Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  Once again, the rest of the family are here in numbers tonight to support the monarch. Prince Harry introduces the Queen to the champion Olympic long-distance runner, Sir Mo Farah, an ambassador for the Young Leaders programme. ‘He’s retiring at the end of the year,’ Prince Harry reminds his grandmother, who needs no reminding. ‘Well, he has run an awful long way,’ says the Queen, to Farah’s obvious delight. ‘I’ve probably gone to Africa and back,’ he tells her.

  The Palace Ballroom is laid out as it would be for an investiture. The Young Leaders queue up to receive their awards from the Queen, ahead of a photo and a grand reception. They will then attend a dinner hosted by Prince Harry. The next day a handful are invited back for an audience with the Queen, including Elizabeth Kite. ‘Nice to see you again,’ the Queen tells them. ‘You’re not too exhausted?’ They are in the same study where the Queen meets her prime ministers and other world leaders. The Governor-General of Papua New Guinea has been in moments earlier to receive his knighthood. The Queen immediately strikes an informal, chatty note. ‘The programme is an interesting one isn’t it?’ she says, turning to Rahat Hossain from Bangladesh. He runs an emergency first-aid network that has now trained 2,600 volunteers. ‘Did you start this?’ the Queen asks. Rahat explains that he set it up after 1,500 compatriots were killed when a building collapsed. ‘That changed my life, I had to start something for the people,’ he says. The Queen is sympathetic. ‘I think Bangladesh has probably been the unluckiest country in the world, hasn’t it, over the years?’ she says, before reminiscing more happily about her own visit in 1983. ‘I thought one of the interesting things about Bangladesh is the difference between the cities and the country. It’s amazing. It’s very – citifed, isn’t it?’ Indeed it is, Rahat concurs.

  Turning to Elizabeth, the Queen apologises for not having been to her home lately. ‘Tonga – I’m afraid, I haven’t been for a very long time,’ she says. ‘I know, but you have come!’ says Elizabeth. ‘I’ve watched the documentaries. Did you enjoy your time there?’ ‘Oh yes, it was wonderful,’ the Queen replies, cheerfully debunking the old myth that one should never ask the monarch a question. ‘We had people playing their nose flutes outside the window. It was the most extraordinary thing to do. It sounds awfully uncomfortable but they do it rather well.’ She casts her mind back to the vast picnic laid on for her by Tonga’s Queen Salote in 1953. ‘The only thing I found difficult was sitting cross-legged – a lot,’ says the Queen. ‘It’s quite painful for people who are not built in the same direction.’

  Elizabeth asks her about Queen Salote.* ‘Of course, I’d met her here,’ says the Queen, mentally ticking off Tongan monarchs she has met. ‘I’ve met both the kings – oh, but I haven’t met the new one.’ She is almost apologetic. ‘Having been here such a long time, I’ve met an awful lot of people!’ Whereupon talk turns to Twitter.

  As she leaves the Palace, Elizabeth and her friends are still trying to take it all in. ‘The best doesn’t even capture how we feel right now,’ she says. ‘I’m going to wake up tomorrow and think: “Did that happen?” We are so lucky to have ended our trip like that.’ All have been struck by the fact that the Queen has such vivid memories of their countries. Elizabeth cannot wait to call her mother. ‘I’m going to get teary, that’s for sure. I already got teary in there.’ She will return to Tonga armed with a message for the young girls to whom she broadcasts: ‘Anything really is possible, anything you dream. I have always dreamed of meeting Her Majesty for tea. I got to meet her one on one – and that is amazing.’

  It is another illustration of that pattern in the Queen’s diary over recent years. The older she has become, the more she has surrounded herself with young people and their work. It is why, when the Queen’s Young Leaders programme had run its course in 2018, she swiftly followed it up with The Queen’s Commonwealth Trust, with Prince Harry as her right-hand man. Why, in her tenth decade, does she keep on inventing new forms of Commonwealth patronage like this? Perhaps because, just like Elizabeth Kite and the others, Elizabeth II was the original Commonwealth young leader who has never really stopped.

  THE WORLD BEYOND

  It was on her twenty-first birthday in 1947 that Princess Elizabeth delivered her famous pledge: ‘My whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family.’ As we shall see, there is now a fascinating little mystery attached to this celebrated address to the world. Yet she has remained unswervingly true to her word. Her message was aimed particularly at her contemporaries. ‘I am thinking especially today of all the young men and women who were born about the same time as myself,’ she said. It was also very pointedly directed at ‘all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire, wherever they live, whatever race they come from, and whatever language they speak’. The reference to ‘peoples’ in the plural, and her explicitly multiracial target audience, would set the tone for the new Commonwealth that was to follow. Within two years the ‘British Commonwealth and Empire’ – as it was officially described -would already start to shed both ‘British’ and ‘Empire’ from its name. From then on, it would be a very different organisation that would occupy and shape so much of the life and the thoughts of Elizabeth II.

  Compared to her children and grandchildren, who would travel the world at a very early age, the most-travelled monarch in history was a late-starter. Princess Elizabeth was twenty before she left Britain for the first time, on what would be her only overseas tour with her parents. Yet it would be a journey that not only taught her the art of royal diplomacy, but also laid the foundations for her record-breaking reign, thanks to that speech which might today be called her ‘mission statement’.

  In the aftermath of the Second World War, Britain was exhausted, virtually bankrupt and viewing the impending dismantling of its Empire with melancholy and alarm. India was well on the way to becoming an independent republic. The Union of South Africa, run by its white minority, was making republican noises, too. King George VI was in dire need of a break, after the stresses of war and ill health. He himself wanted to thank South Africa for its loyalty during the war and to show his support for its Prime Minister, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, the onetime Boer commando leader,† who had gone on to be a great imperial commander in the First World War and a Churchillian elder statesman in the Second. It was Smuts who, in 1945, had drafted and pushed through the preamble to the Charter of the United Nations. His Anglophile Unionists were heading for an election showdown with the far-right Afrikaans-speaking Nationalists the following year. Though ostensibly above politics, the King would do no harm to the prospects of his favourite South African politician by paying him a visit.

  So on 31st January 1947, the King and Queen, together with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, took the train to Portsmouth and boarded the battleship HMS Vanguard, the pride of the British fleet.‡ The weather was atrocious as the royal party headed south with two Private Secretaries, three ladies-in-waiting and a small Royal Household team. The King’s press secretary, Captain Lewis Ritchie, RN, kept an official tour diary, which has remained locked away in the Royal Archives until now.

  After many years at sea, Ritchie was certainly impressed by the special facilities for royal passengers. ‘It should be noted that coat hangers are not provided automatically in a man-of-war,’ he wrote. The Royal Family were clearly suffering. For the first few days, the King and Princesses did not leave their cabins. ‘A good deal of movement. Fifteen-degree roll during the afternoon,’ Ritchie wrote on 2nd February.

  Three days later, the royal party had discovered their sea legs well enough to dance an eightsome reel with ships’ officers on the quarterdeck and watch a film – Odd Man Out. But it was still bracing weather. ‘Domestic note,’ wrote Ritchie. ‘Ashtrays in any places where there is a breeze should be filled with sand.’

  A week later it was ‘insufferably hot’ but raining and Sunday morning service had to be conducted under an awning outside. The Kin
g’s Private Secretary, Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, passed any spare time rereading the later works of Trollope. Mr Scarborough’s Family had proved ‘ideal reading for the tropics, though they give me nostalgia for the relatively cloudless days of the early 1900s’. A brilliant, waspish classicist, who won the Military Cross in the Great War and served four monarchs before his retirement in 1953, Lascelles wrote letters home (now lodged with the rest of his papers at Churchill College, Cambridge) that provide an astute, if occasionally irritable, commentary on one of the great royal adventures of all time.

  As Vanguard crossed the Equator, her less well-travelled passengers were expected to take part in the traditional ‘Crossing the Line’ ceremony for those entering the southern hemisphere for the first time. For the sailors, that meant being smothered in shaving foam, dunked in water and eating soap. The ship’s officer dressed as ‘King Neptune’ was rather more lenient to the Princesses. ‘Razor brush and lather too / Have been debarred for use on you,’ he declared. ‘Elizabeth and Margaret Rose / Accept some powder on each nose.’ The Princesses were forced to eat a candied cherry instead of soap. As they continued south, the crew rigged up a swimming tank for the Princesses, who also enjoyed treasure hunts, yet more films and cocktails with the midshipmen in the Gun Room. The guns would not see much action on this trip. The ship’s commanding officer, Captain Agnew had already received orders forbidding gun salutes on arrival ‘owing to [the] danger of untrained police horses stampeding’.

  The royal party found Cape Town in a state of euphoria, with 1,200 schoolchildren lined up in 105-degree heat on Signal Hill to spell out the word ‘Welcome’. ‘A real Bombay Day,’ wrote Lascelles. ‘Unexpectedly large and enthusiastic crowds . . . a state banquet in a hall as hot as Hades and a terribly slow and dreary dinner, through which we had to sit on very hard little chairs. In thirty years of public dinners, I can’t recall one that caused me greater misery. However, the King spoke well and made a deep impression, and to my great surprise, I found when we got home that the royals had enjoyed it and thought it great fun – especially the young ones.’

  Even on the initial day of her first foreign tour, Princess Elizabeth was already showing an aptitude for the royal diplomatic role that would take up so much of her life. ‘Princess Elizabeth is delightfully enthusiastic and interested,’ wrote Lascelles. ‘She has her grandmother’s passion for punctuality and, to my delight, goes bounding furiously up the stairs to jolt her parents when they are more than usually late.’ He was less impressed with the accommodation. ‘This is one of those incredibly uncomfortable government houses with good rooms but lacking all the essentials like writing tables, tooth glasses etc. and staffed by servants who don’t know if it’s Christmas or Easter.’

  The King’s high regard for Jan Smuts was illustrated from the outset as he awarded him the Order of Merit. Later, at a private dinner, the King and Queen would also give him a famous Afrikaner Bible, looted by the British during the Boer War.

  Captain Ritchie reported an ‘almost incredulous admiration’ among the guests at a garden party. The Royal Family had made it clear that they wanted to meet all sections of South African life, even if their hosts had organised these events on both racially segregated and class lines. There were ‘receptions’ and ‘balls’ for ‘Europeans’ (divided into ‘British’ and ‘Afrikaans’) and ‘non-Europeans’. For ‘Africans’ or ‘natives’ there were ‘rallies’ and ‘indabas’. ‘The most interesting feature of the ball for the non-European community was folk singing by three little Malay girls,’ wrote Captain Ritchie. ‘The City Hall was packed to suffocation.’

  The King was already finding it stressful, Lascelles noted, and suffered ‘repeated spasms of stage fright which gave me much trouble’. Yet George VI battled on through the state opening of parliament, even managing to ‘get out his few sentences of Afrikaans to his own satisfaction’. The Queen, for her part, had worn a ‘too massive tiara which she felt obliged to wear because it is made of the chippings of the Cullinan Diamond.’§

  From Cape Town, the royal party set off across the country by rail in the air-conditioned ‘White Train’, which would be their home for much of the next two months. In between major towns there would be picnics, bathing parties and random stops, with some often touching and unexpected results. At one remote halt, wrote Ritchie, ‘a huge old man with an intractable obstinate face’ galloped up on a Basuto pony. He was Henry Dreyer, an old Boer farmer, who promptly undid the ancient leather belt that he himself had been given by a Central African tribe many years earlier. ‘Give it to the King,’ he said. The tour diary adds: ‘The incident is the more interesting in that he was a rebel in 1914 and fought the British in the Boer War.’

  At Camper, an old man asked Princess Elizabeth if she would look in the direction of his disabled son, Clive, who was at the back of the crowd. The Queen promptly asked for the barrier to be lowered and went over with her daughters to say hello. ‘The father was so overwhelmed with gratitude that he broke down,’ Ritchie noted. The royal party were impressed by the town of Graaff-Reinet in the Great Karoo. Though it had ‘not seen rain for three years’, its floral displays ‘were the best so far’.

  As word spread, so did the expectations of the crowds. When the train failed to stop at Uitenhage, the mayor cabled the train to say that he feared a breakdown of public order. The King swiftly agreed to retrace his steps, with a 20-mile round trip by car back to Uitenhage. The incident rapidly became a topic of national debate, the Natal Daily News warning that there could be no repeat ‘or official time tables will be seriously upset’, while The Star congratulated the King, noting that ‘he overrode the authors of his itinerary’.

  Having originally called for a boycott, the Natal Indian community had decided on a ‘first-class welcome’ ahead of the royal arrival in Durban. One newspaper quoted a stern-faced Boer farmer in Worcester who summed up a popular Afrikaner sentiment: ‘I still don’t like the English but, man, I like the King and Queen’. The view was echoed in the Nationalist press. The New Era said that the royal party would be ‘received with courtesy for they are respected for their personal qualities’, though this should not be misinterpreted as ‘a sudden upsurge of enthusiasm for the Union’s affiliations with Great Britain’. The ultra-conservative Afrikaans newspaper, Die Burger, however, criticised the King for playing tennis on a Sunday. As for the left-wing press in both South Africa and Britain, there was dismay at ‘the apathy and complacency induced by the Royal Visit’. The Guardian warned the oppressed not to ‘take a holiday from the struggle’ or to be duped by ‘feudal devices’. Yet none of this translated into any sort of hostility along the royal route. In fact, the crowds kept on getting larger.

  In Lovedale, Princess Elizabeth heard, for the first time, a piece of music that she would much enjoy hearing again nearly half a century later. A choir of 5,000 black students sang the Bantu national anthem, ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, later to become the first half of the anthem of Nelson Mandela’s multiracial South Africa. ‘In perfect tune,’ wrote Ritchie admiringly, ‘with the basses coming in like an organ, wild and sad – not unlike the songs of Cornish miners and certain Welsh hymns’.

  On 3rd March, the Princess made her first speech of the tour when she opened a dock in the Eastern Cape. ‘This is a young country and everywhere there is a feeling of youth and strength,’ she told an audience who heard almost nothing due to a faulty microphone. The Princess received a casket of cut diamonds – a theme of this tour – for her troubles. There were even a few biblical moments. At Frere General Hospital it was recorded that ‘her presence stimulated a paralysed man into talking at some length although the doctor had not previously heard him say anything but yes and no’.

  One of the largest gathering of ‘natives’ – more than 15,000 – turned out to greet the King in Transkei. Speaking in Xhosa, Chief Jeremiah Moshesh explained that they were in Western dress rather than traditional costume ‘lest the King should think we are naked sava
ges’, to which the diary adds: ‘which was a pity’. The chief then issued the traditional prayer for ‘pula!’ – ‘rain!’ – which promptly followed. ‘The King will get the credit for it,’ wrote Lascelles.

  Like his master, Lascelles was delighted by the warmth of the welcome in the Boer heartlands of the Orange Free State. ‘What fun it is in the OFS discussing the Boer War with old Boer fighters,’ he wrote. ‘They are rolling up in their thousands to give Their Majesties an amazingly good welcome.’ The government minister in attendance, Colin Steyn, regaled the royal party with the story of how his Boer commander father escaped from a British cavalry patrol ‘in nothing but his nightshirt and beard’.

  The high point of this leg of the tour came in Kroonstadt. The royal entourage always love it when something unexpected breaks the monotony. Here, they were gripped by the sight of a local dignitary covered in bees, thanks to his hair lacquer. ‘It was observed that one of the Councillors’ hair was full of bees,’ wrote Ritchie. ‘He was unmoved.’ Lascelles was overjoyed. ‘Knowing the Family,’ he wrote home, ‘you can imagine the instantaneous success this had with them. I was able to set off, in a whisper, a quick one about “bees in the bonnet being better than ants in the pants” which the King used as his own, to the unbridled delight of the rest of the assembly. From that moment, the proceedings at Kroonstad were a Wow.’