“It was such a peculiar thing to have done,” recalled one of Britain’s last official debutantes, the 1,400 young women who swept a reverential curtsey to our late Queen and Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace in the spring of 1958, decked out in Dior-esque day dresses, demure hats and dainty gloves.
Peculiar seemed the word for it by then, on the cusp of the Swinging Sixties, in a year which saw Britain’s first rock and roll single hit the charts, the launch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the appointment of the first female bank manager. But as they clipped in their court shoes out of the palace gates, ready to embark on a heady round of Mayfair cocktail parties and country-house balls, 1958’s
