Yes, civility has passed from the scene... 
and the young folk I see today cannot pour piss from a boot, much less know any history or manners!
Posted on 03/17/2008 5:11:57 PM PDT by forkinsocket
Half a century ago this week, a strange ceremony ended. I was among the last 400 girls arriving at Buckingham Palace to make our formal curtseys to the Queen.
It was the usual wild March weather, cold winds ruffling our full-skirted silk dresses, our mothers in their furs and our moustached fathers wore top hats as we lined up by the railings, gaped at by waiting crowds kept at a discreet distance as if in an Ealing comedy.
The scene had been made poignant by the recent unexpected announcement from the Palace that these would be the last presentations. We were a soon-to-be extinguished species, the last of the English debutantes.
How had we got there in the first place? What was the selection process for what Jessica Mitford, most reluctant of debs, described as "the specific, upper-class version of a puberty rite"?
By and large it was family tradition. Most debutantes were presented by their mothers, who themselves had been presented. In the circles in which I grew up, curtseying to the Queen was not a matter for discussion, it was just a thing you did.
Why did it stop so suddenly in 1958?
The end was a symptom and a symbol of wide changes in Britain in the mid-Fifties. The debacle of Suez in 1956 followed by Anthony Eden's resignation spelt the end of Britain's imperialist ambitions. Almost overnight Britain's potency had dwindled and it had an obvious effect on the morale of the people who considered themselves the ruling classes.
Look Back in Anger, the Angry Young Men: criticism of a Britain seen as increasingly moribund and ineffective was becoming vociferous.
Criticism of the Queen herself - up to then off limits - became personal and cruel in a period that saw the death of deference. The most damaging attack on the complacency of the Royal Family was made in 1957 by Lord Altrincham, who singled out the iniquity of Palace presentation of the debs, an embarrassing ritual which should have been "quietly discontinued in 1945", making way for a "truly classless court".
The Queen, refusing to be bullied, held out for a further year of presentations, until Palace advisers persuaded her that the debs made a convenient public sacrifice.
The system itself was also becoming open to abuse, as well-born ladies charged large fees to bring out girls whose credentials were not always of the highest. The most notorious of these was Lady St John of Bletso, a Lady Bracknell figure who would launch several debutantes at once. By 1958 the exclusivity of the Season was eroded. In the immortal words of Princess Margaret, "We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London was getting in."
Their curtseys must have given them away.
We were trained to make the curtsey, which was by no means a perfunctory bob but a low, sweeping curtsey. The left knee needed to be locked behind the right, allowing a graceful descent with head erect, hands by your side. We learned the technique from Madame Vacani, a dancing teacher who held a kind of royal warrant for the curtsey. A Vacani curtsey was part of the mystique.
However hard we practised, the experience was nerve-racking. Our hearts thumped as we assembled on little stiff gilt chairs in an antechamber, waiting to be called into the ballroom where the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh sat on twin thrones under a crimson canopy adapted from the Imperial shamiana, redolent of the then relatively recent British rule in India.
One curtsey to the Queen, then three sidesteps and another deep curtsey to Prince Philip. What if you wobbled? What if your heel caught in your petticoat and ripped it, the disaster that overtook a friend of mine? How should you respond if a bored Prince Philip winked?
The ceremony, or something like it, had been going for 200 years. The curtsey ritual went back to the reign of George III, when daughters of the court circle who reached marriageable age were presented to Queen Charlotte by their mothers. This signified their entrée on to the marriage market.
Through the 19th and early 20th centuries the system grew and solidified. Presentation was followed by the London "Season" in which potential suitors could eye up the girls newly released into society. It was a means of meeting only the "right" people, a system of exclusion, linking like with like with the sovereign's blessing, a means to centralise wealth and influence.
After the Lord Chamberlain's announcement that curtseys would be ceasing after 1958, there was a record number of applications for the final presentations, like a wave of panic buying. One mother was said to have presented all four of her daughters. Under-age girls were brought out of boarding school to curtsey.
My own presentation day was one of three that week, in which 1,400 girls in total curtseyed to their monarch in a ceremony whose semi-sacred overtones took me back to confirmation services at Wycombe Abbey School. After it was over, the debutantes assembled in the Green Dining Room to giggle, chatter and munch the celebrated chocolate cake provided by the Palace. We were still greedy teenagers in a country in which rationing had ended only in 1954.
Presentation was for many of us just the prelude to a non-stop summer of lunch parties, cocktail parties, dances and country house weekends. Am I imagining it or did the news of the end of presentations give a special aura of defiance to that Season? There were certainly a lot of terrific parties in 1958.
In the weeks before our debut, our mothers had already been working hard exchanging lists of eligible men, eliminating those reputed to be NSIT (Not Safe in Taxis), MTF (Must Touch Flesh) or VVSITPQ (Very Very Safe in Taxis Probably Queer).
The most spectacular event was Queen Charlotte's Birthday Ball, always held in Grosvenor House, for which the debutantes all dressed in virgin white and drew in a huge white cake, towards which we made another of our hallmark curtseys.
An acerbic commentator described Queen Charlotte's Ball as a mixture of the Nuremberg Rallies and the Dance of the Fairies in In the Hall of the Mountain King.
Of course it had to finish. The social scene that I remember was too class-divisive, too silly, too naive to survive into the satirical Sixties. In the era of such programmes as That Was the Week That Was, having curtseyed to the Queen was not something to admit to. While working for The Guardian in the 1960s, I kept it quiet.
The Season itself gradually dwindled when the Queen had in effect withdrawn her support. Once that central, almost mystic, ceremony that connected the monarch and the daughters of the upper classes ended, the Season lost its raison d'être. The number of coming-out parties, in their hundreds in their heyday, reduced to a mere trickle.
Queen Charlotte's Birthday Ball was abandoned in 1976 after reports of drug-taking and loucheness. The Pill put paid to the virginity, which had once been a debutante's greatest selling point.
Was anything lost? As I remember it, the presentation ceremony had a mad, sad beauty. It was the prime example of elaborate social rituals that lingered through the postwar years. Underlying it were concepts of elegance, good manners, belief in protocol, love and respect for Queen and country, qualities which before long appeared impossibly old-fashioned.
The year 1958 was in fact the watershed between the formal worlds of our parents and grandparents and the brasher, more freewheeling and flexible society that we all inhabit now.
Absolute beginners.
Speaking as one on the outside, and thus maybe wrong, British society seems far from improved by the changes.
Sadly, a lost world, when people dressed up and had manners.
Sadder still to look around at young people on the streets today, trying to look skankier by the minute.
Hmmm...I wouldn’t mind being in 1958 again....
There were debutantes in America in those days, too, modeled after the English system. The young ladies were presented, not to the Queen, but to “Society,” at Coming Out Parties, during the Season. It was a social rite de passage.
They were held in New York, Boston, and the other Social Register cities, and by imitation in other cities as well, marking the transition from childhood to future eligibility for marriage.
I remember going to several seasons of coming out parties in the 50s, and I still have a picture of my younger cousin, with her brother next to her in evening dress, photographed before the start of her coming out party.
I was somewhat on the fringe of all that, but found it fascinating. In Boston, the dances at Miss Souther’s and at the Brookline Country Club, were part of the whole business, as well as the parties at people’s houses.
Sadly, a lost world, when people dressed up and had manners.
##
Amen to that!
I remember much better days here in the USA at that time, as well.
The 1950s were a much better time for society, with the exception of racial segregation.
Sadder still to look around at young people on the streets today, trying to look skankier by the minute.
I'll see your comments and raise ya....I remember the days when families dined...not just sat and shoveled food into their mouths. [sigh]
We have debutantes today, my daughter is in the program. It starts when they are 10 through NCL. she was President of her class last year (rotates each year).
They do a lot of good charity works and when the day comes, we have her debutante ball.
Double Amen!!
People dressed up for Mass, going downtown, going out to dinner, jeans were only worn during the day when working on something dirty, calling your friends parents by Mr. and Mrs., moms didn't look like floozies because they dressed as MOMS, teachers dressed correctly and so did students. sigh, sigh, sigh.
Some deb balls are still held, I think mainly in the East and South.
Young people? More like those 50-year old women who think they are twenty-one and SQUEEZE into a spaghetti-stap shirt and tight jeans.
Definitely in the South.
Yes, civility has passed from the scene... and the young folk I see today cannot pour piss from a boot, much less know any history or manners!
Yes, I’m sure that’s so, in fact I’ve been to a few coming out parties of my friends’ children in recent years—partly because we have no Queen with the authority to put an end to these doings.
But things have changed and grown more informal. And many years ago I noticed an increasing emphasis on the “charity” aspect of many society affairs, which is good in itself, but also was meant to deflect outsider criticism of selfish privilege. It’s as much as to say: “We are not gathered here to have a good time and display our wealth and privilege and family background and designer dresses, but to help the poor [fill in the blanks].
Not that anyone would ever have admitted it. And what’s the harm in having a good time and preserving custom and introducing suitable young people to one another while raising money for a good cause?
A case of be careful what you wish for. Classless is right!
Gosh! It seems only yesterday . . .
Sigh. Those were the days, my friends.
Of which there were many in the English upper classes...:^)
Translation: the ruder, cruder, more amoral and soul-less society that we all inhabit now.
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