Through Sunny Seas

A London bartender pondered a picture of his King clad in shorts and soaking up the equatorial sun on the deck of H.M.S. Vanguard. "The papers say he's keeping in close touch with the situation," said he. "Well, 4,000 miles would be close enough for me, too." But many another Briton, shivering in the grip of the coal crisis, took a kinder view as the papers reported, inch by inch, the royal progress to South Africa.

For one thing, fashion reporters were finally permitted to disclose the breathlessly awaited details of the royal trousseaux. Hats were "off the face," for royalty may not hide from onlookers under a lowering brim. For Princess Elizabeth there were pastel evening gowns, "really romantic, with rustling, or softly flowing full skirts." For 16-year-old Margaret ("She's a nice kid," said one of the designers, "with a naughty glint in her eye"), at least one "slinky, grown-up looking, sophisticated" chiffon. "Her Majesty," wrote one reporter, "is expected to land in a misty blue, bordered with matching ostrich feathers."

Aboard the Vanguard, the Queen and her daughters enjoyed the usual shipboard pastimes in cool, short-sleeved, washable prints. One fine day, Her Majesty, prone but queenly, stretched out on the 'deck with the rest of the family to try her hand at target shooting (see cut). Margaret banged out a bull's-eye on her first shot, but young Elizabeth fired 30 rounds without a hit. There were bouts of deck tennis and shuffleboard, and--for the Princesses--a giddy series of tea parties in the midshipmen's "gun room," with charades and some earnest discussion of swing bands. At one formal dinner the Princesses sang the latest hits together as Margaret beat out a syncopated piano accompaniment.

When the Vanguard crossed the equator, the traditional ducking was omitted as too undignified for royalty; instead the Princesses became members of the Order of Shellbacks (traditionally permitting them to spit to windward except in the presence of one who has rounded Cape Horn), with a simpler initiation: ship's petty officers doused their noses with powder and fed them pills. Warned that the pills might be made of soap, Margaret refused to touch them until her big sister ate one and assured her it contained a cherry.

As the Vanguard steamed on, city fathers in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria worked feverishly, decorating their cities with colored lights and bunting. Striking bakers decided to go back to work in honor of the visit, with the threat to strike again when the King had gone home. In Cape Town 18 young men (carefully matched in weight and height) were reported practicing on a three-inch bar suspended like a tightrope to perfect their balance when they took over as stewards on the royal train. Snapped the New Statesman's Kingsley Martin when this news reached London: "Buckingham Palace needs a sensible public-relations department. The King and Queen have a sufficiently burdensome job without this tomfool buildup."

In South Africa, however, the readers were lapping it up, and editors shoved other news aside. An irresistible exception was the story of two teen-aged daughters of a Cape Town railroad laborer, who had simultaneously turned to boys. The younger promptly decided to leave a girls' seminary and join the army. But as the Vanguard finally sidled up to her Cape Town wharf, 1,200 other less protean schoolgirls, dressed in their best white, lined up to form the word "Welcome" on the side of Signal Hill. Some 200,000 more South Africans stood in the sweltering sun or clung to flagpoles to roar their greetings, many fainting with the heat. Britain's considerate King suggested that the shoreward procession start a half hour early.

*Left to right: Princess Elizabeth, the Queen, an officer, Princess Margaret, the King.

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