The Queen - Ben Pimlott

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– £20,000 more than Dalton’s offer. He also suggested that the King should make available only £100,000 of accumulated savings, for a period of four years.33 He was, however, taking a risk. The provision required Parliamentary approval which, in view of the need for a Select Committee, could not be taken for granted. Moreover, if they did not accept it, serious damage would be done to the prestige of the Monarchy, as well as to relations between Palace and Parliament.

      The Committee began hearing evidence on December 3rd. A key witness was the King’s private secretary, who impressed MPs with a dire warning that the Civil List ‘may have to face a crisis of insolvency,’ if it did not receive adequate provision. Should this happen, three major economies would become necessary: the abolition of horse-drawn carriages, the disbandment of the Gentleman at Arms and Yeoman of the Guard, and the closing of Windsor Castle as a royal residence. ‘I don’t think any member of this Committee,’ he declared – repeating Bevan’s remark in Cabinet – ‘will disagree with me when I say that, so long as we have a Monarchy, the Monarchy’s work has got to be done well’.34

      It was a close-run thing. Under only slightly different circumstances – with a less persuasive Chancellor, or one who commanded less authority among MPs – the decision might have gone the other way. As it was, five out of the twelve Labour MPs on the Committee, including the Chairman of the Parliamentary Party, were in favour of substantially lower annuities for the royal couple, backing figures of £35,000 for Elizabeth and £5,000 for Philip. In the final vote, Labour MPs, split evenly, and the higher figures proposed by the Chancellor required Tory and Liberal support to carry them.35

      THE DEBATE over annuities for the Heiress and her husband had many echoes over the next half century, as inflation bit into the Civil List, while rising asset values simultaneously added to royal wealth. The question of what Parliament should provide, and what it was fair to ask the Monarch to pay out of private or accumulated resources, remained one of the central issues surrounding the institution.

      In 1947, however, few matters were of smaller interest to the public. Despite the Government’s misgivings, ‘Royal Wedding Week’ in mid-November provided the national carnival of the decade: a spectacular display of conspicuous consumption, for royalty and subjects alike, which revealed – to those who cared to note it – the public longing for a relaxation of controls after eight years of tight regulation. If there was popular criticism or resentment, little of it ever became public. Mass Observation discovered discontent, here and there, about the extravagance. People questioned about the 300 clothing coupons and £1,200 spent on the wedding dress split evenly on whether it was reasonable or not. The journalist Jill Craigie described the decision to design a calf-length trousseau for the Princess as ‘a major victory for the vested interests of the fashion houses.’36 However, opinion polls showed a mellowing of opinion as the day approached, with a rise between July and November from 40 to 60 per cent of people actively approving of the arrangements.37

      During the autumn, pre-nuptial excitement focused fetishistically on the physical details of the preparations, including the wedding presents which arrived by the crate-load from all over the world. A souvenir book was published listing all 2,428 of them, and the gifts themselves were put on show, tickets a shilling each, at St James’s Palace. ‘After the scarcity, the make-do of the war years,’ wrote Crawfie, who beat Princess Elizabeth to the altar by getting married, more modestly, in September, ‘this sudden lavishness was unnerving.’38 Presents ranged from a gold tiara from the Emperor of Ethiopia to a large number of nylon stockings, home-knitted jumpers and hand-made tea cosies.39 There were political gifts, like a 175-piece porcelain dinner service from Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife; well-chosen ones, like a chestnut filly (Astrakhan) from the Aga Khan; and puzzling ones, like the item given by the Mahatma Gandhi, which the catalogue described as a ‘fringed lacework cloth made out of yarn spun by the donor on his own spinning wheel.’40 Queen Mary thought it was the Indian leader’s famous loincloth, and took a dim view. ‘Such an indelicate gift,’ she told Lady Airlie.41 Not included in the exhibition were hundreds of tons of tinned food from British communities abroad, which were distributed to needy widows and pensioners, with a message from the bride.42

      All exhibited gifts were carefully and democratically itemised in the catalogue, regardless of splendour. The pot pourri of the exhibition, appropriate for the times, was reflected in a preview party for donors, attended by rich and poor, ‘peers and factory workers, statesmen and schoolgirls, old age pensioners and housewives, visitors from the provinces, the Continent and the United States.’43 Such social mixing, however, was not to everybody’s taste; nor were many of the gifts. Chips Channon, caught in the crush, noted with admiration a wreath of diamond roses given by the Nizam of Hyderabad, but ‘was struck by how ghastly some of the presents were, though the crowd made it difficult to see.’44 He owed his own invitation to gift No. 797, listed as a ‘silver cigarette case, sunray pattern set with a cabochon sapphire in a gold thumb piece.’45

      The Princess herself spent much of her time before the Wedding thanking the more important corporate donors in person. For such occasions, she had a set speech, which was like a cutdown version of her Cape Town broadcast and a wedding rehearsal combined. ‘As long as we live’, she recited in her thank-you to the City of London, ‘it will be the constant purpose of Lieutenant Mountbatten and myself to serve a people who are so dear to me and to show ourselves deserving of their esteem’.46

      Of almost as great interest as ‘the presents’ was ‘the cake’ – a topic of special fascination because younger members of the population, reared on sugar rationing, found it difficult even to imagine a culinary creation of such opulence. The problem of having the wedding cake made was solved by a neat and characteristic royal exploitation of professional snobbery, vanity and loyalty. Royal-connected cake manufacturers were graciously permitted to present an example of their work, in return for an invitation to the viewing party in the mirror-lined State dining-room, in the presence of the King and Queen, who wandered around, asking polite questions about the ingredients. The winners had the satisfaction of knowing that their cakes had been consumed by royal guests.47 There were twelve cakes in all, the biggest of which stood four feet high, and took four months to make.48

      Finally, there was ‘The Dress’. Of all the totemic artefacts associated with the royal wedding none drove the press and public to greater frenzy than this garment – partly, again, because of the shortages, which had made fine materials hard or impossible even for well-off people to obtain. Accounts of the wedding dress were caressing: according to Norman Hartnell’s own description, it was made of ‘clinging ivory silk’, trailed with jasmine, smilax, seringa and rose-like blossoms, and included a large number of small pearls. Others were even more lyrical. James Laver, fashion expert at the Victoria and Albert, spoke of Hartnell’s creation of Botticelli curves, and of the raised pearls arranged as York roses, entwined with ears of corn. By the device of reversed embroidery, the design had ‘alternated star flowers and orange blossom, now tulle on satin, and now satin on tulle, the whole encrusted with pearls and crystals.’49 A mythology surrounded the production. Hartnell himself liked to recount that his manager, returning from America after a component-hunting expedition, had replied to the question at the customs about whether he had anything to declare, ‘Yes, ten thousand pearls, for the wedding dress of Princess Elizabeth.’50 Like the presents, the dress was put on display, and at times the queue of people waiting to see it stretched the length of the Mall.

      After the build-up, the Wedding became, in the words of an American monarchophile, ‘a movie premiere, an election, a World Series and Guy Fawkes Night all rolled into one’.51 It was also, at its core, a gathering of the remnants of European royalty – a vast, rivalrous, beleaguered, mutually suspicious and mutually loyal, and frequently impoverished, extended family. In this respect, the Wedding was different from a Coronation, which was a state more than a personal event. Because of the background of the groom, special attention was directed at the least significant members of this inter-related, uniformed, bemedalled and be-jewelled galère, who included the flotsam of two world wars and many revolutions – and for whom Lieutenant Mountbatten was both an object of envy, and a morale-boosting proof that

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