After the Victorians
Page 75
Marion Crawford’s charges, known as Lilibet and Margaret Rose, are instantly recognizable portraits. Aged ten, Lilibet is self-contained, obsessively neat – at one point Crawfie found the little girl getting up in the middle of the night to tidy her shoes – and with a piety and sense of duty which would not have been out of place in a medieval or seventeenth-century monarch. When George V died, for example, Margaret Rose, too young to know what was happening, remained absorbed in her toys, but Lilibet looked up from grooming one of her toy horses and asked: ‘Oh Crawfie, ought we to play?’14 Aged ten, ‘If I am ever Queen,’ said Lilibet firmly, ‘I shall make a law that there must be no riding on Sundays. Horses should have a rest too. And I shan’t let anyone dock their pony’s tail.’15 The royal family probably resented Crawfie’s intolerable breach of manners in writing the book at all, and for letting slip such facts as that Margaret had tantrums and Lilibet bit her nails. But throughout the wondrous childhood related by Crawfie there is not a single instance of the child allowing her guard to drop. She is always royal. Typical is the scene during the war when the little princesses are immured in Windsor Castle and there is an air raid. Crawfie runs to the nurseries and calls for Alah, the princesses’ nurse. The Governor of the Castle and the various officials have all rushed down to the air-raid shelter, where in terrible anxiety they await their royal highnesses. But all that Lilibet will say through her bedroom door is: ‘We’re dressing, Crawfie. We must dress.’16 Louis Quatorze would have approved.
No wonder the book published in 1950 was an instant success. Poor Crawfie was banished from royal favour for having written it, but as the nation prepared itself for the coronation, The Little Princesses was an invaluable and authentic glimpse into the personality of the new sovereign.
Rose Macaulay in her subsequently published Letters protested to friends and family at the excesses of royal-worship at the time of the king’s death and, some eighteen months later, his daughter’s coronation. She described February 1952 as ‘this present desert of royal funerals, royal accession proclamations, lauding of the late monarch and the new one, mournful valedictory music and words on the radio, official assumption that all other interests are in abeyance. Most people are now very tired of it; out of no disrespect to the good king dead or the new queen enthroned, for there is a great feeling for both, but the feeling is inflated and blown up of out proportion by our publicists.’17 She describes how, during the two minutes’ silence for the King’s funeral, two absent-minded people continued to walk down Fleet Street, and were pursued by ‘the mob … shouting “Throw him under a bus!” “Put him in the Thames”…’ This robust Victorian liberal, daughter of Lord Macaulay’s nephew, saw that ‘royalty has a hypnotising effect on our nation’,18 and was relieved to be abroad for the coronation ceremony itself.
Few people in the British Commonwealth were able to take so detached or so sophisticated an attitude. For those, now an ageing breed, who recollect it, the coronation is their first experience of television. Those few who owned television sets could invite their friends and neighbours to gather round the wood-encased, flickering grey cathode ray tube to witness the mystery, the shy, smiling woman in her coronet, riding in a state coach to the abbey through driving rain and cheering crowds, her Ruritanian prince in cocked hat and golden epaulettes seated beside her; the royal family awaiting her – the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret in coronets, little Prince Charles in court dress. The television showed, too, the peerage, en masse, living embodiments of the Watson and Crick demonstration that genes are all. Perhaps some of their ermine was a little moth-eaten, their coronets a little tarnished, but there they all were, after a half-century of democracy, still possessed of their titles, their voting rights in the Second Chamber, and many of them still among the richest in the land. The young Duke of Devonshire, though all but bankrupted by death duties, was still the heir to one of the greatest estates in England. Together with Lord Wilton, thirty-two, he chartered a launch to glide down the Thames that night. ‘It’s mainly to give the children a chance to see the fireworks,’ the duchess, formerly the Hon. Deborah Mitford, told reporters. Television viewers, too, could see the bishops of the Church in their copes, escorting the young monarch to her throne. In her right hand was placed the sceptre and cross, ensign of power and justice; in her left, the rod with the dove, a sign that equity and mercy would temper that power. She was anointed with the oil of chrism on her head and on her chest by the former headmaster of Repton, Dr Geoffrey Fisher, archbishop of Canterbury, a crossword fanatic and firm disciplinarian who, while headmaster, had caned the schoolboy Michael Ramsey, who now stood beside the throne as bishop of Durham. British life, in other words, in all its old-fashioned oddity, was much as it had always been. And here came the crowned heads of other lands, driving through the rain in their landaus – the big, jolly, laughing queen of Tonga, and opposite her the diminutive sultan of Johore. (Who was that? ‘Her lunch,’ replied Noël Coward.) And here is the Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, dressed as Warden of the Cinque Ports, stiff with gold braid, and golden buttons, and medals and old glory, his smiling Clementine, tiara’d and bejewelled, beside him, in the mantle and collar of the GBE.
‘Have you your camera with you to-day?’ asked the London Evening Standard. ‘Then catch the mood of Gay London and enter your snapshot in the Evening Standard’s Gay London contest.’19 They simply meant that London was a jolly place that day: they were not asking for photographs of particularly attractive guardsmen or police officers.
Coronation Day gave the British, and the Empire, a chance to relive VE and VJ Day. The atmosphere was ‘Look, we have come through!’ They had conquered the brigand states, they had conquered the poverty and wretchedness of the 1920s and 1930s, they could afford to be self-congratulatory and optimistic. All their patriotic joy could be focused on the young woman who, with such dignity and grace, gave herself up to these arcane and centuries-old rituals. After the coronation, and before the fireworks, the Home Service of the BBC broadcast Jennifer Vyvyan (soprano), accompanied by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent, singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Much had happened in the years since Dame Clara Butt first sang the song in public in the Royal Opera House in 1902 at the time of Edward VII’s (delayed) coronation. In those days, it still made sense to believe that the bounds of the Empire would be set ‘wider still and wider’. Now, with India gone, the Middle East in turmoil, and Africa merely waiting for independence, the imperial pomp of the British seemed merely unrealistic.
We began this book in the snows of the Himalayas, with Younghusband’s invasion of Tibet. Since early spring 1953, forty-two-year-old Colonel John Hunt had been leading a team of British and New Zealand mountaineers, together with Nepalese Sherpas, with the aim of climbing Everest. On Coronation Day, at 8 am, a New Zealander called Edmund Hillary and a Sherpa named Tenzing, with their oxygen supplies running low, reached the peak of the highest mountain in the world and placed there a tiny Union Jack.20 The mountaineering feat was described in military language as a ‘conquest’, though the British were not on this occasion taking possession of the mountain, nor had they met any resistance, except from the elements.
The Evening Standard probably represented quite widely and seriously held opinion when it said:
Let the mind travel far from the Coronation route to the snow of Everest. There, on this day of Elizabeth’s crowning, the Union Jack flies proud, defiant and challenging on a place where no man has been before.
Is this achievement the product of an Empire that has seen its finest hour and can look forward only to increasing decrepitude and senility? Or is it an omen designed to show that with the Crowning of Elizabeth a new age begins? An age in which if they only have the courage and faith to seize it, there can be for the British people in the years to come greater glory and greater power than they have ever known before?
Much significance was read by the newspaper into the fact that the man who planted the f
lag was a New Zealander ‘working and fighting in partnership and fellowship with other men of the Empire’. (The Standard was still a Beaverbrook newspaper.) ‘Does not the lesson of Everest stand out clear that while collectively and acting in unity the men of the Empire can conquer everything, singly they can conquer nothing?’
Such sentiments, when read today, can produce smiles of nostalgia or derision depending upon temperament. They were written in an intelligent newspaper and in 1953 they were believed by the great majority of British people. Vestiges of the creed, imaginatively adapted, survive in Queen Elizabeth II’s unswerving belief in the British Commonwealth of nations. Her coronation service was in part a splendid piece of religio-patriotic pageantry to celebrate great things which deserved celebration: peace, freedom, prosperity. In part, however, it can now be seen as a consoling piece of theatre, designed to disguise from themselves the fact that the British had indeed, as Dean Acheson so accurately remarked nearly a decade later, lost an empire and failed to find a role.
Notes
1 Oedipus Rex, Oedipus Kaiser
1 Sigmund Freud, p. 202.
2 ibid., p. 203.
3 Dearest Mama, ed. Roger Fulford, p. 30.
4 ibid., p. 55.
5 His collar bore the legend, ‘I belong to the King’, Hibbert, p. 231.
6 Edel (ed.) (1984), p. 184.
7 ibid., p. 181.
8 ibid.
9 Both quoted Hibbert, p. 299.
10 Thomas A. Kohut, ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II and his parents’, in Rohl & Sombart, pp. 70–1.
11 Pakula, pp. 362–3.
12 Kohut, ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II and his parents’.
13 Lamar Cecil, ‘History as family chronicle’, in Rohl & Sombart, p. 106.
14 ibid., p. 105.
15 Manchester Guardian, 6 January 1896, Reinermann (2001), p. 165.
16 ibid., p. 188.
17 Daily Chronicle, 20 November 1899, Reinermann, p. 191.
18 Daily Telegraph, 5 February 1901.
19 St Aubyn, p. 344.
20 Topham, p. 141.
21 Van der Kiste, p. 127.
22 Daily Mail, 5 February 1901.
23 Van der Kiste, p 127.
24 Ensor, p. 377.
25 Steed, p. 283.
26 Fortescue, p. 369.
27 St Aubyn, p. 325.
28 ibid., p. 354.
29 ibid., p. 359.
30 Lee, vol. II, p. 676.
31 Hibbert, p. 219.
2 Rupees and Virgins
1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 13th edn (1926), ‘Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim’.
2 ibid., ‘Machine-Gun’.
3 Morris, p. 134.
4 Patrick French, p. 221.
5 ibid., p. 224.
6 Younghusband Collection. Oriental and India Office, Mss. Eur F/197/80.
7 Verrier, p. 146.
8 Alastair Lamb, Introduction to Younghusband (1985), p.v.
9 010C, Younghusband Collection, Mss. Eur F/197/80.
10 Verrier, p. 199.
11 ibid.
12 Younghusband Collection, Mss. Eur F/197/80.
13 Patrick French, p. 242.
14 Carrington, p. 235.
15 ibid., p. 240.
16 Kipling (2002), p. 257.
17 Bombay Gazette, 10 December 1904.
18 Nicolson, p. 59.
19 Gilmour, p. 118.
20 010C Mss. Eur F 306/12.
21 Brown & Louis, p. 7.
22 Dilks (1970), vol. I, p. 177.
23 ibid., I, p. 170.
24 Ronald Hyam, ‘The British Empire in the Edwardian Era’, Brown & Louis, p. 50.
25 Symonds, p. 37.
26 Kipling (2002), p. 239.
27 Nanda, p. 43.
28 ibid., p. 67.
29 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, 5th series, vol. I, col. 132.
30 ‘The Killing Fields’, New Statesman, 26 January 2004, p. 18.
31 Owen, p. vii.
32 Wells, p. 268.
3 The Land
1 Jaeger, p. 118.
2 Marsh, p. 195.
3 Michael Kennedy, p. 172.
4 Moore (1984), p. 84.
5 Michael Kennedy, p. 172.
6 Newsome (1980), p. 105.
7 Marsh, p. 71.
8 Christopher Taylor (1975), p. 161.
9 Ridley, p. 143.
10 Brown (1982), pp. 26–7.
11 Ridley, p. 57.
12 Brown (1996), pp. 26–5.
13 Galsworthy, p. 51.
14 ibid., p. 52.
15 Darwin, p. 35.
16 Marsh, p. 83.
17 Camplin, p. 30.
18 ibid., p. 30.
19 Horn, p. 217.
20 ibid., p. 224.
21 Camplin, p. 253.
22 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edn, vol. 19, ‘Macropaedia’, p. 573.
23 MacNeil, pp. 210–12.
23 ibid., p. 212.
24 ibid., p. 367.
25 ibid., p. 361.
26 ibid., p. 131.
27 Statistics in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edn, vol. 19, ‘Macropaedia’, p. 577.
28 Robert Blake, p. 282.
29 ibid., p. 283.
30 A. N. Wilson (2002), p. 586.
31 Crook (1997), p. 239.
4 The Accursed Power
1 Butler & Freeman, p. 122.
2 Jenkins (1964), pp. 179–80.
3 Ensor, p. 390.
4 McCarthy, pp. 102–3.
5 ibid., p. 103.
6 Camplin p. 61.
7 McCarthy, p. 109.
8 OED.
9 Ensor, p. 375.
10 Donald Read (ed.) p. 59.
11 Camplin, p. 74.
12 Randolph S. Churchill, vol. II, pp. 89–90.
13 Money, p. 39.
14 Donald Read (ed.), p. 16.
15 Randolph S. Churchill, vol. II, p. 31.
16 ibid., p. 113.
17 Belloc (1991), p. 115.
18 DNB (1922–1930), p. 298.
19 Eustace et al., p. 61.
20 Webb (1971), p. 353.
21 Webb (1983), p. 57 (5 November 1906).
22 ibid., p. 27 (1 March 1906).
23 ibid.
24 ibid., p. 39 (15 July 1906).
25 ibid., p. 40.
26 ibid., p. 122 (‘Early August’).
27 ibid., p. 163.
28 ibid., p. 81.
29 Carey, p. 125.
5 Love in the Suburbs
1 Jenkins (2001), p. 8.
2 Aronson, p. 213.
3 Webb (1984), p. 54.
4 ibid., p. 402.
5 Maddox, p. 95.
6 ibid., p. 113.
7 D. H. Lawrence (1981), p. 217.
8 Corke, p. 41.
9 Arnold Bennett, p. 321.
10 Ridley.
11 ibid., p. 120.
12 ibid., p. 168.
13 ibid., p. 247.
14 Filson Young, p. 211.
15 Hesketh Pearson, p. 124.
16 Cullen (1977), p. 140.
17 ibid., p. 59.
18 ibid., p. 218.
19 ibid., p. 132.
20 ibid., p. 221.
6 God – and the Americans
1 Anson, p. 282.
2 Falkner, p. 393.
3 Vidler, p. 49.
4 Loisy, vol. I, p. 41.
5 ibid., p. 72.
6 Carpenter, p. 102.
7 ibid., p. 124.
8 Kenner, p. 5.
9 William James, pp. 506–7.
10 Edel (1972), pp. 373–4.
11 Chesterton, p. 53.
12 Stewart, pp. 107–8.
13 Edel (1972), p. 539.
7 Nationalisms
1 The Annual Register, p. 137.
2 ibid.
3 Morgan (1981), p. 183. Morgan (1966), pp. 28–30.
4 Grigg (1978), p. 51.
5 ibid., p. 35.
6 Morgan (1966), p. 25.
7 Morgan (1981), p. 5.
8 ibid., p. 184.
9 Lord Robert Cecil’s preface to Ormsby-Gore, p. 10.
10 The Rev. John Owen, quoted Ballinger, p. 61.
11 ibid., p. 15.
12 D. H. Lawrence (1930), pp. 190, 184.
13 Hyam, p. 87.
14 Powell (1995), p. 6.
15 ibid.
16 British Medical Journal 1907, p. 1412.
17 Hyam, p. 76.
18 ibid.
19 Quoted Hamilton (2004), p. 5.
20 ibid, p. 87.
21 Geoffrey Alderman, ‘The Anti-Jewish Riots of August 1911 in South Wales’, The Welsh History Review, vol. 6, December 1971, no. 2, p. 191.
22 ibid., p. 197.
23 Garrard, p. 213.
24 Norman Rose, p. 47.
25 ibid., p. 50.
26 Litvinoff (ed.), p. 55.
27 Isaiah Berlin, quoted Halpern, p. 9.
28 Norman Rose, p. 102.
29 ibid., p. 137.
30 ibid., p. 144.
31 Litvinoff (ed.), p. 11.
32 ibid., p. 17.
33 ibid., p. 19.
34 ibid., p. 20.
35 Noam Chomsky, Guardian, 11 May 2002.
36 Kee, p. 182 and passim.
37 ibid., p. 191.
38 ibid., p. 219.
39 Foster (1989), p. 471.
40 Kee, p. 195.
41 Dudgeon, p. 180.
42 ibid., p. 153.
43 ibid., p. 416.
44 ibid., p. 448.
45 Doerries, p. 20.
46 Kee, p. 271.
47 Foster (1989), p. 483. Kee, p. 274, has 64 rebels killed during the week’s fighting, 220 civilians, and 600 Crown forces wounded. 134 Crown forces were killed or died of wounds.
48 From ‘Easter 1916’, Yeats, p. 180.
49 Kee, p. 4, and for much of the above, pp. 1–15.
50 Yeats, p. 182.
51 ibid., p. 7.
52 Dudgeon, p. 12.
53 ibid., p. 614.
54 ibid, p. 491.
55 ibid., p. 18.
8 Shipwreck
1 Behrmann, p. 82.
2 Kenneth Rose, p. 321.
3 ibid., p. 226.
4 ibid.
5 Pope-Hennessy, p. 100.
6 ibid.
7 Boyd Carpenter Papers, BL Add. 46722, f 70.
8 Topham, p. 237.