I think by then everyone must have realized that war was imminent; but if you were out on an agreeable party you didn’t think too much about it. There you were, you were having a good time, and that was enough for the evening.
Lord Haig reflects on the realities as they seemed at the time:
I couldn’t say now whether most of the girls knew much about the likelihood of war but certainly I think most of the young men were only too aware of it. We’d been let off at the time of Munich when we were already expecting to be called up and sent off so it was a year’s grace really. But the realities of it were only too clear and one knew what one was going to have to do. The difference was that one wasn’t expecting this highly mechanized sort of war. One was being brought up in the aftermath of the trench war, the static war, and really wasn’t expecting the Blitzkrieg. As for what was happening to the Jews in Germany, at the time, the short answer is that we just didn’t know. I believe there was an occasional touch of anti-Semitism among the upper classes – among certain people you saw signs of it – but I certainly don’t think that even they would have countenanced what was happening, if they’d known about it.
And so the last month of the last Season of peace carried on much as usual. Lady Kemsley gave a splendid dance for Ghislaine Dresselhuys, her daughter by a first marriage to an American. It was held at Chandos House, which was at that time the Kemsleys’ London house. It was a beautiful Adam house in Queen Anne Street, one of the few such houses in London then remaining in private hands. (Its history since then has been chequered. It changed hands several times after the war, was for some time the premises of the Royal Society of Medicine, and in 1988 was sold yet again.)
The dance was given royal status by the presence of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. It was attended by two other duchesses as well, besides a glittering array of all the most sought-after debs of the Season and all the most distinguished young men. The music was by Nat Gonella and his Georgians, a new dance band whose music was closer to jazz than the usual popular songs to which the debs danced night after night. Ghislaine was a poised, beautiful and therefore much envied deb, and at this late stage of the Season it was necessary to produce some fairly startling element to a dance if it were to stand out from the nightly procession of all the other dances. Even salmon and champagne and Tubby Clayton pall eventually; but Nat Gonella livened things up considerably, and the sophisticated young guests who thronged Chandos House that evening welcomed music they could swing to.
The hesitant girls, awkward in their new ball dresses, who had ventured into their first dances at the beginning of May were now poised, almost blasé. Going to nightclubs now became a daring and frequent pastime. The smartest and most fashionable of all the clubs was the 400. Situated in Leicester Square, it was the mecca for London’s chic night life and thus the mecca for debs. One of the men who escorted many of the 1939 debs recaptures the clandestine excitement all this entailed:
The great trick was when the chaperone was upstairs playing bridge – there was usually a separate room provided for them, where they had their own champagne and could play bridge or talk – the trick was to say to the pretty girl, let’s nip off to a night club, this dance is rather boring, don’t you think? And she would say, yes, actually. I’ve never been to a night club. So one would say, well, where would you like to go? Would you like to go to the Astor, the 400, the Orchid Room, the Milroy, and so on? And she would select the club. One would take her to the night club and have a few dances in close proximity in semi-darkness, and then return to the ball in time to deliver the girl to the waiting chaperone who felt she’d been doing her duty all along. This was considered very dashing and was quite innocent. There were, I suppose, a few cases where it was not innocent; but generally it was a question of having a dance, tightly entwined, and a few kisses in the taxi coming back.
But it was quite expensive. You had to be a member, and the annual subscription was between ten shillings and a pound a year. For a young man who may have had three or four pounds a week, that could be too much.
Several young men of that year confirm this. One who was already earning his own living as a junior civil servant, says ruefully, ‘I never had the money to go on to the 400 after a dance, although that was where a lot of my friends would congregate. They would go from one dance to another and end up at the 400 – but that was going to be a pretty expensive evening by the time you were finished. Drinks and taxis and everything.’
Ronnie Kershaw was a favourite escort in 1939 and one of his great attractions must have been his passion for the 400 Club.
The 400 was something on its own. It was the best place – I think it was the greatest place ever. There will never be another one. Mr Rossi was the head waiter. He always got you a table if he knew you. Then there was the fat man who played the piano: Tim Clayton. The atmosphere there was absolutely incredible. I went there an awful lot, with various people. It didn’t cost a great deal. If you were in the Army you seemed to be allowed to do things at a very cheap rate … it can’t have been more than a fiver at the most: maybe not as much.
You didn’t go there to meet other people, in fact a great many went there not to be seen! It was so dark, it was quite difficult to see where anyone was. The atmosphere of that place was something indescribable.
The girls were – or it suited them to be – sweetly unaware of the expense involved. Anne Douglas-Scott-Montagu, now Lady Chichester, adored the 400, although her trips there did not become frequent until during the war, when it was a favourite haunt for people on a brief leave in London. ‘We always went dancing at the 400, which was great. We’d sometimes have dinner there, and then dance through to the early hours of the morning. But I’ve no idea what they cost – I never paid, so I wouldn’t know. Poor young men: I suppose they had to pay, but I’ve no idea what they cost. I don’t remember even thinking about it.’
The Earl of Cromer, then Rowley Errington, also relished the night life that London’s clubs and restaurants offered, at prices which, in retrospect, seem startlingly low.
The form very much was that if you were going to a dance later on you might take a girl to the theatre first, or dinner or something – it was all very cheap. None of us had much money. Well … a few did, but the majority didn’t. You could take a girl out to dinner and the theatre then a nightclub for well under a fiver, even in the money of those days. But even so, you didn’t do it too often because, obviously, you didn’t have the cash. And of course it was absolutely out of the question that the girls should ever pay. But the restaurateurs, they all knew the structure and they encouraged the young people to go in the hope that later on, if they’d got the money, they’d come there to spend it. It was purely commercial, but they were nice about it, too.
His favourite place was the Café de Paris:
It was downstairs in the basement of a building in New Coventry Street. The floor wasn’t very big – only about 30 feet square: almost a club within a club, except that you didn’t have to belong to it. It was run by a man called Pilsner, who welcomed the young. Then the favourite place after that was the 400, which had a sort of reputation all of its own – I mean a nice, happy reputation. Then there was Ciro’s, which had a dance floor made of glass, with lights shining through: that was in Orange Street. Then there was another one called the Florida, just off Berkeley Square, which had a revolving floor – quite a novelty in those days. I don’t remember any really sordid ones – I mean with telephones between the tables, where you could pick up a girl. You read about that sort of thing happening in Paris or New York but not in London, no. You went there with your girl. No pick-ups.
Yet here is quite a different point of view from Lord Hood, also a popular young man that year, though far too preoccupied with work to qualify as a ‘debs’ delight’. He had started doing the round of deb dances in 1932, so by 1939 the Season had to offer either a very splendid ball or a dance given by very close friends for him to find it amusing.
It was certainly considered ‘fast’ for a debutante to go to a nightclub, because the chaperone would not have been around. In any case, I couldn’t have afforded it. I was fairly impecunious and saw no reason to go. I went out and had a very good dinner and then I went on to the dance and after that I wanted to go home to bed, as I had to work the next day. So I don’t recall ever having gone to a nightclub. There were of course the rather grand, rich young men who could, and did it, and thought it amusing and, you know, rather audacious and smart and so forth – I didn’t; and there were a great many like me.
That was the men’s point of view. For most of the girls a visit to a nightclub was nothing short of rapture. It was daring, delicious, a chance to be alone with a favourite young man, and thus forbidden and flattering. There were still, of course, many debs who obeyed their mothers’ strict injunction not, ever, in any circumstances, no matter how attractive or safe, to venture into a nightclub. Mollie Acland says, ruefully, ‘Nightclubs were not merely fast: they were absolutely forbidden your first Season.’ So she did not go. Lady Cathleen Eliot (now Lady Cathleen Hudson) was also forbidden to go to nightclubs by her mother, but she went all the same – not least because her mother took an unconventional view of her duties as a chaperone, tending to consider them at an end when she had dropped her daughter off at the beginning of each week:
She was a pilot with her own aeroplane and deposited me in London (Northolt) on Monday and collected me on Saturday, leaving strict instructions that I was not to go to nightclubs. But most of the debs did in fact go to them – it was only considered slightly fast – and I went to the 400 a few times, since that was the smart place to go.
This was the practical view taken by another very aristocratic deb: ‘Yes, it was thought fast for a deb to go to a nightclub, but we went all the same. The most fashionable was the 400, though the Paradise, the Suivi and the Nuthouse were also popular, and the Florida.’ The mothers were obviously fighting a losing battle, though Mary Tyser (now Lady Aldenham) remembers her mother’s disapproval: ‘I remember her commenting on one or two girls who were known to have done so [i.e. gone to nightclubs] and unfortunately I never thought of evading my chaperone: I was far too gauche and childish, I suppose. Anyhow I never went to a nightclub in 1939.’ Lady Elizabeth Montagu Douglas Scott, now the Duchess of Northumberland, said:
Not many girls could go to nightclubs as they were too strictly chaperoned, but I have to admit that from about halfway through the summer I did slip away quite often, but would return before the end of the dance and was only caught twice! This was probably because my mother would leave a ball quite early and go off to a nightclub, so I would have to enquire at the entrance whether she was there or not! My favourite place was the 400, so we would go there first and find out from charming Mr Rossi – who knew everyone – and he would welcome one in or warn one if there was danger! Then we could go elsewhere – such as the Café de Paris or the Florida. The 400 was, definitely a part of life then and all through the war and into the fifties. It had a wonderful band with a lovely huge fat brilliant pianist and leader.
The five or six nightclubs mentioned were only those most frequented by the debs, but London had dozens, many of which thrived all through the war – the Nest (known as ‘London’s Harlem’ because of its black band and its jazz), the Blue Lagoon, the Midnight Room, Hatchett’s, the Hungaria, the Berkeley, Quaglino’s – all of them, say the habituées of those years, much more fun than anything London can offer today.
Why were the chaperones so adamant in forbidding nightclubs? A smooch in a dimly lit (but overcrowded) room, a cocktail or two, surely …? The answer is that nightclubs were, they believed, hot-houses for people who were having – or about to have – an affair. Deb dances were all romance and prettiness, luxury and display and invigilated courting. But nightclubs were dark and secret places, their gloom pierced only by arabesques of cigarette smoke and the stimulating or melancholy music of jazz and the blues. They were, in a word, for sex: that untried and uncontrollable quality that all debs yearned to know more about.
Although the Season – like Jane Austen’s novels – was based on sex, it was never mentioned. In the eyes of the mothers marriage came first. They all believed implicitly in the unwritten upper-class code, that only when marriage had produced a son and heir to safeguard the family property could a woman begin to think of making her own sexual choices. Married women were allowed a good deal of freedom in conducting affairs; and, indeed, the chaperones should not be thought of as stout, ageing ladies for whom sex was a thing of the past. Most of them were still comparatively young – certainly in their forties, or, in a few cases, their thirties – and several were themselves engaged in more or less public affairs with someone else’s husband. But that was different. They had married; established a household (or, just as likely, inherited one); and given birth to children who would ensure that the line continued. After that, if their marriages were less than happy, they were free to look elsewhere. But the debs were different, and their virginity had to be cherished. It was thought – by the mothers – to be the most valuable commodity they possessed. Few of the girls questioned this assumption and, if any did, there was also the fear of pregnancy to restrain them. ‘Every time you went to bed with a man you took your life in your hands,’ said one former deb, speaking more of her wartime escapades than her year as a deb.
Sex and nightclubs were both dangerous, forbidden territory, best left to the grown-ups, and in consequence oh, so desirable!
There were of course some girls mature enough to ignore or flout these conventions. In any group of several hundred marriageable young women – or even the hundred who represented the inner circle of debs – there are bound to be some who do not conform. They may have been highly sexed; they may have been natural rebels; they may have been seduced at some stage of childhood or adolescence; they may, best of all, have been in love. But the majority, the very great majority, observed the conventions. It is significant, perhaps, that one debutante’s first reaction to enquiries about the behaviour of her generation was to say that, certainly, the debutantes were all – as she was herself – entirely innocent and virginal. However, the enquiry made her wonder, after all these years, and she discussed it with her cousin:
She was a 1938 deb, and a very ‘go-ahead’ and well-informed person, in the adventurous set and very social. She told me I must have been very naive to have thought that, on the whole, the debs were an innocent lot. Apparently that was not at all the case, either in ’38 or ’39! It would seem I must have been a real country cousin to have thought it quite dashing to see the dawn in at the 400 Club and not in the boyfriend’s flat!
Ursula Wyndham, who was a few years older than the debs of 1939 but moved in the same family circles, said matter-of-factly, ‘There were always some who did and some who didn’t. But most didn’t.’ This is confirmed by the debs themselves. Lady Cathleen Eliot says: ‘Very few girls went “the whole hog”, as the expression was in 1939, but I knew of one or two who had to disappear for a few months. Having chaperones helped to keep one on the straight and narrow, but occasionally one could give them the slip. I was very seldom chaperoned but much too frightened to do anything too naughty.’
‘Naughty’ – how revealing that childish word is of the docile attitude of a good daughter. Vivien Mosley calls it ‘getting up to mischief, a slightly racier term.
Some of the girls did – though I can’t imagine how, with all those poor wretched chaperones sitting around – but they did manage to get up to mischief. One knew exactly who they were, and exactly what they were up to, and exactly where they were up to it. Nobody thought any the worse of them for it – not among their own contemporaries; there was no censoriousness about it all. In any age, whether it’s called permissive or puritanical, there are some who will and some who won’t.
Rhoda Walker-Heneage-Vivian puts it much more emphatically:
I really think we were pure as the driven snow – unless it i
s just that I was an innocent. I can recall no scandal or spicy gossip, but perhaps it just never came my way. I think our parents were still Victorian in manner – mine certainly were – and, although the maids got into trouble, it just never happened ‘above stairs’. There was a great deal of chaperoning at all the dinners and dances, and really no place to get away from watchful eyes; and the disgrace and shame which any hanky-panky would arouse was just not worth it. I imagine the debs’ delights were brought up to think of us as untouchables anyway.
I remember at the age of fifteen years getting a card out of a slot machine on Mumbles Pier at Swansea telling me ‘I was fond of the opposite sex’ and feeling hot with shame. The word ‘sex’ was what threw me – it was never even said in our household!
All that changed during the war, however, when protected young girls suddenly became self-reliant young women with important jobs to do. Then, she goes on, ‘Wartime was a different kettle of fish and I had a splendid one – falling in and out of love with regular precision, to the horror of my father, who eventually when my husband asked if he might marry me said, “She’ll never stick to you – I give it two years.” I wish he could see us after forty-seven years of joy.’
Even the most beautiful and worldly girls, though they may have been the most ardently pursued, were not necessarily caught. They found themselves in a double bind, which for young women who were more physically mature, or more independent-minded, would have been intolerable. The predicament was that their parents required them to be untouched; but they were worldly enough to know that the men preferred them to be sexy. Elizabeth Lowry-Corry summed it up:
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