Royal visit to FoD (General)

by peteressex , Monday, January 10, 2011, 09:25 (5074 days ago) @ alison2

I suppose someone at Buckingham Palace could answer from records whether Alison is right in suspecting that the Royals used the Beachley Ferry. My instinct is to doubt it, as the tidal window was such that there was usually a queue, the royal couple's driver might have found it a tall order to get a large and notoriously unmanoevrable Rolls Royce or the like onto any of the boats, they would probably have been given their own reserved boat, and I doubt if the Queen would have wanted her loyal motoring subjects to miss the boat and have to go round Gloucester because of her. But it would be interesting if we could work it out from known circumstances, as follows.

By the time that the Queen and Prince Philip had already "done" Malvern, Hereford and Ross, been received by dignitaries at the Speech House, and planted a couple of trees, and presumably having had a spot of lunch somewhere, it's reasonable to suppose it was at least mid-afternoon by the time they were spotted heading from Fetter Hill to Bream, and that they expected to arrive at Badminton in time to get ready for dinner. If they were going to go from the Speech House to Badminton via Gloucester, the sensible route out of the Forest would have been classified roads via Littledean to Elton Corner, with no need to head in the Bream or St Briavels direction, so if they did go towards Bream or St Briavels it suggests they used the ferry.

Then there's the question of what happened to the royal train. It left Windsor two days before the Forest visit and I'm assuming Slowhands is right that the Herefordshire calls were earlier the same day and not on the unexplained intervening day. It might have made sense for the road trip from Speech House to go to Severn Tunnel Junction from which the royal train could then easily have gone to Badminton, which then had its own station. Or the royal train could have been boarded at somwhere such as Lydney or Chepstow and reversed for the tunnel. Possibly in such a case the royal limo was taken on the ferry but without any royalty on board. (But there was also a system at around that time for putting cars on trains through the Severn Tunnel. And just possibly the royal train used the Severn rail bridge but I would have expected Lydney people to remember any such glorification of the "Severn & Wye" as well as a royal transit.)

However, was the ferry running at the right time of day? I can't find any tide tables for 1957, but they should still be around somewhere. I've seen a record of an exceptionally high tide at Sharpness on 16/02/1957 which, if we could find the time of day, could lead us to an estimate of low tide on the day of the Royal journey.