Even the make-do-and-mend aspect of the productions, necessitated by wartime restrictions, betrayed a regal lavishness: in 1944, Princess Elizabeth’s costumes included a glittering, heavily embroidered crinoline frock made for her mother before the war by Norman Hartnell.Īlso on display at Windsor are large paintings commissioned by the pantomimes’ writer and producer, Hubert Tanner, headmaster of the Royal School. Music was provided by the Grenadier Guards or the Salon Orchestra of the Royal Horse Guards.
These were not ordinary amateur pantomimes.
“No one will pay that to look at us!” Princess Margaret, by contrast, assured her sister, “They’ll pay anything to see us.” “You can’t ask people to pay seven and sixpence,” Crawfie recorded the modest Princess Elizabeth protesting. This aspect of the royal pantomimes, according to the sisters’ governess, had prompted an argument in which each adopted characteristic positions. Newspapers did not report the performance’s location – the two princesses spent the war years living at Windsor Castle in secret, as a security measure – or the cost of tickets. With its large-scale pattern of bunches of flowers, 13-year-old Margaret’s long skirt looks suspiciously like repurposed royal furnishing fabric. Instead she had a Chinese-style jacket and trousers suit.” Displayed alongside is the red silk jacket and skirt worn by Princess Margaret as Roxana. As the gossip columnist of The Star told readers: “Princess Elizabeth did not wear the traditional tights. “Princess Margaret does draw all the attention and Princess Elizabeth lets her do that,” wrote her concerned governess, Marion Crawford, known as “Crawfie”.Ī new display at Windsor Castle, opening on November 25, will include six costumes worn by the Queen and Princess Margaret as teenagers in the royal pantomimes of 19, including the outfit Princess Elizabeth wore for Aladdin. Perhaps the distribution of parts reflected the princess’s perception of her own and her sister’s relative attractions. Only in 1944, with the final wartime royal pantomime, did she appear as Lady Christina Sherwood in a production of Old Mother Red Riding Boots. The pantomime was a charity affair, a fundraiser for the Royal Household Wool Fund that knitted comforters for troops throughout the Second World War.Īlathea might have reiterated her complaint at all three royal pantomimes staged between 19: in each case, Princess Elizabeth took the principal boy’s part. In Windsor Castle’s Waterloo Chamber, Princess Elizabeth took the part of Prince Salvador in a performance of Sleeping Beauty, alongside her sister Margaret as Fairy Thistledown and children from the Royal School in Windsor. The “she” in question was the Queen, then 16-year-old Princess Elizabeth, Alathea’s best friend. “It is a pity she is always the boy,” wrote Alathea Fitzalan Howard in her diary on December 11 1942, after a visit to the pantomime.