SANTA CLAUS AT SANDRINGHAM

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 82, Issue 305, 24 December 1938, Page 20 (Supplement)

SANTA CLAUS AT SANDRINGHAM

There are stockings hung over the fireplace . . . and the King and Queen peer through the doorway to watch their children’s joy . . .

By

M. H. HALTON

LONDON. Eng. ILLIONS and millions of little girls ■ * and boys will waken to-morrow morning with awed and starry eyes and creep downstairs in high excitement to see what Santa’s "brung” ; and among these children all around and across the world there will be two small girls aged 12 and 8, named Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, whose hearts and eyes will be none the less awed because they are daughters of a king who rules a quarter of the world.

And in that large homey estate near Kings Lynn in Norfolk, at Sandringham, where the British royal family is spending the Christmas holidays, daddy and mummy and granny and the uncles and aunts will get up earlier than usual, just like you and I, not to see what Santa’s brought but to watch the shin ng miracles in the children’s eyes as they gasp with joy at the foot of a Christmas tree. The daddy and mummy will be King George and Queen Elizabeth of England and the granny will be Queen Mary and the uncles and aunts and cousins will be cukes and duchesses and pr.nces, Ihe Christmas tree will be a huge one and it will stand in the middle of the palace’s great ballroom, a room such as your children and mine have never even seen. But otherwise there will be no special magn - licence for Elizabeth and her sister that our children wouldn t know. No pseudo-classic architecture or ancient Norman towers mark the royal manor of Sandringham as a palace such as Buckingham or Windsor. Except for its size is looks like a thousand other English country homes. But it has a 7000acre estate and is set in a 300-acre park and its value is estimated at over £400,01>0. It was the favourite home ot King George V' and w as disliked by King Edward VIII. George VI is more like his father and Sandringham is in favour again. The day after his fathei died. Edward impatiently ordered all ihe cloc ks in the palace to be set at the right time. When Edward abdicated, the new King at once put them forward again. i his jymbolizes many things to the lasers round Sandringham. The old crcer isn’t changing after all, sav: an h. y are all very glad about that

Sandringham— w here, is you read this, the King s dav.g! ters a ? play.ng wjh their Christmas gifts—:lands in rather remote couniiy at a spot cn the North Sea in Norfolk, the county which lime changes less than any I know . i he great manor was bought for the Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward VII. in 1861, a.id the price paid was £200.000. Edward added to it and enriched it and gave fabulous parties there. But to George V it was home, and now it is home to the King and Queen, and to Princess Margaret Rose who looks like the Queen, and to the child Elizabeth who looks like her lather and is heir-presumptive to the most mighty throne in the world. It was not hard to learn how this family would be spending Christmas. I simply rang up Buckingham Palace. For years

ihe palace had a press officer who had come to regard h.mself as practically royalty, but he was changed this year and now there is a press officer who is a press officer. “Certainly I can tell you," he raid when 1 asked if he coud say how the royal family would be spending Christmas. He even told me things which would be “safe to guess.” It would be safe to guess, for example, he said, that the King and Queen of England and Queen Mary, like millions of other fathers and mothers and grannies in their empire, will steal downstairs on Christmas morning and peek through the door of the Christmas tree room to watch their children’s joy. But it might not be safe to guess that the King will dress up as Santa Claus and come bounding into the room.

LIKE OTHER CHILDREN, VER a week ago the King's foresters, dressed in their picturesque green uniforms, marked out a fine hr for a Christmas tree, and now it reaches from ■ floor to ceiling of the magnificent ballroom, and the estate’s electricians have covered it with coloured lights, and from its branches hang presents for the two famous princesses and their guests. 1 here will be Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra, the baby children of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. 1 here will probably be the two sons of the Princess Royal and their parents. lenor I 5 members of the royal family will be at Sandringham when the King enters his study to broadcast to the Empire through the golden microphone his father used when he made his last and most touching speech to the British peoples just three years ago. There is one room at Sandringham where the children will not be allowed to play with their trains and dolls, the room where George V died. Queen Mary will not allow the room to be touched. Not a book nor a chan nor a picture will ever be ; moved in that room. That makes two holies of holies at Sandringham, because the room where the Duke of Clarence died has been kept exactly as it was at the wish of Queen Alexandra.

It is three years ago since George V sat in the study at Sandringham and said to the listening world: “I send to you all, and not least to the children who may be listening to me, my truest Christmas wishes.” A few weeks later he died. 1 he next Christmas there was gloom in the villages round Sandringham, because there were few celebrations at the palace and little merriment, and because many of the workers on the royal estates had been dispensed with. But go now to the little village of Dersingham near by and you find the people celebrating their gayest Christmas for years. Dersingham is the village for Sandringham, and the home of many of the thousand men who work in the royal estates and forests. The little general store,

where the princesses have often bought material for their dolls’ dresses and small gifts for their mother, is gaily decorated. Every workman on the estate has received a roast of beef from the royal farms. Queen Mary will provide a Christmas dinner for the old women in the almshouses of Castle Riding village, near by, of which she is a patroness, and her own ladies-in-waiting will serve the food. In the village inns free beer will be provided for the men to drink the King's health. Ihe King and Queen will present gifts to ail their tenants and visit many of their homes. In the afternoon, the child who will be queen will go riding on her pony. Eliza-

beta's favourite pastime is riding, and horses are her favourite pets. When this child was told for the first lime that one day she might be Queen of England, says Lady Cynthia Asquith, she made ths immediate response: “Well, if I ever am Queen the first thing I’ll do will be to make a law forbidding people to ride or drive on Sunday. Horses must have a holiday.” But apparently she also likes lambs. “One day, when asked to get some mint from her garden,” says Lady Cynthia, “she exclaimed: ‘Oh, no! No more mint sauce from my garden. It means deading the lambs’!” Lady Cynthia Asquith is the biographer and close personal friend of the royal family. In her book “The Kings Daughters,” she tells other anecdotes about the two exalted young ladies who this week are celebrating Christmas in much the same way as millions of other girls of their age. I like the one about Princess Elizaberb darting up to Mr. Ramsay MacDonald at Buckingham Palace one day and saying: “I saw a picture of you in Punch but you were a gander leading some ducks.” And not long after George V’s death she remarked one day, “Grandua is i,i heaven now, and I'm sure God finds him very useful."

Ihe two princesses, writes Lady Cynthia, are as much like ordinary little English girls as is possible for children who must know they are somehow apart. As might be expected, they are healthy, happy, intelliegnt children of the same rype as millions of their subjects. Il appears, however, that Margaret Rose is precocious in music. "When she was only I I months old her grandmother, Lady Strathmore, was so astonished to hear the little white bundle she was carrying in her arms hum the ‘Merry Widow’ waltz that she very nearly dropped her precious burden. At the age of two, Margaret Rose could sing in perfect tune any song/ she had ever heard.” Elizabeth and Margaret Rose will jot be loaded with presents on Christmas Day. I he gifts they will rective would be the wonder of poor children, of course, bet they won’t be as expensive or as numerous as those showered b/ many people on their children. Their father and mother will each give them one, and there will be a dozen others, including one from their Uncle David and one from Santa Clause. . . , . Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth had spent £.300 on Christmas gifts as early as December 1. The presents they bought for the various royal children are presents familiar to children everywhere—a Noah’s ark, a toyshop hunting scene, model garage, jigsaw puzzle, furry rabbits, toy dogs. For Margaret Rose, who passionately loves birds, the queens bought several “tomtit bells,” wooden bells filled with mutton fat and hung on trees to nourish small birds in cold weather.

"Do the princesses believe in Sants Claus?” 1 asked a certain lady. "Elizabeth got wise two years ago," she smiled, "and Margaret Rose is already asking questions.” She volunteered the fact that Christmas means more to Queen Mary than to any other member of the family. She goes down to Sandringham earlier than the others to get things under way. Under the majestic bearing of this old queen there are the feelings of any grandmother and the love of simple things. She has a deep affection for the remote and quiet Norfolk home where she has spent nearly 30 Christmas days—the home where George V died and where George VI was born. On the day before Christ, every year. Queen Mary pays a social visit to the little home of Richard Stanton, the oldest royal tenant on the great estate. Stanton, who fought in the Boer War, always gives her a bouquet of flowers to take back to the manor—one flower for every woman or girl in the royal family—and Queen Mary always gives something to him. “I love the Queen,” said Stanton a year ago. “I wish I could share her troubles The gayest Christmas we have ever had at Sandringham? It was in 1918, when the war was just over. King George said to me that year that he didn’t think he could have stood another year of war. The saddest Christmas was the one before he died. No one knew he was seriously ill, but we all felt it somehow. We all knew that he was nearing the end.” It will be safe to guess, on Christmas Day. that the Princess Margaret Rose will be the cynosure of grown-up eyes at Sandringham. Prince Edward of Kent is not quite old enough to open parcels with wild wonder in his eyes and Princess Elizabeth is a little too old. But Margaret Rose is eight, the age when the mystery of Santa Claus is most glorious and shining to children. She will have her stocking hanging from the mantel in the night nursery of the palace (it is safe to guess that the King and Queen of England hang up their stockings, too) but she will find only an apple there and some nuts and perhaps a small, cheap doll. And on Christmas morning the Queen who was and the Queen who is will sit and watch the Queen who is to be. Little Betty Windsor will not be dreaming of her mighty future nor studying high politics at the feet of councillors nor musing over the now half-realised greatness of her destiny; she will be playing with her Christmas gifts. At that moment the simple tow-headed blue-eyed girl who by some whim of fate is destined perhaps to be called queen and empress by 450,000.000 souls will be one with Mary Smith in Melbourne and Jane Brown in Vancouver and Sally ’Opkins in the London slums and ten million other little girls wherever Santa Claus is known.