How a mixed-race love affair between an African prince and an Englishwoman caused an international furore |
The Daily Telegraph
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
2016-12-16
Marea Donnelly, History writer
 Ruth Williams and her husband Prince Seretse Khama in London in 1949. |
ONE can only surmise as to whether bank clerk Ruth Williams and her Bechuanaland prince Seretse Khama ever shuffled around the dance floor to The Ink Spots’ hit Prisoner Of Love. United in their affection for the harmonising American doo-wop band, within a year of their meeting at a post-war London dance hall the Ink Spots’ 1946 hit could have been their anthem.
Their black-white romance offended not only their families, but the British and South African governments and the Church of England, which all aggressively opposed their 1948 marriage. Already the subject of a book A Marriage Of Inconvenience, and a film of the same name released in 1990, a new British film about the Khama marriage, A United Kingdom, opens in Sydney on Boxing Day…
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Tags: Bechuanaland, Daily Telegraph, England, Marea Donnelly, Ruth Williams, Ruth Williams Khama, Seretse Khama, The Daily Telegraph