Sequence of tenses

When reading Waugh's 'Vile Bodies' I came across the following sentence: "It was the first time that the party was given in an airship". It would seem to me that in the second clause there should have been past perfect. Could anyone possibly elucidate whether such usage is peculiar to the day and age when the sentence was written or such grammatical pattern is also acceptable nowadays?

Solution 1:

Past perfect tense is used to denote an action completed prior to some past point of time specified or implied. In such a context, the earlier action in the past perfect tense and the later one in the simple past tense are expressed to maintain the sequence of tenses. Here there is no earlier or later time reference. At a certain point of time in the past, a party was given in an airship and such an event was for the first time - both the sequence and event occurred at the same time!