High jinks and junketings

Late August, 1911, and sitting languidly in the medieval garden of a country house, neither society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell nor her guests "...could hope to capture and hold the precious, elusive evanescence of an English summer's day for ever."

So writes Juliet Nicolson in "The Perfect Summer", her portrait of that summer, in which she has captured perfectly a mood and a time. Following the events of that May to September, when temperatures remained at record levels, but when the storm clouds of war were yet gathering, this book presents a wonderfully detailed account of the social history of a nation, seen through the eyes (and diaries) of a compelling range of people from Queen Mary to a butler, a choirboy and a union leader.

While the idle aristocracy amused themselves with eight course dinner parties at which menus might be "inscribed on the shiny surface of a water-lily leaf or on the sail of a miniature boat", and dancers at the Savoy, that summer's 'in' place to be, were sprayed with ozone from iced cylinders to cool them in the intense heat - The Times ran daily reports on "Deaths from the heat" - so the country's poor were living in appalling conditions, there were strikes at the dockyards, on the railways and in London's factories, and the great divide between upper and lower classes was decidedly marked. 

Ladies were known to consult Mrs. Eric Pritchard's guide to fashion, "The Cult of Chiffon" and would "retire to their bedrooms to change into floaty tea-gowns because, as Mrs. Pritchard advised, 'when the tea urn sings at five o'clock we can don these garments of poetical beauty'." [Naturally such practices take place daily chez Cornflower.]

While staff positions were becoming obsolete due to technological advances, the gripes which people aired in letters to the newspapers were familiar: the erosion of the language, the frequency with which holidays were taken: too many people constantly on the move, the bad behaviour of the young. H.G. Wells referred to Queen Victoria as having "like a great paperweight sat on men's minds and when she was removed their ideas began to blow about all over the place haphazardly". With the death of Victoria's son, Edward in the previous year and the accession of King George V and Queen Mary, a new era had begun, and through - essentially - the minutiae of daily life for a cross-section of the population, Juliet Nicolson has written a superb and fascinating picture of those times.

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Related reading:

1939:The Last Season by Anne de Courcy

Speaking for Themselves:The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill

A Circle of Sisters by Judith Flanders

Society's Queen: Edith, Marchioness of Londonderry, by Anne de Courcy

Comments

[peg]

Thank you for showing and telling us about "The Perfect Summer". Do you have to stand with your back to the wardrobe and push to get all that 'puffiness' confined! Perhaps the tea gowns are made of sturdier material during these cool bleak months of winter!
Is that the book we might win? It is beautiful!

[Elizabeth]

Gorgeous entry Karen. *Perfect Summer* came into my local library recently and immediately disappeared! (Really disappeared - they can't find it).I think I'll have to buy it.

[Nan]

I really want to read this book, and the Churchill letters. Very nice posting.

[Elaine]

I am reading this at the moment, lovely book. Love the pics on your post