The Perfect Summer Read online

  Praise for The Perfect Summer:

  “Sharp and rangy . . . Nicolson sets a lively, theatrical pace and makes good use of recurring characters. . . . [There are] many glittering pieces in Nicolson

  The New York Times Book Review

  “Edward VII had died the previous year, and England was peeking out from under the Victorian hem. . . . Nicolson captures it all, down to the frantic silliness and boredom of the upper classes; she has woven the details of those last days before the Great War into an unforgettable literary history.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “As page-turning as a novel.”

  —Joanna Trollope, author of Marrying the Mistress and Next of Kin

  “Brilliant . . . lucid, entertaining, and fascinating.”

  —William Boyd, author of Any Human Heart and Restless

  “A book brimming with delectable information and little-known facts . . . With a real eye for telling details, Nicolson manages to describe every stratum of English society. . . . Where Nicolson is especially good, however, is with the royals and the aristocracy, whose country estates, salons, entertainments, and affairs—discreet and indiscreet—she describes with accuracy and humor.”

  —The Providence Journal

  “The blistering-hot summer of 1911 . . . saw the beginnings of the slide from arrogant innocence, for Britons of all classes, that would carry them all three years later into the exercise in mutual mass murder we call World War I. . . . Ms. Nicolson deftly picks a cast of characters that represents each stratum of society and how those issues broiled along with the weather.”

  —The Washington Times

  “Sparkling social history . . . breezy yet informative . . . Juliet Nicolson has created the perfect beach reading for Anglophiles.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Evocative, gossipy . . . profoundly moving . . . Pour yourself some champagne and revel in the sybaritic trivia that Ms. Nicolson lays out so invitingly before us.

  New York Sun

  “Meticulous . . . Nicolson beautifully captures [the] fever pitch, when ‘it was as if time was running out.’ . . . The Perfect Summer transcends national boundaries: readers don’t have to be British to appreciate her talent. Through rich sensory detail and captivating language, Nicolson’s prose has the power to transport anyone into 1911 England.” —The Harvard Book Review

  “Stunning . . . utterly compelling.” —Joanna Lumley

  “A hugely interesting portrait of a society teetering on a precipice both nationally and internationally.” —The Guardian (UK)

  “Deliciously evocative . . . Juliet Nicolson has fashioned for us a treasure-trove, doubly perfect for winter.”

  —Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and

  the Madman and Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded

  “Rich and marvelously researched.” —The Sunday Telegraph (UK)

  “An intimate portrait of England’s elite that spares no details of their dress, manners, and social habits . . . Bathed in the soft glow of nostalgia, it is a love letter to a lost past that luxuriates in the pleasures of what is presented as a simpler, more stable time. —The Seattle Times

  “A charming bit of social history about how the rich enjoyed themselves that final hot summer before World War I.” —Chicago Tribune

  “A stunning piece of social history . . . What makes Juliet Nicolson’s work outstanding are the portraits it renders of how both the high and the low lived at this turning point in English history.” —The Buffalo News

  “Juliet Nicolson’s brief, pre-World War I narrative reads much like a memoir, and through a prism of nostalgia tempered with suggestions of political turbulence and sexual dalliance, her book succeeds, ultimately emerging as a snapshot of a culture in transition.” —California Literary Review

  “A peach of a book . . . full of good things, sparkling, elegant, and often funny.”

  —Literary Review (UK)

  “Juliet Nicolson transports us back to the enchanted and enchanting summer of 1911. She guides us through its four months in company with some of the most delightful people imaginable. It is a wonderful and poignant tour that proved to be a farewell appearance to their world.”

  —David Fromkin, author of Europe’s Last Summer:

  Who Started the Great War in 1914?

  “Detail makes Juliet Nicolson’s portrait of a single Edwardian year such a fascinating read. . . . I felt transported into what Nicolson felicitously describes as ‘one of the high sunlit meadows of English history.’”

  —The Mail on Sunday (UK)

  “A fast-paced commemorative of the social antics of the English upper class as well as the financial woes of dock workers and household servants . . . A highly entertaining and knowledgeable introduction to a world that was changed forever by World War I.”

  —Hannah Pakula, author of An Uncommon Woman—The Empress

  Frederick: Daughter of QueenVictoria, Wife of the

  Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm

  The Perfect Summer

  The Perfect Summer

  England 1911,

  Just Before the Storm

  JULIET NICOLSON

  Copyright © 2006 by Juliet Nicolson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by John Murray (Publishers), a division of Hodder Headline

  Quotation from A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman is reproduced by kind permission of the Society of Authors (as the Literary Representative of the Estate of A. E. Housman). Quotation from The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling is reproduced by kind permission of A. P. Watt Ltd. (on behalf of The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty).

  Quotations from Royal Archives material: p. 19 RA/GV/CC/25/100 7 May “I am dressed in grey”; p. 19 RA/GV/CC/25/100 7 May “tiresome trousseau”; p. 20 RA/GV/CC/25/100 7 May “the fashions of the season . . . so hideous”; p. 34 RA/GV/QMD/1911 15 May “Most amusing”; p. 38 RA/GV/QMD/1911 19 May “It began at 10 and was over at 1”; p. 38 RA/GV/QMD/1911 20 May “a great success”; p. 188 RA/GV/QMD/1911 9 August “heat perfectly awful”; p. 190 RA/GV/QMD/1911 10 August “At 11:00 a.m. we heard.”

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nicolson, Juliet.

  The perfect summer : England 1911, just before the storm / Juliet Nicolson.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: London : John Murray, 2006.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-10: 0-8021-4367-8

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4367-9

  1. Great Britain—Social life and customs—20th century. 2. Great Britain—History—George V, 1910–1936. 3. Social classes—Great Britain—History—20th century. 4. Great Britain—Social conditions—20th century. 5. Social structure—Great Britain—20th Century. I. Title.

  DA566.4.N54 2007

  942.083—dc22 2006048854

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West
>
  www.groveatlantic.com

  08 09 10 11 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Clemmie and Flora

  Contents

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 The Summer of 1911

  2 Early May

  3 Late May

  4 Early June

  5 Late June

  6 Early July

  7 Late July

  8 Early August

  9 Late August

  10 Early September

  Epilogue

  Dramatis personae

  Bibliography

  Illustrations

  1. Junction of Holborn and Kingsway in London

  2. Queen Mary out on a drive in Hyde Park with her daughter

  3. The Memorial to Queen Victoria

  4 F.E. Smith

  5. George V and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany

  6. Winston Churchill

  7. The entrance to the Savoy Hotel in 1911

  8. Three women at a garden party

  9. Lady Diana Manners and guests at the Savoy Ball on 17 May 1911

  10. Advertisement for beauty treatments from 1911

  11. The Marchioness of Ripon with her husband, chauffeur and butler

  12. Sergei Diaghilev, creative force behind the Ballets Russes

  13. Vaslav Nijinsky, the greatest ballet dancer of all time

  14. Brian Calkin, chorister at St Paul’s

  15. Brian’s special entry ticket to Westminster Abbey

  16. Peers leaving the Abbey after the Coronation service

  17. Rupert Brooke

  18. Rudyard Kipling

  19. Siegfried Sassoon

  20. A footman at Blenheim

  21. Beer kegs at Chatsworth

  22. Dewar’s advertisement

  23. Ben Tillett of the National Transport Workers’ Federation

  24. Herbert Henry Asquith

  25. Strike action at Pink’s jam factory

  26. Augustus John, painter

  27. A.L. Rowse, writer

  28. Fashionable promenaders taking the sea air

  29. Swimmers at Scarborough

  30. View of Brighton

  31. Elinor Glyn, romantic novelist

  32. Schoolchildren inspired by strike fever

  31. Lady Diana Manners, photograph taken by her brother

  34. Dress design by Lady Diana Manners

  35. T.W. Burgess swimming the Channel on 6 September 1911

  The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce illustrations: Plates 1, 5, 8, 16 and 23, Getty Images; 2, 3, 4, 10, 22 and 28, The Illustrated London News Picture Library; 6, Topfoto/Public Record Office/HIP; 17, Topfoto; 7, The Savoy; 9, 33 and 34, Artemis Cooper; 11 and 13,V&AImages/ Victoria and Albert Museum; 12 and 19, Bettmann/CORBIS; 14 and 15, Calkin Family; 18, E.O. Hoppé/CORBIS; 20 and 21, Adam Nicolson; 24, 26 and 32, Hulton-Deutsch Collection/ CORBIS; 25,TUCLibrary Collections; 27, The Royal Institution of Cornwall; 29, The National Archives (ref.: COPY 1/559); 35: The National Archives (ref.: COPY 1/560); 30, NRM/Science & Society Picture Library; 31, The de László Foundation.

  Acknowledgements

  I am extremely grateful to Her Majesty The Queen for permission to quote from HM Queen Mary’s Diaries of 911 and from HM Queen Mary’s letters to her Aunt Augusta, Princess Augusta Caroline, Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

  Miss Pamela Clark, the Registrar at the Royal Archives, has been most helpful.

  I owe a huge thank-you to the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, who has allowed me unlimited access to the Chatsworth Archive, and also to Charles Noble, Keeper of the Collection, and to Helen Marchant and Andrew Peppitt, who have willingly answered my many questions.

  I am indebted to Artemis Cooper for her memories of her grandmother, Lady Diana Manners, and for the loan of the photographs from her private family albums. I am most grateful to Richard Shone for allowing me to quote from his private letters from Duncan Grant, and also to Kevin Brownlow, who illuminated 911 for me through his marvellous archive of film.

  I would like to thank Paul Calkin, and particularly Ian Calkin, for their generosity in sharing their heroic relation Brian Calkin’s papers and photographs with me, and also for permission to quote in full the last letter Brian wrote.

  The staff of the London Library have, as always, been extremely helpful, as have the staff at the British Newspaper Library at Colindale and the staff at the Churchill Library in Cambridge, who gave me the opportunity to read the Churchill papers concerning the summer of 1911.

  I am grateful for the picture research of Clemency Humphries in the V&A Images Department, and also for the research of Heather Vickers. I thank Luci Gosling and Marcelle Adamson at the Illustrated London News Picture Library for their enthusiastic assistance.

  I would like to thank Christine Coates, the Trades Union Congress Library Collections librarian, for all her help, and Susan Scott at the Savoy Hotel archives for her interest and support. I would also like to thank the staff at the Royal Opera House Archives for the chance to see the Marchioness of Ripon’s albums and the Royal Opera House’s collection of ballet and opera pro-grammes from 1911.

  During the writing of this book, I have been given an amazing amount of advice, encouragement, clarification of facts, and guidance on fashion, and have been told some fascinating contemporary stories. Among those to whom I owe so many thanks are Patricia Anker, Lady Anunziata Asquith, Antony Beevor, Georgie Boothby, Susan Boyd, William Boyd, Charlie Boxer, Piers Brendon, Aly Brown, Adam Chadwick (Curator MCC at Lord’s Cricket Ground), Catrine Clay, Caroline Clifton Mogg, PedroDa Costa, Sophie Dundas, Susannah Fiennes, Lady Antonia Fraser (for tellingme about the distant rumble), Lord Glenconner, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, John Graham at Tatler, Christopher Hawtree, Alexandra Hayward, Lucy Johnston (Curator in the Fashion and Textile department of the V&A Museum), Sandra de László, Katie Law, the late Patrick Lichfield, James MacmillanScott, Philip Marsden, Brian Masters, Rebecca Nicolson, John Julius Norwich, Mollie Norwich, Harold Pinter, Paul Raben, Sarah Raven, Hon. Lady Roberts, Julia Samuel, the staff at John Sandoe, Rebecca Servito, Jane Shilling, Foni Shann, Suzanne Sullivan, Kathleen Tessaro, HenryWyndham, RachelWyndham, Philip Ziegler, and especially my late, much-loved, father Nigel Nicolson.

  I consider myself most fortunate in my agent Ed Victor, who understood the point from the very beginning and has shepherded me through the process of writing my first book with such care. I would also like to thank Philippa Harrison for her invaluable comments and Maggie Phillips, Hitesh Shah and Linda Van at Ed Victor’s office.

  At John Murray I would like to thank Roland Philipps, my editor Gordon Wise, and Cathy Benwell for their wonderful enthusiasm and commitment, and also Nikki Barrow, James Spackman and Caroline Westmore for their energetic support. Thanks are due to Douglas Matthews too, for his superb work on the index.

  At Grove/Atlantic I have been blessed with the perception and commitment of my editor Joan Bingham and the indefatigable enthusiasm of Elizabeth Johnson.

  I would like to thank Charles Anson for his loving patience and sustaining encouragement even when absorption in the book threatened to remove me entirely from everyday life.

  Clementine Macmillan-Scott and her assistant Flora MacmillanScott have been model researchers and have never complained once how the demands of the book have consumed the attentions of their mother. The book is for them with my deep love.

  Above all I would like to thank my brother Adam, whose unflagging wisdom, generous sharing of his time, and belief in the book and in me have been more precious than I can begin to quantify.

  Introduction

  This is a biography of a summer, a particularly lovely English summer, for some the most perfect of the twentieth century.

  THE SEASON FROM May to September 1911 was one of the high sunlit meadows of English history. It was a time when England – rich, happy, self-indulgent and at least slightly decadent – felt mo
st contentedly itself. And yet the exuberance and self-congratulatory spirit of those few months was in many ways illusory. Osbert Sitwell, friend of the Prime Minister’s wife Margot Asquith, and one of Society’s most glamorous escorts, observed some time later that ‘an air of gaiety, unusual in northern climates, prevailed. Music flowed with the lightness and flash of water under the striped awnings and from the balconies; while beyond the open illuminated windows in the rooms, the young men about to be slaughtered, feasted, unconscious of all but the moment.’

  During the long hot summer of 2003 I had been reading, for the first time in many years, L.P. Hartley’s wonderful novel of class conflict and heated adolescence, The Go-Between, and I began to wonder whether there was a real English summer like that – and whether I could write about it in a way that would bring the reality of that half-forgotten time to life. I wanted to evoke the full vivid richness of how it smelt, looked, sounded, tasted and felt to be alive in England during the months of such a summer.

  I began with the weather itself. The almost uninterrupted sunshine of 1911 classified the year as one of the hottest of the twentieth century and all previous records were broken when in the middle of August the temperature hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The summer itself suggested my title, but the closer I looked, the more I realised the title could be misleading: ‘perfect’ maybe, but for whom?

  The English are famously bad at dealing with high temperatures, and for those alive in the summer of 1911, even the rich, conditions became intolerable. Just as the petals of an English rose in June prepare to fall at the very moment when the flower is at its loveliest, so the apparently flawless beauty of the summer weather wilted in its own heat. A succession of cloudless days had given people confidence in an unbroken pattern of continuing sunshine. Yet there were unmistakable signs of perfection overreaching itself, as the rumble of thunder and several dramatic storms interrupted the sunny constancy of those months.

  And as the unpredictability of the summer weather unfolded, so the country was brought to a near-standstill by industrial strikes and the breadth of the chasm between the privileged and the disadvantaged became ever more obvious. It was a summer when, as the Countess of Fingall put it, ‘We danced on the edge of an abyss.’There was a sense of urgency about that summer. Socialites crammed in their gaiety as intensively as the poor made their grievances apparent. It was as if time was running out.