Country House Society

by Pamela Horn

  For Sibyl, who had gone into business very reluctantly at the age of fifty-four, the combination of events imposed great stress. She had set herself the target of earning £2,000 a year from her interior decorating and by driving herself and those whom she employed very hard, she was able to do so. But she found the world of commerce dull and unrewarding, compared to her former busy life as a leading Society hostess. Indeed, even in these circumstances she managed to hold some dinner parties and to visit friends. However, throughout there was the pressure to earn money, as she confided to her American friend, Bernard Berenson, in Florence:

  It’s quite true we went smash in October and ever since I’ve been working like a beaver … Arthur of course is making income … [but] the Bar is at its worst for 25 years … somehow we’ve got to build up capital.94

  In November 1930 she referred ruefully to her ‘Cinderella evenings by which I mean after a bath I forget all the drearies and go out or have people in who talk & translate me to another place’. But she could never forget her financial difficulties. ‘It’s like walking on a tight rope & suddenly realising that there’s no net below one – There is none below us,’ she told Berenson.95

  Around this same time Virginia Woolf commented to her sister on the change which had taken place in Sibyl, noting how she had ‘transformed herself into a harried, downright woman of business … and has lost almost all her glitter and suavity … She is at her office from 9.30 to 7 … After all, she … has practised society for 35 years; and now to become a hardhearted shopkeeper – and she is very successful too … must be a grind. She too has shrunk and faded.’96

  As a result of Lady Colefax’s determination and commercial acumen, the venture prospered, so that by the end of the 1930s, in partnership with a gifted young decorator, John Fowler, her business had become the important Mayfair interior decorating firm of Colefax and Fowler.97

  The financial necessity which had driven Sibyl Colefax into business also turned Norah Lindsay in the same direction. She had long given informal advice to friends on how they could improve their garden, and her own garden at Sutton Courtenay Manor was widely admired. By 1924, however, she had little income coming in from her estranged husband, Harry, and her home had been let for several months at a time to provide extra income. She had then to rely on the hospitality of her friends to tide her over these spells of temporary homelessness. In 1924 Norah was aged fifty-one and it was while she was staying with one of her friends, Lady Horner, at Mells in Somerset that the latter suggested she should make a charge for her gardening advice.98 She took up the suggestion and it proved to be the start of her commercial career. In that same year she was paid a retainer of £100 a year by the Astors, to oversee the plant selection and planting at Cliveden, and other commissions soon followed, for example from Sir Philip Sassoon.

  Negotiations, however, were not always easy, especially with her volatile friend, Lady Astor. Nancy Astor quickly criticised Norah if she thought too much money was being spent on the Cliveden garden, or if she believed the Astors’ best interests were being neglected. In 1927, for example, Norah strongly defended herself against a charge that she had been neglectful and profligate, pointing out that as a professional gardener she was given the same terms by the nurserymen ‘as all the other landscape gardeners … My own fees I have never raised since I started … I know a man like Peto who charges £100 a visit wd. laugh at £5 or £10!! But I have so loved the work at Cliveden … and I don’t think you could have got the result any cheaper.’99

  The quarrel blew over and Norah’s business continued to expand so that by the end of the 1920s she had a client base of at least twenty-six properties, mostly in England but with a few on the Continent, especially in France.100 Nonetheless she found the work physically demanding, especially as she grew older. In the autumn of 1926 she confessed gloomily to a younger sister, ‘I am a tired and cold businesswoman! I used to adore lying in bed in a hot bedroom and having nothing to do.’ But except for brief periods when she was staying with friends, such self-indulgence was no longer possible.101 Yet, like Lady Colefax, she carried on working and also published occasional articles on gardening, for example in Country Life. In this way she secured a modest livelihood to the end of the 1930s. But then her age and the effects of the Second World War soon led to a sharp decline in her commissions and consequently in her income. She became increasingly dependent on her younger sister, Madeline, who had married the wealthy Howard Whitbread, heir to the Whitbread brewery business. They lived at Southill Park in Bedfordshire and by 1944 Norah was spending almost six months of the year with them, intermixed with visits to other friends, usually for several weeks at a time.102 Yet by her skills and determination Norah Lindsay had developed a career for herself and had taken advantage of her Society contacts to gain gardening commissions for a period of at least fifteen years.

  Nevertheless, alongside these women who had ‘broken the mould’ of the stereotypical lady of leisure, however reluctantly, countless others continued to enjoy a comfortable existence along traditional lines and free from financial pressures. Yet even they, to a limited extent, diverted temporarily from the stereotype during the General Strike of 1926. This broke out on 3 May and for nine days there were fears that the country would be brought to a standstill by industrial action. It arose from a demand by the coal miners for a National Mining Board to determine wage levels and to achieve the maintenance of a seven-hour working day. These demands the government and the coal owners refused to accept and so, under the direction of the General Council of the Trades Union Congress, other workers then came out on strike in solidarity with their cause. They included railwaymen, dockers, road transport workers, printers, men in the metal trades and those in the building industry.103

  The government responded by recruiting thousands of special constables, drawn from volunteers who came forward in large numbers. According to Barbara Cartland, ‘The whole of Buck’s Club and White’s were enrolled as special constables.’ In addition there were members of the Territorial Army. Hundreds of undergraduates came up from Oxford and Cambridge to London not only to serve as special constables but to take on a variety of other tasks, such as unloading ships and working on the railways. Lady Howard de Walden put up about 200 of them in her ballroom and also organised a canteen in her garage to feed not only them, but other youths who had been put up in various households in Belgrave Square.104

  One commentator claimed that during the General Strike many businessmen ‘realised a life-time’s ambition by driving an engine, acting as a guard, or manning a signal box’, in order to keep the railways running.105 According to The Bystander the Earl of Portarlington worked as a porter at Paddington station and Lord William Nevill sat for hours each day at South Kensington station snipping tickets and telling people their platforms. The underground railway was ‘portered, conductored and guard-ed by cohorts of bareheaded young men chiefly … from Oxford and Cambridge, in grey flannel trousers and Fair Isle “pullovers,”’ declared the magazine.106 The Tatler published a photograph of the Hon. Mrs Beaumont sweeping out the stable yard at the Great Western Railway yard at Paddington, to make sure the horses were not neglected, as they had allegedly been during the 1919 railway strike.107

  Food supplies were secured by volunteer lorry drivers, often with police escorts, while Hyde Park was transformed into a ‘vast centre for the distribution of milk’.108 Men and women worked in temporary canteens kept open night and day to provide for the emergency lorry drivers. Even the Mitford sisters set up a canteen near their Oxfordshire home, mainly under the supervision of the second sister, Pamela, who was the practical member of the family.109

  Among others who became involved were Edwina Mountbatten and her friend, Jean Norton. Edwina had no strong views on the rights and wrongs of the strike but was simply determined that London should not be brought to a standstill. Initially she worked from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the YMCA canteen in Hyde Park, making tea and cooking sausages for volunteer
lorry drivers. She and Jean also sold copies of the Daily Express and Evening Standard, which the Beaverbrook presses were still producing but which the distributors would not deliver. After three days, the printing stopped and Jean and Edwina then stood in for the switchboard operators, who had also joined the strike. Edwina, in particular, had found the canteen work tiring, unused as she was to standing for hours in a hot kitchen. But the switchboard work proved even more taxing. For five days she remained on duty from 9 a.m. to midnight, while ‘the telephone never stopped’ and she and Jean ‘nearly went mad’. She also did shift work in the Express transport canteen, and by the time the strike ended, she was pale and drawn and utterly exhausted. As Janet Morgan notes, ‘Doing the same routine job, day after day, was more killing than she had realized; like other volunteers, [she] was learning what it took to keep the wheels turning.’110 It was a far cry from her usual pleasure-seeking lifestyle.

  Barbara Cartland became involved, too, carrying messages to parts of London she had never seen before. But, as she later wrote, ‘For the majority of young people in the twenties the strike seemed at the time an adventurous excuse.’111

  Some violent clashes between strikers and volunteers and the police took place during the nine days the strike lasted, but there was no loss of life. It was eventually called off on 12 May by the General Council of the TUC, ostensibly so that negotiations could take place to settle the miners’ grievances. The decision caused rejoicing and much relief among members of the social elite, and particularly among the volunteers. The Bystander, for example, sounded a triumphant note of self-congratulation. ‘Our young men showed up magnificently. A week before the strike there were Jeremiahs who spoke gloomily of the modern tendency in our Universities … But the way those youngsters ran our trains and manoeuvred ten-ton lorries … was a joy to all beholders … Most of the young women in Mayfair were serving in the canteen in Hyde Park for the lorry drivers, soldiers, and others engaged in milk distribution’.112

  The miners, not surprisingly, felt they had been betrayed by the General Council’s decision. They continued their strike for several more months, before the dispute crumbled away in September 1926. The coal owners had won, and the miners lost their national agreement and had instead to work for longer hours on lower wages.113

  As one writer has put it, the General Strike showed ‘what was known already, that people who dress like gentlemen will instinctively take sides against people who commonly work with their coats off’.114 In the meantime, the upper classes breathed a sigh of relief and quickly began to take up the customary, if somewhat delayed, social activities associated with the London Season. Lady Mountbatten, for one, neither moralised nor reminisced over her role in the dispute. She simply ‘picked up her old life where she had left off’. That included visiting the theatre, going to Mrs Corrigan’s annual cabaret party, attending the Duchess of Sutherland’s summer fancy dress party, where she went dressed as a gipsy, and joining in Emerald Cunard’s party for the Prince of Wales. At the same time she continued her extra-marital affair with the American, Laddie Sanford.115

  Edwina was not alone in putting the temporary unpleasantness of the strike firmly behind her. As The Bystander commented on 9 June,

  What a summer this is going to be! Their Majesties’ Courts are to-day and tomorrow and the Ranelagh Horse and Polo Pony Show is even now in progress. The first Test Match opens … on Saturday and Ascot opens on Tuesday.116

  A week later it commented on ‘all the other gaieties’ that were taking place: ‘dinners, lunches, and exactly twenty dances of the first-rate importance, and you can imagine what life in London has been this last week. The three dances of the greatest importance all took place on the same night … which meant a lot of running to and fro to those – as many did – who went to all three.’ Earl Winterton, who restricted himself to the Duchess of Sutherland’s fancy dress ball, described it in glowing terms. It was ‘held in the open air in the tennis court with Ambrose’s band; all the beautiful women of … the most celebrated set of society were there … a great evening – colour, beauty, good fun’.117 It was a world far distant from the struggling mining communities who were seeking, without success, to preserve their already precarious standard of living.

  But for some, the events of the General Strike and its aftermath gave pause for thought. Among them was Barbara Cartland. ‘It was for me, and a great number of my contemporaries, a milestone’, she wrote, years later. ‘It was a moment when we ceased to be young and carefree and thoughtless, when we began to think … After the General Strike we ostensibly went on dancing, yet some of the gaiety and spontaneity seemed to have gone out of it.’118

  6

  The ‘Bright Young People’ and the End of an Era

  … the chief characteristic of the Bright Young People was that they made a business of ‘pleasure’ and hunted the ‘good time’ until exhaustion overcame them. By the end of the decade the Wild Party was over … the period with which this book deals came to an end in a confused welter of treachery, fraud and … despair.

  Douglas Goldring, The Nineteen Twenties. A General Survey and some Personal Memories (London, 1945), pp. 229 and 251.

  Young people and those who do not know the ways of the world are apt sometimes to rebel against custom, convention, etiquette – to rebel … against any restraint of their wishes, of their display of personality, forgetting that if community life is to be lived at its best the greatest good of the greatest number must be considered before the desires of the few.

  Lady Troubridge, The Book of Etiquette (London, 1926), p. 2.

  There seems to be little private entertaining this autumn, probably on account of all these crashes … The new collapses in Wall Street and their reflexion over here are making us all feel rather gloomy about our financial affairs, though we seem to hide our feelings fairly well from the world at large.

  The Tatler, 20 November 1929.

  The ‘Bright Young People’

  To the public at large the escapades of the ‘Bright Young People’ provided a dramatic picture of social life in the ‘Roaring Twenties’, with their cocktails, jazz, and sometimes flagrantly abandoned behaviour. But at a deeper level they were responding to the uncertainties and the turbulence of the post-war world by engaging in a series of high-profile pranks and parties, at a time when the cult of youth was exerting an important influence upon Society’s view of itself. To some extent the ‘empty restlessness’ of the age was captured in the lyrics of Noel Coward, such as his ‘Dance Little Lady’ of 1928:

  Tho’ you’re only seventeen

  Far too much of life you’ve seen

  Syncopated child.

  Maybe if you only knew

  Where your path was leading to

  You’d become less wild.

  But I know it’s vain

  Trying to explain,

  While there’s this insane

  Music in your brain.1

  The tensions and the feelings of alienation experienced by many young people were confirmed by Cyril Connolly when he commented on the difficulty his generation found in accepting the duties associated with adult life in the way their fathers had. The war had undermined the old sense of stability. ‘They could not settle down to boring jobs and unprofitable careers with pre-war patience.’2 Patrick Balfour described the post-war generation of young men, which included himself, as a ‘rebel army’, resisting ‘parental tyranny’ and ‘the limited conception of life for which it stood’, even though they were unable to bring forward any constructive policy of their own as an alternative.3

  Brenda Dean Paul, herself a member of the bright young set, underlined these views when she claimed that those such as she, who were ‘faced with the problems of life far earlier than our parents, had no inclination to conform … and broke gradually away, forming little groups or “coteries”, which came to be known by the papers as “the bright young people”’. A ‘camaraderie of youth had arisen’, a desire for independence a
nd equality which ‘gave birth to a new code of social manners’.4 For her that could mean that partying went on into the early hours of the morning, so that ‘for years I never went to bed before four or five in the morning. Constantly burning the candle at both ends, and in the middle too, I must have had a constitution of iron, for throughout those years I seldom if ever bothered to have a regular meal.’ Only later, aggravated by her serious addiction to drugs, did her health finally give way.

  Barbara Cartland remembered that these outbursts of youthful exuberance were greeted in conventional circles with disapproval. Modern girls were condemned as ‘vulgar, absurd, improper, fast, over-sexed, abominable, shaming, humiliating’. To the novelist Winifred Graham, they were mere ‘travesties of womanhood’.5

  Most of the leaders of this new group, numbering only a few hundred, were well connected and rarely followed any definite career. In a small number of cases, members of the middle class, including Evelyn Waugh and Cecil Beaton, were able to gain entry into this world through their university connections and, later on, through the successful demonstration of their artistic and literary gifts. In Waugh’s case, by the end of the decade he had begun to win plaudits for his novels on life among the social elite during the twenties, while Beaton was not only being lionised as a successful photographer and designer, but as a contributor to Society magazines, including Vogue, for which he wrote several articles.6

  Prominent among the activities of the bright young set were the holding of fancy dress parties and the organising of ‘treasure hunts’, these latter being carried on by motor cars in the middle of the night, amid much noise and excitement. Parents, for the most part, reacted to these outbursts with despair or anger, according to their temperament. Hence the former Labour minister, Arthur Ponsonby, noted in his diary in the middle of the decade how helpless he and his wife felt when they were dealing with their headstrong daughter, Elizabeth, who was one of the leaders of the Bright Young People. ‘If I were to do the heavy father and reprove, rebuke, and correct she would simply leave us,’ he wrote sadly. ‘Slender as it is becoming the link between us and her is still of some value.’7