Word: royalities
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Regent's Park, less than two miles away, the 30-man Royal Green Jackets Band was in the midst of playing a medley from the musical Oliver! when an equally powerful bomb pulverized the bandstand. It was 12:55. Said one of the 150 or so people who were attending the lunchtime concert: "Everything seemed to come up from the bottom of the bandstand and blow right into the air-bodies, instruments, everything. There were mangled bodies all over the deck chairs." The toll of the two grisly incidents: ten soldiers killed; 32 soldiers, two policemen and 21 civilians...
...bombings occurred as Britons expressed mounting concern about the effectiveness of their country's police and intelligence services. Details of how Intruder Michael Fagan had found his way to the Queen's bedroom two weeks ago stirred a heated debate about protection for the royal family. In a separate incident, the Queen's chief bodyguard, Michael Trestrail, resigned after admitting that he had had frequent sexual relations with a male prostitute. The scandal came to light when Trestrail's lover, noting the publicity swirling around the palace intrusion, tried to sell his story to a British...
Through an unlocked ground floor window, Faganclimbed into the Stamp Room, where the extensive royal stamp collection is displayed. That set off an alarm, but it was ignored. Fagan went back out the same window, shinnied up a drainpipe, removed his sandals and socks, and climbed to another window, which had just been unlocked by a maid. For the next 15 min. or so, reported Dellow, "he moved through the corridors of the palace unchallenged. One member of the palace domestic staff remembers seeing him, but his behavior was not sufficiently suspicious to cause her to raise the alarm...
Suicide suddenly occurred to him when he spotted the ashtray. He smashed it and, at 7:15 a.m., entered the royal bedroom carrying a shard. The policeman stationed outside the door had gone off duty at 6 a.m. The footman who relieved him, by custom, was walking the Queen's corgis. Her maid was working near by but with doors closed so as not to disturb the sleeping monarch...
Smith was most at home at the race track, even as "a slightly bewildered Yank" visiting Ascot. "Half the royal family was on the premises," he writes in 1960, "and horseplayers were being so polite their teeth hurt." He savors "the soft afternoons under the old elms of Saratoga" and the memories of great races, like the 1941 Preakness: "Whirlaway came loping along counting the house with Arcaro sitting still as a bluepoint on the half-shell." To Smith, horses are people with four legs and wonderful names. What a pleasure to learn that a colt by the French stallion...