PLOTTING A COURSE
As the great Coronation tour was nearing its end in May 1954, most of Britain was looking forward to seeing the Queen sail up the Thames, through Tower Bridge and back to London. It was due to be the most spectacular display of royal pageantry since the Coronation. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, had been ferried out the day before to join the Yacht off the Isle of Wight for the final leg. The Queen had also invited another guest to join this select party, Sir Hugh Casson, the designer of the Yacht’s royal apartments. This might have been the eve of a triumphal homecoming but the minds of the Queen and the Duke were clearly on home furnishings and colour schemes. Following dinner and a film on the ship’s projector, the Duke of Edinburgh steered Sir Hugh away from the other guests to talk through a list of proposed alterations. As the architect recalled in his diary, the Queen then also sneaked away to be part of this interior designers’ pow-wow. ‘The Queen joined us, explaining that Winston was the centre of attraction and she could safely leave him,’ Sir Hugh said later. ‘We all three sat on the main stairs and discussed various suggestions for improvements.’ The Queen, he noted, was especially keen to give the Verandah Deck ‘a more domestic character’.
London turned out in huge numbers to watch the end of the first circumnavigation of the globe by a reigning monarch. As Britannia cruised up the Thames Estuary and the river gradually started to narrow, the rest of the royal entourage were gently encouraged to stand back, so that the public would have a clear view of the Queen and her family on the Royal Bridge. Vehicles on both sides of the river honked their horns. As the Yacht passed beneath Tower Bridge, the Band of the Royal Marines struck up ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and the quayside cranes lowered their jibs in salute – a powerful act of homage, memorably repeated in 1965 on the day of Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral. ‘The whole experience was at once deeply moving and yet I felt completely detached and dreamlike,’ wrote Sir Hugh Casson. Britannia had got off to the best possible start. Before stepping ashore, Vice Admiral Abel Smith was knighted in the Royal Dining Room – with his own sword.
The Yacht returned to its home port of Portsmouth for initial alterations. The V&A would now head for the scrapyard and the Duke of Edinburgh was keen to move some of the contents across, including silver, glass and the binnacle.† The Queen wanted some reminders of her previous voyages. She asked to have her sofa and armchair from Vanguard and the Neptune-style mirror and wheat-sheaf-shaped sconces from the Gothic installed in her new sitting room in Britannia. While she wanted a light, homely atmosphere, the Duke wanted his sitting room to be more of a study, with darker wood, a leather-topped writing desk, plenty of book space and a display case housing a model of his first command, HMS Magpie. They had already choosen different layouts for their connecting bedrooms on the Shelter Deck above. The Queen preferred a bright floral decor and lace-embroidered bed linen, while the Duke had selected a darker finish. He had also given specific instructions about his own linen. There were to be no lace borders on anything.
True to the Queen’s speech on the day of the launch, Britannia’s early priorities were the Commonwealth. Later that summer, the crew set sail for Canada, the first transatlantic voyage by a Royal Yacht. There they picked up the Duke of Edinburgh, who had been despatched to open the Commonwealth Games in Vancouver, and brought him home. The following year, the Yacht was in the Caribbean, before embarking on its first summer cruise to Scotland via the west coast of Britain. There would be picnics in the sand dunes of Wales – where a local harbourmaster, helping to lift the children ashore, was reduced to tears on being informed that he was carrying the future Prince of Wales onto Welsh soil for the first time. The Prince could test the patience of some of the crew, however. En route to the Isle of Man, he kicked his football over the side and asked his ‘Sea Daddy’ if he could get it back. The request was passed up to Vice Admiral Abel Smith, who agreed that it might be a useful exercise in seamanship to lower a boat to retrieve it. The Prince regarded this as enormous fun and, soon afterwards, cheekily kicked his ball over the side once more. He never saw it again.
The cruise was such a success that it quickly established the template for the next four decades. The Royal Family simply adored cruising the west coast of Britain. The main thing was being able to stop anywhere on a whim and go ashore with a minimum of fuss. As Johnstone-Bryden records, the Queen was enjoying an evening stroll alone on the shores of Loch Torridon when a shepherd appeared. He simply raised his hat, observed that it was ‘a grand evening for a walk, Your Majesty’ and walked on. Prince Philip, meanwhile, would relish the prospect of setting up his barbecue in the unlikeliest spots – and cooking anything that took his fancy. ‘He’d lead ashore with all the barbecue kit and the Queen would come later with the salad supplies and all the side dishes,’ says Sir Robert Woodard. ‘He’s a brilliant and very innovative cook. If you produced any strange animal out of the sea, he’d prepare it and cook it. You shouldn’t be surprised if you ate an octopus.’
A pre-dinner ritual was soon established, which was still going strong in Britannia’s final years. ‘I always briefed the family every evening in the Drawing Room on the piano. The top of a grand piano makes a good chart table,’ explains Commodore Anthony Morrow, Britannia’s last captain. His predecessor, Sir Robert Woodard, also fondly recalls the nightly debate. ‘We’d gather round the piano with a big chart and all the Royal Family would be there saying “Can we do this or that?” The Queen would listen and say: “I rather fancy going to so and so”. Then she would look at me and I might have to explain that the tide or wind was wrong and there would be more deliberation. Then the Queen would say: “That’s what we’re going to do”.’
On that first cruise there was also a stop at the Castle of Mey, the Queen Mother’s sixteenth-century fortress at the top right-hand corner of the British mainland, not far from John o’ Groats. She had bought it soon after the death of the King, as a place of solace and escape, but always looked forward to the annual sighting of Britannia on the horizon. A day of family fun would always conclude with much light-hearted radio banter between Yacht and castle, plus the odd firework as Britannia sailed off again. From those earliest voyages, regardless of the weather – and it could be atrocious – there was a magical quality to Britannia that would lift the mood on the most demanding diplomatic missions. According to the Princess Royal, when Britannia finally did reach Aberdeen at the end of that first summer cruise, she did not want to leave: ‘I had to be carried off kicking and screaming.’
EXPLORATION
The new monarch had already circumnavigated the globe, but her Yacht had not. On her 1953–4 tour, the Queen and Duke had gone in a westerly direction. In 1956, Britannia would head in the opposite direction. The plan was to take the Duke of Edinburgh to open the Melbourne Games and then head for Antarctica to link up with the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Organised by the British explorer Vivian Fuchs and New Zealand’s Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Everest, it would involve two teams making the first overland trek to the South Pole since Amundsen and Scott. When it became clear that royal punctuality and the vagaries of polar exploration were not compatible – the expedition would not start in earnest for another year – the Duke decided it would be an ideal opportunity to pay a royal visit to parts of the world that had never enjoyed one before. Among all the extra equipment loaded on board for the voyage were additional fridges, large quantities of long-life milk and a Land Rover. There were several changes of plan due to factors beyond royal control. Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956 forced the Yacht to sail round Africa via the Cape of Good Hope and pick up the Duke in East Africa. When he reached Singapore, rioting diverted Britannia to Malaysia. After visits to Ceylon and Papua New Guinea, the Yacht arrived in Melbourne in time for the Games.
Contrary to the fictitious depiction of the tour in the television series, The Crown, Britannia did not then set sail for fun and games in the South Seas. Instead the Duke was j
oined by two distinguished, elderly companions. One was the artist Edward Seago and the other was the explorer Sir Raymond Priestley MC, who, in his youth, had been to Antarctica with Britain’s two most celebrated polar adventurers, Sir Ernest Shackleton and Robert Scott.
The Crown also includes a fabricated argument between Britannia’s captain, Vice Admiral Sir Conolly Abel Smith, and the Duke in which the latter orders the Yacht to sail thousands of miles off-course to repatriate an injured fisherman to Tonga. Not only did it never happen but former Royal Yachtsmen are even more incredulous that the fictional Duke should be shown mocking Sir Conolly for spending the Second World War on ‘shore duty’. Throughout Britannia’s years at sea, the Duke was acutely conscious that it was the Flag Officer Royal Yachts who was in charge of the ship, not he. Nor would he have traduced anyone’s war record, least of all that of an admiral who could hardly have been further from the shirker depicted in The Crown. The grandson of a VC, Abel Smith had fought in the Great War, was one of the first pilots in the history of the Fleet Air Arm and, like the Duke, was mentioned in despatches during the Second World War.
The Yacht sailed via New Zealand and the Chatham Islands (‘not unlike the Shetlands,’ according to the Duke), before reaching Antarctica in time for Christmas. There the Duke was scheduled to broadcast a message to the Commonwealth via the BBC, ahead of the Queen’s traditional Christmas Day wireless broadcast.‡ This was not simply a spot of Christmas fun for the benefit of the Royal Family. Like the Queen’s speech at the launch of Britannia and again, on her great Coronation tour, there was a subtext to it: the lack of Commonwealth boundaries. It was reminding the world that the Royal Family was a Commonwealth family. It was also reassuring the British people, whose post-war self-esteem had taken a hefty kick during the 1956 Suez crisis, that Britain still had a few things to be proud of. Parallel royal broadcasts from Antarctica and Sandringham on Christmas Day – whatever next?
‘We are absent, most of us, because there is a Commonwealth,’ declared a crackly Duke. ‘I hope all of you at Sandringham are enjoying a very happy Christmas and I hope you children are having a lot of fun. I am sorry I am not with you,’ he told his family, before concluding with a prayer ‘that the Lord watch between me and thee when we are absent from each other’. Moments later, listeners heard the Queen. ‘Of all the voices we have heard this afternoon, none has given my children and myself greater joy than that of my husband,’ she said.
After sending a message of ‘hope and encouragement’ to the sick, to those on duty and to those ‘whose destiny it is to walk through life alone’, she returned to the Duke. ‘If my husband cannot be at home on Christmas Day, I could not wish for a better reason than that he should be travelling in other parts of the Commonwealth.’ The following day, Britannia’s crew saw their first iceberg. They would go on to visit the scientific research stations dotted around the Antarctic Circle and to have an uncomfortably close encounter with a whaling ship, the stench of which ‘cannot be described’, according to the Duke.
The Yacht pressed on via some of the loneliest spots on Earth, including Tristan da Cunha and St Helena, before finally meeting up with the Queen in Lisbon for the 1957 state visit to Portugal. By then, the tour had attracted international media attention because the Duke’s Private Secretary, Lieutenant Commander Mike Parker, had become embroiled in divorce proceedings. Parker flew home early to calm the story down (though he was still working for the Duke months later). Back in the Fifties, any mention of divorce in royal circles was a news story, and the foreign media began to speculate on the state of the royal marriage itself, so much so that the Palace went as far as issuing a statement denying any ‘rift’. Unlike the recent dramatisation, it was, in fact, a comedy moment when the Queen and Duke were finally reunited. Knowing that he had grown a beard on his travels, the Queen had arranged for everyone in the royal entourage – herself included – to put on fake whiskers just before the Duke walked in.
His round-the-world Commonwealth tour had been such a success that he and Britannia would complete another one, two years later in 1959. That same year, the Yacht would then take the Queen and the Duke to Canada for that opening of the St Lawrence Seaway linking the Atlantic to the Great Lakes of North America. Accompanied by the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the Prime Minister of Canada, John Diefenbaker, the royal couple were on deck as Britannia sailed through a specially constructed ‘gate’ between the American and Canadian banks of the St Lawrence River. There had, inevitably, been some complex questions of protocol. US security officials were uneasy about the possibility of a bomb being dropped from a seaway bridge. The crew of Britannia were more concerned about the prospect of actually hitting a bridge. Two of the Yacht’s three masts were taller than six of the bridges along the way. Special hinge mechanisms had been attached to ensure that the tops could be folded down just far enough to squeeze underneath. Older ‘Yotties’ would remember the consternation when a loud explosion was heard as the Yacht sailed through one lock. It turned out to be the sound of a bursting fender, squeezed beyond endurance between Britannia and the wall of the lock. One of the officers on duty, Captain North Dalrymple-Hamilton, would never forget the sight of the Queen, the Duke and the President all joining in the collective effort to spare Britannia’s paintwork by heaving the Yacht away from the wall.
Britannia’s official history records the night during that 1959 tour when Dalrymple-Hamilton received an agitated call from the Queen’s formidable dresser, Bobo MacDonald. One can only imagine the reaction of Britannia’s duty officer as ‘Miss MacDonald’ came on the line with the words ‘There is a bat in the Queen’s bedroom and Her Majesty does not like bats.’ There was not a moment to lose. The Queen was at a dinner ashore, but would soon be returning. With a fellow officer and a pair of tennis rackets, Dalrymple-Hamilton managed to ‘down’ the unfortunate bat with minutes to spare, only to spot another one flapping around in the Royal Drawing Room.
Britannia would come to know the St Lawrence Seaway well, completing several trips through it over the years. One of the problems of such a famous vessel, with such a famous cargo, sailing through such a confined space was that large crowds would always gather for miles on end. One of Britannia’s longest-serving yachtsmen, Warrant Officer Albert ‘Dixie’ Deane, remembers that off-duty Yachtsmen would be asked to form ‘waving parties’ on the upper decks. ‘It was exhausting for the people on the bridge to wave all the way through but they didn’t want to upset the locals,’ he recalls. ‘So we had a party whose job was just to wave.’ It was a very Britannia solution to a very Britannia problem.
SHIP’S COMPANY
During that first decade at sea, Britannia crossed the Atlantic seventeen times and visited every continent. Yet there were just a handful of trips to non-Commonwealth countries, most of them to neighbouring monarchies, including Norway (1955), Sweden (1956), Denmark (1957) and Holland (1958). The Swedish visit got off to an inauspicious start when Britannia’s arrival was delayed by bad weather and fog. In a letter to the Queen on the latest political situation, the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, began by offering ‘warmest sympathy for Your Majesty’s rough journey’. This was especially unfortunate as the King of Sweden had laid on a welcome flypast of 300 aircraft to coincide with the Queen’s arrival. In their determination to make up for lost time, Britannia and its escort of Royal Navy destroyers went full steam ahead as soon the fog cleared. ‘In trying to make up time, the ships produced a wash which destroyed a certain number of boat houses and jetties in the Stockholm Archipelago,’ the British Ambassador to Stockholm, Sir Robert Hankey, informed the Foreign Office, ‘but the matter has been settled and compensation is being paid.’ In fact, the Ambassador had to go on Swedish television to apologise, and the final bill for the mini-tsunami created by Britannia cost the British taxpayer £100,000. The Queen was still an hour late.
Throughout those early years, Britannia and its crew largely divided their time between tours
of the British Isles and trips to the ends of the old Empire, with shore leave in between. While the Yacht’s officers would come on secondment from the Royal Navy, spending a year or two in the Yacht before returning to what they called ‘the grey Navy’, the other ranks could stay for life if they elected to join the Permanent Royal Yacht Service (PRYS). Known as Royal Yachtsmen or Yotties, they would be away from home for considerably longer than their contemporaries in conventional ships. The only promotion ladder in this one-ship navy was known as ‘dead man’s shoes’. Until the man in the next job up from you moved on, you remained where you were. This proved no great deterrent for men like Able Seaman Ellis ‘Norrie’ Norrell, who served in Britannia right from the start. Having begun at the bottom, doing jobs like painting the hull while dangling over the side in a bosun’s chair, he rose via the laundry to one of the most exalted positions in the Yacht, coxswain of the Royal Barge (the Queen’s launch). ‘I’d only been in the job five minutes when we were at Cowes and I hit a gangway and broke the windscreen,’ he recalls. His immediate concern was how he would break the news to his father, a veteran of the previous Royal Yacht, the V&A. ‘I thought: “Dad’s not going to be pleased I’ve been sacked”.’ Norrell said his farewells to his crew and waited for the summons. But when it came, he was in for a surprise. ‘The commander poured me a drink and said: “Don’t worry about it. Accidents happen.” ’ ‘Norrie’, as he is still known to generations of Yachtsmen, would go on to notch up a record thirty-four years in Britannia.
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 45