Memory Lane. 1967 mermaid.
It was November 1967, and I was processing through the streets of the City of London; the crowds were four deep. Heated rocks to sit on had been promised but these failed to materialise.
I was wearing two fleshcoloured body stockings, the bodice covered with shells and bits of mock seaweed. From the waist down, I wore cord jeans and thick socks and boots – but this part of me was invisible as I sat inside the papier-mâché unheated rocks, over which my glittering mermaid tail was spread.
It was the 1967 Lord Mayor’s Show (which takes place this year on 11th
November). The Mermaid Theatre, then run by the charismatic actor Bernard Miles, had a float in the procession with pirates from that year’s pantomime, Treasure Island.
But a mermaid was needed, too, and they held a competition for ‘the most beautiful girl in the City of London’.
My very beautiful friend Marina Warner (now a distinguished author) planned to enter and write a piece for the Daily Telegraph, where she worked. Something interrupted that plan and she suggested I enter. The competition, held at the theatre, was covered extensively by the press as the theatre had spun that the winner would ride topless.
Bernard and the wonderful actress Fenella Fielding were judges. We had to parade in one-piece bathing costumes and high heels and I did not find it funny.
Other entrants had false eyelashes and stuffed tissues to enhance their cleavage. But I won.
My employer, Unilever, was enthusiastic about my win; they wanted publicity. On the day, it was cold but fun: the pirates, oddly accompanied by bankers in bowler hats, were charming.
When the procession gets to the Law Courts, it all stops to wait for the new Lord Mayor to be sworn in.
I needed the loo and the pub queues were huge. So I set off along the Embankment, blonde wig askew and shells jangling.
A young policeman, a trifle alarmed at this sight, asked, ‘Can I help you, madam?’
Sweetly, he took me to the closed Tube station and unlocked the loo; as I stripped off my costume, I heard the procession setting off. So I had to run back and be hauled on to the float by the pirates.
Unilever sent a photographer and then took a contrast shot of me in my office. It was the Sixties, and I wore my skirts short: too short for Unilever’s house magazine. They painted it longer in the published picture.
The Lord Mayor invited me to tea and gave me a book that I still have.
By Catherine Chambers, who receives £50. Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions
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