Beatniks, Coronets and Charlotte Bingham

Coronet Among the Weeds by Charlotte Bingham

published 1963

 

"Some of the cellar parties could get a bit wild. Beatniks got too hep and started throwing things. Sometimes it wasn’t too dangerous, but if they really went potty all the girls had to lock themselves in the loos till they calmed down a bit"

 

Beatniks came up in a recent post

The Second Curtain by Roy Fuller

-And it wasn't my first go-round, as you can find in this collection of posts. But (or so?) I can never resist another opportunity to feature them. Back in 2018 I looked at an odd book

MI5 and Me by Charlotte Bingham

and took the opportunity to reminisce about her Coronet Among the Weeds, which I had enjoyed as a teenager. Bingham died at the end of last year.

I’m going to quote from her Wiki entry. ‘Bingham wrote her humorous autobiography, called Coronet Among the Weeds, mostly about her life as a debutante, searching for a "real man", when she was 19, and not long before her twentieth birthday a literary agent discovered her celebrating at the Ritz. He was a friend of her parents and he took off the finished manuscript of her autobiography. In 1963, it was published and was a best seller.’

She desribes her life as a series of adventure. After doing a secretarial course and trying out a few jobs, she decides to become a beatnik  - or at least to look like one (not clear why that is different).

screenshot from a newsreel film on beatniks

So okay I’d got a beehive. Now I wanted a jumper. You only need one jumper if you’re a beatnik. If you change your jumper you lose your identity. I asked Migo about this jumper. She had a cousin who’d been a beatnik. Or had a boy friend who’d been one or some* thing. Anyway she found one of her father’s gardening jumpers that he’d been through World War I in. It had a few bullet-holes, so you could tell it was genuine all right. It was very long. Down to my knees. And it had a collar you could pull over your face if you didn’t want to see anyone. With my tight jeans and beach shoes, I looked the real thing I really did.

 

She goes to a beatnik party - which is partially held in the garage of a mews house, so very like the picture on this post, which had been discussed with suspicion in the comments.

And we get this:

Then a girl started screaming. You wouldn’t have heard unless you were near like we were. They were really agonising screams.

‘What’s with her screaming?’ I said.

‘Her father’s a duke,’ Spence said.

She was in a real state this girl, sobbing and shouting that her life was ruined and things. My father’s a corney old lord but I don’t let it ruin my life. I mean you’ve had it if you let things like that get you down.

I loved this book when I first read it (serialized in Jackie magazine, with beatniks changed to hippies) but it hasn’t survived well, or perhaps it’s just my being older.

It is too self-consciously simple and naïve. It sounds as if she dictated it (I don’t suppose she did) very colloquial and informal, that must have been her selling-point.

Breathless young women also feature in Jilly Cooper and in Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado – and demonstrate that it isn’t just my age. Those two writers still appeal and read well – Bingham not so much. [Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle – one of my favourite books of all time – may seem to fit this category but is quite different as well as being almost perfect]

But I will still have to do another post on her debutante days, and on her father's career as a spy.

Beatnik party b/w pics from NYPL.