Word: buckinghams
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Dowagers & Movie Stars. The change was not immediately apparent, especially last week, the week of Princess Elizabeth's wedding. Like every U.S. envoy, Lew Douglas had traditional diplomatic rites to perform. He went to a reception at Buckingham Palace, to a dinner with the dowager Marchioness of Reading, and to a St. James's Palace reception to see Princess Elizabeth's wedding gifts...
...Royal Pratfall. As the kings (5) and queens (6), ruling and retired, began to arrive, the royal family's eight-year austerity unbent. At a dance at Buckingham Palace, plump Princess Juliana of The Netherlands was dancing a conga with Elizabeth's uncle, the Duke of Gloucester. She slipped, and stayed down, while Harry of Gloucester tried to tug her up amid a moment of embarrassed silence...
Little mishaps and irreverent remarks continued, but grew less frequent as the festivities narrowed toward the ceremony itself. The crowd began to gather early the night before in favored places near Buckingham Palace and Parliament Square. The crowd was good-natured, a bit rowdy, ill-clad and ill-fed. And, more than in other times, avid for the show that would lift it, not by illusion but by legitimate right, into a symbolic reminder of its own worth. As they waited, chaff flew. When black smoke poured from the palace chimney, a wit said: "Blimey, now they've gone...
...night before the wedding, bride & groom dined alone with their families. The next meal they would take together would be as man & wife at the wedding breakfast in Buckingham Palace, where a three-course austerity menu of fish, partridge and bombe Elizabeth (ice cream) would be served...
...marry off the Princess this month. Each one had his own job. Dr. William McKie, the organist at Westminster Abbey, had a special motet to compose for the ceremony. Sir Arnold Bax, Master of the King's Musick, was working out three trumpet fanfares. Painters were sprucing up Buckingham Palace, which still showed the ravages of war. Electricians were studying ways & means to bathe The Mall with light on the great night...