How and why the Twenties roared

Attempts to anatomise the Bright Young People of the 1920s have included Beverley Nichols’s The Sweet and Twenties (1958), Martin Green’s Children of the Sun (1977) and Humphey Carpenter’s The Brideshead Generation (1989). Osbert Sitwell called Nichols the first of the Bright Young People and Nichols claimed to be the last of them. D. J. Taylor suggests that this was not quite accurate, as there is still one survivor of that febrile group — I think he must mean Teresa (‘Baby’) Jungman, once the object of Evelyn Waugh’s desire, and now 100. Certainly Nichols was Bright Young Person in excelsis. He was clever-silly — the present-day equivalent might be the much nicer Gyles Brandreth, another past president of the Oxford Union, with his jokes, Fair Isle pullovers and teddy bears.

The Sweet and Twenties is a from-the-horse’s-mouth account of the Bright Young People (BYP), with vivid vignettes, some funny anecdotes and pen-portraits of fringe BYP who make no appearance in any of the later books, including Taylor’s. Among these was the ‘roguish’ singer Teddie Gerrard. When delivering the line, ‘I’ve never been kept waiting’, she rendered it, ‘I’ve never been kept [long pause] . . . waiting’.

The members of White’s Club, thronging the stalls, tied themselves into knots of lubricity at this announcement. ‘D’you hear that? Never been kept, what? Ha! Ha! Never been kept! You’re telling me! Ho! Ho!

Martin Green’s Children of the Sun is something of a classic. Its title was derived from the German Sonnenkinder. Green had read almost everything there was to read about the BYP; he was astutely analytical; and a sample of his slightly baroque style ought to go into any anthology of 20th-century prose. In a prologue, he described a visit to Harold Acton — once one of the premier BYP — at his Italian palace, La Pietra:

The butler hustled forward to knock at one of the doors and waved me after him, while the other man hovered behind, quivering with sympathetic excitement.