by Pamela Horn
In contrast, the fiery-tempered Lord Redesdale openly displayed his angry contempt for the ‘effeminate young men with violet-scented hair’ who were invited by his eldest daughter, Nancy, to his Oxfordshire home, and who arrived in ‘noisy open sports cars’. ‘They lounged about the house dressed in Oxford bags with 28-inch bottoms, loud Fair Isle sweaters and silk ties, making silly jokes and roaring with laughter at everything that [he] and his generation regarded as sacred.’8 Flippancy about the war was regarded as a particular offence.
The main aim of these young people was seemingly to abandon the restraints their parents sought to impose and to seek in pleasure an antidote to the troubled times in which they were living. Some of them were ‘rich and aristocratic’ while others were ‘downright disreputable’, plumbing the depths of ‘drink, drugs and disappointment’. The liberty they sought included a rejection of many of the sexual standards which had applied in pre-war society. There was what one writer has called a ‘debunking’ in regard to questions of sex.9 So although homosexual relationships between males remained illegal, many of the young aesthete leaders of the day, like Brian Howard and Stephen Tennant, openly pursued them in contrast to the clandestine arrangements which had prevailed before 1914. Indeed, as one of their Oxford University contemporaries put it, even for those who were not homosexually inclined ‘it was chic to be queer’ in the 1920s.10
Lesbianism, too, was more widely discussed among the avant-garde, although it was still regarded with abhorrence by most members of the general public. In 1921 there was even a proposal put forward in the House of Commons to make it a crime, punishable by imprisonment, as was the case for homosexual contacts between males. One of the sponsoring MPs claimed that the practice had become ‘very prevalent’ and that the lunatic asylums were ‘largely peopled’ by women who had indulged in the vice. The fact that the offence was difficult to prove and might encourage blackmail was no reason to prevent its being made a punishable offence. The proposition was approved by a thinly attended House of Commons on 4 August but was rejected in the House of Lords eleven days later. This was partly because it would be difficult to implement, since many women shared a bedroom for companionship or because of shortage of space, and might give rise to blackmail, and partly because any prosecutions that resulted from such cases would make the practice known to thousands of people who had hitherto been unaware that such offences were committed. In the end those views prevailed and ‘gross indecency between females’ was never subjected to any legal penalty.11
Some contemporaries argued that the ‘violation of traditional sexual limits and roles’ that had occurred during the war and its immediate aftermath, and which had led to females becoming ‘assertively boyish’, had encouraged a change in attitude among women. However, among the most prominent lesbians in High Society was Vita Sackville-West. She conducted a series of relationships with other women throughout her adult life, including before 1914. Yet at the same time she successfully preserved her family life and her marriage to Harold Nicolson. In the immediate post-war period her most passionate affair was with Violet Keppel, or Violet Trefusis as she became when, under maternal pressure, she married Denys Trefusis in June 1919. With Violet, Vita travelled to Europe, particularly to France, where she often donned male attire and called herself Julian. At around this same time, somewhat ironically, Harold was himself embarking on one of his numerous homosexual relationships, on this occasion with the young Paris dress designer, Edward Molyneux.12 In the end, the affair between Violet and Vita petered out in 1921, albeit amid bitterness and feelings of betrayal on the part of Violet. Vita then embarked on other affairs, including forming a relationship with the novelist Virginia Woolf, who might in many respects be regarded as the love of her life. Virginia’s own feelings were more reserved, and her biographer, Quentin Bell, concludes that while she was prepared to attribute to Vita ‘an almost impossible degree of charm and distinction’, she felt no ‘blind passion’ towards her. The fact that Vita was ‘in love’ with her flattered and pleased her but that was probably as far as it went. ‘There may have been – on balance I think that there probably was – some caressing, some bedding together,’ writes Bell. ‘But whatever may have occurred between them of this nature, I doubt very much whether it was of a kind to excite Virginia or to satisfy Vita.’13 Interestingly, Michael Bloch has suggested that while Vita, a romantic by nature, generally loved one woman at a time, Harold had a far more pragmatic attitude towards sex, and could be interested in several young male partners at any one time.14
In 1928 the publication of Miss Radclyffe Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness, seemed to mark a new acceptance of lesbian relationships, but it was soon banned under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, and gave rise to harsh comments in many traditional circles.15 Lady Hamilton, who was lent the book by Lord Esher, read it but confessed to being glad to ‘get it out of my room – it gave me nausea. I cannot understand why she is not imprisoned for writing it – it is a book poisoning the very roots of home life … Apart from what she pleads about, which is abnormal vice, she writes as if sex was the only thing on God’s earth, as if there were not happy useful lives to be lived without the trail of the beast.’16 But the strongest condemnation of the book came from the editor of the Sunday Express. Soon after its publication he declared in florid language that he would ‘rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.’17 After the trial, which led to the book being condemned as an obscene libel, conditions became more difficult for many lesbians, unless they enjoyed high social status like Vita Sackville-West and were careful to maintain a low profile before the wider public, or they mixed in bohemian circles where sexual liberty was the norm.
These aspects of female relationships, however, impinged little on the doings of most of the Bright Young People. Among the most prominent of them in the early days were the Jungman sisters, Zita and Theresa, the wealthy, emancipated daughters of Mrs Richard Guinness by her first marriage. There was, too, Elizabeth Ponsonby, whose thwarted desire for a stage career found some compensation in the publicity she gained from the many pranks with which she was associated. Lady Eleanor Smith, whose father, Lord Birkenhead, had been lord chancellor, was another member of the coterie. Among their various escapades they engaged in a series of hoaxes, including the Jungman sisters pretending to be journalists and interviewing Hollywood stars, who were unaware of the trick being played upon them. In another spoof, Lady Eleanor Smith disguised herself as a Russian princess in exile after the Revolution, and with the help of her friends was able to deceive and ultimately humiliate a pompous young man of her acquaintance.18 Then there was the time when, under Brian Howard’s direction, a group of them played ‘Follow my Leader’ through Selfridges store. They rushed in and out of the departments, up and down in the lifts, and climbed over the counters, no doubt to the annoyance of customers and the confusion of staff. Selfridges seem to have accepted it in a friendly fashion, but it made headlines in the newspapers.19
In an attempt to inject further excitement into their day-to-day existence, a sophisticated form of paperchase was initiated by the Jungmans, too. It involved travelling all over London to follow the clues. Loelia Ponsonby became involved at an early stage, although the initial experiment seems to have been made by Zita and Theresa Jungman with Lady Eleanor Smith and another friend, Enid Raphael. According to Loelia,
Zita and Eleanor were the hares with five minutes start and they zig-zagged about London using buses and undergrounds and leaving clues behind them as they went. This turned out to be such an exciting game they asked me and some other girls to join in and we used to amuse ourselves on blank afternoons by chasing each other round London … The route was thought up beforehand. You arrived with your partner (we always hunted in couples) and were handed a piece of paper on which was written a cryptic message which, when solved sent you to the spot where the next clue on the chain wa
s hidden. Part of the fun was thinking out original places in which to hide the clues …20
So enjoyable was it that the men wanted to join in. This led to the development of the treasure hunts and a change of character. The hunts were held at night, after dinner, and the participants travelled by car rather than on public transport. They were also ‘tremendously noisy’. As there were no traffic lights, recalled Loelia Ponsonby, ‘we used to race madly through the empty streets, rushing out to suburbs and the East End, regardless of the feelings of the inhabitants who were trying to get to sleep’. She reported how they would assemble about midnight at a given place, where the clues were handed out. ‘After that we behaved like Furies.’21
Barbara Cartland also joined in and she remembered that in time the clues became more complicated. On one occasion Lord Beaverbrook even had printed fake copies of the Evening Standard with a clue hidden in the imaginary news.22 All of the participants paid ten shillings into a pool and that furnished the prize for the winning pair. ‘This meant that sometimes the sum to be won was nearly £100,’ Barbara noted, ‘and there was not only a lot of tense competition but a lot of cheating.’
Soon the press got hold of the story, especially when the Prince of Wales became involved, as happened in late July 1924. On 26 July, the day after the meeting, the Daily Mail published a detailed account of it all, under the heading
THE PRINCE IN A TREASURE HUNT
MIDNIGHT CHASE IN LONDON
50 MOTOR CARS
THE BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE
Those joining in met at around 2 a.m. and after receiving their first clues, they leapt into their motor cars and ‘with barking exhausts that echoed through the stillness of the streets, were on their way to the Adelphi Arches’. By 3.30 a.m. ‘slow cars had given place to high-powered ones, and slow wits to faster wits, so that the field, which had started some 50 cars strong, all closely packed … was straggled out’. Carefully arranged coiffures and expensive dresses were disarranged, and according to the Daily Mail reporter, that ought to please the dressmakers since few of the frocks the girls were wearing as they crawled on all fours on the not-too-clean streets of Seven Dials, searching for a clue chalked on one of the pavements, would ‘ever see the lights of a ball-room again’. The prince headed this search, pursued ‘by Mrs Viola Parsons’.
The treasure hunters discovered their final clue in the more salubrious surroundings of Norfolk House, St James’s, where ‘a splendid breakfast had been prepared and a string band to cheer them after their strenuous adventures’. Somewhat incongruously the Prince of Wales seems to have taken part wearing a blue serge suit and a bowler hat, though whether he was still wearing the latter at the end of the chase, the newspaper did not say.
Eventually, though, as ‘every sort of person began to have treasure hunts’, Loelia Ponsonby and some of her friends lost interest in them, though others carried on. ‘I don’t think I went to one after nineteen twenty-four or five,’ wrote Loelia. ‘Nor had I anything to do with the scavenging parties which succeeded the treasure hunts as an after-dark amusement. The competitors were given a list of objects which they had to obtain somehow and the embarrassment of trying to borrow them in the middle of the night can only have been equalled by the boredom of taking them back next day.’23 She also came to resent the way in which any ‘Bohemian rag or large-scale practical joke’ which took place in the West End of London between 1924 and 1930 was attributed ‘to these Bright Young People. They did not distinguish between us, the original Treasure Hunters, and the friends of my cousin Elizabeth [Ponsonby]. She organized parties which we thought exhibitionist – they always seemed to be held where there were photographers and where they would create the maximum disturbance.’24
Barbara Cartland, too, avoided the scavenging parties. She remembered meeting one girl who had dropped out of a scavenger competition when she and her partner were asked to collect ‘the most impossible things’. They included ‘a policeman’s helmet – and if we took that we’re sure to be arrested. A red hair from an actress’ and a pipe smoked by Stanley Baldwin, the then Prime Minister.25
However, it was for their parties, particularly their fancy dress parties that the Bright Young People became notorious. Associated with these was the jazz music to which they danced, especially the Charleston in 1925. Evelyn Waugh noted in his diary in December of that year how one of his friends, Olivia Plunket Greene, had become ‘literally “Charleston crazy”’ and was miserable ‘until in an interval after supper she found a fairly empty room to dance it in’.26
The frenetic atmosphere all this created was described by Patrick Balfour when he noted how each year the London Season became more feverish, with people rushing from one party or restaurant to another, and then on to a third or fourth in the course of a single evening. They would
finish up with an early morning bathing-party, transported at 60 mph to the swimming-pools of Eton through the dawn. On the river, a languid evening in a punt is not enough. There must be dancing as well, at Datchet or at Bray, and a breakneck race down the Great West Road afterwards.27
Society was also leavened by the admission of people from the theatre and the arts, and with some actresses marrying into the peerage. Beatrice Lillie, for instance, became Lady Peel, the dancer June became Lady Inverclyde, and Gertie Millar ended up as the Countess of Dudley.28 Not to be outdone the young Earl of Northesk married an American-born former member of the Ziegfeld Follies.
The bright young set became particularly newsworthy, however, when they began to hold ‘themed’ or ‘freak’ fancy dress parties, having become dissatisfied with the organising of ordinary fancy dress events. Brenda Dean Paul claimed that it was in 1926 that she attended her first ‘freak’ party. It was held by David Tennant at his Gargoyle club, and though intended as an Edwardian party, it was accompanied on the invitation by instructions to ‘Come as you were twenty years ago’.29 The result was ‘a crazy children’s party’, when even the band wore Eton suits and collars and school caps. ‘Baby “pens”, high chairs and prams lined the walls.’
Other freak parties followed, and Brenda listed a number of them. They included ‘pyjama parties, Greek parties, Russian parties, sailor parties, American parties, murder parties, bathing parties and so on’.30
Some of these events proved more controversial than others. David Tennant’s pyjama party, to which guests were instructed to bring their own drink, was one such. The Daily Mail, reporting on it and on another Tennant party in 1928, wondered how Lord Grey of Falloden, David’s stepfather and a former Foreign Secretary, viewed such unconventional affairs, since he was ‘very much a fine old diplomat on his dignity’. Lady Grey, David’s mother, was also ‘of the older school’.31
However, one of the most widely publicised of these gatherings was the midnight bath party arranged during a heat wave in July 1928 at St George’s Baths in Buckingham Palace Road. It was given by Mrs Plunket Greene, Elizabeth Ponsonby, Edward Gathorne-Hardy and Brian Howard, with the guests requested to bring with them bathing costumes, a towel, and a bottle of alcohol. They arrived in taxi-cabs and motor cars, with some still in evening dress, others in pyjamas and dressing gowns, and a few in bathing costumes covered by coats. Each guest had to produce an invitation card, to prevent gatecrashers, and while some quickly entered the water, where a series of informal games were played, others danced in the entrance hall to the music of a black jazz band. Large rubber horses supported some of the bathers in the water, while changing beams of coloured light played on the water, the surface of which was strewn with flowers. ‘One man’, according to the Daily Mail, ‘dived from the high dive’, bizarrely clad in a dressing gown and a soft felt hat.32 The shouts and cries of the revellers could be heard ‘many hundred yards away from the swimming baths’, the newspaper reported. According to Tom Driberg, now working for the Daily Express, the bathing costumes worn were of the ‘most dazzling kinds and colours’, while a special ‘Bathwater Cocktail’ was produced specially for the occ
asion.33
However, it was not the rowdiness of the scene but its nature that aroused critical attention. ‘Great astonishment and not a little indignation,’ declared the Sunday Chronicle,
is being expressed in London over the revelation that in the early hours of yesterday morning a large number of Society women danced in bathing dresses to the music of a negro band at a ‘swim and dance’ gathering organized by some of Mayfair’s Bright Young People.34
The principal objection raised by a ‘well-known Society hostess’ was that the youthful guests had behaved with such a lack of decorum before a black dance band. Even Barbara Cartland’s mother shared these reservations. ‘Fancy dancing in bathing dresses!’ she declared. ‘I’ve never heard of anything so improper! – and watched by black men!’ She expressed relief that Barbara herself had not taken part in such a decadent event.35
Another almost equally controversial party mentioned by Barbara Cartland was a ‘Baby Party’ held in Rutland Gate, Kensington, in July 1929, with the guests invited to have ‘Romps from ten o’clock to bedtime … and we’ll love to have Nanny too. Pram park provided. Dress: anything from birth to school age.’ The Daily Express gave it a good deal of publicity, with the guests apparently arriving in perambulators in some cases and riding rocking horses in the gardens. They ‘chased each other on donkeys and scooters, and bowled hoops’. The result was that