de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception
Noel Coward sang: 'Cocktails and laughter - but what comes after?' in his 1925 revue On With The Dance. The feverish hedonism of the Jazz Age, which ran through the Twenties, was a reaction to the horrors of the previous decade, when World War I and the flu epidemic killed more than 20 million people in Europe alone.
For ten years the moneyed classes in Britain and America partied without heed for the reckoning. It was an era of excess, when money seemed limitless and they believed the boom would never end. It was also the decade that led up to the devastating economic collapse of the Thirties.
And the similarities to the giddy years of the past decade - with their cocaine-fuelled parties, mega-rich businessmen and devil-may- care approach to spending - could hardly have been more relevant when the world stood on the brink of another financial catastrophe.
Of course, it all began in America, but the British soon joined in as jazz music arrived, with the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band playing at the newly-opened Hammersmith
Palais de Danse. Admission cost a shilling (5p).
Frivolity: A typical Twenties party, as depicted in the 1929 film Gold Diggers Of Broadway
While the young quickly became familiar with names such as King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, one clergyman spoke for many when he declared that: 'The morals of a pigsty would be respectable in comparison.'
Jazz was undisciplined and sexually suggestive - something the older generation were going to have to get used to as the decade wore on. It wasn't only the jazz. 'It is rotten! It stinks. Phew, open the windows!' was another clergyman's reaction to the Charleston when it came in - a dance which more than any other is associated with the Twenties.
It was considered vulgar until Edward, the Prince of Wales, danced it (and very skilfully, too).
Londoners queued up to take lessons from his instructor, who demonstrated the steps on the roof of a taxi driving through the West End.
Other dances, such as The Black Bottom, a rather clumsy, foot-stamping effort, did not last the pace, any more than did the jogtrot or the shimmy. The Tango, though, was here to stay, greatly assisted by the Western world's heart-throb of the time, silent movie-star Rudolph Valentino.
Everybody danced - in newly built dance halls, in church halls, drill halls, even scout huts. Like the cinema, dancing was classless and a good way to meet people.
A drunken minister even slid under a table mid-speech
At the top of the range, tea dances took place at The Savoy (five shillings) or the Piccadilly Hotel. Cheaper, at two shillings, were the Astoria Dance Hall and the Regent Palace, which were said to be pick-up places.
From these you went down a few steps, into one of London's 11,000 nightclubs, many of which the puritanical Home Secretary of the day did his best to close.
It was a short walk from the Embassy Club in Bond Street, patronised by the Prince of Wales and his bisexual brother, to the Grafton Galleries, which boasted a negro band and required guests to wear gloves while dancing.
The queen of London nightlife was Kate Meyrick, proprietor of the famous 43 Club. She was regularly raided by the police, but made enough money to send her two sons to Harrow.
In 1924 she was sentenced to six months imprisonment for breaching the licensing laws, winning indignant sympathy from her clients, who included the king of Romania, the crown prince of Sweden, and the actress Tallulah Bankhead.
Three years later, undaunted, she opened the grandest of her clubs, the Silver Slipper in Regent Street, where the walls were painted with Italian scenes and the dancefloor was made from glass. All three of her daughters married into the peerage.
However determined the police were to crack down on out-of-hours drinking, young men who worked all day and wanted the company of women at night were determined to get round the law. This they did through private bottle parties, organised by a 'host' on private premises.
The host would be paid for his trouble at the rate of 25 shillings for a bottle of whisky, up to 55 shillings for a bottle of very average champagne, and five shillings for an egg and two rashers of bacon.
In the early days of bottle parties, the host was expected to provide a good dancefloor, impeccable waiters and luxurious surroundings.
The venues rarely opened before midnight and closed at six or seven in the morning when the last inebriated guests were helped into taxis. As time passed, these bottle-party events grew tattier and the entertainment raunchier, with semi-nude cabarets.
The Stock Exchange was flooded with unproven firms
According to the poet Robert Graves, who wrote an influential book about the interwar years, the clientele was largely made up of Soho vice kings, pools promoters, bookmakers and manufacturers from the provinces - in the phrase of Stanley Baldwin (Prime Minister three times in the Twenties and Thirties): 'Hard-faced men who looked as if they had done very well out of the war.'
Prostitutes also found their way to the bottle-parties. There was a growing number of these, professional and amateur, partly as a result of safer birth control. This, after all, was the era of the modern girl, who during the war had done 'a man's job' and earned her own money.
The expressions 'sugar daddy' and 'gold digger' were very much in vogue as a polite way of describing what was going on. In London, so they said, one girl in ten carried a contraceptive in her vanity case.
The newspapers brought sex into their pages when they could. But since it was accepted that it did not pay to run pornography in a family newspaper, the dailies referred to it obliquely by launching attacks on salacious books and plays.
The Bright Young Things, a phrase redolent of the Twenties and the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, made just as good copy.
Traders yell instructions following the Wall Street Crash in 1989
Led by Lady Loelia Ponsonby and various Guinnesses, the Bright Young Things organised, 'stunt' parties, in Waugh's words, 'masked parties, Greek parties, almost naked parties' and even a baby party, with cocktails served in nursery mugs. They and their friends played jazz and drank gallons of White Lady, (recipe: a quarter lemon juice, a quarter Cointreau and half dry gin - shake well and strain into a cocktail glass).
Drunkenness was not just the preserve of the working classes, although they were the target of temperance reformers. The politician Lord Birkenhead lost his seat in Cabinet because of his constant drunkenness, once sliding under the table at which he had been delivering his address.
Nobody agitated against tobacco or cocaine. Men and women smoked like chimneys and were encouraged in the habit by film stars such as Marlene Dietrich and Mae West. Roughly onethird of Hollywood stars in the Twenties were shown smoking on film, but hardly any of the villains.
Snuff, now regarded as harmful, was very popular. Opium was administered in liquid form to keep babies quiet. Cocaine, usually in tonic wine, was regularly taken as a pick-me-up.
When Tallulah Bankhead was asked if cocaine was habit-forming, she replied: 'Of course not! I ought to know, I've been using it for years.'
The fashions of the Twenties were like nothing seen before or since. The well-heeled woman wore a cloche hat, from around 1925, which required her hair to be cut short, first into a bob and then into a shingle. It was curled with heated tongs, although the rich could afford one of the 'Marcel' permanent waves, done at Harrods for the huge cost of five guineas (£220 today).
Towards the end of the decade, fashionable women wore an Eton crop - so short that when they donned trousers it was hard to tell the men from the girls, especially when they wore jumpers.
Smart men could be seen in a canary-yellow hunting waistcoat, green velveteen trousers and suede shoes - although only the tips of his shoes would be visible, so wide were the trousers. For much of the decade, when they were not wearing trousers, well-dressed women wore short, tubular dresses with very low waists.
The shortness, eventually up to the kneecaps, was an expression of their new-found freedom, though it caused embarrassment to some, like Lady Londonderry, who had a tattoo of a snake wriggling up her leg from her ankle.
Most middle-class women filled their days with bridge, tennis, dancing and motoring off to lunch with friends. They sat in Parliament, following the example of Nancy Astor, and drove racing cars and swam the Channel. At the end of the decade, Amy Johnson made her solo flight to Australia.
It was an age in which enough people had enough money so that no expense need be spared.
The burgeoning car industry made a lot of Austin Sevens, but it also made some of the most beautiful cars of all time, with names like Bugatti and Hispano-Suiza.
They took people to the cinema and to the seaside, where the beautiful people discarded their skin-tight corsets, if they were wearing one, and acquired a tan.
Lady Plunket kept her suntan all winter and was rumoured to paint her skin with diluted iodine.
The Bright Young Things worshipped the sun. From the Riviera they moved on to the Lido in Venice, taking along the usual black musicians to play for them.
Cabaret star Leslie Hutchinson and his band played aboard a floating nightclub organised by composer Cole Porter and moored on Venice's Grand Canal. Streamlining was the buzzword: not just cars but planes, airships, irons, floor-polishers and prams. In the U.S., automobiles emancipated an entire population. In motoring, as in flying, huge prizes were awarded for the fastest, the longest or the highest - whatever it might be.
When it came to sheer luxury, the great airships competed with the ocean liners, until 1937 when the fiery end of the Hindenburg would spell their doom.
Meanwhile, the great liners sailed on: vessels such as the Aquitania, which boasted a Palladian lounge and Egyptian swimming pool, not to mention the walnut furniture decorated with
petit-pointe tapestry.
For the first time, the middle classes could also afford sea travel.
Once the tycoons reached America, they travelled by train in private sleeping compartments, known as 'drawing rooms', which had everything they might require, including their own attendants.
If the Bright Young Things spared no expense, the same sort of luxury and extravagance was evident on this side of the Atlantic, where their opposite numbers bobbed their hair, rouged their cheeks and painted their fingernails, and tended their investments.
The aristocracy, for all their display, were not the only engine of great wealth in Britain. In fact, since World War I, they has lost a lot of land and political power, as could be seen along London's Park Lane, where the great houses of the aristocracy were pulled down and vast hotels on the American model erected. Many peers - those who owned property, such as the Dukes of Westminster and Norfolk - remained inordinately wealthy. Others went into commerce and made new fortunes. Others again married into fabulously rich U.S. families such as the Vanderbilts.
Other men came to the fore who could match the fortunes of the aristocracy: newspaper magnates, beer barons, mining magnates and other plutocrats. In the mid-Twenties, there were reckoned to be more than 300 millionaires in Britain, at a time when a thousandth of that would have lasted a labourer a lifetime.
Two-thirds of the national wealth belonged to 2.5 per cent of gainfully employed adults.
There was a strange indifference in the air. In 1928, the Stock Exchange had a tremendous boom in new issues for companies which often had no profit record or trading experience.
They expected to make fortunes overnight on unlimited markets for gramophone records, or artificial silk, or gadgets to stop bed mattresses sagging.
London's immense prosperity, as the decade drew to a close, was shown in the fact that fashionable restaurants could afford to spend £12,000 a year on dance bands.
In the capital, people moved in droves to live near one of the new Tube stations as the Underground system expanded, and huge property rises followed. Land which three or four years earlier had been sold at £380 an acre was now going at £1,500 an acre.
'Stake your claim at Edgware!' screamed the posters.
Noel Coward had a new play out called Bitter Sweet, an operetta, and R.C. Sherriff opened a poignant new World War I drama, with a more timely title, Journey's End.
In the music halls and the nightclubs they were singing the credo of the decade:
'Not much money, oh but honey Ain't we got fun?
There's nothing surer, The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.'
And then came the Wall Street Crash.
