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gin and tonic with Milford Haven before leaving for the Abbey at 11 a.m. Among the
small crowd waiting to wave him goodbye was Miss Pye, nicknamed ‘pie-crust’ by
Philip, his grandmother’s maid for fifty years, and the Palace sweep and other retainers.
He shook hands with all of them and even ordered coffee for the shivering band of press
reporters assigned to watch him leave.
Elizabeth’s wedding morning, 20 November, began with the ritual cup of tea brought
to her in bed by Bobo and the familiar sound of the pipers on the Palace terrace.
Hartnell’s team arrived at 9 a.m.; it took an hour and ten minutes to finally fit the dress
and 15ft train. There were last-minute panics as the tiara given her by Queen Mary
snapped as it was being fitted and had to be hastily repaired. The Princess wanted to
wear the double string of pearls given her by her parents; they were still with the
wedding presents at St James’s Palace and an agitated Jock Colville, Elizabeth’s new
Private Secretary, was sent to struggle through the crowds on foot to retrieve them.
Finally the bouquet could not be found until a frantic search revealed it in a cold
cupboard. At 11.15 Elizabeth set out for Westminster Abbey with her father beside her in
the huge Irish state coach. The continuity of her girlhood had been emphasized by Bobo
and the early morning cup of tea; Cyril, her footman over the last ten years, stood on
the carriage behind her. She had personally invited Cyril to the wedding, but his
immediate boss, the Serjeant Footman, had vetoed it: ‘No, you’re on duty and you’ve got
to go on the carriage.’ Ahead of them and behind them trotted the Household Cavalry
with bobbing plumes and gleaming boots and cuirasses; it was the first time they had
been permitted to wear full ceremonial dress for six years. Inside the Abbey, the women
guests all wore long dresses, long gloves and hats, which rather belied the celebrating
Archbishop of York’s claim in his address that the marriage was ‘in all essentials exactly
the same as it would be for any cottager who might be married this afternoon in some
small country church in a remote village in the dales’. During the signing of the Register,
both the King and Queen Mary were deeply moved and on the verge of tears, the King
even going so far as to tell the Archbishop: ‘It is a far more moving thing to give your
daughter away than to be married yourself.’ 16
Back at the Palace after the ceremony, at the wedding breakfast, bunches of white
heather and myrtle from the trees that had provided Queen Victoria’s wedding bouquet,
sent down from Balmoral, decorated the table. The speeches were relatively short on the
orders of the King and Queen, who remembered suffering from long-winded relations on
their own wedding day. Elizabeth’s going away outfit was a ‘love-in-a-mist crepe dress
with blue velvet cloth travelling coat, blue felt bonnet trimmed with ostrich pompom
and curved quills in two tones of blue’. Her parents and family lined the staircase
pelting them with rose petals before, despite the freezing weather, the newly married
couple drove off in an open carriage so that the waiting crowds could see them to
Waterloo Station. With them, snuggled under rugs next to hot-water bottles, went the
Princess’s favourite corgi, Susan; while in attendance were, apart from the inevitable
detective, the two familiar figures from Windsor nursery days, Bobo and Cyril. At
Waterloo, the red carpet extended from the point at which the carriage stopped right to