LONDON: After 60 years of marriage, survivors generally have only memories and family photographs of their wedding day. But when you are the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, whose anniversary is on Nov 20, not only will there be a service at Westminster Abbey — at which the sermon will be preached by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who wasn’t even born when the wedding took place — but the National Archive has also been thrown open to disclose all the details of the day.
Documents, which have been turned into a book, detail not only the costs and arrangements, but also how the post-war naturalisation of British citizens was held up because the royal family and the then government of Clement Attlee wished to delay the news that Prince Philip was becoming a British subject until the engagement was announced. They also disclose the horror of Queen Mary, the widow of George V, when the palace received a lace tray cover, woven by Mahatma Gandhi himself as a wedding present for the royal couple, because she thought it was his loincloth.
The book says that the government gave the couple the standard extra 200 clothing coupons, allowed to all brides, but that they were also inundated with coupons sent by women from all over the country — all sent back because passing on coupons was illegal. Among gifts from abroad were 131 pairs of nylons and 500 cases of tinned pineapples from the governor of Queensland. The New York Institute of Dress Designers sent 25 dresses as a gift, 20 of which were given to other brides getting married at the same time.
Among the 2,500 wedding presents were a sewing machine, a vacuum cleaner, an automatic potato peeler and a bath sponge. Some, including a Sevres dinner service given by the government and people of France, are still in use.
The wedding, on Nov 20 1947, followed a year of rationing, shortages and severe weather. It was intended to be an opportunity for public celebration — a “first postwar sight of pageantry and colour” in the words of the Manchester Guardian. The paper reported that huge crowds cheered the princess to and from the service at Westminster Abbey.
The book details many of the costs of the wedding as far as the government was concerned — and its attempts to pass on some of the expense. The dean and chapter of Westminster were less than pleased to be billed for GBP92 to cover the cost of a temporary stand for clergy unable to take their usual seats in the abbey’s choir stalls.
Anxious not to appear too extravagant at a time of rationing, the royal family limited the wedding breakfast to 150 guests and three courses, with partridge as the main dish since it was not rationed.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service
