TIRELESS ROYALTIES

Evening Star, Issue 20986, 28 December 1931, Page 10

TIRELESS ROYALTIES

WHERE THEY EXCEL

Of all the mysteries of court routine there is none so puzzling as this: Since an hour in a museum is sufficient to make most of us feel exhausted; how is it that the King and Queen, no longer young, can stand on State occasions for hours on end and reveal nothing but interest and good humour? asks Campbell Dixon in an article in an English paper. The answer is—technique. Or, so wo are informed by the Hon. Katharine Villiers, who became attached to the Court as maid of honour in 1911, and has now written her memoirs. The endurance of the King and Queen was one of the first things that impressed the youthful Miss Villiers. “ 1 was beginning to feel rather like a cab horse, ‘ gone ’ —or going—at the knees,” she says. “Royalties seem entirely immune from that kind of fatigue. I have never heard one of them complain of it.” Later, as she saw more of the Court and the duties that Royalty involves, she was still _ more deeply impressed: “To the mind of the public, the Queen is a gracious figurehead, always smiling, always walking on red carpets, always receiving bouquets. They have little or no knowledge of the selfdedication and self-forgetfulness that go to the making of the _ technique they so much envy and admire. For to be a Queen requires as much technique as any humbler profession, as much training, as great a vocation.” Miss Villiers gives vivid little glimpses of Royalty’s family life— Queen Alexandra, with her* beauty faded, her youth long since gone, but her wonderful charm unimpaired; Queen Mary, as she first saw her. with Court mourning _ accentuating, “ with almost startling intensity, the extreme fairness and beauty of her skin . . . the soft and shadowy _ hair, and the magnificence of the jewels radiating from so sombre a background”; the King, whoso “ incisive speech, rather gruff voice, and automatic courtesies” did not disguise "a curious sense of kindness, of insight, and of gentleness”; the Royal children of twenty years ago, shrieking with excitement and delight at the "White City, “ breaking off the most boisterous game to assume a quaint and solemn dignity when any stranger is presented.” There are_ pictures, too, of foreign royalties, chief among them a man “ in a grey frock-coat and a buttonhole, whom I barely recognised as the German Emperor, so completely did civilian clothes change his physical appearance. What I had remembered as an imposing, martial figure of some height appeared now as a man of medium height, of no great personal distinction, broad-shouldered, with abrupt, exuberant manners and jerky movements. “With him were two ladies with very long, full skirts and enormous round hats (like haloes trimmed with feathers) at the very hacks of their heads. . . . The Kaiser’s gentlemen were stiff, square-shouldered men, peering over very high collars and clicking heels if we as much as looked at them.” But the Kaiser was not unkindly. When he surprised Miss Villiers and another maid of honour resting on a sofa and they jumped to their feet, ho ordered them to rest “with such an indomitable air of command that we both dropped on to the sofa as quickly and humbly as if we had been a couple of his Uhlans.” Another figure one remembers is that of an Italian diplomat: “Except in a film lover of Mexican extraction, I have never seen anyone so enterprising in that lino of business as the Marchese. For him it was quite impossible to sit next to a woman with the smallest pretensions to youth or charm without informing her of the fact in his halting English, accompanied by amorous and almost sulphurous glances and many twirlings of his moustache.” “It is an age-old game, at which the Italians excel,” comments Miss yilliers. “ Nowadays we prefer golf.”