Gnasher George and his Girls
So too was the last grand monarchy in Europe, the only remnant of the extended family of former German princelings which had once enjoyed power from Siberia to Berlin, Athens to Edinburgh. After the national trauma of the Abdication crisis, George VI had established a reassuringly pedestrian image for the family which now called itself simply the Windsors. In private the King expressed fiercely right-wing views, falling into rages or ‘gnashes’ at the pronouncements of socialist ministers. In public he was a diffident patriarch, much loved for his tongue-tied stoicism during the Blitz, when Buckingham Palace received several direct hits. There had been cautious signs of Royal modernization, with Princess Elizabeth being used to make patriotic radio broadcasts and later joining the ATS, photographed in battledress and even mingling anonymously with the crowds on VE Day. The King and Queen, though, ran what was in all essentials an Edwardian Court well into the fifties. Every March teenage virgin girls from aristocratic or merely wealthy families would be presented to the Queen wearing three ostrich feathers in their hair. Then they would begin ‘The Season’, a marathon four-month round of balls and dinners during which, it was hoped, they would find a suitable man to marry. These debutantes would often have been sent to ‘finishing school’ in Switzerland where they would have learned how to walk properly, speak French and run a household according to the old manner. The Royal presentation dated back to 1780 and would eventually be ended by the Queen in 1958: Prince Philip opined that it was ‘bloody daft’ while Princess Margaret complained: ‘We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London was getting in.’ It continued at a nearby hotel where, in eccentric British fashion, the girls still arrived to curtsy to a six-foot-tall birthday cake, rather than the monarch.
Initially, it was unclear how well the monarchy itself would fare in post-war Britain. The leading members of the family were popular and Labour ministers were careful never to express any republicanism in public – indeed, there is almost no sign of it in their private diaries either – but there were many Labour MPs pressing for a less expensive, stripped down, more contemporary monarchy, on Scandinavian lines. Difficult negotiations took place over the amount of money provided by cash-strapped taxpayers. Yet the Windsors triumphed as they would again, with an exuberant display which cheered up many of their tired, drab subjects. The wedding of the future Queen Elizabeth and the then Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten in 1947 was planned as a public spectacle. Royal weddings had not been so organized in the past. This was an explosion of colour and pageantry in a Britain that had seen little of either for ten years, a nostalgic return to luxury. Presents ranging from racehorses to cigarette cases were publicly displayed, grand cakes made and a wedding dress by Norman Hartnell created out of clinging ivory silk ‘trailed with jasmine, smilax, seringa, and rose-like blossoms,’ encrusted with pearls and crystals.
There had been interesting arguments before the wedding about patriotism, complaints about the silk having come from Chinese worms, and a rather over-effusive insistence on Philip’s essential Britishness. The nephew of Lord Mountbatten was sold to the public as ‘thoroughly English by upbringing’ despite his being an exiled Greek prince, a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, and having many German relatives. In the event, Philip’s three surviving sisters were not invited to the wedding, all of them being married to Germans. He showed himself wryly prepared to accept all this, though he was reported to have annoyed the King by curtsying to him at Balmoral when he saw him wearing a kilt. The wedding was a radio event, still, rather than a television one, though newsreel films of it packed out cinemas around the world, including in devastated Berlin. In its lavishness and optimism, it was an act of British propaganda and celebration for bleak times, sending out the message that despite everything Britain was back. The wedding and the later Coronation reminded the club of European royalty how few of them had survived as rulers into the post-war world. Dusty uniforms and slightly dirty tiaras worn by exiles were much in evidence: the Queen’s younger sister Princess Margaret remarked that ‘people who had been starving in little garrets all over Europe suddenly reappeared’.