Glamis Castle, site of a convalescent Christmas in 1914.

Given the air of timelessness that surrounded her until her death seven years ago at 102, it’s hard to imagine England’s venerated Queen Mum before she entered the royal family. But, as a lighthearted adolescent, she sang ’round the piano, danced the Cake Walk, and endured her brothers’s teasing about girlish gluttony. (“Excellent lunch — beefsteak — 3 helps — ham and roley poley. I eat a good deal,” they graffiti’ed in her diary.) No episode better illustrates the warmth and noblesse oblige that motivated her family than the memorable Christmas of 1914, spent at Glamis Castle, their turreted country home in Forfardshire, Scotland, detailed in William Shawcross’s recently published The Queen Mother: The Official Biography:

In late summer and fall, writes Shawcross in his biography of the Queen Mother, “shooting was at the heart of life at Glamis,” parts of which date to the 15th century. Festive parties of 20 or more regularly descended, personal maids and valets in tow, to hunt partridge, grouse, woodcocks and other game. Loading into horse-drawn carts in the morning, they would ride up to the moor for the day, often shooting more than a hundred birds in a single outing.

Not yet wired, the castle was lit by gas jets, lamps and candles in the years before World War I. But legions of servants (including six in the laundry alone), ensured a life of ease and comfort for its denizens and guests. “The maid brings in tea — lights my candles & goes off with my sponge and towels” to prepare the bath, wrote one awed arrival, a new governess. “Arrived there, I find a huge hot bath set — the Bath is enormously deep — a large blanket spread on the ground & beside the bath a carpeted step ladder by which one mounts in order to descend into the Bath.”

Evenings during the hunt season “were also lively” at Glamis, Shawcross recounts. “The Castle was lit by hundreds of candles; there were immense fires; there was dinner in the great dining room, which the twelfth Earl [of Strathmore] had renovated in ‘Jacobean’ style and which boasted an enormous carved sideboard, family portraits and wooden armorial shields illustrating family alliances.” In the drawing room afterward, “the focus of the room was often the piano at which Lady Strathmore or one of her daughters would play in the evenings while the rest of the party gathered around to sing traditional Scottish ballads or popular songs of the day.”

Remarked one guest, there was “no stiffness, no aloofness anywhere, no formality except the beautiful old custom of having the two pipers marching around the table at the close of dinner, followed by a momentary silence as the sound of their bagpipes died away gradually in the distance of the castle. It was all so friendly and so kind … No wonder little Elizabeth came up to me once as my visit was nearing its end and demanded, ‘But why don’t you beg to stay?’”

Elizabeth had four brothers in the service.

Glamis was usually dark at Christmas. December 1914 was the first year in 20 that the family stayed for the holiday, to the delight of 14-year-old Elizabeth. With the shadow of war cast across her country and her family –  her four elder brothers were off soldiering, two of them at the front — perhaps she relished the manor’s cozy familiarity. And she undoubtedly felt needed there, having helped to tend soldiers at one of the two convalescent hospitals established by her energetic mother.

By summer of 1914, Glamis was devoted to the all-out effort to defeat the Kaiser. “[T]he billiard table was stacked with thick shirts and socks, mufflers, belts and sheepskins to be made into coats and painted with a waterproofing varnish” to plug a shortfall in supplies of greatcoats, Shawcross writes. Lord Strathmore, Elizabeth’s father, turned his attentions to territorial defence, instructing local farmers on preparations for invasion.

Perhaps most important, Glamis, “like many great homes … was at once converted for hospital use,” and commended especially for its care of shellshocked patients, writes Shawcross. Elizabeth’s “task was generally to make the soldiers feel at home. She did rounds of the ward, talked to them all, made friends with many and went to the village shop to arrange large quantities of vital purchases — Woodbines, Gold Flack and Navy Cut tobacco.”

Like many great homes, Glamis was converted for hospital use.

The teen-aged Elizabeth’s ease and curiosity endeared her to soldiers from all classes, homesick for towns in Britain and Commonwealth countries alike. Arriving with horrible stories and frightening wounds — to the stomach, the lungs, the “nerves” — the soldiers were lovingly tended at Glamis, only to be sent back to the front as soon as they recovered. A new lorryful of broken men arrived for every group that left.

It was in this atmosphere that Elizabeth “jumped up in delight & kissed her Mother exuberantly” on learning that Christmas would be celebrated at Glamis, with a diminished family of five, absent its soldier sons. With 20 wounded soldiers in their care, as Shawcross describes it,

family and staff at Glamis did their best to bring good cheer to the soldiers, setting up an immense tree in the crypt and distributing presents. ”The fun was fast and furious,’ according to Elizabeth. Everyone ate too much and she and [younger brother] David danced wildly with the soldiers in the ward. All in all, she said, it was ‘a dandy Xmas, you bet your bottom dollar’.”

Christmas candlelight photo by GearedBull.

Related Posts

• England has Coldest Winter in 31 Years!
• Explore England’s England: A Ruined Castle?
• Bright Young Things: The Making of Bruno Hat
• AngloFiles TGIF: Mrs. Cornelys Brings Nightclubbing to Georgian London
• Anglophile in Exile: Explore History by Following the Blue Plaques

Bruno Hat: Still Life With Pears, 1929

Abstracts for Distracted Aristocrats

Whiskey flowed and banter flew on the evening of July 23, 1929, as England’s young and chic descended on a gray-brick Westminster mansion abutting narrow Buckingham Street. Approach to Hat read the catalogue handed out at the door. Inside, rooms were hung with the most daring sort of modern art — vaguely cubist compositions painted on canvas or cork, some of them framed in heavy rope. They whispered “Picasso” but were signed “Bruno Hat.”

London’s smart young socialites and their literary compatriots — collectively known as “Bright Young Things” — were more accustomed to wild soirees than seemingly sedate art shows like this one for “England’s first abstract painter.” But, in pampered lives like theirs, always on the verge of Existential Boredom, any party would do, so long as the hosts were of the Right Sort. Their antics helped hide the impending world  collapse behind a veil of champagne bubbles and cigarette smoke.

10 Buckingham Street, site of the must-see 1930 Bruno Hat exhibition.

At the BYTs’ more typical galas, costumes were de rigueur, writes Mary Lovell in The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family: “A party where guests attended in ordinary evening clothes was just plain unsmart.” Clowns, Russia, book subjects and scanty clothing all provided inspiration for costume galas. In addition, “there were ‘baby parties’ at which guests arrived dressed as infants in prams or on hired donkeys, some even accompanied by reluctant nannies borrowed for the evening,” recalls Jessica Mitford in Hons and Rebels, a memoir. “There were treasure-hunts in which each guest was given a list of items he must retrieve: a lamppost, a St. Bernard dog, a policeman, a duck from St. James’s Park. The newspapers dubbed the participants the Bright Young People, and railed at these sons and daughters of the rich for fiddling while Rome burned.”

Rome itself was a theme, in fact, as was Greece. Hat-show hostess Diana Mitford Guinness dressed for one bash as Nero’s queen, Poppaea, in a daring bustier. Her friend, Brian Howard – another of Mr. Hat’s backers — hosted a BYOB bacchanalia in 1929 he dubbed the “Great Urban Dionysia.”

The Hat exhibition was just one of several soirées Diana hosted with her husband, brewery heir Bryan Guinness. Like the glittering young couple themselves, their parties left their mark. An 1860s-themed Guinness gala, for example, inspired Evelyn Waugh to write Vile Bodies, a satire that pinned and labeled the Bright Young Things like butterflies on display — irridescent, but doomed.

For this night, though, Waugh was discoursing on art, under the playfully punny pen-name, “A.R. de T.” “In overcoming for the first time what the artist himself admits as his extraordinary shyness, and opening her house to those who wish to see the works of Bruno Hat, Mrs.Guinness is attempting to do a service less to him than to the artistic public,” Mr. de T. enthused in the catalogue’s introduction to the previously unknown Mr. Hat.

Given boldface names like Mitford, Guinness and Waugh, and the posh Guinness digs as backdrop, news correspondents descended to cover the new artistic phenomenon. For an obscure, impoverished artist of Polish — or was it German — extraction (no one seemed to know), the mustachioed Mr. Hat was making a splash on the London scene.

But was there more to the scene than his refracted oils revealed?

Our Hosts

It was the “nuptials of the year” when, in January 1929,  the Hon. Diana Mitford married Bryan Guinness at fashionable St. Margaret’s church in Westminster. Guinness was not merely handsome and rich, but clever, friendly and poetically inclined, and he danced like a dream. He was clearly besotted with his 18-year-old wife, a celebrated beauty of their age and a lively wit. Diana was almost as delighted with Bryan as she was thrilled to have escaped the sheltered life of a country peer’s daughter.

Her parents, David Freeman-Mitford, Lord Redesdale, and his wife, Sydney, had frowned on the engagement, mostly on account of Diana’s youth. But their frugal tendencies, born partly of necessity, also contrasted sharply with the Guinnesses’ free-spending ways, as Diana’s sister Jessica recalled in Hons and Rebels. “We gathered that Muv’s main objection centred on the fact that Bryan was ’so frightfully rich’,” Jessica wrote.

Indeed, Diana went from home-baked bread and home-sewn frocks to a lavish wardrobe of Paris couture, purchased right after her wedding. She briefly played at tracking expenses in a ledger from her mother, leather-bound “with my initials in gold,” she said. But the practice horrified her new mother-in-law, the eccentric Lady Evelyn. ‘How barbarous of Bryan,’ she exclaimed, assuming it had been her son’s idea. Diana “never thereafter returned to this barbarous occupation,” she admitted, even when she no longer had Guinness millions to splash around.

Spring found the newlyweds ensconced in their first home, near St. James Park, with a skittish dog named Rubbish. The dog was a gift from the bride’s father; the house was a gift from the groom’s. While “modest” by Guinness standards, 10 Buckingham Street (now Buckingham Place) wasn’t cheap: Its yearly property taxes alone, at £910, surpassed the income of most of Diana and Bryan’s friends, Lovell notes. It had been assembled from several townhouses in the early 1900s by renowned architect Edwin Lutyens, famed designer of the Thiepval memorial and other prestigious commissions. (A prior owner was Muriel, Countess de la Warr, descended from Delaware’s founding family.)

Lady Evelyn, product of an American textile fortune, was that rare mother who worried that her son was underspending his allowance while at university. Like their house, most of the young couple’s furniture came from his family. As Lady Evelyn’s decorating tastes favored kitschy medieval flourishes and ersatz “aging” (in her own manors, she served meals on pewter and encouraged smoky fires to appropriately blacken the panelling), she generously provided heavy items like an austere refectory table for the dining room. Pewter jugs and Jacobean glasses served as ornament. Only in subsequent homes would Diana exercise her flair for airy, pastel rooms and light, Edwardian furnishings.

"It" girl, Diana Mitford Guinness.

Diana “was now a Beauty with a capital B. Photographs of her stared from the covers of the society weeklies with great regularity,” recalled her sister, Jessica. Jessica and the other cloistered younger sisters pined for their playful sibling but mostly followed her activities through the society pages. They feared Diana had become affected, but her friends considered her anything but.

More than lace, central heat and baronial homes, what Diana relished in her new life was the largesse she could offer the smart crowd of friends she’d made with her brother, Tom, an Etonian, and elder sister, Nancy, a sharp-tongued writer. Though less learned than her Oxford-educated cohort, Diana outdid them in warmth, curiosity and joie de vivre. She was the life of the party and knew how to have fun in the daytime, too.

These overlapping cliques of aesthetes, aristocrats and intellectuals included the esteemed Bloomsbury writer Lytton Strachey, theater folk of the Noel Coward ilk, and early jet-setters, like American-born Emerald Cunard, of the cruise-line dynasty. Admirers like Waugh would come sit on her bed to chat in the mornings while Diana sipped tea and handled correspondence, and then accompany her to lunch and outings. She and Bryan were regulars at the Savoy’s restaurant during his law school lunch breaks, where pals likewise joined them. Dinner, too, was a social event, often followed by theatre, if no party was on tap.

It was amidst this gay whirlwind that Bruno Hat emerged.

The Scene: Why you wish you’d been there

“Artistically, we are incurably unpunctual,” archly wrote A.R. de T., slyly chiding the English for lagging Europe in its embrace of modernists like Picasso, Gris and de Chirico. Perhaps the effort to redress this unpunctuality inspired the swooning reception for Hat’s work, or perhaps it was the bold-faced names and tony surroundings that stirred the press to raptures. Waugh did his best to stoke the passion, with high-toned commentary that called Hat “the first signal of the coming world movement towards the creation of Pure Form.”

A writer for the Sunday Dispatch hailed the impending show and described its inception. Bryan Guinness had discovered  Hat, she explained, near Clymping, Sussex, in a village shop. “[E]ntering by mistake the wrong room, he found a number of very good paintings in the modern French style. The paintings were done by the son of the old lady who keeps the store. … I have seen one or two and they are surprisingly clever.” His absent father was German, she reported, but Hat had never travelled, so his work was wholly untutored and original.

Bruno Hat: Adoration of the Magi, 1929

Hat collector Strachey

“[T] our joy not only all our friends but also the critics came in droves,” Diana recalled in her memoir, A Life of Contrasts. “Photographers elbowed their way in with immense cameras and were firmly directed by Brian away from [Hat] and persuaded to photograph the art.” Cocktails were being served when, along with the literati and glitterati, reporters from the Dispatch and its competition descended upon the show. Milling with guests about the Guinnesses’ pompously “period” rooms, they pondered some 20 abstracts with titles seemingly torn straight from the National Gallery’s collection: Still Life with Pears, Adoration of the Magi. “Lytton Strachey bought a picture,” the Magi, “to please me, and I stuck a red spot on it,” Diana wrote in Contrasts.

The only off note was Hat himself, who proved gruff and uncommunicative. As The Talk of London column put it, “Mr. Hat sat in a wheeled chair, a morose, taciturn figure, with a marked German accent, a moustache worthy of Harry Tate and smoked glasses. In one hand he held a thin cheroot, in the other a glass of iced coffee, and as he sipped and puffed he grumbled about the colour of the walls and about the publicity he was receiving.”

The work was well received, nevertheless, which amused the hosts, because Bruno Hat was a fraud.

For those in search of perpetual entertainment, pranks are a good standby. While Guinness was touted for “discovering” Hat, it was the other Brian, Brian Howard (note the initials), who hatched the idea and brought the works to life in the studio of his friend, painter John Banting. It was Diana’s brother Tom who donned the wig and whiskers for the show, affecting that mittel-European growl. The “bath chair” he sat in had been “a mad idea,” Diana later decided, for, if  Hat was “a cripple … how was that it he had managed to paint all the large pictures which covered the walls?”

The hoax made all the papers. Among the cognoscenti who had fallen for it, there appeared to be no hard feelings. (Many claimed later to have been in on the joke, as Strachey clearly was.) “An excellent Hat trick,” chuckled the Daily Express.

The Scene: Why you’re glad you missed it

The sparkle of Hat-induced laughter couldn’t last long for the Bright Young Things, as Waugh foreshadowed in Vile Bodies. Like a knife slashing through canvas, doubt, betrayal and a world at war destroyed their bright veneer, and death, dissipation and divorce all too quickly ruptured their playful bubble.

The “death” of Bruno Hat, for starters, also put paid to the artistic dreams of his supposed benefactor, Brian Howard. Seeing Hat’s work treated as no more than a prank, “I believe in his heart of hearts Brian was very disappointed,” Diana wrote. “He had hoped for a Hollywood-style miracle, and that he would be ‘discovered’ by an astonished art world as a master.”

But Howard, a noted dilettante, lacked the diligence to yoke his artistic talents. Though he took credit for the Hat oeuvre, the paintings most likely owed their finesse to the far more skilled Banting, Howard’s friend and a modernist painter of some renown (who sometimes frames his own canvasses in rope). “In later life,” according to the Leicester Galleries essay on Bruno Hat, “Banting played down his part in [the paintings'] execution. In 1964 he was to write: ‘as there was not quite enough work to show, I filled in the empty spaces in Brian’s unfinished canvases.’”

More than paintings testified to the sadly unfulfilled promise of young Howard, who dared to live about as openly homosexual a life as his era would tolerate. (The bond with Banting was platonic.) Writer and critic V.S. Pritchett recalled him as dangerous and brilliant, “a plaguing character of wasted talent.”

“It is hard to say why he achieved nothing at all,” Diana mused of Howard. “I suppose he wanted the palm without the dust, but more disastrously he despised what was within his range. He might have made a success in journalism, or even fashion, but he aspired to greatness and thought such things beneath him. He wanted to be Rilke, or Nietzsche, or Picasso.” Instead, depression, drugs and discontent plagued him until his death from an overdose in 1958, the faithful Banting at his side.

Bryan and Diana, too, unknowingly faced dark times. Though they joyously parented two cherubic boys in short order, Diana soon after committed marital hara-kiri by falling in love with  a charismatic  politician, Oswald Mosley. Mosley,  a handsome cad, hewed to a warped set of ethics that said he could sleep with Diana but never leave his wife. (Never mind that he had slept with both his wife’s sisters.) Diana didn’t care. She leased a small house in which to receive her lover and sought divorce from Bryan, who, though humiliated, proved surprisingly sportsmanlike. (He later remarried.)

Diana’s commitment to Mosley consigned her forever to the fringes of society, less for deserting Bryan than for loyally following Mosley, politically as well as personally. Founder of the British Union of Fascists, he was an ardent fan of Hitler and Mussolini. After he was unexpectedly widowed, he and Diana married — in the Goebbels family’s parlor.

Heil! Tom and sister Diana (Unity?) Mitford in Germany, 1930s

The British upper classes, and Diana’s family in particular, were rife with Nazi sympathies before the war. But Mosley took matters too far by creating the British Union of Fascists, complete with goose-stepping, black-shirted goons. When war broke out, he and Diana were locked up as “politicals.” Interned at the grim Holloway Prison, Diana characteristically introduced as much party atmosphere as grim conditions allowed. She shared with her mostly working-class fellow inmates the occasional creature comforts — like a Victrola and occasional food packets — afforded her through the efforts of well-placed friends and relatives (including Winston Churchill).

Years later, one of the wardresses remarked, “We’ve never had such laughs since Lady Mosley left.”

The Mosleys lived their later years in comfort near Paris, where they socialized frequently with those even more notorious Nazi sympathizers — Wallis Simpson and the former King Edward VIII, known since his abdication as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Diana referred to him jocularly as “the Dook.”

Of “Bruno Hat” himself — or, more accurately, his bewigged portrayer — there is even less to report: Despite admiring Nazi Germany, where he spent happy sojourns throughout the 1930s, handsome Tom Mitford joined his country’s army when war  began. In 1944, having fought in Italy and North Africa, he sought a posting in the East because, he told a friend, “he does not wish to go to Germany killing German civilians whom he likes. He prefers to kill Japanese whom he does not like.”

Assigned a staff position on arrival in Burma, he quickly maneuvered to join a fighting unit as brigade major. In March 1945, he took several bullets when his Devonshire Regiment came under fire. One of them, in his spine, left him paralyzed. Surgery was planned but, before the month was out, Mitford was dead from pneumonia.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, by Mary Lovell.

Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History

Essay on Bruno Hat from Peter Nahum At The Leicester Galleries.

A Life of Contrasts, by Diana Mitford.

Hons and Rebels, by Jessica Mitford.

Photo of Bruno Hat, "Still Life With Pears," courtesy of Peter Nahum At The Leicester Galleries.
Photos of 10 Buckingham Place courtesy of The Lord Taverners, a current occupant.

Related Posts

• Anglophile in Exile: Explore History by Following the Blue Plaques
• Anglophile in Exile: Interactive Literary London
• Anglophile Pictures – London Through the Ages: Pictures from LIFE Magazine
• England has Coldest Winter in 31 Years!
• A Pint of Bitter: MPs in the dock, a journalist questioned – and Gordon’s brown sugar

Helping the High-Born Get Down

It’s February 27, 1770. England is riding high in the reign of George III, and Viennese-born courtesan and entrepreneur Teresa Cornelys is teaching Londoners how to party.

Streaming between heavy drapes on the windows of Cornelys’s rented mansion in Soho Square, the light of nearly 4,000 candles drips like pearls on the streets below. Thousands of commoners have lined the roadway for a glimpse of her socially connected – but still paying – guests. Some 800 of what she airily calls the “principal nobility and gentry of this kingdom” hold tickets for a masquerade ball due to start inside at nine o’clock.

Soho Square was getting tatty when Mrs. Cornelys moved in, but the Fashionable Set would "slum" to attend her gigs.

Arriving in carriages or sedan chairs carried by footmen, these bejeweled, bewigged and elaborately costumed “subscribers” jostle their way inside. Space quickly grows scarce in reception rooms clad in mirrors, satin and gilt, filled with tables bearing sweetmeats prepared by the Prince of Wales’s chef and the music of a hundred hired musicians. Dancing, cards and gossip will last well into the night.

The monthly parties held by Cornelys at Carlisle House are hot, crowded and pricey. Given the throngs of gapers, hecklers and pickpockets outside, they’re also hard to reach and even dangerous to depart from. Complaining about them in local gossip sheets — the Gawker.com of their day — has become a new form of chic.

Still, Society can’t stay away, and tonight is no different.

Our Hostess

Mrs. Cornelys knew P.R., getting her parties written up in the 1770s versions of Gawker.com.

With its two million residents, Georgian London found itself Europe’s largest city in the 1760s, morphing from a cloistered society of coffeehouses and salons into a red-hot center of European culture. If England’s throbbing capital was a forerunner of go-go 1980s New York, then Teresa Cornelys was its Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager combined and her paid “entertainments” the Studio 54 of their day.

Like the flashy disco’s founders, she offered stodgy mercantilists a sexy new venue and stoked an obsession with exclusivity — all with similarly sensational, and scandalous, results. A master of public relations despite her poor grasp of English, Cornelys blanketed London papers with news of her musicales and supper balls and the swells who attended.

For all her successes, though, “Mrs.” Cornelys (a name she borrowed from a Dutch lover) hid precarious finances and a scandalous past behind her satin window drapes.

Though married more than once she was a single mother when she arrived in London in her late 30s, trailing a string of aliases and lovers across western Europe. (Casanova fathered one of her children.) Despite grand ambitions, she quickly failed as a concert singer, falling back on her talent for stagecraft, instead, to remake herself as a social impresario. If her parties failed, she undoubtedly feared, only dire choices stood between her and penury.

Horace Walpole: "At first, they scandalised ..."

In 1761, Cornelys leased the onetime home of the Earls of Carlisle for £180 a year, feeding the London papers with every detail of thousands of pounds she lavished on upgrades. The gambit worked: Before the decade was out, she was mistress of three dozen servants and owner of a country estate. Influential pundit Horace Walpole described her expanded townhouse as “a fairy palace,” and wrote of her parties: “At first they scandalized, but soon drew in both righteous and ungodly.”

In a pattern that looks all too familiar today, however, Cornelys was highly leveraged and prone to cash shortfalls. She soon earned her a reputation for stiffing contractors. As her career wore on, she came to know all too well the inside of London’s bankruptcy courts.

Toward her titled and affluent guests, however, she turned only her gayest, most obsequious smiles.

The Scene: Why you wish you’d been there

–18^th-c ballad on a masked ball

Former home of the Earls of Carlisle, today the site of St. Patrick's church, Teresa Cornelys's Soho Square mansion was the Studio 54 of its day.

Cornelys instructed guests to proffer their tickets in the parlour before proceeding to the “Blue-room,” then the “Red-room,” the “Tea-room,” “Stage-room,” and so on. Her main chambers, “The Gallery” and “China Room,” she lined with mirrors and Doric columns around windows swathed in blue and yellow satin bunting under a ceiling adorned with stuccoed designs.

The guests entered decorously enough for the evening’s masquerade: “Lady Waldegrave” was there with “Lady Pembroke, the Duchess of Hamilton, Mrs. Crewe, Mrs. Hodges, Lady Almeria Carpenter, &c.,” we read in the 1895 account, Soho and Its Associations, by Edward F. Rimbault.

Sir W.W. Wynne came as a Druid, and Sir R. Phillips disguised himself as a chimney sweep. A more daring guest dressed as Adam, “in flesh-coloured silk, with an apron of fig-leaves.” Miss Monckton, “daughter to Lord Galloway, appeared in the character of an Indian Sultana … The seams of her habit were embroidered with precious stones.” There was a Friar, a Quack Doctor and a Vestal Virgin. The Duke of Devonshire, for all that, came as Himself.

Things heated up with the arrival the French “mechanician” Joseph Merlin, servant to the Spanish Ambassador residing across the square. He arrived bearing a fiddle and his latest invention, a “pair of skaites, contrived to run on wheels.”

The technology was still in beta, however: “Not having provided the means of retarding his velocity” — i.e. brakes — “he impelled himself against a mirror of more than five hundred pounds value, dashed it to atoms, broke his instrument to pieces, and wounded himself most severely,” Rimbault phlegmatically recounts.

The Scene: Why you’re glad you missed it

–from the ballad

Future novelist Fanny Burney, still a wide-eyed ingénue, had expected much of her first evening at Carlisle House, given all she’d heard about the exalted company and “splendour of the illuminations and embellishments.” But alas, she lamented, “The rooms were so full and so hot that nobody attempted to dance.”

Worse than the heat may have been the smell. Bathing was still viewed as an indulgence, if not an outright risk, in 18th-century England. Yet the slew of powders and potions used to mask the body’s natural bouquet may have hurt more than they helped.

A letter to the Public Advertiser described a miasma at Carlisle House combining “the Effluvia of Essence Bottles, perfumed Heads and Handkerchiefs, together with all the natural and acquired odors issuing in warm Weather and a great Crowd from fine Ladies and Gentlemen who fare sumptuously every day.”

For those who nevertheless retained an appetite, Cornelys banquet tables sometimes failed to satisfy. “The feast of the night was calculated rather to gratify the eye than the stomach,” griped one attendee.

If the crush of humanity indoors failed to quash partygoers’ enthusiasm, the gauntlet in the streets outside might have. Ogling the rich was a pasttime of poor teenaged servant girls and their swains — nearly 10 percent of the city’s populace — who were prone to wandering the streets at night looking for excitement. Gawkers would shine  lanterns directly into coaches, sometimes even breaking the window glass, to get a better look at those inside. Political agitators weren’t above chalking their slogans on carriage sides.

In classified ads, Cornelys practically begged the drivers of hackney cabs to use a side gate so ladies in their carried chairs could go directly to her entrance and descend unmolested. Meanwhile, “pickpockets appear to have been very busy,” Rimbault records, with “Ladies’ pockets cut off their dresses in great numbers” and rifled gentlemen’s purses piling up in corners.

Not everyone visited Carlisle House twice, even with free admission. “We hear that two Great Personages were complimented with two tickets for Monday night’s masquerade, which they very politely returned,” one newspaper sniggered.

The Aftermath

As Limelight followed Studio 54, Cornelys’s showy success gave rise to competition. Business rivals blew the whistle on her for hosting operas without an official license, while contractors hauled her into court over unpaid bills. But it was the potent weapon of Moralism that finally brought her down. In 1772, writes Rimbault,

Mrs. Cornelys had to appear before the magistrate’s bench at Bow Street to answer the charge, ‘That she does keep and maintain a common disorderly house, and did permit and suffer divrse loose, idle, and disorderly persons, as well men as women, to be, and remain during the whole night, rioting and otherwise misbehaving themselves…

In other words, the posh parties were getting out of hand. Walpole gleefully reported the verdict:  “[T]he Bench of Justices, less soothable by music than Orpheus’s beasts, have pronounced against her.” Mrs. Cornelys declared the first of several bankruptcies in 1772. When the contents of Carlisle House were auctioned off later that year, admission was sold.

In the years that followed, Cornelys tried to revive her party business, but she had lost the froth of novelty. Subscriptions dwindled as her fashionable patrons drifted to fresher, more of-the-moment clubs, like Almack’s (pictured at top). In what seems to have been a last-ditch inspiration, in 1795, Cornelys opened a tea house featuring “asses’ milk.” The results were all that you’d expect of such a venture.

She died at 74, alone, in debtors’ prison.

SOURCES

FOR MORE on Georgian lifestyles

Not-So-Nice Work: Prostitution in 18th-Century London, at AngloFiles.

London Debating Societies, 1776-1799, Donna T. Andrew

Related Posts

• England has Coldest Winter in 31 Years!
• Explore England’s England: A Ruined Castle?
• AngloFiles TGIF: The Queen Mum’s Scottish Wartime Christmas
• Bright Young Things: The Making of Bruno Hat
• Anglophile in Exile: Explore History by Following the Blue Plaques

photo by misocrazy from Flickr

A Royal Engagement: Lady Diana’s Debut and the Dress that Launched Her

“Wait till you get an eyeful of this.”

It was a far from typical greeting that Charles, Prince of Wales, gave the waiting crowd of oglers and photographers as he unfolded from his car in the dusk of March 9, 1981, outside London’s palatial Goldsmiths’ Hall. Then again, the occasion was a far from typical evening, even for the heir to England’s throne. The “eyeful” in question, shyly emerging after him, was Charles’s new fiancée, “Shy Di” Spencer. The event, a black-tie benefit for the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, was their first official date as a soon-to-be-married couple.

A recitation of poetry by Princess Grace of Monaco, the ethereal former actress known as Grace Kelly, provided the evening’s nominal attraction. A more intimate dinner at Buckingham Palace was to follow. But what the crowd outside and flush opera lovers inside truly hankered for was a close-up of the 19-year-old ingénue, descendant of kings, who had captured the world’s imagination.

Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. photo by Matt From London, on Flickr

When she straightened, gasps of awe issued from the sidelines. Flashbulbs surrounded her in a fiery ring of scrutiny. Inwardly, Diana withered, but she did her best to face the glare, offering greetings and demure smiles throughout the event – a glittering promise of England’s royal future. A darker prophesy, though, would come later that evening, in Di’s lone moment alone with Princess Grace.

Still, the mood was light as the royal couple entered the reception hall, Charles chuckling at the hubbub over his betrothed’s outfit. “Have all the fashion writers finished?” asked the Prince Royal.

“Oh, no, Sir,” he might have been warned. “They have only just begun.”

The Scene: Why You Wish You’d Been There

Since 1327, by royal appointment, the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths has regulated England’s craft and trading in gold. Its City of London headquarters provided a suitably grand setting for a fundraiser-recital headlined by Princess Grace, for which some 300 guests had paid the equivalent of $110 each.

With Diana, the question of what she wore only later became a matter of whom she wore. On this night, her dress came from a married pair of couturiers known chiefly to a small coterie of titled ladies, Elizabeth and David Emanuel. Diana had only recently asked them to create her wedding gown.

“When the engagement was announced, what we saw was a demure Sloane Ranger, all pie-crust collars, floral skirts and cardigans,” David Emanuel later told the Daily Mail of his most famous client. So, when Diana breezed into their studio just a few days before the Goldsmiths gala — too late to tailor a dress — she may have surprised the designers by selecting a strapless black number off the rack, never mind its being a size or two too small.

When she almost fell out of it on unfolding from the car, “It knocked the Budget off the front page of every newspaper,” Elizabeth Emanuel drily recalled.

For jewels, Diana wore diamonds– heavy pendant earrings and a necklace – borrowed from her mother, Lady Shand Kidd. Prince Charles wore a pink rose boutonniere, not that anyone noticed.

Diana, rapt, watched Princess Grace perform in Goldsmiths' Hall. [Photo by Matt From London

At the palace later on, she continued to charm reporters and guests, who were equally dazzled by her engagement ring, a six-carat sapphire surrounded by 18 diamonds. She let the women ogle it, permitted a young man to kiss her hand (“You’ll never live this down,” she teased), and complained coquettishly of “too many formal dinners” at her new Buckingham Palace digs.

Things began to get out of hand, though, as a progressively tightening scrum grew around her. It was with a sense of relief that Diana would be pulled away for a fateful encounter with her idol, Grace of Monaco.

The Scene: Why You’re Glad You Missed It

The awed reception outside Goldsmiths was actually not the first shock occasioned by The Dress.

Soon after the announcement of her engagement on February 3, Diana had been relocated to the royal residence and left mostly to her own devices in a quiet suite off a long corridor, often dining solo. It was a lonely time for a naturally chummy girl who knew no one at the palace and was beginning to harbor vague suspicions about her fiancé’s “friendship” with Lady Camilla Parker-Bowles.

Diana was therefore happily anticipating a rare few hours with her betrothed when she swirled into his study like an excited schoolgirl that afternoon to show off her get-up. Charles’s first response was silence. Then, “Royals only wear black for funerals.”

Change, he instructed. There was nothing to be done for it, replied Diana, stung. She had no back-up, so she must wear the dress or skip the gala.

Given this start to the evening and Diana’s shaky confidence overall, it wasn’t surprising that she was nearing nervous collapse by the time Grace, sensing her distress, pulled her into a Buckingham Palace ladies’ lounge. Gwen Robyns, Grace’s aide, was with them; she later described how Diana began to unburden herself onto the understanding princess while touching up her make-up in the mirror.

“Her breasts were on display and she was quite a wreck,” said Robyns. Lamenting the too-small dress, the relentless paparazzi, and the total loss of her privacy, Diana burst into tears. Grace responded sympathetically, recounted Majesty magazine, folding an arm about her. Then “she cupped Diana’s face in her hands. ‘Don’t worry, dear,’ she said with a gentle smile. ‘You see, it‘ll only get worse.’”

Diana remembered the debut as “a horrendous occasion.”

The Aftermath

Later that spring, Diana was asked by a friendly matron presented to her at a garden party if she was enjoying her engagement. “Oh, no!” she responded readily, according to New York Magazine, “I absolutely hate the engagement. But I shall adore being married to Charles.”

She was wrong, of course. By the eve of her July 29 wedding, with 2,500 guests descending, an anticipated television audience of millions, and England awash in “royal wedding” tchotchkes, Diana was awash in doubt. Maybe she could back out, she suggested in a huddle with her sisters, Jane and Sarah.

“Too late, Duch,” they cheerfully replied, using a family nickname, “Your face is already on the tea towels.”

How many of those tea towels must have outlasted the marriage. The Waleses’ wouldn’t be the only pairing to fail. Elizabeth and David Emanuel, creators of the fairy tale gown and veil, split in 1990.

And the former Grace Kelly, who had stoically survived alcoholism, her daughters’ catastrophic romances, and her own husband’s philandering, died in an auto accident in September, 1982, less than two years after meeting the future English princess. Diana alone represented the royal family at her funeral.

SOURCES

Daily Mail Weekend Magazine, July 29, 2006

The Royals, by Kitty Kelley

Royalty magazine, “What Grace Told Diana”

Related Posts

• Royal Round Up 12-29-09: William in the Rough; The Queen’s Christmas Message; More Windsor Goodies

Mandy Katz lives in a neighborhood called “English Village,” in Maryland, but inhabits a truly English village in her mind, the source of AngloFiles, her blog.

It wasn’t always like that. As a New Jersey teenager, Mandy discovered

Freddie Laker, the Eurailpass and backpacking. She managed to visit several countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East by the time she turned 24, and spent a year in Hong Kong and China as a freelance writer.

All without setting foot on English soil.

Having dabbled in Hebrew, Japanese and German, and actually learned French and Mandarin, Mandy reasoned, why visit a country where people speak just a mangled version of her native tongue?

Things changed, though, after she married the son of an ex-Londoner. Her mother-in-law may have cleaved to American wonders like minivans and the Redskins, but Mandy went the other way, after family visits took her to Frome and Bromsgrove, Dudley and Sudbury-on-Thames. When business led to London in 1999, she homesteaded with her husband and three young kids in a Hyde Park flat for two months and never got over leaving.

Now every trip she takes seems to go a U.K. airport. Armchair travel and web-surfing, too, lead Mandy to all things British – news, art, books and food. It’s all fodder for Anglofiles and her @Anglofilia tweets.

Yes, Mandy’s a fan, but a bemused critic, too. In short, she is …

When not immersed in AngloFiles, Mandy writes regularly for the New York Times and is a senior editor at Moment magazine.

Random Posts

• High Speed Trains Debut in Britain
• Trip to England 2009 – Day Four – Leaving London for Salisbury and Shaftesbury
• Dispatches from the South: Breakfast
• Fawlty Towers has been Remastered for its 30th Anniversary
• Dispatches from the North: Retrospective Part IV