Second in 3 part series ~ When the Queen was a Tyke

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The first time I had  tea with the new King and Queen at Buckingham Palace, I was invited to sit down in a magnificent pink and gold chair.
Suddenly, I heard an ominous ripping sound. Within seconds the chair —which hadn’t been re-caned since Queen Victoria’s day — had dissolved.
You may think a royal palace is the last word in up-to-date luxury but nothing could be further from the truth. Living at Buckingham Palace was rather like camping in a museum — one that’s dropping to bits, with equipment three decades behind the times.

As the governess to Princess Elizabeth (known as Lilibet) and her sister Margaret, I had to help settle them in when we moved there in 1937, from the tall, narrow house in Piccadilly where their parents had lived as Duke and Duchess of York. That first night, the wind moaned in the chimneys like  1,000 ghosts.
 The palace had only recently had electricity installed, and with little thought to those who had to live there. My bedroom light, for instance, could only be turned on and off by a switch two yards outside in the passage.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2147347/Diamond-Jubilee-Playing-castle-dungeons-Nazi-bombs-fell-Elizabeth-panto-princess.html#ixzz1vTiGIAZZ

The Queen as a Tyke

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Throughout the Queen’s long reign there has only ever been one intimate account of her early life – written by her governess Marion Crawford in 1950 and now reissued to mark the Diamond Jubilee.
 In the first part of our serialisation, Crawfie, as the Queen called her, recalls her first meeting with her five-year-old charge, when her father — the future George VI — was still Duke of York...

Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth II, and her sister Princess Margaret. 'Margaret always wants what I want,' was a common complaint

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2146542/Queen-Elizabeth-The-day-Queen-threw-tantrum-tipped-pot-ink-head.html#ixzz1vIhMfjzI

65 Years at Cannes

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The Cannes Film Festival is not only the most prestigious of the world’s cine-centric celebrations but arguably the most picturesque. For the past 65 years, the festival has allowed Hollywood icons to trade the grit of the Walk of Fame for the breezy charm of the Croisette, the palm-lined promenade that zips around the French town’s stretch of the Mediterranean. Centered at the Palais des Festivals, the event has hosted a free-spirited Brigitte Bardot just months before her sex-kitten re-christening in And God Created Woman; an impeccably styled Grace Kelly just days before she met the Monegasque royal who would make her a princess; and a diamond-decked Elizabeth Taylor, visiting with her third prince, Mike Todd.

To celebrate the 2012 program, which commences today, Vanity Fair remembers the festival’s golden age in the 1950s and 60s, when Old Hollywood’s most famous residents decamped to Cannes for their yearly infusion of sunny Riviera glamour.

The Historic Landmarks of Manhattan’s West 44th Street

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44th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues

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Positively 44^th Street

Along one stretch of New York asphalt—44th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues—the author excavates a vanishing civilization, peeling back decades of his own past as well. Thirty years on, the barber in the old New Yorker building is still there. The blueblood haunts are trapped in amber. The ghosts of Frank Crowninshield, William Shawn, Dorothy Parker, and Harry Houdini linger. From the Algonquin to the Harvard Club, to the ever morphing Royalton, Alex Shoumatoff savors the madeleines of the life he left behind.

By Alex Shoumatoff

PHOTOGRAPH BY MEYER LIEBOWITZ/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX.

WEST SIDE STORY The Algonquin Hotel, site of the fabled Round Table in the 20s, in 1965.

Room 2806, the presidential suite in the Sofitel at 45 West 44th Street, goes for $3,000 a night, which is not out of line for a suite in Midtown Manhattan. The Mandarin Oriental on Columbus Circle has one for $18,000. But three grand is a lot more than the seedy Hotel Seymour, which occupied the Sofitel site until being demolished in 1983, used to charge for a room. The Seymour was one of the three welfare or S.R.O. (single-room occupancy) hotels, as they were also called, on the block—44th between Fifth and Sixth—where retired theater people had been living for years at reduced rates.

In the 70s, I remember, I met one Broadway widow—a heavily rouged woman in her 80s who smoked cigarettes through a long black holder and called me “Dahling,” à la Tallulah Bankhead—at the Teheran, the bar down the block from the Seymour that everybody went to after work; it, too, is gone. The two other residential hotels were the Royalton, at 44 West 44th, and the Mansfield, at 12 West 44th, which were both renovated in the late 80s and 90s when the Times Square district was “Disneyfied,” as critics called the process. They are both now boutique hotels, though not as luxurious or pricey as the haute Euro Sofitel.

The Royalton was resurrected in 1988 by the hotelier Ian Schrager. In 1992 he brought in the downtown restaurateur Brian McNally, who had opened a string of hot spots the previous decade, including Indochine, the Odeon, and Canal Bar, to run its restaurant. McNally made the restaurant—called Forty Four—and the Royalton’s Philippe Starck-designed lobby the place to eat and meet and be seen, particularly for the literati, as the Algonquin Hotel across the street had been 60 years before, when the roués of the Round Table had their famous drunken luncheons there.

Read on: http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2012/06/new-york-city-manhattan-west-44th-street-harvard-club-new-yorker-algonquin

Post War London

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At first glance an unseen collection of black and white photographs shows little more than the humdrum of everyday city life. On closer inspection, they capture London in a state of recovery as it emerged from the austerities of war.

Experts believe they are so unique, that these unveiled pictures are now part of an exhibition to be shown at the Museum of London. 
 Photographer Frederick Wilfred's street life collection displays the nostalgic charm familiar to post-Second World War photography.

 

Days gone by: Frederick Wilfred took a camera with him wherever he went which resulted in a collection of street photography capturing the essence of the age

Just swimmingly: A shot of a crowded lido. Wilfred did not leave much information about his pictures, so the precise location of some of his images are unknown. Anyone who recognises a location should contact the Museum of London

Cleaning up the city: Wilfred's remarkable pictures of London street life were all taken between the late-1950s to mid-1960s

Despite the fact he was little-known, Wilfred - who died in 2010 - was an award-winning professional photographer specialising in portraiture.

Born in Islington in 1925, Wilfred was served in the RAF as an airframe fitter repairing Sunderland flying boar before being transferred to the Army in 1944.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2146276/Frederick-Wilfred-exhibition-Photographer-captures-everyday-life-London-emerged-austerities-war.html#ixzz1vFWNXcxM

Renaissance Art

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A macabre scene of a man being slowly burnt to death over a blazing fire was a depiction of St Lawrence, one of the seven deacons of Ancient Rome who was martyred in 258 for his beliefs.

The Renaissance artist Titian who created the art work may have painted himself into the grim scene.

Experts restoring his 15ft-high The Martyrdom of St Lawrence have uncovered a man in a turban in the bottom corner.

The man’s face, tilted upwards and looking towards the burning man, bears a looks remarkably likeness to the artist himself.

Titian completed the work in the late 1550s – but the apparent self-portrait has gone undetected for more than 450 years, it has been reported.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2146304/Titian-turban-Art-historians-say-painter-hid-portrait-grisly-masterpiece.html#ixzz1vFTP0wvo

Cecil Beaton on Elizabeth Taylor

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A photo of Elizabeth Taylor taken by Cecil Beaton has emerged after nearly 40 years after being kept in a private collection.
 But surfacing along with the image is the revelation that society photographer Beaton loathed the 'monster' that was Elizabeth Taylor, and called both the star and her husband 'vulgar, common and crass'.
 Despite his utter contempt for the late actress, the famed society photographer nonetheless captured Taylor in her prime, allowing her natural beauty shining through.

'Vulgar, common and crass': Cecil Beaton loathed what he called the 'monster' that was Elizabeth Taylor, but was forced to photograph the then 39-year-old star with husband Richard Burton at a black tie event in 1971

The black and white shot was taken by Beaton at a lavish black-tie ball in 1971 at which he was commissioned to snap the rich and famous guests.

Taylor, then aged 39, was pictured with her fifth husband Richard Burton.
She was captured wearing a couture Valentino dress with a Van Cleef and Arpels necklace entwined in her hair.

A short time later Beaton gave the photograph as a gift to friend Brian Hammond, who owned the famous Gerry's Club in London's Soho.


The framed picture hung in his club up until he died earlier this year. His family, who have inherited the image, are now selling it at auction in London where it is expected to sell for £12,000.

Sarah Wheeler, a specialist in the photographs section of Bloomsbury Auctions, said: 'The fact that Cecil Beaton produced such a beautiful portrait despite his personal dislike for them, shows what a consummate professional he was.'

'This photograph has never been sold at auction before and had been in private ownership for more than 30 years.

'It is a beautiful portrait of her.'

In Beaton's diaries that were later published, he wrote a damning opinion of Taylor and Burton following the brief photoshoot.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2145758/Elizabeth-Taylor-Richard-Burton-photo-taken-Cecil-Beaton-described-star-vulgar-common-monster-surfaces-40-years.html#ixzz1vFSUWwLv

The Rebel Rothschild

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THE BARONESS: THE SEARCH FOR NICA, THE REBELLIOUS ROTHSCHILD
BY HANNAH ROTHSCHILD

Lovestruck: Nica Rothschild and Thelonious Monk

Hannah Rothschild first met her notorious Great Aunt Nica in a seedy New York basement dive. There she sat, a ravaged version of her former beauty, smoking a cigarette in a long black filter, her priceless fur coat draped beside her. ‘Sssh, listen to the music,’ she told Hannah.

It was the name that had first caught the young Hannah’s attention. Pannonica - what kind of great-aunt had a name like that? Someone thought it was the name of a butterfly - and the obvious person to ask was her other great-aunt, the world-famous entymologist, Miriam Rothschild. But she wasn’t telling.

Nica, as Baroness Rothschild called herself, was the black sheep of the family. Rumours and mysteries shimmered around her like ancestral treasure. Embarrassing gossip followed her across two continents: how she left her husband and five children and shacked up with a black jazz pianist, Thelonious Monk; how junkie saxophonist Charlie Parker died mysteriously in her apartment; how she took the rap after a drug bust and faced jail; how she surrounded herself in her rickety household with 306 cats.

No wonder Hannah wanted to write about her

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2145859/Sex-drugs-JAZZ-How-rebel-Rothschild-baroness-fell-drug-fuelled-music-genius-THE-BARONESS-THE-SEARCH-FOR-NICA-THE-REBELLIOUS-ROTHSCHILD-BY-HANNAH-ROTHSCHILD.html#ixzz1vFPbVRLW

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes

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Holmes has broken the record for having more film and TV portrayals than any other literary character.
 The consulting detective has been depicted on the big and small screen a total of 254 times.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation beats the next most popular character, Hamlet, by a total of 48 appearances.

Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes in The Hound Of The Baskervilles (1939). The literary character has been portrayed a record-breaking 254 times on film and TV

Benedict Cumberbatch in BBC's series Sherlock

Peter Cushing in The Hound Of The Baskervilles (1958)

Ian Richardson in The Hound Of The Baskervilles (1983)

Jeremy Brett in the 1980s' Sherlock Holmes TV series

Michael Caine in the comedy film Without A Clue (1988)

Christopher Lee in Holmes And The Deadly Necklace (1962)

Roger Moore in Sherlock Holmes In New York (1976), with Patrick Macnee (right) as Watson

Shakespeare’s prince of Denmark has been portrayed 206 times.

In the past couple of years alone, Holmes has been portrayed by Cumberbatch in the Bafta-winning BBC series and by Downey Jr in two Hollywood blockbusters.

 

Previous incarnations include Basil Rathbone in several US films mostly made in the 1940s, and Jeremy Brett in more than 40 ITV adaptations in the 1980s and 1990s.

 

Whereas Brett's work stayed faithful to the canon, Rathbone's war-time plots stretched beyond Conan Doyle's stories and had him thwarting Nazis, among others.
 

Robert Stephens in The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

John Barrymore in Sherlock Holmes (1922)

Richard Roxburgh in The Hound Of The Baskervilles (2002)

Robert Downey Jr (centre) in Guy Ritchie's film Sherlock Holmes (2009), with Jude Law and Rachel McAdams (also pictured)

Edward Woodward in Hands Of A Murderer (1990)

Clive Brook as Sherlock Holmes in the 1930s

Rupert Everett in The Case Of The Silk Stocking (2004)

Tom Baker as Holmes in TV mini-series The Hound Of The Baskervilles (1982), with Terence Rigby (left) as Dr Watson

Arthur Conan Doyle's character made his debut in the 1887 novel A Study In Scarlet and became a hit

Conan Doyle’s character made his debut in the 1887 novel A Study In Scarlet and went on to become a hit with the reading public.

His first depiction on screen is believed to be in a 30-second silent movie, Sherlock Holmes Baffled, which appeared in the US in the 1890s.

He has since been played by more than 75 actors.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2146091/Sherlock-Holmes-portrayed-literary-character-TV-film.html#ixzz1vFNP8Pz1

The Last Empress

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SHE almost squeaked through unscathed. A product of a generation of patrician Americans who lived by the dictum that a woman’s name ought to appear in print only at birth, marriage and death, Rachel (Bunny) Lambert Mellon, the widow of the banking heir and philanthropist Paul Mellon, made it almost to her centenary little known outside her rarefied sphere.

Of all the things money can buy, Mrs. Mellon’s late husband once remarked, privacy “is the most valuable asset.” The decorum Mrs. Mellon prized and preserved came to be emblematized by a phrase from a 1969 interview she gave to The New York Times: “Nothing should be noticed.”

In reality, Mrs. Mellon has long been an object of fascinated notice. Born into a moneyed Social Register background (her father was president of the Gillette Safety Razor Company; her grandfather, a chemist who invented Listerine), she, with her second marriage to Paul Mellon, married into wealth even greater than her own.

The wall of discretion that surrounds the heiress amounts to a kind of omertà. Contacted at his country place outside Paris, the couturier Hubert de Givenchy (he dressed Mrs. Mellon for decades and even designed uniforms for her staff) declined through a relative to comment. Socialite friends in New York and Cape Cod also refused to speak publicly about a woman who, Mr. Langella writes, was “selective in her friendships, clever in her dealings with the press.”

 

Raleigh News & Observer/MCT, via Getty Images

The Mellons in 1987.

Teresa Zabala/The New York Times

In 1978, Bunny Mellon, next to her husband, Paul, with J. Carter Brown (far left in photo), Jimmy Carter and I.M. Pei, right.

Associated Press

NOTICED Bunny and Paul Mellon (at right in photo) greeting Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and his wife in 1975.

 

 

CAUGHT UP John Edwards, who is accused of using Mellon donations to hide his mistress, Rielle Hunter, center, with their daughter. A former campaign aide, Andrew Young, and his wife, Cheri, who testified at the trial.

What news media attention Mrs. Mellon did attract over the years tended to focus on the superficial, often missing the dedication this talented amateur brought to her gardens (she was instrumental in the restoration of Louis XIV’s potager du roi at Versailles), art collections (she personally acquired from the artist what were long considered the finest Mark Rothko pictures in existence), her role as a mentor to Jacqueline Kennedy and to a manner of living so low key, its simplicity was almost a form of ostentation.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/fashion/bunny-mellon-is-thrust-to-center-in-john-edwards-trial.html?_r=1&BR-D-E-AD-OB-TXT-BTS-ROS-0512-NA=

Jewish Gangsters

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LINK: http://forward.com/articles/154101/jewish-gangsters-get-their-day-at-museum/


In the mid-20th century, a cadre of tough Jews, shedding the bookish bearing of exile, went forth to create a new society in a forbidding desert. Armed to the teeth, they lived outside the law and built their outpost by any means necessary. Against all odds, despite implacable enemies, the desert bloomed.

National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement

Meyer Lansky

Think you already know this history? Think again. This is an American tale told by the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, in downtown Las Vegas. Open since February, and already better known as “The Mob Museum,” it is essentially an American Jewish history museum by another name.

The museum tells the story of American organized crime, from its birth in the ethnic slums of established cities like Boston, New York and Chicago to the city the mafia itself begot, the Mojave metropolis of Las Vegas. The institution is the brainchild of Oscar Goodman, the flamboyant Philadelphia-born mafia attorney whose clients included Meyer Lansky, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and Herbert “Fat Herbie” Blitzstein. Goodman went on to serve as mayor of Las Vegas from 1999 until 2011.

While the exhibit only breaks the code of omertà about Jewishness at the beginning of its chronological display — noting the Jewish immigration wave alongside the Irish and Italian — as visitors move through the 20th century they see a pantheon of mosaic Murder Inc.

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/154101/jewish-gangsters-get-their-day-at-museum/?p=all#ixzz1vAnIMsRL

Halakha

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Halakha (Hebrew: הֲלָכָה‎) (Sephardic Hebrew pronunciation) (ha-la-chAH) — also transliterated Halocho (Ashkenazic Hebrew pronunciation) (ha-LUH-chuh), or Halacha — is the collective body of Jewish religious law, including biblical law (the 613 mitzvot) and later talmudic and rabbinic law, as well as customs and traditions.

Judaism classically draws no distinction in its laws between religious and ostensibly non-religious life; Jewish religious tradition does not distinguish clearly between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities. Halakha guides not only religious practices and beliefs, but numerous aspects of day-to-day life. Halakha is often translated as "Jewish Law", although a more literal translation might be "the path" or "the way of walking". The word derives from the Hebrew root that means to go or to walk.

Historically in the diaspora, Halakha served many Jewish communities as an enforceable avenue of civil and religious law. Since the Age of Enlightenment, emancipation, and haskalah in the modern era, Jewish citizens are bound to Halakha only by their voluntary consent. Under contemporary Israeli law, however, certain areas of Israeli family and personal status law are under the authority of the rabbinic courts and are therefore treated according to Halakha. Some differences in Halakha itself are found among Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Yemenite Jews, which are reflective of the historic and geographic diversity of various Jewish communities within the Diaspora.

Halakhah is a heritage that belongs to all Jews as it belongs to all Israel. Its continued vitality in Reform Judaism links the Jewish people to the religious expressions of other Jews, uniting them as part of a community whose history spans many countries and many generations.

This does not mean that rabbinic law and its literature function in exactly the same way for all Jews. Just as Reform Jews have a particular experience as a modern Jewish religious movement, so do they have a unique approach to halakhah which emerges from that experience.

Since the late 20th century, the leadership of Reform Jewry has showed renewed interest in adding its voice to the discourse of halakhah.

Religious History in Film

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The Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille   
Prince of Egypt, Steven Spielberg

The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese

Jesus of Montreal, Denys Arcand
Fiddler on the Roof, Norman Jewison
Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg

The Chosen, Jeremy Paul Kagan

 The Exorcist, William Friedkin
The Apostle, Robert Duvall
Crimes and Misdemeanors, Woody Allen 

 Dogma, Kevin Smith

Keeping the Faith, Edward Norton
The Matrix, Andy and Larry Wachowski

Kennedy Loss

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Is there a curse?

People die in every family ... once again the death of a Kennedy reincarnates the sad tale of tragedies and loss.

At the link read about the Kennedy's sad stories: http://gma.yahoo.com/kennedy-curse-political-familys-troubled-life-210101590.html

Early Gospel Sold For $14 Million

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http://news.yahoo.com/uk-library-acquires-key-early-gospel-14-million-153431983.html

A seventh century gospel discovered in a saint's coffin more than 900 years ago, and the oldest European book to survive fully intact, has been acquired by the British Library for nine million pounds ($14 million), the library said on Tuesday.

The manuscript copy of the Gospel of St. John called the St. Cuthbert Gospel was produced in the northeast of England in the late 7th century and was placed in the saint's coffin on the island of Lindisfarne, probably in 698.

His remains were carried to the mainland when the monks and people of the island fled Viking invaders, and ended up in Durham where the coffin was opened in 1104 and the gospel discovered.

Cuthbert's body was reburied in the new Norman cathedral there and became a focal point for pilgrims.

"It is undoubtedly one of the world's most important books," said Scot McKendrick, head of history and classics at the British Library.

"Most people who know about books know about the St. Cuthbert Gospel. The staggering fact is that we don't have a European book that looks as it did when it was made before this. It's quite astonishing."

According to the British Library, which has had the gospel on long-term loan since 1979 and exhibited it regularly, it will be displayed open temporarily after conservationists and curators deemed it safe to do so.

The manuscript features an original red leather binding in excellent condition and is the only surviving "high status" manuscript from this period of British history to retain its original appearance.

Victorian Women Imprisoned for stress, post natal depression and anxiety

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Women were often labelled insane and locked up in madhouses for a range of conditions – from postnatal depression to alcoholism or senile dementia, and even for social transgressions such as infidelity (‘moral insanity’).

These photographic records exist because some influential doctors, including the photographer, believed that the new science of photography could help to diagnose mental illness by capturing what was called the ‘exact point that had been reached in the scale of unhappiness’.

The idea that a face could be used to read a mind – and how one looked in a photo could determine their fate – fascinates and horrifies.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2141741/Sent-asylum-The-Victorian-women-locked-suffering-stress-post-natal-depression-anxiety.html#ixzz1un7M1wYR

A neglected wife, her X-rated diary in Victorian Britain

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Isabella Robinson was a well-to-do Victorian lady, the wife of a successful businessman and the mother of three children.

To the outside world, the Robinsons were as prosperous and respectable as could be, living in a smart area of Edinburgh, attended by four servants, mixing with the social and intellectual elite.

But Mrs Robinson’s diary, which she started keeping in 1849, told a different tale.
After a fairly disastrous first marriage, ending in the madness and death of her husband, she had reluctantly accepted Henry Robinson on his third proposal.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2143441/Heres-original-Mrs-Robinson.html#ixzz1ulKQ8GTT

After her fevered confession to her husband - Robinson confiscated his wife’s journals, along with hundreds of other letters, essays, notes and poems of hers, took custody of their two children and turfed her out.

The scene was set for a scandal — played out in the newly constituted divorce courts  that rocked Victorian England’s treasured image of blissful family life and a wife’s happy, subservient role in it.
Observers asked themselves how such a well-brought-up, middle-class lady could have had such lustful thoughts and dreams, let alone acted on them?

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2143299/Mrs-Robinsons-Disgrace-A-neglected-wife-X-rated-diary-Victorian-Britain-discovered-women-enjoy-sex-too.html#ixzz1ulLvU51U

Men in high places quivered with anger and anxiety, and the judges even ordered female spectators out of the Westminster Hall courtroom for fear of corrupting their morals, so salacious and inflammatory was some of the evidence thought to be.
 This now largely forgotten case comes back to life in a new book by Kate Summerscale, author of the highly acclaimed, best-selling and prize-winning The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher.

What exactly was going on beneath the starched petticoats and buttoned-up bodices of our great-great-great grandmothers?

With Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, she shifts her forensic eye from a celebrated Victorian murder to the secrets and lies of a monstrous Victorian marriage.

It is an intriguing story that challenges the conventional view of respectable English society in the 19th century.
 What exactly was going on beneath the starched petticoats and buttoned-up bodices of our great-great-great grandmothers? Much much more, it turns out, than we can ever have suspected.
 The case was a complex one, mired in claim and counter-claim, but one fact was largely unquestioned — that Henry Robinson was a rotten husband. Obnoxious, sullen, selfish, uneducated and rude, he married Isabella — a  thirtysomething widow with a son — for her inherited money, which he then purloined for his own purposes, though he was a wealthy man in his own right.  He ran a thriving business building steam boats and sugar mills, which took him away from home frequently.
 This left her feeling abandoned and lonely in a loveless marriage, but also relieved to be without the brute. In his absence, she had time and opportunity for finer things — literature, poetry, philosophy, science, religion.
 And love. And passion. And the search for happiness and fulfilment

1937 Coronation

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75 years ago, the Queen, then an 11 year old Princess Elizabeth, witnessed her father King George VI leave Westminster Abbey following his Coronation in the Abbey on May 12, 1937.

The ceremony took place a mere five months after the abdication of King Edward VIII in December 1936.
Behind the scenes there was  considerable drama, much of which would have escaped the young Princess at the time.

The Lord Chancellor’s Office considered the thorny question as to whether bankrupt peers should be summoned. The most notable was the Marquess of Winchester who, under normal circumstances would have done homage as representative Marquess.
 He and other peers were not summoned. The 2nd Baron Sinha was not recognised as eligible to sit in the House of Lords – despite being the rightful heir of his father and a peer since 1928.
 The 7th Marquess Townshend, born on May 13, 1916, a minor peer since 1921, did not come of age until midnight so he was not allowed to take his place among the peers.

For more behind-the-scenes details of that famously controversial Coronation read on at the link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2143418/There-wonder-Papa-crowned.html#ixzz1ulGnfnTs

Homicide 1920s

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At the link see actual crime scene photos recently released in New York city that depict cases of homicide and their perpetrators in the 1920s.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2143312/Chilling-black-white-pictures-reveal-New-Yorks-grisly-history-crime.html?ICO=most_read_module

Iconic Fragrances

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Here is a fun topic ... see the fragrances of iconic beauties at the link!
http://glo.msn.com/beauty/iconic-fragrances-8217.gallery

Marilyn's Agenda

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A Splash of Marilyn

It was the assignment of an ambitious young photographer’s dreams: capturing Hollywood’s sexiest star for Look magazine in 1960. The chemistry with Marilyn Monroe seemed promising, and their professional relationship deepened when he photographed her on the set of her final, never finished movie, Something’s Got to Give. As the 50th anniversary of her death approaches, Lawrence Schiller, in an adaptation from his memoir of those sessions in VanityFair, recalls Monroe’s mix of vulnerability and cold calculation as she guided his camera toward the ultimate revelation—breathtaking nude shots, some unseen till now—and their tense encounter the day before she died.

Read artcle extract here: http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2012/06/marilyn-monroe-nude-photos-exclusive

Legendary Vidal Sassoon

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

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Sassoon's creative, geometric cuts were an integral part of the Sixties look as championed by the likes of Mary Quant, the fashion designer who popularized the miniskirt, and actress Mia Farrow.

When Sassoon picked up his shears in the 1950s, styled hair was typically curled, teased, piled high and shellacked into place.

Then came the 1960s, and Sassoon's creative cuts, which required little styling and fell into place perfectly every time, fit right in with the fledgling women's liberation movement.

Sassoon opened his first salon in his native London in 1954 but said he didn't perfect his cut-is-everything approach until the mid-'60s.

Once the wash-and-wear concept hit, though, it hit big and many women retired their curlers for good.

R.I.P.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2142049/Vidal-Sassoon-death-Legendary-hair-stylist-dies-aged-84.html#ixzz1uVyiUPll

life in India a century ago

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

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Photographs showing life in India at least a century ago - and they were all found in a shoebox.
One image shows buildings in the city of Calcutta lit up over the Lal Dighi body of water, commemorating a British royal visit, while another depicts ships arriving at the Chandpal Ghat, the main landing site for visitors to the city along the Hooghly River.
All 178 of the plate-glass negatives were found inside a size-nine Peter Lord shoebox by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) in Edinburgh.

They are said to have been taken in the country at the time of the British Raj and it is thought the negatives were untouched for almost 100 years.

Archivists at RCAHMS have already confirmed that some of the images were definitely taken in 1912, when King George V and Queen Mary visited Calcutta. It was the only visit by a British monarch to India as Emperor of the subcontinent.

Little else is known about the images and the photographer, prompting a search for clues as to his or her identity.

One theory is that the photographer was a British civil servant in Calcutta, or was connected to the jute trade, as many Scots were said to be at the time.

There is a Scottish cemetery in the city that dates back to the time of the British Raj, which has recently been cleaned up and recorded.

RCAHMS hopes that members of the public and photography enthusiasts might be able to shed more light on this discovery.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2140759/Days-Raj-Huge-collection-photographs-showing-life-India-century-ago-shoebox.html#ixzz1uVvcxCu1

Scrapbook of Diana's Wedding For Sale

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

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A scrapbook by the designer of Charles and Diana's will go under the hammer in an online auction.

A bidding frenzy is expected from those wishing to own a piece of royal history.

The front cover features a black and white print of Diana on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral and is edged with the specially commissioned Nottingham lace used on the bodice of the princess' bridal gown.

The first page of the scrapbook features an original watercolour sketch of the gown while the second page features press clippings from a newspaper article entitled‘Fairytale comes True.’

It has been applied with fragments of bridal tulle, ivory faille bow, pearl beads, lace used on the hem of the dress and two swatches of silk all taken from Diana's bridal gown fabric.
Page three consists of facsimile sketches copied from the original press release about the dress, spangled tulle taken from the bridal veil and a bow of apricot silk from the bridesmaids' dresses.

On page four there is a facsimile sketch of one of the bridesmaid's dresses - again, including lace and fabric swatches.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2142351/Princess-Dianas-wedding-dress-designer-Elizabeth-Emanuels-scrapbook-auction.html#ixzz1uVsuRQWB