A Year in the Life of Downton Abbey: Seasonal Celebrations, Traditions, and Recipes (16 page)

There was one event in the lives of young upper-class girls in the early 1920s that was anticipated for many months with feverish excitement. It signified their overnight transformation from child to young woman – the moment, in short, when they exited the schoolroom and entered the ballroom.

Not their wedding, but their presentation at court, marking them out as a debutante for the London Season. For Lady Rose MacClare, cousin of Robert and the charge of the Granthams while her parents are abroad, it is a chance to buy new dresses, make new friends and, hopefully, pick up a handsome suitor or two.

The tradition of introducing men and women to the monarch by way of validating their aristocratic status had been going on since Elizabeth I, but the debutante season took on its formal shape under King George III (1760–1820), when young girls were first recorded as being presented during his wife Queen Charlotte’s birthday ball. The ball itself died when the King did and was only revived in 1925 as a charitable event (and led to the myth of debs curtseying to a giant birthday cake – in fact, they curtseyed to the president of the ball, who stood beside the cake). But the ritual of introducing young women to the monarch as a way of launching their debut in society (and again on their marriage, so you were effectively presented twice) continued. Under Queen Victoria, the debutantes would even receive a Certificate of Presentation, providing sure evidence of their credentials.

Having had a hiatus during the First World War, the debutante season proper had only returned the year before Rose’s coming out. There had been no court presentations at all between 1915 and 1919, and then there were so many applicants that they were done in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, a great disappointment to many, who would have preferred the splendour of being inside the throne room. They were only felt to have returned to ‘normal’ in 1922, so for Rose, coming out a year later, the event enjoyed something of the glamour of novelty as well as of tradition. Rose is, says Julian, ‘a child of the new world – she doesn’t really remember a time before the war’. This means that Rose likes to do things differently; she is less captivated by tradition and revels in opportunities to shock the older generations, particularly her mother. But in some respects, she is happy to conform to the expectations of her family and class; when it comes to the aristocratic system for sending its people onwards, she boards its train.

Debutantes preparing to be presented to Queen Victoria.

In the two hundred years or so since court presentations had formally taken place – and more informally for another two hundred years before that – little had changed. Violet and Cora, both presented to Queen Victoria, would have had almost exactly the same experience. Cora’s season took place in 1890 – ‘I’d only been in the schoolroom a few months before,’ she says, ‘but my mother was eager.’ Martha Levinson, who had brought Cora to London in 1890, would have been keen to take advantage of the marriageable prospects of a young debutante in London, so that she could marry her daughter’s money to a titled family, and in this she was quite tenacious. A great many American mothers felt the same way and achieved the same success – between 1870 and 1914, there were more than one hundred marriages of British peers’ sons to young, moneyed American daughters.

In many ways, it was easier to enter into high society in England than in America. An application would be made to the Lord Chamberlain’s office at St James’s Palace often by the young girl’s mother but equally could be anyone else, so long as she had been presented herself at least three years before – and, if approved, she would receive her magic ticket: a presentation card. If you could find an impoverished peeress who had been presented herself, she could be persuaded, for a few pounds, to do the same for your daughter.

THE COUNTESS OF GRANTHAM
(Cora)

Advertisement for Reville Ltd, the approved dressmakers for court presentations.

Cora and Rose.

With this firmly in hand, preparations for the day could begin, sometimes several months before. Magazines –
The Girl’s Realm, The Queen, The Lady
– ran articles in the weeks running up to May and June (when court presentations took place), advising the debs and their mothers on what to expect, how to behave and, crucially, what was needed for their wardrobe.

There were royal guidelines on this, issued by the palace’s own favourite dressmakers, Reville Ltd. Under Queen Victoria, the young women were instructed to wear three plumes of ostrich feathers in their hair (representing the Prince of Wales), two yards of tulle or lace falling down the back of the hair and a four foot-long train. The dress itself, which was always white, had to be low in the bodice and short-sleeved, with long white gloves, unless one was in mourning, in which case black or lavender gloves were acceptable.

After the First World War, the feathers remained in place, despite the fact that they were quite hard to fix to bobbed hair, but the train was shortened to ‘18 inches from the heel’. This was probably done partly as a nod to post-war economy, but largely because it sped up the curtseying debs. Having to gather up an enormous train, usually with the help of a courtier standing by, and sidle backwards away from the monarch, was, understandably, both slow and tricky to do. The dress itself, after the war, did not have to be floor-length (or pure white) and Rose is seen taking full advantage of this to wear a dress that was, in shape, only fashionable for a brief few months in 1923, with a shorter skirt and extra-wide hips.

No make-up would be worn, except perhaps a tiny bit of powder to stop shiny noses and rosebud-coloured lipsalve, although they might have had a manicure, ‘so a girl could look groomed rather than wanton’, explains the social historian Lucinda Gosling in her book
Debutantes and the London Season.
Rose might, however, have splashed on a bit of scent. Expert Lizzie Ostrom says she would have ‘made a beeline for the ultimate flapper fragrance purveyors, Caron, whose 1922 release Nuit de Noël came in a black flask-shaped bottle with a band round the rim designed to look like the headgear of a Bright Young Thing. It had a mossy, heady scent, garlanded with deep roses.’

There were just three or four court presentations in the year, with one specially devoted to ladies connected to the diplomatic service. Under Queen Victoria, the presentations took place from three o’clock in the afternoon and lasted several hours, with no refreshments available for the wilting debs, nor even a loo – just a chamber pot behind a screen. King Edward VII – always a man who liked a good party – moved the presentations to the evening, where they stayed.

The number of requests, there could be hundreds, meant there would be an enormous and slow queue building up outside the palace. Debs were eager to be one of the first in the room, as it was not unheard of for the monarch to tire of the event and pass the baton to one of their less glamorous relatives. It was also far more fun to hang around in the throne room after being presented to watch the other girls – there was bound to be at least one misjudged curtsey to provide amusement.

Lady Rose MacClare

Before the women and their sponsors even got to Buckingham Palace, they would spend a few hours sitting in a long line of cars down the Mall – that marvellous route laid out for processions between Admiralty Arch (leading to Trafalgar Square) and the enormous black iron gates of the palace. Crowds would gather to watch the debs, with newsreel crews and press photographers among them. In 1927
Bystander
reported that some from the throng even stood on the footboards of the cars to get a better view: ‘More venturesome souls, apparently thinking this waiting is for their especial benefit, actually open the doors.’

Once the debs and their sponsors had assembled in the presence chamber, an ante-room to the throne room, they would nervously wait their turn. At the signal to go in, the girl would enter with her sponsor and hand her presentation card to the Lord Chamberlain. As former deb Loelia Ponsonby recalls, it was ‘… over in a flash. One reached the head of the queue, handed one’s invitation to a splendid official, he shouted aloud one’s name and tossed the card into a rather common-looking little wastepaper basket, one advanced along the red carpet, stopped and made two curtsies to the King and Queen who were sitting on a low dais surrounded by numerous relations and then walked on.’

Loelia was presented to King George V and Queen Mary, as was Rose. The Queen was a popular figure in her day, having led by example in encouraging much of the women’s war effort by being seen to visit the wounded and dying soldiers and leading a drive to send parcels to those at the front – all conducted with a perfectly stiff-upper-lip manner, even as tragedy raged all around.