A ROYAL SALOON

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19626, 21 October 1933, Page 10

A ROYAL SALOON

QUEEN'S EARLY TRAVELS. How Queen Victoria made her first train journey and how she insisted on attaching a signal to the royal saloon to tell the driver when he was going too fast, is recounted in the August number of the “Great Western Railway Magazine.” The Prince Consort conceived the daring idea that the Queen might travel from Widsor to London by train instead of by coach, and in October, 1840, the Great Western Company built a royal saloon much like a modern guard's van for a goods train.

It was not until June, 1842, however, that the Queen consented to travel by the train, and then the great Brunei himself was on the footplate. The train reached Paddington 25 minutes later, and the Queen emerged to deafening applause, and "in a most condescending manner returned the congratulations of the assemblage present.” The speed, however, naturally alarmed the Queen. By her order, the new royal saloon, built in 1850, bore a strange disc and semaphore on the roof, and a chair at the back of the coal tender of the engine.

If the Queen thought the train was going too slow, and particularly if she thought it was going too fast, or ought to stop, an attendant inside the carriage could work the disc and semaphore. A porter, sitting with his back to the engine, on the chair on the coal-tender, instantly noted the royal instructions as expressed on the roof of the saloon, and passed them to the engine driver, who acted upon them. Even with this safeguard, however, ail was not well, for a confidential letter presently reached the company, in which insistence on rigid adherence to the approved time-table was expressed. This was because one of the directors of the company had told the Queen “that they had been driving a train at the rate of 60 miles an hour, a gratuitous piece of information winch very naturally alarmed her, although it was probably incorrect.”

THE NEW HATS. No one is surprised that the new hats introduced by most of the dressmakers are set straight on the head (says a London writer). They are in keeping with the new waists and basques and the new importance given to the bust. The final touch is given by the manner in which they are pulled forward over the forehead, just as if there was a mass of hair behind to be humoured. And it was noticeable that in several collections where this new tilt was seen the girls wore their hair curled over the back of the head. Nearly every house of importance now introduces models with the appropriate hats. Chanel's are shallow little shapes, showing most of the back hair. They vary from a very flat little “pork-pie,” trimmed with fur, if fur is worn on the coat, to a kind of inverted basin, the front part of which is pulled a little forward.