In the spring of 1911 Gladys sold her huge house in Carlton House Terrace and moved to Coombe Court, a handsome house with a large garden near Kingston, a convenient hour by car from London. Privileged guests would find the stars of Covent Garden mingling on the Surrey lawns with Gladys’s long-standing friend Queen Alexandra and other members of the Royal Family. The press were never tipped off about these gatherings, but not because Lady Ripon thought them ‘canaille’, too vulgar to be invited to cover her parties. Gladys spared neither the time nor the energy to think about common journalists at all. She hated the tastelessness of self-promotion, and was on occasion surprisingly reticent about drawing attention to herself. On visits to the Niagara skating rink, next to St James’s Park underground station and ‘scene of the most amusing parties’, according to Mrs Hwfa Williams, she persuaded her women friends to stack the heels of their shoes with ‘elevators’ so that her height did not make her conspicuous. Her accommodating friends hobbled stilt-like ‘in utmost discomfort’ across the pavement while Gladys glided gracefully towards the rink, at ease with her anonymity.

  By 1911 the popularity of the Australian diva Dame Nellie Melba was such that the celebrated French chef Georges Auguste Escoffier (whose fourth cookery book, Le Carnet d’Epicure, had been published that year) had been inspired to name an ice-cream and peach-based pudding after her. One gala night Osbert Sitwell was in the stalls when she sang with the celebrated tenor Enrico Caruso, ‘fat as two elderly thrushes as they trilled at each other over the hedges of tiaras.’ But Dame Nellie was spending much of the early summer in her native Australia, and the voices of Gladys Ripon’s two favourite Polish male singers, Édouard and Jean de Reszke, were beginning to sound a little raspy: Covent Garden’s seats were half-empty, and Gladys was becoming worried. She had to come up with a plan sufficiently marvellous and original for the Coronation summer.

  Over the course of the past two years the Russian producer Sergei Diaghilev had been introducing the opera singers, dancers, music and startling choreography of his Ballets Russes to amazed European audiences in France and Italy. In April 1911 in Monte Carlo Gladys’s married daughter Lady Juliet Duff had attended the world première of a new ballet, Le Spectre de La Rose, based on a poem by Gautier with music by Carl-Maria von Weber arranged for the orchestra by Hector Berlioz. Lady Juliet had been astonished by the performance of the 22-year-old Ukrainian, Vaslav Nijinsky, who danced the leading role. Gladys had seen Diaghilev’s dancers several times in Russia and Paris, and had made a point of getting to know Diaghilev himself. When Lady Juliet rushed breathlessly home from Monte Carlo with news of his latest creative spectacle, Gladys knew she had her next ‘stunt’. She had once told Mrs Hwfa Williams that her enthusiasm for ‘discovering a new stunt’ meant that ‘where the ballet goes I go too’, but there was no need for her to go to Monte Carlo if she could arrange for the ballet to come to London.

  For all the frenzy of the Coronation year, Gladys Ripon was not alone in her awareness of a void in her life and a yearning to fill it. Furtive assignations in rooms off darkened corridors were no longer enough. Dissatisfaction and unease riddled every layer of society, and that included the ambitious, bored, unfulfilled intellectuals, who felt at a loss, waiting, longing for something to happen. For those with the insight or the courage to admit it, it was a life that despite the ‘fun’ currently signified nothing. In November 1910 the art critic Roger Fry had organised an exhibition of European paintings at the Grafton Galleries, a few hundred yards from the Royal Academy. Pablo Picasso from Spain and Henri Matisse from France were among those whose work Fry had chosen to exhibit in ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, but most of the paintings were the work of two French artists and one Dutch. The 21 paintings by Paul Cézanne, 37 by Paul Gaugin and 20 by Vincent van Gogh dealt with the fundamental issues of life, death and passion, executed in bold colour and daring, defined strokes. They contradicted what Fry thought of as ‘the fatal prettiness of British art’. The critics who defined the conservative taste of the British art world, applauding the elegant barometers of taste as exemplified in the appealing and flattering portraits of Philip de László and John Singer Sargent, considered Fry insane. The Morning Post said the ‘primitive and sinister paintings’ he exhibited were intended for ‘students of pathology and the specialist in abnormality.’ The Queen magazine called the show ‘barbarous’, the Daily Telegraph said it was ‘weird and uncouth’. The Establishment painter Philip Burne-Jones wrote to The Times full of anti-French scorn, suggesting that the whole thing was a ‘huge practical joke organised in Paris at the expense of our countrymen.’ Old ladies had to be carried from the gallery after fainting in shock. An acquaintance of Lady Sackville confessed that she had been physically sick at the sight of the paintings. But the young writer Virginia Stephen, at work that summer on her first novel Night and Day, went so far as to feel that with the exhibition in December 910 ‘human character changed’. And one lone critic, Hugh Blaker, predicted that ‘cultured London is composed of clowns who will by the way be thoroughly ashamed in twenty years’time and pay large sums to possess these things. How insular we are still.’ And yet for the three months of the exhibition, more than four hundred visitors a day travelled to Mayfair to see and buy the pictures. Roger Fry wrote later of how ‘the English public became for the first time fully aware of the existence of a new movement in art, a movement which was the more disconcerting in that it was no mere variation upon accepted themes but implied a reconsideration of the very purpose and aim as well as the methods of pictorial and plastic art.’

  Many of Roger Fry’s group lived in London’s Bloomsbury. Among them his new lover Vanessa Bell and her painter friend Duncan Grant, a cousin of the biographer and critic Lytton Strachey. All were exhilarated and inspired by what they saw happening on canvases in Europe. That summer, several of these young English painters formed the Camden Town Group, and on 9 June the directors of the Borough Polytechnic near the Elephant and Castle invited Fry and Grant and a couple of other members of the Group to paint the students’ dining room. The striking murals, based on an appropriately sunny summer theme of ‘London on Holiday’, transformed the dull Victorian walls: painting had become indistinguishable from decor. The students were delighted.

  The Russian ballet too was soon to demonstrate the stimulating possibilities of this overlapping and merging of art forms. The appeal of things Russian was not unknown among British intellectuals seeking some meaning to life, spiritual or otherwise. A vogue for Russian literature was promoted in part by the novelist Arnold Bennett’s encouragement of the publication of English translations of the works of Chekhov and Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev. And in the late 880s the Ukrainian-born mystic Madame Helena Blavatsky had introduced to European consciousness the concept of ‘Theosophy’, the intuitive insight into the nature of God. Inspired by the teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism and by the writing of William Blake, Blavatsky devoted her life to demonstrating her conviction that the simple, inner truth of religious thought had been corrupted and complicated by the inadequate interpretations of man. ‘I am an old Buddhist pilgrim,’ she wrote, ‘wandering about the world to teach the only true religion, which is truth.’

  A cult following for Blavatsky’s teachings grew up in Europe, and the writers William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and Edwin Arnold were among those who felt her influence. Other forms of spiritual stimulation became popular, including séances and clairvoyance, necromancy (the summoning of the spirits of the dead), palmistry, and all varieties of crystal-gazing mysticism. In England Annie Besant, convincingly passionate and outspoken, adopted Blavatsky’s beliefs, became President of the British Theosophical Society in 1907, was an advocate of birth control for women, fell in love with the playwright Bernard Shaw, and was scheduled to speak at the suffragette rally planned to take place (with Asquith’s reluctant per-mission) a few days before the Coronation. Under Annie’s leadership membership of the Society had reached 16,000 by 1911. Lady Emily Lutyens, wife of the architect Edwin and sister of a notoriously active suffragette, Lady Constance Lytton, was fascinated to find a religion that combined the psychic and the spiritual. In the Society’s Bond Street headquarters she met their secretary, the shy Miss Sharpe, andwas overjoyed to discover that she had known Miss Sharpe in her previous life as a mouse. When squeaky-voiced Miss Sharpe introduced her to Mrs Besant, all white-robed, silky-seductive- sounding, Emily felt herself ‘face to face with something immeasurably greater than anything I had ever known.’

  In the same way that Roger Fry had recognised the potential impact of the stimulating and imaginative vision of the European painters on British taste, so Gladys Ripon identified a similar potential in Russian dancers. In their raw energy, their gravity-defying movements and their unashamed sexuality she saw something that was sure to divert a sophisticated London audience from the dreariness of familiarity, even of emptiness.

  Russian ballerinas were by no means unfamiliar to London audiences, for several had already appeared in the mixed bills of variety shows at the music halls. Tamara Karsavina had danced at The Coliseum in 1909, and in the spring of 1911 Anna Pavlova was invited to renew her contract of the previous year at the Palace. She had shared a programme there with a four-foot six-inch singer of comic songs, the phenomenon Harry Relph, popularly known as ‘Little Tich’, and through her recommendation he became a favourite with Nijinsky.

  Lady Diana Manners was mesmerised by the slight Russian figures she saw performing at the Palace. Explaining that dreary blocked toes and tutus were not all the new ballet had to offer, she persuaded her sceptical mother to accompany her every Saturday to lean against the golden rail at the back of the theatre with its easy access to the champagne bar, as was the fashionable custom, and watch Anna Pavlova’s graceful steps. She was ‘a leaf, a rainbow, a flake, an iridescent foam, her bones of music made’, so aware of her own pre-eminence that any partner unfortunate enough to drop her while lifting her into an airborne arabesque risked having his face firmly and publicly slapped. Audiences longed for her to be dropped.

  Just as it had been fashionable to persuade Dame Nellie Melba to sing at private parties, so a party was considered the height of chic if from a large basket of roses carried into the room there emerged, beribboned-and-pointed toe first, the fragile form of Pavlova, star of the Palace stage. During the summer of 911 a Russian ballerina could be found dancing at all the large music halls in London’s West End. The Duchess of Rutland became entranced, and her daughters needed little persuasion to agree to take ballet lessons. The Duchess of Rutland arranged for Lydia Kyasht, the Russian girl currently dancing at the Empire, to give up some of her day off to teach Diana to ‘glide like a Russian peasant’. Lady Ripon’s former brother-in-law, now Earl of Lonsdale, had also been much taken with Lydia, and had offered to provide her with lodgings for the summer in St John’s Wood, conveniently near his own home. Lydia and the other ballerinas would rehearse on Lord Lonsdale’s lawn, to the delight of such lunch guests as Mrs HwfaWilliams. But the London audience had not yet seen the Russian male dancers, and, in particular Nijinsky.

  The theatrical impresario EricWollheim had been responsible for bringing the French actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Madame Rejane to London, and had made the previous arrangements for the visiting ballerinas: he was delighted to help Diaghilev realise his plan to bring the whole company to London. Diaghilev had already been in direct negotiation for more than a year with Lady Ripon’s good friends Sir Joseph Beecham and his son Thomas, who was director of events at Covent Garden. Sir Joseph had promised to sponsor the production, but Edward VII’s death and the subsequent mourning period had thwarted initial plans to bring the ballet to the Aldwych Theatre in the summer of 1910. As soon as it was deemed decent, negotiations began again between Diaghilev and the Royal Opera House, with Lady Ripon’s encouragement.

  Until well into Edward VII’s reign, production standards for ballet and even for opera – despite Lady Ripon’s glittering influ-ence – were ‘shockingly shabby’. Little attention was paid to rehearsals either for performers or for the orchestra, and almost no thought was given to presentation. The notion of choreography was nonexistent. In one famously shambolic performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin, the pulleys that were built into the floor-boards, designed to help the swan glide gracefully off into the mist, had become hopelessly rusted up. As the orchestra ran out of music, the sparse audience could hear the sound of yanking and wheezing in the wings, then suddenly there was a loud clank and a small explosion. The swan’s head shot into the air, leaving the Knight exposed and distressed astride a decapitated swan until a couple of workmen rushed onto the stage and pulled him off.

  For all her love of the life of the stage, the Duchess of Rutland was contemptuous of the ballet. She was no fan of the exquisite Danish prima ballerina Adeline Genée, Eric Wollheim’s protégée and allegedly his lover, who had been for ten years the star at the Empire and whose fragile form was often compared to Dresden china. Adeline had done much to revive the ever-dwindling reputation of classical dance, but though she had introduced the longer ballet Coppélia, her repertoire was largely short and unadventurous, and she stuck closely to the favourite classics, Cinderella and Papillon. Nellie Melba also remained unmoved by the art form that so often shared the bill with her own. ‘Our western eyes had been trained to regard ballet as merely a conventional monotonous affair of toe dancing and white ballet skirts and occasional gymnastics,’ she wrote, dismissing it as an entertainment with ‘little colour, little thrill, and practically no contact with life.’

  Something far more thrilling had been meeting the popular appetite for entertainment. Since 1908 music halls all over the country had been introducing moving-picture screens into their theatres, and some were even being fully converted into cinemas seating several hundred people. In the summer of 1911 the roller-skating rink in Brighton’s West Street became The Grand Picture Palace, the fourth cinema in the town. The Bioscope Annual and Trades Directory was an invaluable publication that listed cinemas county by county, and that year’s volume ran to more than four hundred pages. While ballet dancers performed to small and somnolent audiences, the new films that arrived thrice-weekly from France and America were playing to packed auditoriums. Films made by D.W. Griffith were particularly popular. A young cub reporter turned amateur actor from Kentucky, Griffith worked for Biograph, a small company on East Fourteenth Street in New York and his beautifully made films, often hand-coloured, combined technical expertise with all sorts of innovative camera shots. Even the English were beginning to join in the movie-making craze. Epping Forest in Essex or Box Hill in Surrey became the background for stories of cowboys and Indians, and genteel picnickers were surprised by whooping half-naked men wearing feathered headdresses leaping on horseback over the cress sandwiches. In the cinema a piano, a full orchestra, and some coconut shells to clack together to indicate the clatter of horses’ hooves intensified the drama of the silent movie. Thrilling drum rolls would fill the theatre as the bow-painted lips of an unfortunate girl tied to a railway line trembled while she waited to be rescued from her perilous position. In a uniform curly typeface, helpful plot explanations like ‘The black canker in the rose of love is the moment of parting’would appear on the screen, often read aloud by their friends for the benefit of the illiterate.

  The hour-long programme usually included a main feature, which might be a love story, a comedy, a thriller or a ‘Western’, plus the latest in current affairs from Pathé News. In June the oldest man in the world, a Frenchman aged 105, was seen shakily recounting his memories of the Battle of Waterloo to the camera, while the Kaiser, in England for the Coronation, was filmed ‘visiting the tourist sights of London’. In America movie houses took their name – Nickelodeons – from the nickel (5 cents) charged for the cheap seats; in England these were sixpence, with seats at the back, where the glare was less damaging to the eyes, costing a little more. During the past year, safety rules had been tightened up and the projector, which was liable to catch fire when the reel accelerated beyond the operator’s control, was now housed in a screened-off booth – a new-found privacy sometimes abused when the projectionist, looking forward to an evening date, would speed up the film so that it was out of sync with the disconcerted live orchestra who was unable to keep up.

  The cinemas were filthy and smelly, and not just from the thick cigarette and pipe smoke that filled them. As the programme was only an hour long it was not thought necessary to provide public lavatories, and the theatre could be particularly foul-smelling after a screening to a full house of children unable to contain their excitement. Attendants would walk through the aisles spraying the air from huge bottles filled with bright blue Jeyes fluid in an attempt to remove or at least conceal the stench. Gradually, however, some of the hundreds of especially-built movie houses smartened up their appearance. The Lenton Picture Palace in Nottingham opened in December 1910 with room for six hundred people and seats ranging from the expensive ones upholstered in red leather that tipped up, to wooden benches at the bargain price of two pence. The screen was curtained in blue plush with gold trimmings, and the building was heated by steam and lit by electricity. Some cinemas had tea-houses, and special sitting-out rooms reserved for ladies only. A reassuring manager in a tailcoat – like a maitre d’hôtel in a restaurant or a butler opening a front door – would greet the audience as they arrived.