IS IT WORTH IT?

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 58, 1 December 1934, Page 17

IS IT WORTH IT?

A Debutante’s £lOOO Season

The London season being now as dead as mutton and respectably interred at Cowes, the 1934 uebutantes (on whom a host of little fortunes has been spent in the last three months) have been let loose, like a flock of pigeons, for a long, long rest (says a writer in the “Daily Mail.”) In the south of France, on the Italian Riviera, in Scotland, in other people’s country houses nearer home, even though they blush at it— in London, they are recovering from the exhaustions of their first season, slowly and painfully, like their fathers’ incomes. This latter end of August—grim weeks of anti-climax for “debs” and their mammas—is the time when hundreds of families ask each other yearly, “I wonder, was it worth it?” If the debutante herself has her doubts as to the wisdom of this strange burst of expenditure, how much more fearfully must her father search his credit and his conscience when all is over! Even the other day a London magistrate, with a young daughter ripening fast for 1935, raised his voice publicly, begging to know if there were jio possible escape. For can there be any justification for draining the family purse and possibly mortgaging the home simply in order to give a girl of 19 six months of laborious pleasure, at the end of which she will emerge with the not very comforting knowledge that in subsequent seasons she will be a back number?

The burden ahead of a debutante’s father is a heavy one—even though he confines himself to only the coming-out dance, quite apart from the season’s other financial calls upon his daughter’s behalf.

Fifty years ago no girl would have breathed a word to tarnish the romantic reputation of her first season. Today they are more outspoken—and, of course, the circumstances are changed. Fifty years ago the number of eligible “buds” was equalled by the eligible young men. There were still sprigs of the nobility who did not have to work for a living; they were—incredible to think of I—anxious for suitable brides. A girl who came out at 17 was most likely married at 18 and a mother at 20.

The cost of her coming-out ball was amply repaid by soon having her so rapidly off the family budget. To-day the engagement announcements following a London season contain few debutantes’ names. The girls on whom anything between £7OO and £lOOO has been spent in a e space of 12 weeks are left feeling a little flat, wondering what they will do next. The expensive launching has been for—what? There are few eligible or willing bachelors, and few girls nowadays want to marry at 19. The best one can say for the business of violently launching a daughter as if she were a Cunarder is that it “makes for trade.” Yet few families, surely, undertake it for purely philanthropic ends. . A debutante of 19 (who would die rather than not be anonymous) the other day poured into my ears the doubt and disappointments that had overtaken her in this last week of August. “It’s not really,” she said, “that I expected to get engaged so soon. I don’t, frankly, want to get married for a year or two yet—which is just as well, considering the dearth of proposals. But what worries me is the terrible flatness of everything now that the season’s all over.

“So much has been spent on this business that we can’t even afford a really decent holiday, and Mummy and I will have to be very economical for a long time. I almost think I shall try to get some sort of job. You can’t hang around indefinitely, branded ‘vintage 1934.’ ”

When I asked her whether she would willingly have forgone the expensive luxury of a coming-out dance and all that goes with it, she hesitated unhappily and said “No.” “It isn’t that I got so much out of it,” she said, “as that it would have been so impossible not to have it. You’ve got to do something, and invite everybody, or you won’t get Invited anywhere yourself. Nobody particularly enjoys it. . . .” The cost of entertaining 500 people (“who have simply got to be asked”) to a dance with champagne supper and buffet is set out here. These are all actual figures, from a West End hotel exceedingly popular as a launching ground for daughters. Champagne supper and buffet .. £625 Band of 10 players 100 Band leader £5 Hire of palms, hydrangeas, etc. 20 Cigarettes 10 £7BO Ten per cent, for tips 78 Total £B5B The lyQudon magistrate may well be apprehensive, for at the end of it all what will he have given his daughter? She will be a little more sophisticated, a little jaded, possibly a little spoilt, certainly more than a little tired, and exactly where she was before. Why not spend the money over two or three good years, giving her a reasonable and leisured introduction to London life, a pleasant knowledge of other places? “Oh, but,” the debutante will say, “you couldn’t possibly do that unless everybody did it.” Yes, but why not all do it?