FROM THE ARCHIVES:"The bride looked as edgy as if it were the Badminton Horse Trials and she was waiting for the bell to gallop off," Maeve Binchy wrote of Princess Anne arriving at Westminster Abbey for her wedding to Captain Mark Phillips in 1973, thereby unlocking a stable-full of outraged letters from readers of
The Irish Times
MAEVE’S FRONT-page report of the first wedding among Queen Elizabeth’s children was highly descriptive but notably lacking in the purple prose that was de rigueur for royal events.
It drew a surprisingly large reaction from royalists, romantics and believers in good manners and fuelled a vigorous correspondence for two weeks.
“And then the royals started to arrive,” Maeve wrote after setting the scene in the abbey where newspapers had to pay £23 for a seat.
“We could see them on the television set – which was six inches from me – leaving Buckingham Palace in their chariots, and like characters stepping out of a film, they suddenly turned up a hundred feet below our seats. The Queen Mother looked the way she has ever looked – aged 56 and benign. The Queen looked thin and unhappy in a harsh blue outfit.
“Princess Margaret looked like a lighting devil with a cross face and an extraordinary hideous coat, which may have been some multi-coloured fur, but then was there ever an animal or even a selection of animals which would have been given such a coat by Nature.
“The Phillips parents looked sick with nerves; nobody in the place was hating it as much as they were. Mother Phillips nearly tore her gloves to shreds, father Phillips let his invitation fall and it struck me as odd that the groom’s parents should have had to carry an invitation at all. Their son and heir stood smiling and resplendent in scarlet, dimpling and smiling, and you felt that if all else failed and he doesn’t become a brigadier or something in six months, he will have a great living in toothpaste commercials.”
And it wasn’t just the British royals who were the targets of Maeve’s pithy descriptions.
"Grace Kelly staring into space, looking like she always looked, kind of immaculate. Rainier has aged a bit oddly and looks like Marlon Brando in the Godfather. Harold Wilson, all smiles and straightening his tie [ . . . ]Jeremy Thorpe was all giggles and jauntiness, [Ted] Heath looked like a waxwork."
Her media colleagues were also skewered: "The man from the Manchester Evening Newsseemed to be writing an extended version of War and Peacein a notebook and on my right an agency reporter was transcribing a file of cuttings."
The ceremony itself was uneventful, watched by a reputed 500 million television viewers. There had been a run on television sets and rentals in the Republic and RTÉ rebroadcast the event. A presumed anti-monarchist cut the television cable in Churchtown in Dublin, depriving 2,000 homes from Rathfarnham to Rathmines of the wedding pictures, but made only a minor dent in the audience who tuned in.
Maeve concluded: “It was a superbly organised show, with all the actors playing their parts perfectly, timing and all. Everyone who had a role kept it; the Duchess of Kent looked sweet and pure English girlhood, Princess Alexandra managed to give the odd vaguely tomboyish grin which she thinks is expected. The Duke of Edinburgh and Lord Snowdon looked as self-effacing as Mark Phillips is beginning to look already. The ushers saw us out, thrilled that we had been able to get there and hoping earnestly that we had a good view of everything. The evening papers were already on the streets with early photographs. ‘The Snow White Princess!’ screamed one headline, as if the readers had expected the bride to wear scarlet jodhpurs.
“It was a very well-produced show, no-one could deny that, but then the actors are getting slightly above Equity rates.”
The reaction came with the next day’s post, almost all from women. “Positively nauseating,” one woman wrote.
“Rather pathetic and in very poor taste,” another offered.
“Cynical;” “bad-mannered;” she should call herself Maeve Bitchy, several suggested.
“One does not refer to a royal wedding at Westminster Abbey as a superbly organised show, nor does one criticise the royal family and their guests,” a woman wrote from Ballsbridge, concluding,
“The familiar saying, ‘There will always be an England’ is very evident.”
“Maeve Binchy makes me sick,” another began.
“Surely any wedding, even an English one, could not produce such an adverse effect on anyone with a normal outlook,” another thought, describing Maeve as “peevish and dyspeptic” and concluding: “From a woman’s point of view (and perhaps a man’s) it was one of the happiest family events of the year.”
The reaction to the reaction came swiftly too, with supporters outnumbering the critics.
“Hilarious”, “excellent”, “a sense of balance” and “the only person who put the ‘circus’ in its proper perspective”, letters said.
“The adulation which we still give to royalty and all its meaningless splendour must indicate a mentality that can best be expressed in the Irish term ‘shleeveen’,” a woman wrote from Ennis.
With both sides engaged, the letters columns got longer and harsher and, inevitably, more political. A woman from Bray complained of “our tight little group of west Britons“.
“John Bull is alive and well and living in Ireland,” another writer declared. Look at the surnames of the outraged, another suggested.
The counter view was put by a contributor to the Belfast Telegraphwho wondered what the reaction in the South would have been had he written in similar vein about the recent inauguration of President Erskine Childers. Perhaps Maeve's report should be seen as a comment on the "editorial ineptness and political sectarianism of the once highly respected Irish Times", he suggested, insisting that the Telegraphwould never have printed a similar report about Childers.
The exchanges filled columns for almost two weeks before petering out to be replaced by the reaction to the latest Catholic bishops’ statement condemning contraception.
The newlyweds divorced in 1992.