In this respect the Second World War was very like the First. Soldiers home on leave packed a frenzied whirl of West End night life into their brief respite from fighting. The 400 Club and the Embassy were as popular as they had been during the Season; only now the young crowd that thronged there had suddenly grown much older, more independent and worldly-wise. Inevitably, sexual standards were relaxed, and not just because chaperones disappeared as war arrived. People who knew they might never see each other again often saw little point in waiting for a wedding night that might never happen. The young women no longer felt themselves to be children, subject to their parents’ discipline and rules. The work they were doing – sometimes paid work – made them separate individuals, people in their own right, and as such they made their own decisions about whether or not to sleep with the men they loved.
A great meeting place in those days for a drink before dinner was the old Berkeley [says Christian Grant]. It’s now been pulled down and turned into offices, but it used to be opposite the Ritz, on the corner by a tube station that has also now disappeared but used to be called Down Street. One met in a sort of funny long passage, it wasn’t like a proper room but just a long bar where all the before-dinner drinks went on and everyone sat around talking and being jolly. Everyone used to head there at six o’clock and you could be certain of meeting friends there.
Knowing that it was sure to be full of people dizzy with cocktails and laughter and the latest gossip, it was here that Airey Neave – Rosamund’s brother – arrived after his sensational escape from Colditz. Christian Grant remembers:
Suddenly the door from the street burst open and in came Airey Neave. The only way I can describe it is to say that it was like in old pantomimes when the devil used to shoot up through a trap door from underneath the stage in a puff of smoke … well, he came in like that. None of us even knew he had escaped, and his arrival had the same sort of explosive quality. You can imagine: he’d just got back to England – and the whole room just erupted in amazement and joy that he’d just sort of walked in.
Ronnie Kershaw remembers the 400 Club as a haven from the war:
We went to the 400 rather a lot, right through to 1942/3. It did very well, the 400 – kept up the feel of the old place. And the girls, too: they managed to look glamorous, in spite of clothing coupons, right through the war.’ Lord Cromer too was struck by the sudden changes at that time:
In the first year of the war there were no parties as such, but people were looking for amusement and gaiety and so on, but in a different kind of way – by going to nightclubs or what have you. It was a very gay time. And it suddenly became much more sophisticated – particularly the girls, who were no longer sheltered children just out of the schoolroom. They were working with the war effort, in the wrns or in aircraft factories or whatever.
Working in an aircraft factory is precisely what Christian Grant was doing. Her family home in Scotland had been scheduled as an auxiliary hospital, but after six months during which she sat there and nothing happened, she got bored waiting for patients who never arrived:
So I thought, I must get where the action is, and so I came down to London and got a job in an aircraft factory, making heavy bombers. The factory was on a direct Underground line to Piccadilly, and so one left one’s factory bench, still in dungarees, and was instantly in the Ritz bar – well, in half an hour – so it was all very jolly. Until everybody started getting killed.
Marigold Charrington had done some Red Cross training before war began, so she went to nurse at Basingstoke Hospital, near her parents’ home.
We had a lot of the casualties from Dunkirk. They were brought straight there with terrific burns, so there I was at eighteen, really flung into it. We coped – how did we cope? – because we had to; and we’d been trained just to carry on. But in any case we were so busy, there wasn’t any time to think about how you felt. After all, it was much worse for the men. I remember hearing that my cousin, Christopher Jeffreys, had been killed at Dunkirk, and we were all overwhelmed. A neighbour said, ‘Marigold, you musn’t take things so hard: you must try not to mind so much.’ But you did. I don’t think you talked about it nearly as much as people do nowadays – in fact I don’t think I talked at all – but how could you not mind? I always minded.
No wonder that, as Madeleine Turnbull said, ‘You got a terrific sense of the insecurity of life. The Blitz did that too, because places you’d been dancing in would suddenly disappear.’
One of the most traumatic casualties of the Blitz was the Café de Paris, which was bombed on the night of 8 March 1941. It was crowded with people enjoying themselves, confident that no bomb could penetrate 80 feet underground. They were wrong. Just before ten o’clock, when the dance floor was packed and every table was taken, a 501b land-mine came through the ceiling and blew up right in front of the rostrum where Snakehips Johnson’s band was in full swing. Snakehips was killed, as were thirty-three other people, and over a hundred people were wounded. Helen Vlasto was nursing in Gosport at the time, but she heard news of the bombing:
There was much said at the time of ghoulish grovelling among the dead and wounded by opportunists looting jewellery and evening bags by candle-light. I can just remember thinking of all those ethereal, perfectly brought up and turned out young people cut down while enjoying a romantic evening out in all their finery. There were touching announcements in the Deaths column in The Times: ‘died in all her glory’ and the like.
People can adapt to anything, especially when they are young, and in the Blitz, they even managed to adapt to the threat of bombs: and to find ingenious ways to deal with their worst fears. Anne Douglas-Scott-Montagu had a horror of being disfigured by flying glass:
I was living in lodgings in somebody’s flat in Cadogan Square and I had a very long French window at the end of my bed. So for quite a long time I had an extra mattress on top of the bed, which I’d propped up on four enormous Monarch polish tins to raise it off the floor; and I put another mattress under the bed and slept on that quite happily for a very long time. I wasn’t, sort of, I don’t think I was frightened of bombs, but I was frightened of the glass.
It is a tribute to the courage of these young women (one cannot any longer call them girls) that they overcame a lifetime’s conditioning as creatures of leisure and luxury, for whom a day’s hunting was hard work and a night’s dancing was exhausting, and threw themselves with efficiency and zest into the real rigours of war work. As we have seen, Lady Cathleen Eliot – who could not boil an egg and would scarcely have known how to make toast without a kitchen maid to cut the bread and Nanny to hand her the toasting fork – cooked for eighty people. Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, whose uncle did not know how many rooms his house had – indeed, who hardly knew how many houses he lived in – worked as a paid laboratory technician (donating all her wages to the hospital at the end of the war). Their upbringings, which had cramped them in so many ways, forcing them into a mould in accordance with their parents’ expectations and the limited role which their class allocated to women, stood them in good stead in one respect. It gave them a clear-cut sense of duty. Armed with little more than this – no practical experience, few ordinary everyday skills, little knowledge of dealing with people outside their own kind – the former debs embarked upon war work with fervour and dedication – and delight.
It was a liberation [says one], it set me free. If it hadn’t been for the war I would never have had the chance to find out what I could do – or the satisfaction of doing it. It sounds wicked to say it, but the war was a godsend to me. I never really came alive during the Season, which was a disappointment because it was something I’d wanted to do ; but the war made me come alive, all right. Never looked back. I’ve worked all my life since then, been all over the world and met people, run my own business – I could never have done that without the war. We all lived our own lives terrifically after that.
It comes as the greatest surprise to learn that, despite this evidence tha
t the young women of 1940 were more capable of taking on responsibility than they had ever been credited with, nevertheless the dauntless mothers of the next batch of debutantes managed to organize a Season in the first year of the war. It was not like the last Season of peace – but then, nothing ever was – but it was a Season nevertheless. Perhaps the second greatest surprise is to find Mary Churchill, Churchill’s younger daughter, cropping up as one of the debs that year. In spite of the fact that her father was First Lord of the Admiralty, and she herself had been serving in the Red Cross and WVS and was about to join the ATS; in spite of all this, Mary Churchill curtseyed to the cake at Queen Charlotte’s Ball that year. Esmé Harmsworth (now Lady Cromer) remembers the occasion vividly:
Queen Charlotte’s Ball was held in the great room at Grosvenor House as was customary. The debs, all dressed in white, processed down the stairs to curtsey to Lady Hamond-Graeme (Lady Ham ‘n’ Eggs) and the cake, then dispersing to their separate dinner-tables to dine. Just after we were all seated, a sudden hush swept through the room. Mary Churchill rose to her feet and ran to greet her father with a hug ; at the same time everyone stood, clapped and cheered: for it was the very evening that Winston Churchill became Prime Minister.
The Season was truncated, of course – though not, apparently, as much as had been expected. Esmé Harms worth again:
Menus for dinners and dances were still no problem. Strawberries were plentiful as was champagne and smoked salmon ; cream was still obtainable. Restaurants still produced excellent food, if possibly with less to choose from. By 1941 there was a deterioration, much less on the menus, with ever increasing shortages as war continued. There were some charity dinner dances in London and a few small country dances as well, though nothing as large or as grand as in 1939. Nevertheless, we all wore our best ball dresses. The men, of course, looked far smarter in their ‘blues’ than they ever did in tails. ‘Blues’ was the evening dress for the Household Brigade. Others wore green, dark red or whatever, but they all looked splendid. There were also far more men available as partners, most being stationed in England and in training for the rigours to come, and therefore quite eager for a dance or any form of party or diversion.
After Dunkirk in June 1940, small parties continued. Dinners in private houses or restaurants would be followed by a visit to a nightclub or two … chiefly the 400 and then the Nuthouse.
The war, which had already begun to affect the freedom allowed to young women, even altered the conditions surrounding debutantes of seventeen or eighteen emerging for their first Season:
Chaperones had become completely outdated and, from the beginning of the war, were suddenly considered unnecessary. As time went on groups became smaller, a foursome, and then just a couple, as a girl would be escorted out alone by an admirer. But there was a new limitation. Petrol was in short supply, so any mileage outside London had to be carefully worked out. Rationing came a little later: five gallons for an eight-horse-power car per month. Later in the war there was none at all for the private motorist.
Even newly emerged, seventeen- or eighteen-year-old debs were not exempt from the desire, and in due course the necessity, to do war work: ‘For myself, I had two jobs that year. The first was working in the canteen at the Beaver Club (which was a club for Canadian soldiers) as a washer-up ; then subsequently as a filing clerk in the prisoner-of-war department at St James’s Palace. The latter was vastly preferable, for washing up endless mustard pots after dancing the night away was really no cure for a hangover.’ Like the debs of 1939, Esmé Harmsworth too is nostalgic for her youthful Season: though it must have been a strange, double life she lived, swinging between glamour and drudgery, party-going and danger, the soft lights of the dance floor and the searchlights in the skies:
We still wore long dresses on our evenings out, and sometimes just picked up our skirts and ran in our dancing shoes over broken glass to find a safer refuge like the underground ballroom at the Mayfair Hotel from the perils of the Mirabelle with its glass ceiling, while a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square and the scene was lit by searchlights. We were young and carefree and romance filled the air in spite of all the dangers. There was no seeking greater security in a squalid London tube shelter for us when the bombs fell.
But the war, when it was over, had put an end to the Season in its original form. The young women who grew up in the 1930s had tasted freedom and, while it might be tarter and stronger than champagne and strawberries, they had acquired it and could not forget it.
The post-war years of austerity and rationing changed Society, too. Once again, as had happened after the First World War, families found themselves impoverished by the deaths of their sons, the draining away of money in death duties and taxes, and the gradual decay of great houses whose upkeep many could no longer afford. Equally significant, the Labour governments further undermined the automatic link between ownership of ancestral property and the right to rule. The upper class still existed, but it was no longer a ruling class. This does not mean that its influence and patronage disappeared altogether: it had not then and it has not today. But the process, begun in the 1920s and 1930s in the aftermath of the First World War, whereby the middle class gradually infiltrated and then monopolized the formerly exclusive and controlling Establishment of the upper class, continued after the Second World War, too. This transfer of power from the landed classes to what became known as the new meritocracy meant that, in due course, the Season was little more than a fiction, a stylized aping of the past. When the monarch was no longer a source of patronage, requiring the ambitious to flock to Court to seek his favour, and the aristocracy no longer controlled other great offices, one of the main attractions to the annual gathering in London lost its magnetic pull.
Viewed from the perspective of half a century later, the last Season of peace seems remote and fantastical. Its few months could almost be likened to the jewel-encrusted minuets performed by the denizens of Versailles before the French Revolution. The debutantes of 1939 were the last to inherit a world whose extravagance and luxury were not questioned and needed no justification, a world in which the privilege they were born to was taken for granted.
Court presentations ended in 1958, Queen Charlotte’s Ball in 1976 (though plans are under way for it to be revived in 1989). One hundred and seventy-two girls ‘came out’ in 1988; but the words ‘debutante’ and ‘coming out’ no longer have any real meaning. These young women are not being launched into Society, for most of today’s eighteen-year-olds have been enjoying a catholic and unsupervised social life since their early teens. There is still a number of girls – a small number – brought up in the country who have gone to boarding school and whose social life has been neglected. Perhaps they are too timid, or their parents too strict, to enjoy the freedom of their contemporaries, and now they need to meet young men in some socially approved forum. One gossip columnist said recently that the Season was still ‘a very superior dating agency’; and the shy and unsophisticated will always need a bit of a shove into the adult world.
Society – and the word no longer refers exclusively to the upper classes – barely notices the so-called debutantes of the 1980s. No great occasion marks their launching, extravagant parties have become a rarity (there was only one in 1988), and they curtsey neither to the monarch nor even to a cake. Those who do decide to marry will choose their own partners and need pay no more attention to their parents’ views and ambitions on the matter than any other girl ; though a title still has certain attractions. Whereas the nuances of family and lineage have lost much of their significance, snobbery will always exist. Few except the titled themselves any longer know the difference between one degree of ladyship and another. A fourteenth marchioness and the wife of a loyal Tory back-bencher rewarded with a knighthood are today much of a muchness, if the latter’s accent passes scrutiny.
The obsessional curiosity and hero-worship that used to be focused upon the comings and goings of the aristocracy have all but vanished. Even
in the gossip columns they now rub shoulders with stars of show business and errant sportsmen or entrepreneurs. Their sexual peccadilloes receive widespread publicity, where once they were sheltered within the bastions of their own kind. Money and celebrity now command the adulation once accorded to rank. When did the public last queue to see a Society bride emerge resplendent from St Margaret’s, Westminster, or stand on chairs to catch a glimpse of some well-born beauty?
Instinctive deference to the upper classes has gone ; the ability to afford retinues of servants has all but vanished, along with the desire to serve. Many of those who do still keep staff employ Portuguese, Spanish or Filipino couples. If they have English servants, these tend to be aged – sometimes in their seventies or even eighties. Nannies are usually very young girls who expect luxurious perks like a ‘nursery car’, who may call their employers by their Christian names and who often eat with the family. Governesses are extinct.
In half a century the world that the debutantes of 1939 were brought up and brought out to expect has changed – yet their world has not changed beyond recognition. They have kept many links with their past, inherited both material and personal attributes from their parents. Most still live in beautiful houses lined with fine old furniture and family portraits. Beyond their walls stretch ordered English gardens edged with herbaceous borders and lawns of that particular lustre which takes decades, if not centuries, to achieve. Now in their late sixties, these women have known grief and experienced problems, but seldom poverty. Their manners remain formal, their courtesy is immaculate and kind, their voices are confident. They still support the Conservative Party, though some may have reservations about Mrs Thatcher’s version, and prefer that of Macmillan, or Home, or Butler. They read The Times or the Daily Telegraph, although a few are thinking of switching to the Independent. They sent their children to public schools and have helped, where necessary, to ensure that their grandchildren were educated privately, too. They have learned to cook and make beds – tasks that would have been unthinkable when they were young – but few have to do these jobs daily. Most keep at least one or two staff and the great families still keep great establishments.
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