Category Royal Garden Party
On the 75th Anniversary of the Washington Visit by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth
In Canada, the 75th anniversary of the Royal visit to North America is being honored this year with special commemorative coins and whiskey. In the United States, there has been little historical account of the jammed-packed two days in the District of Columbia and northern Virginia during the inaugural trip to North America of the […]
The Embassy Gardens in Post-War Recovery
The Immediate Post-War Years The monarch’s birthday celebration in the gardens of British Embassy, last held in 1938, was revived in June 1947. The ambassador who greeted guests entering through the wooden Lutyens garden gate was the unconventional, if not eccentric, Archibald Clark Kerr, 1st Baron Inverchapel. Wearing white linens, he presided over a more […]
The Second World War as Seen in the Embassy Landscape
The transformation of Washington during the Second World War can be seen in structural changes at the British Embassy. Quickly assembled wartime additions to the Lutyens Chancery were erected in 1940. When those proved inadequate for the burgeoning staff’s needs, property was leased throughout the city and land bordering the Embassy’s service road and Observatory […]
The Aftermath of the Royal Garden Party
Ronald Lindsay’s tenure as Ambassador to the United States finally came to an end in the summer of 1939, following the King and Queen’s trip to Washington and then on to New York. Lady Lindsay, exhausted from the preparations and attending criticism of those events, struggled to pack up from the Ambassador’s Residence, her main […]
Moving Images: The Royal Visit, British Embassy and Lindsay-Era Washington
The visit of the King and Queen to the nation’s capital in early June of 1939 was all about images, pageantry and symbolism. The first two videos here demonstrate the careful choreography of the event while offering rare, surviving and openly available views to the British Embassy gardens at the time. The other two films […]
The Royal Garden Party
Ambassador Ronald Lindsay was commanded to hold a garden party for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth on 8 June 1939, followed the next day by a morning reception for British subjects, and then a dinner, all at the Washington Embassy. These were to be the Lindsays’s last, but by far their most public and […]
Landscape of a Washington Place 
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