The death of a king (or indeed a queen) can disrupt the most carefully laid plans. After May 6, 1910, when Edward VII suddenly succumbed to pneumonia aged 68 after just nine years on the throne, Britain was engulfed in eight weeks of compulsory black-draped mourning. The distress was felt particularly by an aristocracy not only shaken by the unexpected demise of a much-loved, life-relishing sovereign, but anxious at the prospect that Royal Ascot might be cancelled.
To everyone’s great relief George V, the new King, announced that the race meeting would go ahead — with the proviso that all those in the royal enclosure should be clothed in “unrelieved” black. The socialite Lady Diana Manners had to scrabble for black chiffon to disguise her customary Technicolor frocks. Martin Williams’s account of that black Ascot reminds us that the monochrome race in the 1960s film My Fair Lady (when Eliza Doolittle’s language runs away with her) was inspired by the real-life Edwardian gathering 50 years earlier.
