Country House Society
Page 6
There were nights when the ‘43’ might almost have been mistaken for an overflow meeting from the House of Lords, with princes, dukes, earls, and countesses all moving in a light-hearted maze beneath the gay streamers and balloons. On other nights I have seen my dance-floor scintillating with foreign orders, with assorted faces of every hue … Sometimes the predominant note was struck by the stage, at other times by high finance.23
Interestingly, three of her own daughters eventually married into the aristocracy.
Unfortunately for Mrs Meyrick, her cavalier attitude towards the licensing laws led to the ‘43’ being raided for the first time in 1923 and she was fined £300 for serving drinks after hours.24 On this occasion she was allowed to pay in instalments, but that proved to be the precursor of many such Court appearances, despite the fact that she had apparently paid ‘protection’ money to at least one metropolitan police sergeant. Ultimately she had six spells in Holloway, prior to her death in 1933. During her absence the ‘43’ and the other night-clubs she owned were kept running by her family and friends. Barbara Cartland, who knew Mrs Meyrick, considered her an attractive personality who displayed ‘warmth and originality’.25 Her more rakish wealthy clients, meanwhile, clearly enjoyed the frisson of mixing with the prostitutes and ‘roughs’ who were also patrons.
But in the long run the police raids and attempts by the Home Office to clamp down on the clubs did have an effect in diminishing their numbers. During the half-year to June 1924, for example, there were estimated to be forty night-clubs in the Metropolitan area, of which six had been deregistered during that period and a further one had gone out of business. There had also been eight police prosecutions, all of them successful, and on eight occasions premises had been raided by the police, according to the Home Secretary.26
The West End theatres, too, were attracting large audiences at this time. ‘The stage was very much a part of our life’, wrote Barbara Cartland. ‘We went to every new show, we discussed it, criticised it and were absorbed it.’27 Contemporary diaries show that dinner, followed by a visit to the theatre and attendance at a ball provided an evening’s entertainment for many members of High Society during the London Season. Typical of such entries was that by Lord Winterton for 29 May 1919:
Dolly Rawson, the Edward Wyndhams, Miss Barbara Lutyens and young Spicer dined with me and we went to see a moderate play ‘Kissing Time’ … Then I drove Miss Lutyens on to the Dudleys Ball which was enormous fun. Most of one’s friends old and young and yet plenty of room to dance.28
The opera, too, had its ardent supporters, with Lady Cunard among its keenest advocates, inspired by her devotion to the leading conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham (as he had now become) and by her genuine enjoyment of music. Eddie Winterton paid tribute to her ‘civic patriotism’ in promoting the opera and to her ‘kindness of heart’, although, like other aristocrats, he had reservations about her general conduct. ‘She is a curious character. A bad wife and a worse mother with the worst attributes in some ways of the Nouveaux Riches, and causing almost a scandal by her display of riches.’29
For the male members of society there were their clubs, which offered dining facilities, conviviality, and opportunities for gambling as well, in some cases. According to Philip Ziegler, Duff Cooper’s ‘spiritual home was White’s, playing bridge for high stakes, drinking and talking until late into the night’. On Derby Day in 1921 he went to the club to get his hair cut and made a triumphant entry in his diary that the barber had given him a tip for the race. ‘I backed it £10 each way, a large bet for me, and it won at 6 to 1.’ It was surprising that he considered £10 a large bet to place on a horse when he was willing to lose hundreds of pounds at chemin de fer and other gambling games. ‘I must confess,’ he declared snobbishly to his wife, ‘that the only milieu I really like is the “smart set.” I hate the provincialism of the respectable as much as I hate the Bohemianism of the unrespectable.’30 Duff’s diary confirms, too, his clandestine meetings with various female friends who had temporarily attracted his roving eye. That applied both before and after his marriage to Lady Diana Manners in June 1919. Typical of many such confessions was that for 1 November 1919, less than six months after the wedding:
I arranged – secretly to lunch with Diana Capel … I had to lie terribly [to his wife]. We lunched at Sherry’s and it was very agreeable. Intrigue of this sort has a fatal fascination. I don’t care for her one thousandth part as much as I care for my own Diana, and when I got back to the latter and found her very low with a headache … but believing all my lies, I felt a monster of wickedness and cruelty.31
But these pangs of conscience did not prevent another secret assignation with Diana Capel four days later, or his many similar meetings with her and other women with whom he had sexual encounters of varying intensity. Lady Diana rarely displayed jealousy, however, realising that he was intensely sensual. Physically he could not content himself with having just one woman and even before his honeymoon was over; he was seeking extra-marital diversions. He himself recognised his weakness. ‘My infidelities are entirely of the flesh,’ he wrote on one occasion. ‘The long habit of promiscuity asserts itself. I feel guilty of no unfaithfulness, only of filthiness.’32 As for Lady Diana, her own sex drive was weak, and in some ways the large number of Duff’s conquests reassured her that although they satisfied his lust, she alone possessed his love and support.
Like many others in their circle in the early 1920s, they enjoyed an active social life. During the last three months of 1920, for instance, they spent just five evenings alone together at home. For the rest, they went to the theatre fourteen times, and the cinema eight; they had seven weekends away at the homes of friends, as well as paying several visits to Lady Diana’s home, Belvoir Castle. They spent four days in Paris, where life became still more hectic, and Duff passed, on average, eight to ten hours a week at White’s. When he was so engaged Diana spent time with her own friends. Yet, as Lady Diana’s biographer, Philip Ziegler, points out, they never grew apart: ‘on the contrary each was amused by and interested in the other’s private life and each prised the other’s company more and more highly.’33 Like other socialites they also resumed their pre-war foreign holidays, visiting the Riviera and spending their honeymoon in Italy.
Duff and Diana’s participation in Saturday to Monday house parties at the homes of friends was typical of many other members of their circle. These breaks offered opportunities not merely for gossip but for tennis, golf, punting, and dancing, or for quieter pleasures like fishing. There was usually a plentiful supply of alcohol and many opportunities for practical jokes. As The Bystander commented, once such tricks would have been the preserve of the young, but ‘since grandmothers have taken to wearing short frocks, and grandfathers may be seen in restaurants dancing between courses’, guests of the older generation were also joining in. As well as the usual apple pie beds, the ends of pyjama legs and sleeves would be sewn up with double thread and, more unpleasantly, treacle might be smeared on hair brushes. Barbara Cartland, who attended house parties at that time, remembered playing these tricks herself or being the victim of them, with pillows smothered with flour or a bunch of holly placed strategically at the foot of an apple-pie bed.34
Of course, not all house parties were so unconventional. In mid-June 1920 Duff and Diana Cooper went to Blenheim Palace, and Duff was much impressed not only with the grandeur of the Palace but with the fact that the Duke of Marlborough kept ‘high state’:
wears his Garter for dinner and has a host of powdered footmen. The dining room is beautiful and so is the bridge over the lake. There was a party of about 20 people. We had the most magnificent bedroom – the best in the house – I don’t know why.35
But as Barbara Cartland noted sadly, there were many families for whom house parties, to say nothing of stables and carriages, were no longer feasible. With the death or serious injury of a father or husband, incomes were much reduced. In these circumstances, a number of wives and daught
ers, like Lady Cynthia Asquith, had themselves to seek paid employment. Lady Diana Cooper, too, was keen to boost her finances and to that end was willing to accept gifts in cash and kind from wealthy friends and admirers, both before her marriage and after. Indeed the need became more pressing when, despite the bitter opposition of her parents, she married Duff Cooper. At that time he was a Foreign Office clerk with a limited income and expensive tastes, whom the Duchess of Rutland considered was a mere penniless drunkard with undesirable friends. On the eve of their marriage, however, a wealthy American admirer, George Moore, deposited £500 in Lady Diana’s bank account, and also guaranteed her overdraft at the bank. He even took a box at Covent Garden in her name.36
Rather more lucrative, however, were her forays into journalism, although, in reality, the articles appearing under her name were penned by Duff. On 20 December 1918, almost six months before their wedding, he and Diana dined with the press magnate, Lord Beaverbrook, who was a long-time admirer of Diana. In the course of conversation he mentioned the new Sunday newspaper, the Sunday Express, which he was about to launch. He then offered Diana £200 to contribute four articles to it. She accepted at once and ‘he then and there wrote her a cheque for the whole sum’, noted Duff, while ‘I racked my brain to find subjects for the four articles.’37 By February 1919 the four had grown to eight and the remuneration had increased to £400. In 1921, Diana even became editress of the English edition of a French magazine, Femina, with a salary of £750 per annum proposed. Unfortunately she had no idea how to edit a journal, took little interest in the project, and expected her husband to write most of the articles. Unsurprisingly, the venture collapsed in a few months. More successful were her contributions to the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, with Duff again doing most of the work. It was her beauty and her fame as a fashion icon that gave her this valuable entré into the world of journalism. For the same reason she was offered ‘as many dresses as she [liked] for nothing as an advertisement’ by the leading Paris fashion designer, Edward Molyneux, in March 1921. In June of that year Lady Diana also appeared in The Tatler modelling hats for Ascot on behalf of ‘Rose Bertin’.38 But most lucrative of all these early money-making activities was her entry into acting for the cinema. Although the two films she made in 1920–21 were mediocre at best, despite her friends loyally reassuring her that her own performances were creditable, Duff Cooper noted on 1 June 1921, that the producer, J. Stuart Blackton, had already paid her £1,000. More was promised, but Blackton was experiencing difficulties, his financial backers having let him down. In the years ahead, however, Lady Diana was to earn many thousands of pounds by appearing on stage. It was her money-making ability which not only helped to cover some of Duff’s gambling debts but enabled him to abandon his unrewarding Foreign Office career for that of a Member of Parliament. This led eventually to ministerial office and to his appointment as Ambassador to France.
Few other female members of High Society were able to achieve the earning capacity, or the fame, of Lady Diana Cooper. But for a number of young unmarried women there was a sense of anti-climax when they returned to civilian life after their wartime employment. It was a desire for an occupation that led Lady Marjorie Dalrymple, a relative of the Earl of Stair, to contact Lady Airlie in October 1920, asking her, as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary, how she, Lady Marjorie, could get an appointment in royal service. ‘I am somewhat ashamed of bothering you thus, please forgive me,’ she wrote. ‘I suppose my only excuse is that after much occupation during the war one wants to do something, and it is horrid being an idler.’ Unfortunately, however, when Lady Airlie broached the subject to Queen Mary, the queen dismissed it out of hand, declaring she did not think Lady Marjorie was ‘suitable’.39
But these social changes represented only one aspect of society coming to terms with the new post-1918 world order. Beneath the frantic pleasure seeking there were also continuing signs of stress. One aspect of this was a resort to drug-taking by some of the more reckless members of the social elite. Even Lady Diana Cooper resorted to morphia on occasion, to her husband’s concern, but perhaps his influence, plus her own will-power, prevented her becoming an addict. Others were less fortunate. There was a growing circulation of different drugs, including opium, heroin and cocaine. On 7 April 1920, The Bystander claimed it was in the ‘restaurant-haunting, night-club-dancing semi-underworld that the cocaine habit [had] its votaries. The pace is so fast that they can’t keep it up without the constant stimulant, and, with so many of them, men and women alike, there is the unending need for money or the fear of the police.’ The habit was to persist among some sectors of society throughout the 1920s and it formed the background of Noel Coward’s play, The Vortex, in 1925. In the case of young socialites like Brenda Dean Paul, it led to years of ill-health and despair as they sought, often in vain, to cure their addiction.40
Within society at large there was the continuing need to come to terms with the loss of sons, husbands, fathers and close friends in the war, and among many of the men who had survived there was often a latent sense of guilt. Significantly when Duff Cooper had his ‘bachelor’ dinner at the Savoy Hotel on 31 May 1919, two days before his wedding to Lady Diana, he confessed the next day to her and to Katharine Asquith how much he had ‘missed the dead at it … How easily would I have replaced the eleven living with eleven dead all of whom – or at least eight out of the eleven – I should have loved better.’ Even on their honeymoon in Florence, he and Diana talked about their dead friends until Diana was reduced to tears.41
The continuing popularity of spiritualist séances was another sign of the underlying sense of loss. It was claimed, indeed, that in the immediate post-war years, séances had become ‘almost as plentiful as dances, with the result that the cleverer mediums [were] booked as far ahead as seats at a popular revue.’ However, as The Bystander warned, in many cases trickery and deceit were resorted to in order to encourage grief-stricken wives and mothers that contact was being made with those whom they mourned. Some mediums employed as agents ‘women in Society’ who for a fee would, ‘by stories of wonderful manifestations’ and accounts of how ‘dear Lady So-and-so had a message from her boy’, boost attendance at the séances. They were often able to pass on information about the physical appearance or other characteristics of the deceased to assist the medium to defraud the bereaved. In such cases the victim of this deceit might return several times to the medium, unaware that a proportion of the guineas she was paying ‘so gladly and lavishly goes into the pocket of the friend who recommended the medium’.42
Other families derived comfort from visiting the graves of their dead sons and husbands in the war cemeteries. They included Ettie Desborough, who in May 1919, with her surviving son and elder daughter, Monica, spent a hectic few days in Paris, shopping and attending various social events. Then she and Monica enjoyed a brief break in the peace of the Fontainebleau forest before they visited Julian’s grave. Billy, of course, had no grave. ‘I dreaded coming back here in a way, as well as longed to,’ Ettie confessed to Mary Wemyss, a fellow mourner. ‘All the five years seemed to sweep before one.’43 As Richard Davenport-Hines notes, most of the ‘bereaved mothers thought tenderly of one another during their pilgrimages to war cemeteries.’ During that same May of 1919, for example, Lady Kenmare visited the grave of her son, Dermot. As she later told her friend, Lady Desborough, it was ‘all so beyond comprehension, the wide battlefields, so awful so terrible; the strange hush over all that devastation, the grim ruins, the piteous little crosses standing here and there in utter loneliness; one’s mind and soul seemed to break’.44
War memorials began to be erected throughout the country and included the unveiling of the Cenotaph in London by King George V on Armistice Day in November 1920. The Desboroughs commissioned their own memorial to their dead sons in the grounds of their Taplow home. In December 1920 they also attended a commemorative ceremony at their sons’ school. ‘A bronze frieze running along a wall of Founder’s Quad recorded the
name of 1,157 Etonians who had perished’, a figure representing around one in five of the 5,650 Etonians who had served in the First World War.45 That total took no account of those survivors who had been permanently maimed in body or mind.
The general sense of flux within society likewise probably contributed to the rising divorce rate during the post-war years. Although for women in particular, divorce still carried with it a certain stigma, including exclusion from Court and a refusal of admission to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, the social penalty was far less severe than had been the case before 1914. Hence by 26 January 1921, The Tatler was referring to the perfect ‘maze of divorces’ that that were taking place. Three months later The Bystander claimed that the ‘Lord Chancellor … had to lend a hand in the overwhelming work of the Divorce Courts, such a record crowd is there of petitions’. According to Barbara Cartland, by 1919–20 the number of divorce petitions had risen to 4,874 compared with an annual average of 965 in 1911 to 1913. She considered the war was largely responsible for this, not merely on account of the disruption to family life that long separation had inevitably entailed but because of the ‘emotional urgency of marrying a man who might be killed’ within a few weeks of the marriage. Then, when the bridegrooms returned at the war’s end, the couple found they had little in common. In one case a friend of Barbara Cartland had married a V.C. when he was still in the Army. But ‘he seemed so completely different out of uniform in a worn blue serge suit,’ she confessed to Barbara, that she had left him. She could hardly believe ‘it was the same man! … but he did look awful’.46