Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  For the Queen, this was a visit that had to blend the forward-looking egalitarianism of the new India with a nod to those who had been most loyal to her late father – India’s own royalty. In all his dealings with his British ministers during the moves towards Partition, the King’s firmest intervention had been to seek ‘fair play’ for the princes and nobility. Dressed in a white gown and the same Russian Fringe Tiara that she had worn at her own wedding, the Queen spoke of the ‘free partnership’ of the Commonwealth, before gently reminding India not to jettison its past. ‘You do not wish India in all the fierce rush and strain of the modern world to become oblivious of the best traditions and the great legacy from former generations,’ she said.

  Underlining that point, the royal couple were promptly transported back to the past a day later. Having flown into modern Delhi, they then travelled to Rajasthan to spend a couple of days rooted in Raj-era India with the Maharajah of Jaipur. As the royal car approached Jaipur, the couple switched to a pair of elephants. ‘Fasten your seatbelt,’ yelled the Duke of Edinburgh as the Queen set off on top of a richly decorated, hand-painted creature called Beauty. Royal photographer Reginald Davis, by now struck down with dysentery, took what he still regards as one of his best-ever pictures: an image of the Queen, beaming down from Beauty’s back. At the palace, the Maharajah presented 200 local noblemen, all dressed in the same extravagantly elaborate ceremonial garb in which their forebears had greeted George V at the great Delhi Durbar of 1911. The women present were expected to watch through peepholes in the alcoves above. The only nod to the twentieth century was that the official programme omitted the word ‘durbar’ and called this a ‘reception’ instead.

  The Maharajah was very clear about the main purpose of the visit: the Duke of Edinburgh was going to shoot a tiger. At that very moment the Duke was in the process of establishing the World Wildlife Fund, which would be founded four months later. Yet in the India of 1961, the tiger was still seen as a dangerous pest and a very desirable trophy. There was certainly no secrecy about the exercise. ‘Of course I plan to shoot a tiger if possible. Why not?’ the Duke had told reporters at an earlier reception in Delhi. The Maharajah had even erected a special press tent in the jungle, complete with bar and telegraphing facilities, to enable the world’s media to report on progress. In Britain, the League Against Cruel Sports was objecting loudly. It was not the killing of tigers that upset many members of the British public nearly as much as the fact that the hunt involved a tethered buffalo as bait. It was hardly sport. Ever sensitive to opinions overseas, the Indian authorities were irritated by the criticism. ‘How can the English fuss when they spend their time hunting stags and foxes and happily watch their hounds tearing the animals to pieces?’ a government spokesman told the Evening Standard. ‘At least we don’t sit and watch the buffalo.’ One Indian commentator complained to the Guardian that Western critics were wrong in portraying this as a purely aristocratic pursuit, pointing out that many heroes of the left had also pursued tigers: ‘Why give a sport which Tito and Nasser enjoyed an imperialistic flavour?’ According to this argument, tiger-shooting was every bit as proletarian as darts or rugby league.

  Day and night, the Queen, the Duke and their hosts waited in a machan or tree platform while 200 beaters scoured the jungle below. Finally, on their third outing, the Duke bagged a tigress just as it was time to return to Delhi.

  The episode had done little to temper Indian excitement about the visit. The Times of India said that the Queen had ‘aroused fabulous enthusiasm in republican India’, attributing this both to the legacy of Gandhi and to the fact that ‘Britain had the courage and the good sense to be essentially liberal in her Indian empire’. There was, however, irritation among the new political establishment that the old aristocracy were peddling an outdated image of India; that the media were focusing on clichés like tiger-hunting instead of the country’s exciting new steel industry. The Indian Express voiced what it called a ‘trenchant criticism of the Maharajah’. Nehru had a more restrained dig at the old grandee, telling politicians: ‘In the past, people thought of India as a country of snakes and snake charmers, the rope trick and gay Maharajahs. Well, they are still there but they are fading, and rightly so.’

  The British press preferred to blame the royal advisers, rather than the royal couple, for the dead tigress in Jaipur. Elsewhere in the Commonwealth, however, the reaction was scathing. Noting that the Queen was present throughout the tiger hunt, the Melbourne Age lamented: ‘The presence of the Queen unhappily sets the stamp of her approval’ on ‘a grotesque revival from the magic-lantern days of potentates and sahibs’. It ‘lacked only the Duke’s right foot planted melodramatically on the sacrificial beast’s neck to bring back days we thought were dead beyond recall’.

  India was much more interested in another sight. The Queen agreed to attend the country’s Republic Day parade in Delhi, the first time a foreign head of state had joined the President as he received the salutes. Not even Eisenhower had done that. Old India and new were competing for attention once again, as costumed elephants paraded past the presidential dais while a helicopter hovered overhead, dropping marigold petals on the VIP area.

  Back in Britain, there was fresh grumbling. It had nothing to do with wildlife. Why was the Queen driving around in both a Mercedes and a Cadillac, but not a Rolls-Royce? Might this be some sort of nose-rubbing exercise by the Indians? Why, the London Evening Standard demanded, was the Queen not promoting British industry? It turned out that the hosts had, in fact, contacted Rolls-Royce the previous year to order a new open-topped vehicle, but the company had replied that making one in six months would be ‘out of the question’. The Indians had then spoken to Mercedes, which found it no problem at all. Here was another small illustration of the dismal state of Britain’s post-war productivity.

  Before leaving Delhi for a moonlit inspection of the Taj Mahal, the Queen reaffirmed her belief in the Commonwealth as ‘a practical example of the kind of relationship which human beings can have if only they will listen to the good of their own hearts’. Addressing the Mayor of Delhi, she added that she was excited to be visiting ‘the new factories, the power stations . . . signs of an ampler life in the towns and the villages’. There would be plenty of that during royal visits to major industrial cities like Ahmedabad and Bombay. In Calcutta, she was greeted by what was perhaps the largest single crowd that has ever turned out for her. Not even her Coronation had drawn the estimated 3.5 million who gathered on the streets of the capital of West Bengal. The British press gleefully reported (and no doubt the Foreign Office gleefully noted) that this was considerably more than the three million who had turned out for Khrushchev when the Soviet leader visited Calcutta the previous year.

  It was essential for the Queen to honour both sides of the Partition divide. However, the tone of the visit was entirely different in Pakistan, where the Queen’s host was General Ayub Khan, by now three years into a military dictatorship. Instead of a focus on industry and civic development, the emphasis was on martial might. The tour involved a review of Pakistan’s fleet and several army tattoos. If the lack of democracy ran counter to the Commonwealth’s mantra of enlightened fellowship, it did not show. The Queen certainly wasn’t going to criticise this particular host for taking power at the point of a gun. At the state banquet in Karachi,¶ she said ‘it should not come as a surprise’ if British forms of government had been modified since independence. ‘The forms are not sacred but the ideals behind them are,’ she noted. Her effective endorsement of military rule delighted Pakistan’s leadership. Though her words had obviously been prepared by the Foreign Office rather than the Queen herself, the royal couple clearly got on well with their Sandhurst-trained host, who delighted in organising more shooting parties and polo matches for the Duke of Edinburgh.

  Having been struck by the extremes between rich and poor in India, the British media were struck by the great divide between the sexes in Pakistan, as well as the Queen’s capaci
ty to bridge it. In Peshawar, it was noted that thousands of women ignored the norms of purdah and happily fought their way to the front of predominantly male crowds to catch a glimpse of the Queen. At the Lahore Fort, men were excluded from the Queen’s tea party, though one or two women were barred as well. The government had insisted that all 200 lady guests had to provide a doctor’s certificate confirming that they had undergone both a medical test and an X-ray, if they were to be permitted within 15 feet of the Queen, let alone introduced. One crestfallen Lahore matriarch was excluded because she was deemed to have a sore throat. Had she been aware of the poor woman’s predicament, the Queen would hardly have objected. Just three days earlier she herself had pulled out of the Wali of Swat’s goat hunt, thanks to a cold of her own.

  The pursuit of wildlife had certainly been an international public-relations challenge in India. It was threatening to be a disaster on the third leg of the tour. The King of Nepal was preparing a big-game expedition that would make the Maharajah of Jaipur’s tiger hunt look like a rabbit shoot. More than 2,000 workers had been drafted in to build 12 miles of road and a new airstrip in the Tarai jungle. The ground beneath a town-sized campsite had been dug up to a depth of one foot, in order to remove all scorpions that might sting a royal toe. It was then relaid with fresh turf. This time the royal couple would not be sitting in a tree. They would be hunting tigers – and a rhino or two – from the top of elephants, of which the King had mustered more than 300. Under the circumstances, cancellation was not an option, whatever the growing noise and fury back in Britain.

  Come the day of the shoot, however, there was a bizarre if fortuitous development. The Duke had mysteriously developed an infection in his trigger finger, which had been encased in a thick bandage. While a Palace spokesman confirmed that he was responding well to penicillin, there was no way the Duke could shoot anything. When a tethered buffalo finally lured a tigress out of the jungle, 327 elephants and a long canvas screen encircled the animal in the royal line of fire. It fell to the most senior non-royal member of the party, the Foreign Secretary, the Earl of Home,# to take a shot. Eight times the tigress was driven in front of his gun. Five times he failed to take a shot and three times he missed. Finally, at the ninth attempt, the animal was felled by Sir Christopher Bonham-Carter, the Duke’s treasurer.

  There were, predictably, no complaints in Nepal. There was also an important military background to the tour. Although Nepal has never been part of the Commonwealth, having never been under British rule, it is from this country that the British Army has drawn some of its finest troops over two centuries. The Queen and the Duke travelled to the hill regions from where the Royal Gurkha Rifles have always recruited their elite infantrymen.

  The royal couple returned home in early March, with an equally groundbreaking state visit to Iran – and the ancient ruins of Persepolis – on the way back. Both in Britain and in Asia, the trip had been viewed as an outstanding diplomatic result, by the public, politicians and press alike. There had been some obvious lapses of judgement on the part of both the hosts and the Palace. The Herald’s Anthony Carthew called the tiger shoot ‘silly, undignified, a bad mistake by the Queen’s advisers’. However, he wrote that it was to India’s credit that ‘the Queen could see the poor and they could see her’. The Guardian’s Michael Wall described the tour as an ‘unqualified success’. India and Pakistan, he observed, had been deeply impressed by the contrast between the ‘small young woman in simple dresses who perches on the back of an open car waving and smiling and the austere statues of her grandfather’.

  All this had taken place less than fifteen years after British rule had come to a close, in violent and bloody circumstances. Yet the atmosphere on that first visit had been unfailingly warm and cordial. An important line had been drawn under the central chapter in Britain’s imperial story. As the editorial in the Hindustan Times proclaimed, the tour had ‘stirred an intimate chord of memory’.

  WIND OF CHANGE

  Within months of that epic tour of the India sub-continent, the Queen would embark on that equally important but challenging tour of Africa. She had originally been due to visit Ghana in 1960. The impending arrival of Prince Andrew had forced her to abandon that trip but it would only be a postponement. There were major upheavals underway across Africa and the Queen wanted to play her part.

  The former colony of Gold Coast had been the first African colony to obtain independence when it became Ghana in 1957. Though it retained the Queen in the beginning, it was already planning to remove her as head of state and become a republic. It had also opted for one-party rule under the volatile Kwame Nkrumah. This was always going to be a challenging assignment for the Queen. Despite his socialist credentials, however, Nkrumah retained a deep personal affection for her and was keen to keep his country in the Commonwealth, if only for the sake of ‘that young girl’, as he called her. With the Soviet Union and China ready and willing to fill any goodwill deficit towards this brand new African nation, the pressure was on the Queen to keep the balance tipped towards the West. So when her pregnancy precluded all travelling, she invited Nkrumah to Balmoral by way of an apology for cancelling that trip earmarked for 1960. She also made him a Privy Councillor for good measure. At the same time the British government embarked on a charm offensive aimed at Nkrumah’s key lieutenants. One of his closest aides was the urbane Kwesi Armah, posted to the Ghanaian High Commission in London. Armah’s family recall the way that he was feted by the British establishment, with shooting and fishing invitations from the Duke of Devonshire, nephew of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Africa might be changing but, as the Queen well understood, it had to be kept close.

  1960 was the same year in which Harold Macmillan travelled to Cape Town to deliver his famous address to the white-dominated South African parliament, warning that ‘the wind of change is blowing through the continent’. The National Party government of the new Prime Minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, was wedded to white supremacy and racial segregation and heading in a very different direction from the rest of the Commonwealth. It was also planning to dispense with the Queen, too. When South Africa voted 52:48 to become a republic later in the year (only whites were eligible to vote), the rules meant that it would now have to reapply for Commonwealth membership. Rather than face humiliation, it announced that it had left of its own volition.

  This was a watershed in so many regards. The balance of power in the Commonwealth was shifting away from the cosy consensus of old white realms towards the newly independent nations, many of which had chosen a presidential constitution rather than a royal one. As Professor Philip Murphy has demonstrated, the British government was actually urging colonies to abandon the Queen and opt for a republican model, for fear that she might end up being caught in some constitutional crossfire. The Queen would not complain – as long as these ex-colonies stayed inside her Commonwealth.

  ‘When Macmillan talked about the “winds of change”, the Queen was presiding over an empire evolving into a Commonwealth of Nations. That cannot be done unless the “winds of change” change you as well,’ says the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, a Ugandan schoolboy at the time. ‘The Queen is not into revolution but she is into very deep evolution. She’s evolved with the Commonwealth and the Commonwealth has evolved with her.’

  It had not gone unnoticed by the Commonwealth states that, during the Queen’s ‘maternity leave’, she had staged a particularly lavish welcome for the French President, General Charles de Gaulle. The UK had laid on opera, fireworks and even state trumpeters to herald his speech to Parliament, all in the (ultimately vain) hope that he would welcome Britain into the EEC. A few weeks later, the Commonwealth prime ministers met in London, feeling a little spurned and making it clear that even among those nations that had abolished the Crown, there was still a great affection for the Queen. That is why she set off for India in 1961 and why, eight months later, she would leave Britain and her infant son once more to fulfil her promise to President (as he ha
d now become) Nkrumah. She was on her way to Ghana, despite serious civil unrest and bombings in the capital, Accra. In Britain, there had been parliamentary calls for her to cancel the trip. The Queen was unperturbed.

  According to The Crown, the fictionalised Netflix drama about her life, the Queen’s chief motive for visiting Ghana was because she felt inadequate compared to the impossibly glamorous American first lady, Jackie Kennedy. This thoroughly misleading portrayal of a scorned royal diva ignores the Queen’s astute grasp of realpolitik. Jackie Kennedy had played no part whatsoever in the Queen’s decision to visit Ghana. First, the trip had already been agreed two years before. More importantly, the Russian premier, Nikita Khrushchev, was keen to make new friends in West Africa and the Queen was determined to exclude him. ‘How silly I should look if I was scared to visit Ghana and then Khrushchev went and had a good reception,’ she told Macmillan. Splashed across newspapers around the world were historic pictures of the black independence leader dancing with the smiling white Queen whom he had just removed as head of state. Here was living proof of that ‘wind of change’ sweeping through Africa, even if the media in one corner of the continent pretended not to notice. Just fourteen years before, South Africa had showered her in diamonds. Now, its media simply ignored her.

  * Queen Salote of Tonga greatly endeared herself to the British public at the Queen’s Coronation, famously refusing to raise the roof on her carriage during a downpour, for fear of obstructing the view of the crowd.

  † Smuts was on the Boer side at the 1900 Battle of Spion Kop, which surely ranks as one of the great small battles in modern history. It not only involved two future prime ministers, Smuts himself and Winston Churchill (a war correspondent with the British), but one Mahatma Gandhi was also in the thick of it (and decorated for his role as a stretcher-bearer). This modest mountain in Natal then entered British sporting vernacular as the nickname for a steep grandstand. To this day, Liverpool’s most ardent fans still congregate on ‘the Kop’.