GREAT BRITAIN: Prelude

Jeffery John Archer, Earl Amherst was a soldier of the King during the World War, won himself the Military Cross. Later he became a dramatic critic on Manhattan’s famed morning World, an intimate of all the Tonys on West 52nd Street and a bosom companion of Noel Coward. Last week the Earl of Amherst, 40, stood in a London tailor’s shop wrapped in the mantle of crimson velvet and banded ermine in which he must make obeisance to his King.

“I look,” said he, “like something out of a very old deck of foreign cards.”

¶With only a fortnight to go before Coronation, Lord Amherst’s Sovereign and his consort last week took a state voyage down the Thames from Westminster to Greenwich, famed for fried whitebait and the o° meridian. Queen Elizabeth wore fawn, King George the tight tail coat of an Admiral of the Fleet. Ocean liners, tramps and tugs were aflutter with bunting, and crowds stood six deep along the quay-sides. Eighteen years ago when King George V went down the Thames he rode in a gaudy gilded rowboat pulled by the blue-capped royal bargemen. George VI last week used a 300-h.p. green motor launch (later to serve as Admiral’s barge for Admiral Sir Edward Evans, commander-in-chief at The Nore), his escort consisting of four of Britain’s new secret torpedo motor boats. Such a vast wash did they create that dozens of spectators near Cleopatra’s Needle on the Embankment were swept from their feet, nearly drowned.

Object of the excursion was to open the rearranged, remodeled National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, world’s greatest collection of marine paintings, ship models, instruments and relics, greatly enlarged by munificent gifts from Sir James Caird, shipowner and meat importer, and from Queen Mary. King George last week was able to inspect the coat in which Nelson died; the first chronometer; Sir Francis Drake’s astrolabe; two logbooks belonging to Captain James Cook.

¶Warped to its tremendous pier at Southampton last week was the Queen Mary, bearing the first contingent of U. S. visitors to the Coronation, prominent among them James Watson Gerard of the official U. S. delegation. The U. S. press, feeling knee breeches unmanly except for sliding bases or playing golf, was in a characteristic, hayseedy dither over whether Special Envoy Gerard would wear court dress. Mr. Gerard, Wartime Minister to Germany, opined that he would.

“If my host dined in pajamas, I would wear pajamas. On this occasion my host will wear court dress, and I will wear court dress.”

Another flurry was caused by word from impressionable young reporters in Washington that General Pershing, military representative, would attend the Coronation in a gaudy $600 uniform of his own designing, consisting of an ostrich-plumed “fore & aft” hat, a frock coat embroidered with oak leaves, epaulets, brass buttons and a buff silk sash. Infuriated, General Pershing stomped up the gangway of the President Harding without ever explaining clearly to reporters that his Coronation costume was no flight of fancy but the regulation full-dress uniform of a General in the U. S. Army. Grinned Admiral Hugh Rodman, naval representative: “I think I’ll wear pink undies.”

Laborite Members of Parliament received special permission last week to attend the Coronation in dark business suits or ordinary morning dress: cutaway coat, striped trousers, spats optional. Quakers will wear ordinary evening dress trousers, two kilted delegates from the Fiji Islands will wear no trousers at all.

¶Still full of Coronation tourists was the Queen Mary, other steamers were not. In Coronation reservations alone, the French Line reported 250 cancellations, the Holland-America Line 100 more. The Aquitania cleared New York with 100 last-minute vacancies. Advertisements in the London Times offered blocks & blocks of Coronation procession seats at half their stamped value.

Britons, however, were not disturbed by the slackening of “the foreign invasion,” liked to think of the Coronation as an exclusively British beanfeast. On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of them flooded into London with paper-bag lunches, trudged over the decorated Coronation route, tried out the grandstands. It did not trouble them that there were no London busses running, that 26,000 bus hands had strategically struck for shorter hours.

¶Worried tourist agencies blamed the sudden foreign chill in Coronation fervor chiefly on Lord Marley, Laborite and chief Opposition Whip in the House of Lords. Lord Marley may have Socialist ideas, but as a Marlborough School graduate and long-time naval officer he was sufficiently genteel to be a friend and Lord-in-Waiting to George V. In San Francisco three weeks ago he delivered himself of the following:

“King Edward showed great interest in the poverty-stricken condition of the workers. The Government felt that this was a criticism of their inaction in this matter. Therefore they simply made use of the Mrs. Simpson episode as a reason to force his abdication.

“The Government feared there might be a falling off in popular support of the Coronation, so they adopted a plan of haing more soldiers, more military bands, bigger and better decorations. … As for my American friends, I don’t desire to see them overcharged for seats to view the Coronation procession, overcharged for accommodations, overcharged for hotels and generally exploited. My advice is: Stay at home or go later, when you will find normal conditions and see the English people at their best.”

¶Many tourists had a still simpler reason for avoiding the Coronation. Thanks to the radio, color films and the resources of the modern press, stay-at-homes everywhere will have a far more vivid impression of the procession and the ceremony in the Abbey than even the Archbishop of Canterbury.* To get this record to the public, photographers were preparing to risk their lives, aviators to fly the Atlantic. Inside the Abbey were a number of camera boxes, soundproofed, almost hermetically sealed. Three to six men and a bulky camera will have to remain in each one for at least six hours. Other photographers will be strapped to an 18-inch platform suspended high above the nave.

¶Dissatisfaction was not entirely limited to tourists. Secretly seething were the 150 members of the khaki-clad Australian military detachment. Most of them decorated World War veterans, they were jammed into overcrowded barracks, fed rations that included no butter (until complaints were published in the London press), and finally given no time for a pilgrimage to the French battlefields, a party most of them had been counting on since leaving Melbourne.

¶Not until three days before the Coronation will Canada’s most popular delegation, a troop of 34 scarlet-coated “Mounties,” reach London, a fact that kept War Office underlings in a state of jitters for weeks. To Major General Sir James H. MacBrien, commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, they cabled anxiously that the men come sooner to get their horses accustomed to cheering crowds. General MacBrien cabled back that the horses were being made crowdwise at Rockliffe Barracks near Ottawa.

“Better come early anyway,” replied the War Office. “Our uniforms will be strange to your horses. Think of our bearskins.”

Retorted Major General MacBrien: “Bears are one thing our horses are ‘broke’ to.”

-Manhattan camera stores last week were taking advance orders for rental of 16-mm. newsreels of the entire Coronation for home projectors at 50¢-$1 a reel, $1-$2.50 with sound.