Dancing till break of dawn

On 8 May, 1945, the day the war in Europe ended, an exhausted King George VI wrote in his diary of his beloved daughters: "Poor darlings, they have never had any fun yet." Princess Margaret, approaching her 15th birthday and the younger of the "poor darlings" was soon to change all that.

In the late 1940s, throughout the 1950s and for much of the 1960s Margaret embraced London and all it had to offer with an enthusiasm that left others exhausted. She cut a swathe through the West End with a tireless round of parties, suppers and balls. And even as a teenager, she adored the capital's nightclubs.

For a girl surrounded by the constraints of the royal household, the nightclubs and the demimonde that frequented them were a thrilling escape. In her late teens, with young blades like Billy Wallace, Colin Tennant or Johnny Dalkeith, she would stay out until 4am, dancing, singing and - quite often - playing the piano.

She was an accomplished pianist and could sing many of the songs then cheering an austere, ration-book-era London. The celebrated band leader Paul Adam would invite her to play and sing some of her favourite Cole Porter songs at Les Ambassadeurs. The club, at 5 Hamilton Place, Mayfair, was known as "Les A" and the princess had her own table near the stage. The club had a raffish feel to it and one night in 1956 gambler John Aspinall, then 29, had a stand-up fight with Neville Clark, former racing manager to the Maharanee of Baroda.

The £7 a year member's subscription was waived for Princess Margaret, but a bill for the evening's drinks was always presented to one of her escorts. In the early 1950s the tab was often picked up by Old Etonian Billy Wallace who inherited a fortune from his father, former Tory transport minister Captain Euan Wallace. Anyone asked to describe Billy almost always said "chinless", because of his receding jaw. But he had a robust character. In the early 1950s Wallace often collected Princess Margaret at Clarence House in his bubble car. They would meet friends at the 400 Club in Leicester Square where the dancing rarely ended before 4am.

The 400 Club was one of Princess Margaret's favourites. It was housed in a cellar and was described by a newspaper as "the night-time headquarters of society". Margaret and her circle had a table known as The Royal Box, close to the 18-piece orchestra which always played softly, to avoid drowning out conversation. There was a minute dance floor and food, but no menu. If guests wanted to eat, they simply ordered whatever they wished and it was served promptly. This was no mean feat in post-war London.

If you were still there at dawn, breakfast was offered. There was a minimum charge of one guinea, and drinks were sold only by the bottle. If you didn't finish your bottle, it was stored for a future visit. Some lay untouched for years. In 1957 the 400 Club dropped its dinner-jacket-only rule, but manager Gaudent Rossi always wore his, as did Princess Margaret's escorts.

The party years began in her teens, but there was a fateful interruption. At the end of the war, King George VI appointed a handsome young RAF officer as his equerry. Group Captain Peter Townsend had been a Hurricane pilot, one of the heroes of the Battle of Britain, and the king liked him immensely. In the late 1940s he came into contact with the young princesses often, but by 1948 courtiers began to realise he was forming a special bond with Margaret, then only 18.

As the Press touted Billy Wallace, Johnny Dalkeith and others as potential future husbands for the princess, she and Townsend became increasingly close. He confessed his love for her in 1951. She said she felt the same and on 20 December 1952 Townsend was granted a divorce from his wife Rosemary, by whom he had two young children.

Their feelings for each other were kept secret, but when the king died in 1952 they grew even closer and people began to notice. The next year Margaret told her sister that she and Townsend wanted to marry. The Queen invited them to supper and explained the difficulties. Her private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, was more direct with Townsend. He told him: "You must be either mad or bad."

There followed nearly two years of agony for the princess and Townsend. He was banished to Brussels in a diplomatic post; she continued her life in London interspersed with royal duties. It finally ended in 1955 when she agreed to a public statement which made it very clear she had no plans to marry. Townsend went to live in France with a beautiful Belgian woman, Marie Luce, 25 years his junior. He saw Margaret again briefly on a visit to London in 1992. He died in 1995 at the age of 80.

After the Townsend episode, Billy Wallace and the princess spent more and more time together. It was no secret he wanted to marry her. They danced for hours at the Halloween Ball at The Dorchester and often went to the Fortune Theatre. Among her friends, Billy was known as Old Faithful. It was thought he proposed to her on a regular basis. But in 1957 he went on a jaunt to the Bahamas and had a fling with a local beauty. On his return to London he blurted out a confession to Margaret. She banished him for a year and he subsequently married Lord Inchyra's daughter Elizabeth. The princess was among the wedding guests.

In her mid-twenties she had a circle of friends that came to be known as the Princess Margaret set. There was Johnny Dalkeith, later 9th Duke of Buccleuch, a tall, red-haired young man whom many saw as a potential suitor, although close friends knew the princess was attracted to less conventional, more artistic men.

The Marquess of Blandford (Sunny), heir to the 10th Duke of Marlborough and Blenheim Palace, had been a friend since childhood and was always close during her party years. So, too, was a man the princess met in 1947, Colin Tennant. Many believe he was her first real boyfriend. He was heir to Lord Glenconner and took her to his family's 9,000-acre estate, Glen, in Peebleshire and delighted her with his eccentric humour. At their first meeting he introduced himself as "2nd Lieutenant Tennant" of the Irish Guards. He remained a friend for life and in 1967, as her marriage to Lord Snowdon disintegrated, he visited her at Kensington Palace. With him was a large-scale map of Mustique, the Caribbean island he had bought years earlier for £45,000. Together they chose an ocean-front, 10-acre building plot which he presented as a gift and on which was built her holiday home Les Jolies Eaux, the only house she ever owned. Lord Plunket was another central figure in the life of the princess in the 1950s. Patrick Plunket was considered a steady young man, impeccably connected and a safe pair of hands. Like all her close friends he signed letters to her with his initials on the bottom righthand corner of the envelope. Staff at Clarence House were instructed not to open mail that bore the initials of friends.

In 1953 Lord Plunket helped the princess stage Lord and Lady Algy, in a charity production starring another friend, Lord Porchester, and a striking young woman called Raine Legge, daughter of the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland and later to become Countess Spencer, stepmother of Princess Diana. Princess Margaret was forbidden by protocol from appearing on stage, but she directed the play with great aplomb.

Lord Porchester shared the princess's love of theatre and played a cockney police sergeant in The Frog, an Edgar Wallace thriller which Princess Margaret produced for charity in 1954. No?l Coward, although a great favourite of the Royal Family, was scathing about her production. He wrote: "The whole evening was one of the most fascinating exhibitions of incompetence, conceit and bloody impertinence I have ever seen. The entire cast displayed no talent whatsoever. In the dressing room ... we found Princess Margaret eating foie gras sandwiches, sipping champagne and complaining that the audience laughed in the wrong places."

After the play Lord Porchester and other members of the Set went to the Milroy Club, neighbour of Les Ambassadeurs in Hamilton Place. The Princess loved the Milroy and its rather louche clientele. A contemporary newspaper diary records that she and Lord Porchester danced together six times to the music of the latest Broadway hits.

The Party Princess