The lucky ones felt the kind of excitement people feel when they attend events everybody else wishes they were at: they found beauty and wonder everywhere, in the building, the words, the music, the congregation, the Royal Family, the royal couple and especially the bride. There were many accounts from people eager to display their privileged access, and inside knowledge. Faces were studied for expressions, clothes critically examined for the minutest detail. Mrs Fisher, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, thought the Princess looked ‘very calm, absolutely lovely’ coming up the aisle. The effect of her outfit, she wrote, ‘was a diaphanous one with her lovely train of silk tulle and her veil’.73 Channon ‘thought Princess Elizabeth looked well, shy and attractive, and Prince Philip as if he was thoroughly enjoying himself’.74 Others were impressed by the theatricality of the event. ‘The King looked unbelievably beautiful’, Sir Michael Duff wrote to Cecil Beaton, ‘like an early French King and HRH the Bride a dream.’75
After the signing of the register in the Chapel of St Edward the Confessor, the couple returned, the Prince bowing to the King and Queen, the Princess dropping a low curtsey, her train billowing out behind her. Then they returned together in the Glass Coach to Buckingham Palace, for an ‘austerity’ wedding breakfast for 150 guests. At the end of it, the King made no speech. He simply raised his glass to ‘the bride’.76 The going-away involved an additional ritual. As Philip in naval uniform and the Princess in a coat of ‘love-in-a-mist blue’77 left the Palace forecourt for Waterloo Station, they were chased by bridesmaids and relations, including the King and Queen, pelting them with rose petals. Queen Alexandra recalled that the Monarch and his wife were hand in hand,78 Crawfie that the Queen lifted her skirts to join the farewell party by the railings, as the couple disappeared into the crowds that lined the route.79 According to The Times, ‘Roll upon roll of cheers followed the carriage’, on its journey.80
Press coverage was even greater than for the Coronation – the start of an inflation in the news value of the Monarchy which eventually took its toll. In 1947, it helped to inflame a public interest in the display of royalty which had lain dormant since before the war. Radio was the dominant medium – used by the BBC to create images in the minds of listeners that were reverential, awe-inspiring and atmospheric. ‘Into London’s gathering dusk this afternoon’, the six o’clock newsreader intoned, ‘Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh – man and wife – drove away in an open landau from Buckingham Palace for their honeymoon . . . It’s been a day which London will long remember.’ The written script was broken up, with strokes between words and phrases, to indicate pauses for solemn effect.81 Afterwards, radio and its world-wide audience became part of wedding lore, with tales of huddles of avid listeners in unlikely places – for example, it was reported that the skipper of the New Zealand ship Pamir hove to in the middle of the South Atlantic so that all his crew could listen properly to the broadcast.82 Mass Observation noted that in a typical provincial office, the radio was switched on all day. ‘We couldn’t get into the room’, reported an informant, ‘and just joined the crowd clustered outside.’83
As well as listening to the radio, a small number of people in Britain were able to watch some of the day’s events on an apparatus described by the press as ‘television’s magic crystal’ which had recently resumed broadcasting. A TV camera placed over the Palace forecourt was able to follow Princess Elizabeth’s coach as it came out of the gates, and another took over outside the Abbey. The service itself was filmed, and shown on television the same evening, while the film and other press and broadcasting materials were flown for distribution next day in the United States. So great was the international interest that the Wedding film was even screened in Allied-occupied Berlin. The 4,000 seat cinema in which it was shown in the still devastated city was fully booked, seven days a week.
For British children, the most potent symbol of the Wedding was probably ‘the cake’. Many schools celebrated with feasts of ices and buns, often (so it was reported) ‘without recourse to special supplementary permits from the Ministry of Food’, and in spite of a request from the Ministry of Education to head teachers to be as modest as possible in their spending. Universities treated it as an unofficial rag. Oxford had ‘its gayest celebration since the war,’ with community singing and fireworks in the streets, and undergraduates dancing eightsome reels.84
What was it really about? People were as puzzled then as they are now. Apart from the chance to escape austerity, if only for a day, there was what a woman in Leatherhead described to a Mass Observer as ‘a delighted sort of family feeling. I always get it when watching any sort of royal do.’85 The Archbishop of York had alluded to such a feeling in his marriage service address, and John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, displayed it in a mawkish but revealing Prayer for the Royal Marriage. ‘To those dear lands, still calling Britain “Home”,’ he versified, ‘The Crown is still the link with Britain’s past, The consecrated thing that must outlast / Folly and hate and other human foam.’ A less embarrassing version of the same sentiment was provided by the historian G. M. Trevelyan who wrote in the official souvenir of a King above politics, and a symbol of national unity, yet one ‘who appeals below the surface of politics to the simple, dutiful, human instincts which he and his own family circle represent,’ and ‘who holds the Commonwealth together by the common bond of his royal authority’.
In short, the Wedding was to be regarded – in the Establishment, but also in the Labour Government version – as a reminder of the direct link that supposedly existed between royal familial virtue and the constitutional and political functions of the Monarchy; and the public rejoicing as a celebration of a democratic system which worked. The whole occasion could be seen as a kind of victory parade for liberty, for a constitution, ‘still the most sea-worthy of all political craft,’ which had ‘weathered the storms of two world wars’, and for a family which provided a vital human ingredient. Trevelyan’s argument was pragmatic, yet also romantic. ‘In Great Britain the Crown is the least criticised of our domestic institutions’, he claimed; ‘throughout the Dominions and Colonies it is the point on which the eyes of loyalty are turned from across every ocean. Affection for a King’s person and family adds warmth and drama to every man’s rational awareness of his country’s political unity and historic tradition. It is a kind of popular poetry in these prosaic times.’86
What Trevelyan did not say – something which provided an important element in the Empire-wide celebration of an essentially personal event – was that ‘family’ had come in the dozen years since George V’s death to encroach still further on the other aspects of Monarchy. As the author of an internal Cabinet Office paper on the functions of the Prime Minister put it in June 1947, not only was it absolute doctrine that the King did nothing political except on ministerial advice, ‘the tendency has been to regard more and more matters as having political significance’.87 The Second World War, the election of a highly political Labour Government, and the personality of George VI, had all contributed to this tendency, which had rendered the areas of royal activity that were controversial, or open to normal criticism, nugatory, and narrowed the range of public interest in royal figures and royal lives, without removing its intensity.
Thus, the reduction of the Royal Family to picture book iconography did not diminish public enthusiasm: indeed, by removing all remaining partisan elements, it enhanced it. Appreciation of the virtues of the British system turned into an appreciation of personages from whom all hint of blame had been removed for anything that went wrong – yet who could be thanked for the things that had gone right. The biggest of these was survival. In the late 1940s, apart from the United States, British democracy had no major-state rival, and this was a point, not just for patriotic pride, but also for sober contemplation on the constitutional reasons why it should be so. The point was contemporary and urgent: amongst other things, the Wedding – the ‘splash of colour’ as Churchill called it – was a propaganda blast against totalitarianism at the start of the Cold War. ‘To every foreigner present,’ Wheeler-Bennett was able to write a few years later, the ceremonies, processions and public enthusiasm were ‘an object lesson, doubly expressive in the existing distressed state of Europe, of the stability of Britain’s political