Crowning gory

THE mother-in-law was a popular butt of jokes by comedians before political correctness took hold. I bet Prince Philip didn’t laugh very much at those jokes as he had the Queen Mother of mother-in-laws living under the same roof and taking, shall we say, an over-active interest in organising family occasions.

The battle royal found the prince and his mother-in-law jostling for position over the Queen’s Coronation in 1953.

She favoured the traditional pattern of the pageant dating back almost 1,000 years. He wanted a fresh and modern style to herald the beginning of a new Elizabethan age.

The prince met a wall of resistance on everything from who’d design the dresses to who’d take the photographs.

The Queen, caught in the middle between husband and mother, made him head of the coronation committee, but his ideas were rejected by traditionalists like the Queen Mother, coronation organiser the Duke of Norfolk and even Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

An added problem was having the Queen Mother living in the Palace. She was in no hurry to move out to Clarence House, although her favourite photographer, Cecil Beaton, wrote in his diary after a visit that he suspected the heating had been turned off to freeze her out.

Philip was considered a “brash young naval officer” although his ideas for reforming the household had value. He was amazed, for instance, to find that when you wanted to send a message to another member of the family in Buck House, you summoned a footman and gave him a handwritten note which he put on a salver and carried half-a-mile to another part of the palace and gave it to that other member of the family. Why couldn’t they use walkie-talkies like he did in the Navy, he asked?

One new-fangled invention did get past those advocating tradition and continuity in the Coronation ceremony. BBC television was allowed to cover the royal event for the first time.

The idea was rejected despite repeated requests until the BBC leaked news of the refusal. The media and public outcry that followed saw the Palace cave in and allow the event to be shown on TV.

Some things, like showing due deference to the monarchy, didn’t change.

Naval ratings in the RNVR who were going to line the route to Westminster Abbey were given orders to refrain from alcohol and sexual intercourse for at least 48 hours before the ceremony. You wouldn’t want the Queen to know they’d been enjoying themselves, would you?

Joanne and Barbara are having a good time in the Dominican Republic in Man Hunters: Sex Trips For Girls.

When grandmother Joanne says goodbye to the younger Dominican man with whom she’d shared a holiday romance, she gives him the remainder of her holiday money. The £45 is roughly the equivalent of two weeks wages for him.

So the 54-year-old is asked in the programme if that counts as sex tourism. A good question, but the answer depends on your point of view.

For Joanne, she gets a good time with a virile young man, who’s unlike the men at home whom she says are boring, drink too much and are no good at dancing.

Barbara, a 67-year-old from Rochdale, also heads to the Dominican Republic in search of romance. She has no trouble finding it with a 30-year-old local man. “He makes me feel good, he makes me feel younger, I just enjoy being with him,” she says.

No harm is being done as long as she knows that pursuing female tourists is part of his job. Back at home, he’s more than likely to have a girlfriend and child.

One of the Caribbean lover boys is quite open about his motives of going with holidaymakers.

“I don’t do it because I want to, I do it because it’s a necessity,” he says.

Barbara knows the score, having learnt the hard way. She ended an earlier romance with a hotel barman after realising he had ulterior motives. All he wanted were gifts, money and meals.