Royal wedding fever
Every detail about Diana and Charles’ ceremony made the pages of the Manawatu¯ Standard, which was full to the brim of wedding news in 1981.
‘‘Breakfast to be served on gold plates,’’ ran the Manawatu¯ Standard’s headline on Thursday July 23, 1981.
With only five days to go until the eagerly awaited wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, the Standard featured a huge broadsheet story about the preparations.
A story by Dennis Bardens began: ‘‘Only a handful of British people nowadays associate breakfasts with special occasions.
‘‘Ceremonies are usually marked by a lunch or more especially, a banquet. Most banquets are evening affairs. The wedding breakfast to be held in the vast, elegant ballroom – 30 by 20 metres – of Buckingham Palace will be ... a minor banquet, with a wide variety of dishes prepared in the palace kitchens.
‘‘Yet it will be nevertheless a family affair, with relatives and friends of the respective families, plus the cream of the more distinguished guests. Footmen and waiters will be in full scarlet and gold livery.’’
The story revealed that the last time the famous royal gold-plate collection had been valued, in 1911,
it was worth £1.5 million, ‘‘so its present value is hardly short of £5m.
‘‘The plates are very heavy and are stored at Windsor Castle.’’
The wedding feast, though lavish, would not be as stupendous as one held in the time of James II, readers were told – that event had had 1245 different dishes on the menu. The uncanny smoothness of the meal service would be due to ‘‘tiny lights hidden in the banked-up flowers, which are operated by the palace steward as a signalling system for them to take up their positions, start serving, or clear things away’’.
The seating arrangements would be non-traditional, since the bride’s father and mother were divorced, and both had remarried. Where to seat both Diana’s mother and her stepmother?
‘‘But divorce has ceased to attract the taboos it once did.’’
On the London streets, the Standard reported, royal wedding souvenirs were selling fast.
The Design Council had approved about 60 ‘‘good-taste’’ souvenirs. The selection committee had faced ‘‘a rather daunting task’’ of sifting through hundreds of ideas from the interesting to the downright tacky, before choosing commemorative Wedgwood mugs, decanters and plates, Prince of Wales-inspired cufflinks, quilted cushions with lovers’-knot designs and silk Liberty scarves, among others.
The history of Prince Charles’ home, Highgrove House, where the couple would live, was described in a second story, by David Verey.
The Georgian house, set in 140 hectares near the market town of Tetbury in Gloucestershire, had ‘‘nine bedrooms, four reception rooms, six bathrooms, a nursery wing and servants’ quarters’’.
The extensive grounds, set in the heart of the Beaufort Hunt fox hunting country, included a stable block. The Standard story noted: ‘‘The town of Tetbury has decided to give the prince a new set of gates as a wedding present.’’
Highgrove was built in the late 18th century for a man named John Paul. After a fire damaged the house in 1893, it was restored and enlarged. The Paul family were Huguenots who came to England in the 17th century and settled in Woodchester, King’s Stanley and Tetbury. They were described as ‘‘moderately successful clothiers, distinguished only by their use of the biblical Christian names Nathaniel, Onesiphorus, Josiah and Obadiah’’. Their original house would be altered by various descendants over the years.
One, named Sidney Kitcat and born in 1868, gained some fame when he caused the Marylebone Cricket Club to make a change to the sport’s laws.
‘‘When batting for the Marlborough College XI against Rugby, he was given out after being caught at cover-point off the bowling of CW Bengough, who through an oversight was bowling at the wrong end. The matter was referred to the MCC, the law then stating that ‘the bowler may not change ends more than twice in the innings, nor bowl more than two overs in succession’. The law was amended in 1889, ‘allowing a bowler to change ends as often as he pleases, provided he does not bowl two consecutive overs in one innings’.’’
Sir George Onesiphorus Paul became a famous prison reformer.
His descendant, John Dean, married a granddaughter of the eighth Earl of Strathmore, an ancestor of the Queen Mother.
In 1974, Highgrove was bought by MP Maurice Macmillan, son of Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister from 1957 to 1963.
Finally, Prince Charles became its owner in 1980 and began planting his extensive gardens.
Elsewhere in that day’s issue of the Standard, there was news that telethon frontwoman and New Zealand recording artist Rhonda Bryers had been chosen to star in a special Australian tribute to the royal wedding: ‘‘Rhonda will probably sing a Ma¯ ori medley written by composer Peter Wood and arranged by Carl Doy.’’
Thirty-six Palmerston North anti-tour protesters had begun a 36-hour ‘‘symbolic’’ fast to protest the Springbok tour; TV One was showing Last of the Summer Wine and Coronation Street, and TV Two’s programmes included the Dukes of Hazard and the Hudson and Halls cooking show.
The real estate page featured local three-bedroom homes priced from $38,500 to $78,000.
But on that day in Palmerston North, the most eagerly-awaited news event was the wedding of the pretty 20-year-old soon to become the Princess of Wales. There was no hint of the drama and tragedy to come – a story that would join a myriad of other royal scandals littering the pages of history.
The most eagerlyawaited news event was the wedding of the pretty 20-year-old soon to become the Princess of Wales.