The Queen who Came to Tea

It was a time when a great new adventure was beginning for women, when Aunt Mary led a band of suffragettes and even had her picture in the paper for shouting "Votes for Women" in the House of Commons, which made Helen Bradley's father very cross. Winston Churchill became their M.P. and Father was convinced that motor cars would never catch on, but bought one all the same. There were exciting holidays and new things to see: a three-masted schooner at the quay in Douglas, pierrots on the sands at Blackpool and Grandpa's new house on the Isle of Man which he bought with the thought that the sail backwards and forwards would do the family good. But most exciting was the day King Edward and Queen Alexandra rode through the streets of Manchester, a scene which Helen Bradley re-creates as she saw it from atop her Uncle John's shoulders. The next day Aunt Mary assured her that the Queen had indeed come to tea, as Grandma said she might, after the children had gone to bed, and Her Majesty had gratefully learned the secret of making proper Yorkshire pudding.

The delights of Edwardian childhood, from a new pair of curling tongs to the roundabout at Lees, are nowhere recaptured with more charm than in the incomparable pictures of Helen Bradley.