Isla Campbell on the choreography of the Buckingham Palace summer reception, the strategic deployment of the cucumber sandwich, and the great British art of casual proximity
The Royal Garden Party at Buckingham Palace is, I have come to believe, the strangest event in the British calendar. It is, on its surface, a tea party. It is, in fact, an exercise in the management of approximately eight thousand people who have been told they have been Specially Invited to the back garden of the King. Building on my earlier work at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, I want to take you, today, behind the cucumber sandwich.
The Logistics
Three Royal Garden Parties take place each summer, in the gardens behind Buckingham Palace, which extend over forty acres and which most of the public has never seen. The parties are, in effect, the principal mechanism by which the modern monarchy says thank you to the substantial volunteer and public-service workforce that holds British civic life together. Headteachers come. Hospice nurses come. Charity treasurers come. Local councillors come. Members of the diplomatic corps come. Buglers from regimental bands come.
The eight thousand attendees are, in the substantial majority of cases, perfectly normal people who, in their own communities, do good work that has been noticed by someone with the standing to put their name on the invitation list. According to The Guardian, recent reporting on the modern royal calendar has documented that the Garden Parties remain, by a substantial margin, the largest single mechanism of public access to the monarch in any given year.
The Cucumber Sandwich
The catering is, I should say, real. There is, by my count, approximately eighteen tons of food deployed across the three parties. There are, in particular, the cucumber sandwiches, which are made fresh on the morning of each party in the kitchens of Buckingham Palace, and which are, by the time they reach the tables, in a state of slightly tragic dampness that is, I have come to believe, part of the charm. There are also scones. There is also Earl Grey tea, served from urns by waiters in livery.
The food is, structurally, a tactic. The food keeps the eight thousand attendees moving in patterns that the staff can predict. The attendees queue at the tea tents. The attendees collect their plates. The attendees wander, plate in hand, around the lawns, looking, with elaborate casualness, for the moment when the royal procession will appear.
The Royal Procession
The royal procession is the entire point of the afternoon. It happens at, approximately, four o’clock. The senior royals emerge from the rear of the Palace, in a careful diagonal formation, and proceed across the lawn, splitting into three separate paths so that they can, between them, cover as many of the eight thousand attendees as possible.
Each royal is preceded by a small group of officials known, in royal-engagement parlance, as ‘pickers,’ whose job it is to scan the crowd in advance and identify, from the attendee list, the people whose presence the royal should specifically acknowledge. The picker approaches the chosen attendee, says, in a low voice, that the royal would like to meet them, and forms them into a small line at the side of the procession. The royal, when arriving, then has approximately ninety seconds to greet the line, which has, by this point, been carefully curated to include the right mix of professions, regions, and personal stories.
The Casualness Theatre
The rest of the eight thousand attendees, the ones who are not in the curated line, then engage in what I have come to think of as the great British art of casual proximity. They wander, with elaborate casualness, towards the area through which the royal procession will pass. They stop, with elaborate casualness, on the lawn next to the path. They look, with elaborate casualness, at their plate. They are, in fact, doing none of these things. They are, in fact, trying to position themselves so that the royal will, while passing, look at them.
This works, on average, for about three hundred of the eight thousand. The royal, while passing, does briefly meet eyes with a substantial proportion of the casually-positioned attendees, and does, in the substantial majority of cases, smile. The smile is, for the recipient, a thing that is then talked about for the rest of the year. The smile is, for the royal, the eighty-fourth smile of the afternoon.
The Modern Question
The Garden Party is, in many respects, an event of striking continuity. The format has not substantially changed since the 1950s. The dress code has, in some respects, loosened, but morning suits and military uniforms still substantially dominate the visual register. The cucumber sandwich is the cucumber sandwich. According to The Evening Standard, recent reporting on the modern monarchy has documented the substantial institutional consensus within Buckingham Palace that the Garden Party format should not be substantially modernised, on the grounds that its very stability is part of its appeal.
I have written before, in my previous columns on royal events, that this institutional consensus is correct. The Garden Party works because it does not change. The volunteers and headteachers and hospice nurses come because the format is, in some recognisable sense, the same format their predecessors attended in 1973, and they will, in turn, be succeeded in 2073 by people who attend the same format. This is, structurally, what monarchy is for.
The Cost
The Garden Parties cost, by my best estimate, somewhere in the region of two million pounds across the three events each summer. This is, in the context of the Sovereign Grant, a significant but not enormous sum. It is, in the context of what the events provide in terms of public engagement and royal goodwill, an extraordinarily efficient piece of soft-power infrastructure. The two million pounds buys, in effect, twenty-four thousand individuals a memory that they will, in many cases, talk about for the rest of their lives.
I have my own views, dear reader, about the cost-effectiveness of monarchy as a form of government. They are not relevant here. The Garden Party, considered as a discrete piece of public engagement infrastructure, is genuinely good value.
What I Took Home
I attended a Garden Party last year in a working press capacity, which means I was wearing flat shoes and was permitted to take a notebook. I did not, on that occasion, meet the King. I did, however, meet a hospice nurse from Carmarthenshire who told me, with great matter-of-factness, that she had, the previous month, sat with seventeen people while they died. She was, on the lawn, eating a scone. She was, structurally, the entire point of the afternoon. I think about her, still, when I think about the Garden Party. I think you should too.
For more of my dispatches on the institutional life of the modern monarchy, you can find me at my page on The London Prat.
For satirical takes on royal-events-as-cultural-question, see The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
