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Laborite Members of Parliament received special permission last week to attend the Coronation in dark business suits or ordinary morning dress: cutaway coat, striped trousers, spats optional. Quakers will wear ordinary evening dress trousers, two kilted delegates from the Fiji Islands will wear no trousers at all.
¶Still full of Coronation tourists was the Queen Mary, other steamers were not. In Coronation reservations alone, the French Line reported 250 cancellations, the Holland-America Line 100 more. The Aquitania cleared New York with 100 last-minute vacancies. Advertisements in the London Times offered blocks & blocks of Coronation procession seats at half their stamped value.
Britons, however, were not disturbed by the slackening of "the foreign invasion," liked to think of the Coronation as an exclusively British beanfeast. On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of them flooded into London with paper-bag lunches, trudged over the decorated Coronation route, tried out the grandstands. It did not trouble them that there were no London busses running, that 26,000 bus hands had strategically struck for shorter hours.
¶Worried tourist agencies blamed the sudden foreign chill in Coronation fervor chiefly on Lord Marley, Laborite and chief Opposition Whip in the House of Lords. Lord Marley may have Socialist ideas, but as a Marlborough School graduate and long-time naval officer he was sufficiently genteel to be a friend and Lord-in-Waiting to George V. In San Francisco three weeks ago he delivered himself of the following:
"King Edward showed great interest in the poverty-stricken condition of the workers. The Government felt that this was a criticism of their inaction in this matter. Therefore they simply made use of the Mrs. Simpson episode as a reason to force his abdication.
"The Government feared there might be a falling off in popular support of the Coronation, so they adopted a plan of haing more soldiers, more military bands, bigger and better decorations. ... As for my American friends, I don't desire to see them overcharged for seats to view the Coronation procession, overcharged for accommodations, overcharged for hotels and generally exploited. My advice is: Stay at home or go later, when you will find normal conditions and see the English people at their best."
¶Many tourists had a still simpler reason for avoiding the Coronation. Thanks to the radio, color films and the resources of the modern press, stay-at-homes everywhere will have a far more vivid impression of the procession and the ceremony in the Abbey than even the Archbishop of Canterbury.* To get this record to the public, photographers were preparing to risk their lives, aviators to fly the Atlantic. Inside the Abbey were a number of camera boxes, soundproofed, almost hermetically sealed. Three to six men and a bulky camera will have to remain in each one for at least six hours. Other photographers will be strapped to an 18-inch platform suspended high above the nave.