xfce startup on vnc - Ubuntu 18.04

I followed the digitalocean instructions on setting up xfce properly over vnc for the virtual machine I was running on GCP. Initially, the ~/.vnc/xstartup  file was either blank or absent, so only a bare-bones X was coming up. After adding this in the xstartup file,

#!/bin/bash
xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
startxfce4 &

xfce came up nicely. My earlier manual startup trials were missing the xrdb line, hence xfce was not starting cleanly.