Last Curtsey Read online

  Last Curtsey

  THE END OF THE DEBUTANTES

  Fiona MacCarthy

  Contents

  Title Page

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  ONE Presentation at the Palace

  TWO Preparations for the Season

  THREE Cocktail Parties

  FOUR The London Dances

  FIVE My Dance at the Dorchester

  SIX Country Dances

  SEVEN The Dublin Horse Show

  EIGHT The Scottish Balls

  NINE What Happened to the Season?

  TEN What Happened to the Debs?

  Epilogue

  Select Bibliography

  Sources

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Illustrations

  Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  2 Invitation to the Palace

  2 Fiona MacCarthy dressed for her presentation

  3 Debs and their parents queue outside the Palace, March 1958

  3 Sonia York, her parents and friends arrive for the presentation

  4 Debs’ escorts mourn the end of presentations

  5 1958 debs coming to make their curtseys

  7 Penny Graham and her great grandmother

  8 Madame Vacani training debutantes to curtsey

  10 Cynthia Charteris, later Lady Asquith, in white crêpe-de-Chine

  19 Fiona and Karin MacCarthy with a schoolfriend

  23 Lovice Ullein-Revicsky, the last of the debs to arrive at the Palace

  23 Judy Grinling, the last deb to curtsey to the Queen

  24 The Reluctant Debutante with its original cast

  CHAPTER TWO

  27 Lady Rosemary FitzGerald with a fellow debutante

  28 The Hon. Penelope Allsopp

  30 Fiona MacCarthy with her grandfather, the Baron de Belabre

  30 The marriage of Gerald MacCarthy and Yolande de Belabre

  31 Gerald MacCarthy in India in 1937 with his chestnut Arab horse

  31 Fiona MacCarthy with her mother in a Schiaparelli parrot dress

  31 Fiona MacCarthy with her father at home on his last leave

  37 Betty Kenward, the social diarist Jennifer, with her son

  38 Alexandra Bridgewater and her cousin Georgina Milner

  39 Lola Wigan on the cover of Queen magazine

  41 Margaret Whigham, Deb of the Year in 1930

  43 Henrietta Tiarks, Deb of the Year in 1957

  54 Some of Annabel Greene’s many invitations

  CHAPTER THREE

  61 Allegra Kent Taylor and Pamela Walford at their joint party

  69 Charles MacArthur Hardy conversing with Lady Lowson

  76 Lady Mary Maitland and the Hon. Robert Biddulph

  80 Ingestre in Staffordshire, Aunt Ursula’s family home, in 1958

  81 Lady Ursula Stewart (the writer Laura Talbot) at Wilton

  82 The Berkeley Debutante Dress Show

  83 Debs not chosen to be models at the Berkeley Dress Show

  CHAPTER FOUR

  86 Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball entrance ticket

  86 Dinner menu for Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball

  88 The maids of honour in the Grosvenor House ballroom

  89 Cutting the birthday cake at Queen Charlotte’s Ball

  91 Tommy Kinsman serenades a deb

  97 Sally O’Rorke at her dance at Hampton Court

  105 Georgina Milner dancing

  106 Fiona MacCarthy with a now-forgotten escort at Claridge’s

  113 The Countess of Dalkeith (later Jane, Duchess of Buccleuch)

  CHAPTER FIVE

  115 Victoria Bathurst Norman at the Fourth of June at Eton

  121 The clan McAlpine

  121 Sir Robert McAlpine and his daughter Agnes on his yacht

  121 Sir Robert watching the construction of Wembley Stadium

  125 The Baroness de Belabre on the putting green at Knott Park

  125 The Baroness and Mrs Poulton, her ladies’ maid

  129 The Dorchester Hotel elaborately decorated by Oliver Messel

  130 Fiona MacCarthy’s tenth birthday party at the Dorchester

  133 Fiona and Karin MacCarthy with their nanny Isabella Hughes

  134 The MacCarthy–Burness dance at the Dorchester

  136 The MacCarthy–Burness dance going with a swing

  CHAPTER SIX

  142 Bucolic scene at Belinda Bucknill and Sara Barnett’s dance

  144 Bramham Park, West Yorkshire

  145 Miranda Smiley on the night of her dance at Parham Park

  150 Clandon Park, Surrey

  157 Barn dance given for Mary Groves and Eliza Buckingham

  157 The two debutantes Eliza Buckingham and Mary Groves

  166 Sally Croker-Poole being given a word of advice by her mother

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  168 Beaulieu, the Waddington’s house at Drogheda, Co. Louth

  169 The girls in the Beaulieu house party

  170 Nesbit Waddington with Lady Ainsworth

  171 Penny Graham’s five-year diary

  174 The Hon. Diana Connolly-Carew and her brother

  176 The Kildare Hunt Club meet at Castletown, Co. Kildare

  177 Luttrellstown House, Co. Dublin

  179 William Montgomery, Master of the Eton beagles

  182 Borris House, Co. Carlow

  184 Lady Rosemary FitzGerald, in the childrens’ pony competition

  184 Lady Rosemary FitzGerald and Fiona MacCarthy at the Dublin Horse Show in 1959

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  189 The 110th Royal Caledonian Ball at Grosvenor House in 1958

  189 1958 deb Lady Carolyn Townshend with Alasdair MacInnes

  192 Tessa Prain and Ann Carington Smith before their dance

  192 Dancers at Tessa Prain and Ann Carington Smith’s ball

  193 Holly Urquhart before her dance at Craigston Castle

  195 Highland Ball programme

  198 Rowallan Castle in South Ayrshire

  200 Dodavoe, the shooting lodge at Glen Prosen, Kirriemuir

  201 Grouse shooting in the Highlands: the truck for the guns

  CHAPTER NINE

  209 Tana Alexander’s coming out dance at Dropmore in 1963

  209 Lady Rosemary Muir at the Dropmore ball

  217 Annette Fletcher modelling Young Jaeger beachwear

  217 Sarah Harman modelling an Annacat pyjama suit

  222 Poster for the Oxford Union Chastity Debate in 1961

  224 Karin MacCarthy in her coming-out year in 1960

  CHAPTER TEN

  228 1958 ex-debutantes in the Sunday Telegraph in 1993

  230 The Aga Khan and his bride, 1958 debutante Sally Croker-Poole

  235 Lord and Lady Cobbold and their children at Knebworth

  239 Lady Beatty, the former Diane Kirk, at Chicheley Hall in 1959

  241 Caroline Cuthbert and Camilla Paravicini with Frank Sinatra

  242 Jennifer Murray, record-breaking helicopter pilot

  247 Bridesmaids at Fiona MacCarthy’s wedding

  252 Nicolette Powell, the former Marchioness of Londonderry

  253 Children’s fancy dress party given by Rose Dugdale

  254 Rose Dugdale in male disguise at the Oxford Union

  256 Rose Dugdale in 1980 on her release from Limerick prison

  260 Fiona MacCarthy promoting Guardian women journalists, 1965

  EPILOGUE

  264 Lady Diana Spencer, leaving the Royal Academy of Arts, 1981

  Preface

  This book has been a kind of double coming out for me. For many years I could not bring myself to talk about the Season, hardly ev
en think about it. Especially in the 1960s, when I was working for the Guardian, the debutante Season was my taboo subject, an unmentionably embarrassing secret history. How could I expect anyone to take me seriously once they knew I had been amongst the final group of debutantes to curtsey to the Queen?

  What has happened to make me change my mind, after so many decades? It is a natural condition of ageing to lose some inhibitions and to see things that once seemed worryingly shaming in a different perspective. By the time you reach your sixties you achieve a glorious imperviousness to what other people think. Viewed from this distance, the final year in which debutantes performed the curtsey to the monarch, breaking a tradition of two hundred years, has historic and sociological importance. In 1958, the year of the last curtseys, the so-called upper classes, to which the debutantes and their families belonged, were already showing signs of a loss of confidence. We were there right on the edge of the socially challenging, sexually revolutionary and, from the point of view of the establishment, destructively satiric 1960s. The end of the curtsey was part of the whole story of England in a particular, and often very anguished, condition of evolution and flux.

  This book is partly a defence of debutantes against the cartoon image of the vacuous and flighty socialite. An ‘ex-deb’ is a phrase that still has a dismissive connotation. This is a facile and patronising view. Yes of course there are still debs of the unreconstructed kind, easily identified by their clothes and vowel sounds as they bray to one another across Sloane Square. But the girls who curtseyed with me in 1958 have been as much affected as women in any other section of society by the profound changes to the expectations of women over the past half century. When people talk of ‘the hard way up’ they automatically think of women overcoming the disadvantages of being born into poverty. But there is a Poor Little Rich Girl syndrome too. There could be a considerable struggle in surmounting hidebound parental attitudes, the spoken or (equally lethal) unspoken pressures to conform, the minimal education given to a daughter whose future was viewed solely in terms of a good marriage and the paucity of career opportunities available to most of my contemporaries. A bonus of this book has been the scope it gave me to renew old contacts with my fellow-curtseyers and to examine the often very enterprising and surprising ways in which their lives developed from then on.

  Perhaps what has motivated me most of all has been the feeling that I was witness to a scene so far removed from present-day experience, so strange and so arcane, that it is worth recording. That last Season of last curtseys was part of a period which is now almost forgotten, the details of which are disappearing fast. Some of the background information is now beyond retrieval. When I approached the palace while researching this book a spokesman for the Royal Archives refused my request for the full list of girls who made their curtseys in that final year on grounds that this would constitute a breach of privacy under the Data Protection Act.

  The debutantes themselves are inexorably ageing. It came as a shock to me to realise that some of the girls who went with me to the palace – and some of the debs’ escorts I remember dancing energetically to Tommy Kinsman and his band – are already dead. But I have been lucky in finding many people with still vivid memories to draw on and the photograph albums and diaries of girls who did the Season in 1958 have been a valuable resource. ‘It was such a peculiar thing to have done’, as one ex-debutante recently remarked to me. Peculiar indeed: both in terms of the elaborate social rituals that lingered through the post-war years and in the underlying concepts of elegance, good manners, belief in protocol, love and respect for the monarchy, deference towards your betters, courage, kindness and idealism, qualities which before long appeared impossibly old fashioned. 1958 was the watershed between the lost worlds of our parents or our grandparents and the world which we know now.

  Last Curtsey

  CHAPTER ONE

  Presentation at the Palace

  In 1958 – the year in which Khrushchev came to power in Russia, the year after Eden’s resignation over Suez, two years after John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger – the last of the debutantes, myself among them, went to the palace to curtsey to the Queen.

  Aristocratic teenage girls had been making their deep curtseys to the monarch for the past two centuries. This most eccentric of tribal initiation ceremonies had been evolved by Queen Charlotte, wife of George III. The Lord Chamberlain’s announcement that it would be ceasing after 1958 prompted a record number of applications for the final presentations held at Buckingham Palace in mid-March, like a wave of panic-buying once famine had been forecast. One mother was said to be presenting all her four daughters. In total 1,400 girls were to curtsey in three batches of four to five hundred, in ceremonies spread over three days. Following the rules that a debutante had to be presented by a relation who had herself been presented, a formal application had been sent to the Lord Chamberlain by my mother who herself had made her curtsey in 1925, wearing the then obligatory ostrich feather headdress and white dress with a long train.

  I still have the stiff buff card with its raised gold insignia EIIR. It bears the message ‘The Lord Chamberlain is commanded by Her Majesty to summon Mrs Gerald MacCarthy and Miss Fiona MacCarthy to an Afternoon Presentation Party at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday the 18th March, from 3:30 to 5:30 o’clock pm.’ The dress code was now less formal than in my mother’s presentation year. Ladies were instructed to wear day dress with hat. Gentlemen had a choice of morning dress or non-ceremonial day dress, esoteric instructions presumably immediately intelligible to our parents’ still militaristic post-war generation. The Lord Chamberlain directed that ‘If in possession swords should be worn.’

  Invitation to the palace

  Fiona MacCarthy dressed for her presentation in blue wild silk and black kid gloves

  So it happened that on a cold and blustery spring afternoon I joined the troupe of well-bred gels, their parents and their sponsors assembling along the iron railings outside Buckingham Palace for what turned out to be an ordeal of a wait. There was to be a lot of waiting on presentation day and indeed throughout the London Season that succeeded it: endless hanging around, filling up the spaces, exchanging sometimes desperately sprightly small talk, sipping at a drink. What made that wait outside the palace so peculiarly memorable was not just the savage weather assailing the poor debs lined up in what The Times reporter called their ‘flimsy finery’, exposed to ‘rough winds shaking their chiffon and light silks’. It was the deeper certainty that this whole old world of privilege and upper-class frivolity was doomed. As shown in faded press cuttings the scene seems to encapsulate a strangely melancholy period quality. Moustached fathers in their toppers, proud mothers swathed in mink. A certain bitter sweetness, an end of empire feel. The Times noted the ‘valedictory spice about the familiar pageant of the debutantes on their way to a brief moment of glory in the State ballroom’. There were crowds outside the palace, kept at a discreet distance, staring at the toffs as in an Ealing comedy. On the final day of presentations two young blades in bowler hats drove up The Mall in a vintage Rolls Royce tourer, holding up a placard crudely lettered GOODBYE DEAR DEBS.

  Debs and their parents queue outside the palace, March 1958

  Sonia York, her parents and friends arrive for the presentation ceremony

  Debs’ escorts mourn the end of presentations

  At last we were inside and ascending the Grand Staircase, an ostentatious sweep of Carrara marble with bronze balustrade. Up the red carpet the debutantes were entering an Alice in Wonderland world of stagey pomp and comic fancy dress. Beefeaters in their ruffs were stalwartly in attendance. Placed at strategic points throughout the palace were distinguished ancient soldiers, members of Her Majesty’s Body Guard of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen at Arms, recalled to duty for the afternoon presentations, and giving the scene an air of spectacular unreality with their plumed helmets, their heavy gold epaulettes and quasi-medieval halberds, held ready to root out the traitors in the crowd. The debs
were now denuded of their tweed or camel overcoats, thronging through the palace, eyeing one another as if entering heat one of an old-time beauty contest, which in a sense it was. The presentation ceremony marked our entry into a complicated, sometimes cut-throat competition that could shape a girl’s whole future. We were on the starting line for the thing called ‘coming out’ which, in its old and precise sense, meant a young girl’s rite of passage out of the schoolroom and into society, once she became of marriageable age. The ritual was once connected with menstruation’s onset. Society doctors in the Victorian age advised the delay of a young girl’s menstruation as long as possible, ideally until her formal ‘coming out’ at seventeen, prescribing a strict regime of cold baths and exercise in the open air to allow her to make full use of the valuable formative years of puberty. The debutante would then emerge, butterfly from the chrysalis, to parade before the eyes of her prospective suitors in ‘the full perfection of womanhood’.

  1958 debs coming to make their curtseys in full-skirted dresses and little petal hats: from left, Sally O’Rorke, Julia Chatterton, Victoria Bathurst Norman, Jane Dalzell

  By 1958 such brutal delaying tactics were abandoned. Girls’ bodies matured earlier: I had started menstruating at the age of ten. But in a sense our development too had been retarded in the stultifying of female ambition and the deadening of our critical sense. In the contest for a suitable husband, ideally titled, landed and with money, originality had never been high on the agenda. Sameness and acceptability were of more value. In 1958 we looked alike in full-skirted calf-length dresses, long kid gloves and tiny hats constructed of myriad petals or soft feathers perched on our carefully waved hair. Whether the dresses had been made by a couturier, Victor Stiebel and Norman Hartnell being the prestige names, or run up by the deb’s mother’s village dressmaker, the final effect was curiously similar. I was wearing blue wild silk, the favoured fabric of that Season, and everywhere I looked were other girls in rustling skirts in the uniform light blue, turning Buckingham Palace to a shimmering silk sea. The atmosphere, although excited, was peculiarly docile. You could hardly call us teenagers: we were altogether too formal and submissive, imitations of our mothers, clones of the Queen herself, here at court in our court shoes.