1939

by Angela Lambert

  the very sad and embarrassing situation at 6 Stanhope Gate when the very elaborate and delicious supper was laid out in a room whose (uncurtained) bow window overlooked the street. One could see pathetic faces looking in, pressed against the glass at this scene of splendour and scrumptious food. I remember trying to sit far away so that I couldn’t be seen – it quite put me off my supper !

  The same thought occurred to Ruth Magnus, when she was a deb – a more thoughtful and imaginative one than most:

  In the streets of London it was a common sight to see a crowd of shabby passers-by watching richly dressed guests as they walked from their cars across a strip of red carpet into brilliantly lit houses where a dance was in progress. I used to wonder, with the fierce intensity of youth, what were the respective thoughts of the poor and the privileged, but the class system in those days was generally accepted as a law of nature, so probably the sight of the revellers aroused no more envy among the onlookers than some lush scene in a film.8

  Charity events were fun and also a convenient way for people to silence the occasional qualm of conscience. A typical example is the ‘Naughty Ninety Night’ held on 8 June – the same night as Vivien Mosley’s dance – in aid of the Royal Cambridge Home for Soldiers’ Widows. It was organized by Susan Hambro who had been a deb some seasons earlier. The tickets cost thirty shillings each (£1.50 – or about £30 at today’s values) and covered supper, champagne, cabaret (‘Miss Frances Day has very kindly consented to appear’) and a band from Carroll Gibbons. The meticulously kept accounts for the night have survived, providing fascinating evidence of the cost of organizing what was – by comparison with the big deb dances – a fairly modest evening’s entertainment for about 200 people.

  The most expensive items, accounting for £235 of the total cost, were catering, by Jacksons of Piccadilly, at £141 7s 3d; wine, from Grants, at £5710s; and the hire of Carroll Gibbons’ band for the night, at £3615s. For this sum, eight men played from 10.30 p.m. until 3.30 a.m. – five hours for what used to be called 35 guineas, or just under £1 an hour each. Other expenses were minimal: for the printing and postage of the invitations, just under £10; for tips to the butler and staff, £1 (not each – altogether). The list ends with two intriguing items: ‘Parrots, Hire of 2 … 10/-’ and ‘Whiskers & glue … 10/-’. The total cost of the evening was £25014s 6d and the money raised by ticket sales was £24910s. Fortunately, some guests made additional small donations and these amounted altogether to £12, enabling the Royal Cambridge Home for Soldiers’ Widows to benefit by the sum of £1017s 6d.

  On 13 June, Governors’ Speech Day took place at Harrow – a more low-key event than the Fourth of June, and in any case Harrow’s great triumph of the summer was yet to come. On brilliant afternoons and during the long, light evenings, Harrow was preparing for its great confrontation, but that day of glory was a full month away.

  The middle of June saw the apotheosis of the English Season, the four days of Ascot. Announcements in The Times the previous week had detailed the hosts and guests at forthcoming house parties arranged around the racing. Nobbscrook, Binfield Park, Queenshill and Little Paddocks all awaited their quota of racing enthusiasts and leaders of fashion. ‘Entertaining for the meeting’, it was reported, ‘promises to be on much the same scale as during the last few years.’

  With the exception of the floral decorations – always the last of the many preparations to be made at Ascot – everything is now ready for the opening. All the wood and ironwork at the stands has been repainted, and with the grass of the lawns and enclosures at its best everything looks fresh and inviting. The turf, too, is in splendid condition. Thanks to the system of watering installed a few years ago the dry spell of the past fortnight has not adversely affected it and the going should be perfect.

  The Cavalry Club, the Highland Brigade, Buck’s Club, and the Carlton, the Conservative, and the Naval and Military Clubs will, as usual, have their luncheon tents on the heath, and the Marlborough will again be in the paddock.9

  The Irish racing fraternity was on its way over ; only the King and Queen would be absent. Having visited the World’s Fair in New York and been greeted by a crowd of 600,000 in Washington, they had returned to Canada, whence they would begin the voyage home. The visit had been a success. Americans adore celebrities, and the welcome they gave the royal couple had been warm and timely. It was a good moment to renew the Anglo-American alliance.

  Royal Ascot provides the best four days of flat-racing in the year, as well as a chance to appraise the finest horses and the most elegant men and women. But it also offers something harder to define. It epitomizes what English society is all about – what it prides itself on, and what it does best. Against a glorious background of green and white, rails and stands and sky, racing silks and floating dresses, it shows society in its favourite setting, indulging in its favourite pastime. There is little to choose between the parade of the runners around the paddock and that of their owners and followers in the Royal Enclosure. Both are faultlessly turned out; both under scrutiny by experts. As Lady Sarah Churchill has already put it tartly, ‘The debs, too, were under starter’s orders: just like fillies at a race track, y’know, being wandered around for sale to the best bidder.’ What makes a winner on four legs or two is pedigree – looks, training, spirit and style. Horses prove, more reliably than the aristocracy, that breeding tells. Racehorses symbolize that alliance between money and breeding on which the success of the British upper classes has come to depend – which may be why the aristocracy are such keen racegoers. One deb’s delight of 1939 was quite specific about the connection:

  Racing and breeding thoroughbreds is a safe way of discussing and proving something that is a source of private satisfaction to them, though it would be immensely bad form to talk about it in relation to their own families. Certainly of my Eton and regimental contemporaries a number are passionately involved in the racing world. It reminds me of an expression which occurred frequently in my grandmother’s conversation. She was always referring to people’s pedigree. That was the term she always used – pedigree – though if I were to use it, it would be in connection with the bloodstock industry, but she connected it with family. For ‘pedigree’ read ‘good family’.

  The great owner-breeders of the twenties and thirties were Lord Astor, with the Cliveden Stud, and Lord Derby, with his Stanley House Stud. The latter produced the great Hyperion among many other classic winners. But racing was not merely an aristocratic preserve ; there were many other, more raffish, figures, like the (recently ennobled) Lord Glanely, the first self-made man to be elected to the Jockey Club ; the Joel brothers ; and, of course, the jockeys: small, starved, waspish men, the goblins of the pantomime. Racing appealed to its devotees for a number of quite different reasons. First, there was the skill of breeding. Next, the skill of the trainer in picking which races to enter his horses for, so as to give them the best chance of winning; and allied to this, the skills of the jockey in riding a race carefully judged according to the horse, the going and the course. Then, the excitement of betting. Finally, the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the spectacle.

  A Totalizator – or Tote – said to be the largest in the world had been installed at Ascot in the late 1920s, and made gambling easier and faster. It had 360 windows in operation, and was manned by over 500 people. In the four days of Ascot, it took well over half a million pounds. Debs who attended Ascot in a family party might have been allowed to ask someone to place a bet – it would depend how strict their fathers were – but most of them would have gone not to gamble, but for the exhibitionistic pleasure they gave, and derived, at the fashion parade. The Times printed its usual checklist of who wore what and with whom; but – although many of them pretended to despise photographers from Society magazines – it was much more fun to have one’s picture taken in full fig for the Tatler or Bystander, or perhaps for the gossip column of a newspaper. These show a procession of intimidatingly smart and grownup looking debs. It is h
ard to detect, behind their tailored suits or drifting dresses, chic hats and severe hairstyles, the nervous schoolgirls of just a few weeks earlier. The Season was doing its work. The geese were turning into swans.

  Mary Pollock was the type of girl who would derive most fun from Ascot, coming as she did from a family whose racing connections went back at least two generations.

  I enjoyed Ascot enormously because racing was in my family: my great-uncle had owned racehorses and another great-uncle had been a gentleman jockey and twice came second in the Derby; while yet another relation had a stud and trained horses.

  You had to apply for the Royal Enclosure a long way in advance, and it was much more exclusive then than it is now … you couldn’t have anyone divorced in the family.

  I had rather a wretched dress that year – it was rather low-cut, which made me feel self-conscious; and to make matters worse I was catching the sun and I could feel myself getting red.

  It all seems so long ago, and as though it were some other girl.

  Susan Meyrick was another keen race-goer, and she loved Ascot.

  We always stayed at Brown’s Hotel in London as my family lived in Hampshire, and from the hotel we went to Ascot by train from Waterloo. That was ghastly. My parents thought it was much easier – it avoided all the queuing for the car park and made a much quicker getaway afterwards – but I found it very embarrassing being all dressed up and in large hats on the station and then in the train.

  Once we got there we always went to Buck’s Club tent, where we got a very good lunch. The racing was marvellous and it always irritated me that people round the paddock were more interested in looking at each others’ clothes than at the horses.

  Ascot then was much less crowded and you could always get a place in the stand in front of the Royal Enclosure, or you could go up on the roof.

  We went on all four days in 1939, which meant you had that awful business of having to wear something different every day – especially on Gold Cup day, which was the big day.

  Some debs went to Ascot because they were genuinely interested in the racing, but others went simply because it made a change, after all those ballrooms, to meet in the open air. Christian Grant came into this category: ‘I knew nothing about racehorses and so, frankly, I just betted on the jockey with the prettiest colours. One wouldn’t dream of going to a bookie oneself: a young man put two bob on for one – and I didn’t even do that much, because I was far too careful of my pennies. It was primarily a social event – one of the occasions to see and be seen.’ The weather held for the first three days of Ascot, only to break on the Friday into a spectacular rainstorm. Next day The Times reported sulkily:

  Yesterday it was a case of furs, some no doubt borrowed at the last moment from the hostess with whom visitors might be staying, of overcoats, of few silk hats and many grey ones, and still more soft hats or bowlers. It was indeed a sad Ascot from the point of view of fashion, whether of men’s clothes or women’s. It is many years since so few new clothes have been seen.10

  Perhaps it had something to do with the absence of the royal couple, for (The Times again): ‘Ascot without the King and Queen is not Ascot at all: like being asked to dinner and being told on arrival that the host and hostess have gone elsewhere and would one make oneself at home and ask for what one wants ?’ There was no winner that year to match Brown Jack’s stunning succession of wins in the early years of the decade ; indeed, if anything, it was the French horses who came out best.

  Lord Abergavenny had ceased to take much part in the Season by 1939, having the previous year married Mary, one of the eight Harrison sisters who came out over a period of eighteen years spanning 1928 to 1946. By 1939, too, Lord Abergavenny was a serving soldier with the Life Guards. But he was, from 1972 until 1981, the Queen’s Representative at Ascot ; and he believes racing is classless in its appeal.

  All country people were used to breeding, owning, hunting and riding horses – they’d been around horses and dogs since they were in nappies – the only difference was that the upper classes were likely to have land on which they could breed horses, and this formed the original backbone of the bloodstock industry. Likewise, racing originated as matches – riding contests – between two aristocrats, who usually gambled on the outcome.

  Until 1948 Ascot had just the one four-day meeting a year. It now has twenty-six days. It has always been more exclusive than Epsom, because Epsom was common land, which meant anyone could go; whereas entry for Ascot has always been charged.

  What is special about racing in this country is the knowledgeable following it attracts. People have always taken a great interest in horses by name, and they know the breeding of each and why it is named that way.

  Remember that in 1939 only certain classes had the leisure to follow racing regularly. Similarly, at that time many fewer people had cars, and in the days when there weren’t always convenient train services – say, to Newmarket – people who hadn’t the means of transport had less opportunity to go racing. Now, everybody has leisure and many more people have cars. That’s why there’s been such a huge increase in the number of days’ racing in the year.

  At the same time as Ascot, the Cambridge May Week and Boat Club balls were in full swing, while the Guards had combined the two into a Boat Club Ascot ball at Maidenhead. (May Week, confusingly, was actually two weeks in June.) Sidney Sussex, Pembroke, Corpus Christi and King’s all had May balls in the same two days, and no sooner were they over than Oxford’s Commemoration Balls began on 19 June. These were balls held by each college in rotation over five years, and were not strictly part of the Season, since anyone who had connections with the college and could afford the two-guinea ticket could attend. Undergraduates would make up parties of a dozen to twenty, inviting their girlfriends, sisters, cousins for a long night’s celebration of the end of term and, perhaps, of Finals, in a setting whose antiquity and beauty could only be rivalled by the greatest country houses. The evening often began with a dinner-party in one of the private college dining-rooms, at which college servants would serve five or six courses cooked in the college kitchens and presented on college plate to be eaten with college silver and accompanied by wine from the traditionally fine college cellars. The main rooms and most of the grounds were thrown open for the night. Young men and their partners could wander across manicured lawns – the product of centuries of mowing and rolling and weeding, weeding and rolling and mowing – and admire the gardens, at the peak of their June beauty, all through the fragrant summer night. Or, yet again, they could dance – not just to one band, but usually to two or three. Around midnight, a huge buffet would be laid out, consisting of such culinary extravaganzas as whole roast swans and haunches of venison. At dawn, breakfast would be served, and the balls traditionally ended with exhausted young women reclining in punts, being slowly propelled along the Cam or the Isis by the drooping figures of young men held upright only by the punt pole. Gaudeamus igitur…

  On 14 June, the evening of Royal Hunt Cup day at Ascot, Harold Nicolson went to dine with Kenneth Clark. It was a gathering of men and minds with influence in a number of spheres and – inspired perhaps by the company – Winston Churchill, the guest of honour, made a defiant and uncannily prescient speech. Nicolson reported it apparently verbatim:

  Winston is horrified by Lippmann saying that the American Ambassador, Joe Kennedy, had informed him that war was inevitable and that we should be licked. Winston is stirred by this defeatism into a magnificent oration. He sits hunched there, waving his whisky-and-soda to mark his periods, stubbing his cigar with the other hand. ‘It may be true, it may well be true,’ he says, ‘that this country will at the outset of this coming and to my mind almost inevitable war be exposed to dire peril and fierce ordeals. It may be true that steel and fire will rain down upon us day and night scattering death and destruction far and wide. It may be true that our sea-communications will be imperilled and our food-supplies placed in jeopardy. Yet these trials and disasters, I
ask you to believe me, Mr Lippmann, will but serve to steel the resolution of the British people and to enhance our will for victory. No, the Ambassador should not have spoken so, Mr Lippmann ; he should not have said that dreadful word. Yet supposing (as I do not for one moment suppose) that Mr Kennedy were correct in his tragic utterance, then I for one would willingly lay down my life in combat, rather than, in fear of defeat, surrender to the menaces of these most sinister men. … Nor should I die happy in the great struggle which I see before me, were I not convinced that if we in this dear dear island succumb to the ferocity and might of our enemies, over there in your distant and immune continent the torch of liberty will burn untarnished and (I trust and hope) undismayed.11

  Back to the Season – since, as one man who danced as gaily as the rest put it, ‘If you knew the world was going to end tomorrow, and there was nothing you could do about it, wouldn’t you have fun while you still could ?’ On 16 June, the final – wet – day of Ascot, Mrs Humphrey Pollock gave a small dinner dance for her daughter Mary, at Grosvenor House. The word ‘small’ could mean anything from 300 or 400 guests, and in some cases was used mainly to indicate that the dance would not be attended by royalty. On this occasion, however, it really did mean small. Mary Pollock, Mrs D’Oyly, admits frankly that her parents were not well off, and her Season had to be managed as economically as possible. In this instance, ‘small’ meant a dinner dance for no more than forty people, mainly to pay back hospitality. Even so, they enjoyed a five-course dinner and quantities of champagne.

  I wore my Court dress, which was of embossed silver brocade and had been made for me free by the Royal School of Needlework because my father, who was a doctor, attended them for nothing, and this was a nice way of saying thank you. My sister, who was three years younger, was at school still, but we thought it would be a great shame if she were to miss it, so she was allowed out for the evening. She wore the dress that I’d worn for Queen Charlotte’s, but of course it had to be taken in, as she was only fifteen.