and a cuddle; but never, or only very seldom, did it amount to anything more.

  One is left with the obvious conclusion that the least desirable young men were the dull ones – especially if they were conceited as well. The worst offenders seem to have been the very young Guards officers: ‘We thought they were frightfully stupid and unsophisticated and dreary.’ Remarkably few of the men seem to have been good dancers; indeed, one former deb said bitterly, ‘Good ? Most of them were atrocious – atrocious –’

  An awful lot of us that year loved waltzing more than anything else, Viennese waltzing, and one used to stand there with that silly programme and one used to absolutely pray and wait and look around saying, I do hope, I do hope … Well, there were about half a dozen real dab hands, and one simply didn’t care, they could come up to one’s knee and be covered in warts or anything – but if they could waltz well, I mean, one was so pleased.

  The ritual of the dance cards still survived, although both sexes found it archaic. One man who was in attendance during the last two Seasons of the decade recalled how it worked:

  The girl had the dance programme with a pencil attached on the end of a cord, and a young man would go round and say to a girl he liked the look of, ‘Are you free to dance the 12th?’ (which might be a waltz, or it might be a two-step) and the pretty girls normally had all their programmes filled up. The ones who were not pretty, I’m afraid, indulged in a certain amount of subterfuge, and it was not unknown for a girl to fill in her own programme, so that she would not lose face with her mother or her chaperone. She would say, ‘I’m tired, I’m sitting this dance out.’

  Mary Pollock (now Mrs D’Oyly) tells the story of what she did when faced with an almost-empty dance card:

  There was one dreadful evening at 6 Stanhope Gate when hardly anybody asked me to dance. I think I had two names on my card. I sat there feeling so awful – kept going off to the loo – coming back – still nobody – so in the end I rang up my parents. It was late, and they’d gone to bed but my father who was a frightfully kind man said, ‘Don’t worry – I’ll be at the door in half an hour.’ Just after, a young man came up to me and said, ‘Excuse me, I’ve noticed that you don’t seem to have had many dances: will you come and dance with me?’ I had to tell him that I was leaving in half an hour, but anyhow we danced for the rest of the evening, and I got to know him quite well. Next day he came to call on me. He became a good friend – no, I didn’t marry him !

  It is good to be reminded that the young could be spontaneously kind to one another.

  Lord Cromer remembers the gamesmanship, as he calls it, attached to dance cards:

  As far as the young men were concerned, a lot of them were very shy. The one thing you didn’t want to. do was to be left on your own. Of course it was always easier for the boys because at a party they could always go to the bar and have a drink. If a girl wasn’t asked to dance then I think she had a very miserable time. At private parties, programmes were universal, and there was a great deal of gamesmanship in it. If a girl was pretty and much sought after, then you would say, have you a spare dance? And she would say, oh, I can manage number eleven and you knew perfectly well she’d made it up. It was all part of the sort of mating – well, not mating, that’s too strong a word – dating ploy. It was a private piece of paper. A girl kept her programme, and only a very persistent young man would say, I want to see it. Now, having promised you number eleven she was honour bound to dance with you – if she was still there. But the party might have broken up. She couldn’t though, say, ‘I’ve forgotten’. That was bad.

  A man might be conscious that he had been rejected ; but for a girl a half-empty programme was a disaster. It was public humiliation to be seen sitting like a wallflower at the edge of the room while others danced. One deb remembers vividly:

  People used to gather in the entrance of the ballroom and you used to start off looking quite confident and then you’d start to look slightly worried and then you’d sort of look round and you’d look at your card as if someone had let you down, and hopefully someone would come and ask you to dance. And then there was the other thing: you used to go to the bar and pretend someone was getting you a drink. It was a tragedy if your programme wasn’t filled. I never used to go and spend time in the cloakroom. You’d never get asked to dance there.

  A young man who liked dancing was rated above one who was a good talker. Most of the debs positively expected to be bored in conversation. They were advised not to be too interesting themselves, in case it intimidated the men, and certainly not to display signs of intellectual prowess. ‘My mother said to me, “Darling, boys don’t like bookish girls.”’ says Sarah Norton – which must have been frustrating for her, since she was rather well read. Elizabeth Lowry-Corry had exactly the same experience:

  Setting the world to rights was not really one of my subjects, but I was in a way already becoming an intellectual. I had studied music in Dresden; I’d read a great many books by this time, and I think if I’d been able to talk about these kind of things, it would have been fine. But in fact none of the chaps I knew, or most of the girls either, believed in that line of country at all. And my father hated talking to intelligent girls. He didn’t like it if you came out with anything, really. Perhaps one may have t
ried to say something, but it fell flat. So all this made conversation very difficult.

  Even Priscilla Brett, who moved among an unusually bright and articulate young crowd, experienced the same problems as soon as she left the company of her close friends: ‘At the dinner-table, if you were put next to a stranger, the difficulty was to keep the thing going without saying anything very interesting, because that wasn’t done.’ This remembered range of topics conjures up an image of a young man who expects to hold forth and a young girl who expects to have to listen: ‘Most of them liked telling you about their regiments, or their horses, or their hunting prowess, or their plans for the future; and occasionally their sad stories of disappointments with other girls.’ Lady Cathleen Eliot was even more unlucky:

  The main conversation that I remember was how many dances you were going to that week; which of last night’s two or three were you at; and were you going to so-and-so’s tomorrow! A few of the men were of course intelligent, and that made them good conversationalists, but on the whole they were dull. I was lucky enough to be a good talker, helped by the fact that my mother had a pilot’s licence and used to fly me up and down to London from the country, which made me popular with the men. The war and politics were not talked about among my friends, so I thought that hunting, house parties and parties would go on ad infinitum until perhaps one day I would get married. I think debs at that time were very parochial and xenophobic, mostly because they’d had such a sheltered upbringing.

  One senses that the young people for whose benefit the Season was so elaborately stage-managed were often scarcely more than children and, for all their beautiful manners, underneath that façade they were ill at ease, inexperienced and – especially the men – quite unprepared for emotional contact with the opposite sex. Prep and public schools ensured that, for ten years or more, boys had almost no knowledge of girls outside their immediate family. At the same time they were often indoctrinated with the belief that it was unmanly to show their feelings – not triumph or disappointment or pride, not tenderness or affection, and, above all, never a chink of vulnerability. Small boys despatched sobbing to prep school at the age of seven or eight, frightened and homesick in their scratchy new uniforms, came home after one or two terms with the concept of the stiff upper lip already firmly lodged in their minds. Tears and teddy bears were laughed to scorn and bullying was endemic. ‘From the age of eight I slept with a knife under my pillow, ‘ said one good-looking scion of the aristocracy. Adolescent sexuality took the form of torrid love-affairs with other boys or, more sinisterly, the organized brutality of caning. Boys were at a further disadvantage in that many of them were not allowed to betray signs of affection at home, either, and were much more subject to discipline than girls. Boys from aristocratic families usually referred to their fathers by their title at all times, except to their face, when they might say ‘Papa’ or ‘Pater’. Boys in their teens could be ordered around by any passing uncle or cousin – ‘Go and change your shoes before your father sees you’ – and only the bravest or most devoted mother would demur.