The last of the debs

[couch]

This thread probably belongs in the Retrocentrics room, off the main Lounge club room, but as it may have more general appeal I'll risk it here.

One of the many pleasures from my fast-fading June in London was a modest exhibition at Kensington Palace called "The Last Curtsey," based around the excellent book by Fiona MacCarthy. The book, like the exhibition, chronicles the final 1958 "London Season" in which well-bred young women were introduced into society, at the center of which was their presentation at court (making their curtsey to the Queen).

Don't fear that this book is twee or fluffy--it's fine social history. MacCarthy is an intelligent biographer (Byron, Eric Gill, William Morris) and winner of the Wolfson History Prize, who just happens to have been one of this last cohort of debs. The achievements of her later career--like those of her fellow debs who became IRA militants or the Begum Aga Khan--embody the changes that were beginning to transform society when she was coming out.

The details on dress, social rituals, the scramble to keep up appearances in a time of austerity, the hilarious codes used by mothers and chaperones to characterize potential escorts or "deb's delights"--NSIT for Not Safe in Taxis, MTF for Must Touch Flesh, VVSIT for Very Very Safe in Taxis (=gay)--all add up to a fascinating picture that often reads like a novel. Many of the events and customs had remained unchanged, except for evolutions in form, since the eighteenth century, so MacCarthy leavens her tale with historical anecdotes and digressions on origins and sources.

Since much of the Season's dress for men as well as women was prescribed and often formal, the Kensington exhibition presented in some detail what was involved in the dress and toilette for each occasion. Contrasted with this were samples of the new youth-oriented fashions just coming into vogue with the advent of rock and roll, pointing up the tension, not to say cognitive dissonance, between the two cultures often inhabited by the same young men and women. The quality of the objects shown was mixed; some were outstanding examples and others not so fine, but the whole was greater than the sum.

One point MacCarthy makes that strikes me as both apt and sympathetic is her conjecture that the popularity of Fleming's Bond books arose in part from their hero's embodying an attractive evolution of the ideals of the young officer class that seemed better suited to a world in which neither the British military nor the British administrative service retained their unquestioned dominion over much of the globe. A questionable move in the book's final chapter is MacCarthy's interpretation of Princess Diana's emergence and subsequent public life as a parallel to those of the debs. There are real similarities, but one feels the effort to help the reader inhabit the world of 1958 by relating it to a more familiar story strains a bit, and risks a sentimentality that she successfully eschews throughout the rest of the book. But this is a quibble.

Perhaps other members saw the show or have read the book, and might care to comment. The book is available through Amazon's U.S. site as well as its U.K. one.

[storeynicholas]

A great review, couch. It sounds a good read. I know what you mean by the dragging in of the recent late Princess - I often think that references to Princess Charlotte Augusta (only legitimate child of the Prince Regent) would be more telling - died young in childbirth to at least equivalent national mourning, in the days before all the news coverage.
NJS