Bridge Magazine - Part 1

In the summer of 1929, the residents
of rutland gate would, upon peering down
through their elegant sash windows, have
been aghast. for in the street below, a motley
crew of mostly twentysomethings had begun
to assemble in varying states of disarray, lured
to this pocket of south kensington for one of
rosemary sanders’ parties.
while this tableau might have been an
all-too-familiar feature of what we have
retrospectively come to term as the “roaring
twenties”, more unusual was the mode of
transport by which the revellers arrived. they
came in prams and baby carriages, and their
dress, far from couture, was more befitting of
the nursery. what the neighbours would not
have glimpsed – no doubt to their eternal relief
– was that once out of gaze, the merrymakers
were provided with an assortment of dolls and
bottles, props to be frolicked with inside adultsized
playpens, while the nursery beakers
contained not so much milk as gin.
so far, so fetish, but this was not, contrary
to appearances, a gathering of oddballs on
the fringes of society. the party was attended
by such well-known scene-dwellers as the
actress brenda dean paul,
along with some of the
best-connected and most
louche-living aristocrats of
this, the Jazz Age. for this
was the notorious second
childhood party, and the
determinedly frivolous
set of attendees were, as
they were labelled by the
incredulous yet transfixed
press at the time, the
bright young people.
but if the second
childhood party attracted
disapproval, it was
hardly the first of its kind
to do so. if anything, the
quickly bored bright
young people (in whose
studiedly flippant parlance,
much was deemed “too,
too tiresome”) saw it
as marking a decline
in the ingenuity of their
legendary japes. its
attendees considered it
an asininely deliberate
attempt at the kind of
American actress
and bonne vivante
Tallulah Bankhead
Flapper on the cover
of Life in 1926
FEATURE
parties which had
previously defined their
movement.
it was on precisely 26
July 1924 that the set made
its debut in the eyes of The Daily
Mail and its readers. the paper’s
headline announced them unambiguously
with the words: “midnight chase in london.
50 motorcars. the bright young people”;
they were thence set to be near permanently
present within its pages for the next few years.
the group that came into startling focus on
this day in 1924 was a band of young society
people who, up until then, would have been
habitués of the more formal coming-out balls.
now they ran amok on the streets of the capital
in a sort of drunken treasure hunt, which
culminated in breakfast at norfolk house, st
James’s. the heady mélange of celebrity –
including the American star tallulah bankhead
– with glamorous aristocrats made for the stuff of
instant legend, particularly amid the landscape
BRIdGE MAGAZINE 31