PALACE WATCHING:News of The Dress filtered through to the waiting crowds from unlikely sources, writes RÓISÍN INGLEin London
THE FIRST champagne cork popped near the palace at 8.30am. “None of your rubbish, only the best,” said Ryan Delaney, who had travelled with friends from Sydney, Australia, to be here within bouquet-tossing distance – if the bride had a very good arm – of the balcony at Buckingham Palace.
He cut a dashing figure in his new suit, keeping his strength up by nibbling blue cheese on water biscuits. “It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he said. Hundreds of others had made the same decision about their location.
It meant being coralled beside the palace watching minor royals depart in mini-buses – “Ha! Ha! Mini buses!” shouted one less deferential reveller – and listening to the wedding on a loudspeaker. If you popped through the barriers to the main part of Green Park, where there was a big screen, you weren’t allowed back. It was right royal sacrifice and no mistake. “I don’t care, it’s worth it,” said one wild-eyed woman from Pakistan, there for two days.
With no wedding visuals to feast on, news of The Dress filtered through from unlikely sources. One woman was getting regular text updates from her friend in Canada who was watching the wedding on telly. Kate’s hair? Half up, half down, a demi-chignon, which all agreed in fashion terms could only mean certain death for the hair straightener. The dress? It has sleeves! And a plunging neck! The flowers? There was, we learned, Sweet William in the bouquet.
The crowds had come from all over the world but Jane Graham, from Mayfair, just had to run across the park. After watching the Queen leave with the Duke of Edinburgh in a Rolls Royce, she planned to run back to her home because she had a date with her sister in the Cayman Islands. “She’s six months pregnant and it might be the hormones but she is making me Skype her from London so she can watch the wedding on her computer. She is obsessed,” she said.
Bernadette Rees had been queuing from early morning with her daughter Jessica. A retired sergeant in the British army once posted to Northern Ireland, she said she wasn't as interested in the wedding so much as the pomp and ceremony. "I love the military aspect of it," she said as the seemingly endless procession of the Household Cavalry trotted by in a stunning equestrian display. She was beside herself when the palace guards began marching around the Mall playing what sounded suspiciously like Molly, My Irish Molly. "I was here for the Queen's jubilee and Diana's funeral and I never saw that many of them," she gasped.
There was competitive picnicking and jealous guarding of patches of ground, and red, white and blue everything. There were people, including some women, walking around in wedding dresses. T-shirts ranged from the wishful “It Could Have Been Me” to the grateful “Where There’s a Will There’s a Day Off”.
Civil servant Ike, born and brought up in England by Nigerian parents, had brought his five-month-old baby, Vincent, to the palace to witness “history in the making”, although strangely the baby seemed more interested in his bottle. “I know some people think it’s outdated and irrelevant but I don’t agree,” he said. “This is a major part of the tradition and pageantry of this country and I don’t think there is anything wrong with wanting to hold on to and celebrate that. I want to be able to tell Vincent when he is older that he was here when William, the possible future king, got married.”