(3 of 3)
¶Dissatisfaction was not entirely limited to tourists. Secretly seething were the 150 members of the khaki-clad Australian military detachment. Most of them decorated World War veterans, they were jammed into overcrowded barracks, fed rations that included no butter (until complaints were published in the London press), and finally given no time for a pilgrimage to the French battlefields, a party most of them had been counting on since leaving Melbourne.
¶Not until three days before the Coronation will Canada's most popular delegation, a troop of 34 scarlet-coated "Mounties," reach London, a fact that kept War Office underlings in a state of jitters for weeks. To Major General Sir James H. MacBrien, commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, they cabled anxiously that the men come sooner to get their horses accustomed to cheering crowds. General MacBrien cabled back that the horses were being made crowdwise at Rockliffe Barracks near Ottawa.
"Better come early anyway," replied the War Office. "Our uniforms will be strange to your horses. Think of our bearskins."
Retorted Major General MacBrien: "Bears are one thing our horses are 'broke' to."
-Manhattan camera stores last week were taking advance orders for rental of 16-mm. newsreels of the entire Coronation for home projectors at 50¢-$1 a reel, $1-$2.50 with sound.