The publicity build-up that preceded the marriage of Princess Alexandra earlier this week was truly breathtaking.
Since the announcement of the date of the engagement a couple of months ago, there was hardly a day when one or the other national daily did not carry either a picture of Princess Alexandra with Mr Angus Ogilvy or alone or a write up about either or both of them. For the time being at least, Princess Margaret took a back seat. Princess Alexandra incidentally is twelfth in the line of succession.
We saw the Princess and Mr Ogilvy take a stroll with his parents in their garden. We saw Mr Ogilvy present the engagement (of course diamond) ring to the Princess. We saw them wear it. We saw them shopping together, or the Princess doing it alone. We were told the Princess could not be too careful about the dress for the occasion. Previously she was praised because she had bought dresses off the peg which means ready-made and even shopped in Marks and Spencer (a by-word for lower middle class shopping). Had we not been told earlier that the Princess had received a raw deal in the matter of allowances and had to sell family assets to be able to carry on?
Protocol
We even saw photographs of the Princess being stared at by passers-by who had recognised her and Mr Ogilvy parking his car and putting money into the meter. On certain days the Princess released her latest picture. On the eve of the marriage on Wednesday, the cameras shifted their “eyes” towards the Royal guests from Europe. This was not all. We have a fairly accurate idea of how they will live now that they are happily married,
Mr Ogilvy, for instance, cannot address the Queen, though she is his wife’s cousin, by her Christian name even in private. He must call her and the Queen Mother “Ma’am.” In public at least he must always walk a few steps behind his wife – never abreast of her. His women relations and friends must curtsy whenever and wherever they meet the Princess. When he accompanies her on a public engagement, his car will bear a Royal crest. The Princess, in her turn, will have to play hostess to stock brokers and bankers because she has married a business man.
Mr Ogilvy is a director of 21 companies and has close links with 20 others with their activities ranging between garages and laundries on the one hand and finance and mineral exploitations abroad on the other. His father’s estates cover 40,000 acres. This makes him a different kind of commoner from Armstrong-Jones, first commoner to marry into the British royal family. He has since become Lord Snowden and there have been reports of Royal pressure on Mr Ogilvy to accept a similar title.
No Criticism
No one has breathed a word of criticism at all this fuss. It was a long time ago that men like Lord Altrincham and Malcolm Muggeridge raised questions about royalty in this country. Princesses, like stars, are a welcome distinction even in an affluent society. Whatever the validity of the old saying that if you cannot give the people bread, give them circus, the reverse is certainly not true. The more bread people have the greater the clamour for circus. Look at the Americans: They did not have a court and they have had to create one with Jackie Kennedy cast in the role of Queen.
Not only are the critics silenced but the enthusiasts have been busy cataloguing the signs of royalty changing with the times. The catalogue is impressive indeed for tradition-bound Britain. Entertainers, trade union officials, doctors and footballers are now invited to Buckingham palace. Prince Charles, heir apparent, has forgone all privileges at his public school. The Duchess of Kent lives in a small flat in Hong Kong where her husband is doing a term of duty in the army. Mr Armstrong-Jones has a full-time paid job as a photographer in Mr Roy Thompson’s Sunday Times. The Earl of Harewood travels by tube. One prince is trying for a university degree so that he can become a civil servant. Princess Marina, mother of Princess Alexandra, even takes her own dog for a walk.
These are indeed strange times. Only a month or so ago, a poor gardener employed by a county council inherited the title of his father. He is now a Member of the House of Lords. About 80 per cent of the Lords have had to open their estates to plebeians to earn enough money to maintain them. Lord Astor is the latest among them.
Only after Princess Alexandra and Mr Ogilvy, the man in the news is the 75-year-old American hotel magnate, Mr Conrad Hilton. The occasion was the opening of his 30-storey and 328-foot-high hotel which has been built at a fabulous cost of £8,000,000. Not only can one command a view of the famous Hyde Park from the hotel but one can look down upon Buckingham Palace and into its gardens. This fact of proximity to the Palace caused a storm of protest when permission to build the hotel was first granted and the controversy did not die down till the opening day last week.
Tall Houses
This is by no means the only skyscraper to rise in good old London in recent years. Vickers, the well-known arms manufacturers, are now housed in a 36-storey building. The Shell Building, in the heart of the metropolis near Piccadilly, towers above the scene like a mighty colossus. As the cost of land soars to astronomical figures, the tendency is to build higher and higher even if the result is totally bizarre. It is beginning to be feared that in years to come all historic monuments including Saint Paul’s Cathedral will be covered from view. The magnitude of the traffic problem raised by the concentration of office building in the heart of the Metropolis can well be imagined from the fact that 1.2 million people come to work here between nine and ten every morning.
Returning to Mr Hilton, he has not come to London in search of anything so gross as money. To quote from his statement, “as early as ’48 I sat down and did some real thinking, perhaps real philosophising” and “I became convinced that if nations were to survive they had better become friends”. The result of this philosophising was Hilton International. This year alone it would open 12 new hotels representing an investment of £60 million which reminds me that New Delhi was one of the capitals which frustrated this experiment in international co-operation. And if the London hoteliers are anxious about their future they have only their parochialism to blame.
The Hilton has 512 rooms with accommodation for 864 people, five restaurants, seven private dining rooms, five bars and piped music in the lifts. On the bedside table the reading material includes the book Mr Hilton wrote on the collapse of his marriage with the famous actress, Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Cap & Bells
Three weeks ago, in another column I referred to the intention of a well-known comedian popularly known as Jimmy Edwards to seek election to Parliament as a Tory candidate. Since then he has been adopted as a candidate by the local association. If he is returned, he would probably be the only professional comic in the House of Commons. Accepting the nomination, he said disarmingly: “There is a place in the most serious side of life for a cap and bells, for the clown.” In their present mood, the electors might well agree, which improves his chances of election.
He added, “I do not want to be a professional politician. I just want to be an amateur – you love the job, you do it out of love. The word amateur comes from Latin. I have been called a gifted amateur – and I would rather like to be that than a slick professional.”
In these few simple sentences he, perhaps unconsciously, summed up the Conservative party’s attitude towards Parliament, proving he is a born Conservative even if he never formally joined the party. A majority of Conservative MPs are truly “amateur politicians but professional business men”. With directorships, personal incomes and properties, they do not care for their salary as MPs. No wonder Mr Macmillan once again turned down the Labour and Liberal demand for an increase in MPs’ salaries.
Incidentally, right in the middle of this controversy regarding the amateur or professional status of Members of Parliament has burst another: Critics have it that the whole British civil service with its training in the humanities functions in an amateur kind of way wholly at variance with the needs of the technological revolution now in progress. The economic sluggishness is said to be the result of this amateur approach.
French Model
It has been pointed out that out of 280 top civil servants recruited in recent years only six were science graduates. The British Government is said to employ only a few top economists. Almost all top civil servants have come from Eton, Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge jointly called Oxbridge. There is strong criticism that there is no interchange of personnel between Government and industry with the result that they hardly understand each other. France is held as the model where products of polytechnics and technological institutions have created a dynamic economy growing three times faster than Britain’s.
The Times of India, 28 April 1963