All the remainder was organised in the manner of a working Royal Navy vessel. The royal apartment occupies about a third of the yacht and has its own connected cabins, services and galley.
#By royal command e book windows
There is also the Sun Lounge ( Fig 1), a room with large windows that opens onto the verandah deck towards the stern. On the Shelter Deck above are the private family rooms, including the Duke’s and The Queen’s bedrooms ( Fig 8), each with its own bathroom. The stairwell also incorporates the formal entrance to the yacht, making this the hallway of the royal apartment. Between them is an anteroom and the main stair ( Fig 5), as well as sitting rooms for the Duke and The Queen ( Fig 6). Incorporated within the Upper Deck are the State Drawing Room - the fireplace within it had to be fitted with an electric fire because of naval regulations ( Fig 4) - and the State Dining Room ( Fig 3). To a striking degree, and despite repair and renovation, the interiors of the yacht still resemble these views.įig 5: The grand staircase connecting the royal bedroom suites with the state rooms. His accomplished and loosely worked watercolour sketches have the effect of bringing the picture hang and the furniture to the fore, setting chintz patterns and pastel tones against the clean lines and bold details of the architecture. He proposed a single colour carpet throughout, white walls, polished mahogany doors and some gilding of highlights. He was also given a brace of pheasant bearing a prominent label ‘From The Queen’, which he hung ostentatiously from the luggage rack of his train carriage as he travelled south.Ĭasson’s stated aim in Britannia was to create a country-house interior in the yacht, although the conscious simplicity perhaps more powerfully evokes the residence of a British colonial governor or High Commissioner. The next day, Casson was dismissed with an instruction to get on with the work and send samples of materials. What discussion the drawings elicited is unclear, but Casson makes it apparent that the Duke of Edinburgh was otherwise a crucial point of connection in the design process and that the choice of fabrics was taken by the royal couple.
Two ornate compasses or binnacles were also rescued, but these, in fact, originally came from a yet earlier vessel, Queen Victoria’s Royal George.
These included her picture collection, china, silver, linen and glass. That done, and in company with John Wright, an architect and furniture designer in his office, he visited the previous Royal Yacht - Victoria and Albert III, built in 1899 and retired in 1937 - to salvage fittings.
#By royal command e book series
After a sequence of interviews with the Duke of Edinburgh, the Admiralty and a representative of McInnes Gardner, he quickly produced a series of large watercolour sketches of the main rooms that were posted off to the Royal Family at Balmoral. By happy coincidence, Casson loved liners, having spent part of his childhood in Southampton.Ĭasson had never properly met his royal clients before this commission and time was of the essence. Russell suggested Casson on the strength of his Festival of Britain experience. He requested something simpler and asked the furniture designer Gordon Russell for advice. The Duke of Edinburgh, however, judged its Louis XVII-style proposals as too much in the character of a transatlantic liner.
The main interiors of the yacht, meanwhile, were created with the assistance of Sir Hugh Casson, who had recently been knighted for his work as director of architecture for the Festival of Britain.īy Casson’s account - recorded in a series of interviews in early 1990 for the National Life Stories of the British Library Oral History Project - the dockyard had initially turned to the established local firm of McInnes Gardner to furnish the yacht. One outward mark of their involvement in Britannia is the deep blue of the hull ( Fig 2), which is borrowed - together with its enlivening band of gold leaf - from the Dragon Class racing yacht Bluebottle, which was a wedding gift in 1948. This close involvement makes the royal apartment within the yacht one of the most coherent surviving expressions of the royal couple’s personal interests and taste. As the Duke explained in an interview in 1995, she ‘was rather special as far as we were concerned because we were involved from the very beginning in organising the design and furnishing and equipping and hanging the pictures and everything else… All the other places we live in had been built by predecessors’.
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