My father had commented on this picture of his parents and Auntie Goggie in fancy dress that this was all his mother’s doing – his father just went along because Billie could be very persuasive! I never saw my grandfather in fancy dress and couldn’t imagine the man I knew could ever have permitted his face to be painted with a beauty spot or to be photographed in a costume like that. Yet there was the photo.

It wasn’t hard to imagine other people liking costumes – my mother, father and stepmother were actors – but Gamps…

In looking through records from Portsmouth in the 1920s for details on my Great Aunt Maisie’s story, I saw a number of newspaper ads for Wallace Ash, the company that Maisie’s husband (Cedric-the-brute) worked for. An Ancestry contact related to Cedric’s younger brother passed on a clipping showing Cedric had been Secretary for the short-lived Cavendish Club in Southsea. Looking into that led me to stories that Wallace Ash had not only furnished the new club but the owner’s son had been one of the principals of the business.

When I say short lived, I mean opened on Jan 31 1920 and closed May 27 1920 – and the copy in the ads run in the Portsmouth Evening News was over the top even for the standards of that time. This ad is the calmest of them. They offered free membership to the first 300 to sign up and by early March claimed that popular demand had led them to expand that to the first 600. There were dancing lessons offered as well. Possibly being in the rear entrance to the Victorial Hall (music hall then cinema) wasn’t the best location for the upscale, modern marketing pitch.

Curious about how an established company like Wallace Ash could have the bad judgment to mess up so fast (or give up so quickly), I did a bit more digging in the newspaper archives and found out that in September 1920, they opened The Esplanade Assembly Rooms, with both father and son from Wallace Ash as proprietors. The Cavendish Club was barely cold – they’d auctioned the contents in July – and they wanted to try again. This time they got a better format.

There was no membership and they dropped all the faux as-good-as-London pretense and put on entertaining dances – for St Patrick’s Day, an “Oriental Night” (Chinoiserie was big in the twenties and saying Oriental wouldn’t raise an eyebrow), and so on. When I found the ad for the Pierrot dance, I recalled the picture of my grandparents and Goggie, and realized that it was July 1920 when my grandparents started dating (they married in April 1923) and it was very possible that the costumes they were photographed in were for the Esplanade Assembly Rooms event! I have no captions or other confirmation, but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis to me.

Maisie and Cedric had separated in April 1920 and I have no idea whether Cedric continued to work for Wallace Ash on this new venture, but I can’t imagine his involvement would discourage Billie from a fancy dress dance. The Assembly Rooms were in the rear of The Esplanade Hotel

Sadly, the pier was bombed in 1941 and the Esplanade Assembly Rooms were destroyed. I imagine the balls and dances in the 1920s, including the Pierrot Night, were much livelier and more crowded affairs than this photo, but at least it gives an idea of what the interior looked like.

The father’s involvement may have been the difference between the success of the Esplanade Assembly Rooms and the rapid shuttering of the Cavendish Club. When I checked the probate records for the two men, the father left the son (in 1934) the equivalent today of £1,850,000. The son died 13 years later in 1947 and left his widow the equivalent of £6,000!

For the record, here’s a picture of the young couple around the time they married, Gamps apparently in cricket whites and Nanny ready to swim – except for that adorably cute puppy. I don’t know which Bungie he was (they were all Bungie).

To finish off with a dress-up image, here are their children in costume – I have to hope this was just acting for the camera versus my father being awful to his younger sister Jill. Nanny mentions in the progress book various costumes the two children wore at school events and birthday parties (no pictures though). This was probably taken around 1936 or 37 in the back garden of the Winton house. Love the creative spirit; could do without the rope!