The outbreak of war in 1939 was not greeted with the same universal rejoicing that had rolled jubilantly around the capitals of Europe in 1914. The memory of that last war was too recent. The public-school ethos fostered by the Victorians, which led the sons of the upper classes to dash impatiently into the fray, avid for death or glory, was modified. Patriotism was still there, but war was no longer seen as a rather more dangerous version of cricket. People knew that war could not be avoided and were prepared to fight ; but they knew it would be hard and serious. The fun and frivolity, the gaiety and extravagance were over. Britain was confronting the forces of Hitler: superior forces, led by evil men. The Bystander, of all papers, summed it up in a column called ‘The Passing Hour’, written by A. G.Macdonell in September 1939:
It seems, then, that there is nothing more to be said. Once again we stand where we stood in the Channel in 1588 when the Armada was approaching, where we stood at Blenheim, at Waterloo, and in 1914, face to face with the powers of darkness. So, good luck to all of us, for we shall certainly need all the good luck there is.
Chapter Ten
An Excellent Introduction for Life ?
Suspended between the 1890s and 1980s, the Season of 1939 was far closer in its conventions and the way of life it reflected to the former, yet the young girls who enjoyed or endured it have grown up and lived their lives in the twentieth century, not the nineteenth. Looking back across those fifty years, did the Season have a function: did it work for them ?
One deb said, ‘Society was so that everybody knew each other … but, as it was, the war meant that an awful lot of the people you met completely disappeared.’ Rhoda Walker-Heneage-Vivian hit the nail on the head when she summed it up thus: ‘Looking back on it now it seems like another world full of empty-headed people – but a happy, carefree world full of colour, beautiful clothes and perfume and, I am sure, an excellent introduction into life as it was in 1938.’ Others never stopped to think about it: ‘At eighteen you don’t ask yourself questions like what the Season is for. It appealed to me, personally, because I thought it established the fact that I was now grown-up!’ And another ex-deb said, ‘The majority of debs took part in the Season just for fun – and it was a wonderful way of getting to know a great number of other girls of one’s own age.’ It has proved to be successful in its function of introducing eligible young people to one another, even though the prospect for some was not appealing: ‘The men were awful. Deadly dull, no conversation at all, but a handful of debs had such a burning desire to get married that they accepted the first offer. I remember one girl stitching her trousseau and saying glumly, “All this, and John at the end of it!’”
Lady Mary Dunn was already married and a mother by 1939; but she was then and remains now a perceptive observer of the English upper classes. Does she think the Season had a purpose other than as an opportunity to meet a suitable spouse ?
The Season was overdone in the 1930s and possibly in the 1920s as well. The amount spent in one night would have kept a whole family out of poverty for a year; so I think it’s a good thing that the excesses of 1939 never came back. But, having said that, I think there was more to it than just the narrow wish to make sure that marriages were made among your own class. I can understand that parents wanted to see their daughters taken care of, and wanted them to live a life to which they’d been brought up.
But, in addition to that, these families were very aware of the beauty of their houses and their land: they were aesthetically aware of their heritage, and they felt a great sense of responsibility to see that it was maintained. The house might have been in the family for two or three hundred years; its titles and estates dated back generations. They saw the tenants very much as their responsibility, too; and so they’d like their son to marry someone who understood all this and would carry it on.
If that is accepted as the real purpose of the Season – to keep England’s heritage of ancient land and houses safely within the hands of those who would best understand how to run them – then that of 1939 was quite successful. Many of the noblest debs of that year did indeed marry into the nobility. Lady Elizabeth Scott, daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch, became the Duchess of Northumberland. On the other hand, her great friend, Lady Sarah Churchill, has been married three times but never to an English aristocrat and has now reverted to her maiden name. Lady Isabel Milles-Lade, sister of the fourth Earl Sondes, married the nineteenth Earl of Derby, but her sister, Lady Diana, is unmarried. The Hon. Anne Douglas-Scott-Montagu, daughter of the second Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, married Sir John Chichester, the eleventh Baronet and still lives a few miles from her ancestral home. Ursula Wyndham-Quin, granddaughter of the fifth Earl of Dunraven and Mount-Earl, married Lord Roderic Pratt, son of the fourth Marquess Camden, while her two equally beautiful sisters married the Marquess of Salisbury and the first Baron Egremont, thus becoming mistresses of Hatfield House and Petworth House respectively.
Returning to the sample of forty-five debutantes whose families were analysed in Chapter 4 one finds a high degree of continuity. All but three of those forty-five debutantes married. Eight of the titled girls (meaning those whose fathers had titles and a seat in the House of Lords) married titled husbands. Only one girl married into the aristocracy without having one or other parent titled, and she was exceptionally beautiful. There is in fact a high correlation between good looks and good marriages. All the girls who were frequently named as being among the great beauties of 1939 married ‘well’, as their mothers would have understood the word.
Perhaps the greatest surprise is the number of divorces found among the girls who came out in 1939. Twelve of the forty-five have been divorced, some of them three or four times. This is partly due to the number of hasty marriages contracted soon after the declaration of war and later regretted; while few of the marriages to foreign (usually American or Canadian) servicemen have lasted a lifetime. A divorce rate of over 25 per cent is certainly high, for it was not until the divorce laws were relaxed in 1969 that the number of divorces climbed dramatically. The forty-five women chosen to form this sample are not – it should be stressed – a properly random sample, and it may be that those who divorced are over-represented, and as untypical of their fellow debs as they would be of their whole generation.
Many of those marriages precipitated by the outbreak of war, however, have survived, although others were poignantly short. Sonia Denison married Edgar Heathcoat-Amory in 1940, having met him in the course of the Season, and by 1944 he was dead, leaving her at twenty-three with two young children. The transition, for her, was sudden and gruelling – from the artless fun of the Season into a war during which she worked as a VAD and brought up her two small children alone for the next few years.
Ann Schuster was another girl who married in a rush because of the pressures brought about by the war:
The house had been commandeered; my mother went off on a war job to the Isle of Man, to sort out the people who had been interned there; my father was working in the Ministry of Information ; my brother had been called up. The whole family was dispersed, and we had no home. Literally. I got engaged on 5 September, two days after war broke out. I can remember telling my mother, and she was so distracted, poor love, having to get out of the house and everything breaking up around her, and I think she said, ‘How nice, darling. I’m so glad it’s out.’ But it was a very secondary thing by then. Everything had overwhelmed her, really.
Ann’s husband was killed in the war:
I didn’t know where he was. I wasn’t ever allowed to know until after the war. The General, Colin Gubbins, had to come and tell me that it had happened a few weeks back, but he wasn’t allowed to tell me where. I was never allowed to write to Bunny (my husband) or him to me, because in SOE you didn’t even have your own name. And so the fact that suddenly something had finished … it’s rather like having a bad fall: you don’t feel it for a while. I was living with my mother at the time, in West Kensington somewhere, and she’d find
me writing letters. I used to write every week and send it to the Baker Street headquarters, and in fact I think some of them were parachuted in because one or two of them were found with his things. But I used to go on writing these letters because it hadn’t really sunk in. It was happening to everybody. You just went back to work – or whatever you were doing – and then I think the shock of it came later. A little bit like the hurricane of autumn 1987 – you suddenly realized that things could end. Disappear.
It was a considerable shock for a young woman whose world had been largely confined to her close-knit family and the dizzy pleasures of the Season ; and – despite a happy second marriage – it left her with a lifelong sense of the impermanence of things.
Death had a universal impact on the girls of 1939. There cannot be one who did not lose a friend – a partner – a brother – or a cousin. Christian Grant, one of the maddest and gayest and wittiest and most original of the 1939 debs, speaks in a very different voice when it comes to the young men who whirled and flirted through the Season with her:
It was of course our dancing partners who were killed: the subaltern generation, the second lieutenants, the flight lieutenants – they were the ones who really got wiped out. They went into the war in 1939 and they had six years of being shot at one way and another, and by jove, they just were killed. And I miss them awfully, even now, I really do. I quite often think back to all the ones I … It’s something that nobody who wasn’t eighteen when the war started ever really understands. And what’s more, a particular set of eighteen-year-olds, because the gang I was with were all the boys fresh from Eton who would go and join up the first day. Later in the war, when I worked in an aircraft factory – well, the solid workman is a splendid chap, but he did not volunteer. He waited till he was called up. And I didn’t find that the factory workers had nearly the same outlook on this whole question as our group. Ours was a dashing group of young men who had been brought up in a tradition of fighting for their country. And they were just all killed off.
It had been widely anticipated that, as soon as war broke out, a hail of bombs would fall on London and it would be the civilian population that was slaughtered. What happened was mercifully, eerily different. What happened was the phoney war, when for ten months nothing happened. Esmé Harms worth, the beautiful younger daughter of Viscount Rothermere, remembers the strange atmosphere of those months:
The period from the outbreak of war in September 1939 until Dunkirk in June 1940 was a time of quiet, a time when no one knew what to expect. Therefore people were inclined to continue life much as it had been before. Of course the young men were called up to join one of the armed services and to train for warfare. The young women were not called up so early: in my case, not until mid-1942. During this quiescent autumn of 1939 and the following winter some ex-debutantes went happily skiing in the Alps regardless. No bombing, of course, had taken place in England and the Germans had not commenced their great advance through France.
The strength of the German Luftwaffe had been exaggerated, which increased people’s terror of the destruction they were daily expecting. Defence experts had calculated that 100,000 tons of bombs would drop on London in fourteen days. In fact, the total dropped on London throughout the entire war was less than this.1 Liddell Hart wrote in 1939, ‘Nearly a quarter of a million casualties might be expected … in the first week of a new war.’2 This, a cautious estimate at the time, proved wildly exaggerated. In the event, there were 295,000 civilian casualties from air attack throughout the whole of the war, of whom 60,000 were killed. And while the deaths among the armed forces were high (though far lower, proportionately, than in the First World War) only one of the debs from the 1939 Season was killed as a direct result of the war. Her name was Iris Brooks, and she was in the ATS.
This was not because they were all safely at home. Quite the opposite is true. Almost without exception, as soon as war broke out the young girls did exactly what the young men were doing: they rushed to volunteer for war service. Here for instance, is what Rhoda Walker-Heneage-Vivian did:
Wartime was a very different kettle of fish. I enlisted with the FANY at the outbreak of war and after a course at Chepstow learning how to drive and maintain heavy vehicles I was sent to Saighton Camp, Chester, which held 500 infantry and 500 gunners. The only females were a Sister and four VADS, and two FANYS to drive the ambulance. My papa nearly died when he heard and I only wish I had kept the letter he wrote about the iniquities of Army Camps etc. etc. From then on I called the camp Satan Camp and settled down to having a whale of a time. Our ambulance was a converted furniture van with ‘Anytime, Anywhere’ written on the door, which made it difficult to be aloof – but I still remained ‘pure as the driven snow’: Papa’s influence, no doubt !
Sarah Norton had a fascinating, if secret war: she spent most of it working at Bletchley Park, the centre for code-breaking which monitored and deciphered secret German transmissions.
All the debs did something in the war, even before the call-up in May 1941. Lots went into the WVS but I remember I didn’t fancy the idea of having to wear a uniform much, even though many of them were designed by Norman Hartnell and looked very nice. Every day through the war you turned to the casualty lists in The Times and thought, oh God, who’s it going to be now?
The Hon. Sheila Digby (now the Hon. Mrs Moore) had been a shy and initially reluctant deb, but when the war began she threw herself into it with eager and sometimes excessive enthusiasm:
At the end of my Season, I said I wanted to get a job in London. I was told that my elder sister Pam, afterwards married to Randolph Churchill, was going to be in London and Mummy wouldn’t have two daughters in London. So I joined the ATS in August and was helping in the office in Dorchester. I got home one afternoon from the office and was out in a boat on the lake. The butler came to say I was wanted on the telephone, so thinking it was a beau, I ran like mad and out of breath picked up the phone to hear a voice say, ‘Digby, you have been called up. Report as soon as possible to the Barracks in Dorchester.’ That was three or four days before the war started.
I arrived to find that I was meant to feed about twenty Tommies in a gym that had been made over into a cookhouse mess, but no food. I was to go into town to get food. Having been used to four or five courses at home even if it was just the family, I went out and got a mass of food and the Tommies seemed delighted. No wonder! A few days later, I was called in and was asked what all the bills were! I then discovered that in the evenings they should just have had something like bread, cheese and tea.
Although Minterne, my home, was only ten miles from Dorchester, I wasn’t allowed to go home. I was billeted in an attic near the railway station. There was a window in the ceiling which they hadn’t been able to blackout, so I wasn’t allowed to turn on any lights! Luckily, I was only there ten days before going to Bovingdon Camp.
The sheltered privileged life I had known disappeared with a bang! But because of the strict discipline with which we had been brought up, I didn’t find it too difficult to adjust.
Lady Cathleen Eliot worked in a convalescent home, where she had to cook for eighty people. ‘It was very good experience,’ she says drily. It was near Sir Archibald Mclndoe’s East Grinstead Hospital where, in a pioneering unit, he rebuilt the faces of young airmen whose features had melted when their planes crashed or caught fire. His techniques of skin grafting enabled many people to resume normal lives who otherwise would have had to withdraw behind masks and closed curtains. Part of the job of rehabilitating these young men lay in teaching them to confront ordinary people – for although the techniques of plastic surgery were making huge advances, they were very far from perfect. Lady Cathleen used to take these young convalescents with their still-raw faces to the theatre, or to the West End for dinner and dancing. It must have been an ordeal for her, too.
Barbara McNeill, the deb whose dance at Dutton Homestall was one of the very last of the Season, also worked at East Grinstead, nursing in
the uniform of the Red Cross. It was while she was there that – by the lottery of billeting – she re-encountered Michael Astor, with whom she had danced and chatted casually during the Season. With the urgency that often characterized such wartime relationships, they married just two months later. Theirs was one of the marriages that was not to last.
One of the hardest things to comprehend about these years is how much fun people still managed to have. It was perfectly possible to have a job that was dirty or nasty – like factory work – or harrowing, like nursing, or physically gruelling, like being a Landgirl; and yet at the end of the day to change into what were called ‘gladrags’ and revert to a world of glamour and gaiety. The girls – most of whom were still, after all, under twenty – would drink and dance half the night away before returning at dawn to go back on duty. Anne Douglas-Scott-Montagu – hard at work with the Red Cross – played hard too:
We had a good deal of fun in the war. It’s no good pretending we didn’t. People would come back on leave and they’d ring up frightfully late in the evening, you might be going to bed, and they’d say, ‘I’ve just got back – come out with me.’ And you’d get dressed again. Get out of bed, put all your make-up on, and off you’d go. Dinner at the Berkeley was one of the places, or sometimes dinner at the 400, dancing through till the early hours of the morning.
And of course eating out was very cheap during the war. Five shillings was the maximum you could pay, and they never allowed a table charge. You were allowed to pay for a roll and butter, I think, extra to the five shillings, and coffee ; but otherwise five shillings was the maximum you could spend in a restaurant on any sort of meal. Amazing what they produced for that, too. This went on all through the war, all through the bombing. Oh yes, you got up in the morning; but I didn’t have to be in my Red Cross office in Wilton Crescent till half-past nine unless there was some sort of an emergency, and half-past nine is not so early. So I used to go off on my bicycle to work, having been dancing till perhaps four in the morning. It’s amazing what you can do when you’re only eighteen !
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