After this shrewd appeal to Hitler’s vanity and his hunger for the acclaim of generations to come, Churchill went on, speaking now to his audience:
Considering the German preparations, the tone of the government-controlled press and Party leaders, there can be no conclusion but that the worst could happen and happen quite soon. I must consider – I think we must all consider – July, August and September as months in which the tension in Europe will become most severe.21
Churchill had thrown down the gauntlet, even if Chamberlain would not. Those who prevaricated, claiming that Danzig and its 400,000 citizens were not sufficient justification for a war risking the lives of millions, were missing the point. The point was that Hitler would not take Danzig and then stop ; he would demand and threaten and take, and then find fresh demands, just as he had always done in the past. There had to be a geographical and political frontier at which he either stopped, or fought. Danzig – Poland – was that frontier.
That day, Chips Channon wrote in his diary: ‘The whole outlook is appalling, Hitler is a bandit; we are all mad; and Russia is winking slyly – and waiting.’22
It was now the end of June – and still the dances went on. The next, yet again at 6 Stanhope Gate, was for Rhona Wood and Eve Bannerman, whose mothers were great friends. Rhona – now Mrs Peyton-Jones – recalls the blissful, light-hearted extravagance of it all:
Our decor had as its centrepiece a fountain which shot water up high into the air. They’d decorated the place beautifully – it was all done by Searcy’s. My mother had said, ‘When you’ve had your dance, darling, then you can go out with a young man.’ Otherwise you were never allowed to be with a chap alone.
Mummy bought me a very, very expensive pink net dress. It was skin-tight down to the hips and then it flared out in layers of net. It had thin shoulder-straps with full-blown pink roses on them. I kept it till after the war and went on wearing it – because of clothing coupons, you know, you couldn’t buy anything. The dance was the most enormous fun. You knew everybody there by then, you’d seen the girls at all the same dos night after night, and the young men – though some of them were ghastly and you tried to avoid them.
And then afterwards – I think this is right; I’m sure it’s right and it was that same evening – because I was now ‘out’ I went off to a nightclub for the very first time. It was the 400 of course – naturally it was the 400! – the Embassy was much more down-market. The 400 was the nightclub ; everybody went there. René, who was the head waiter, got to know me, and he’d keep my same table for me every night. And Tim Clayton had the band and played the piano, and when he saw you he’d play your special tune. Yes, I remember what mine was, but I’m not going to say !
The Friday of that week was the last day of June, and the month culminated with one of the greatest and grandest dances of the Season. It was given by the Duchess of Sutherland for her niece, Elizabeth Leveson-Gower. Both her parents were dead; her father had died in the year she was born and her mother in 1931, when Elizabeth was ten. As the only child of Lord Alastair St Clair Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, Elizabeth would one day succeed to the earldom of Sutherland and the barony of Strathnaver in her own right. Thus, although paradoxically she was only a ‘Miss’ among a gaggle of Hons, she was in one sense the most titled of them all. Dunrobin Castle was the ancestral home of the dukes of Sutherland; Sutton Place, near Guildford, was their country house in England, and it was here that the coming-out ball was held on 30 June.
Elizabeth’s memories of the day of her dance are surprising:
The garden directly in front of the house looked a bit sparse, so we rushed out to Woolworth’s and bought a mass of artificial delphiniums and things and stuck them in among the real ones to make them look a bit better. If anyone noticed they were too polite to comment ! Topazia [her great friend, an Italian girl] and I spent two hours the day before, picking lime leaves off the branches of the trees, to leave buds for decoration. The house was relatively small and not ideal for a dance. We used one of the long galleries for dancing, up on the first floor, which had to be shored up with pillars to support the weight of all that activity. We disguised them by entwining them with leaves and flowers. Looking back, I think it was a mistake not to have hired professional florists. We tried to do it all ourselves, which took hours, and in the end didn’t look as good. Some of them were paper, too, and I overheard one guest saying to my aunt, ‘What wonderful flowers you always have, darlings, and how good they smell !’
I had a yellow dress with satin bows all over it and a high square neck. All my clothes were chosen for me, and it never occurred to me that I might have any say in the matter, though I didn’t like most of them. They were always pink or white or yellow, which were colours I hated and that I thought didn’t suit me.
We had fifty for dinner beforehand, and I sat between Jack Kennedy and George Townshend. The dance itself was quite hard work, in a way, because being my own dance, I had to dance with everyone who asked me. You couldn’t say no.
The gardens looked wonderful after all – everywhere was floodlit and the swimming pool was surrounded by fairy lights. In the end it got quite cold, and people started coming indoors. Breakfast was served from about four o’clock onwards, but the dance didn’t end till 5.30.
That evening is one of the half dozen of the Season that has stayed in everyone’s memory. The garden – whatever Elizabeth Leveson-Gower says – did look marvellous, and people remember strolling through its floodlit borders in the balmy, light evening of late June, conscious that it was an extraordinary moment.
When dances were given privately, in people’s own houses, the guests usually included a wide and cosmopolitan selection of the hostess’s friends, and not only debs of that Season. Lady Sarah Churchill remembers the dance at Sutton Place for two reasons. One is that the Duchess of Sutherland – Elizabeth’s aunt – looked ‘simply wonderful’. The other is more unexpected:
I also remember getting ticked off thoroughly because I danced with the Aga Khan’s son, Aly. Coming back in the car with Mummy I was told that I didn’t dance with those sort of people. But Daddy was saying, ‘Well, tell her why.’ You know the sort of thing – and laughing. I knew I wasn’t to dance with married men, but I didn’t know why I wasn’t to dance with Aly. And it turned out it wasn’t because he was a foreigner or his religion was different or anything like that. It was because he was an older man! There was a bit of a frown on for that.
On the same evening – that of the last day in June – Margaret Proby and Elizabeth Lowry-Corry had their dance, too. It was in London, at 96 Cheyne Walk, in a house that belonged to Rick Stewart-Jones. He was a wealthy young man who had used a legacy to preserve beautiful houses, and 96 Cheyne Walk was one of the loveliest of these. He had bought it from Bryan Guinness, and its large ballroom was a perfect and unusual private setting for a deb dance. It easily accommodated the 200 people invited that evening.
Elizabeth Lowry-Corry had spent some time in Dresden – a city where, she believes, many people disapproved of the Nazi regime and its treatment of Jews. She returned just before the Munich crisis, and was one of those who undoubtedly knew what was happening in Germany. Perhaps in part because of this, she could not throw herself wholeheartedly into the Season, though she admits to having enjoyed it. She and Margaret Proby were ‘country cousins’. They both came from country families, not especially grand and not especially rich. Neither of them was part of a debby ‘set’. They were practical young women: Elizabeth was combining the Season with a typing course at Queen’s, and spent every morning there, ‘dotty with sleep’.
She still has the dress she wore for this party, a fragile bell of white silk taffeta, embroidered all over with tiny forget-me-nots. It is a dress such as Marie-Antoinette might have worn in her fantasy as a shepherdess, with its wide neckline and ruched bodice over which a little corset of turqoise blue lattice-work was tied with narrow satin ribbons.
I had been looking forward to my dan
ce, and as it was towards the end of the Season one had become more confident. I knew that people would have to dance with me, which they did, thank God, though at other dances that was not always the case.
I remember we had a house-party in the country the following month and one of the guests – Edward Imbert-Terry, who was my father’s godson – wrote in his thank-you letter that he had joined his regiment. He was in the Coldstream Guards.
You knew by then, you couldn’t help knowing, that there was soon to be a war. You simply couldn’t imagine what it would be like. Not the slightest conception.
Margaret Proby, now Mrs Harrison-Cripps, was a most unusual deb. For one thing, she spent that summer living in Bethnal Green, in a house belonging to her aunt, who ran a settlement there. This, she says, was considered a joke by the other debs, few of whom ever moved beyond the charmed circle of Mayfair, Belgravia, Knightsbridge, Kensington and Chelsea. The East End was just a name to them, a symbol of poverty and working-class deprivation; they could hardly imagine how one of their number could actually live there.
Margaret Proby never took her Season too seriously. She did it because her mother thought she should ; but at the same time her parents took it for granted that in due course she would get a job. Her sister had been to university ; Margaret herself attended the Royal School of Music. All this gave her a sense of proportion that was quite lacking in most of her contemporaries. She was very different in one other respect; not just different, but unique. Her family not only knew what was happening in Germany, they actively did something about it.
I went to Germany with my mother in 1938 and I can still remember seeing a large mural, and people around us whispering, ‘That’s where the concentration camps are.’ We didn’t understand what they meant. One couldn’t imagine that anyone could be so perfectly awful. But we saw little boys from the Hitler Youth being drilled in the streets of Munich, and although people said Hitler had given them jobs, given them prosperity, given them hope – which he had – one always felt there were overtones….
My aunt was involved in getting children, Jewish children, out of Germany and we used to have young Jewish girls working for us as kitchen maids. They didn’t like it very much, but at least they were out. We also had a Jewish doctor living with us for some time, who – despite many years of hospital practice – was forced to redo her medical training here before she was considered qualified to work.
This aunt was tremendously courageous; she went into Germany several times to get Jewish people out. She used to smuggle their jewellery out as well – which was forbidden by the Germans, of course ; they’d let the people leave but they weren’t allowed to take anything of value with them – and on one occasion she was found by the border police with a whole lot of rings that she’d hidden. She claimed they were hers, so the police said, ‘Try them on and we’ll see if they fit’; so my aunt had to put them on her own fingers, having no idea if they would be the right size – but thank God, they were.
Margaret’s aunt, Miss Barbara Murray, is still alive and still, at ninety, perfectly clear-headed in her recollection.
It was Bishop Bell of Chichester – a most remarkable man – who started the whole thing in about 1937. He formed a committee of people who were concerned about what was happening to the Jews of Europe. He had been to Germany and seen for himself their ill-treatment so he made contact with sympathetic priests from the German Lutheran Church. I was a member of this committee, which used to meet in London to plan how Jewish people could be got out and found homes and sponsors here in England. We managed to get free places in schools, too, for some of the children.
Yes, I suppose it was quite an unusual thing to do: but most people in England didn’t know what was going on, or if they did, didn’t care. They didn’t care what happened to Jews. If it wasn’t ignorance it was indifference.
We mostly placed them in middle-class homes: with the clergy, or with teachers, and from there quite a number went over to America or Canada after the war. No, I can’t remember any upper-class families taking one of our children. I may be wrong; but I don’t remember a case.
In The Times for 1 July there are nine insertions commemorating young men killed on active service: rather fewer than might be expected, since it was the twenty-third anniversary of the first day of the Somme: a day which was marked by the deaths of 19,249 young Englishmen. It is not that parents forget the death of a son; but perhaps after twenty-three years the ritual of the In Memoriam column had come to seem pointless or even – with another war looming – tactless. It is interesting to note that, of those nine names, two are Jewish.
Chapter Seven
The Last Two Months of Peace: July
July started badly. It rained. For 3, 4 and 5 July, Evelyn Waugh’s diary recorded ‘Continuous rain’ and, on 6 July, ‘More rain.’1 This meant that the hundredth Henley Royal Regatta, which opened on 3 July, was a pretty miserable affair for all but the most dedicated rowing enthusiasts. One such was Tom Vickers, a young bachelor living in digs in Ebury Street and working at the Colonial Office. He attended many deb parties that summer – he was especially popular because he was a good dancer and delighted in waltzing. A great friend of Rosamund Neave and her family, he soon found other invitations coming in. His name began to crop up on other mothers’ lists, he enjoyed the dances, and found that the main disadvantage of the Season was the very large laundry bills incurred in washing and starching all those white shirts.
Rowing had been his passion, both at school and university, so Henley was a welcome break from a demanding London life:
I went to Henley in 1939 for two reasons. One is that the King’s College Boat Club were able to send a full eight to row at Henley that year, whereas the previous year [his final year at Cambridge] we could only send a four. The other reason was that my twin brother was still at Trinity, Oxford, and he was going to be rowing in the Trinity second eight. As far as I remember I went on my own, because I still regarded myself as more part of the rowing fraternity than the London Season. I wanted to be able to watch the rowing, to retire to the Angel – the pub just by Henley Bridge – with my King’s friends. I was more interested in doing that than in having girls and their mums tagging on. I think they would have been in the way.
Henley was then, and still is, dominated by the Stewards and Leander. It’s essentially a male event. The old boys like to come out if they’ve got an Oxford or a Cambridge Blue. Of course … you want to put on your Blue cap or you want to wear your Leander tie and your Leander socks – it’s not really a Society event. I mean, there are no top hats at Henley: the emphasis is quite different. So for Henley I would have worn my King’s first-boat blazer and a King’s tie and a King’s cap probably; I mean, I would have worn what was expected. You were only entitled to wear the blazer or the cap or the tie if you had actually got it. It showed you were a rowing man.
The tie of all ties during Henley week comes from membership of the Leander Club. To aspire to that, a man has to have rowed in a winning event at Henley, or rowed in a boat that went head of the river at Oxford or Cambridge. It is an honour granted to few, and those few celebrate it, wearing a particularly bright salmon pink, in Leander’s pretty Edwardian club house beside Henley Bridge. To this day, fifty years later, no women are allowed to row at Henley. It is, as Tom Vickers said, a very male event.
There were of course some debutantes there: what would Henley have been without its quota of girls in pretty frocks (rather damp and drooping frocks that year) even if they were sweetly ignorant about who was racing and who had won? Lady Elizabeth Scott was there with Lord Haig and Katharine Ormsby-Gore, photographed by the Tatler in an elegant group. Christian Grant was there, ‘mainly because my future husband, who was then a sort of boyfriend, had been in the eight at Eton and so was passionate about rowing’. The weather prevented any really good times – in both senses of the word – for the wind was too strong for the boats and the rain too heavy for the debs. Most people shelt
ered in one of the many club tents as soon as they decently could, and the ‘wet-bobs’ Ascot’ was a bit of a wash-out. A pity: for it was not only the centenary year, but very possibly the last Henley for some years.
Increasingly, as month succeeded tense month in the summer of 1939, leaving less hope that war could be averted, people took part in the Season with the unspoken fear that each event could be the last; or, at any rate, their last. The young men who rowed at Henley, or watched others row, were mostly training for war by July. Many of the girls had embarked on some sort of preparation, nursing with the Red Cross perhaps. For almost a year people had convinced themselves that Munich had worked; but as the Polish crisis deepened it became clear to anyone who was at all politically informed, and especially to those with access to Establishment sources, that this time there was to be no way out. The stratagems put forward to placate Hitler were increasingly dishonourable. In early July there was a flurry of correspondence in The Times from people claiming that it was not worth starting another world war over Danzig. Better to annex its 400,000 citizens for Germany (most of them were German anyway). But Lloyd George had predicted twenty years earlier that Danzig and the Polish Corridor would trigger the next war, and he was right. Whatever the justice of the territorial boundaries redrawn by the Versailles agreement, Poland was always the weakest link. The only thing Munich had achieved – perhaps the only thing it could ever have hoped to achieve – was a year’s breathing space, during which Britain could partly remedy the dangerous arms imbalance between herself and Germany.
Lord Hood describes the attitudes that resulted from this sense of fatalism:
One was hoping against hope that it could be avoided, as it was at the time of Munich, and I don’t think the young realized what mobilization and all that would mean. But there was nothing they could do about it – there was nothing I could have done about it – and so I went on with my work and my ordinary play. It was a matter for governments to try and negotiate, and for the armed forces to get as well prepared as possible. I don’t see anything unreasonable or wrong about the Season going on. In fact I think it would have been looked upon as panicking if it hadn’t. And so we went on living the way we normally did. It didn’t harm anybody.
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