The royals - Kitty Kelley [64]
“I was at her side while she leafed through a sample book of Bon Marché fabric with pretty designs for draperies,” said William Ellis, former superintendent of Windsor Castle. “The Queen saw the prices and lifted her eyes toward me, lowered her head, and said with regret, ‘They are truly pretty, Mr. Ellis, but I believe they are too expensive for me. It will be necessary to find something better priced.’
“The same thing happened with the lighting,” Ellis recalled. “She refused a great number of excellent lampshades. Reason: too expensive. All of the lampshades that I finally bought for her had to be purchased locally in town and could only cost a few shillings. The Queen is very prudent about money.”
At her other country homes, she regularly inventoried supplies and foodstuffs. “I remember her checking the liquor levels on the whiskey bottles every time she came,” said Norman Barson, her former footman. “And she counted all the hams in the larder, too. Everything was logged. She was very businesslike and could spot if something was missing. She’d want to know why the cigarette box she remembered as full was half-empty, even though she didn’t smoke. Or she’d ask why the gin was empty and where had the angostura bitters gone.”
Absorbed with the mind-numbing details of the coronation, the Queen rehearsed by walking up and down the halls of Buckingham Palace with sheets trailing from her shoulders so she could learn how to walk regally with a sixty-foot train. She sat at her desk and worked on her dispatch boxes wearing the crown of St. Edward to get used to balancing the seven-pound weight on her head. In choosing her coronation stamp, she examined sixty-three designs. And to select her most flattering picture for her official souvenir,* she examined 1,500 photos.
The Palace issued strict orders about what to wear during the ceremony. Gentlemen were required to wear dress uniforms, full decorations, and knee breeches. The Foreign Office cabled a series of instructions to embassies around the world: “If black knee breeches are worn, they should be of the same material as the evening dress coat, and should have black buttons and black buckles at the knee. Black silk stockings should be worn and plain black court shoes with bows—not buckles.” Women were told to wear head coverings—preferably a diamond tiara—or a shoulder-length veil that dropped no lower than the waist. The diplomatic cables specified: “Any colour excepting black can be used for this headdress and it should be made in a suitably light material such as tulle, chiffon, organza or lace. It can be attached by a comb, jewelled pins, flowers or ribbon bows—but not with feathers.”
Within Buckingham Palace, the livery room worked to outfit the men of the royal household in black velvet knee breeches with white silk stockings, black waistcoats, gold-braided tailcoats, lace neck ruffles, and patent-leather pumps with silver buckles. Fifteen thousand policemen were brought to London to handle the coronation crowds, and twenty thousand soldiers were assigned to line the coronation route. In accordance with ancient custom, the troops were ordered to abstain from sexual intercourse for forty-eight hours before the sacred crowning. The six young women who wore white satin gowns and carried the train of the Queen’s gown were required to be virgin daughters of earls—“unmarried and untarnished.” They were described by the London Sunday Times as the Queen’s maids of honor—“the girls the whole world envied.”
No movie star ever had a greater hold on her fans than this beloved twenty-six-year-old sovereign had on her subjects. They