Singled Out (17 page)

rich and cosmopolitan. Rose had set her heart on securing such a position,

and marriage just wasn’t compatible with the hard work and long hours

required of a personal maid. Her engagement endured, in name only, for

nine years. ‘All right, in those days long engagements were normal, but this got ridiculous. We hardly ever saw each other, so it was severed by mutual agreement.’ That ended Rose’s love life; she never married.

She fulfilled her ambition, however, becoming lady’s maid to the formidable Nancy Astor, whom she served for thirty-five years. With Lady Astor she travelled the world, met the cream of international high society, and

made herself indispensable to the doyenne of one of the first families in the land. Lady Astor’s life was her life, eighteen hours a day, seven days a week; she had none of her own. That was the deal.

*

Rose Harrison opted not to spend her life penned in a nine-foot-square

kitchen with five babies and a leaky ceiling. She preferred to see America,

meet George Bernard Shaw and visit the great European cities in return

for being at the beck and call of a spoilt aristocrat, but for too many there was no choice. Girls like Irene Angell, who had prayed during the war years for their brothers and fathers to come home safely, now faced the

shortage of boyfriends for themselves. Irene mourned the loss of a score of

her pre-war schoolfellows, cadets killed at Mons and Ypres. ‘I knew every

one of those boys. I used to play tennis with them and go to school with

them. But there were no more.’ Irene’s sister was luckier than she was; she

managed to get the brother of a friend. ‘He was twelve years older than she

was. You really had to work hard to get a husband, I think, in those days.

It wasn’t the kind of work I was looking for.’ Like Rose Harrison, Irene

was not well-off. She was forced to make her own way in life, and she

never married.

The social balance in the s was skewed by the lack of men, and in

the new world some of the old niceties had to give way. The dance

boom of that decade was a symptom of the need among young, mainly

working-class women to exert themselves in finding partners. Night after

night you put on your warpaint and went down to the Locarno or the

Palais with your girlfriends. Girls danced together or stood on the side

waiting to be asked by a boy. It didn’t matter if you didn’t know them;

formalities like being introduced were dispensed with. But only if it was a

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

‘Ladies Excuse Me’ or a ‘Buzz Off ’ did the girl get a chance to ask the boy to dance. The fittest, and fairest, survived. Postal worker Evelyn Symonds shot up after the age of seventeen and felt crippled with embarrassment by

her height. ‘I used to tower over all the men I ever met, and it was silly

but I was
so
self-conscious. I used to think to myself, Oh, I hope people don’t think you belong to me.’ So she stopped dancing.

In some ways the upper classes had the worst of it, for they had most to

lose. The mating game had given their lives meaning. The haunting story

of Isie Russell Stephenson gives a glimpse of what it felt like after the

bottom dropped out of their once dizzy social world. Although Isie, who

married, never had to experience the depredations of spinsterhood, nevertheless her story vividly communicates the sense of social distortion that all her class of women seem to have felt.

Towards the end of the war in  Isie got a message to say that her

husband, Hamilton, who was at the Front, would be arriving home. In

high excitement Isie prepared for the long-awaited reunion. She decked

herself out in her prettiest dress and headed for the docks to await his boat.

But the dreamed-of moment turned suddenly to nightmare: Hamilton

appeared on a stretcher, mangled and bandaged; he was appallingly

wounded and clearly dying. There had been no warning. She had not even

known he was injured. Isie took him home and nursed him, and not long

afterwards he died. Isie mourned; nevertheless she was young, she could

not mourn for ever.

The following year, during the Season of , Isie was invited to a ball

in London. She willed herself into the mood, did her hair, and put on her

ballgown. One had to keep going. But when she arrived and walked into

the ballroom, she thought she must have made a mistake. The party seemed

to be women-only – a hen party. ‘But if it’s a hen party,’ she thought to

herself, mystified, ‘why is every woman in full evening dress?’ At last,

through the crowd, she spotted a man in tails . . . and again through the

crowd another . . . and then a couple more. And gradually she realized that

this pathetic clutch of males, this speckling of survivors, were the men who were left. There were about ten women to every man. Isie never forgot that overwhelming experience of the way in which war had laid waste to

her class. ‘It’s hard to explain,’ she remembered, years later. ‘It was as if every man you had ever danced with was dead.’*

* I am indebted to Julian Fellowes for telling me this story about his Aunt Isie (born a Fellowes), whom he later immortalised as the formidable Lady Trentham in his screenplay for the film
Gosford Park
().



Singled Out

If being in a majority of ten to one was hard work for the young women,

pity the middle-aged hostess trying to achieve the right ‘mix’ at her parties.

Before the war the Season had gone with a swing; every mother kept a list

of eligible men who were automatically invited to her match-making balls

Punch
’s solution to the lack of dancing partners (October )

– with a few spare men thrown in for luck. After the Battle of the Somme

there was a huge hole in the guest list that was never again filled. Hostesses gave up the unequal struggle, and sent out invitations to ‘Miss — and Partner’.

When the invitations came Miss — was then faced with the responsibility

of finding somebody to escort her. You had to beg, borrow or steal them;

blind dates were the norm, and one couldn’t afford to be choosy. Barbara

Cartland had to negotiate with a schoolfriend for her first dance partner. As she remarked in her memoirs, such unorthodox arrangements contributed signally to the breakdown of class distinctions in the s: ‘. . . Society had ceased to have any meaning.’ Beatrice Brown, who, like Barbara Cartland, was born in , noted how the lack of men aged precisely two to five

years older than herself – men killed at the ages of between eighteen and

twenty-one – now left her awkwardly stranded. It was not so much that

there were no men at all, it was just that the few there were ‘were not for

us’. The older men in their late twenties – the ‘war graduates’ as she called
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

them – didn’t want greenhorn youngsters like Beatrice who had been

schoolgirls in . They were looking for women who had been out in

the world as they had. Men in their late twenties wanted to experience the

gaiety of post-war London with the young women who had been VADs

and Wrens – women who had danced in nightclubs during the war, used

the latest slang, and could match them drink for drink.

They were not for the likes of her. ‘It was like trying to jump on to a

merry-go-round that has already got into its stride.’ With heavy heart

Beatrice would get out her address book and start the wearisome task of

trying to pin down an acceptable partner. This was not how things were

supposed to be: having to make a nuisance of yourself by ringing up

second-rate young men, in the dim hope that ‘Were they doing anything,

perhaps they would like to . . . ?’

I was not the only one, I suspect, who after trying this out for three or four dances, swore that I would never again accept an invitation for which I had to supply my share of the party. One went to parties to meet young men, not to wear out those one had by importuning them.

It was a buyers’ market, though not all the young men appreciated their

popularity. One of the hapless male victims even wrote to the editor of the

Daily Mail
in  complaining that he felt squeezed. ‘As one of these unfortunates I suggest that the worst thing any young man can do is to learn to dance. Once he does so he becomes a slave to dancing, he spends

all his money on it, and he never has a moment of his own from dancing.

His life becomes a constant round of pressing invitations that he is unable

to refuse.’

Even if you were lucky, and did find a man willing to spare you a

quickstep, he would be in such demand that more often than not you’d

get abandoned halfway through the evening when he saw someone he

liked better. But the chances were that all the popular ones had already

been snapped up, leaving behind only the dull ones – ‘what, later, we

would have called ‘‘wet’’ . . .’ – so one spent the evening dancing with a

drip. Meanwhile the glamorous ‘war graduates’ found themselves equally

glamorous dancing partners who were sophisticated and could understand

them: ‘their steps fitted’. Beatrice Brown and her friends watched these

smug couples with mortification.

With no proper balls to go to, she got her entertainment where she

could. You were fortunate if you happened to be on the list of one of the

hostesses who connected with Americans, because these ladies were known



Singled Out

to ‘get up’ little ‘gramophone dances’ to which they invited respectable

American officers who had not yet been repatriated, or were working for

embassies, depots and the like. The American officers Beatrice Brown

danced with were decent, sober and boring, and they conversed respectfully

about English cathedrals. At least they could dance. But they were not

husband material.

It didn’t help that Beatrice had, in her own view, a lumpy figure and a

muddy complexion. The race was to the fair. Another of her contemporaries, Mary de Bunsen, daughter of a senior diplomat, was handicapped both by her parents’ narrow-minded assumption that women’s natural

destiny was marriage as well as by her misfortune in being physically disabled from an attack of childhood polio; she was also short-sighted. Mary sat out dance after dance, struggling to endure until her party finally went home

‘at some unearthly hour’. Her too easy compliance with her parents’ expectations wasted five years of her life: ‘I was far too innocent to recognize this life as the marriage-market which, indeed, it still is, or to realise the fact that with a lame leg and horn-rimmed spectacles I stood no chance in it whatever . . . A debutante born with the proper equipment saw, and still

sees, a very different side of the picture. All it gave me was a hatred of

dance music and a horror of hunt balls.’ In later life Mary overcame her

disabilities to become an accomplished aviator. She never married.

*

The battle for husbands left defeated girls lining the walls of dance halls

across the country, wondering where to go next. Sooner or later, the

Surplus Women had to acknowledge that they were part of a demographic

crisis, and must face the fact that a large proportion of them were not likely to find husbands in this country. Sooner, as it happened, for the war was barely over before concern started to be voiced as to where to put that

surplus. To many of the great and the good, it seemed self-evident that

now was the time for our Empire Overseas to do its bit and take up the

slack. This had, after all, long been the accepted route for debutantes

‘
refuseés
’, who, after failing to find a husband over the course of three or four seasons, used to get packed off on the aptly-named ‘fishing fleet’ to find one in Rawalpindi. The Countess of Dudley wrote promptly to the

Daily Mail
urging us to ‘distribute our material’ among the Colonies. Louise Field, the Hon. Secretary of the National Council of Women’s Emigration Committee, added her voice to the
Times
correspondence columns, with figures demonstrating a total excess of over , men in Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand combined. Public-spirited ladies like
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

these saw the sending of thousands of single women to the far-flung reaches

of Empire as essentially a make-weight, an adjustment of supply to demand.

A
Mail
editorial reacted by urging the government to legislate to prevent ‘too heavy a flow of foreign virgins into the country . . .’ And Dame Mary Scharlieb, responding to the news of the  Census, penned a letter to

the editor of the
Daily Express
recommending that ‘. . . girls who want to Meeting and mating (
Punch
, December ) get married must go to Canada and the Colonies, where the toll of war has

not been as great as it has in this country, and where men want wives . . .’

Not slow to pick up a theme, the lower-class weeklies now started to run

articles for ‘the girl who thinks of emigrating’. In ‘What Australia Wants’

(June ),
Woman’s Weekly
gave practical advice on wages for cooks, waitresses and companion-helps, while not forgetting to emphasise the romantic opportunities: ‘No matter what your work is, there is time for

pleasure, and the pleasures in Australia, though mostly simple ones, are

enjoyable. There are moonlight river trips and rides, impromptu dances etc.’

Many women readers responded. Like Winifred Haward on her slow