This week, in honour of its 70th anniversary, the Feathers Association released photos of youths aged 14 to 16 at its annual Christmas charity ball. Among them, a young David Cameron is pictured poutingly draped around Laura Stanley. The Queen’s son, Tom Parker Bowles, stands with his black tie askew, laughing at the camera with all the exuberance of youth. In private homage to the Feathers Ball, this week I too dug out the picture I have of myself before my first Feathers Ball in 1997. It is categorically not for public consumption. Standing in the Kensington townhouse of a school friend before we left for the ball, I am wearing a mini-dress and platform shoes. My expression is one of awkwardness but also, I think now, of foreboding. In that photo, I stand at the threshold of girlhood and adolescence. Luckily, we never know these things at the time.
David Cameron, Tamara Beckwith and Tom Parker Bowles are pictured partying at the high-society Feathers Ball in never-before-seen photographs https://t.co/UTKlVd0DYx pic.twitter.com/Cq27BLvQDn
— Tatler (@Tatlermagazine) December 11, 2024
As a London day-school girl at an all-girls school, the Feathers was the ticket. At school, we spoke of nothing else but who might be there, what we would wear and, crucially, how much Archers and lemonade we could drink before tumbling out of whatever Volvo estate someone’s dad happened to be driving to drop us off. But as day-school girls, we knew we were working at a disadvantage once we got there. The girls with the real advantage were those at boarding schools – Downe House, St Mary’s Ascot, Benenden, Tudor Hall – because they already had ‘socials’, or dances, with their brother schools. They therefore held the trump card: access to boys. You might get lucky as a day-school girl and have a brother who would introduce you to his friends, but this was rare. Every single stop was pulled out to ensure we might be invited to dance in a circle of boys, with all the desperate anxiety of a Mitford novel: male cousins called upon, parents’ godsons sought out, vague familial acquaintances renewed, doors slammed in angst in the run-up.
Whether or not the organising committee was aware of it, the only – nay, the crucial – aim of the Feathers was to ‘pull’ as many boys as you could between the hours of 7 and 10 p.m. before we all had to line up to be collected in the line of dads’ taxis. On this premise alone, the Feathers Association must have raised millions for its youth community projects. ‘Pulling’, a singularly unattractive expression, was the term used in the Nineties for snogging. I wonder if it sprang from the vigorous ladette culture of the time, or maybe it originated from the more practical roots of a room full of sexed-up teenagers literally pulling themselves towards one another. In this regard, the Feathers never disappointed, even with no alcohol on offer.
Once inside the Ministry of Sound nightclub where the Feathers of my era were held, we moved quickly as a group or in pairs, identifying the Debs’ delights of our generation. Gone were the dance cards of my grandmother’s day, replaced with lipstick marks on our arms to record our totals, appended with an E or an R for either Eton or Radley. Marianne Dashwood would have been appalled by our methods, but we were, I suppose, all searching desperately for a John Willoughby.
It being the late Nineties and the era of the young princes William and Harry at Eton, the fevered anticipation was that you might hit the jackpot and end up ‘pulling’ either one or both. One friend recalls agreeing to kiss a boy under a banquette on the basis that he knew Prince William; another admits that she showed her nipple to someone after he agreed to introduce her to Prince Harry. Were the Middleton sisters there, engaging in the same Faustian bargains? I like to think so. Maybe the Feathers is where Samantha Cameron first brushed up against Dave, or where Boris no doubt seduced many; the beauty lies not in the sordid realities but in the conjecture, only on offer at the best parties.
I look back now at the photograph of myself before I had first been ‘Feathered’ as an important record. Freed from the chaperoned Scottish reels I had previously been sent to, with grandmothers sitting like dowagers on chairs during an Eightsome Reel, the Feathers represented a thrilling foray into adulthood. The whole thing teetered on the vulnerable border between the socially acceptable and the sexually illicit. No other party since has offered quite the same promise. Now a mother myself, I cast my mind’s eye ahead to when my own daughters might go to the Feathers. When the time comes, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the lipstick marks on their arms.
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