Cecil Beaton: A Family Archive, Hawarden Castle by Professor Helen Rees Leahy

Draft 1, 4 March 2025 

Cecil Beaton: A Family Archive, Hawarden Castle

Introduction

Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) was one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. His clients included royalty, actors, artists, politicians, socialites, pop stars and fashion models. But Cecil did more than record the appearance of his sitters: he captured their character and shaped their public image. Today, we all view celebrities through Cecil’s camera lens. 

Cecil became as famous as the people he photographed. His biographer commented: ‘He advanced the role of the photographer from being a man who arrived at the tradesman’s entrance to arriving at the front door and very often staying for lunch.’ In fact, he was a successful designer, artist and writer, as well as a photographer. Whatever the latest project - from a fashion shoot for Vogue to designing costumes for Hollywood films like My Fair Lady and Gigi - Cecil applied an unerring instinct for the theatrical and the beautiful.

Cecil lived with the same courage and flair that characterised his work. Always impeccably dressed, he brought a sense of style to everything he did, however transient - whether arranging a vase of flowers or organising a garden party. Away from the public eye, Cecil spent time here at Hawarden, the family home of his niece Rosamund, Lady Gladstone. Rosamund’s mother was Cecil’s sister, Baba, whom he had first photographed as a girl and then as a beautiful young debutante. Baba was Cecil’s first model and muse: his pictures of her (and their sister Nancy) defined the glamour of the 1920s. 

Through this family connection, the Cecil Beaton archive at Hawarden survives as a trove of personal memories, including photograph albums, scrapbooks, drawings, paintings and ephemera. Like all family collections, the archive tells a story of loving relationships and private enjoyments. By sharing these things with our visitors for the first time, we hope that they provide inspiration, pleasure and perhaps a different view of Cecil, at ease among family and away from the spotlight.

Young Cecil: Apprentice Photographer

There were few clues in Cecil Beaton’s early childhood to the extraordinary success and fame that he would achieve as a photographer, designer and diarist. The eldest of four siblings, he was born into a comfortable middle-class family without artistic connections. Cecil’s world changed when, aged eleven, he was given his first camera. From then on, photography became an obsession. Not content with the ‘point and shoot’ approach of hobby photographers, young Cecil soon began to compose theatrical images with lighting and backdrops. His sisters, Nancy and Baba, were recruited as models, often having to hold an uncomfortable position for up to five minutes.

Cecil was an entirely self-taught photographer. During the school holidays, he created elaborate sets in his parents’ house, using borrowed lamps and household mirrors to mimic the conditions of a photographic studio. He made costumes and backdrops from sheets and carpets, and learned how to produce specific effects through trial and error. For example, a blurred background could be achieved by shaking a rug behind the sitter: one sister shook the rug while the other posed for the camera.

By the time they were young adults, Nancy and Baba had become Cecil’s favourite models. When he could afford it, Cecil paid them each sixpence per picture. Once he posed Baba with a glass dome over her head to make her look like a waxwork in an exhibition. Apparently she was nearly asphyxiated, but Cecil achieved his desired effect and he repeated the trick with subsequent sitters. He declared that he did not only want to make people look beautiful, but fantastic and amusing as well.

In the early 1920s, Cecil’s highly original and glamorous photographs of Nancy and Baba began to appear in society magazines like the Tatler and the Bystander. All three siblings benefited from the exposure. Cecil attracted paying clients to his homespun photographic studio, and his sisters were invited to the most fashionable parties on the London social scene.

Bright Young Things

Cecil’s transformation from shy schoolboy and unhappy student (he left Cambridge University without a degree) to the dazzling centre of the fashionable world was entirely self-willed. His talent as a photographer combined with an instinct for social networking, propelled him into the set known as the Bright Young Things. These were the Roaring Twenties when party goers danced to jazz music and the mass media turned movie actors and sportsmen into celebrities. For those who could afford the new automobiles, radios and gramophones, the world felt modern.  

Cecil had found his footing, both socially and professionally. It is due to his singular skill and vision as a photographer, that when we think of the Bright Young Things, we see them in Cecil’s costumes, through Cecil’s lens and as Cecil’s friends.  

The Bright Young Things took parties very seriously. The craze for fancy dress balls, pageants and masquerades demanded the most creative and extravagant costumes. There was a baby party at which guests arrived in prams and where drinks were served in a playpen, and a literary party where everyone came dressed as the title of a book. Prizes were awarded for the best costumes.

Cecil was in his element. He not only designed and made the most ambitious costumes for Nancy, Baba and himself, he also photographed his sisters and their friends for the magazines and newspapers that reported on fashionable society. Cecil understood power of dressing-up to liberate, transform and transgress. He also knew that he could create stunning effects with fabrics, beads, metallic foil and cellophane. For the Galaxy Ball in 1929, he designed a costume for Nancy as a Shooting Star. The following year, he photographed Baba and two of her friends as the Soapsuds Group for the Living Posters Ball. In Cecil’s picture, the three young women are surrounded by huge bubbles created from balloons wrapped in cellophane. 

The collection at Hawarden Castle includes one of Cecil’s most famous photographs of Baba, dressed as the Medieval romantic heroine, Heloise, for the Lover's Pageant held in 1927. Baba’s full Medieval costume included an elaborate headdress: Cecil has omitted this for the photograph, giving Baba a strikingly modern appearance. The image is a vivid example of the artifice and brilliance that Cecil could create from fake pearls, foil and shiny fabrics. Baba appears as the epitome of 1920s beauty and glamour.

Wedding Albums

In 1932, Cecil’s sisters, Nancy and Baba, each announced that they were engaged and within two years, both were married. Nancy married Sir Hugh Smiley in 1933 and the following year, Baba married Major Alec Hambro. For Cecil, weddings were an opportunity for a theatrical production. He loathed conventional weddings with ‘wired roses and lumpy girlfriends looking like bad imitations of musical comedy bridesmaids.’ True to character, he declared ‘I can see no point in making a marriage a dull, quiet, obscure thing.’

A scrapbook of press cuttings in the Hawarden collection shows that Nancy’s wedding was anything but dull and obscure. The ceremony took place in St Margaret’s, Westminster, which was decorated by the famous florist, Constance Spry, one of Cecil’s friends. She filled the church with chalk-white flowers and hazel branches sprayed with chalk. It was a winter wedding and Cecil wanted his sister to look like the snow queen. Nancy wore an ivory chiffon gown, lavishly embroidered with pearls and silver sequins, and the hem trimmed with ermine. She was followed by eight bridesmaids harnessed to each other with garlands of white flowers. Among the guests, Cecil was prominent in pale lavender-grey trousers, white satin stock and a white top-hat. 

Baba’s wedding was equally stunning. Her costume was designed by Charles James and was extremely modern in its simplicity. In fact, the cut of the dress was highly complex and designed to cling and drape around Baba’s slim figure. Today, it is in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Cecil gave his new brother-in-law an album which he entitled ‘To Alec of Baba from Cecil’. It contained a collection of the many photographs of Baba that Cecil had taken during the previous decade. Here is Baba in fancy dress, in fashionable evening gowns and in elegant day clothes. It is a visual tribute to both the model and the photographer. No one observed the quality of Baba’s beauty more closely than Cecil. He wrote that she ‘has the repose of archaic sculpture…with classical features and limp spun hair like a Medieval page’s… her figure is so elongated that, on her, materials fall in vertical folds like the flutings on a Grecian column.’ Seen through Cecil’s camera lens, Baba’s look was both timeless and very modern. 

Baba and Alec had two daughters: Alexandra (born in 1935) and Rosamund(born in 1939). Rosamund’s marriage to Sir William Gladstone in 1962 brought her to Hawarden and, in turn, both her mother and Uncle Cecil became frequent visitors to the estate. Baba died here in 2018.

Putting on the Style

It would be an understatement to say that Cecil loved clothes: they were his obsession. As well as being immensely knowledgeable about their design and construction, he understood the social language of clothes and could decode the meaning of any outfit, worn by a man or woman. Beaton knew that clothes have the power to transform how we present ourselves in the world, and how the world sees us.  

Producing fashion and society spreads for magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair Beaton worked with the leading designers in Paris, New York and London, but he was more than a follower of fashion. He famously remarked: ‘The truly fashionable are beyond fashion’. His own look often mixed garments from different periods and from different cultures with classic English tailoring. Combining vintage pieces with, say, a Saville Row suit might not raise eyebrows today, but in his day Beaton was a trailblazer. The day he went to university, he wore ‘an evening jacket, red shoes, black and white trousers, and a huge blue cravat.’ Defying convention required courage as well as style. 

Vintage jackets and antique waistcoats were a cornerstone of his wardrobe. He picked up pieces on his travels in America, North Africa and Europe. Although Cecil went to Savile Row, where he had accounts with more than one tailor, for his suits, he also had copies made in Hong Kong. As he wrote in his diary: ‘If only people knew! I spend comparatively little on clothes…’ 

In 1954, Cecil published a book called ‘The Glass of Fashion’. This was his idiosyncratic account of twentieth-century fashion from the perspective of diverse tastemakers, from designers such as Chanel and Dior to his Aunt Jessie. It was a very personal book: written from an insider’s perspective, laced with social history, peppered with his famous wit and illustrated with his own sketches. It was also a rebuke to those who dismiss fashion and style as frivolous and superficial. Cecil wrote: ‘When we talk about fashion… we really mean the whole art of living.’

There is a story that when Cecil died, among the first people to be informed was his tailor.

Diaries and Scrapbooks 

As well as a photographer, designer and artist, Cecil was an energetic writer who kept a diary of his daily activities from the age of eighteen. Between 1922 and 1974, he filled 145 notebooks with a candid and humorous account of his life. An edited version was published in six volumes during his lifetime. He also developed the habit of jotting down a pen portrait (not always complimentary) of his celebrity sitters after a photographic shoot. As someone who met and knew so many remarkable people, his diaries and notebooks form a unique chronicle of the twentieth century. 

Cecil collected images of anything and everything else that interested him. One of his serious pleasures was pasting pictures, articles and cuttings into the scrapbooks that he compiled throughout his life. Some of his scrapbooks recorded a particular event, such as the book of press cuttings about his sister Nancy’s wedding, which is part of the Hawarden collection. Others were purely serendipitous.

In 1937, he published Cecil Beaton’s Scrapbook, a collection of short essays, photographs, sketches and clippings. As he wrote in the preface: ‘I have now over fifty diaries & scrapbooks, memorials of many violated magazines, repositories of museum picture postcards, theatrical programmes, letters, photographs & pictorial miscellanea which have accumulated since childhood.’ The great pleasure of the book - as with any scrapbook - was the unpredictable mixture of topics and images. Articles on Marlene Dietrich, Hats, Greta Garbo, New York, Wallis Simpson, The Russian Ballet, Katherine Hepburn, and Christmas reflected Cecil’s interests in art, fashion and society, as well as his personal observations of many of the most famous women in the world. The book was a commercial success, although his unflattering comments about some of his subjects (including Garbo and Hepburn) unsurprisingly incurred their annoyance. 

Cecil’s sketches and scrapbooks reveal his eye for the beautiful, the unexpected, and the absurd. His aesthetic impulse is always evident in his choices and juxtapositions, but there is also a sense of coincidence and contingency. Scrapbooks do not follow any rules: they can be playful and illogical, guided only by imagination of their compiler. The French writer, André Malraux, argued that photography enables each of us to construct our own musée imaginaire (usually translated as ‘museum of the mind’) of favourite artworks gathered together from anywhere in the world in an ideal museum that exists only in our heads - or the pages of a scrapbook.

Cecil understood the capacity of photography to inhabit the imagination and to create new ways of seeing. By sharing the Cecil Beaton archive at Hawarden with our community during 2025, we hope to stimulate new conversations and connections informed by his legacy. What can we learn from Cecil’s approach to life and art, and how can his pursuit of creativity inspire us today?