Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  Some days later, in Commondale, the King was similarly struck by the sight of a gigantic local farmer, Cornelius Mostert, and asked for a tape measure to confirm his height: 7 feet 3 inches. A less welcome surprise was the stray firework that burned a hole in Princess Elizabeth’s dress in Ladybrand. Other unusual spectacles included a trip to an ostrich farm and an encounter with a ‘liger’ – a cross between a lion and a tiger – in a zoo. It was more successful than a visit to the Kruger National Park to view the lions. So many unwanted hangers-on, and their vehicles, had latched onto the royal convoy that every living creature for miles around had vanished. A peevish diary entry concluded: ‘The King observed at the end of the day that the only member of the feline species he had seen was a ginger cat at Pretoriuskop.’

  Meanwhile the rallies kept on growing larger. For all the daily discrimination suffered by the ‘natives’, old tribal patriarchal social structures meant that the hereditary King Emperor was viewed as a wholly different and essentially benign symbolic leader, unlike the colonial oppressors governing in his name. Almost 70,000 Basuto tribesmen, many of whom had ridden for several days, greeted the King in Maseru, in modern-day Lesotho, while an eager crowd of prisoners and lepers watched from the slopes of a nearby hill. In order to make it easier for large crowds to identify him at ‘native’ events, the King made a point of wearing white naval uniform with the Garter ribbon, while the other male members of the entourage were told to wear dark suits.

  The great Maseru rally would, in turn, be eclipsed by the royal greeting from the King and Queen Mother of Swaziland. ‘The gathering of the natives was the most impressive to date,’ wrote Ritchie, ‘a sea of raised knobkerries behind a frieze of naked torsos, shields and leopard skins, an enthralling spectacle. It was said to be a representation of the sea breaking on the shore – the more remarkable as none of the participants had ever seen the sea.’

  By mid-March it was time for a rest. Smuts arranged a few days of fishing and walking at a government hostel in the Drakensberg Mountains. He also gave the King an ‘entirely neutral’ guided tour of the Battle of Spion Kop, adding his own side of the story of Winston Churchill’s celebrated escape. Having been taken prisoner during the battle, Churchill wrote a bestselling book about his exploits and his hair-raising journey through enemy territory to freedom. Yet Smuts explained that he himself had already secured Churchill’s release, on the grounds that the young Englishman was merely a war correspondent. Canny young Churchill had escaped regardless and had turned the whole escapade into a spiffing Boy’s Own yarn. Smuts noted that it had ‘earned him £9,000 and allowed him to get married’.

  Hundreds of thousands of all races turned out to greet the royal entry into Durban. Fighting broke out between 100,000 Africans and 65,000 Indians around the Curries Fountain stadium, due to a lack of water and crowd control. The crowds were even greater on April Fool’s Day in Johannesburg as the Royal Family drove through the ‘native settlements’ around the main gold mines. ‘It is estimated that a million people saw Their Majesties. This is probably the peak day for the tour in all that it has asked of the King and Queen,’ wrote Ritchie. Lascelles agreed: ‘We are just finishing the most exhausting day of the whole trip having left Government House at 9 a.m. and been yelled at by vast crowds, black and white, ever since. I’ve never seen larger, noisier crowds save perhaps in Montreal in 1939 . . . but I don’t like the “City of Gold”.’

  After six weeks on tour, tempers were at breaking point. The following day, an excruciating episode occurred as the royal party drove through crowds in the East Rand district. ‘A Zulu rushed out and appeared to board the Royal car,’ the official diary noted. ‘The Queen fended him off with her umbrella and he was arrested.’ It was only after the man had been roughed up by the police that the truth emerged. ‘It turned out his motive was to present ten shillings to Princess Elizabeth,’ wrote Ritchie. ‘He was apparently a harmless religious crank.’

  THE PROMISE

  A change of scene was well overdue, as the tour moved on to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. Although the Queen had lobbied hard against travelling by plane, they flew to Salisbury. In case of an accident, it was standard practice for the King and Princess Margaret to fly in one aircraft while the Queen with the Heir Presumptive flew in the other, precisely two minutes behind (the order of precedence even applied in the air). In Southern Rhodesia, the racial segregation was fractionally less rigorous. The Princess was given that platinum-and-diamond ‘Flame Lily’ brooch as an early twenty-first-birthday present from children of all races (‘European, Asiatic and Coloured’ children contributed one shilling each, while ‘Africans’ gave a penny). The royal party felt considerably more relaxed. The Queen ‘shopped in the town’ while the King met 2,500 servicemen, including two holders of the VC. The Princesses were taken to a Girl Guides rally in a strangely empty spot, whereupon the District Commissioner gave a signal and girls ‘came rushing down the hillside’.

  Tommy Lascelles liked it so much that he wrote home to his wife talking wistfully of ‘spending our declining years’ there. ‘The servant problem doesn’t exist, the housewife has no worries, the air is like wine; the gardens bloom,’ he told her, adding that he had a ‘delicious humming bird’ outside his window.

  The tour resumed by train to Victoria Falls, where the Royal Family marvelled at one of the great sights of Africa and then travelled across the Zambesi River for a day-trip to Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). They were escorted on their crossing by the state barge of Imwiko, the British-educated Paramount Chief of Barotseland, whose father had asked the Crown to protect his lands half a century before. A drummer kept the forty paddlers in time. The notes for the royal party explained that ‘in former times, if a paddler in the State Barge did not pull his weight, he was thrown overboard and risked death from the crocodiles’.

  The most fascinating entry in the official diary concerns what happened next. Back at the Victoria Falls Hotel, in what is now Zimbabwe, the royal party spent a quiet weekend, albeit a very historic one. For, on Sunday 13th April, Ritchie wrote: ‘At the Victoria Falls Hotel. Princess Elizabeth read her 21st Birthday speech for the newsreel photographer; Horton and Boland [two of the travelling press] also took photographs.’ Following ‘Divine Service’ in the drawing room, held by the Bishop of Pretoria, it was back to work. ‘Princess Elizabeth went through her speech with Frank Gillard [of the BBC] in the presence of the King and Queen,’ the official diary continues. There was a break for lunch followed by an afternoon walk and a swim. The diary continues: ‘At 6 p.m., Princess Elizabeth recorded her speech for the BBC. It was afterwards played off for Her Royal Highness to hear and was a great triumph.’ And so it would prove to be – even if it now appears that her pledge to devote her whole life to ‘our great imperial family’ was delivered in Southern Rhodesia rather than South Africa, as has been universally accepted ever since.

  The Royal Family left Victoria Falls that evening for Bulawayo. Here, once again, there was a clear sense of tribal kinship with the Royal Family, as the warriors of the Matabele Nation performed their first royal indaba since the death of Chief Lobengula fifty years earlier. The King and his family went on to visit World’s View, the hilltop grave of the colonial founding father, Cecil Rhodes, a place of ‘almost primeval grandeur’, according to Ritchie. When the Queen struggled to make it up the hill in high heels, Princess Elizabeth gave her mother her own shoes and walked in her stockings, a telling gesture that attracted considerably more media attention than the view.

  Finally the royal party returned to South Africa via the famous ‘Big Hole’ diamond mines of Kimberley, where they were shown a selection of diamonds worth £3 million (£110 million today) and were given a small selection to take home. After travelling 6,942 miles across Africa for over two months, it was back to Cape Town in time for the Princess’s twenty-first birthday on 21st April. There was a certain theme to all her presents: a diamond flower brooch from the Royal Household, diamond
earrings from the Diplomatic Corps, a diamond brooch from the Grenadier Guards . . . Later that night, at one of a series of birthday parties, she would receive a diamond necklace from the South African Prime Minister. Before that, the Princess reviewed a parade of 10,000 troops at 3 p.m., followed by a ‘youth rally’ at the Rosebank Showgrounds.

  So what about that famous twenty-first-birthday speech? The tour diary made one brief reference to what was by far the most important event of the day, if not of the whole tour: ‘At 7 p.m., Princess Elizabeth broadcast a speech to the Empire.’ Of this famous address, Captain Lewis Ritchie wrote only that ‘reception in the UK, and America was excellent’ and that ‘HRH spoke beautifully’. It is an oddly understated diary entry, presumably because the BBC was transmitting the version which the Princess had recorded with Frank Gillard at the Victoria Falls Hotel. The famous newsreel footage of the moment shows the Princess uttering her famous declaration while sitting outdoors at a table in the shade of a tree. The stonework behind her is speckled with sunlight. Yet the official diary says it all happened ‘at 7 p.m.’ However, the Cape Town sun sets well before 7 p.m. in April. It is, therefore, clear that this must have been filmed on another occasion – and with good reason. The schedule had been unrelenting all day and the Princess had a long evening of official engagements ahead of her. These were hardly the best circumstances in which to be making an historic broadcast to the world. Buckingham Palace can provide no further information on the speech, although we do know that the BBC had started using new ‘Magnetophone’ high quality tape recorders the previous year. None of which makes a jot of difference either to the content or relevance of this great speech. However, it has always been a source of enormous pride to South Africans – and a key part of the modern Commonwealth narrative – that the future Queen made her selfless act of dedication in South Africa. It would now seem that Zimbabweans can stake a claim, too.

  Having glossed over the radio broadcast, the diary of that 21st birthday goes on to discuss the evening’s social events in much greater detail. Dinner at the Governor-General’s residence was followed by two balls, which went on into the night. The Princess, it was noted, danced with Lieutenant Commander M. G. McLeod of HMS Nigeria.

  Two days after the birthday celebrations, the royal party boarded HMS Vanguard for the voyage home. There was one final presentation of gifts, including a gold teaset for the Queen and a gold box for the King, containing yet more diamonds to create a new Garter Star for the Sovereign. By now Sir Alan Lascelles had an awful lot of jewels in his care. ‘To me fell the task of guarding them. I am not used to looking after £200,000 worth of diamonds,’ he wrote. He was in good spirits, however. ‘I feel refreshed and even a bit exhilarated by the tremendous success of the whole thing and of Princess Elizabeth’s speech on which I have lavished much care.’ He was also pleased with the ‘loot’ he had bought for his wife – 48 pounds of marmalade for a guinea and a ‘ham or two’.

  Emotions were running high. ‘We had a great send-off with everybody crying,’ said Lascelles. The tour diary called it ‘the last upsurging of a people’s love and loyalty . . . a triumph beyond all expectations’. The parting editorial in the Cape Times saluted the King in heroic terms: ‘It is only too apparent that he did not come to sunny Africa to get away from the hardships of England. His troubles can be seen on his noble, thoughtful face. Rather he came – they all came – the better to get acquainted with their larger family. And who of us does not now respect England a thousand times more than we did?’

  Once they were under way, almost all the royal party came down with colds. The highlight of the return journey was the first visit by a reigning monarch to St Helena and a trip up to Longwood, the final home of the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte. ‘I have never found a place so permeated with melancholy – it gave us all the heeby-jeebies,’ wrote Lascelles, deploring the way the French government – to whom Britain had donated the property – had allowed it to fall apart.

  Reflecting at length on this colossal undertaking as Vanguard returned to Portsmouth – where half a million people lined the shore to welcome their returning King – Lascelles was proud of his handiwork: ‘It has been an immense success and amply achieved its only object (at least from my point of view) – to convince the South African people that the British monarchy is an investment worth keeping.’ He was wrong in that regard. The following year, Britain’s friend and ally, Jan Smuts, would be ousted by the Nationalists. They would go on to create the reviled system of apartheid and, in due course, to abolish the monarchy.

  Yet this tour had undoubtedly been a success for another reason, one that Lascelles touched upon in a shrewd and candid pen portrait of the future Queen. It is an assessment that holds fast today, more than seventy years later, as surely as that great act of self-dedication on (or at least around) her twenty-first birthday. ‘From the inside,’ Lascelles wrote to his wife, ‘the most satisfactory feature of the whole business is the remarkable development of Princess Elizabeth. She has come on in the most surprising way . . . Not a great sense of humour, but a healthy sense of fun. Moreover, when necessary, she can take on the old bores with much of her mother’s skill, and never spares herself in that exhausting part of royal duty. For a child of her years, she has got an astonishing solicitude for other people’s comfort; such unselfishness is not a normal characteristic of that family. But what delights me especially is that she has become extremely businesslike and understands what a burden it is to the Staff if some regard is not paid to the clock. She has developed an admirable technique of going up behind her mother and prodding her in the Achilles tendon with the point of her umbrella when time is being wasted in unnecessary conversation. And, when necessary – not infrequently – she tells her father off to rights.’ In short, she would certainly have what it took, when the time came.

  As Vanguard sailed up the English Channel on its last night at sea, the tour finished with a boisterous wardroom dinner, followed by a final conga – and a sorry end for one feathered stowaway. ‘At 11.30 p.m., the dottrell – which the better informed have decided is a young golden plover – was still on the quarterdeck being stalked by cats,’ Ritchie noted in the official diary. ‘At midnight, it was no longer visible.’

  END OF EMPIRE

  The British Empire had started with the transatlantic warrior-explorers of Elizabeth I’s age. British expansion to the west gathered momentum across the Caribbean and the Americas until the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, followed by the eventual loss of the American colonies in 1783. The empire then redirected its focus in the direction of Asia, the Pacific and, latterly, Africa, creating a global network of colonies, protectorates and allied states, all under the Crown, but enjoying varying degrees of self-determination. Empire it might have been, but the monarch remained a ‘monarch’. ‘Emperor’ was a foreign concept, carrying unhappy associations with the mad and bad – from Julius Caesar to Napoleon. In 1858, following the bloody anti-British uprising known as the Indian Mutiny, control of India passed from the East India Company to the British government. Given its size and composition, India could claim to be an ‘empire’ of states in its own right. The Tory Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, would eventually create Queen Victoria ‘Empress of India’ in 1876. The idea was, in part, to glamorise and reinforce India’s bond with Britain, but also to enhance public affection for the Queen after several years of widowed seclusion. Any form of self-government, however, was still a long way off.

  In honour of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, the leaders of those colonies with their own governments were summoned to London for a colonial conference, an event that might be described as the first Commonwealth summit. Occasional conferences thereafter, usually in honour of royal landmarks, would lead to the Balfour Declaration of 1926 – the year of the Queen’s birth – which formally established these (all-white) colonies as dominions. They were defined as ‘autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status’ and ‘united b
y a common allegiance to the Crown’. All were free and equal members of what was now the ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’, an idea that was formally enshrined in law five years later when the UK Parliament passed the 1931 Statute of Westminster. Britain had, effectively, relinquished all control over these dominions. They were now sovereign nations within this new Commonwealth – the same one that Princess Elizabeth was talking about in 1947 when she made that twenty-first-birthday speech.

  Today the Commonwealth might exude a rather dated feel, just like its palatial eighteenth-century red-brick headquarters. Marlborough House, sandwiched between a row of royal residences on one side and the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall on the other, still feels like a blend between the two. Before he became King Edward VII, this was the home of Queen Victoria’s rakish heir, Bertie, Prince of Wales. It was the birthplace of George V, whose widow, Queen Mary, would be the last member of the Royal Family to live in it, since when it has been home to the ‘family of nations’. It still has royal portraits on the walls, and much remains as it was in the days when the Queen was a little girl and knew this place as ‘Granny’s house’.

  There is little indication of the original, often radical thinking that has driven so many deliberations in these somnolent state rooms. Queen Mary was still in residence in 1947 when her son, King George VI, and his ministers were gloomily pondering the new, existential threat to the entire Empire. India, the most prized of all the Crown’s colonial possessions – the one upon which the British Empire was founded – was not only heading for independence, but also for Partition.