Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  Despite its meagre budget and its constant struggle for attention on a crowded world stage, the Commonwealth still has the ability to touch people in a way that other organisations cannot. For, aside from the Queen, it is best-known for two things: sport and sacrifice. ‘Mention the Commonwealth to most people and they immediately think of the Games,’ says Sir John Key, former Prime Minister of New Zealand. The Commonwealth Games have become the second-largest multi-sport tournament in the world after the Olympics. The event has long been the most popular and high-profile manifestation of Commonwealth bonhomie. Falling exactly midway between summer Olympiads, and featuring some of the greatest athletes and keenest sporting nations in the world, it attracts a global television audience. World records are broken. Olympic champions strive for gold.

  Yet there is a certain charm that the Olympics cannot replicate. This is an event in which nations and territories as small as the Isle of Man and Anguilla can compete against a sporting powerhouse like Australia. At one end of the sporting spectrum, the Games include world and Olympic champions; at the other, they give an international platform to tiny teams from tiny places – like, say, the middle-aged members of the Cook Islands lawn bowls team. ‘The Commonwealth Games has a spirit and a friendliness which, if we’re being honest, the Olympics doesn’t have,’ says Lord Coe. Praise indeed from the Olympian who ran the 2012 London Olympics. ‘The athletes recognise the competition is important, but you are not entirely defined by standing on that rostrum.’ Though they attract a global audience, the Commonwealth Games have never enjoyed anything like the same financial or media clout as the Olympics. The entire budget for the 2014 Glasgow Games was just 4 per cent of the cost of the 2012 London Olympics. Those arriving at the athletes’ village in Glasgow might have found themselves in the breakfast queue with Olympic legends like Jamaica’s Usain Bolt. Or they might have met Norfolk Island’s badminton team. In 2014, there were only six competitive badminton players on the South Pacific island, and five of them competed at the Commonwealth Games. Back home, the only place they could train or compete was a single community hall, and even then they were required to remove their floor markings each time the hall was booked for a dance or wedding. Asked what they were most looking forward to at the Commonwealth Games, they had a charming reply: ‘Opponents’.

  Unlike the ultra-professional world of the modern Olympian, these are games that can still throw up the occasional fairytale. Marcus Stephen was a teenager on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru, the smallest independent nation in the Commonwealth, when he registered for the 1990 games with just three days to spare. When he won gold in the weightlifting, Nauru exploded with joy and a national holiday was declared. Stephen would go on to win multiple Commonwealth medals and a world championship silver medal and would compete at three Olympics. In 2003, he was elected to parliament and rose to be President of his country.

  Even he could not quite match the sporting journey of a Commonwealth Games legend who would become one of the Queen’s favourite athletes. As Britain’s former sports minister, Denis Howell, put it: ‘The story of Precious McKenzie is one of the most incredible in the history of sport.’ Born in a ‘coloured’ ward in pre-war South Africa, McKenzie was a sickly infant who nearly died from a botched childhood operation. He never met his father, who was killed by a crocodile soon after his birth. His mother was a chronic alcoholic; and he would never grow taller than 4 feet 10 inches. At one stage, a sadistic foster mother claimed that he and his sister were possessed by devils and took them to a witch doctor, who scarred them for life with cuts all over their bodies. McKenzie excelled as a gymnast at a mission school, but his hopes of becoming a circus acrobat were thwarted by South Africa’s apartheid laws. He turned to weightlifting and even set a new national record, but was barred from the South African Olympic squad because of the colour of his skin. Britain gave him citizenship in time for the 1966 Commonwealth Games in Jamaica, where he won the first of four Commonwealth gold medals (and danced a calypso with a teenage Princess Anne). Though Olympic success would elude him, he had a legion of fans, among them Prince Andrew and Prince Edward, and in 1975 the Queen invited him to Buckingham Palace. After winning gold yet again at the 1978 Edmonton Games, he was intercepted by a policeman, who steered him to a waiting squad car. The Queen was in the midst of a garden party nearby and wanted to know why McKenzie was not there. ‘We got there just in time,’ he told sports writer Brian Oliver. ‘I was taken straight to the Queen and she said “Where have you been?” I said I hadn’t been invited, and she said, “Well, you are now.” I asked her if I could have a photo taken with her and she said “Of course”. Later on I sent the photo to Buckingham Palace and asked if the Queen would autograph it for me, and she did. It is one of my proudest possessions.’ McKenzie would retire to New Zealand, where he still has many fans, among them the former Prime Minister, Sir John Key.

  Holding an Olympiad, says Key, is a ‘pipe dream’ for most of the world. However, staging ‘the friendly games’, is entirely possible for a medium-sized nation like his own. Key is proud that his wife, Bronagh, took part in the opening ceremony for the 1974 Christchurch games as a schoolgirl. The opening routine is similar to that of the Olympics, with a Commonwealth baton much like the Olympic torch. Unlike the torch, which is lit from the rays of the sun in Olympia, Greece and then carried afar by athletes (a ‘tradition’ invented for Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Games), the baton contains a message from the Queen.

  The first ‘Empire Sports Meeting’ took place in London in 1911, following the Coronation of George V, but it was in 1930 that the modern event took shape in Hamilton, Canada. From the start, the intention was that the Games should be ‘merrier and less stern’ than the Olympics. Indeed they were. When a sprinter from New Zealand was twice disqualified for a false start, the roar of the crowds persuaded the judges to allow him a third attempt. Great sporting moments – like Roger Bannister and John Landy both running a sub-four-minute mile at Vancouver in 1954 – were not without elements of farce. At the 1950 Auckland Games, the marathon winner was attacked by a dog three miles from the finish. By 1954 the event had become the British Empire and Commonwealth Games; and, after the 1966 Games, the word ‘Empire’ was dropped altogether. The ‘British’ would finally go, ahead of the first ‘Commonwealth Games’ in 1978 in Edmonton, to which the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh brought Prince Andrew and Prince Edward.

  With no language barrier, the closing ceremony would often descend into a sing-song. In Perth, the 1962 Games concluded with 700 athletes surrounding the Duke of Edinburgh’s car, singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’. The entire stadium serenaded the Queen with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at the 1982 Games in Brisbane. Coming shortly after the Falklands War, it was a particularly emotional moment. Long before South Africa became a sporting pariah during the apartheid era, the Commonwealth was taking a stand against the country’s racial policies on the field of play. Having been chosen to host the 1934 Games, South Africa had the honour taken away in 1932 because of its treatment of black athletes. The Commonwealth Games have a sense of humour, too. The opening ceremony for the 2014 Glasgow Games, held in front of the Queen at Celtic Park, had plenty of big-name entertainment, including Rod Stewart and the Pipes and Drums of the Scottish Regiments. It also lampooned the grandiose nature of Olympic opening ceremonies with a giant haggis, dancing Tunnock’s teacakes and a team of Scottish terriers to lead in each national team. Four years later, the Prince of Wales would open the 2018 Gold Coast games in Queensland, Australia, in a ceremony featuring a Kombi van, a surf scene, an Aboriginal ‘smoking’ ceremony and a flying white whale.

  THE FALLEN

  Perhaps the ultimate symbol of the ties that bind the Commonwealth are those still, silent and impeccably maintained patches of sacred ground scattered all over the world under the banner of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It is often said that Australia was forged as a country on the beaches of Gallipoli in 1915. In the same way, Canada points to a staggering feat
of arms in April 1917 as its coming-of-age as a modern nation. It was at Vimy Ridge, following two years of failed British and French attempts, that the four meticulously trained divisions of the Canadian Corps stormed a pivotal escarpment near Arras in northern France. They not only held it, but redrew the map of the Western Front, at the cost of 3,500 Canadian lives. In April 2017, the Prince of Wales and his sons joined the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, at Vimy Ridge to salute them all. ‘This was, and remains, the single bloodiest day in Canadian military history. Yet Canadians displayed a strength of character and commitment to one another that is still evident today,’ Prince Charles told a crowd of 25,000 Canadians. ‘They did not waver. This was Canada at its best.’ The Prime Minister echoed the sentiment. ‘Canada est né ici,’ Trudeau declared. Canada was, indeed, born here.

  Towering over them was the 6,000-ton double-pillared limestone memorial to the dead, unveiled in 1936 by King Edward VIII, shortly before the Second World War would see the Empire rallying to the Crown once again. Nearby, the final resting places of the dead are immaculately maintained in perpetuity by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. For many people, this organisation represents the very best of Commonwealth values. At the height of the Great War, Fabian Ware, a former schoolmaster-turned-journalist who had been rejected by the Army for being too old, was running an ambulance unit for the British Red Cross in northern France. He was deeply troubled by the lack of organisation when it came to burying the dead, and began lobbying the authorities. The result was the Imperial War Graves Commission (it switched to ‘Commonwealth’ in 1960). From the outset, it embraced several key, forward-thinking principles: the dead would be buried without regard to rank or faith; all would have a headstone of equal size; and all those with no known grave would be assured of a permanent memorial somewhere. Long before the formal creation of the modern Commonwealth or its Secretariat, this was the first Commonwealth institution in which all member nations enjoyed equal status. As its royal charter made clear, the Commission’s role was not just to bury the dead. It was ‘to strengthen the bonds of union between all classes and races in Our Dominions’.

  Tone was all. The finest architects and gardeners of the day – including Sir Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll – were charged with creating these sacred spaces, while the empire’s pre-eminent man of letters, Rudyard Kipling, himself a bereaved father, established the language of commemoration: ‘Known unto God’; ‘Their name liveth for evermore’, and so on. To this day, the care and attention that the Commission devotes to the graves and memorials commemorating 1.7 million men and women from all over the old Empire at 23,000 locations in more than 150 countries is unfailingly moving. The grass will always be mown before it gets too long. Every row of graves will contain pretty but sturdy plants chosen to minimise the splashback of rain against the headstones. Many of these places are still so full of unexploded ordnance that the Commission staff have to tread carefully. At Vimy, for example, some sections of the memorial area are still deemed too dangerous for the Commission’s lawnmowers. Standards still have to be maintained, however. So they employ sheep.

  Wherever members of the Royal Family travel in the world, a call on a Commonwealth cemetery will always be a priority. ‘It’s hugely impressive and very challenging,’ says the Princess Royal, who has visited cemeteries in places as remote as Somalia and Madagascar. ‘Often, you have no idea that British forces have been in those areas. A grave might be very isolated but it is never forgotten.’ The Princess’s husband, Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, is the Commission’s vice-chairman and has helped to establish a foundation to encourage young people to become guides and volunteers at particularly important sites. When the Commission created a commemorative garden at the 2017 Chelsea Flower Show, to mark its centenary, most of the Royal Family turned up in support.

  A commemoration of every notable British wartime anniversary inevitably becomes a Commonwealth affair, be it the Battle of Britain or the Allied invasion of Normandy. Stand at the very centre of London, on Hyde Park Corner, and there are substantial monuments to Commonwealth sacrifice in every direction: the Australian War Memorial; the New Zealand Memorial; the Commonwealth Memorial Gates honouring the fallen from across the Indian subcontinent, Africa and the Caribbean (with the inscription ‘Our Future Is Greater Than Our Past’). Here, too, is the mighty memorial to those who had one of the most dangerous jobs of the Second World War. Of those who volunteered for Bomber Command, nearly half – more than 55,000 – would not survive. Their life expectancy was significantly lower than that of a First World War infantryman at the Somme. The shock was felt across the Commonwealth. Ten thousand aircrew from Canada alone were killed – nearly 60 per cent of Bomber Command’s Canadian intake. Nonagenarian veterans from as far afield as Australia were present at the 2018 opening of the magnificent new International Bomber Command Centre in Lincoln.

  Come Remembrance Sunday, the Queen invites all the High Commissioners of all the Commonwealth nations to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph. Across her realms, there is still one decoration that transcends all the rest – the Victoria Cross. Although countries like Australia, Canada and New Zealand would develop their own honours systems over time, all still retain the VC as the ultimate recognition of valour. No fewer than four VCs, for example, were awarded to Canadian soldiers for valour at Vimy Ridge. Only one of them lived to receive it in person. Today, all living recipients of the Victoria Cross and the George Cross (awarded for the highest gallantry away from the battlefield) come to London every two years – at no cost to themselves – for a series of reunion events and a party given by the Queen or the Prince of Wales.

  It is the monarchy that acts as the bridge between all these different strands of the Commonwealth story, between past and present, between both military and civilian sacrifice. In the summer of 2017, the Queen and the Duke visited the East End of London to mark the centenary of a defining moment of the Great War. On 13th June 1917, a fleet of German Gotha bombers attacked London in the heaviest daylight raid of the war. One bomb landed on North Street primary school in Poplar, plunging through two floors before exploding in the infant class below, killing eighteen children aged between four and six and injuring many more. Many of the survivors, old and young, never recovered. Having found the body of his own five-year-old son in the wreckage, the school caretaker took his own life some months later. The battlefield had suddenly moved from the Western Front to home and hearth. Enormous crowds from across London turned out to honour the victims of an attack which caused such revulsion that it is said to have altered the course of royal history. The following month, the Royal Family changed their name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the House of Windsor. The fact that they had shared their name with the bomber made it no longer tenable.

  A century on, a diligent team of local historians managed to track down relatives of all but one of those killed at the school for a memorial service. Even a hundred years later, the events of that day reduced several of them to tears as they joined the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at All Saints Church, Poplar. ‘There is something about the killing of young children that is profoundly disturbing: all that innocence, all those unwritten stories and all that unfulfilled potential,’ said the Right Reverend Adrian Newman, Bishop of Stepney, before the names of the dead were read out.

  But the day was not just about commemorating a tragic footnote to a war that killed millions. The Queen had also come to visit the replacement primary school built nearby after the war was over. Now called Mayflower Primary School, it serves one of the most multicultural areas in Britain. As a result, up to 96 per cent of Mayflower pupils do not speak English as their first language. Yet most have a Commonwealth connection thanks to a substantial local Bangladeshi community. Greeted with near-hysterical applause, the Queen and the Duke toured the school and learned that the centenary had helped to bring the whole community together. Projects based on the events of 1917 had actually helped to create a fresh sense of shared heri
tage among children of all backgrounds. Rather than presenting the First World War as a remote, whites-only conflict from another age, here was a connection. The Queen was even shown a spying game in which the children had to crack a code in order to bring a British special agent home from Berlin.

  Escorting her was her local representative, the Lord-Lieutenant of Greater London, Sir Kenneth Olisa. An eminent businessman and banker, whose father was from Nigeria and whose mother was from Nottingham, Sir Kenneth sees it as his role to keep the monarchy in tune with every community and culture in the capital. ‘An individual’s identity is not about history. It’s about heritage,’ he said afterwards. ‘The Commonwealth is a big family full of heritage and the job Her Majesty has done in keeping that family together is something of which we should all be very proud.’

  TIP OF THE ICEBERG

  All through her reign, it is her Christmas broadcast to the Commonwealth that has been perhaps the most familiar and popular aspect of that job. She is now so proficient that the production teams refer to her as ‘one-take Windsor’. Back in 1952, delivering her first Christmas message by radio, she was still using imperial terminology. ‘We belong, all of us, to the British Commonwealth and Empire, that immense union of nations, with their homes set in all the four corners of the Earth,’ she said from her desk at Sandringham. By the time of her first televised broadcast five years later, the language had switched from imperial to fraternal. ‘This year, Ghana and Malaya joined our brotherhood. Both these countries are now entirely self-governing. Both achieved their new status amicably and peacefully,’ she said. Distancing herself from monarchs of old, she echoed her twenty-first birthday pledge from ten years before: ‘I cannot lead you into battle, I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something else, I can give you my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.’