The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  Spring 1961 saw her embarking in Britannia to Tunisia on a visit instigated by the Foreign Office as a demonstration of British goodwill. No member of the Royal Family had previously visited the country, which had gained its independence from France in 1956. The President, Habib Bourguiba, was seen as an important voice of moderation in Africa; moreover he had frequently made gratifying public comments on Britain’s handling of decolonization. To return the compliment, the Foreign Office suggested that a visit by the Queen Mother would ‘do much to confirm our regard for Bourguiba and our interest in Tunisia’. She would be a particularly appropriate envoy because it appeared that Tunisians, especially women, already regarded her with interest and affection.1

  The royal yacht set off in fine weather down the English Channel. Among those on board was Brigadier Bernard Fergusson,* whom Queen Elizabeth had invited to join the royal party because he knew Tunisia well and was a fluent French-speaker. His hostess, Fergusson wrote to his wife, was in excellent form, cracking endless jokes, including her own line in funny voices, from Cockney to French. In the Bay of Biscay they were able to spend a lot of time on deck. They were all eating too much, Queen Elizabeth said, ‘and I forgot to bring my skipping-rope. I shall have to do this instead.’ Whereupon ‘she went gliding off across the sun deck doing mock eurythmics throwing her hands up in the air at every hop … She is so obviously enjoying herself madly.’2 They stopped in the British dependent territory of Gibraltar where the crowds were ‘almost delirious’. Even Spaniards joined in with enthusiasm, which they had not been allowed to do during an earlier visit by the Queen and Prince Philip.3

  When Britannia set sail again, the weather in the Mediterranean deteriorated. And, as they approached Tunis, so did the situation in Algeria, where rebellion broke out among the French troops stationed there. There were fears that Tunisia might be drawn into the conflict and Queen Elizabeth sent word to President Bourguiba offering to postpone her visit. The answer was non.4

  Before landing, she prepared meticulously for her speech in French in honour of Monsieur le Président – although she said that it didn’t matter a hoot what she said as no one ever listened. They arrived at Tunis on 24 April, with a gale blowing, but in bright sunshine. The banquet at which she spoke that night was not easy. The President was tired and worried about Algeria, Tunisian officials altered the seating plan at the last moment and even Queen Elizabeth could not make the conversation flow.5 Nonetheless, according to Fergusson, she gave her speech ‘quite charmingly, smiling at the President with every sentence.’ Dinner, served with fruit juices, included ‘brik à l’oeuf,’ a deep-fried pancake containing an egg. Back on board, Queen Elizabeth called for champagne and they all dissected the evening. She described how her brik had exploded and covered her chin with egg.6

  The next day after various formal engagements Queen Elizabeth gave the President a return banquet aboard Britannia. This was a much more enjoyable occasion than the night before; the British Ambassador, Anthony Lambert, called it ‘a masterpiece’ – because of Queen Elizabeth’s ‘warm and gracious personality’. The Belgian Ambassador, the doyen of the diplomatic corps, whispered to Lambert, ‘I feel I am in a dream; so does everyone else.’ The effect on the President was the most marked – he seemed to relax and tell Queen Elizabeth his entire life story.

  Over the next two days arrangements were constantly altered by the Tunisian hosts, a practice which Lambert hoped their guest found diverting rather than fatiguing. She visited a women’s organization, a foundling hospital and the Islamic Museum in Tunis; at Medjez el Bab she saw the Commonwealth War Cemetery (where there were the graves of many officers and men of her own regiments). To the Ambassador’s alarm she was driven through the narrow streets of Kairouan, where religious feeling ran very high, and was shown the Great Mosque. She visited Sousse and Monastir, the President’s birthplace. At a reception for 250 people which she gave on board Britannia, British Embassy staff ‘worked like a team of well-trained collies’, cutting out and bringing forward individuals for presentation, so that she spoke to at least a hundred of them. All in all, the Ambassador declared the visit ‘a brilliant success’ for Anglo-Tunisian relations and ‘one more personal triumph for Her Majesty’. The universal verdict was ‘La Reine Mère a conquis tous les coeurs.’7

  In June that year Queen Elizabeth was obliged to cancel several engagements after breaking a bone in her foot. ‘It is a great bore’, she wrote to D’Arcy Osborne, ‘because one cannot get a shoe on, & therefore I cannot hop round Hospital wards, shipyards, Universities, garden parties, picture galleries, boys schools, girls schools, race meetings, Agricultural Shows, Civic Centres, slum clearances, Horse Shows, regimental reviews, and all my usual treats!’8 Nevertheless she managed to get to Newcastle on Tyne on 27 June to launch the Northern Star, a Shaw Savill liner. It was on this occasion that she was presented with the unfinished portrait by Augustus John for which she had sat in the early months of the war, and which the directors of Shaw Savill and of the Vickers Armstrong shipyard had acquired. She was delighted.

  Business could always be combined with pleasure, if only because of Queen Elizabeth’s natural inclination to enjoy herself; but on her visit to Northern Ireland in April 1962, when among other engagements she attended the 350th anniversary celebrations of the town of Enniskillen, visited her regiment the 9th/12th Royal Lancers at Lisanelly camp and opened the new Department of Physics at Queen’s University, there was the special bonus of a racing victory. At Down-patrick racecourse she watched her horse Laffy win the major race ‘in front of an enthusiastic and record crowd’.9 This trip was followed at the end of the month by a pleasurable cruise in Britannia to Cornwall, where she visited a spring flower show and had tea with a young farmers’ club in Truro. In Devon she opened the Tamar Bridge and then spent a day island-hopping by helicopter in the Scillies before sailing back to Portsmouth.

  *

  IN JUNE 1962 Queen Elizabeth made her first visit to Canada since 1954. The main purpose was to celebrate the centenary of the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada, of which she was colonel-in-chief. The regiment was based at Montreal, but at the request of the Canadian government she agreed to ‘balance’ her stay there with a visit to Toronto, the home of her other regiment, the Toronto Scottish, and of the famous Woodbine racecourse.10 That set the pattern for several more Canadian visits – care was taken to include both regiments, and both English- and French-speaking areas.

  There was a second purpose to the visit: the Canadian government was, perhaps optimistically, keen to establish that members of the Royal Family could come to Canada for limited trips in the same way as they visited different parts of Britain. This visit was therefore kept as low key and easy for her as possible.11 She had a full programme nonetheless; in Montreal this included six Black Watch engagements, a garden party and several civic events. One day’s engagements filled fifteen hours.

  The next four days were spent in Ottawa, where Queen Elizabeth was the guest of the Governor General, Major General Georges Vanier, and carried out another dozen engagements, including the presentation, as colonel-in-chief of the Royal Army Medical Corps, of an RAMC sword to her other Canadian regiment, the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps. She attended a civic luncheon at which, as her lady in waiting Jean Rankin commented, ‘iced water was drunk’, and dined with the Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker.12

  For her Toronto visit Queen Elizabeth stayed at Batterwood House in Port Hope with Vincent Massey, who had been governor general at the time of her 1954 visit, Her last day, Saturday 16 June, began with a long hot drive into Toronto for a civic reception where the guard of honour provided by the Toronto Scottish Regiment fired a royal salute which was so loud that it smashed windows. After an official lunch she was able to escape to one of her favourite places – a racecourse. At the Woodbine track she watched one of Canada’s premier races, the Queen’s Plate Stakes. That night she flew home with the eloquent thanks of the Governor General, who w
rote that Canadians ‘will never forget the grim war years when a gracious Queen stood strong and steadfast beside a noble and gallant King’.13 She had endeared herself to them again and ‘Your Majesty has a great part to play for the Crown throughout the Commonwealth.’ That was certainly her hope.14

  *

  AS EVENTS turned out, her next official Commonwealth tour was not for another three years. Meanwhile there were more short trips in Britannia in the British Isles. She sailed to the Channel Islands for four days in May 1963, her first visit since she had been there with the King in 1945. The trip was nearly disrupted by gale-force winds. A local press photograph shows Queen Elizabeth, her petal hat firmly anchored with a large scarf tied under her chin, seated next to the indomitable Dame of Sark, Sybil Hathaway, who had stoutly resisted the German occupation. Despite the wind, the two women drove around the island in the Dame’s open carriage – no cars were allowed on Sark. She flew on to Jersey in weather so bad, her lady in waiting Jean Rankin recorded, that the spectators were appalled. Britannia was forced to take refuge in a sheltered bay; even so, the heavy swell made it difficult for Queen Elizabeth to get aboard from the royal barge, and dinner at Government House had to be cancelled. On the last day she toured Alderney, strong winds and choppy seas notwithstanding.15

  In July she paid a visit to the Isle of Man, presiding at the island’s parliament, the Tynwald, and attending its Banquet. She drove to Douglas in a horse-drawn tram and met crowds of children and, along with other engagements in the island, again gave a dinner party on board Britannia before setting sail for Portsmouth. On her way home she stopped at St Mawes in Cornwall for a convivial lunch with Dick Wilkins.

  In October she flew to Northern Ireland, where she opened the War Memorial Building in Belfast and was given a standing ovation at a civic luncheon. In cold and windy weather at the Abercorn Barracks at Ballykinlar next day the 1st Battalion 3rd Royal Anglian Regiment, of which she was colonel-in-chief, paraded for her and she presented medals. A trip to the Maze racecourse had been included in her programme that afternoon, but visibility was so poor that it was almost impossible to see the horses, and the day ended unhappily, with a charity film premiere of what turned out to be ‘a very bad film’, according to the lady in waiting, Rampage starring Robert Mitchum and Jack Hawkins.16

  A few weeks earlier Queen Elizabeth had agreed to make a tour of several weeks to Australia and New Zealand in 1964. She had been invited to open the third Adelaide Festival of Arts, of which she was patron; visits to other states and to New Zealand were built around that. All was arranged. Then on Sunday 2 February, she felt unwell and was admitted to the King Edward VII Hospital. It was entirely unexpected – the frequent attacks of flu or tonsillitis she had suffered when she was younger were now behind her and she rarely admitted to being ill. She hated even taking her temperature; she thought that a tiny homeopathic tablet or powder would cure her of any complaint – and she tended to think that most complaints were imagined, anyway. Her Scottish childhood had taught her that nothing was better than open windows in the bedroom or a stiff walk in the wind to ‘blow the germs away’.17

  Not this time. Clarence House announced that she was to have an emergency appendectomy, and she underwent surgery on 4 February.* Martin Gilliat immediately sent telegrams around the world to cancel the tour. Sackfuls of letters and vast quantities of flowers arrived for her at the hospital. Within a few days she was receiving members of her family and then her friends. Prince Philip wrote to say ‘how happy and relieved I am that everything has gone off (come out!) so well’.18 Prince Charles, writing from Gordonstoun, told her that after he had had his appendix removed in 1962 he made the mistake of watching Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques on television. ‘I literally nearly split my sides laughing. My goodness it was agony! … I wish I could come and visit you like you visited me, but as I’m at this horrible place, it’s impossible.’19

  She returned home to Clarence House on 16 February. Her surgeons advised that she undertake no public engagements for two months. But a two-week convalescent cruise in the Caribbean on board Britannia proved therapeutic. She visited more than a dozen islands and the Queen commented that her programme looked ‘madly busy and not at all what I had envisaged as a rest cruise for you’.20 But she thoroughly enjoyed it all. Sometimes they anchored off secluded beaches, and while the rest of her party swam, Queen Elizabeth collected shells. They had an evening picnic on a beach in Montserrat. ‘One of the sailors played an accordion and we danced a reel by the light of the moon. As the beach sloped, we found ourselves dancing gradually down to the water, & the last grand chain was well into the sea.’21

  In the Antipodes, however, disappointment over the cancelled tour was real and widespread. Allen Brown, the bard of her last tour and now Australian High Commissioner in London, sent a poem to Martin Gilliat:

  Trusting Fate would be propitious

  This time we left out Mauritius.

  But indeed as if to spite us

  Fate called in appendicitis.

  Why should Fate thus aim at you

  Something we would never do?

  Let us take firm hold of Fate

  ‘Get well at a rapid rate.’

  And though there’s no one wants to wait

  Pencil in another date.22

  She was willing to do that right away. Gilliat reported to Bernard Fergusson, now Governor General of New Zealand, that she was ‘quite open-minded’ about a visit in one or two years’ time.23 (The next Adelaide Festival would be in March 1966.) She herself wrote to Fergusson about how badly she felt about having let everyone down. After so many inoculations and so many dress fittings, ‘I should not be prone to typhoid or small pox or yellow fever for some years, & tho’ perhaps the chiffons will be a little old fashioned by the time I get out to you, I hope to be fairly healthy.’24

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  ON 24 JANUARY 1965 the news reached Sandringham at breakfast time that Winston Churchill had died. It was a solemn moment for Britain. While Churchill lay in state in Westminster Hall, 300,000 people filed past his coffin. At St Paul’s Cathedral on 29 January he was given the first state funeral for a person not of royal rank since that of the Duke of Wellington in 1852. The ceremony was attended by 6,000 people and all senior members of the Royal Family, including the Queen and the Queen Mother. Fifteen heads of state were there and 112 countries were represented. The ceremony was sombre but stirring and, as Churchill promised, there were ‘lively hymns’. The historian Andrew Roberts later wrote that Churchill’s funeral ‘marked the end of a distinctive epoch in British history, one that had been as glorious as it was long’.25 Indeed, the era of British imperialism into which both Churchill and Queen Elizabeth had been born was gone. But over the years to come Queen Elizabeth remained true to the concept of British greatness which Churchill had defended, preserved and personified. In particular she did everything she could to sustain the Commonweath, Britain’s inspired attempt to come to terms with the end of, and the legacy of, Empire. Her daughter the Queen was, if anything, even more passionately committed to the ideals of the Commonwealth.

  Three weeks after Churchill’s death, Queen Elizabeth set off for a visit to Jamaica, where she had been invited to receive the first honorary degree awarded by the University of the West Indies, of which Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, was chancellor. The journey out on 18 February involved an exhausting wait in a ‘super heated VIP lounge’ at Kennedy Airport, and two more flights before Queen Elizabeth and her party arrived at King’s House, Jamaica, at 5 a.m. London time.26

  On the evening of 20 February her degree of Doctor of Letters was conferred upon her by Princess Alice. She made a short speech of thanks, which was followed by an unexpectedly long peroration by Adlai Stevenson, the distinguished American statesman. As a result it was 10.30 p.m. before the reception for her could be held. By now she was tired, but when a steel band played, she asked to be shown the local Ska dance.

  The next morning, Holy Commun
ion at St Andrew’s Parish Church took some time – over 800 people had come to share the sacrament with her. Then she had a spectacular, twisting drive up into the hills above Kingston to lunch at the military camp of Newcastle. That evening at a special service at the University Chapel, the lights all failed and a torch had to be found so that Princess Alice could read the lesson. When power was restored a dog appeared and wandered up and down the aisle. ‘It was an unusual service!’ noted Queen Elizabeth’s lady in waiting.27

  She was enjoying her trip, Queen Elizabeth wrote to Princess Margaret, but ‘I always have very bad luck with the drinks! Perhaps because I am considered a frail invalid, I am always given delicious fruit drinks with so little alcohol that one feels quite sick! Then I ask timidly if I might have just a very little gin in it, & then too much is put in, & I have to ask for a little more ice to stop my throat being burnt, & so it goes on! This is usually at Government Houses, I may say.’28

  No such problem was likely to arise when she went to lunch with Noël Coward at his house, Firefly Hill. It was a small party and lunch was a delicious curry cooked in a coconut shell. She always enjoyed Coward’s wit and she invited him to stay at Sandringham for the King’s Lynn Festival that July to hear the Russian cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich.* ‘Should I brush up my Russian?’ Coward asked her. ‘It is limited at the moment to “How do you do?” “Shut up you pig” and “She has a white blouse”. But I am eager to improve.’29