Queen Charlotte's Ball is proof that young women still want to be debutantes

In the first week of May 1971, in the basement of London’s Grosvenor House Hotel, Lady Celestria Noel was preparing for her big moment. As a debutante attending Queen Charlotte’s Ball, she had been chosen alongside five other girls to escort a 3ft-high cardboard birthday cake through the hotel’s Great Room on a trolley. The cake’s destination? Parked in front of the 100 or so debs preparing to curtsy to the guest of honour, Margherita, Lady Howard de Walden, who ‘cut’ the cake. This was a key moment in the debutante season — one that had, by then, been repeated for nearly 200 years. Yet, oddly enough, Lady Celestria (now Hales) remembers, the ball wasn’t that glamorous an occasion. ‘My dress cost £28 and we didn’t wear jewellery. You wore flat shoes and you might have got your hair done — but not necessarily.’

The ball for which glamour was somehow not requisite by 1971 was founded in 1780 by George III to mark the birthday of his wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. After Queen Charlotte, a patron of the eponymous London maternity hospital, died in 1818, the ball continued, becoming a key event in the debutante season during which upper-class girls were launched into Society and encouraged to mingle with eligible young men.

During the Second World War, Court presentations were paused, but the ball carried on, albeit in some-what constrained form: in Last Curtsey, historian Fiona MacCarthy (who attended in 1958) describes a wartime cake ‘concocted with dried eggs’ and proceedings that, by 1944, had become ‘a kind of picnic’ thanks to rationing, with attendees bringing their own food. Having been re-established in its current mode in 2009 by former debutante Jennie Hallam-Peel, the ball’s modern-day purpose is to prepare young women for the world and encourage them to take part in charitable works.

Much has changed in its new incarnation. In Lady Celestria’s day, ‘if you were an upper-class girl and you wanted to be a deb then you could just be a deb’. Now, Jennie’s charges are interviewed for their suitability and the demographic is distinctly different. No longer are peers’ daughters front and centre: today, the Queen Charlotte’s girl is on her way to Oxbridge or the corporate world and looking to do good. Shivina Kumari, who grew up in India and works at Goldman Sachs, is typical, having attended Queen Charlotte’s in 2023 and 2024. When she applied to Jennie, she wasn’t motivated by a question of how the ball might help her career, but ‘how my career could help the causes that the ball is supporting — it was about being involved in something bigger than yourself’.

By contrast, Lady Celestria (who went on to become social editor of Harpers & Queen) happily admits she likes a party — and plenty of her fellow debs did, too. ‘Light a candle and I’ll come,’ she says. ‘I’m a social person. I thought, why not?’ Her elder sisters, Lady Juliana and Lady Maria, had both attended Queen Charlotte’s before her; Lady Juliana was so popular that she had a disco named in her honour, whereas Maria ‘was dragged kicking and screaming to the ball and walked out halfway through’.

Yet it was never compulsory for the likes of the Noels. ‘You always had a choice,’ notes Lady Celestria. ‘There were plenty of girls who only wanted to go hunting and it wasn’t their cup of tea.’ This is borne out in the small survey I conducted on the subject of Queen Charlotte’s. ‘I didn’t go and I honestly can’t remember anyone who did,’ admits the sprightly 90-something daughter of an earl, whose family would have been prime candidates. A peeress recalls that ‘they would have had to drug me to get me to Queen Charlotte’s’ and a duke’s daughter who attended in 1968 supposes ‘we all realised how absurd it was, to curtsy to a cardboard cake with such ridiculous solemnity, dressed in virginal white’. Nevertheless, she says, ‘very few of us rebelled’. Another who would have been the ideal debutante attended a school that saw itself as ‘rather progressive — the idea of being a deb was thought of as a last resort’.

Despite these near-universal results, I was nevertheless struck by the relative variety of girls who did attend the ball in the mid 20th century, including the offspring of colonels and civil servants. For Winston Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames, Queen Charlotte’s was remembered as a ‘dream of glamour and happiness’ and she was far from the only daughter of an MP — or even the only daughter of a future Prime Minister. Lady Meriel Douglas-Home attended Queen Charlotte’s in 1957; years later, she described how she ‘felt socially ill-at-ease from an early age, guilty whenever I saw that I was more privileged than others’. One of her intake married a future duke and another joined the Royal Household, in the employ of which she remains. In 1962, from a selection of 20 Queen Charlotte’s attendees, three were daughters of Conservative MPs and two of hereditary peers. Several went on to marry peers, another became a barrister and three graced Country Life's Frontispiece within the decade.

Today’s girls are more varied still. In 2023, Shivina became the first attendee both born and brought up in India and her peers included a pair of Texan sisters. The international element of today’s ball appeals to Gillian Beauclerk, Duchess of St Albans, who, with her husband Murray Beauclerk, 14th Duke of St Albans, is a patron of the ball. ‘It’s as good a way as any for countries to get together,’ she says. ‘It’s simply a wonderful thing in this strange world we live in.’

In 2022, Emily Wilson, from Northern Ireland, became the youngest-ever debutante when she attended the ball aged 15. Her motivation for applying was focused on the charitable aspects. ‘Although it’s very glamorous, real work is being done to improve people’s lives, so it’s not only enjoyable, but worthwhile,’ she enthuses. Reserved by nature, the ball has brought her out of herself. ‘I’ve gained a lot of confidence,’ she acknowledges. ‘It’s a great thing to say you’ve been able to do and you learn so much from it.’ Later this year, 18-year-old Emily will sit her A levels and is hoping to take up a place at Cambridge.

Coverage of today’s ball often focuses on the gowns and glittering jewellery loaned by designers to the attendees. This element is also distinct from Lady Celestria’s experience. She remembers how the late Isabelle Hohler, from 1982 Countess of Erroll, wore her Queen Charlotte’s dress (‘which I think she might have made herself’) to the Royal Caledonian Ball for 40 years thereafter: ‘Every Caledonian Ball it came out. We didn’t think about spending a lot of money on clothes.’

As Shivina’s culture dictates, she won’t wear a white gown to be married and the more glamorous aspect of the modern ball had undeniable appeal. ‘There’s an element of getting dressed up that is synonymous to any ball, but you’re in a bridal gown,’ she explains. Her grandmother, Rani Aruna Vijai Singh of Koela, was bursting with pride when Shivina was named debutante of the year in 2024. ‘She could hold her own and she made an impression on others,’ she says. ‘I was married, in an arranged marriage, before I was 18 — there was no question of debuting anywhere. It’s a different world today.’

‘Heirs and Graces: A History of the Modern British Aristocracy’ by Eleanor Doughty (Penguin, £30) will be published next month