Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  In April 1975, ahead of the Commonwealth meeting in Kingston, the British High Commissioner to Jamaica, John Hennings, predicted that the Queen’s upcoming visit would be her ‘last’ as Queen of Jamaica. Evidently no one had informed the cheering crowds who greeted her again in 1983. Nearly twenty years after Hennings predicted the advent of a Jamaican republic, another British High Commissioner, Derek Milton, was reporting back to London on the mixed reaction to the Queen’s 1994 visit. Foreign Office files, newly released under Freedom of Information rules, show that while the Jamaican public were happy enough to see the Queen, her Prime Minister, Percival ‘P. J.’ Patterson, had informed Milton that a constitutional referendum was imminent and that the Queen would be gone within four years. ‘Mr Patterson may want to go down in history as the man who made Jamaica a Republic but I would not bet on that happening in the near future,’ wrote Milton. Eight years later the Queen was still head of state, and Patterson was still Prime Minister when she arrived on her Golden Jubilee tour of 2002. Yet he was long gone by the time Prince Harry arrived to mark the Queen of Jamaica’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012.

  Though Jamaica had not (and still has not) found the appetite for that referendum on the monarchy, they have occurred elsewhere from time to time, always with the same result: a public preference for an unelected absentee royal head of state rather than yet another politician. Republicans sometimes talk of her ‘clinging on’. After more than sixty-five years, it has been quite a cling. So how has she done it? The stories vary from realm to realm, but what is common to all of them is that this has never been about ‘clinging’. It has been more a case of leading by example. And despite inevitable mistakes, a few upheavals and the best efforts of some of her politicians, it is an example of which the Queen’s subjects seem to approve.

  AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND

  The round-the-world Coronation tour that began in 1953 remains the most ambitious royal expedition of all time. It would take the Queen more than 40,000 miles, most of them by sea, going from east to west. Along the way she would shake 13,213 hands and acknowledge 6,770 curtseys (the bows were not recorded). She would make 157 speeches herself and endure 276 by other people. The only recorded public display of irritation, according to the News Chronicle, was a rebuke to a member of her own entourage during a reception. ‘Are you tired, General?’ she asked. ‘No, Ma’am.’ ‘Then take your hands out of your pockets and stand up straight.’ Separated from her children for four months, and on a treadmill of repetitive formal occasions for days on end, the Queen certainly had private moments when her patience snapped. On the fifth week of the Australian leg of the tour, she and the Duke had been allocated a weekend to recuperate at a government chalet on the shores of the O’Shannassy Reservoir. Even so, there would still be a couple of public engagements in the form of a church service and an inspection of wildlife, for the benefit of the camera crew making an official film of the tour.

  Evidently the royal couple had forgotten about their appointment with the film crew as they began arguing in the chalet. It concluded with the Duke charging out of the door, followed by a flying pair of tennis shoes plus tennis racket; followed, in turn, by a very angry Queen, shouting for him to return. The distinguished cameraman, Loch Townsend, and his deputy had been waiting, as instructed, and were already concerned about the fading light. When the door opened, Townsend and his team simply began filming. They were as astonished to find themselves watching a royal bust-up as the Queen and the Duke were to find themselves on-camera. Moments after the couple had retreated indoors (or, as Townsend recalled, the Queen had ‘dragged’ the Duke inside), the irascible royal press secretary, Commander Richard Colville, came striding over in a state of even greater indignation than usual. Townsend, who still had many days of filming ahead, knew when he was beaten. He opened the back of the camera, removed 300 feet of exposed film and told Colville: ‘Commander, I have a present for you. You might like to give it to Her Majesty.’ Shortly afterwards, an attendant appeared with a tray of beer and sandwiches by way of thanks. The Queen was not far behind. ‘I’m sorry for that little interlude,’ she told Townsend, ‘but, as you know, it happens in every marriage. Now, what would you like me to do?’

  If royal tempers had reached snapping point, it was not surprising. As Dr Jane Connors explains in The Glittering Thread, an excellent study of the tour’s impact on Australian society, much of the southern hemisphere seemed in the grip of royalist hysteria. Hence the crowd that gathered outside the Hotel Gollan in Lismore, following a brief royal ‘refreshment’ stop. They were queuing up for a piece of unused royal toilet paper – one sheet per person – in much the same way that medieval pilgrims might once have queued to acquire a fragment of the Cross or a saintly nail clipping. The small mining town of Lithgow experienced the only traffic jam in its history as people from miles around descended for the Queen’s twenty-five-minute stopover before re-boarding the Royal Train. At one point she walked along a length of red, white and blue carpet created by the staff of a local wool factory. What to do with the carpet? Afterwards, it was decided that the fairest solution was to cut it into tiny pieces, so that everyone had a souvenir. ‘The adulation was extraordinary,’ the Duke of Edinburgh said. Neither he nor the Queen would see anything quite like it again.

  The almost messianic levels of excitement had been the same in New Zealand, where the royal couple landed first. The standard explanation for all this euphoria is that these loyal dominions were seeing a reigning monarch for the first time. This was true, but another factor was involved. The Queen was making up for years of bitter disappointment, at a time of mounting geopolitical uncertainty. For this tour had originally been discussed as far back as the Thirties.

  In 1938, it was agreed that King George VI and Queen Elizabeth would visit Canada and the USA the following year. It would mean that Canada was the first dominion to receive a reigning monarch – quite a coup for Ottawa. The governments of Australia and New Zealand started bidding for a royal visit in 1940, plans that were promptly shelved with the declaration of war. After the end of the war, however, it was South Africa that was deemed the most pressing case for a visit from the King. India was already preparing to part company with the British Empire, and there were powerful Afrikaner voices in South Africa making similar arguments. There was no questioning the loyalty of Australia and New Zealand; they could wait a little longer. So it was, in 1947, that the King, the Queen and their daughters set off in HMS Vanguard for that tour of southern Africa, ahead of Princess Elizabeth’s twenty-first-birthday speech.

  Plans were then announced, in March 1948, for the King to visit Australia and New Zealand in early 1949. He would not merely be thanking them for their patience, but for their stalwart support from Day One of the war. This was a time when most people still regarded themselves as British. Up until the 1948 Nationality and Citizenship Act, all Australian citizens were considered to be British subjects anyway. In a 1947 poll, two-thirds of Australians said they wished to remain so. Their future Queen, however, would not be coming on the 1949 trip. By the spring of 1948 she was the newly married Duchess of Edinburgh and was already expecting Prince Charles. The King and Queen would head Down Under with Princess Margaret.

  By the summer of 1948 the planning was well under way in Australia. Dr Connors has unearthed the story of one entrepreneurial woman who had cornered the entire market in ostrich feathers, ahead of all the hat-making that was likely to ensue. Plans were so far advanced that, in London, the King’s equerry, Group Captain Peter Townsend, was asked to assemble a selection of films for the royal voyage. Commander Colville and his team in the press office were busy fielding media enquiries with their customary economy of detail. The Australian Consolidated Press submitted a lengthy list of questions about royal ‘likes and dislikes’ for a special royal supplement, to which the Palace replied: ‘No information’. The nearest to a semblance of a story was the official response to a question about Princess Margaret’s preferred choice of d
ances. Back came the reply: ‘All kinds of dances, waltzes, reels and modern steps.’

  In November 1948, however, the bunting had to go back in the box. The King had reported severe cramps in both legs. While he insisted on going about his duties, not least to avoid worrying Princess Elizabeth who was due to give birth at any minute, there could be no arguing with the great cardiovascular expert, Professor Sir James Learmonth. After seeing the King on 12th November, he diagnosed arteriosclerosis. Worse still, there was talk of a possible amputation. The tour planned for the start of 1949 was off.

  The King responded well to treatment, buoyed by the arrival of Prince Charles, his first grandchild, but he was well aware of the inconvenience all this had caused. As he explained in his 1948 Christmas broadcast: ‘By an unkind stroke of fate, it fell to me a month ago to make a decision that caused me much distress – to postpone the journey for which my peoples in Australia and New Zealand had been making such kindly preparations.’ He had been greatly comforted, he added, by ‘the wave of sympathy and concern which flowed back to me not only from the Australians and New Zealanders themselves but from friends known and unknown in this great brotherhood of nations’.

  On the other side of the world, however, the public were crestfallen. One Australian supplier of street decorations stood to lose £20,000. We can only imagine the dismay of that speculator stranded with Australia’s entire supply of ostrich feathers. Towards the end of 1949, the doctors decided that the King had recuperated so well that he could start drawing up new plans for the Antipodes. It was, by now, too late to think about 1950 and plans were well advanced for the Festival of Britain in 1951. So the Palace agreed a new date with Canberra and Wellington. The King, Queen and Princess Margaret would arrive in early 1952.

  Once again, itineraries were prepared for the longest tour ever planned by a reigning British monarch. This time the King’s newest realm would be bolted onto the schedule, too. Following the Partition of India into both India and Pakistan in 1947, Ceylon had become an independent nation in 1948, opting for dominion status with the King as head of state. Plans were so advanced that in the autumn of 1951, the King did something quite extraordinary. He manufactured a general election in Britain, ahead of his departure, in order to ensure that there wouldn’t be one while he was away.

  The 1950 general election had been won by Clement Attlee’s Labour Party with a slender majority of eight. Parliamentary business soon ground to a halt. By today’s standards, a majority of eight might seem a workable situation, but the post-war House of Commons was an older, frailer legislature than today’s. The sight of elderly MPs being dragged from their hospital beds for a routine vote was commonplace. By the summer of 1951, the King was getting worried. Nine MPs had already died or retired through ill-health since the election the year before, and the King – who was in poor health himself – was planning to be away for many months. On 1st September, he wrote to the Prime Minister making his views clear. ‘It would be very difficult for me to go away for five or six months unless it was reasonably certain that political stability would prevail,’ the King explained. ‘It would be disastrous if my visits to three of the self-governing countries of the British Commonwealth had to be postponed or even interrupted on account of political upheavals at home.’

  The Prime Minister had been giving much thought to the issue himself, as he informed the King five days later. ‘Among the factors to which I have given particular attention was the need for avoiding any political crises while Your Majesty was out of the country,’ he wrote. So he agreed to meet the King later in the month to seek a formal dissolution of Parliament. Britain went to the polls in October 1951, Attlee duly lost and Winston Churchill returned to Downing Street with a Conservative majority of seventeen. Long before it had even started, the royal tour of 1952 had inadvertently made history.

  Except that it would not be the King who would undertake the tour. No sooner had Clement Attlee decided to seek that dissolution than the King’s doctors had bad news. X-rays had revealed a worrying patch on one of his lungs and they would need to conduct a bron-choscopy to remove a sample for examination. That took place on 16th September and promptly revealed the need to remove the King’s entire left lung. There was no official mention of cancer. A blocked bronchial tube was given as the reason and, on 23rd September, the King went under the knife once more. Though the operation went according to plan, there were sufficient concerns about his recovery that Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh were asked to delay their long-planned tour of Canada and the USA by a week. When they did finally leave a week later, they carried a draft accession declaration, just in case. Two days later, the people of Australia and New Zealand received the news they were dreading, but expecting. For the third time, the King would have to cancel his plans to see them. His 1952 tour was off. However, the Palace was pleased to announce that Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh would take his place. Thousands of members of hundreds of welcoming committees from Perth to Auckland could breathe a sigh of relief. They just needed to change the names and faces on the covers of all the souvenir programmes. By now the Empire had formally come to an end. Australia, New Zealand and all the other dominions had signed up to the new-look Commonwealth, too. They were no longer talked of as dominions, but as realms.

  By the end of January 1952 the excitement was building all round the world. The crew of the BOAC Argonaut that would fly the Princess on the first leg of her tour became minor celebrities in their own right. Captain Robert Parker from Bracknell in Berkshire and his team of six men and one woman were presented to the British media ahead of the nineteen-hour flight, via Libya, to Kenya, where the Princess and the Duke would have a few days of official engagements and a short safari. In the Kenyan port of Mombasa they would then board the SS Gothic, a Shaw Savill cargo liner converted into a surrogate royal yacht, and sail across the Indian Ocean to Ceylon, where six RAF Shackleton seaplanes were preparing to escort the Gothic into Colombo. From there, the royal couple would arrive in Fremantle, Australia on 1st March to begin their tour Down Under. Having mapped it all out ahead of the cancelled 1949 tour, Australia’s Lieutenant-General, Frank Berryman, the distinguished war hero placed in charge of the royal visit, knew every inch of the itinerary off by heart anyway. What could possibly go wrong?

  The Princess and the Duke were among the last to learn of the King’s death that epochal day in February 1952. By then the news had travelled around the world, and the Commonwealth was already in shock. Australia and New Zealand mournfully put the bunting away once more. Lt-Gen. Berryman folded up his plans again. Among the first announcements of the new reign, however, was that the Princess’s tour of Australia and New Zealand was not cancelled, but postponed. By the time these two supremely patient and loyal realms would finally get to see their sovereign, there would have been one further catalyst for all this suppressed monarchist euphoria: the Coronation. As in Britain, so in most corners of the old empire, 2nd June 1953 was the cue for Coronation balls, Coronation fetes, street parties, receptions and carnivals across the Commonwealth and, especially, across the realms. Families and entire communities would gather around grainy black-and-white television screens in Britain and around wireless sets all over the world. The atmosphere was every bit as febrile and emotional in Australia and New Zealand – but with one important difference. As far as they were concerned, this Coronation business was all well and good but it was only a dress rehearsal. The real business would not begin until 23rd November 1953, when the Queen and the Duke finally boarded a plane and set off for the southern hemisphere. Unlike their previous attempt, the royal couple would travel in the other direction, from east to west, via Bermuda, Jamaica and the South Seas. Was it any wonder that, after so many years of waiting and three false starts, the Ozzies and the Kiwis momentarily took leave of their senses when the royal foot finally did touch home soil?

  New Zealand would be the first to clap eyes on the Queen when the SS Gothic docked in Auckla
nd on 23rd December. Every part of the country had been sprucing itself up in anticipation. For example, a maintenance team had been hard at work along the entire 25-mile stretch of road from Hokitika to Greymouth, in preparation for a single royal car journey. Because it would be a one-way journey, they had only resurfaced the left-hand side of the road along which the Queen would be travelling, leaving the opposite direction still full of potholes. Locals would forever after refer to the smooth half as ‘Lizzie’s side’. Most of the country turned out to see her, the royal presence not merely a matter of glamour and celebrity, but an important piece of economic symbolism. Two-thirds of all New Zealand’s exports were destined for Britain in 1953. After all the uncertainty of wartime (New Zealand had played a gallant part in the recent Korean War, too), there was a sense that the good times really were back.

  A day after the Queen’s arrival, however, the country suffered one of its worst peacetime disasters when a landslide destroyed a bridge at Tangiwai. The Wellington–Auckland express train plunged into the Whangaehu River, killing 151 people. Yet it was the royal tour that would continue to dominate the headlines. The Queen would later meet survivors of the crash and quickly rewrote her Christmas broadcast – in the days when it was delivered live – to include her sorrow for ‘a most grievous railway accident . . . which will have brought tragedy into many homes’.