The following article appeared in the Daily Mirror on Thursday, 1st November 1917:
“Did you notice that they served us like mother would, but that they never took their gloves off!”
Thus remarked a little boy when the Queen served him yesterday with a dinner at a communal kitchen off the Uxbridge Road, London.
The Queen and Princess Mary are by now experts in the art of serving food. But for speed and dexterity the royal servers established a record yesterday when they dished over a thousand portions in less than an hour.
In the Uxbridge Road district the shopping is all done by the “little mothers” under fourteen or by grandma. Mother is away working in the munitions factory.
Princess Mary laughed when Daisy Vine, a small girl with a big dish, demanded six portions of penny apple-roll. “All that?” the Princess asked. “I shop for the family,” answered Daisy.
The fact that portable pies are provided for the army of war workers and laundresses who work near by, and have no dishes, was commended by the Queen.
“Don’t bother to curtsy or you’ll spill your pies,” was her kindly remark to a small girl.
My dad would have been seven-years-old then and lived minutes away in Becklow Road. I wonder if he was there?
Steve Russell
(Thanks to Colin Woodley for sending me the article. The pic is from my collection)