Ah! – those wonderful parties in town, Season after Season, when we danced until dawn – those long summer afternoons, when we sauntered through the gardens of the great houses that entertained us in those days…

J B Priestley (1894–1984)

Her Ladyship will start by not beating about the bush. For many years – over 150 years, at a conservative estimate – the Season existed to give aristocratic young ladies the opportunity to ally themselves to suitable young men. Yes, girls were presented at court; yes, they went to balls and dinner dances, Royal Ascot and Goodwood; yes, they wore gorgeous dresses and partied till four in the morning, but really what they were doing was looking for husbands.

The idea of girls being presented to royalty to mark their ‘coming out’ into Society at the age of seventeen or eighteen was inaugurated in 1780, when George III gave a ball to celebrate the birthday of his wife, Queen Charlotte, and to raise funds for the London hospital to be founded in her name. (A descendant of that hospital still exists, and until quite recently blue-blooded women paid their respects to its royal benefactress by having their babies there.) By the early nineteenth century being presented at court was an established custom and the girls making their debut had become known as debutantes. ‘Curtseying’ – there was no need to specify to whom – was a part of every debutante’s career until Queen Elizabeth II discontinued the practice in the increasingly egalitarian world of 1958.

Court presentations were surrounded by a code of etiquette as rigid as any whalebone corset. A girl being presented had to be sponsored by a lady, normally her mother, who had herself been presented. It was as simple and as unyielding as that. If the mother was deceased or (perish the thought) divorced, an aunt, grandmother or close friend could take her place. Such a system obviously made it very difficult for outsiders to gain access to it, and the extent to which the ‘Upper Ten Thousand’ of Society intermingled and intermarried only confirmed its exclusivity.

As the growth of industry and trade brought wealth to non-aristocrats, however, and inheritance tax or reckless extravagance took it away from those who had been born with it, money began to speak more loudly: a prosperous merchant’s daughter could marry an impoverished peer and gain access to High Society, if not for herself then at least for her children. Call it broadening the gene pool, call it lowering the tone – either way, even in the nineteenth century, times were beginning to change.

By the twentieth century, a handful of Society matrons with an eye for the main chance supplemented their income by sponsoring the daughters of anyone who was willing to pay. This obviously brought the whole system to the brink of disrepute: as early as 1938Vogue was describing ‘yammering hordes of social “racketeers” [who] have introduced madness into method and turned a traditional practice into a flourishing industry’. So unexclusive had court presentations become by the 1950s that, in the much-quoted and possibly apocryphal words of the late Princess Margaret, ‘We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London w