Country House Society
Page 14
For the sons of these elite families, the educational path was a good deal clearer. Attendance at a public school, after a spell in a preparatory establishment, was the usual progression. Eton, Harrow and Winchester were the schools favoured by the wealthiest and most prestigious families, but a growing number of other public schools had by this time made their appearance. In all of them academic pursuits were seemingly regarded as secondary to sporting prowess, while bullying and fagging were among the ordeals the younger boys had to endure. Patrick Balfour, for one, claimed he learnt nothing at school except to be ‘rendered fit to black any man’s boots. (For in fagging I cleaned a dozen or so pairs per day.)’ According to him the atmosphere at Winchester, which he attended, was ‘primarily athletic’. Athleticism was ‘the primary’ instrument in the manufacture of character as the public schools conceive it.’30
At Lancing, too, the young Evelyn Waugh joined in a variety of sports, even though he had little interest in them. His main desire was to be successful, and that meant engaging in sport. Also present there, as in the other public schools, was a strong homosexual influence, despite the fact that such practices were still illegal. As Waugh’s biographer notes, although Lancing may have been more ‘overtly religious than some public schools’, that did not mean its moral standards were particularly high. ‘For most boys the years at public school were years of erotic and romantic passion and many of Evelyn’s contemporaries were engaged at one time or another in the pursuit of love, conducting amorous affairs with younger boys with or without physical expression.’ Evelyn himself was not averse to talking ‘filth’, as sex was called, in the changing rooms, but he seems to have kept aloof from physical encounters at this stage. In that respect he differed from Tom Driberg, a fellow pupil, who ‘went on the downs with older men, and on Sunday evenings organised competitive masturbation sessions in his dormitory’.31 Driberg was eventually asked to leave the school but both he and Waugh then went on to Oxford University.
Oxford in the 1920s has been described as a city of ‘sports cars and motor-bikes, jazz and gramophones’, and of smart young men in plus-fours – although those with strong ‘aesthetic’ tendencies wore polo-neck jumpers and Oxford bags (that is distinctive wide-legged trousers). Then there were the ‘young bloods’ of the Bullingdon dining club ‘who hunted, played polo and got spectacularly drunk on an income of £3,000 a year’.32 As a reaction against the solemnity of the war years, frivolity and childish behaviour, often accompanied by heavy drinking, were commonplace. For many it was also fashionable to pretend to be homosexual, if such a pretence were needed.33 Many of the leaders of the most reckless social group were former Etonians, and subsequently they were to be prominent in the exploits of the ‘Bright Young People’ during the mid- to late 1920s.
Daphne Vivian visited Oxford in the mid-1920s with her friend, Lettice Lygon, daughter of Lord Beauchamp. She often went to parties given by Lettice’s brother, Hugh, and remembered the whole atmosphere as vibrating ‘with a fantastic ephemeral life … The young men who were the leaders of the so-called aesthetes of that period have since become legendary figures’. They included men like Harold and William Acton and Brian Howard. Howard, who was to be particularly prominent in the exuberant London social scene of the 1920s, was described by Daphne as a
sinister impresario, epigrams crackling from his lips … It was Brian who made a tailor fashionable at Oxford, it was Brian’s taste in ties and shirts that predominated … The Charleston and the Black Bottom had just been introduced into England. Brian decided that we should all become proficient in the steps of these dances, and encouraged us all to take lessons in London.34
Howard was considered to be ‘one of the most extravagant of the aesthete-homosexual circle at Oxford.’
Not all outsiders were prepared to tolerate the irresponsible and high-spirited doings of the more extreme undergraduates, however, and that was true of John Fothergill. He kept the Spread Eagle Inn in Thame, which was favoured by many leading figures of the day as well as by some of the undergraduates from nearby Oxford. In 1926, Fothergill noted in his diary,
It’s hard to be governess as well as cook, but it’s only by great vigilance that we’ve won a reputation amongst the better-class undergrad, or, rather, lost it with the worser. The fool or bounder seldom comes now, or if he does he behaves as nowhere else. One has to watch him from the moment he comes into a charming dining-room with his hands in his pockets … It’s no pleasure to go and tell eight ‘hearties’ in the common-room that people in the hotel might be bored with the sound of their hunting horn, or that I don’t like girls who are not sisters or suitable companions, or not to swing on one leg on an eighteenth-century chair. The other day I told some lads who seemed to be blowing up for the idiotic to go to those places in and around Oxford where the furniture was made for breaking … To make this an Eton or Stowe of public-houses will be no joke, but it’s got to be done … Yet to have to dinner the pick of charming or clever youths is a vast privilege and a knowledge.35
This last comment by Fothergill was a timely reminder of the presence of the large number of undergraduates at Oxford, Cambridge and other universities who completed their academic courses blamelessly, without attracting any of the notoriety of the exuberant few.
The London Season
During the three months from May to the end of July, when the London Season was in full swing, there was a feverish round of social and sporting events, including the all-important presentations at Court of debutantes and young married women. The latter were probably being presented for a second time after their marriage.
For the debutantes the advent of their first Season meant important personal changes, not least in their wardrobe. ‘I used to have awful clothes before I grew up’, recalled Katherine Viscountess Mersey, who was a daughter of the 6th Marquess of Lansdowne. ‘When I came out, everything had to come from a very good dressmaker or a very good tailor … I rather enjoyed having some nice clothes at last.’36
Loelia Ponsonby remembered, too, the fluctuating fashions during the 1920s, although paradoxically it remained essential to wear a hat all the year round. That applied even when playing tennis, or gardening, or lunching in a restaurant. Hems rose and fell, while waistlines wandered ‘high and low, but throughout the twenties bosoms and hips were definitely out … We squashed ourselves into tight bustbodices … As plastic surgery developed it was rumoured that in Paris you could get your curves operated on.’37 According to Frances Donaldson, girls not endowed with flat breasts and boyish figures were constantly on a diet. As skirts became very short, ‘to be born with fat legs or thick ankles was an innate disaster’.38 As Patrick Balfour wryly commented, during the decade the ‘modern woman herself grew each day slimmer and slimmer’.39 Cosmetics were still frowned upon in conservative circles, but increasingly girls used face powder and although at the beginning of the decade nobody wore bright lipstick, this, too, was becoming accepted by its end. When Loelia Ponsonby first saw Alice Bingham, owner of the fashionable Rose Bertin hat-shop, wearing a hat trimmed with large red cherries and with ‘lipsalve as it was called, to match’, she was shocked. It seemed impossible that ‘Englishwomen should ever take to such a garish fashion but of course we all did’.40
There were other signs of female emancipation, too, notably the short hair revolution, with the adoption of the shingle and the bingle. This ran parallel to the abbreviated skirt lengths. Parents, particularly fathers, seem to have objected to the new hair fashion, considering it a violation of women’s crowning glory. But as both Daphne Vivian and Nancy Mitford discovered, after initial anger when they first had their hair cut, parental hostility evaporated fairly quickly.41
Other symbols of women’s growing independence was their ownership of cars, with wealthy young women like Edwina Mountbatten driving all over the place in their own vehicles, albeit not always very safely. According to her biographer, her ‘frantic travels often ended abruptly. She tipped the two-seater Rolls
into a ditch, was caught speeding at 34 miles an hour over a crossroads and prosecuted for dangerous driving.’42
These were the new trends that had to be taken into consideration when debutantes and their mothers were preparing for the excitement of the London Season. They also needed to be aware of the most up-to-date fashions promoted by the French couturiers and their many imitators. As Frances Donaldson observed, to be really well dressed ‘was to be dressed by one of the great French dressmakers … no departure from the style of clothes that were portrayed in such magazines as Vogue was conceivable for those who wished to conform to the standards of fashionable London’.43
Many girls had other anxieties about their wardrobes, too, wondering what to take when they went on a country house visit lasting several days. ‘Even for a shoot in Scotland – a seven-day shoot – you had to dress for every day of the week. And naturally that meant a different hat; and a hat box … There were very rich people who had marvellous clothes, but on the whole one just scraped through’, commented Lady Marjorie Stirling, a daughter of the 8th Earl of Dunbar.44
For girls entering the adult world for the first time, the Season had three main benefits. First it enabled them to get to know other young people within their social milieu, and to be introduced to ‘eligible’ young men. That remained true even though initially many of them found the formalities involved daunting, once they had moved beyond the security of their domestic circle and that of long-term family friends. Loelia Ponsonby described the misery she had experienced owing to her shyness, and the ‘paralyzing terror of being noticed or drawn attention to in any way’ that she had felt. These included ‘ghastly moments of humiliation’ when attending a ball. Once ‘the band struck up a new dance all the guests surged into the ballroom and set off with fresh partners … but a pathetic jetsam of girls was left standing partnerless in the doorway feeling the cynosure of all eyes. One imagined that when the Dowagers put their tiaraed heads together they were saying what a pity it was that the Ponsonby gal had so little success.’ One means of escape was ‘to take refuge in the ladies’ cloakroom between the racks of coats and endure the contemptuous glances of the maids’.45
A second purpose of the London Season was to serve as a marriage market. As one writer has commented, ‘the girls were not allowed by their mothers to forget that, in the end, making a good marriage was the underlying aim of the Season’. To this end the girls were carefully guided, to make sure that they associated only with the ‘right’ kind of young man. As Lady Mary Dunn put it, parents ‘wanted to see their daughters taken care of, and wanted them to live a life to which they’d been brought up.’46
That restrictive policy was not always easy to implement. As in the immediate post-war period, so throughout the 1920s, many of the more spirited girls adopted ingenious ways of eluding parental surveillance. Daphne Vivian, for example, borrowed a latchkey from her lady’s maid, and had it copied. Then when she had been brought home by her chaperone, she would sneak out again as soon as the coast was clear to meet her friends and to visit night-clubs, usually of the unconventional kind such as Mrs Kate Meyrick’s ‘43’ Club where she knew she was unlikely to meet people who knew her family.47 Night-clubs were regarded as particularly unsuitable for young girls, being seen as places of sexual danger, ‘dark and secret … their gloom pierced only by arabesques of cigarette smoke and the stimulating or melancholy music of jazz and the blues.’48 By then women had themselves taken to smoking as a matter of course, no matter how much the older generation disapproved. For the young it was seen as a sign of sophistication.
The third benefit debutantes derived from the Season was in familiarising them with the formality of life at Court, as epitomised for most of them by the protocol involved in their presentation. That included the strict dress code to be observed and the way they were to conduct themselves during the presentation ceremony itself. Specialist teachers, such as those at the Vacani School of Dancing, were consulted by anxious mothers, to ensure that the girls learnt to curtsey in the correct manner.49
Court ceremonial under King George V and Queen Mary followed a rigid pattern – something against which the Prince of Wales, in particular, often railed. It may also have been the reason why only after many months of hesitation the young Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon agreed to marry the king’s second son, the Duke of York. As she wrote to her sister, shortly after the engagement was announced, ‘The King & Queen are both so charming to me, but it’s most terrifying!’50 It was significant, too, that one sympathetic lady-in-waiting wrote to her friend, Lady Airlie, ‘I do feel that she is giving up all the adventure of life.’51 Even for Lady Elizabeth’s parents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, it meant many changes. ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am for the parents’, the lady-in-waiting told Lady Airlie. ‘I don’t believe they had really the least realized before coming [to Sandringham] how different things really are & that – gild the pill as you may she will be royal now.’52
For the relatively few other young people who went on to have close links with Court life, even if they did not marry into the Royal Family, it was important that they understood what was expected of them. Helen Hardinge, who was married to one of the king’s private secretaries, remembered being advised by one of the ladies-in-waiting how she was to conduct herself. As she subsequently wrote,
The Court at Windsor was a very formal one and most particular in its routine [it] meant that exactly what one was to do, where one was to go, and how one was to behave at any given moment, was clearly laid down. To feel reasonably secure, one just had to learn the rules.53
When she was invited to dine at Windsor Castle for the first time after her marriage she noted that it was the king who chose the menu and selected the music played during dinner. At the end of the meal he rose to his feet as a signal for the ladies to withdraw. ‘We had to curtsey to him and follow Queen Mary … out of the room.’ The queen then seated herself on a sofa ‘in her own special corner of the Green Drawing Room … and various ladies were brought up to talk with her, one at a time’54 At first Helen found it all very intimidating, but she learnt to fit in and to play her expected role with suitable discretion and decorum. However, she did confess to being upset when she was told by ‘one or two of the older members of Queen Mary’s entourage’ that it was thought wise that Lady Elizabeth after her engagement should not see too much of long-standing friends like Helen, once she was married to the Duke of York.
The older ladies were afraid that we should not treat her with enough dignity. And I was so anxious to be courteous and to behave properly towards her, that I became very formal and decorous – so that it took the Duchess of York some time after her marriage to come to terms with all our conventional efforts to treat her correctly.55
Indeed, as she confessed to her mother in September 1923, after she had attended a large royal gathering at Balmoral, with the young duchess among those present: ‘I did such a deep curtsey to her … that as she is tiny I very nearly couldn’t get up again. It puts one’s eye out so having first the Queen and then her’, because, of course, the queen herself was tall.56
However, for most debutantes entering adult society for the first time, the niceties of Court life had limited immediate relevance. Some of them, like Daphne Vivian, may have had what was called a ‘little Season’ before they came to London. Perhaps they had visited friends in the country or had attended Hunt balls and dinner parties in their immediate neighbourhood. Lesley Lewis, who returned from her Paris finishing school in about 1926, when she was almost eighteen, recalled that initially she followed the example of her contemporaries and went hunting, played tennis, and visited the country houses of friends. ‘I did my stint in local good works such as the Red Cross, helped whenever help was needed at home and at all odd moments read voraciously.’57 She attended parties held by neighbours who ‘with great kindness’ enabled her to work off some of her ‘gaucherie’. She had limited cash and so found it embarrassing when she stayed in a
country house on her own to know how much to tip the maids or the chauffeur who drove her to the railway station. Then, too, she was self-consciously aware that however pleasant the servants might be in the house where she was staying, she had ‘an uncomfortable feeling of being under surveillance’, especially since she had no lady’s maid of her own. ‘It was thought essential to have proper equipment of matching brushes to be set out on the dressing table. We were usually packed or unpacked for, and clothes were laid out on the bed before dinner’, with one of the housemaids in the home where she was staying carrying out the duties of a lady’s maid. But, she confessed, there was always a worry as to whether your underwear would ‘come up to scratch and was there enough of it?’58
In 1927 Lesley embarked on her first London Season. She was to be presented at Court by an aunt rather than her mother, since her uncle and aunt had a more extensive social circle than her parents. As an eighteen year old she found it ‘an exacting performance’ since she had little experience of the kind of world she was about to enter.
First there were several fittings with a French dressmaker who afterwards put in The Times your name, her name and what you wore. My dress was white chiffon over a pink slip and as skirts were then very short and waists very long, the belt area was round my hips and I had great difficulty in not showing my knees. To my shoulders was attached a silver lamé train which in due course was frugally turned into another dress. With other girls I was made to practise with a table-cloth how to curtsey without getting entangled in a train, and to move off crabwise so as neither to turn my back on the royal couple nor fall flat on the carpet … I carried a borrowed white feather fan and at the back of my head, secured by a pearl bandeau across my forehead, rose three ostrich feathers from which hung a length of tulle. I had white kid gloves above the elbow and silver brocade shoes with straps across the instep. My aunt, in a grey dress with a lace train, wore some splendid diamonds of her own but had also borrowed my mother’s and a sister-in-law’s … George V and Queen Mary enthroned on a dais among the uniforms, brocades, medals and jewels of an entourage which included some well-known public figures, provided a climax I have never forgotten … This was one of the last Courts for which cars were allowed to queue up in the Mall instead of waiting in the Palace quadrangle. The milling East End crowds were good-naturedly enjoying the show and their forthright comments were kindly, but times were hard … for the urban poor in about 1927 and the display seemed tactless.59