Mae's Real Stories

My friends Sheila and John live in London, the capital of England. In June, the Queen of England, Queen Elizabeth, is honored with a special celebration called "Trooping the Colour." For this year's ceremony, Sheila and John saw the parade that comes before this celebration, and took many pictures.

Sheila explained this ceremony. She wrote: "The colour is the regimental flag which has various battle honours listed on it and the regiments of Guards parade it past the Queen with lots of intricate drill work. You can recognise which regiment of Guards you are looking at (Welsh, Scots, Grenadier, Coldstream etc) as the patterns of their buttons are distinctive." (Of course she could not see their buttons from where she was sitting, you'd have to be much closer.)








"The Coldstream Guards were the ones who marched today. We watched from the Terrace behind the Royal Society's building. A friend belongs to the Royal Society, and he invited us to join him there. These photos are the result. The trees masked the main procession, so you could just catch glimpses as they turned off the Mall towards Horse Guards Parade Ground. The Queen is just visible riding in a carriage in lime green in the following photo."
"We watched the main ceremony on a big TV screen in one of the Royal Society's lecture rooms & then had a lovely buffet lunch. We were lucky. It poured before & after, but not during!! This is the first time I've even seen part of it live. It was fun. I haven't watched it even on TV for some years."

"I have another story about Trooping the Colour. We have a friend who was the Music Director of the Welsh Guards for a few years. He was involved in Trooping the Colour some years back and it absolutely poured with rain. The parade ground became about 4 inches deep in water, so you can imagine how wet their uniforms were. He told us that when they got back to the barracks they could not unbutton their tunics as they are made of wool, which had swollen due to being so wet. This meant that the buttons would not go through the button holes!! He didn't tell us how they eventually managed to get out of them!! Of course, if it's really hot you sometimes get the opposite problem and a Guardsman keels over in a faint as he's got too hot inside all that wool."