Saying Yes to the (Royal) Dress

Forrest Pass

King Charles and Queen Camilla arrive in Canada next week for a visit that has been timed to buttress Canadian sovereignty amid tensions with the United States. Royal watchers will pay close attention to the royal couple’s wardrobe choices for subtle signs of the Sovereign and Consort’s support for Canada. Recently, the King chose to wear his Canadian medals for a Royal Navy visit, and the Princess of Wales’ choice of a red dress for Commonwealth Day festivities may also have been a gesture of solidarity.

The intersection of sovereignty and sartorial selection presents an interesting parallel between this visit and the Canadian tour of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later Elizabeth the Queen Mother) in 1939 – the first by a reigning monarch and his consort. Then as now, organizers hoped that the visit would emphasize Canadian autonomy within the Commonwealth and shore up national unity in uncertain times. And in 1939 as in 2025, some Canadians and Canadian heritage institutions became very excited about an article of royal clothing.

The garment in question was the dress worn by Queen Elizabeth during the couple’s visit to Parliament Hill, when the King had presided over Parliament’s prorogation and gave royal assent to a number of bills. Conceived by acclaimed British designer Sir Norman Hartnell, the dress had reputedly cost $20 000 and was one of the Queen’s favourites. For artist Elizabeth Delafield of Toronto, the dress was an item of aesthetic and historical importance. “Never have I seen something quite so lovely as Her Majesty in that beautiful gown,” gushed Delafield in a handwritten note to Sir Arthur Shuldham Redfern, Secretary to the Governor General. “May not this very beautiful bit of Royal Canadian History be left in Canada to be cherished?” On permanent exhibit, the dress would inspire future generations, both as an example of historical costume and as a memento of a historic constitutional moment.[1]

Redfern dealt daily with “letters containing wild and impracticable suggestions,” but he believed Delafield’s idea had unusual merit. He lost no time in writing to Lady Katherine Seymour, the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, aboard the Royal Train, then chugging rapidly through northern Ontario. Several months of negotiations between Rideau Hall and Buckingham Palace ensued, and by the autumn of 1939, the Queen had consented to send her dress to Canada. But which museum would house and display it? Redfern disagreed with Delafield’s suggested home – the National Museum of Canada – which he privately characterized as “a mouldy and uninspiring collection of stuffed birds, dinosaurs, Indian canoes, bottles of wheat grain and geological specimens.” He suggested, instead, that the dress go to the Public Archives of Canada and the Palace agreed.[2]

Redfern’s assessment was harsh, but it contained a kernel of truth: before the 1960s, the National Museum focused on natural history and on Indigenous archaeology and ethnology and did not yet have a clear mandate to collect recent Canadiana. Meanwhile, the Public Archives’ collections mandate included three-dimensional artifacts as well as archival documents, owing to the ambitions of longtime archivist Arthur Doughty. Doughty and his staff and successors curated an eclectic museum, which had become a popular Ottawa tourist attraction. The Queen’s Dress was a welcome addition and Princess Alice of Albany, wife of incoming Governor General the Earl of Athlone, presented it to the Archives with much fanfare on December 19, 1940.[3]

But the dress had another smitten suitor. At the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, director C.T. Currelly hoped to acquire the dress to complement two Coronation dresses already acquired from the King’s mother, Queen Mary. When he wrote to Buckingham Palace to request it, Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, the King’s assistant private secretary, responded that the Queen had consented to give the dress to Canada, but deferred to the Governor General’s office to decide which museum would house it. Currelly argued to Redfern that his institution should have the honour, “as we are the only museum in Canada that has a gallery of dresses, and also as we are so enormously greater than all the others put together.” Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and other federal officials maintained that the dress had been worn at a federal, not provincial, ceremony and ought to stay in Ottawa. Redfern tersely communicated this decision to Currelly.[4]

Currelly, however, was stubborn. In 1944, he wrote to national archivist Gustave Lanctôt protesting that the Queen had promised the dress to his museum, and “official bungling” had led to being mistakenly presented to the archives. This version of events conveniently ignored the paper trail, and Lanctôt responded as much. Currelly conceded reluctantly. “This being so there is nothing more we can do about it,” he replied to the archivist, “but I still think it would be much better placed in our collection.”[5]

Currelly’s conciliatory attitude didn’t last. Two years later, he wrote to Rideau Hall, noting that the dress was essential to his exhibition of queenly gowns and that it would commemorate Canada’s contribution to the Commonwealth war effort. He again alleged – without evidence – that the dress’s presentation to the archives was an administrative error. Forwarded to Prime Minister King, Currelly’s letter mysteriously provoked an immediate decision to send the dress to Toronto, with no rationale given. Lanctôt protested to his boss, Secretary of State Paul Martin, Sr., that there was “no record” of the Queen having promised the dress to the ROM, and that this national artifact ought to remain in the national capital. In the end, however, the archivist complied, asking only if the ROM might purchase the expensive mount and case the archives had just commissioned for the dress. The victorious Currelly declined: his display cases all had to match. The dress remains at the ROM to this day.[6]

The case of the Queen’s Dress illustrates the strength of some Canadians’ fascination with royal clothing and the messages it can send. To Elizabeth Delafield, the dress was an inspiring souvenir of a magical moment. To federal officials, including archivist Gustave Lanctôt, it recalled an important episode in Canada’s constitutional evolution, the first time a reigning monarch had presided in Parliament. For the ROM’s C.T. Currelly, it commemorated Canada’s war contributions, but mainly contributed to an ambitious collections and exhibition project on historical clothing.  The fight over the frock also revealed the divisions and jealousies among Canada’s emerging heritage institutions, whose mandates were, as yet, broadly defined and sometimes overlapping. Sleeveless though it was, the Queen’s Dress inspired custodians of the nation’s memory to put their elbows up – if only to assert or defend their own institutional turf.

Forrest Pass is a curator at Library and Archives Canada. His work on aspects of Canadian material culture has appeared in Water History, Dress, the Journal of Sport History, and the Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism.

[1] Library and Archives Canada (hereafter LAC), Office of the Governor General fonds, RG 7 G 26, v. 95, file 2213 D (26), Elizabeth Delafield to Arthur Shuldham Redfern, May 1939.

[2] LAC, RG 7 G 26, v. 95, file 2213 D (26), Redfern to Seymour, Jun 3, 1939; Arthur Penn, A/Secretary to the Queen, to Redfern, Jul 5, 1940.

[3] “Queen’s $20 000 Gown is Presented to Canada,” Ottawa Journal, Dec 20, 1940.

[4] LAC, RG 7 G 26, v. 95, file 2213 D (26), C.T. Currelly to Redfern, Oct 18, 1939; Sir Alan Lascelles to Currelly, Oct 4, 1939; Hugh Keenleyside to Redfern, Nov 1, 1939; E.H. Coleman to Redfern, Nov 23, 1939; Redfern to Currelly, Nov 25, 1939.

[5] LAC, National Archives of Canada fonds, RG 37, v. 75, file 60-7-6, Currelly to Gustave Lanctôt, Feb 2, 1944; Lanctôt to Currelly, Feb 3, 1944; Currelly to Lanctôt, Feb 24, 1944.

[6] LAC, William Lyon Mackenzie King fonds, MG 26 J 1, v. 401, Currelly to Princess Alice, Feb 11, 1946; RG 37, v. 75, file 60-7-6, Martin to Lanctôt, Mar 13, 1946; Lanctôt to Martin, Mar 14, 1946, enclosing “Memorandum regarding Queen Elizabeth’s Dress now in the Exhibitions Rooms of the Public Archives”; Lanctôt to Martin, Mar 21, 1946; Lanctôt to Currelly, Mar 21, 1946; Currelly to Lanctôt, Mar 22, 1946; v. 47, Lanctôt to King, Mar 26, 1946.