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 they still had a place in the world.
Since 1918 – if not before – the British Royal Family had been the premier dynasty; and now, with fewer surviving monarchies than ever, its pre-eminence was even more apparent. ‘You are the big potato,’ Smuts was overheard saying to the King’s mother at the wedding-eve party; ‘all the other queens are small potatoes.’52 Nobody doubted it or that this was an occasion for big potatoes to show cousinly solicitude to small ones, whatever their circumstances. Lady Airlie cast her mind back to 1939 or even 1914. Old friends were reunited, she wrote, old jealousies swept away.53 ‘It was a tremendous meeting place,’ recalls Princess Margaret. ‘People who had been starving in little garrets all over Europe, suddenly reappeared.’54 Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia likened the atmosphere to that of a boarding school, in which all the royal families belonged to the same house: the Wedding reminded her of a reunion of school friends, all ‘shedding their grown-up facade, and romping together in an abandon of gossip, leg-pulling and long-remembered family jokes’. Many of the visiting royals – especially the mendicant ones, who had their travel expenses discreetly paid by the Windsors – crowded round a communal table in the dining room at Claridges, where they were put up, adding to the illusion of an unruly and cacophonous academy.55
However, simple accounts of happy high jinks, and of bygones being bygones, did not give the whole picture. Delicate decisions had to be made. Though Philip’s mother was invited, his three surviving, German-married sisters were not. Nor was the Duke of Windsor, who spent the day morosely in New York in his Waldorf Towers suite. A few who came might have done better to have stayed away. ‘When I am back behind the Iron Curtain,’ Queen Helen of Romania remarked during her brief stay, ‘I shall wonder whether