Cute child to father of the bride…my weddings bliss
0 Comments | Derby Evening Telegraph, Aug 25, 2009 | by Philip Whiteland
IT was my daughter’s wedding earlier this month and, inevitably, the need to make a speech loomed large with me over the preceding weeks.
Quite why, I’m not sure, because I make my living talking to groups of people so a wedding speech should be like falling off a log.
I suppose the difference is that I didn’t want to let my daughter down and knew full well that I only had one chance to get it right.
The MC announced me as “Philip – Father of the Bride”, which I thought made me sound like a feeble comic-book hero. It’s hardly “Superman – Man of Steel” or “Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future”, is it? Nevertheless, it started me thinking of the roles I have had at weddings over the years.
For most of the 1950s, I seemed to have a frequent part to play as a presenter of silver horseshoes. Not the heavy metal variety, which would be somewhat unwelcome and would weigh down the blushing bride, but rather the cardboardcovered-in-silver-foil sort with white ribbons and so on.
This wasn’t really an official role; I was never a page boy or anything quite so formal.
I leapt into action at the point where the bride and groom had just exited the church and the photos were being taken.
Clutching my cardboard etc horseshoe, I would be pushed forward by my mum to present same to the bride, mutter whatever mum had told me to say, be kissed by said bride, blush to the roots of my hair and run back to mother covered in confusion.
Not, perhaps, the high point of the wedding celebration I’ll grant you, but it seemed to please my mother.
She worked diligently before each of these occasions to make me look “cute”, a task that grew more impossible as the years accumulated.
She was determined that my relatively straight hair would have a wave at the front and so, before each of these outings, she would set about my hair armed with a series of grips and something that rejoiced under the name of Toddilocks.
This, I imagine, was a sort of setting lotion for the aspiring pre-school matinee idol.
I can remember my Nanna Whiteland coming in to see if we were ready to go to whichever wedding we were attending and staring in horror at my gripped and lotioned coiffure. “You’ll turn that lad into a girl,” she muttered darkly.
The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the marriages of two of my dad’s brothers and one of my mum’s sisters, so my horseshoe presentation role was called in-tplay quite often.
But once these relatives were safely ensconced in marital bliss, the opportunity for wedding involvement seemed somewhat sparse.
Joining the choir at All Saints Church, in Branston Road, Burton, however, added a whole new financial inducement to attending weddings.
For the most part, being part of the choir was a voluntary occupation calculated only to enrich your soul and gladden the hearts of your parents (it got you out of the house for a good portion of each Sunday).
However, if you were called to provide choral accompaniment to a wedding, you were guaranteed a payment for foregoing your Saturday afternoon. I seem to remember the fee was a half-crown
wedding speeches father of the bride
