The duke, a fastidious, sarcastic and autocratic man, considered an hour quite long enough for the consumption of this huge meal; and after that time had elapsed his duchess, having ‘collected eyes’, would dutifully rise to her feet to lead the ladies to the long library where an organist would be playing Bach or Wagner or a Viennese orchestra would strike up a waltz.
In some houses the meals served were even more elaborate than the dinners at Blenheim. Poached turbot and salmon mayonnaise would follow the hot and cold, clear and thick soups; two subsequent dishes – turkey and roast mutton, perhaps – would be accompanied by several entrées, such as cutlets, vol-au-vent, fillets of leveret or sautéd fillets of fowl. These would be succeeded by two roasts; and, as well as sorbet and game, there would be numerous entremets – lobster salad, maraschino jelly, truffles with champagne. Those with delicate appetites would merely pick at a selection of these dishes; but others might help themselves to all. The Prince of Wales was a celebrated, though not apparently uniquely exceptional, trencherman whose great appetite was not in the least affected by the huge cigars and the Egyptian cigarettes he smoked in such quantities. After drinking a glass of milk in bed, he would fortify himself for a morning’s shooting with platefuls of bacon and eggs, haddock and chicken, toast and butter, the kind of breakfast, in fact, served at Trollope’s Plumstead Episcopi where the household sat down to ‘dry toast and buttered toast, muffins and crumpets; hot bread and cold bread, home-made bread, baker’s bread, wheaten and oaten bread … eggs in napkins and crispy bits of bacon under silver covers … and little fishes … and devilled kidneys frizzling on a hot-water dish’. Soon after breakfast an hour or two in the fresh air would sharpen the prince’s appetite for hot turtle soup. Yet this would in no way impair his appetite for luncheon at half past two, just as a hearty luncheon would not prevent his appearing in the hall at Sandringham where, as his band played appropriate tunes, he would help himself to poached eggs, petits fours, preserved ginger, rolls, scones, hot cakes, cold cakes, sweet cakes and that particular species of Scotch shortcake of which he was especially fond.
The dinner which followed at half past eight consisted usually of at least twelve courses; and it was not unknown for him to take a liberal sample of every one. He had as evident a relish for rich as for simple food, and would tuck into Scotch broth, Irish stew and plum pudding with as much zest as into caviare, plovers’ eggs and ortolans. He was once noticed to frown upon a bowl of boiled ham and beans, but this, he hastened to explain, was not because he despised such fare but ‘because it should have been bacon’. He would enjoy several dozen oysters in a matter of minutes, setting the fashion for swallowing them between mouthfuls of bread and butter; and then would go on to more solid fare, to sole poached in Chablis and garnished with oysters and prawns, or to chicken and turkey in aspic, quails and pigeon pie, grouse and partridge; and the thicker the dressing, the richer the stuffing, the creamier the sauce, the more deeply did he seem to enjoy each mouthful. No dish was too rich for him. He liked his pheasant stuffed with truffles and smothered in oleaginous sauce; he delighted in quails packed with foie gras and served with oysters, truffles, mushrooms, prawns, tomatoes and croquettes. He never grew tired of boned snipe, filled with forcemeat as well as foie gras and covered with truffles and Madeira sauce. And, after eating all this food for dinner, he would advise his guests to have a good supper before going to bed, strongly recommending grilled oysters which were his own favourite refreshment at that time of night. On his bedside table was placed a cold chicken in case he became hungry during the night.3
His passion for food was shared by many if not most contemporaries of his class. At Marienbad a photograph was taken of him in earnest conversation with the Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. So serious did both men appear, the one striking his palm with a clenched fist in emphasis of some point to which the other was listening with close attention, that when the picture appeared in an illustrated paper it was captioned: ‘Is it peace or war?’ When shown the paper by his private secretary, Sir Henry asked if he would like to know what actually was being discussed. It transpired that the question under such intense examination was whether halibut was better baked or boiled.4
Splendid as the food was in the grand houses at which the prince was so demanding, though appreciative, a guest, it rarely arrived on the table hot; for the dining-room was often separated from the kitchen by long, draughty corridors down which servants endlessly tramped with trays and trolleys. The dining-room at Blenheim Palace was a good 300 yards from the kitchen, and in some houses the two rooms were separated by distances even greater than that. At one of these, the food was so cold that, when the champagne was served, the Earl of Beaconsfield was heard to exclaim sardonically: ‘Thank God for something warm at last.’5
The method of serving dinner varied from house to house. The old-fashioned preferred to retain the eighteenth-century practice of having several dishes on the table at once, the gentlemen helping themselves when the covers had been removed, offering to help their neighbours, and sending a servant to fetch anything they could not reach. In other houses service was à la russe, each course being served separately and handed round by servants in white gloves who either offered the dishes first to the ladies and then to the gentlemen or went straight round the table from one guest to the next.
The Duchess of Marlborough grew to ‘dread and hate’ the dinners at Blenheim, not only those dinners eaten alone with her husband – who sulkily pushed his plate away from him, backed his chair from the table and, crossing one leg over the other, endlessly twisted the ring on his little finger – but also those formal dinners which entailed a great deal of preliminary worry as, indeed, did the whole arrangement of a weekend house party. She resented the ‘amount of trouble’ these regular visits of twenty-five or thirty weekend guests always gave her. For, so she recalled,
my round of the thirty guest-rooms, accompanied by the housekeeper, was apt to reveal some overlooked contingency too late to be repaired; a talk with the chef more often disclosed an underling’s minor delinquency; orders to the butler invariably revealed a spiteful desire to undermine the chef – a desire that, if realised, I knew would jeopardise the culinary success of my party. Menus had to be approved and rooms allotted to the various guests. I had, moreover, spent hours placing my guests for the three ceremonial meals they would partake with us, for the rules of precedence were then strictly adhered to, not only in seating arrangements but also for the procession in to dinner. Since it was then considered ill-bred not to answer all letters oneself, I had no secretary. There was therefore a considerable amount of purely mechanical work to be done – dealing with correspondence, answering invitations, writing the dinner cards and other instructions which appear necessary to ensure the smooth progression of social amenities – which took up a great deal of my time … The seating arrangements caused endless trouble but were greatly facilitated when I discovered a Table of Precedence and against the name of every peer the number of his rank. I was glad to know my own number, for, after waiting at the door of the dining-room for older women to pass through, I one day received a furious push from an irate Marchioness who loudly claimed that it was just as vulgar to hang back as to leave before one’s turn.6
The duchess rarely enjoyed these weekends even when there were no unpleasantnesses with either guests or servants. She received her guests in the Italian garden where tea-tables had been laid, and after tea they would amble through the pleasure grounds until it was time to change for dinner. The duchess then showed the guests to their bedrooms, and ‘shuddered’ at the sight of washstands with pitchers and basins prominently displayed against a background of magnificent tapestries depicting the battles of the Great Duke, and of round bathtubs surrounded by hot and cold water jugs, soap and sponge bowls, towels and mats, all strangely incongruous beneath heroic forms of dying horses and dead soldiers.7
The guests were often as reluctant to go to these weekends as the duc
hess was to receive them. One of them, Arthur Balfour, described a big weekend party given for the Prince and Princess of Wales:
There is a big party here … To begin with (as our Toast lists have it) ‘the Prince of Wales and the rest of the Royal family –’ or if not quite that, at least a quorum, namely himself, his wife, two daughters and a son-in-law. There are two sets of George Curzons, the Londonderrys, Grenfells, Gosfords, H. Chaplin, etc., etc. We came down by special train – rather cross most of us – were received with illuminations, guards of honour, cheering and other follies, went through agonies about our luggage, but finally settled down placidly enough.
Today the men shot and the women dawdled. As I detest both occupations equally I stayed in my room till one o’clock and then went exploring joining everybody at luncheon. Then, [there was the] inevitable photograph … and here I am writing to you.8
To the Duchess of Marlborough, Sundays seemed particularly tedious, ‘interminably long for a hostess who had no games wherewith to entertain her guests. Golf and tennis had not yet become the vogue’, and would not, in any case, have been played on a Sunday. The guests trooped off to church at Woodstock for Matins and then to the palace chapel for Evensong. In between these two services, ‘promenades were the fashionable pastime, and the number of tête-à-tête walks she could crowd into an afternoon became the criterion of a woman’s social success’. The duchess had known ‘some unattractive women, who, unfortunately for their peace of mind, were as vain as they were self-conscious’, and preferred to spend the afternoon in their rooms pleading a headache than to acknowledge that they had not been invited to go for a walk.9
At country houses less respectable than Blenheim Palace, however, house-parties could be highly pleasurable. Lady Brooke, later Countess of Warwick, for instance, spent an immense amount of money on hers and took pains to ensure that all her guests enjoyed themselves to the full. One of her parties lasted a week, the guests being transported by a special train which ran from London and back every day, and actors being engaged to play the parts of chessmen in the gardens, arrayed in fantastic costumes.
According to Elinor Glyn, who lived nearby at Durrington House and often attended her neighbour’s house-parties at Easton Lodge, those with a taste for sexual intrigue and illicit liaisons found their hostess an ever-willing and resourceful collaborator, always careful to warn her guests that the stable yard bell rang at six o’clock in the morning, thus providing them with a reliable alarm in case they had to return to a previously unoccupied bed.
In the staircase hall [Mrs Glyn wrote], there was a tray, on which stood beautifully cleaned silver candlesticks … one of which you carried up to your room, even if you did not need it at all. It might be that in lighting it up for you, your admirer might whisper a suggestion of a rendezvous for the morning; if not, probably on your breakfast tray you would find a note from him, given by his valet to your maid, suggesting where and when you might chance to meet him for a walk … Supposing you had settled to meet the person who was amusing you in the saloon, say, at eleven, you went there casually at the agreed time, dressed to go out, and found your cavalier awaiting you. Sometimes Lady Brooke would be there too, but she always sensed whether this was an arranged meeting or an accidental one. If it was intended, she would say graciously that Stone Hall, her little Elizabethan pleasure house in the park, was a nice walk before lunch, and thus make it easy to start. Should some strangers who did not know the ropes happen to be there, too, and show signs of accompanying you on the walk, she would immediately engage them in conversation until you had got safely away.10
Once the intending lovers had come to an understanding, it would usually be agreed that something would be left outside the lady’s bedroom door to signify that she was alone and that the coast was clear; but a pile of sandwiches on a plate, formerly a favourite sign, had fallen into disfavour since the greedy German diplomat, Baron von Eekardstein, seeing some in a corridor at Chatsworth, had picked them up and eaten them all on the way to his room, much to the consternation of the countess who had placed them there.
Baron von Eekardstein had been asked to Chatsworth to meet Joseph Chamberlain to discuss Anglo-German relations; and house-parties often did serve as an excuse and as a meeting place for informal conferences of this kind. But most were organized purely for pleasure; and, in the opinion of the Hon. Sir Harold Nicolson, writing of those given in Edwardian times – which differed little from those given half a century earlier – they were ‘the most agreeable form of social intercourse that the world has ever known’.
Awakened by their valets with brass cans of hot water for shaving and with trays of tea, toast and biscuits, the gentlemen would arrive in the dining-room at about half past nine. ‘The smell of last night’s port had given place to the smell of this morning’s spirit of wine. Rows of little spirit lamps warmed rows of large silver dishes. ‘As well as hot food, there would be cold hams and tongues, galantine, pheasant and ptarmigan laid out on a separate table; on a third there would be porridge; on a fourth jugs of lemonade and water; on a fifth coffee and Indian and China tea, the China indicated by yellow ribbons, the Indian by red. At the centre table,
bright with Malmaisons and toast racks, no newspapers were, at this stage, allowed … A pleasant sense of confederacy and sin hung above the smell of the spirit lamps. For had they not all been brought up to attend family prayers? And had they not all eluded that obligation? It was true of course that the host and hostess had at nine proceeded to the family chapel and heard the butler reading a short collect for the day. But the guests had for their part evaded these Victorian obligations. The corporate evasion gave to the proceedings an atmosphere of dash. There was no insincerity in the bright gaiety with which they greeted each other, with which they discussed how he or she had slept. ‘A little kedgeree, Lady Maude?’ ‘Oh, thank you, Mr Stapleton.’ Evidently it was all going well.
After breakfast they would go to church, after luncheon for a drive in a large motor-car, after tea they would play bridge, after dinner they would return to the bridge tables, and after a supper of devilled chicken they would go to bed. In the morning their valets would pack their fruit salts and their shooting-sticks, and they would be driven to the railway station to go back to London. ‘Their carriages would meet them, horses champing bits at the arrival platform.’ In the train they would have picked up the Morning Post and read with satisfaction a list of their own names as members of the house-party. ‘They returned to Curzon Street feeling very pleased indeed. And next Saturday it would all begin again.’11
49 Dressing, Smoking and Social Rank
For ladies, one of the principal preoccupations of the house-party was the problem of clothes and the need to keep changing them. Breakfast in the dining-room demanded an elegant costume of velvet or silk, or perhaps, a riding habit; before luncheon these clothes were discarded for tweeds, suitable wear for joining the guns and watching a drive or two; at tea-time tweeds gave way to an elaborate tea-gown; and then it was time to change for dinner when the maids brought out satins or brocades which were worn with a great display of jewels. ‘All these changes necessitated tremendous outlay, since one was not supposed to wear the same gown twice.’1
Putting on these costumes was a lengthy business, for the flimsy, figure-revealing, often transparent, frocks of the Regency had long since given way to dresses of an increasingly cumbersome, figure-concealing fussiness. In the 1830s a footman in the employment of a rich widow confided to his diary how deeply the immodest clothes of his mistress’s young guests shocked his sense of propriety:
It’s quite disgusting to a modist eye to see the way the young ladies dress to attract the notice of the gentlemen. They are nearly naked to the waist, only just a little bit of dress hanging on the shoulder, the breasts are quite exposed except a little bit comeing up to hide the nipples. Plenty of false haire and teeth and paint. If a person wish to see the ways of the world, they must be a gentleman’s servant then they mite
see it to perfection.2
This footman died in 1892 and by then he would have had no cause for such complaint. The high-waisted and straight-hanging style of the early years of the nineteenth century had first given way to the much more elaborate style of the 1830s with the waists lowered and the skirts belled, then to the fashions of the 1840s with skirts, supported by masses of petticoats bunched at the waist which made the crinoline ‘a physical and mechanical necessity’. The crinoline had been in full swing in the 1850s and remained in fashion, disliked though it was, until the late 1860s. But this, in turn, had given place to the flounces, polonaises and bustles of the 1870s, and, eventually, a more manageable style developed with the greater freedom and activity of late Victorian life.3 Leg-of-mutton sleeves, however, outlasted the century as did those long, trailing skirts which had to be held up before their wearers could move about in them. So also did corsets which even young girls wore to compress their waists as near as possible to the required eighteen inches and which were frequently responsible for fainting fits and occasionally for permanent ill-health.
Some advanced women took to the bloomer – a short skirt with loose trousers gathered round the ankles – a form of dress recommended by the advocate of women’s rights, Amelia Jenks Bloomer; but most ladies considered this sort of apparel quite shockingly outré, though the bloomer both concealed and impeded female legs rather than revealed their charms. Knickers began to be worn in 1890, though in a very apologetic kind of way at first being long and wide and frilled at the edges so that if they were seen at all, they would look like the petticoats they were intended to replace. At the end of the century the customers of Harrods, the fashionable department store, were not being offered underclothes much more liberating than these. The store’s 1895 catalogue offered unappetising longcloth knickers with trimmed edgings and longcloth drawers at is 6d the pair, cambric combinations with ‘trimmed Torchon Lace Insertion’ at 3s 11½d, and nainsook camisoles at is 11½d.4 At this time a separate blouse might have been worn by a lady playing tennis, but even for this activity she still wore a long though not a trailing skirt, and she normally kept her corset on as well, even on the hottest summer days.
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