The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh held a magnificent Ball for 1,500 Guests to celebrate the Wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer at Buckingham Palace on this day in 1981, 45 years ago, following the Christening of Zara Phillips at Windsor Castle and two days before the Wedding Ceremony!
Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer danced into the early morning hours Tuesday before 1,500 Guests at a glittering Buckingham Palace wedding ball in their last time together before they meet at the altar. The heir to the throne and his bride-to-be were the focus of every eye at a glittering palace reception and the following ball for 1,500 guests, given by Queen Elizabeth.
The ball — which followed a gold-plate dinner for 90 in the palace’s state dining room — substituted for a big reception after the wedding. Charles and Diana mingled with friends, foreign royalty, First Lady Nancy Reagan, estate employes and wedding ceremony participants at the ball, at which the prince’s favorite pop group, the Three Degrees, played. ‘There was no protocol about it,’ a palace spokesman said. ‘It was purely a party for friends and friends of friends.’
Lady Diana wore her Saudi Sapphire Suite.
The dazzling, shocking pink silk taffeta gown was created at the Emanuel studio for the then Lady Diana to wear at the pre-wedding ball held at Buckingham Palace on Monday, 27th July 1981.
The Queen Mother was wearing the Greville Tiara and Queen Alexandra’s Wedding Necklace.
Countess Spencer wore the Spencer Honeysuckle Tiara with the Duchess of Shrewsbury’s Diamond Earrings.
The Duchess of Devonshire recalled:
Celebrations began with an evening party for hundreds of people at Buckingham Palace. Emma, Andrew and I dined at Chesterfield Street, where we were joined by Father Harry Williams, who had been Dean of Chapel at Trinity College, Cambridge, when Prince Charles was an undergraduate.There are two entrances at Buckingham Palace when big parties are held and the invitation clearly stated our time of arrival, but the whole of London seemed to be making for the palace at the same time and there was a long queue to get in. We were fortunate in having an ‘entrée’ pass, given to diplomats, government officials and a few others, so we were able to go through a side door by the Queen’s Gallery where we found a milling throng and an apparently stationary queue waiting to get up the stairs. We spotted the Archbishop of Canterbury, Alec Douglas-Home and Quintin Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor, who was wearing old-fashioned court dress with lace ruffles and knee breeches and looked like a mischievous boy with his hair scraped down.
We were all staring sadly at the queue when some knowing person said, ‘Let’s take the lift.’ So this strangely assorted company, including portly Father Williams, took the lift and when the door opened we found ourselves spat out just where the Queen and Prince Philip were receiving their guests.
The spectacle was better than any film. The women had all made an effort to look their smartest – rare today – and were wearing new, or anyway clean, dresses, and had got out anything that shone to put in their hair. The men, some in unfamiliar foreign uniforms, looked splendid, and there was the usual sprinkling of Africans in multi-coloured robes. The palace brings in outside staff for these occasions and some of the footmen’s uniforms did not exactly fit. I often saw old friends among the retired butlers and looked out for Henry Bennett, who had been a footman at Chatsworth before going to be page to the Queen. (The Queen called him ‘Bennett’ and I called him ‘Henry’, which made me feel in the swim.) I did not see him that evening – he was probably in the rarefied atmosphere of the supper room where the Queen and the royal family were entertaining their foreign guests.
At 1.30 a.m. Andrew announced, ‘We’ll go home now.’ His sight was beginning to fail and parties had become a strain. Once he had decided he wanted to go home, home it was with no waiting about. But that night it was not so easy. The crowd was still huge and I could not remember which stairs to make for to reach our waiting car. I was almost desperate when I spied Lord Maclean, the Lord Chamberlain, whom I had known when he was Chief Scout. I collared him and said, ‘You’re a Boy Scout, how about your good turn for the day? Show us the way out.’ He looked surprised but, good Scout that he was, took us downstairs and shoved us into the passage that eventually led to the side door.
The next day I was sorry we had not stayed longer. Emma did, and at the very end of the party some high-ranking soldier cut down the balloons from the ceiling with his sword. There was a stampede of dowagers, fighting like mad for the blue and white souvenirs to take home for their grandchildren. Emma managed to get three, one for each of her children.”
Princess Cécile of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a great-niece of the Duke of Edinburgh, also talked about the Ball:
There were these family events or bigger balls or things that my parents or my aunt or grandmother attended. As a little girl of course there was just this thing when all the preparation started and all the dresses came out. They would all discuss which dresses they were going to wear, then who was going to wear which tiara and which jewels would go with what. When I was smaller and we were in London for the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, we were able to be there and watch from Buckingham Palace. I was still too young to go to any of the balls or anything, but it was special watching my mother getting dressed up and putting these things on. [It was special], just sitting there and staring at these things and getting to see them and grow up with them – not just in the trays but actually still worn which I think is rarer and rarer these days.”
Two days later, after Wedding, the Queen (wearing her South African Diamond Suite) and the extended British Royal Family joined all the Royal Guests and Relatives in London for a splendid Gala at Claridge’s Hotel, where the Queen was pictured alongside Queen Silvia of Sweden and Princess Grace of Monaco watching the broadcast before a simple Supper was served and then the dancing commenced. Nicky Haslam wrote about the occasion:
‘At 6.30pm, wearing the required black tie, I walked into the anteroom of Claridge’s ballroom and saw the most extraordinary sight imaginable. Sitting in a semi-circle, their eyes glued to a hastily erected screen, were all the major wedding guests watching themselves on the film that, miraculously, Elizabeth Shakerley had had spliced together in the few hours since the ceremony.
Besides the Queen herself, and every European monarch reigning or exiled, there were Nancy Reagan, Princess Grace of Monaco, the Empress of Iran, the Crown Prince of Japan, archbishops, princelings and potentates…
This extraordinary melange, these remnants of foreclosed kingdoms, sat cheek by jowl with the few who had survived, watching a film that seemed to be a living fairy story. I could catch their murmured comments. ‘Ach, vot has happened to poor Alfonso?…How could Dagmar have worn that?…Lilibet does things so well…Ma chere, the size of Karim…Only Louise Sweden could carry off purple lace.’
I noticed Mrs Reagan cupping her face in her hands as her dark eyes shone with emotional tears. Then she turned to whisper to her Hollywood film-star contemporary, Grace Kelly, whose showbiz wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco I had watched on TV years before…
The ‘dinner’ was mainly simple breakfast food – sausages and baked beans, kedgeree, scrambled eggs with smoked salmon for the more sophisticated. And, of course, rivers of champagne. There were no placements, except for the Queen’s table; the rest of us sat wherever we found a seat. But no one sat for long. Pretty soon everyone, led by the Queen and Prince Philip, headed off to dance.’
Those pictures are not from Charles & Diana’s pre-Wedding ball.
No photos of them from that event have been made public, and Diana’s hair is also not circa early-1981.
The photos shown were taken 16 May, 1983 at the opening of the ‘Renaissance at Sutton Place’ exhibition in Guildford, England.