The Press: Palace Pressagents

For Captain Lewis Anselmo da Costa Ritchie, the British Royal Family’s business and pleasures were a frightful strain. The press sometimes felt the strain too. All the newsmen on the Palace beat agreed that Captain Ritchie, Their Majesties’ only press-relations officer, was a decent chap, but he never knew just what to do. Ritchie is a retired naval supply officer who moved into his Buckingham Palace job in 1944 untouched by previous contacts with the press. His office was always ready to answer queries about royal events—so long as they involved nothing more arduous than conveying questions to a royal secretary.

On royal junkets, Ritchie dished out what information he thought was fitting to what he called the “entourage press.” The newshens on the beat, sharply eager for every bright bit of news about the royal gowns, particularly distressed him. The feeling was mutual: the ladies of the press had long felt that the woman’s touch in Palace news had been neglected.

Last week the ladies got some relief, and so did Captain Ritchie. With Princess Elizabeth’s marriage coming up, the captain finally cracked under the strain of it all, had to be bundled off to a nursing home. As an experiment, a woman assistant was hired. Until Ritchie gets well, she is the only one on the job. Ritchie is expected to retire in the fall. His probable successor: Commander Richard Colville, who, like Ritchie, got to know the King through service aboard the royal yacht. (One press wag suggested that His Majesty might have confused Fleet Street with the Fleet.)

The new assistant is Diana Lyttleton, tall, 27, and a strawberry blonde whose specific assignment is to help out women reporters. With royal doings providing the only local news likely to distract newspaper readers from the grim realities of postwar Britain, she expects to have her hands full at “Buck House” (familiar term for the Palace). She will answer queries about the royal wardrobe and other feminine matters which “a man could not be expected to know about.”

Miss Lyttleton, fresh from school, started the war in the WAAF ranks in an Air Force plotting room, ended up as a trusted officer in the sacred precincts of Winston Churchill’s map room. Diana has one thin link with journalism: her father, a former Assistant Master of Eton, covers the Eton-Harrow cricket match every year for the London Times.