Duchess of Cornwall ‘delighted’ to be in Bexhill for 2010 celebration

The Duchess of Cornwall took home around 2,000 Bexhill residents after her visit to the De La Warr Pavilion in September 2010. If you went along to the building’s 75th anniversary photograph party, as featured in Retro section recently, your face would have been among those set to hang on a wall in Buckingham Palace. Camilla, the building’s president, toured exhibitions on her anniversary visit, before returning to the Education Block where she laid a plaque on her previous visit in May 2006.

Children from Sidley and Pebsham Primary Schools waited in the sunshine to greet the Duchess, who told the waiting crowds she was ‘glad to be back in Bexhill’. Confronted with the mixture of modern sculpture and installations, Camilla maintained a graceful smile, and appeared to enjoy herself throughout. Speaking to George Korner from Lewes, a 100-year-old guest and distant relative of Serge Chermayeff, one of the pavilion’s architects, Camilla said she remembered meeting him before and was glad to see him looking well. She asked him the secret of his youth and he told her ‘a glass of red wine each day’.