by Andrew Marr
For, fundamentally, television flattens. In person, most British people would feel some sense of awe in the Queen’s actual presence. Distanced by the TV lens, they feel none. We want to see more and more, close-ups and private moments. We have the illusion of intimacy. We want to know more. Monarchy must respond to changing public tastes but monarchy depends on an aura of mystery and personal distance, Bagehot’s ‘magic’. How is it possible to reconcile familiarity and magic? Through her reign, the Queen has struggled to answer that question.
The earliest years had been no problem. Richard Dimbleby’s encyclopedic knowledge of royal and constitutional history, and the fixed cameras needed for state occasions, meant that a genre of slow-marching, hushed reporting established itself. The Palace had simply refused to allow cameras anywhere near private family moments; even filming the outside of palaces was frowned upon. The BBC hierarchy rarely pushed requests for more access. Broadcasters dressed formally and waited with shiny shoes for formal announcements.
This changed quite soon. Prince Philip had had experience of TV in making scientific programmes and then in 1966 he had been a key figure in giving the go-ahead for Royal Palaces of Britain, a documentary by Kenneth Clark (who later made the series Civilisation) about six royal palaces. That had been the first time most people had seen inside the walls and gardens of Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Kensington Palace, St James’s Palace and Hampton Court – the paintings, the décor, the flowers, the grand ballrooms. It was a safe subject, in safe hands, safely produced as a joint venture by the BBC and its upstart commercial rival ITV. Broadcast by both channels on Christmas Day 1966, it was a success. If the Coronation cameras had shed daylight on the ancient ritual, Clark had pulled back the curtain on the country’s once mysterious royal residences.
But the most startling royal attempt to change with the times came two years later, when the Queen decided to allow television cameras to follow her and her close family for a television documentary film. Royal Family went a giant step further than Royal Palaces had and allowed the cameras to pore over the Queen, the Duke and their children. It followed some of the ritual and pomp of the royal year and tried to explain the Queen’s job. But its punch was in answering, at least partly, the question, ‘But what are they like?’ It allowed anyone with a television a view of the Windsors apparently so intimate that only a handful of courtiers and family friends had been there before. As in 1966, Prince Philip was crucial to the project, chairing an advisory committee to oversee the experiment.
For seventy-five days during 1969 a film crew of eight, again working jointly for the BBC and ITV, were allowed remarkable access to the family. The film’s producer was the head of BBC documentaries, Richard Cawston, a tall and debonair former army signals officer whose career at the Corporation had made him a master of camerawork, sound, the cutting room and the dubbing theatre. Cawston knew he could hardly ask the Queen for a second take, so everything would be at least partly spontaneous ‘cinéma-vérité’. The camera team became so familiar that the family did indeed almost start to forget they were there.
The Queen, according to Cawston, became quite an expert about problems of lighting and sound recording. Forty-three hours of film were edited to produce the 105-minute final programme. Most viewers today would be struck by the upper-class 1950s accents and old-fashioned clothing, but the informal shots of a family barbecue at Balmoral, the Queen driving her car, walking with dogs and chatting with the young children, are still fresh and interesting. The Queen smiles and sometimes laughs as she goes about the serious business of reigning. Prince Andrew and Prince Edward, who had barely been seen by the public, seem normal, cheerful boys. The shrewd script by Antony Jay, later of Yes, Minister fame, was respectful but lightened with gentle jokes. Of the royal Rolls-Royces he noted, ‘no cars in the world can have been driven so far, so slowly’. Jay says now he thought the film had emerged ‘because in the 1960s there couldn’t have been a decade that was more anti-monarchy . . . It was about classlessness. It was about equality. It was about being popular. And all the things that the royal family represented, like order and respectability, were jokes.’ In the press, even the conservative press, he felt, there was ‘a feeling that, you know, the royal family – well, their time’s gone. Nothing to do with us. What are they? Oh, they’re just an irrelevance.’
Lord Brabourne, the film producer married to Mountbatten’s daughter, had come up with the idea, says Jay. He thought, ‘if only people could see what the royal family is like, they’d feel much, much better disposed towards them. And he put up this idea for a film, a BBC film, just showing them. Not a defence of the monarchy, but just an explanation, a portrait of it.’ Jay says he was much impressed that the Royals, though well used to cameras, were much more worried about what the microphones might pick up, not on their own account but that they might hurt other people: ‘That they might say things that would upset people, particularly, you know, the high ranking people, dignitaries from other countries and all the rest of it, who might be upset by what they said. So they were much more worried about the sound than they were about the pictures.’20 They need not have worried. Cawston, in Jay’s reckoning, was a great diplomat as well as a great film-maker. Though the BBC had a ‘very strong republican element’ at producer level higher up, the film was considered a great coup and so there was a strong element of BBC self-censorship in not wanting to offend, ‘a sort of deferential sense of respect and obligation towards the monarchy and there was no doubt who was the boss in the operation’.
When it was shown in the summer of 1969, Royal Family became easily the most watched documentary in the history of British television, with 23 million people tuning in to see the first showing, in black and white, on the BBC and another 15 million watching it when it was shown on ITV in colour.21 An estimated 68 per cent of British adults watched the film. The reaction was everything the Duke of Edinburgh would have hoped for. Even the New Statesman’s republican-leaning television critic John Holmstrom found that the Queen, ‘who doesn’t always look very appealing or animated on newsreels, emerges as a warm, engaging and even girlish person, capable of little giggles of motherly pleasure . . .’ He concluded that Cawston and Jay should be given knighthoods: ‘They’ll certainly have added a decade or two to the life of the British monarchy.’22 In the Spectator they welcomed the film and mocked the idea that by letting in the cameras the monarchy had devalued itself: ‘If the sight of the Queen making salad is thought to dissolve the magic of monarchy, what about this sort of comment: “His late Majesty, though at times a jovial, and, for a King, an honest man, was a weak, ignorant, common-place sort of person . . . his feebleness of purpose and littleness of mind, his ignorance and his prejudice . . .” ’ before revealing that the remarks came from their own obituary of William IV.
The Queen and the Prince seemed pleased by the huge audience figures and the general reaction. Perhaps at the Duke’s suggestion, the Queen gave her appearance fee and share of the profits, £60,000, to the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, which helped it move to its current headquarters in Piccadilly. Neither Cawston nor Jay was honoured at the time, though Jay was knighted later on. He also wrote the film Elizabeth R and was made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. He was interested enough in the Queen’s role to later consider making a sequel to his Yes, Minister called Yes, Ma’am. Yet in retrospect, there were faint indications that letting in the cameras was a tricky business. Stuart Hood, the Spectator’s television critic, felt that it had been ‘the apotheosis of home movies’ whose purpose must have been ‘to promote the idea that one family is very like another. It may even presage a move to a Scandinavian type monarchy.’23 If the first proposition was tenable, the second was certainly not the message intended. After the year of its release, the Queen did not permit the original uncut documentary to be shown again.
Those who suggested that Royal Family was intended as a riposte to inquisitive politicians
, or even to bizarre rumours about the supposed ill-health of the Queen and younger princes, were told this was all nonsense. The film had been meant as a prelude to the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales a few days later on 1 July.
Prince Charles had by now undergone much of the training his father had wanted for him – head boy at Gordonstoun, further toughening up in an Australian outback school, RAF jet training and university – he was then at Cambridge, studying history. The next step would be the navy, but before that he was to be introduced to his public role. The investiture was, in its way, as ambitious an attempt to re-project a modernized monarchy as Cawston’s film. This time, however, the choreographer was not the Duke of Edinburgh or a BBC producer, but one of the younger and newer Royals by marriage, Princess Margaret’s husband, Anthony Armstrong-Jones, who had become Lord Snowdon after their wedding in 1960. The child of a barrister and a mother from a notably arty family, divorced early, Armstrong-Jones had become a successful society and royal photographer. Thanks to another upwardly mobile Welshman, David Lloyd George, the ancient practice of ‘investing’ Princes of Wales had been moved to the spectacular setting of Caernarvon Castle and turned into a patriotic spectacle as long ago as 1911. The romantic and artistic Lord Snowdon, appointed by the Queen Constable of Caernarvon, decided it was the perfect opportunity to design a contemporary royal pageant, theatrical and television-friendly.
The castle would be refurbished. Giant stages would be erected. The largest perspex structure ever made would be created, all to show off the young prince. Snowdon began a struggle with the more traditionalist Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk. A wickedly perceptive article in the New Statesman saw this as a fight between old monarchism and the new ways, between ‘the greatest expert in ceremonial nonsense outside the Vatican’ and Snowdon’s ‘Mary Quant’ world-view: ‘One could search the universe in vain for two men who have less in common . . . the Duke knows the exact degree of precedence between, say, an Irish countess and the eldest son of an English baronet; he can spot an incorrectly dressed Herald Extraordinary at a hundred yards flat; but he has neither the desire nor the talent for designing canopies and pennants, has no knowledge of textiles and the uses to which they can be put; he is not trendy and has no wish to be.’24
By 1969 it was at last the Sixties in the full meaning of the phrase, and so Lord Snowdon won. The investiture was indeed a carnival of colour and modern design, meant to show Wales as being both romantically ancient and also, with its Severn Bridge and nuclear power stations, determinedly modern. On the day an astonishing 250,000 people thronged the streets of the small town and the television coverage, with a young, oddly vulnerable-looking Prince Charles repeating his vows of fealty to his mother in English and newly studied Welsh, was spectacular. Philip Howard, writing in The Times caught the mood of rapturous excitement: ‘There were proud peacock processions, frequent fanfares of silver, snarling trumpets, coveys of red dragons . . . hymns, harps and heraldry, choirs carolling, brass bands booming, dodders of druids and bards . . . lions rampant, regimental goats . . . It was the greatest television spectacular in history, a carnival to entice tourists to Wales for years.’
So it was. And yet it was not quite the unvarnished success for the monarchy Lord Snowdon had hoped for. This was a time when Welsh nationalism was on the march, and in a more militant mood than ever before. An ‘explosive device’, later found to be a dummy, was discovered under a railway bridge on the royal route. Two naval minesweepers patrolled the entrance to Caernarvon harbour and a team of frogmen was waiting on board the Royal Yacht to search for underwater bombs. There was a gelignite explosion at Abergele, where two men were killed, apparently by their own bomb. In Cardiff Post Office six sorters had a narrow escape when a parcel bomb exploded, the fourth bombing in the city in three months. Telegraph wires running along the railway track to Caernarvon were cut and later a soldier was killed when a military police van caught fire and exploded. Among the crowds there was scattered booing and a few eggs were thrown. None of this amounted to anything like the serious unrest emerging in Northern Ireland. Nor would the ‘Free Wales Army’ amount to a serious threat when some of its adherents later faced trial. But the mood had changed from the unrestrained enthusiasm the Queen had enjoyed when she announced during a visit to Cardiff in 1958 that Prince Charles would become Prince of Wales, or during her 1963 visit to Caernarvon. Welsh national pride was no longer automatically loyal to the British idea. The Scots had shown flickers of nationalism when students stole back the Stone of Destiny, used during Coronations, from Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1950. Scottish nationalists later attacked letter-boxes with ‘ERII’ on them, since she was the first Queen Elizabeth in Scotland. Now Welsh nationalists were causing trouble too. Monarchism relies on common symbols, reliably beckoning common responses. It seemed that different parts of the United Kingdom were beginning to lean in different directions, while the centre seemed less sure of itself, for all its pageantry and colour.
The Swingeing Seventies
Though the 1970s was a difficult decade for the British state (not necessarily for the British people, who enjoyed foreign holidays, better health and a greater variety of food than ever before) these were in general good years for the Windsors. The Cawston film, the settlement of the financial argument, the emergence of Prince Charles as a public figure and of Princess Anne as a horsewoman good enough to compete at the Olympics, added up to a family success story. Prince Charles was in his action-man phase, a trained RAF jet pilot and then naval officer who seemed to be relaxing more into his public role, and had already taken on important royal visits to Japan, South America and the US. He was learning to make speeches: intermittent speculation in the media about girlfriends was still genial, even friendly, in tone. Under the surface, the story was not so happy. As a man carving his own place in the dynasty, Charles had become increasingly cut off from his parents. He had been unable to form a very close relationship with his father, and while in awe of his mother, found her mostly physically or mentally focused on her job. One of the questions raised time and again by people who know the royal family is the dilemma of ‘what went wrong’ and the extent to which the Queen can be blamed for her oldest son’s unhappiness.
It is interesting, and true, that we seem to find it easier to empathize with ancient historical times than our own recent past. Nothing is as far away as the world of our grandparents. The Queen had been brought up in a largely male world, dominated by ritual and duty. She had close and loving parents but from a very young age her responsibilities had been drummed into her. The speech she gave in South Africa on her twenty-first birthday was the speech of a true believer – in monarchy, nationhood, God and destiny – which left little room for an ordinary relaxed family life. She became queen of a nation and a wider Commonwealth that were quick to criticize absences and jealous of their right to see and hear the monarch. Time-management rules her every moment. The diary is her most unrelenting master. And Charles was her first child. The aristocracy had developed habits of bringing up sons who went to Eton, Harrow or a handful of other posh schools and mingled at dances and hunts, going on to live lives surrounded by friends they had made early. But the royal family are not aristocracy. They are apart. Furthermore, the Queen had had no brothers or close childhood male friends. She had never attended a school herself. So it should hardly be a surprise that she sub-contracted much of the job of looking after Charles to Prince Philip.
He, as we have seen, had had a disrupted childhood himself during which boarding school had been a delight and an inspiration. So in turn it was no surprise that he hoped Charles would thrive, as he had thrived, at Gordonstoun and then in the navy. None of this makes Charles’s unhappy early life happier. But it ought to ram home the glibness of psychologists (and poets) who rush to blame the parents for every problem faced by children in later life. Parents are people too. They have their own lives, and their own problems, and a retrospective orgy of blaming every prev
ious generation for the troubles of the next leads nowhere but to emotional quagmire. In the end, individual temperament matters more than anything else. Another son – indeed Prince Andrew, perhaps – could have lived Charles’s early life and enjoyed every moment. So blame is inappropriate. Charles was simply very different. Genetic shuffling ensures these mismatches happen all the time.
Thinking of himself as a future monarch, however, Charles was becoming increasingly independent-minded. Though there were two charitable trusts raising money for good causes and connected to the Silver Jubilee of 1977, he was becoming interested in the idea of his own Prince’s Trust, which would disburse grants to individuals, as well as organizations, in order to give deprived teenagers a fresh start in life. Though there were aspects of him that contrasted with his parents’ values (his fascination with Eastern spirituality, say) there was also much that he had learned from them, and from the very same institutions he had flinched from. He believed in physical challenges, self-discipline, order and authority. He was no kind of hippy. He recoiled from the joshing, alpha-male atmosphere of the navy but he was a traditionalist when it came to the military, to ceremonial and protocol. He loved the humour of the Goons, routinely referred to as ‘anarchic’ – but he was quick to rebuke secretaries for spelling errors or to blast equerries for minor failures. So, as he began to take a more active and prominent public role, the Prince was already a complex figure.