“ROYAL ASCOT” FLOODED.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18643, 12 August 1930, Page 11

“ROYAL ASCOT” FLOODED.

RUINED FROCKS AND RUINED HOPES

(From Our Own Correspondent) LONDON, June 20

In living memory there has been nothing like the happenings of Royal Ascot Hunt Club Day. It will go down to posterity as Deluge Wednesday. An insular British imagination could hardly grasp what the rainfall was like. Only those who have experienced a cloudburst in the East, or have suffered under an equatorial rain at the head waters of the Congo can realise the situation. And it happened too, at Ascot, of all places in the world, happened to create devastation among the creations of all the great dressmakers of London and Paris, to destroy clothes that had cost many thousands of pounds in the aggregate. Most of the women seemed to have left both raincoats and umbrellas behind because there was sunshine in London, and they arrived to find lowering clouds, rumbles of thunder and an atmosphere so still and oppressive that it was almost impossible to breathe. At noon, just as people were making their way from the Royal Enclosure to the luncheon tents, the first drops came, and women rushed helter-skelter for protection on the stands and under any and every ledge which offered itself. Almost as suddenly as it had begun the rain stopped, and for half an hour women walked about the paddock and on lawns regardless of the fact that the grass was soaked and that their slippers and the hems of their long dresses were soon wet through. Tulle flounces and floating trains which trailed on the ground were ruined in a matter of moments. Chiffons lost their soft daintiness and became lank and lifeless.

While crowds of people were pouring into the paddock for the parade for the Royal Hunt Cup, the lightning began to play, and the thunder began to peal. Then cames the deluge. It was not rain such as we know it in the ordinary way. It was a gigantic waterfall. All the pent up forces of Nature were released for nearly threequarters of an hour. Women became terrified. In a twinkling beautiful frocks hung on their wearers like bathing dresses. Women ran blindly back in the direction of the stands colliding with one another, stumbling over their dresses, getting wetter and wetter each moment, and those in their chiffons working themselves into a state of panic. One woman, her light blue and white frock soaked became hysterical and fell, and her companion blinded by torrential rain, stumbled over her. Neither seemed to have the strength to get up, and when people helped them to their feet both were hysterical and had tears streaming down their faces. The covered stands were packed solid, and within two minutes from the time the storm burst the enclosure and the paddock were at tenantless as in midwinter. There was no sign of either man or horse—but there was one girl, a girl in a green chiffon dress who stood in the Royal Enclosure through it all unable to obtain shelter—the heroine of the day. Within a quarter of an hour during which the noise of the thunder bombardment was only half-drowned by the noise of the waterfalls from the roofs, the enclosures were under water. Great pools formed in the paddock, which became like a morass. It is hardly fair to describe the scenes at the back of the Royal Enclosure, but the picture of the whimpering girls, huddled together among their ruined frocks and their ruined hopes was unforgettable. A little group under the trees in the paddock stood until they were a mass of wet, clinging draperies. Two of the girls wore the very thinnest of muslin dresses over the lightest of foundations, and with streams of water pouring off them and their clothing so saturated that it was transparent, they suddenly took to their heels and rushed across the grass in a wild endeavour to escape the frightening force of the rain. Women in long dresses suffered the most. Their flounces clung to their movements. They stumbled when they tried to run, and more than one of them arrived at the entrance of the Royal Enclosure mud-stained from falls in the flooded grass. Regardless of appearances, more than one woman picked her skirt up, swung it above her knees, and dashed for shelter. ,

Long lines of luxurious motor-(cars and motor-coaches changed into so many mud-bespattered streaming objects, ploughing their way, on parts of the road, through water nearly two feet deep. Beautiful women and faultlessly attired men were transformed into shivering, dishevelled, miserable human beings. Men in mud-spattered silk hats drove motor-cars in their shirtsleeves, their soaking coats, collars and ties lyning across their knees. Their women passengers sat huddled together, crumpled picture hats in their hands, their hair streaked and dripping wet. All of them had removed their coats, furs and hats. In one car a girl wrapped in a bath towel, crouched against the corner of the seat for warmth. Her beautiful dress, a soaking mass of material, her stockings and her shoes were laid on the seat beside her. Two other women also removed their dresses, shoes, and stockings. Their hair was running with water as they sat with rugs over their knees and newspapers wrapped around their shoulders.

The crowded motor-coaches presented the stangest spectacles. They looked like huge moving clothes-llines. Men and women within them had removed their outer clothing, their shoes and stockings, and within the windows could be seen hats, coats, furs, summer frocks, women’s stockings and men’s boots and dainty high-heeled shoes heaped against the panes. In years to come surely there will be no day to equal Hunt Cup day of 1930. For the women, the super-optimists, who had put on their fashionable hats and dresses, there was no consolation in recollection. All the care and thought, culled from a century of fashion, that went to make up the medley of beautiful dresses was absolutely ruined. That was not the worst of it, for the more marvellous the gown, the greater was its fall from grace. The entire impracticability of the long skirt was demonstrated over and over again, and many women were heard to declare on their way to the station that they had worn their first and last, long skirt. Maybe the first clap of thunder sounded the death knell of the too-long trailing skirts. In truth, by half-past three they had already become strangely—and miraculously—short.

Never in proud Ascot’s glorious history has there been such an inglorious desolate end to a day’s racing. To see a crowd suddenly falter and then scuttle to shelter before a terrifying storm is always pathetic, but the contrast of a Royal Ascot crowd of fashionably dressed women in diaphanous and gossamer-like creations suddenly becoming mute and bedraggled like broken butterflies, was nothing less than tragic.