PAST RIVER PAGEANTS
continued to serve the royal family until the 20th century, when she concluded her official duties by participating in the Thames Peace Pageant on 4 August 1919 to celebrate the Allied victory in the First World War, and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. A five-mile procession included the ceremonial barges of the City’s Livery Companies, naval pinnaces, watermen’s wherries and a barge displaying guns that had been used during the four-year-long conflict.
A VENERABLE OLD LADY
In 1930, King George V presented the Queen’s Shallop, by then 241 years old, to the National Maritime Museum which also cares for three other similar craft, including Prince Frederick’s gilded rowing barge. This 63ft (19.2m) vessel was designed by William Kent and built by John Hall on the southern bank of the Thames opposite Whitehall for King George II’s eldest son in 1732. Following Prince Frederick’s death in 1751, it became the principal royal barge used by every successive monarch until 30 October 1849, when it performed its last official duty by conveying Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, along the Thames from Whitehall Stairs to the City of London to open the Coal Exchange. Although illness had prevented Queen Victoria attending, the
occasion generated a great deal of interest because it was the future King Edward VII’s first state occasion, and the first royal river procession since 1835. The elderly barge was helmed by King William IV’s son, Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence, then commanding officer of HM Yacht Victoria & Albert, and propelled by 22 oarsmen who wore gold badges and black velvet caps. Describing the scenes in a letter to Mrs Gladstone a few days later, the royal children’s governess, Lady Lyttelton, wrote: “The weather was Italian – not a bit of fog or cold or wind. St Paul’s seen as clearly as a country church up to the cross, and on the cupola sat many people. Every inch of ground, every bridge, roof, window, and as many vessels of all sorts as could lie on the river, leaving our ample passage clear, were covered, close packed with people.”
She continued: “Everybody in full dress, liveries like the state drawing-rooms, and all sorts of feudal City customs, the swans (live ones) in their barge, with their keeper, the Lord Mayor’s barge, quite dazzling, just ahead of ours, and he and all the functionaries in new robes of scarlet cloth or crimson velvet. And such floods of sunshine all the time, and an incessant thundering of ‘God Save the Queen!’ by a succession of bands; and the bells, and the Tower guns! Enough to drive one mad.”
Above: King George V in the royal barge at Henley, 1912 by John Fraser
Below: Fireworks on the Thames to celebrate the coronation of King James II in 1685, by Willem van de Velde the Elder
NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM CLASSIC BOAT JUNE 2012 49
NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM
NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM
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