Betty Kenward, who died on January 24th aged 94, was the undisputed doyenne of professional partygoers. As the author of Jennifer's Diary in Tatler, then Queen and finally Harpers and Queen, she chronicled the social life of English county families at balls, cocktail parties, weddings, royal receptions, race meetings, private views and country house weekends for nearly half-a-century. Her column consisted of a list of names occasionally preceded by complimentary adjectives, her favourites being "radiant", "exquisite" and "tireless".
She had a phenomenal memory for names, titles and jewellery. "The jewels at this ball were unbelievable in their beauty. The Duchess of Northumberland wore a superb family tiara with her red dress, and her beautiful mother the Duchess of Buccleuch now Mary, Duchess of Buccleuch, wore the exquisite Buccleuch emeralds and diamonds. The Duchess of Roxborough, later Mary, Duchess of Roxborough, wore huge diamond bows on her dress and diamond cupid bows in her hair . . ."
She attended on average a reception, two cocktail parties and a dinner and dance every day, but never took notes. Her style was uncritical. She registered disapproval of a person by omitting to mention them.
A young society photographer working for Queen once approached her at a function. "My photographers never speak to me at parties," she informed him acidly. Soon afterwards the young photographer married Princess Margaret and became the Earl of Snowdon, but for years afterwards Jennifer referred to the royal couple as H.R.H. Princess Margaret and her husband.
Her writing style, especially her punctuation, was idiosyncratic. Royal personages were always preceded and followed by semi-colons and Queen Elizabeth by her own special comma; exclamation marks were preferred to full stops.
Betty Kenward's appearance was equally singular. By day she favoured Hardy Amies suits like the queen's, by night pink taffeta ballgowns. She always wore a four-string pearl choker, hard, geisha-esque makeup, and was heavily powdered with her stiff, bouffant, champagne-coloured hair fastened at the back with a velvet bow.
Despite constant mentions of "dear friends" in her diary she was not a particularly friendly person. This may have been the result of an insecure childhood which she describes without self-pity in her 1992 autobiography, Jennifer's Memoirs.
She loved her father, Brian Kemp-Welch, and her twin younger brothers, but she did not get on with her mother, Verena, whom she described as "very pretty but very immoral".
At finishing school in Brussels, the 12-year-old Betty Kenward was advised by her friend Bunty that they could no longer share a room because Mrs Kemp-Welch was living with a man who was not her husband.
Betty Kenward ran away from home at 16 to work in a hatshop in Knightsbridge, and through family connections she met Barbara Cartland and joined the country house and cocktail party set.
In 1932, she married Capt Peter Kenward at St Margaret's, Westminster. Their son Jim was born a year later. But Kenward was a violent alcoholic and they divorced 10 years after. To pay for her son's education at Winchester, Betty Kenward worked in a munitions factory, as a house matron at Eton and on the inquiries desk at Vogue, but even so she was occasionally forced to pawn items of jewellery to pay school fees.
In 1944, she started working for the On and Off Duty in Town and Country column of the Tatler. In the early days she would stand for hours outside the Ritz to see who came in and went out. The following year the editor changed the column's name to Jennifer's Diary because he said she looked like a Jennifer.
Betty Kenward is often credited as the person who put an end to the tradition of presenting debutantes at court; she confided to a friend of the queen's that she considered it outdated, vulgar and commercialised. It stopped in 1958.
Her personal style and social standards may have been set in aspic, but she recognised before many of her peers that it was more sensible for a young woman to go to university than to look for an eligible husband.
The young women who worked on Jennifer's Diary - she had two full-time assistants - did not, however, regard Betty Kenward as their champion. They were not allowed to smoke, have red hair, use biros or be Irish. Most of them left after four months.
Elizabeth Kenward: born 1906; died, January 2001