The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  Sydney was another matter. The city, she said, ‘nearly killed me!’ The organizers kept slotting in new events – on one morning she had three children’s rallies ‘in boiling sun’, then visits to a factory and a housing estate, followed by a garden party, after which she had to give out presents to people who had helped with the tour. She did not like this ritual – it was ‘always at the end of a busy day, & one gradually thanks them less & less, until the poor deputy transport officer gets a mere whisper’.47 On one memorable day, because of the intense rivalry between the two towns, she had to fit in both Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, and Launceston, a hundred miles away, on a day trip by air from Melbourne. Her entourage was daunted; but the Queen Mother, rarely unable to enjoy herself, found it hilarious.

  I went to Tasmania for lunch yesterday. That’s the form! It was a gloriously crazy day, & I haven’t laughed so much for years! First of all, we arrived in a howling gale, which is always faintly funny.

  Sir Ronald Cross had an A.D.C. from the Grenadiers who was having ghastly trouble with a huge bearskin, & I thought he had gone mad when he conducted me firmly to the back of the Guard of Honour – I had visions of inspecting their backs, when on a word of command, they revolved, & we faced each other bravely. Then on arrival at their house, there was drawn up a lot of Army nurses to inspect. As I started down the line, a particularly vicious blast took all their hats off, & being round & flat, they rolled away like little bicycles!

  Then the public address system broke down when I was making my very boring speech, & then we had a mad chauffeur who obediently slowed down on approaching a group of people, and then accelerated violently when passing them, so all the poor things saw was a pair of white shoes, as I was thrown back against the seat & my feet shot into the air. Let us hope that they thought they saw little white hands waving.48

  There were some days off and the relaxation that she enjoyed the most was visiting studs or going to the races. Early in the trip around New Zealand, at Trentham racecourse, near Wellington, she presented the St James’s Cup to Sir Ernest Davies, a colourful businessman and former mayor of Auckland, whose horse Bali Ha’i had just won. To her astonishment, ‘he roared up to the microphone’ and announced that he wanted to give her the horse ‘as a present from all the sports people of New Zealand!! You can imagine my feelings!’ she wrote to the Queen. ‘And at once I thought of you and Margaret saying, “what has Mummy done now”.’49 She wrote also to her trainer Cecil Boyd-Rochfort asking him to take the gift horse into his stable.50 In the event, Bali Ha’i was an excellent horse and raced well for her after he had arrived in England.

  Right through to the end came more civic ceremonies, more mayoral receptions, more awards to be given, parades of ambulance workers, tours of housing projects, inspections of factories, more garden parties, further civic receptions, meetings of youth organizations and attendance at a schoolchildren’s rally in Perth, until on the evening of Friday 7 March Queen Elizabeth left on one of Qantas’s best planes, a Super Constellation named Southern Star, bound for London. As she flew north and west, she was pleased with her tour and was looking forward to dinner with her family on Monday night (she never liked being alone on the evening she returned from a trip). And then the unforeseen happened.

  The refuelling in the Cocos Islands was without incident. But about two hours before arriving in Mauritius for another fuelling, a cylinder seized in one of the plane’s four engines. Serious damage was caused. Cyclones in the Mauritius area added to anxiety about a safe landing. To everyone’s relief they made it into Plaisance airport, but it then became clear that the engine’s cowling needed to be replaced. The intended one-hour stopover had to be extended – and extended. In the end the necessary repairs delayed them for three nights. The weather was dreadful: airless and steamy, crackling with violent electrical storms or pouring with rain. But Queen Elizabeth made the best of her enforced holiday. The Governor concocted an impromptu programme and she was cheered by crowds of delighted Mauritians wherever she went. She toured Port Louis, and at Pamplemousses she inspected the araucaria tree she had planted in 1927 on the way back from Australia; she drove up into the mountains for a picnic. Everywhere she went, she met with enthusiastic crowds.

  She was offered another aircraft to continue, but knowing how upset her Qantas crew (and their superiors back home) already were, she said that she preferred to stay with her Qantas flight. Back in Australia Sir Allen Brown, the director general of her visit and a keen writer of rhymes, concocted a telegram about her plight:

  A cowling’s just a piece of tin

  To keep the aircraft engine in

  But without it one gets vicious

  Especially if in Mauritius

  Anticipating that Martin Gilliat would be more upset than his mistress, he added,

  I fear the rage of Comrade Martin,

  Because the aircraft won’t get startin’

  Yet tell him that the loudest howling

  Will not replace the missing cowling51

  On 11 March, after a new cowling had eventually arrived from Australia, she flew away, church bells pealing, people shouting farewells as she waved goodbye from the steps of the plane.52

  Her greatest concern was for Kenya where she had been scheduled to open Nairobi’s new airport during another stopover. The delays had made this impossible and she sent a message to the Governor of Kenya saying how sad she was about this, but expressing confidence that ‘on another voyage, which I hope will not be too far in the future, my aircraft will land at your new airport’.53 It happened just one year later.

  Instead of Nairobi, her plane was routed by Entebbe where she landed in the middle of the night. Once again, engine trouble prolonged what was to have been a refuelling stop. Once again, she was offered another aircraft but declined. A further eighteen hours late, she took off for Malta. She was almost home but even here there was trouble and another delay of at least twelve hours was promised. So finally she agreed to transfer to a BOAC plane and completed the journey to London, landing on the morning of 13 March, sixty-eight hours late. When the desolate Qantas manager in London apologized, she reassured him, ‘It could have happened to anyone. I feel very sorry for the crew; they all worked so hard.’54

  Typically, she saw the incessant delays in her flight home more as an adventure than as a setback. She had reason to be pleased with her trip; in one letter home she wrote, ‘I have been deeply touched by their very true feelings of love, & amazed at their enthusiastic reception.’55

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  ALL IN ALL the Queen Mother was becoming an avid traveller. She had enjoyed flying since her first flight in 1935, and she loved to be the Royal Family’s pioneer in the air. She was one of the first in the family to fly by helicopter, which she loved – indeed it became a method of transport she enjoyed till the very end of her life.

  She was also gaining confidence in her own ability to represent her country abroad. She was widely, visibly present in Africa as what Harold Macmillan later called ‘the winds of change’ swept through the continent, fanning nationalist sentiments and removing British colonial rule. Ghana was the first African colony to become independent, in 1957, and it was followed by Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika (Tanzania), Uganda, Kenya, Nyasaland (Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) through the 1960s. All became members of the British Commonwealth. Its growth, as the Queen herself later said, marked ‘the transformation of the Crown from an emblem of dominion into a symbol of free and voluntary association. In all history this has no precedent.’56

  In early 1959 Queen Elizabeth made an official tour to Kenya and Uganda. It was nostalgic for her, the first time she had been to Kenya since she and the Duke of York had been there in 1924–5. The visit to Kenya was arranged partly in order to make up for the previous year’s cancelled visit to open Nairobi Airport. This time the British government considered cancelling the visit again, because of political unrest in the colony. The African elected members of the Kenya Legislativ
e Council had decided to boycott any official functions during the visit, but their leader Dr Kiano sent Queen Elizabeth a personal message assuring her of their esteem for her and the Royal Family.57 The authorities in Nairobi were unworried, and persuaded the Colonial Office that cancellation was unnecessary.58 She was met at Nairobi airport on the afternoon of 5 February by the Governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, and his wife Molly. The Governor had devised a sophisticated programme for her and his efficient staff guided her with care around the country.

  East Africa had been suffering serious drought, but, soon after she arrived in the almost waterless Masai district of Narok, not for the first time in royal history fate obligingly took a hand. At a picturesque baraza with Masai tribesmen, some in lion-skin headdresses, Queen Elizabeth made a speech expressing a hope for rain. ‘An hour later the skies opened & an inch fell in 20 minutes,’ recorded her lady in waiting. ‘The Masai were convinced that HM had magic powers.’59 Princess Margaret congratulated her on being a rain-maker: ‘The BBC man read it out quite seriously and dead-pan which made it sound even more unbelievable. It reminded me so much of when Papa said “Pula” in Bechuanaland. That worked too!’60

  Queen Elizabeth travelled widely through Kenya by train, sitting for hours on the observation platform and being welcomed with huge enthusiasm at every halt and road crossing, where hundreds of people had gathered and waited to glimpse her, even at night.61 Evelyn Baring commented that from the train she had a real glimpse of true rural Kenya. ‘There were European farmers, Asian traders, Africans working on farms or in forest villages, and the forest officers in charge of them.’ At one station there was a farmer with five couple of fox hounds which he hunted himself, ‘since in Kenya the eccentric English individualist is not yet a thing of the past’.62

  On Valentine’s Day the train crew sent her cards. The best was hand drawn, with a background of a smiling sun above mountains and a little train weaving past hearts and cherubs:

  To show you our affection this is a simple sign

  And tell you most sincerely, you are our Valentine

  The only thing that worries us when we are on the line,

  Is that there is no corridor between our coach and thine.

  At the bottom of the card was a line of black Africans waving Union flags and a fat bald white man, also waving his flag.63

  She drove through the Nyeri Reserve, past crowds of cheering Kikuyu tribesmen, to spend a night in the new Treetops Hotel (the original cabin in which Princess Elizabeth had stayed in 1952 had been burned down in the Mau Mau revolt in 1954) and enjoyed the wild animals. Rhino, buffalo, baboon, the rare giant forest hog and many shapes and sizes of antelope appeared that night for her and her party – but, alas, no elephants.

  Next day she spoke for some time with a group of Kikuyu chiefs before flying back to Nairobi. Baring was struck that the Kikuyu were more enthusiastic than almost any of the other African tribes and that the cheering in Nyeri ‘was the loudest heard during the visit’. It was particularly remarkable because this was an area ‘where the struggle against the Mau Mau had been at its hottest’. The Governor believed that Queen Elizabeth’s presence in their lands ‘gave to many Kikuyu there a feeling that the bitter story of the past was closed, and she appeared as a symbol of a new and a better era’.64 Similarly the two barazas held with the Masai and with the Elgeyo and Marakwet tribes seemed great successes. ‘Here there was no sign of political trouble and there were no dark memories of the Emergency to forget. The people received Her Majesty with great enthusiasm.’65

  African nationalist politicians had tried to persuade the citizens of Nairobi not to turn out in the streets to cheer her. To the great relief of the Governor their attempts failed; she was welcomed heartily everywhere, and by everyone – Africans, Asians and Europeans. In Mombasa the Arab population greeted her with courtesy. There were dances in her honour at a reception for women of all races.66

  She was struck by the achievements of the colony. In Nairobi she visited the King George VI Hospital for Africans and, according to the Governor, was impressed by the standard of medical care dispensed. Everywhere she went she seemed to be delighted – and this in turn pleased everyone she met. The Governor concluded that her visit was ‘a most outstanding success. It made a profound impression on all the people of Kenya. In my view it has, in an indirect but a powerful way, assisted the recent more hopeful political developments in this complex and often troubled country.’67 Lady Baring wrote to the Queen Mother, ‘There has been a most genuine drawing together of all sorts of people & races & groups as a direct result of your coming.’68

  ‘Kenya was very crowded as to programme,’ Queen Elizabeth wrote to Princess Margaret, ‘but goodness, what a beautiful country it is!’ The only drawback, she said, was that people constantly told her how much they had enjoyed Princess Margaret’s own visit two years before. The sheikhs in Mombasa had ‘looked gravely at my flushed & streaming face, & red eyes (v. small too) and said “We DID so love having Princess Margaret here – I do hope she comes again soon, soon.” ’69

  On 18 February she flew from Nairobi to Kisumu on Lake Victoria for a brief visit, and then on to Entebbe, the capital of neighbouring Uganda, still a British protectorate. In Kampala, as chancellor of the University of London she visited the University College of Makerere, which had a close relationship with her university. There, suffering from the heat in her Chancellor’s robes, she presented doctorates and opened the new University Library. On the green college lawns she was surrounded by students and academics in coloured robes, all anxious to talk to or at least glimpse her. It was a relaxed occasion.

  That afternoon she opened the new headquarters of the Uganda Sports Union, and watched boxing, athletics, hockey, tennis and cricket. Everyone was impressed when the Kabaka’s brother, Prince George Mawanda, hit two magnificent sixes clean out of the ground. This was followed in the evening by the Uganda Royal Tattoo in a crowded stadium. Among the displays the Queen Mother watched was, rather astonishingly, a reconstruction of the Battle of Leik Hill in Burma, during the last war, by the 4th King’s African Rifles. This was followed by African, Indian and Scottish dancing, and music by military and police bands. The whole Tattoo, she told Princess Margaret, was ‘so gloriously English that it was almost funny’. All was most enjoyable except, she wrote, ‘I had a lizard in my room all night, & it hung over my bed looking at me with bulging eyes. I felt quite embarrassed.’70

  She visited the Western, Northern and Eastern provinces of Uganda, travelled to two national parks and sailed on Lake Victoria, Lake Albert and the Nile, spotting birds, hippos and crocodiles. She was pleased that she was often taken on the same route and to the same places that she and the Duke had visited in 1925 – the trip that she later described as the best time of their lives. In each province she listened to kind addresses of welcome.

  At Paraa in the Murchison Falls National Park a special cottage overlooking the Nile had been built for her visit; there she watched a spectacular display by Acholi dancers, each of whom wore a large headdress of ostrich feathers. To general delight she repaid the compliment by wearing her tiara.71 In Jinja, in the Eastern Province, the welcome was even more enthusiastic with thousands of people lining the streets. She was presented with many gifts, including a bag of coffee from Bugisu, accompanied by a plea that Her Majesty ‘influence the British people to take to drinking more coffee and less tea’. She loved it all, and in her farewell speech said that the ‘spirit of courage, confidence and enterprise’ she had seen ‘bodes well for the future of Uganda’.72

  As she left, the East African Standard asserted that her tour was one of the most successful ever undertaken by a member of the Royal Family. In his report to Alan Lennox-Boyd, the Colonial Secretary, the Governor praised Queen Elizabeth’s demeanour throughout, stressing that ‘the unqualified success of the visit was attributable above all to the Queen Mother herself, to Her Majesty’s visible affection for and interest in all those she met and t
o her gracious and friendly manner to all on all occasions’. Over 950 people were presented formally to her and the Governor noted that she had ‘a friendly and informal word for scores of others and a gracious smile and wave for thousands’. He thought that it all amounted to ‘a personal triumph’.73

  It was not just loyal colonial administrators who thought this. George Thomas, the Labour Member of Parliament for Cardiff West and future Speaker of the House of Commons, returning from a trip to Kenya, wrote to Martin Gilliat that everywhere he had heard ‘profound appreciation’ of the good the Queen Mother had done. The Arab community in Mombasa ‘were quite ecstatic’ at the interest she had shown in them, and all other races felt the same. ‘It is not my habit to write to pay this sort of tribute but in view of the tremendous surge of appreciation of this Royal visit I am breaking a rule! It will do no harm for you to know that people like myself feel the impact of what this visit meant. Above all I felt that it had been a real tonic for those folk who have the sticky job of everyday administration in that difficult country’.74

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  SOON AFTER Queen Elizabeth’s return from Africa she prepared for a trip to Rome with Princess Margaret. It was an unofficial visit but she was to have an audience with Pope John XXIII and unveil a monument to Byron in the Borghese Gardens. She wrote a happy letter to D’Arcy Osborne, saying, ‘I can’t believe that at last I am coming to Rome! It really is too exciting, and I am looking forward to it all so much – It is the first time in my life that I am to visit a place just for pleasure.’75 She told him that she had already been inundated with anxious letters from Protestants about her visit to the Pope. ‘I wish that one could convey to these people (who are simple & good) that if one goes to Rome, the Pope, being a Sovereign, must be visited out of politeness if nothing else. There is great ignorance & fear still about the R. Catholic religion – possibly because they are so well organised.’76 The visit went well and included lunch with D’Arcy Osborne and a lunch at a trattoria on the Via Appia Antica. The British Ambassador to Italy, Ashley Clarke, reported that the Romans were usually cynical about distinguished foreign visitors to the city. But the warmth of the welcome given to the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret was striking.77