Buckingham Palace Spiffs Up For Tourists
Cleaners on scaffolding dragged 6-foot-long feather dusters across plaster cornices, painters retouched a gilded staircase, antique sofas were carried out for reupholstering. Minions with portable vacuums strapped to their waists gently cleaned dust from the green silk curtains patterned after the originals ordered 170 years ago by William IV’s wife, Adelaide, in order to give employment to Irish weavers.
Frenzied housekeeping is the signal that Buckingham Palace, the queen’s official residence in London, is preparing itself for the annual onslaught of tourists.
This marks the palace’s fourth season of public exposure during the months of August and September, a decision fueled by the fire that consumed parts of Windsor Castle in 1992. Overtaxed citizens and liberal politicians urged the Windsors to foot the castle’s renovation bills instead of dipping into public coffers, and though the queen’s swift decision to open her home seemed an indignity in some circles - Buckingham Palace open to cameratoting, guidebook-clutching day trippers? - it now seems a canny business decision.
In the last four years, more than 1.2 million tourists have contributed about $12 million toward Windsor Castle’s $60-million restoration budget. And though the palace was originally opened on a five-year experimental basis, it has been such a success that visitors are now welcome until the year 2000 and if palace sources are correct, possibly will be well into the next century.
Unlike President Clinton, who lives in the White House while sightseers shuffle through, the queen has scheduled her home’s open months to coincide with her annual summer vacation at Balmoral, her castle in Scotland. She will return in October.
When the queen is in residence, the palace is a blaze of color and courtiers for special occasions, with Tudor-costumed Yeomen and a staff of 770, from ladies-in-waiting and equerries to footmen and gentlemen-at-arms. In August and September, however, these dazzling displays are replaced (to the chagrin of many tourists) with wardens in schoolteacherish white shirts and blue trousers or skirts.
These months were once a time for a thorough cleaning of the palace, when intricate chandeliers were dismantled and scrubbed, and household repairs made. Now, there is a very swift cleaning before and after the paying guests visit, in addition to the regular maintenance.
Airport-style security systems are installed, valuable carpets are rolled away and hard-wearing commercial red carpet laid down, ropes go up and the summer wardens arrive to be trained in everything from fire evacuation procedures to first aid, handy when palace visitors and fate collide, as happened last month when two women were hit by lightning during a garden party.
The five-day training program turns the wardens - a total of 200 mainly students, housewives and retired people between the ages of 18 and 60 - into a crack team responsible for everything from the gift shop to, more surprisingly, security.
“If someone runs amok in the Picture Gallery with a knife, don’t try to intercept them,” a representative from the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch advised them last Monday. “Pictures can be patched up much more easily than you can.”
The wardens are taught to spot regular problems, like canisters of mace, which it is illegal to carry in Britain. “We have to confiscate them from a lot of Americans, and some of the women in particular are very upset about this,” said Chris Bowles (“Bowles, as in Parker Bowles, but no relation,” he added), 32, a summer warden.
It seems safe to say that the wardens are enthusiastic royalists. Rose Lambah-Stoate, 19, an art history student from Bristol who is assigned to the State Rooms and the gift shop, has been a Windsorite “since I was 7,” she said. “I went around the palace last summer as a paying visitor and knew more about the paintings than the wardens did, so someone suggested I apply.”
The approximately $350 a week salary is not much more than what she will pay to live in a college residence hall during her two-month stint, but Lambah-Stoate said, “I would do anything for this job. Seeing the palace changes people’s lives. My mother and I couldn’t stop talking about it all last summer, and it should be available to the public. After all, they’re our pictures, really, aren’t they?”
(Actually, no. The Royal Collection is self-funded through tourism, not taxes.)
A different state room is chosen each year as a theme for the giftware sold in the tented shop assembled each summer in the garden. This year it is the circular Music Room, with its lapis lazuli columns and laurel wreath-engraved parquet floor.
Gift sales account for around $2.2 million of the $4.2 million profit made by the palace opening last year. There is a sterling silver and lapis lazuli bracelet and matching cuff links (about $85 each), a silk scarf inspired by an 18th-century painted piano (about $52) and the annual commemorative mug, cup, saucer and plate, this year with the golden laurel design from the Music Room floor (from $12).
Most items, especially the most expensive limited edition ones, like this year’s $750 enameled music box, sell out quickly. In the first year of the palace’s opening demand was so underestimated that they had to rush out and buy “any old mug” to have fired with the royal design.
That sort of glitch does not appear to faze the palace’s fee-paying admirers. They are, like the wardens, usually monarchists, who regard the whole experience as a privilege. As an elderly ex-military officer said tearfully as he entered the palace for a tour last year, “I never thought, when I stood outside the railings with my father to watch King George V go out in his Daimler, that I would be inside here.”
Buckingham Palace is open to the public this year until Sept. 30. Tickets are about $10 for children under 17 and $15 for adults. Information is available by calling 011-44-171-839-1377, or sending a fax to 011-44-171-930-9625.