Bridgerton, the popular show streaming on Netflix, takes place in London in 1813 and centers around a family’s efforts to get their daughters properly married. The first step in that process is to have them presented to society at the Queen Charlotte Ball, founded by Charlotte who was married in 1761 at the age of seventeen to the British monarch, King George III, six hours after she met him for the first time. Known as a patron of orphanages, in 1809, Charlotte founded a hospital and the Ball was established to provide funding for that institution.
The tradition lasted until late in the 20th Century and even in war-ravaged London, young ladies fought to be accepted so that they could curtsy to the reigning monarch as he or she stood beside an enormous birthday cake in honor of Queen Charlotte.
On March 18, 1943, my mother came out at the Queen Charlotte Ball. Life in London during the war was full of ironic twists. The day before, on her seventeenth birthday, my mother had taken a job in the Naval Division of MI5 as a decoding agent for which she was required to sign the Official Secrets Act.
Here’s my mother talking about the evening of the ball:
The QC Hospital was founded for wayward girls and foundlings. All the debutantes in their innocence (one hopes) were dancing to benefit the fallen girls and the bastards. Even then I thought it was pretty funny.
My best friend, Bee and I were to come out together and her mother, Lady Mowbray, was giving a dinner for us because Mummy and Daddy didn’t have the money to do that, and Daddy was very pinchpenny. I got chicken pox very early on and recovered and then typical Bee, she caught it from me and never made the dance. So poor Lady Mowbray was giving a dinner party for me.
I wore a dress designed by Molyneux, the famous Parisian designer who moved his firm to London during the war.
Suddenly, my mother spied my father in the balcony, sitting next to his date, an older girl in a slinky black dress. He had pursued my mother the previous fall, but when it was clear that her parents disapproved of this soldier, twelve years older than their daughter and an American to boot, he’d given up. As he reported home to his parents in Connecticut, “they wouldn’t even let me take her out to the British museum.”
My mother wasted no time. She marched up to the balcony and tapped him on the shoulder. I can just imagine the tilt in her eyebrows as she wondered aloud why he had given up his pursuit. Abashed, he escorted her back down to whirl her around the dance floor, which as my mother said, he did appallingly badly. Here was this elderly man with all these young girls. He was in uniform of course. He was a first leftenant in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps. He returned to his date in the balcony, and I went back to my dancing with all the callow youths of the time.
But as she told me later, this chance meeting rekindled his interest and by the time he shipped out to North Africa with his regiment two months later, they were secretly engaged.
Coming from Regal House, Fall 2022:
Daughter of Spies:
Wartime Secrets, Family Lies
#elizabethwinthrop, #elizabethwinthropalsop, #memoirs, #daughterofspies
