Noble Ambitions by Adrian Tinniswood

Author:Adrian Tinniswood [Tinniswood, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

One advantage of having a coming-out dance in the country was that it kept down the costs, especially if, as was often the case, parents could spread those costs by sharing the event with another couple. In the 1950s the minimum outlay for a coming-out dance was around £1,000, around £25,000 in today’s money. A ball in one of the big London hotels could easily cost four times that amount, sometimes much, much more. But against that, there were formidable logistics involved in using one’s own country house or borrowing someone else’s for the night. It wasn’t only the need to arrange accommodation: there was also the struggle involved in luring guests to a remote location. Textile magnate Miki Sekers had a large and attractive Georgian country house of his own, Rosehill, which would have been perfect for his daughter’s dance: it even had its own theatre with an interior designed by family friend Oliver Messel. But Rosehill was in Cumberland, and Cumberland, Sekers decided, was “too far away for the young.”17 For his daughter Christine’s coming out in 1961, he and his wife, Agota, made use of the Pavilion at Syon Park in Middlesex, lent by the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland. Less than ten miles from central London, it was a happy compromise between town and country.

Then there were marquees to rent, waiters and waitresses to hire, reliable caterers to find. One young woman who ran a freelance catering business in the early 1960s recalled her first job, a ball at an Elizabethan country house in Leicestershire. “The kitchen, we reckoned, was half a mile in length, and two of us were supposed to cook for three hundred people on a stove that hadn’t been lit for twenty-two years.”18 A local photographer would be needed on the night to record the fun, at around twenty-five guineas. One, two, or even three dance bands were required, and they had to be up to the almost impossible task of keeping several generations happy at the same time. Despite the advent of rock and roll, Bert Ambrose and His Orchestra was still going strong after a career which began during the First World War; Edmundo Ros and his Latin American sound were popular after Ros was invited to play at Windsor Castle by George VI; Bobby Harvey and his orchestra were known to make any dance a lively affair, perhaps because of their habit of helping themselves liberally to the free drinks.

Top of the private dance pops, though, was Tommy Kinsman and His Orchestra, famed as the “Deb’s Delight Band.” Kinsman charged at least £100, and perhaps several times that amount, depending on the distance his band had to travel and the number of musicians involved. He was said to have asked for more than £1,000 to bring his band from London to play at a twenty-first birthday party at Powerscourt House in County Wicklow in 1962. Local dance bands were much cheaper, of course. But there was often a reason for that.

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