Monday, September 27, 2010

Edward VII and Coronation Dinners

Watched the Brit TV series "Berkeley Square", which is sort of an Upstairs, Downstairs with the focus on three nursemaids/nannies in different households on the exclusive Berkeley Square.  A feature of Episode IV was a coronation dinner (Edward VII), where the posh set served the poorer classes. Difficult to find anything on it, a NYTimes article here on the coronation mentions the dinners.  There's a photo for sale here showing the setup.

This sentence: " Born in 1841, he built up a huge potato enterprise and supplied all the potatoes eaten at a dinner for the poor of London to mark King Edward VII's coronation."  This from a cached Worthing piece: " To mark those three previous coronations, Worthing’s civic fathers settled for a lunch or tea party for the young, poor and the elderly (on one occasion, all three together), with a small procession of local organisations as a kind of bonus. Not many were impressed." And another picture.


I didn't know Edward suffered appendicitis right before the scheduled date for his coronation, and the successful surgery put that operation on the map. His illness delayed the coronation, but not the dinner for the poor.

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