SIT DOWN” TEA

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20927, 5 January 1938, Page 10

SIT DOWN” TEA

THE ROYAL FAMILY Afternoon tea is a family meal at Buckingham Palace. It is the time to which the King and Queen and Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret all look forward, for it is a Palace rule, which only the most important affairs of State are allowed to break, that the King and Queen shall spend at least half an hour with their daughters at the tea table. The Queen, though she is a very modern person in many ways, does not like the modern fashion of having tea handed round. Instead the little Royal Family party of four, with perhaps Queen Mary, the Duchess of Gloucester, or some other intimate visitor with them, have a “sit down” tea. served usually in the Queen’s drawing-room on the first floor.

Royal servants set the table, bring in bread and butter, jam and honey, from the Royal farms at Windsor, and the cream cakes that are Princess Margaret’s especial delight, the Princesses come down from their schoolroom on the next fljor, the King comes in from his business room to join the Queen.

r.nd then the tea is freshly made by one of the servants in the room. The Royal kitchens are so far away that if the tea were made there it would “draw” too much, and the King, like his father. King George V, insists on his tea being served and made properly. Sometimes, if the King and Queen have an engagement in the afternoon, the routine is broken and the two Princesses have their tea upstairs in the schoolroom with their nurse, Mrs Knight. When the King and Queen are at Royal Lodge, Windsor, for the weekend the same tea-time ritual is observed, but here, in the country, the Queen often dismisses her servants and makes the tea herself with an electric kettle.

Mr and Mrs Hill. Miss Jean Henry, Mr C. A. Henry, Mr R. H. Biggs (Christchurch), Mrs A. Anderson (Southbridge), Mr G. Edwards, Miss K. Robertson, Mr and Mrs Watson (Dunedin), and Mr and Mrs E. Padgett (Cromwell) are guests at the Balmoral.

Miss Myra Curtis has accepted the job of Assistant Secretary and Director of Women’s Establishments of the British Treasury, states an overseas correspondent. This means that she is in charge of 70,000 women civil servants, and her salary will be about £lOOO a year. Her last job was principal of the mails branch of the General Post Office. It was Miss Curtis who decided which machines should carry air mail to South Africa, and other transport problems. Now she will settle the wages and promotions of all the women in Government offices. She succeeds Miss Hilda Martindale, to whom the Duke of Kent recently presented an address at a reception in her hjnour at Lancester House.