It is said that President Roosevelt appointed Joe Kennedy because he did not want an Anglophile ambassador, but one who would be disinterested in his reports on the European situation. Anglophilia was certainly not Kennedy’s problem. In spite of that, he was determined to secure for himself and his children the kind of social acceptance that had eluded them in Boston, where ‘the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God’. Be that as it may, they did not speak to the upstart Roman Catholic Kennedys, nor did they let Joe join their clubs, and the snub rankled bitterly.
Reinforced by the palatial setting of the American Embassy and its neighbouring residence in Prince’s Gate; buttressed by his personal wealth ; and helped most of all by three socially talented children, Kennedy achieved much of the success he had hoped for in London Society. Kathleen, his eldest daughter, acted as co-hostess for him with her mother. She was sent – as were so many debs – to Madame Vacani to learn how to do a proper Court curtsey for her presentation in 1938. (Madame Vacani’s immortal words to the fledgling debs were: ‘Throw out your little chests and burst your little dresses !’) Curtseying was the only skill Kathleen needed to learn. Her American confidence, her vigour and energy and her propensity to tease made her instantly popular.
Her father’s popularity posed much more of a problem. He was coarse, brash, vulgar with money; he was an unashamed womanizer; and, above all, he seemed far too impressed by Hitler and the Germans and was, as a result, outspokenly in favour of appeasement – even at a time when the British government had abandoned the policy. If he could not stop the war, he would do everything in his power to stop American involvement in it. He was anti-Semitic. His political judgement was poor – as well it might be, since he had virtually no previous experience of politics. His judgement of people was little better, and he dismissed Winston Churchill as a drunkard. Perhaps most damning of all, he allowed his privately held, extreme right-wing views to dictate his conduct while he was the official representative of his country. A scathing paragraph in Claud Cockburn’s political magazine The Week informed its readers:
There are those in ‘high places’ in London [meaning those who supported Sir Oswald Mosley] who regard it as axiomatic that the war must not be conducted in such a manner as to lead to a total breakdown of the German regime and the emergence of some kind of ‘radical’ government in Germany. These circles are certainly in indirect touch with certain German military circles – and the intermediary is the American Embassy in London (after all, nobody can suspect Mr Kennedy of being unduly prejudiced against fascist regimes, and it is through Mr Kennedy that the German Government hopes to maintain ‘contacts’).19
By 1939 Ambassador Kennedy’s clandestine and self-serving behaviour was practically public knowledge. He was accused by the exiled Czech, Jan Masaryk, of having sold Czech securities so as to secure for himself a profit of £20,000. He was accused of having packed his family off to the safety of Ireland at the time of the Munich crisis, thereby setting a poor example and lowering morale. He was accused of being too sympathetic to Nazism. He made no secret of his belief that, when the time came, Hitler would march right over Poland and then it would be Britain’s turn next. Yet none of this seemed to have harmed his daughters.
One deb, impeccably bred but far from rich, commented, ‘It was hell to go to dinner with the Kennedys, as they were fearfully squashing to anyone who was not in their close-knit circle.’ Since July 1938, that circle had included Billy Hartington, heir to the Duke of Devonshire. The family owned 180,000 acres and several residences, among them Chatsworth in Derbyshire, Lismore Castle in Ireland, Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, Hardwick Hall and several London houses. Kathleen’s popularity compensated for the bad impression created by her eldest brother, Joe, whose abrasive manner and cruel humour were the obverse of Kathleen’s energy and teasing wit. Joe was known to have a violent temper, and – used to the greater licence permitted to young women in America – he could be sexually aggressive. His next brother, Jack, who was also still at college in America but made frequent visits to London, was better looking and more personable, and better able to keep his sexual aggression in check for the benefit of the gently reared English debs.
With such formidable siblings, Eunice’s debut cannot have been easy. Her father determined to launch her with a spectacular dance. Although announced in The Times as a ‘small dance’, this was merely a signal once again that the King and Queen would not be present – hardly surprising, since they had only the same day returned from their tour. The guests at the dinner-party beforehand included some of the leading lights of the Season, while the young men who partnered them offered a dazzling selection of suitable escorts and potential husbands to the Kennedy daughters. If not already titled – like Earl Haig and the Marquess of Hartington – they were likely to inherit a title in due course. The hostesses giving dinner-parties for other guests were brilliant figures in their generation, though the list is unusual in that two young, unmarried women also gave dinner-parties: the Hon. Deborah Mitford and Miss Jane Kenyon-Slaney (now Mrs Robin Compton). Eunice – or perhaps the choice was dictated by her parents – selected her intimates from the highest rung of society, and given that it was notoriously difficult to penetrate the upper ranks of the upper classes in one generation, let alone after a single Season, the Kennedys had done very well. It was not all due to Kathleen’s skill and charm. Sarah Norton, another friend of the whole family, speaks warmly of young Jack Kennedy:
He was much the nicest of them all … very personable and attractive, with beautiful manners and a nice sense of humour. Joe the eldest was anti-British even then, and as for his father … after the very first air-raid during the Battle of Britain, he took the whole family to a house in the country and then himself skedaddled back to the States as fast as he could !
Vivien Mosley was a member of the group of rather clever, rather independent, very upper-class girls who were Kathleen’s chosen set, and she became friendly with Eunice in the summer of 1939:
She was a terribly nice girl, actually, though shyer, much more reticient than Kick. Now Kick had established herself as a tremendous character, almost as soon as she arrived, but Eunice was a different kettle of fish. She was awfully sweet, though and pretty – very pretty. Rosemary was around quite a lot as well – she was the one who was sort of … slightly … I don’t know that one could say she was exactly … well, she was shy. Eunice was always very tactful about her. And Joe didn’t play very much part, because he was already heavily involved with his flying.
Eunice’s pictures from that year show a classic Kennedy face, brimming with health and energy. Wide sparkling eyes and white sparkling teeth, in conjunction with a slightly more gentle and serious manner than her glamorous elder sister, must have guaranteed her success with young men. She was intelligent, too, and her American talent for swift repartee made her conversation livelier and more unexpected than that of the sheltered English girls. But it was her naturalness that charmed most: even if it sometimes stemmed from ignorance. The Tatler for 12 July tells an anecdote from the Blenheim Ball, at which, the magazine said, ‘No seventeen-year-old looked half as alert as Lady Cunard, with the possible exception of the second Kennedy daughter, Eunice, a complete unselfconscious darling of a girl who rushed her partner up to the Duke of Marlborough with, “Let’s ask this man the time !’”
Eunice’s dance was on a Thursday. The two dances the following night – for Lorna Campbell and her cousin Helen Campbell ; and another for Priscilla Hale and her brother Michael – were both held in the country. Friday night was, for obvious reasons, a favourite for country dances. It provided the perfect excuse for a country weekend, with everyone congregating at house-parties given by local hostesses, who would each give a dinner for their house-guests and then arrive in a group for the evening’s dance. (By one of those curious coincidences which demonstrate the essential continuity of the English upper classes, the Hales’ dance was given in the house in Plumpton, Eas
t Sussex in which Rosalind Cubitt lives today.)
It was Midsummer Day next morning, Saturday, 24 June, but the brilliantly sunny days had ended. The weather broke on 17 June and was cool, pale, unsettled right through until the end of the month. This has not prevented the debs of 1939 from describing it over and over again as ‘a brilliant summer’, ‘wonderful weather for just weeks on end’. The same was said of the whole Edwardian period, although scrutiny of the records of the Meteorological Office shows that in both cases the weather was no better than average. In 1914, the last summer of peace was indeed brilliant: a heat-wave hung unnaturally over the country for weeks on end, and August was still and scorching. This memory seems to have been suspended, so that in retrospect it bathed the whole decade in its stifling, airless heat. Nineteen-thirty-nine was a typically cool English summer. Yet it seems as though, once again, the fact that the country was enjoying a heatwave when war broke out has preserved that weather in amber, exotically golden and heavy with the buzzing haze of heat and idleness, and that is what people remember.
The first Test Match began at Lords that Saturday, against the West Indies, and on the Monday, 26 June Wimbledon fortnight opened. It was a mediocre year for tennis lovers. R.L.Riggs took the men’s title, although his ‘robot rallies’ bored the crowd; and Alice Marble from the USA took the ladies’ title. A few debs went along to watch – those who were keen on tennis, or good at it, for Wimbledon was not a fashionable occasion – and had their photographs taken for the Bystander. Although journalists were much less intrusive fifty years ago, there was a lively interest in the goings-on of Society, and photographers attended all the main social events. Leading debs would find their picture in the Daily Express gossip column next morning; the difference being that its writer – Tom Driberg – was not likely to reveal any scandal until it had become common knowledge to everyone except the readers of the Daily Express. The Tatler would not then dream of doing what is common practice now – catching an unflattering or compromising photograph of a girl looking undignified or in the wrong company. The upper classes were avid for gossip, but believed that its circulation should be restricted to those of their own kind. The habit of discretion persists to this day. Research for this book revealed a few girls who had deviated from the code that demanded virginity until marriage; but this information – always concerning the same half-dozen names – was divulged in the strictest secrecy, and only in return for a promise that it would not find its way into print.
The tone of Society magazines of the thirties is one of brittle and snobbish frivolity rather than the veiled spite which often characterizes them today. The following three captions are all drawn at random from a single page in the Bystander for August:
‘Beetle’ – Edith Lambert is the real name of this attractive young creature, the only child of Lord Cavan’s brother and heir-presumptive.
The Hon. Deborah Mitford, 19-year-old ex-deb, sat on a paddock seat with Lord Andrew Cavendish, who is the same age.
Two 1939 debs, Osla Benning and the Hon. Guinevere Brodrick, daughter of Lady Dunsford, had Ian Farquhar to talk to them between races.
The oddly stilted tone of these remarks is due to the fact that they are, in magazine jargon, justified left and right: which means that they had to form a perfect rectangle with no short lines. This involved the laborious counting of letters and re-arranging of words so as to ensure that the caption fitted exactly into its space. The captions provided an insider’s guide to who was with whom, and a snobs’ guide to family networks. The two main Society magazines of the time were the Tatler and the Bystander. The former was rather more cosmopolitan and contained gossip about Society members in New York, Paris and the French holiday resorts, as well as several pages in each issue covering theatre and cinema and the private lives of the stars. The Bystander was more old-fashioned, confining itself largely to the events of the Season. It, like The Times, was the notice-board of the upper classes, but with pictures. Every week it published pictures of debutantes, engaged couples, weddings, young mothers with babies, so that the provincial gentry could keep up with what was going on.
The debs, while pretending to find all this frightfully embarrassing, were not in truth averse to being photographed, as is proved by the many who carefully cut out and kept these pictures. They paid lip-service to the belief that it was infra dig to have one’s name in the papers, other than The Times’ Social Column, or listed under ‘hatches, matches and despatches’. The title ‘Deb of the Year’, insofar as it existed at all, was bestowed by popular newspapers in return – it was rumoured – for payment; thus none will admit to having been Deb of the Year in 1939. Some of the more pushy mothers were prepared to pay for publicity, and then the girl in question would find a posse of photographers waiting for her outside every dance and clustering around her at Ascot. This was thought ineffably vulgar by the others, but it sometimes worked. Margaret Whigham had been Deb of the Year in 1930 ; she and her mother discreetly orchestrated her flattering press coverage and it certainly did not handicap her marriage prospects. American mothers were particularly good at stage-managing this kind of attention for their daughters. South African mothers did it too, despite knowing that this was frowned upon by the English, ‘IDB,’ people would murmur, looking askance at a woman bowed down under the weight of her tiara. It meant ‘illicit diamond buying’ and was much disapproved. One former deb has never forgotten the behaviour of one of these wealthy South Africans:
There was a terribly vulgar woman in London before the war and she had three children. My mother was at a lunch-party one day, just a small one, and she was sitting next to this woman. Well, in her guileless sort of way she said, ‘I can’t think what to do, I’ve got so-and-so’s presentation in about a fortnight and I’ve got a tiara of course but it’s at Asprey’s and won’t be ready. I wonder how I can get one?’ All perfectly innocently meant. So this woman, Mrs, well I won’t mention her name, nudged my mother and she said, ‘Don’t you worry about that, Lady x, I’ll lend you one of mine.’ You know … one of her tiaras. Whereupon my mother got a sharp kick in the shins from the other side and this was Mrs x, an old friend, and she whispered, ‘Don’t you borrow one from that woman. I’ll lend you mine.’
Anyway this South African woman did very well, she succeeded in marrying all three children – she had two daughters and a son – into titled families.
The week beginning Monday, 26 June started with two dances and a charity ball. The Hon. Mrs Milles-Lade gave a dance for her daughters Diana and Isabel (now the Countess of Derby), which they shared with Sybil Jennings. Lady Diana – older by one year than her sister – remembers it with delight:
We were terribly lucky because we had Carroll Gibbons to play for us. That was considered a great privilege; but he was a friend of Sybil’s father, so he kindly came and played half the night for us, which was wonderful. First we had our dinner-party at Claridge’s, and then we all went and stood at the top of the staircase at the dance: the two mothers and we two sisters and Sybil, to greet our guests. Stanhope Gate was lovely – it was like your own house; smaller than a hotel and much more friendly. Goodyear – they were florists – did the flowers for us, pink and white carnations all round the rooms.
Everybody was so well behaved in those days and everybody looked so nice – they’re all so frightful nowadays, but still. … The men were beautifully groomed in their white ties and tails and with a red carnation. There was nothing sort of evil, one just enjoyed it. Everybody went swinging around in a very, very friendly sort of way. I had to dance with everybody and see that they were all right and there weren’t any girls standing miserably against the wall – and I had to look after Carroll Gibbons. That meant seeing that he had a drink. There was a picture in the Tatler of us receiving the guests, which I take out and look at now and again. It was all such fun.
The following night was Elizabeth Hambro’s dance, shared with Hersey Williamson and given at Lady Forres’ house at 41 Chelsea Square.
Elizabeth, now Lady Bonsor, says, ‘One young man climbed up the marquee in the garden, which I remember annoyed my father very much – but yes, of course, I enjoyed it all very much. It was fun while it lasted. We knew it wouldn’t last. Everybody was talking about the war: by now you couldn’t be unaware of it.’
Matters were coming to a head. Hitler’s harassment of Danzig was becoming ever more blatant, and he was beginning to intimate that he would not be satisfied with just Danzig any longer ; he wanted the whole of the Polish Corridor. Danzig was now effectively German – as were 90 per cent of its citizens. Its administration was controlled by the Danzig Nazi party and in all but name it was already part of the Reich. But President Moscicki of Poland – to whom name mattered, and who saw that Danzig would not satisfy Hitler – said in a speech on 29 June: ‘Any attempt to change the status quo in Danzig, either by a move within or from without, would be a cause of war.’ Winston Churchill, not at this stage a member of the Cabinet, had made a speech at the Carlton Club the day before in which he addressed himself, dramatically, directly to Hitler. Churchill must have known that war was, at best, a matter of months away. Chamberlain was burned out by the responsibilities and stress of the last year ; a man haggard with physical and mental exhaustion. He had been showing signs of strain for months, as even his supporters had to admit. The pressure for Churchill to be included in the Cabinet was coming to a head, but Chamberlain was inclined to compromise on the Danzig issue, while Churchill would not. So Churchill, unable to urge his views upon policy-makers in Britain, addressed them instead to Hitler:
Pause. … consider well before you take a plunge into the terrible unknown. Consider whether your life’s work – which may even now be famous in the eyes of history – in raising Germany from defeat and frustration to a point where all the world is waiting for her actions, consider whether all this may not be irretrievably cast away.20
1939 Page 19