The Press: A Royal Secret

For a month, Fleet Street had laid impatient siege to Buckingham Palace. The press wanted to take pictures of Princess Elizabeth’s baby, and the palace press officers were in no hurry to oblige.

Two weeks after the prince was born (TIME, Nov. 22), London editors realized that they were getting a royal runaround. They guessed that the baby was being given daily airings in the palace grounds. So photographers reconnoitered the streets around “Buck House,” looking for a high point from which to shoot over the iron fence and bushes into the grounds. Along Grosvenor Place, which overlooks the grounds, they ran into a snag: leases on the houses there, owned by the Duke of Westminster, prohibit tenants from creating any nuisance for their royal neighbors, so tenants were timid about cameramen. But a few lensmen talked their way to the rooftops and began a long vigil that lasted through eight rainy, cold days, and the record fog.

Last week it bore small fruit when Nurse Helen Maud Rowe took the baby for an outing on a footpath, pushing Elizabeth’s old royal-blue pram. Cameras with telephoto lenses clicked furiously. But the pictures showed more pram than prince. Two days later one snapped a picture that showed the top of the prince’s head (see cut). Then the royal family requested editors to call off their men. A reporter remonstrated with a lady pressagent at Buck House about the royal family’s impregnable reserve. “After all,” she retorted, “it is a private matter, really, isn’t it?”

Lord Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard thought not. Last week its “Londoner’s Diary” complained: “It is now over three weeks since the birth of Princess Elizabeth’s son. Only a favored few* know what he looks like or how he is progressing . . . Why this secrecy? The whole world is waiting to know about the baby . . . The palace authorities are ill advised.” The Paris press went further; it wondered if there was anything wrong with the health of the baby to warrant such secrecy.

Acme Newspictures tried another tack: it put a price on the baby’s head. Acme would pay $2,000, it announced, for the first good exclusive picture. The offer went begging. This week Society Photographer Cecil Beaton went to the palace to take pictures of mother & child. But the world was likely to keep right on waiting until the official pictures were released, probably after this week’s christening.

*One of the few was Countess Granville, sister of Queen Elizabeth, who cooed that her grandnephew was “golden-haired, with a most beautiful complexion . . . couldn’t be more angelic looking,” and had “amazingly delicate features for so young a baby.”