Country House Society

by Pamela Horn

  Others, too, shared that more sombre mood. Country Life on 23 November 1918 pointed to the general economic and social dislocation that was inevitable after four and a half years of war: ‘It will require the whole of the national energy to get things straight again.’

  Still more devastating for many was the epidemic of septic or Spanish influenza which had begun to manifest itself even before the war ended. On 23 November 1918, for example, the Oxford Times reported that at the small Oxfordshire village of Bladon, at the gates of Blenheim Palace, ‘nearly every family’ had been affected, and there had been ten deaths. ‘The Duke of Marlborough has kindly sent soup every day for the past three weeks to the invalids, besides other comforts to the worst cases.’

  Nor did members of High Society escape its ravages. On 12 November 1918, Duff Cooper reported that he was suffering from a mild attack, from which he recovered relatively quickly. His younger sister, Stephanie, was less fortunate. She developed pneumonia and on 9 December 1918, she died, at the age of thirty-three, leaving behind two small children: ‘her lungs were full of poison and … the case was hopeless’.115 Nancy Cunard, too, in 1919 caught influenza and quickly developed pneumonia. She lay in bed ‘weak and furious in her mother’s house … for most of January, February and March. When she eventually recovered she was physically and emotionally exhausted’, declared her biographer. Eventually she travelled to the south of France to recuperate. Overall, the epidemic was to kill about 100,000 people in the United Kingdom alone.116

  It was small wonder that after this miserable end to what had been one of the most testing periods in the nation’s history, the survivors looked forward to a revival of pre-war pleasure-seeking. ‘The war had ended picturesquely and memorably, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’, remembered Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, of her younger self. ‘Optimism was in the air. Although in the last four years the flower of the country had been killed and nearly every home mourned a son, a brother, a husband, a fiancé or a dear friend … the hostesses of London … tried to put the clock back to 1914. Wounded soldiers in their blue suits and red ties disappeared from the square gardens and hospital wards became ballrooms again. London was dancing mad.’117

  2

  Adjusting to Peace: 1919–1921

  Among the men who returned from the war there emerged a conspiracy of silence, a mutual and unspoken understanding that the horrors witnessed on the battlefield should appear to be forgotten. For landed society the happy world of the years before the war was transformed into one of cynical detachment … The realization that landed wealth and influence were no longer unassailable seemed to engender among the survivors a brittle, frenetic outlook. Daring and constant diversions were looked for by those who emerged from wartime England.

  Madeleine Beard, English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century (London, 1989), pp. 55–56.

  Coming to Terms with the Post-War World

  When the First World War ended with the Armistice of 1918 and still more following the formal signing of the Peace Treaty at Versailles on 28 June 1919, there was a desire among most sections of the population, and particularly among the social elite, to throw off the anxieties and the sorrows of the last five years and to return to a more carefree existence. For some, inevitably, that was difficult to achieve. Alec Hardinge, who became private secretary to King George V, not only emerged from the war with his health undermined but with his whole approach to life seriously affected, too, in that all his closest friends had been killed and there had also been a heavy toll among his relatives. According to his wife, through these experiences he developed an ‘intense loathing for “brass hats” and non-combatant generals’.1 Herbert Asquith (known as ‘Beb’ in the family), the former Prime Minister’s eldest surviving son, was equally unable to overcome the trauma of the battlefield and to resume his career as a barrister. It was his wife, Lady Cynthia, who was to become the chief breadwinner. Shortly before the end of the war she had been appointed the personal assistant and secretary of the playwright J. M. Barrie, and she not only continued in that role after 1918 but became a writer and journalist in her own right. Barrie proved a generous employer, assisting her financially with the education of her sons and when he died in 1937 she was the principal beneficiary from his will. ‘Beb’, meanwhile, sought to make a career as a poet and writer, and eventually secured an editorial post with the publishers Hutchinson.2 He sadly became a heavy drinker.

  ‘Beb’s’ next youngest brother, Arthur (or ‘Oc’), also suffered as a result of the war. He had to have the lower part of one of his legs amputated as a result of a war wound, and suffered other injuries. Although he resumed his business career in 1919, he was never fully fit again and died in 1939 at the early age of fifty-six.3

  In a different way, the long-serving Conservative MP Lord Winterton was affected, too. He was proud to have seen active service and that cut across his Party loyalties. It was said that he ‘showed more respect for the opponent who had borne arms than for any colleague who had chosen to lie abed on St Crispian’s day’.4 Hence his acid comment in March 1920 after he had been to a large ball attended by the king and queen, ‘which is the most disgraceful. To have no ribbons (like Jersey) who has shirked fighting in two wars, or to have 12 like Philip Sassoon without having earned them?’5 Sir Philip Sassoon, by serving as private secretary to Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig from 1915, had never experienced front-line combat. Although he, too, was a Conservative MP, in Winterton’s eyes, his military shortcomings more than outweighed this, although there may have been a latent anti-Semitism in his comments, too. On at least one occasion in his 1919 diary he referred to Sassoon as the ‘Yid Philip’.6

  Against this background, therefore, The Bystander struck an unusually sombre note when it warned its High Society readers against neglecting ‘our own poor men, thousands of them, still in hospital here – wrecks of the War, crippled, shell-shocked, and worse’.7 More broadly, there was also a recognition that the social world itself had changed, and was much more fluid than before 1914. ‘The men of the moment were the ex-officers,’ wrote a contemporary, Patrick Balfour, ‘and a large proportion of them men of a class which, before the war, had no place in the social world’. But now the ‘patriotic hysteria of victory allowed no place for social distinctions. No gentleman questioned for a moment the claim of any man with the title of major or captain to be accepted as an equal.’ In addition, there was the large-scale infiltration into society of the families of the war profiteers, who were estimated to number around 340,000, as well as by others who had prospered on the home front during the hostilities.8 To the disapproval of many members of the traditional upper class, they were able to ‘buy’ their way into the social elite by marriage, or by the purchase of a landed estate, or, as will be seen, by the more direct route of buying a title from a compliant post-war Lloyd George coalition government.

  Characteristic of the widely felt desire for a new, more light-hearted approach to life, however, was the enormous upsurge in the popularity of dancing. As The Bystander put it on 8 January 1919:

  not even before we thought of war, did we dance here in London as we dance … now. There is dancing in the mornings – for the newest jazzes and the latest rags must, of course, be learned some time – there is dancing all the afternoons, and there is dancing all the nights at nearly all the restaurants and halls … They say the shops have netted fortunes selling ten-guinea dance frocks ... And Prime Ministers hardly earn in a year what a black jazz band now rakes in in a season.

  Even the middle-aged were drawn into these post-war gaieties. Lady Desborough, then in her early fifties and still secretly mourning the loss of two sons, nonetheless was determined to remain in the vanguard of fashion. In March 1919 she gave a dance at which the guests ‘danced “jazz”’, in the case of some of them, for the first time. Older and more sober aristocrats, like Lord and Lady Lansdowne and Lady Minto, might deplore the new ‘jazz’ age and its influence on soc
ial relationships, but significantly the Lansdownes’ thirty-seven-year-old nephew, Lord Winterton, who had attended Ettie Desborough’s ball, took a different view. He had enjoyed it so much that after dining with the Lansdownes he went on to ‘a very amusing dance’, where he ‘jazzed’ with a new female friend.9

  Shortly afterwards Winterton began taking dancing lessons with a specialist teacher at the home of Lady Evelyn Guinness. Later he went for private tuition and found it ‘rather amusing’. Despite recurring memories of the battlefield deaths and mutilations he had witnessed, he rejoiced in the fact that he, as a former combatant, had been spared to go to a London ballroom again, to meet ‘one’s … friends … and to dance in a proper spirit of pure comradeship with real pretty girls in an atmosphere almost attuned to heroism by the many empty sleeves among the men’.10

  The determination to make a fresh start after 1918 was equally apparent among the hunting fraternity. According to The Field, by March 1919 many hunts had already relaunched themselves, to the satisfaction of those returned officers who had previously only been able to ‘snatch an occasional day’ with the hounds during their leave. They included some who had been invalided out of the Army; ‘Your enthusiastic hunting man does not allow such disabilities as a lost arm or injured leg to interfere with the sport if he can help it.’11

  Nonetheless it was the popularity of dancing that dominated the post-war social scene. As Loelia Ponsonby, later the Duchess of Westminster, recalled, ‘Supported by nothing but tea or coffee (a glass of sherry would have turned it into an orgy) we fox-trotted tirelessly till it was time to dash home and change into evening dress for a real dance … Dancing was more than a craze, it had become a sort of mystical religion.’ If by chance no formal thé dansant was available for Loelia and her friends, they would meet at the home of one of them ‘and as soon as tea was swallowed, [we] wound up the gramophone, put on a record and began practising new steps’.12

  Interestingly, too, there was a return of chaperones. During the war years these had been largely dispensed with for young women who were following independent careers as volunteer nurses, land workers, and motor drivers, or were engaged in other areas of war production. But with the coming of peace, there was a desire, at least among some of the older generation, for a return to this pre-war convention. The Bystander in April 1920 welcomed the trend, claiming that they prevented ‘boredom, and are responsible for the conveyance of their charges to their domiciles. Men … are beginning to feel that since women have the vote and claim a sex equality they shouldn’t put men to the expense of their taxi-fare, after the dances.’13 A month later The Tatler gave fulsome praise to the ‘marvellously well-chaperoned’ dance that Lady Falmouth had given for her ‘young daughter … who is eighteen this year. Quite along the old lines, … with goodly rows of dowagers complete with tiaras … very young men, with white kid gloves, and clumps of girls standing in the doorways … Marvellous band, marvellous floor, and … a marvellous supper.’ The Tatler even mentioned an advertisement by a ‘Lady of Title’ who was willing to chaperone a ‘Young Girl of Good Social Standing’, for a fee. The lady in question had a large house and would escort her charge to Mayfair dances in the afternoon or evening, as well as being prepared to let her own ‘Beautiful Ball-room’ to families wishing to arrange their own dances. As The Tatler commented drily, ‘Sign of the times, isn’t it? … Anything to turn an honest penny – or rather, now in the full flood tide of the dance craze – an honest pound or two.’ In earlier times such a venture would have ‘turned our grandmothers green with horror’.14 The families expected to take advantage of such an offer were the nouveau riche, anxious to assimilate themselves into aristocratic circles.

  The more spirited girls resented the restrictions, however, and sought to evade them, if necessary, like Lady Diana Manners, by subterfuge. Edwina Ashley, daughter of a Hampshire landed family and granddaughter of the immensely rich financier Sir Ernest Cassel, fell into this category, too. Although she recognised it was impossible to go to restaurants or private supper clubs in the evening unchaperoned, as her grandfather would be sure to hear of it, she ‘discovered small cafés for intimate lunches … Friends with motors were a godsend.’ Edwina learnt to be vague about her precise doings, letting it be assumed she was with a married cousin, whom Sir Ernest considered a suitable chaperone, while she kept that cousin in the dark as to her true intentions. This was unfair to the cousin, who felt ‘she should know where Edwina was, and with whom, in case there was an accident’.15 Even after her marriage in 1922 to Lord Louis Mountbatten, a relative of the royal family, Edwina continued to pursue an unconventional and independent lifestyle.

  Dining out became popular again among the social elite, despite complaints about the high prices being charged. In ironic mode The Bystander, on 8 January 1919, referred to the manager of a Piccadilly hotel who regretted that he had ‘only charged three guineas a head, sans wine, at his New Year’s party. For at five guineas apiece he discovered, all too late, he’d still have been turning ’em away! … Seems as though being a restauranteur in this peace year of 1919 is going to be an even fatter job than it was in the war years.’ Hotels like the Savoy, Claridge’s and the Ritz began to offer dinner and dancing to a clientele who were experiencing a post-war shortage of domestic servants or, with straitened finances, were anxious to limit expenditure on hospitality in a way that was more difficult when lavish provision at home was the alternative. At the Savoy the supper dances were accompanied by cabaret performances, themselves a new departure and one soon adopted elsewhere.16

  Night-clubs of varying respectability also proliferated at this time. Some, based around Bond Street and Piccadilly, attracted members of the social elite, among them the Prince of Wales. They included the exclusive Embassy, with a high subscription fee. Frances Donaldson remembered first visiting this with her father at the age of seventeen. She recalled the looking-glasses ranged along the walls above the sofas and tables so as to reflect the doings of the high-spirited clientele. The centre of the room served as a dance-floor, although late at night, when the restaurant was full, ‘tables placed uncomfortably close together would edge towards the centre of the room, until there was almost no space left in the centre’. At one end was a balcony, which acted as the bandstand. According to Frances, the dominant figure was Luigi, the manager, yet despite his sometimes brusque manner, club members and their friends came night after night, with the food ‘always crammed down between dances, drowned with gin-and-tonic, blown over by cigarette-smoke’.17

  The Prince of Wales attended regularly at the Embassy, often coming with his then mistress and close companion, the Hon. Mrs Freda Dudley Ward, and his younger brother, Prince George, later the Duke of Kent. Mrs Dudley Ward was the estranged wife of a Liberal MP. Petite, dark-eyed and well-dressed, she was the Prince of Wales’s principal confidante from 1918 until the early 1930s.18 In December 1920, she and the Prince of Wales were at a small party also attended by Alfred Duff Cooper. According to him, the prince ‘hardly left Freda’s side. They say he loves her terribly … He refused apparently to shake hands with Michael [Herbert] because he is jealous of him.’19

  One problem for the night-club revellers, however, was the survival of wartime licensing restrictions, under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA for short). Even when these were somewhat relaxed in 1921 under a new Licensing Act, the concessions were limited. In London, drinks could only be served with food after 11 p.m., so patrons ‘submitted willingly to ordering unwanted sandwiches with their drinks and to having their glasses removed at 12.30. In the provinces, the hours were even more restrictive. Furthermore clubs that flouted the law could be raided by the police and the owners fined or have their licences revoked. Those present could be arrested and subsequently fined for drinking after hours. Even the prestigious Kit-Kat Club, which claimed to have thirty peers among its members, was raided on the night following a visit by the Prince of Wales.20

  In these circumstances, not surp
risingly, less respectable night-clubs, often conducted in damp, overcrowded cellars in the back streets of Soho and Leicester Square, sprang up in considerable numbers. They were prepared to risk prosecution in order to boost their membership and their business by breaching the licensing laws. Some earned a reputation as places of ill repute by allowing prostitutes to make contact with potential customers there. In this shadowy world one particularly prominent promoter was Mrs Kate Meyrick, the deserted wife of a Brighton doctor. Initially she seems to have taken up night-club work to pay for her children’s education and she began by sharing in the running of a club in Leicester Square. Unfortunately its patrons were not confined to the ‘smart set’ but included prostitutes and gangsters. As a consequence on 28 January 1920, Mrs Meyrick and her partner were prosecuted, with the magistrate describing the club as ‘a sink of iniquity’. Its licence was withdrawn, and Mrs Meyrick was fined £25.21 Soon after she went into business again, setting up another club, which she subsequently sold, before establishing her famous club at 43 Gerrard Street, under the name of the ‘43’. Its visitor list included the distinguished and the well-to-do, as well as more dubious characters, such as boxers, jockeys, and the pedlars of sex and drugs. Among the latter were members of a Chinese dope-gang headed by ‘Brilliant’ Chang. He was a near neighbour of the ‘43’ and Mrs Meyrick claimed she had tried to stop Chang promoting his wares in her club or, indeed, in any other clubs with which she was associated. According to her, at first she did not serve alcohol at the ‘43’, but merely sandwiches and non-alcoholic drinks. Then breakfasts were added to the menu, and soon after that alcohol was introduced. It proved highly profitable. As she later admitted, champagne, which cost her an average of 12s 6d per bottle, was sold during licensed hours at from 22s 6d to 30s a bottle and after legal hours for 30s to £2. ‘For beer I paid 4½d per bottle and sold it for 8d during permitted hours and afterwards up to 1s 6d.’22 She prided herself, too, on the breadth of her clientele.