The idea, simply, is to recognise those who graft away quietly for the greater public good. Only three thousand people can receive an honour like an MBE each year. This is a way of extending that national recognition via a raspberry shortcake and a day to remember. And every invitee can bring a companion. The rule used to be just a spouse plus any married daughters between sixteen and twenty-five. By the nineties, the Queen felt that the rules were unfair on the widowed, the divorced, the gay and the single. No one, she decided, should come to the Palace without a friend with whom to share the day. So the rules were changed to include a companion of whatever complexion – and then unmarried sons were included, too. The Garden Party Ladies gather a bundle of passes and badges for all of them. They must check every name and address very carefully, not least because most invitations (and many envelopes) will end up in a frame in pride of place on someone’s wall. Fortunately for the team, though perhaps sadly for the rest of us, modern technology has now crept in to this most Edwardian of summer rituals. The Garden Party Ladies no longer write the invitations themselves. It is all done by a machine with a special handwriting font. Household officials point out that it’s more efficient and people now get their invitations more quickly. What’s more, they say, no one has complained. No doubt they haven’t. It would be a little churlish to be invited for tea with the Queen and then grumble about the writing on the invitation. It’s just another little bit of modernisation in a far-flung corner of the Palace.
Technically, all royal invitations are a command issued to a senior member of the Royal Household – ‘The Master of the Household is Commanded by Her Majesty to invite Mr and Mrs Andrew Other to a reception’ etc. The formal way to reply is laid out in a book called Debrett’s Correct Form, the definitive guide to all forms of etiquette. In the case of a garden party, the invitation comes from the Lord Chamberlain and so the ‘correct’ response is: ‘Mr and Mrs Andrew Other present their compliments to the Lord Chamberlain and have the honour to obey Her Majesty’s Command to attend …’
In fact, given the huge numbers at a garden party, there is no requirement to reply if you are coming but a simple notification is requested if you are not. It’s a security rather than a catering issue.
For smaller Palace events like a reception or a dinner, the invitation will always say ‘RSVP’. Interestingly, only half of today’s guest list will respond in the traditional way. The rest will write whatever seems comfortable. ‘Dear Master of the Household’/‘Dear Lord Chamberlain’ is a frequent opener. It is an interesting indicator of social habits in modern Britain. People are no longer so bothered about traditional etiquette or ‘the form’, yet they retain their innate good manners. They want to reply, but they are happy to do it their own way, regardless of that ‘form’.
It is not just the guests who have changed. The Palace has updated the RSVP process. Because some people no longer write letters of any sort, royal invitations are now issued with an email address for replies. It is another tiny change but a giant leap in modern manners. Email has finally achieved social respectability. Hyacinth Buckets of this world, take note. Understandably, there are some people who are not aware of the abbreviation of the courtly French term Répondez, s’il vous plaît and therefore do not reply at all. Two weeks before an event, Sarah Townend, Deputy Secretary of the Master’s Department, will organise a team to start chasing up non-replies. ‘Sometimes people don’t know they were supposed to reply, sometimes they have forgotten and you might get around fifty who never got the invitation because it went to an old address,’ says Townend. ‘Imagine how gutted they would be if they later found out what they had missed.’
Every facet of British public life is crunching across the Quadrangle, through the Palace and out on to the terrace where they look down on one of Britain’s largest camomile lawns. The Yeomen of the Guard have already started to ‘hold ground’ – mark out lanes through the crowds. Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon Birdwood and his team wander among the new arrivals chatting to people at random, gently enquiring what has brought them here, where they are from and whether they have met the Queen before. ‘If you feel they’re right – any conversation has got to be fruitful – you might say, “Would you care to meet me at that corner of the tent at 3.30?” Then I’ll come back and position them inside the lane. Only then do I tell them that they really are going to meet the Queen. You don’t want to disappoint people.’
One of today’s Gentlemen Ushers has specific instructions – or what is known as a ‘drift’ – to track down specific guests for the Duke of Edinburgh, among them a ninety-six-year-old war veteran from Nottinghamshire. At 4 p.m., the Queen appears on the terrace – she always wears a colourful, visible dress for these events; today it’s bright yellow – with the Duke, the Earl and Countess of Wessex and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. Everything and everyone stops for the National Anthem. Some people suddenly find themselves overwhelmed. Whether it’s anticipation, pride, affection, the majesty of the setting or a mixture of all of those, a number of guests start to cry. It happens more and more as the Queen’s years advance, particularly since she inherited the mantle of national matriarch from her late mother. It’s that sudden acknowledgement of being a personal guest of someone who is not merely famous but exceptional. It can creep up on the most hard-boiled old cynic.
The Gentlemen Ushers are already parking the first fruits of their hunter-gathering in the Queen’s lane, explaining that any bowing or curtseying is optional, that it’s ‘Your Majesty’ followed by ‘Ma’am as in jam’. They have made brief notes about everyone and hand their cribsheets to the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Peel, who will introduce guests to the Queen. That way, he can cover the basics in his introduction ‘Ma’am, may I introduce you to Mr John Jones from Leicester who has been a fireman for twenty years’ – and there is no need for the usual, ‘What do you do?’ The Queen gets straight down to conversation.
Jan Butler and her two colleagues from the Girl Guides are still in a mild state of shock. They came here expecting a nice day out. One of Birdwood’s team grabbed them on the steps and here they are moments away from a formal introduction to their patron (and founder member of the 1st Buckingham Palace Guide Unit in 1937). Lord Peel does the introductions and suddenly they are chatting away about their big anniversary. ‘The Queen knew it was our centenary,’ says Butler afterwards as she seeks a badly needed cup of tea. ‘And she knew what a lot of work we’ve been doing. We’re thrilled.’ The Queen has now moved on to Lieutenant Paul Evans of the Royal Navy and his wife, Annie. At six foot two inches tall, Evans suddenly realises that the Queen is having to look up at him and has the sun in her eyes. ‘Would you like me to move to block it out?’ he asks her. ‘Would you,’ the Queen replies. ‘You’re awfully tall.’
Over in the Duke’s lane, there is some lively banter with Derek Martin, the actor who plays cab driver Charlie Slater in the BBC soap EastEnders. Martin is King Rat, the head of the show business charity the Grand Order of Water Rats. The Duke is a Companion Rat. ‘Where’s your emblem?’ asks Martin, pointing out that all members are liable to a fine if they are spotted in public without their Water Rat badge. ‘It’s on the premises!’ the Duke pleads.
A less formal crowd has gathered round the Earl and Countess of Wessex. Neena Lall, a primary school teacher from east London, has decided that she is not going home without meeting a member of the Royal Family. So she asks a Gentleman Usher if she can meet the Earl. Moments later, they are discussing education in the East End. ‘It’s my birthday!’ she adds. ‘Happy birthday!’ the Earl replies. ‘It’s made it a very special day,’ she says afterwards. ‘It pays to be pushy.’
Most guests are just happy to gawp and to eat. During the afternoon, the guests will consume gallons of the Queen’s own ‘Garden Party’ tea (a blend of Assam and Darjeeling) and as much food as they can eat from a menu which includes old favourites like scones with clotted cream, coffee eclairs and Wiltshire ham sandwiches plus a few more modern touc
hes such as smoked salmon bagels and passion fruit tarts. There is iced coffee and Sandringham apple juice for those who don’t want tea. The whisky in the Dundee cake will be the only alcohol available. The Queen checks it all herself beforehand and makes a few subtle regional variations when in Scotland – shortbread instead of strawberry tart, smoked salmon on oatcakes rather than bagels. For reasons which are not entirely clear, the Scottish guests also devour nearly twice as much fourteen items per head. Perhaps it is the fact that there is more garden to explore at Buckingham Palace. Snooping is positively encouraged.
‘At any formal occasion, it is the touch of informality which makes it enjoyable,’ explains Jonathan Spencer of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. ‘We want people to go away thinking “Gosh, I enjoyed that” rather than “Phew, I didn’t make a mistake”.’ His colleague Alexander Scully has now produced a new booklet for every guest. It not only contains a map of the garden but also includes walking times so that people can work out how long it will take them to get from, say, the Waterloo Vase to the nearest cup of tea. ‘People can go off and explore and kick their shoes off and sit under a tree if they want to,’ says Scully.
For the Queen, however, there is no choice. After more than an hour in her lane, she adjourns to the Royal Tent where a group of VIPs are waiting to meet her. Today they include Lady Thatcher, the Archbishop of York and Lord Strathclyde, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who has brought his mother-in-law. Next door, in the Diplomatic Tent, there are thirty-four ambassadors (countries are invited in strict rotation). Guatemala and Jordan have brought their children. In one corner, Birdwood and his perspiring team have a quiet debrief over iced coffee. They are pleased.
Group Captain Hugh Rolfe, in charge of the Queen’s lane, reports that the Monarch met a bumper tally of twenty-six different groups, including a bus driver and a lady in a wheelchair clutching a 1946 invitation which she was determined to show to the Queen. The Duke met all fifty of his pre-arranged guests plus another twenty groups besides, although there is a frisson of professional disappointment that the Duke was introduced to three Royal Navy groups in a row. There has obviously been a quiet word to all the disabled guests because, as the Queen and her family return to the Palace, all the wheelchairs have been lined up alongside the path. There is informal chat. One elderly gent is so overcome by the moment that he finds the strength to stand up in his wheelchair as the Queen passes by. It’s not quite a miracle. His carer urges him to sit down. Sue Bradshaw, a civil servant from Cornwall, was worried about bringing her seventy-seven-year-old mother, Connie Timmins, all the way from Cornwall in a wheelchair but mother was not missing it for anything. She was supposed to have come to the Palace thirty years before, she explains, but her husband was having his leg amputated that day. Her only complaint is that someone put too much pepper in the cucumber sandwiches. ‘We felt like royalty, today, we really did,’ says her daughter. ‘And, look, I’ve got a souvenir.’ She is clutching a copy of the menu.
It is hard, if not impossible, to think of a British monarch who has witnessed such a revolution in the social diversity, the expectations and the emotional language of the population. The tears and flowers which followed the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, are often cited as an example of Britain’s psychological transformation from wartime stoicism to touchy-feely, extrovert emotion. The untold story of the royal hearse is illuminating. After it had carried the Princess’s coffin to her final resting place at Althorp, it had to be rebuilt. So desperate were the crowds to ensure that their bouquets landed on the roof of the vehicle that many had loaded them with stones to make them fly further. According to one member of the funeral cortege, the hearse was ‘corrugated’ by the end of the journey.
As in the wider world, so within the Royal Family itself, some social boundaries have not merely shifted but disappeared. At the start of the reign, Princess Margaret was effectively barred from marrying a divorcee. By the late sixties, the Queen still sought the government’s approval before permitting her divorced cousin the Earl of Harewood to remarry (he had to do so in America). By 1992, her own daughter was divorced and remarrying in a Scottish church without a word to the Cabinet. Reflecting but also embracing the changing attitudes of society is a challenge for any monarch. George V understood this well, hence the royal turmoil in the summer of 1917. As the Great War was bleeding Britain of a generation, the Royal Family not only abandoned its German names and titles and became the House of Windsor but the King also introduced the Order of the British Empire. It would be one of the great legacies of his reign. The Order of the British Empire suddenly opened up the prospect of national recognition to millions of ordinary people. Until then, the only orders of chivalry were for grandees (the Orders of the Garter in England and Thistle in Scotland), diplomats (St Michael and St George), commanders (Bath) and royal officials and staff (the Royal Victorian Order). The Order of the British Empire was universal – and unisex. The King created the first knighthood for women, the damehood. Everyone could aspire to one of the Order’s five ranks: Member (MBE), Officer (OBE), Commander (CBE), Knight or Dame (KBE/DBE) and, most exalted of all, Knight or Dame Grand Cross (GBE). Today, the Order is thought to number 120,000 living recipients, all of whom have the right to hold services in the Order’s chapel in St Paul’s Cathedral. By contrast, the Order of the Bath has 1,800 living members. Most exclusive, with just sixteen, is the Order of the Thistle.
George VI sought to bridge the social divide in other ways with his factory tours, his groundbreaking meetings with trade unionists and his boys’ camps for pupils from both private and state sectors. Like his father, he also extended the honours franchise further. During the Second World War, he wanted decorations to reflect acts of great courage which had not occurred in combat. To this day, the George Cross ranks alongside the Victoria Cross as recognition of the highest bravery.
With the exception of Edward VIII, modern British monarchs have been careful to respect the great royal paradox, namely that we want our monarchs to be just like ‘us’ but also completely different from ‘us’. What they must never do – and it is a lesson which so many defunct European royal houses failed to learn – is appear superior to ‘us’. It helps that they marry ‘us’, too. When Prince Charles was born, the press made much of his direct descent from Robert the Bruce and Owen Glendower but also rejoiced in the fact that he is descended (via the late Queen Mother) from a clergyman and a plumber called John Walsh. The new Duchess of Cambridge, whose own antecedents include mill owners, solicitors and carpenters, is by no means the first to bring a splash of fresh genealogical colour to the royal family tree.
However arcane the rituals of the early twentieth-century Court may seem to modern minds, the British Royal Family was way ahead of their European cousins in social terms. In 1913, at the wedding of Prince Ernst August of Hanover to Princess Victoria of Prussia, there was royal apartheid when the orchestra struck up a waltz which could only be danced by those listed in Part I of the Almanach de Gotha (the old studbook of European royalty). The minor royalty listed in Part II were obliged to leave the dance floor. Queen Mary, deeply conscious of her relatively minor German royal ancestry, studied it to the point of obsession. Our Queen’s own interest in pedigree is limited to horseflesh and dogs.
The most successful monarchs have often been those condemned for their ordinariness. European princes, with gold braid and uniforms for every occasion, would mock George V for wearing plain clothes or for raising his family at York Cottage, Sandringham, in a house full of department store furniture.* The same continental cousins would scoff at photographs of the King Emperor perched uncomfortably on a miniature railway or digging potatoes during the Great War. They were less quick to sneer when their own thrones started collapsing. As King Farouk of Egypt would note some years later, as his own throne was about to fall: ‘There will soon be only five kings left – the Kings of Diamonds, Heart, Spades and Clubs, and the King of England.’
The British Roy
al Family, like the British public, sees something richly comic about Ruritanian princelings standing on too much ceremony and lineage. It’s no laughing matter among some European royalty, however. ‘It’s junior foreign royalty like Princess Michael of Kent who tend to be the most protocolaire, worrying about people bowing and curtseying to them,’ says one royal intimate. ‘It’s usually the ones who’ve lost their thrones who are the most serious about it because they have nothing else to think about. It’s always more important to bow to someone like King Constantine of Greece because he’s lost his throne so he’ll be more sensitive about it.’ That is not to say that there hasn’t been some crashing home-grown snobbery around – and about – the monarchy. The original champagne socialist, Beatrice Webb, described Edward VII as a ‘welloiled automaton … unutterably commonplace’ and George VI and Queen Elizabeth as ‘ideal robots’. H. G. Wells attacked George V for his ‘alien and uninspiring’ Court – ‘I may be uninspiring but I’m damned if I’m an alien,’ he is said to have retorted. Some of the most withering remarks about the Royal Family often come from ancestor-worshipping aristocrats. As Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in 1957: ‘Duchesses find the Queen dowdy, frumpish and banal.’ Harold Macmillan’s wife, Lady Dorothy, the daughter of a duke, was heard to exclaim on being informed that her husband had been summoned to the Palace: ‘What do they want?’ Her sentiment was no different from that of a grand Norfolk neighbour of the Royal Family. When his wife suggested inviting George V and Queen Mary to dinner, the Earl of Leicester is said to have replied: ‘No, don’t encourage them.’
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