‘It was the dress of the century’
Bethan Holt meets the seamstress behind the royal gown – who later used the pattern for her own dress
It may be 70 years since the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Phillip Mountbatten, but Betty Foster’s memory of the time is as sharp as a dressmaker’s pin. Now 89, Betty, from Harold Wood in Essex, was one of the seamstresses working in the studio of couturier Norman Hartnell when he was entrusted with the commission of a lifetime: to create the wedding gown of the glamorous young Princess and future Queen.
“I think it was the most wonderful dress of the century,” Betty declares proudly. “When you look back at the Queen Mother’s wedding dress, or Queen Victoria’s, they were very plain by comparison.”
Indeed, Hartnell’s design took inspiration from Sandro Botticelli’s
Primavera painting, with its intricate embroidery of crystals and 10,000 seed pearls depicting roses, foliage and wheat sheaves. “It had been war time, so everything had been rather plain. Everyone was so pleased to see that lovely wedding dress because no one had ever seen anything like it before,” Betty remembers.
In fact, she was so enamoured by the dress’s elegant silhouette that when she married her husband Bill, in 1953, she used the same pattern, enlisting her old colleague and bridesmaid Edna Dalton to help. “It was such a lovely shape and we were always allowed to use the patterns for ourselves. Of course, we didn’t have the same beautiful materials.”
Like the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, the couple went on to have four children. Betty would make all the children’s clothes, as well as her own. And when her two daughters grew up, they would show her pictures of the dresses they wanted her to recreate for their work parties.
The pattern for the royal wedding dress was even dug out again for the wedding of her eldest, Julie, in 1983, with just a slight adjustment to give the sleeves the voluminous look that had become fashionable by then.
Now, Betty’s granddaughters are proud of her links with Hartnell’s creation, posting pictures on their social media feeds when she appeared last month in ITV’S documentary about the wedding.
Betty left school at 14 and confides that she had never really excelled in sewing lessons – “I always had to unpick” – but nevertheless decided that she wanted to become a dressmaker. After a visit to a careers adviser in east London and a few phone calls later, she found herself in the Mayfair studio of Hartnell, who had been designing for the Royal family since 1935, although “we’d never heard of him – we didn’t mix in those circles”.
Under the guidance of Miss Annie Holliday (all the women were called “Miss”), Betty almost immediately began working on dresses for Princess Elizabeth. “I remember I was 19 when Mr Hartnell brought the sketch that Princess Elizabeth had chosen to the table. He said to Miss Holliday: “Will you make the wedding dress?” She was a bit hesitant, but we were so excited. She told us we had to behave ourselves.”
With just four months between the engagement and wedding, the studio quickly became a hive of activity. As well as cutting the pattern, it was Betty’s role to put in the buttonholes at the back of the bodice after all the embroidery had been done, a task that she practised extensively. “Everyone always asks if I was scared to work on the wedding dress. I don’t remember being nervous, I just knew I had to be careful.
“One day, the Queen (later the Queen Mother), Princess Margaret, the Duchess of Gloucester and Queen Mary arrived because they wanted to see where the dress was being made. Mr Hartnell was telling them about some Americans who had rented a flat opposite to see if they could get a glimpse of the dress. Of course, they couldn’t, but Queen Mary said in her very deep voice: ‘What a bore!’ She was so regal, every inch a Queen.”
Although Betty didn’t go to the wedding itself, she still remembers having a special ticket for a viewing point outside Buckingham Palace where she glimpsed the Princess in the carriage.
“She looked so beautiful,” she gasps at the memory. Years later, she saw the dress at an exhibition at the palace. “I wanted to see the back, because I never remembered if I made 20 or 22 buttonholes, but I couldn’t see. I think it’s getting very frail, now but it was still magical.”