Tea with QEII in the summer of ’73
Manawatu¯ Standard, Friday January 5, 1973: Brian Masters is watching TV with the Queen, while she knits him a sweater. Dinner is announced, and Masters finds he is in jeans and badly unshaven.
Getting presentable is a lengthy nightmare. When he finally bursts into the dining room, the Queen is eating dessert. ‘‘You’re too late now,’’ she says coldly. ‘‘I couldn’t wait.’’
At that point, Masters woke up. The Manawatu¯ Standard
continued the story: ‘‘When Masters told the story at a London party he found that nearly everyone there had had a dream about royalty. So he collected more dream recollections – hundreds of them – from all over the Commonwealth, and included them in a book, published by Blond and Briggs. It was called: Dreams About Her Majesty the Queen and Other Members of the Royal Family.’’
If there was one activity that dominated royal dreams, Masters told journalists, it was drinking tea. ‘‘Nearly half the dreams involve sharing a cuppa with the royals.’’
Meanwhile, in Palmerston North, January had ushered in a hot summer – the temperature had climbed to 28.3 degrees Celsius. Local families were heading to Himatangi Beach.
On the sand, among hundreds of swimmers and holidaymakers, a sandcastle-modelling contest was won by H Owen, Marion Cherry, Joanne Owen and Jim Connell with their Mickey Mouse creation.
Youthful Surf Lifesaving Club members in their brief swimming trunks and rubber caps reclined in battered armchairs in the sun, waiting for business.
‘‘Too much is demanded of lifesavers,’’ ran the Standard’s
editorial for that day. ‘‘On New Year’s Day, 29 people were rescued
by the Palmerston North Surf Lifesaving Club at Foxton and Himatangi beaches. A further 38 were rescued at these two beaches on January 2 – sobering statistics which demonstrate holidaymaking is not always fun.
‘‘Their task is not made easier by those who persist in swimming outside the flagged areas . . . The surf lifesavers have made it clear that their priority for rescues are those swimming within the flags.
‘‘How long can we depend on the voluntary efforts of surf lifesaving clubs to rescue those who get into trouble? Few people seem prepared to give money to what could prove the most worthy cause of all – saving their own lives.’’
On January 18, 2018 – 45 years later – Richard Mays would write in the Standard: ‘‘Surf lifesavers at Himatangi Beach are still having issues with people swimming outside the flags.’’
The Foxton Beach Society cancelled a planned Sunday show starring singer Allison Durbin because of a disagreement over ‘‘unsatisfactory financial arrangements’’.
In town, 25,000 people had visited The Lido during the past few days as temperatures passed the average maximum for January. And in Auckland, a sign of the times: An unemployed labourer ended up in court after having ingested a $3 LSD tablet and run naked under the Gillies Ave motorway viaduct, throwing stones at passing cars.
The magistrate told him: ‘‘Let this be a lesson to you on how serious the effects of mind-altering drugs are.’’
On a somewhat related note, Paul and Linda Mccartney’s new Wings single, Hi Hi Hi had just been banned from the airwaves. Mccartney had retorted: ‘‘You can see more that’s controversial during an evening’s television than anything that’s on the record.’’
In Wellington, efforts were continuing to break the deadlock in an airport firefighter’s dispute that threatened to bring air services to a halt from midnight on Sunday.
Overseas, headlines reported no early end to the Vietnam war. The All Blacks, touring Britain, had had some reported criticism for offthe-field behaviour. However, American tourist Mrs E W Elizabeth Hening, who’d stayed at the same hotel in Penzance, Cornwall, as the team, told reporters: ‘‘All the players I met were charming and courteous. They did not put a foot out of place. If they had been an American team they would have smashed the place up.’’
At home, ‘‘closely guarded plans to control demonstrations during the [planned] Springbok rugby tour this year are the most extensive launched by the police in New Zealand. Commissioner of Police WHA. Sharp wouldn’t comment on whether police leave would be cancelled during the tour. One Auckland policeman said this week: ‘Leave, as such, hasn’t been cancelled. But it might as well have been. It’s quite common knowledge that no-one has a chance in hell of getting leave while the tour is on’.’’
As things turned out, the Springbok tour postponement under Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk would end up being a long one. Until 1981.
Palmerston North movies being shown that week were: State Theatre, Broadway: Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs rated R18 for violence; Regent, Broadway: William Holden in The Revengers; and at the Regent’s late-night session at 10.45pm, The Curse of Frankenstein, rated R16 for horror.
The hot summer day turned slowly to night, and the city slept – only to be jolted awake just before 2am by an earthquake.
‘‘Big Tremor: Palmerston North’s Worst for 30 Years’’ screamed the Saturday headlines. The 17-second quake had registered 7 on the Richter scale, the biggest since the shake of 1942, and was felt around the country.
The T and G clock stopped, goods fell off store shelves and smashed, and main trunk trains were delayed for almost three hours.
However, a seismological observatory spokesman told the Standard: ‘‘The quake was deeper than normal [163km] and this would account for the lack of serious damage.’’
It was a dramatic coda to a golden day.