Looking Back, with Eric Leaver

IF EVER there was a time when Britain needed cheering up and something to celebrate, it was 50 years ago.

Excitement over the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh pierced the gloom of a nation plunged into post-war austerity.

It was Winston Churchill who summed up what the event meant when he hit back in the Commons at a Communist MP who carped at the extravagance of a royal wedding at a time when Britons were struggling to clothe and feed themselves and the country's coffers almost were empty.

"Millions will welcome this splash of colour on the hard road we have to travel," he said.

And so they did - even if the royal wedding day, November 20, 1947, was just another working day for most people. Only the schools got a holiday.

But a few folk from East Lancashire did join in the celebrations in the crowded but damp streets of the capital as the 21-year-old princess and her husband exchanged marriage vows at Westminster Abbey. Some 120 people left by coach for London the night before to commandeer places along the royal route. Among them was a Mrs R Holt, of Broadway, Blackburn, who had attended every royal occasion since the death of Queen Victoria.

But one pair who had privileged places were the Deputy Mayor and Mayoress of Darwen, Coun and Mrs J Braithwaite. They were in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace - thanks to their friend, Bill Harwood, who worked in its kitchens and who, like the rest of the palace staff, had been issued with passes for two relatives or friends. Yet when their 37-year-old son Tom, who had gone from being a cook at a local caf to become a chef at Buckingham Palace, offered to do the same for Blackburn labourer Arthur Aspden and his wife, they turned the invitation down "because it was too much trouble."

For other East Lancashire stay-at-homes the big event on the royal wedding day was a ball at Hoghton Tower attended by nearly 300 guests.

But it couldn't be a feast. Banquets for more than 100 people were outlawed in October. And such were shortages, and the dwindling of Britain's dollar reserves that might have eased them with imports, that most foods were rationed anyway - meat, sugar, jam, cheese and sweets among them.

The butter allocation for each person was just three ounces a week. In Burnley, butchers supplemented their limited stocks with whale meat.

Even bread and potatoes, which were never "on points" during the dire days of the war that had ended two years before, were rationed in 1947. Indeed, when the clampdown on spud sales came that weary winter, an angry Tory MP asked: "Is it the thin end of the veg?" The government was urging people to take late working holidays on farms to help harvest potatoes.

Yet there was little fondness for the Labour government that had swept to power in 1945. The party of desperate post-war austerity lost seats galore in the local government elections that preceded the royal wedding date.

After fighting a long war, the country - especially the labour-starved textile mills and mines - was now being urged to work longer and produce more in order to win vital export revenue but was having to endure shortages of every kind in return. Clothing coupon limits meant that a man might have to wait six months to acquire enough for a suit. Even the royal bride had to count the coupons for her trousseau, despite being showered with gifts of dresses from all over the world.

Petrol was strictly rationed and fuel was so scarce that homes and industry suffered power cuts and housewives were forbidden to use electricity for cooking until noon.

Huge queues formed in Blackburn when the town's Fuel Office issued 5,000 permits entitling householders to supplement their coal ration with 56lb of coke every two weeks - which they had to collect from the gas works.

Paper, too, was so scarce that the government forced the football pools firms to halve the size of their coupons. This newspaper's forerunner, the Northern Daily Telegraph was restricted to just eight tabloid pages - so that many of the photographs of the royal wedding which it had received "by telephoto and plane" the same day could only be be displayed outside its offices.

It was little wonder, then, that the dazzle of the royal wedding provided a welcome distraction from the grimness and hardship that were most people's lot.

"Loyal" Lancashire responded by being the first in the country to decide on a "county" wedding present for the royal couple, launching a "shilling" fund in September to purchase a period piece of furniture as its gift. As one of the world's major weaving centres, Blackburn's wedding gift, naturally, was cloth - yards of different dress materials that came from the looms at the town's Pioneer Mill, "all in new and exclusive, weaves, designs and finishes never previously submitted to the trade."

The consignment was delivered to Buckingham Palace by the Mayoress, Mrs R Sugden, and the Town Clerk's wife Mrs CS Robinson and added to the exhibition of presents at St James' Palace. Similar lengths of material went on display in aid of charity at the town's Lewis Textile Museum.

The newly-wed princess responded with her own gift - a £40 cheque, one that she had received as a present from the South Australian branch of the Rejected Volunteers' Association. Endorsed with the signature, "Elizabeth," it was donated to Blackburn Diocese's 21st birthday appeal for the Cathedral building fund.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.