including the service, were broadcast to forty-two countries. The address by the Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, stressed the universality of the occasion. Never, he said, had a wedding been followed with such interest by so many people, yet the ceremony was ‘in all essentials exactly the same as it would have been for any cottager who might be married this afternoon in some small country church in a remote village in the Dales’.67 One of the essentials – despite a few protests from ‘extreme advocates for sexual equality’ – was the promise by the Heiress Presumptive ‘to love, cherish and obey’ her husband.68 Non-essentials included the attendants, the list of whom made no concessions to social equality. All were either royal or aristocratic. Philip’s cousin, the Marquess of Milford Haven, was best man.
The congregation of two thousand included, as Wheeler-Bennett put it, ‘one of the largest gatherings of royalty, regnant and exiled, of the century’.69 There were so many kings and queens and their off-spring, together with foreign heads of state, that other categories were squeezed – British MPs, for instance, had to ballot for places, much to their irritation. Many of the guests were unknown to either the bride or the groom. Others were known to the entire Abbey. When the Leader of the Opposition, Winston Churchill, arrived a little late, ‘everyone stood up’, as Channon observed, ‘all the Kings and Queens’.70 There were also eccentrics. Lady Munnings, wife of Sir Alfred, President of the Royal Academy, sat through the whole service with her Pekinese dog, Black Knight, concealed in her muff.71 To be invited was bliss: to be left off the list, when you thought you should be on it, was torture. ‘Miserable royal wedding day’, wrote Lord Reith, former Director-General of the BBC, in his diary. ‘Didn’t get up till 10.30. Completely out of phase with everything and everybody through not being asked to the Abbey.’72
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