WINTERHALTER ON THE FLOOR

Alexandra Artley in the guise

of the ballerina, Grisi, quadrilled the Victorian night away

THE Reform Club is always a wonderful place for a fancy-dress ball. With its subdued polychrome magnificence and wide staircase melting into huge rounded mirrors it calls for big people (or, at least, people in very big dresses) to fill Barry's opulent mid 19th-century spaces. On Saturday evening this vast 'frame for the people' as one dancer described it, held a dazzling succession of live portraits as 400 splendidly dressed guests arrived for the Winterhalter Ball. This very spirited and amiable event was arranged by Lady Harriot Tennant and Dr Malcolm Rogers of the National Portrait Gallery in aid of the gallery's Trust Fund. Including gener- ous donations, over £12,000 was raised. Dancing began at 8.30 in the long Coffee Room, whose windows overlook the club gardens between Pall Mall and Carlton House Terrace. It was chosen as the ball room to provide a flat mile of polished parquet for the quadrilles (and one galop) which appeared on the programme of dances. The music, assembled by Oliver Davies (Director of the Prince Albert Ensemble) consisted of many ball-room rarities not much heard since their original performances.

Each dance was associated with a Win- terhalter sitter. They included, for exam- ple, the Alice-Polka, composed by Johann Strauss for the sixth birthday of Princess Alice (and first performed at Buckingham Palace, on 30 April 1849). Hommage a la Reine Angleterre, again by Johann Strauss, turned out to be a waltz-time version of the National Anthem played at VR's first State Ball at Buckingham Palace on 10 May 1838. Many musicians in the band were drawn from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic. Conducting from the piano, Oliver Davies had the light, easy-going charm of the musician who genuinely enjoys playing for people to dance.

Winterhalter has always struck me as Easy Lookin' (the visual equivalent of what popular record labels used to call Easy Listenin'). But as direct evidence for the fashion historian or theatrical costu- mier he has his practical uses. The true Winterhalter Look' conveys a luxurious hot-house fragility, the much emphasised shoulders rising from a sea of pastel silk or tulle and with endless flowers worn in the hair (singly or in wreaths) and attached to bodice, waist or skirt. Lace, fluttering ribbons and veiling complete this most fully romantic of evening styles. After ten years of fancy-dress balls and parties I have got crinoline fatigue. For a complete change I took a tier off my pastel silk wedding dress, pinned some full-blown silk roses to the bosom, dug out my white satin ballet shoes and went as Carlotta Grisi, the ballerina who created the role of Giselle and brought it to London in May 1842.

Dresses at the ball ranged from the youthful simplicity of white tulle to the alarming flame velvet and gold lace of Olde Ruritania. At one end of the colour range Ann Hodson-Pressinger and Jane Abdy dressed entirely in white and wore long white veils cascading from the hair a bit like the Winterhalter portrait of Princess Metternich (1860). At the other end of the spectrum, Anna Somers-Cocks (editor of Apollo) wore an enormous black silk crinoline with white flowers in her hair. Oriele Hawood also wore black with a full wreath of red roses set over a black lace mantilla, rather like the Winterhalter por- trait of Adelina Patti as Rosina in The Barber of Seville. Both men and women had raided costume jewellery trays for large 'diamond' stars like those which stud the loose hair of Elizabeth, Empress of Austria in a portrait of 1865. Boldly ignoring the Winterhalter spirit, Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, appeared in a brilliant red sheath dress. As usual, most men looked immensely reliable in boiled shirts (stiff enough to knock on) and white tie. Alan Powers and Jonathan James looked particularly dashing as Prince Albert-like dandies.

To the pulse of Labitzky's Sutherland- Waltzer (1842) off we launched into the swift and dizzying turns of the Viennese waltz, which looks wonderful but requires immense concentration. (A little resin on the dance floor would have been a good idea.) In the great rounded mirrors at each end of the ballroom the chandeliers marched off in perspective, and as we whirled past, occasional soothing currents of sharp night air blew in through windows swagged with crimson velvet. 'Just like the Victorian dodgems,' said my partner cheerfully as he steered us firmly past hurtling young men and through satin shoals of high velocity twirling.

Quadrilles figured on the dance prog- ramme three times. These tortuous set- figure dances reduce me to giggles (I prefer waltzes, polkas and galops with a bit more go). Two quadrille classes had been held at Battersea Town Hall earlier in the week by Ellis and Christine Rogers of the Early Dance Circle. After these, some dancers gave a very good impression of knowing what they were doing. (It's a bit like bridge except you're letting four people down instead of two'.) At the end of each figure it was clearly a relief to return to Demi-Chaine Anglaise, a simple hand- clasping manoeuvre which gives dancers a sense of dance-floor geography again.

At ten o'clock the ball supper was unveiled on two vast buffet tables beneath the sombre gilded Corinthian columns of the club Library. Here dishes had been very elaborately presented by the chef, Alan Riddle and sous-chef, Andrew McLay in the manner of Alexis Soyer, the good-natured and eccentric Frenchman who became chef at the Reform in 1841.

As in Soyer's enormous book, The Gastro- nomic Regulator, certain cuts of meat were crazily shaped like enormous fully-rigged galleons or men o' war, a style called 'the Dindoneau a la Nelson'. This was all done by sculpting turkeys and beef and setting them into carved pumpkins with wooden skewers for rigging and billowing sails made from linen napkins. These asto- nishing vessels were becalmed on a sea of two-tone (red and white) savoury tarts filled with cranberry jelly and horseradish sauce. Nearby, on shore, martello towers were carved from pumpkins and filled with melon crosses.

The historian-confectioner Alan Little- wood had also reconstructed dramatic pieces montees such as huge meringue cor- nucopias spilling fruit and enormous pyra- mids of profiteroles glazed with toffee. He also made white temples of royal icing in which sugar nymphs hid behind pillars iced with green ivy or looked down on votive offerings of coloured marzipan fruits.

Feeding 400 guests at once is quite an enterprise, but was smoothly achieved.

`It's not a very long queue,' said Harriot Tennant as dancers waited to enter Soyer's food wax-works. 'It's just that the skirts are so big, it looks long.'

After supper, time flew, hastened by the Patti Polka, the Prince of Wales Galop, glasses of sorbet and the waltz, Wiener Bonbons. Shortly after midnight, an Orsini-like anarchist in a black cloak and wide-brimmed hat tossed a round fizzling `bomb' into the ball-room as a reminder of what lay outside. Amid authentic scream- ing he fled down the back-stairs.

Well after two a.m. it was time to go home. 'I wish it were carriages, preferably with a foot-wanner,' said one girl as no taxis whatever appeared on _Pall Mall. Gradually, as we queued down the stairs to collect our cloaks, the Winterhalter Look' was giving way to a sense of mere bovine encumbrance. Upstairs in the hall, post- ball reality took other forms. 'I've lost my car keys,' confided a young man, 'and worse than that, my house-keys are at the house where I changed and they're ex- directory. . . . ' Beyond him through the doors, the musicians packed up their in- struments, the Soyer debris was patiently cleared away and with lowering lights the Reform Club looked inwards again, like a theatre sombre and waiting.

Hoorah for the Filth-Packets! by Alexandra Artley is published by Methuen, £4.95.