Tumbril Talk – Part One

Six political parties in the UK are led by women (pedantically five 1/2); none so far as I know in the US. However, there have been women who have carried considerable influence in American politics and none more so than Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

She was President (Teddy) Roosevelt’s daughter. I am grateful to Sibby Lynch for sending me this extract from her autobiography Crowded Hours published in 1933.

There was a terrible self consciousness of Americans in the Edwardian period about the British. They adored and aped everything British. It was a time when all those young and sometimes not so young American heiresses were leaping across the Atlantic to marry European aristocracy. It was extraordinary how quickly these ladies became assimilated into the English social scene, after they were married. They even managed that curious fluffed up way of talking of the English upper classes of that time.

I had a friend, Beatrice Granard, who was very much the English grande dame. She was married to Lord Granard, who was Master of the Horse. And twitched. I stayed with her once at the delightful house her parents had in Paris. She said to me one day in her lispy “Mayfair” accent, “Do you want to come shopping with me this afternoon, Alice?” “Sweet (her father) has promised to buy me a tiara for little dinners. But don’t tell Twin, or he will have to buy her one too.” Twin was her younger sister, Gladys. A tiara for little dinners! I ask you! Heaven knows what she had for the big ones.

Beatrice and Twin were pure bred American girls. Their father, Ogden Mills, had inherited lots of California gold rush money and their mother, Ruth “Tiny” Livingston, was descended from one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. They were very grand and lived in a “stately home” on the Hudson, which became even statelier with the advent of the forty-niner money and stretched, much larger than the White House, down to the river.

I once asked Beatrice’s mother what she had given her daughter as a wedding present, and she said, with a vague wave of her hand, “Oh, she took a parure.” As if they were lying around the house for the asking. Along with the tiaras!

A lot of what Noel Coward used to call “tumbril talk” went on in those days. Tumbril talk is what rich and/or aristocratic folk might say on the way to the guillotine. It usually reflects a rather startling unawareness about how anyone else lives. Marie Antoinette was reputed to be very good at it.

A good example of tumbril talk is when an extremely wealthy New York lady, who had never ridden on a bus, decided to do so and got on one to ride down Fifth Avenue. It was the days when the conductor came around and collected the fares in a small bag. When he came to her, she smiled brightly and said, “Oh no, my good man. You see, I have my own charities I contribute to.”

There was lots of tumbril talk at the Millses’. I can hear Tiny saying to her husband. “Ogden, why do you bother about going into politics? You see very unattractive people there. You could look after your family affairs. That’s quite enough to do, don’t you think?” They had a delicious sense of their own importance.