Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  One person well placed to judge the tour, from both the Palace and the Australian side, is Sir William Heseltine, the Australian civil servant who would go on to join the Palace and become Private Secretary to the Queen. Sir William was working in Canberra at the time. ‘I would call the Sixties tour anti-climactic,’ he says. ‘There was a certain flatness to it. Television made it less essential to stand on the road. The attempt to replay ’54 didn’t really work.’ Suddenly, Australian opinion-formers and public opinion itself began to look towards the USA as a more exciting and useful ally, especially if the erstwhile mother country was going to concentrate on Europe.

  The affection for the Royal Family, however, still ran deeper than cosmetic appearances might suggest. When the Queen next returned Down Under in 1970, the old dominions had certainly recovered their enthusiasm. If it wasn’t quite 1954 all over again, it wasn’t far off. An important factor was the simple fact that the Queen and the Duke were accompanied by their two eldest children, both now young adults. ‘We had Charles and Anne with us which generated a lot of excitement and there was nothing lacking in the warmth of the welcome,’ says Sir William Heseltine, who was by then the Queen’s press secretary. ‘That and all the subsequent visits through the Seventies and Eighties went swimmingly.’ By now the Palace and the realms had adopted a new strategy. Rather than try to cover the entire nation for the sake of it, the Queen would make shorter visits based around a specific event. In 1970, she was marking the bicentenary of Captain Cook’s first landings in Australia (just as her next visit, in 1973, would be to open the Sydney Opera House).

  The crowds that turned out to watch the Royal Yacht bring the Queen into Brisbane were the largest since 1954, with an estimated 250,000 on the waterfront. Thousands of small craft were kept at a distance, until a message was passed down from the Queen to the harbour authorities: ‘let them come closer’. Though Britain was just two years away from entering the Common Market, the sense of shock had subsided. It was hardly news and, in any case, Australia’s flirtation with the USA had started to wane. A recent visit by the US President, and the attendant macho security circus, had reminded people that their Queen was rather more human. And in 1970 the country was in the process of withdrawing from a terrible mistake – the Vietnam War. As Queen of Great Britain, the monarch had stayed out of the conflict. As Queen of Australia, though, she was in the thick of it. Over eight years, more than 50,000 of her Australian servicemen and women would serve alongside the Americans in Vietnam, and 520 would not return.

  In Brisbane, the Queen held an investiture on the Royal Yacht and there was no question of who would be first in line. By tradition, the award of the Victoria or George Cross comes ahead of every other decoration, from a knighthood downwards. In May 1969, Warrant Officer Class II Keith Payne had been serving with a training unit in Vietnam when his company came under a sustained North Vietnamese attack on three sides. Though wounded himself and under constant fire, he would not withdraw until he had rescued more than forty wounded men and led them out of enemy territory. A year later he came to receive his VC from the Queen in person. The investiture was about to begin when the Queen’s equerry, Lieutenant-Commander Jock Slater, had a problem as he lined up all the recipients. Number One in the queue was missing. ‘I went dashing round the ship looking for him,’ Slater recalls. Eventually, he found Payne alone on the Verandah Deck, grabbing a final smoke before his big moment. Being attacked by an overwhelming force of Viet Cong enemy troops was not nearly as daunting as meeting the Queen. ‘Sir, I have never been so nervous in all my life,’ explained the reluctant hero, stubbing out his cigarette.

  Despite the size of the overwhelmingly friendly crowds, however, the first signs of a rebellious spirit could be detected here and there. Shortly before the Queen was due to come ashore at Botany Bay, to replicate Captain Cook’s landing, a speedboat came tearing up to the beach and a young man leaped ashore to plant an Australian (not a British) flag firmly in the sand. When the Queen did arrive, no one could hear her words because vandals had disconnected the microphone.

  But the royal couple themselves had been happy to cause a few upsets on this trip, too. Before the arrival in Australia, the Queen had, once again, visited New Zealand. In the capital, Wellington, which had proved so morose on her previous trip, the weather was doing the royal party no favours. ‘The joys of windy Wellington!’ says the Princess Royal, at the mere mention of the tour. Here, the Queen agreed to try out a break with protocol. Before arriving at yet another greeting line in the capital, the royal car would stop short and the Queen would walk the last 50–60 yards, stopping to say ‘Hello’ to random members of the public. It might have alarmed the police, but it was a tremendous success with the public and the media. The Daily Mail journalist Vincent Mulchrone immediately gave this new experiment a name. He called it a ‘walkabout’. Within a few days, it had gone from a trial run to a mandatory crowd-pleaser. When the Queen returned to the UK, her British subjects were clamouring for similar access to their monarch, and the first British walkabout was recorded in Coventry. New Zealanders, however, would always be proud that they saw it first. They were also particularly proud of one of the Queen’s dinner guests on board the Royal Yacht during her visit. Only three people in history had won the Victoria Cross twice, and the last was Captain Charles Upham from Christchurch.

  Famously contemptuous of fame (‘I don’t want to be treated differently from any other bastard,’ he said in a rare interview), this taciturn farmer was typical of his breed and generation in his deep, visceral disapproval of Britain’s ever-closer ties with Europe. A year after his dinner with the Queen, he made a brief foray into the political arena with an uncompromising letter to The Daily Telegraph. ‘They’ll cheat you yet, those Germans,’ wrote Upham, whose enduring dislike for the old enemy extended to banning German cars from his property. The generations who had fought for King, country and Commonwealth had been increasingly hurt by the British policy of general disengagement ‘East of Suez’. They had been hurt all the way back in 1940, when the British talked of fighting on ‘alone’ after the fall of France, despite the fact that Australia and New Zealand had loyally declared war on the same day as Britain. They felt nothing less than betrayed, as British MPs voted to join the new EEC in 1972.

  Alick Downer, that frustrated Minister for Migration during the Queen’s 1963 visit, had gone on to become Australia’s High Commissioner in London. There he fought a losing battle with the British government to recognise the damage that accession to the EEC would do to the UK’s old allies. Years later, his son, Alex, would be appointed to the same job, having been Foreign Minister longer than anyone in Australian political history. He can still recall standing with his father at the Menin Gate, that great memorial to the Commonwealth war dead in Flanders. Downer senior had tears in his eyes as he read the names of Australia’s fallen, while denouncing the British Labour politician Roy Jenkins. During the European debate, Jenkins had called for Britain to abandon the politics of ‘kith and kin’ in favour of European integration. Downer senior returned to Australia ‘a sad man’ just three months before Britain’s accession to the Common Market on 1st January 1973. Other Australians were even more upset as Britain started giving Europeans preferential treatment – not just in terms of trade, but even at passport control – to the detriment of the Commonwealth cousins. The Deputy Prime Minister, Doug Anthony, from the centre-right Liberal Party, renounced a lifetime’s loyalty to the Queen and joined the republican movement.

  Britain had not, actually, turned its back on ‘kith and kin’. In negotiating its way into the Common Market, the British mandarins had been acutely aware of the need to remember the Commonwealth cousinhood. In his report, ‘Britain’s Entry Into the European Community’, the UK’s lead negotiator, Sir Con O’Neill, recorded that the British public felt a deep sense of debt and honour to a vulnerable ally like New Zealand. In early 1970, his delegation had received the following brief: ‘The essential need is t
o provide New Zealand with a breathing space long enough for her to make the painful adjustments to her economy.’ As he explained, failure could have had serious implications in Britain: ‘The way the Community would treat her had become a touchstone, for millions of people, of their attitude towards our entry.’ In 1971, the leader of the UK delegation to the Council of Europe, Duncan Sandys (himself a former Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations), warned the French Prime Minister that he and many others would never support a deal ‘which betrayed New Zealand’s trust in Britain’.

  The events of 1972 were a challenge for the Queen in all her realms. Here was Britain being demonised as a cheating lover walking out on the Commonwealth family and abandoning them for a sexy new paramour on the continent. The situation was especially challenging for the monarchy in Australia. There, the Liberals were kicked out and the country elected a Labour Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, with a radical agenda and the slogan ‘It’s Time’. Though not actively seeking a republic at this stage, he launched a contest to find a new Australian national anthem instead of ‘God Save the Queen’. In 1973, ‘Advance Australia Fair’ pipped ‘Waltzing Matilda’ to the top slot.

  That same year the Queen invited Whitlam and his wife, Margaret, to Windsor and ordered the full treatment. Her Private Secretary, Martin Charteris, would later recall the almost girlish way in which the Queen fussed over Whitlam’s gift, a sheepskin rug. ‘She sat on that rug, stroked it and said how lovely it was,’ Charteris told the writer Graham Turner. ‘It was an arrant use of sexuality.’ It obviously worked, as Whitlam later told Charteris, ‘Well if she’s like that, it’s alright with me.’ He would not be saying that two years later.

  Many commentators like to point to Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975 as the start of serious Australian republicanism. The two houses of the Australian parliament were locked in a Budget stalemate that was threatening the economy. Whitlam went to see the Queen’s representative, the Governor-General Sir John Kerr, to seek a partial election in the upper house, the Senate. To his astonishment, Sir John, a retired judge, dismissed him. He then invited the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser, to form a caretaker government ahead of a full election.

  The Queen had known nothing about any of this, to her eternal relief. Nonetheless, Whitlam’s supporters would paint the Crown – and, by extension, the Queen – as the villain, even though the electorate roundly rejected their man. Fraser won the subsequent election very comfortably, but many Australians, particularly those on the left, were still angered that a democratically elected government could be fired by the monarch’s representative. Ahead of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee tour of 1977, there were fears that the monarch could be in for a much unhappier tour than that of 1963. As he packed his bags for the trip, Sir William Heseltine received warnings from Down Under. ‘I was told by all my friends and relations in Australia there would be demonstrations because of the dismissal,’ he says. ‘Everyone was expecting protests, though I was not.’

  The global Silver Jubilee celebrations of 1977 would be one of the high points of the Queen’s reign. While Britain was bogged down in economic crises, the monarchy offered something to cheer about and rally round. There were, though, republican elements within the Labour government of Jim Callaghan who regarded twenty-five years of a hereditary monarch as something to be overlooked rather than celebrated. When the London Celebrations Committee proposed floodlighting the buildings along the Thames during the summer, the Energy Minister, Tony Benn, vetoed the idea as a waste of electricity.

  ‘Bloody nonsense,’ Callaghan replied. ‘I think this is pernickety bureaucracy.’ The lights went on. All over Britain there would be the first big street parties and bonfires since the Coronation. And there was certainly no shortage of enthusiasm when the Queen set off to celebrate in her realms. Despite the upheavals that Britain’s European entry had caused to its economy, New Zealanders were ecstatic to see their Queen again. Sir William Heseltine recalls that the chief problem was over-lengthy cultural displays, and persuading event organisers that the Queen neither wanted nor expected a five-course meal at every stop. In just over a fortnight she would cover the entire country, usually commuting by plane each day from wherever her beloved Britannia was berthed. As an Australian, Sir William would always discern the small but significant differences between a royal welcome in New Zealand and one in his native land. The Kiwis, he says, tended to be less chatty – like the mother and child who met the Queen on a walkabout in Wellington. Mother (to child, one inch from Queen’s nose): ‘Wyve y’ fleg.’

  The crunch, though, would come in Australia. Would the Whitlam affair sour the Jubilee mood, particularly since Sir John Kerr was still Governor-General? As such, he was the Queen’s official host when she arrived in Canberra.§

  In fact, there was no trouble in Canberra, or anywhere else. Sir William recalls ‘a few mild protests up to this point, but nothing to justify the alarmist prophecies’. What was becoming increasingly clear was that the country had managed to compartmentalise the monarch, and detach the Queen of Great Britain from the Queen of Australia and the Head of the Commonwealth. She might have turned up in a yacht called Britannia, but she had not come as a Brit. It was summed up by an editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald: ‘She is by her presence certifying that the bond of the Commonwealth – the intangible link, so hard for others to understand, between independent nations of widely different outlooks – is still a reality. It is a changing reality, but it is proving a remarkably enduring one.’

  Even when the royal party attended the last day of the Centenary Test between Australia and England at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, there was no sense that the Queen favoured one side over the other. The only tension was when Australian government officials tried to move the Duke of Edinburgh on to his next engagement, just as the match was reaching an enthralling climax. The Duke was said to be apoplectic.¶

  The royal weddings of the Eighties, along with the subsequent royal babies, would remove any mainstream appetite for republicanism. After successful visits by the Prince and Princess of Wales, who had wowed Australians by turning up with baby Prince William in 1983, there were renewed suggestions that the Prince should spend a few years as Governor-General. That was taking things too far, however, for the new Labour Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, and his party. In 1986, the Queen returned to Australia to abolish the last vestigial remnants of colonial interference. For complicated legal reasons, the British Privy Council was still, in theory, the ultimate Australian court of appeal and the British Parliament could, in theory, still interfere with state politics. All that was formally abolished at both ends. Having announced that her last official task in London had been to sign the Australia Act, while her first official engagement in Australia had been to do exactly the same thing, she went on: ‘Anachronistic constitutional arrangements have disappeared but the friendship between two nations has been strengthened.’

  By now, her hitherto sceptical Australian Prime Minister had become a firm fan. ‘She has arguably got the most difficult job in the world,’ said Bob Hawke, ‘and she discharges it with an absolutely remarkable capacity and composure, relieved by a magnificent sense of humour.’

  If there was anything to worry about, it was the situation in New Zealand, where the monarchy was increasingly seen as fair game for the more extreme elements of the Maori protest movement. In 1986, the Queen was hit by an egg, which caught her coat. Though the incident alarmed her – Prime Minister David Lange called it ‘deplorable’ – she later made a joke that she preferred New Zealand eggs ‘for breakfast’. Elsewhere, there was repeated baring of Maori bottoms and the occasional ‘Go Home, Liz’ banner. As ever, the hosts reacted indignantly to the slightest criticism from members of the British media, some of whom had accused New Zealand of failing to protect the Queen. ‘I don’t remember complaining when a man got into her bedroom at Buckingham Palace,’# an exasperated David Lange told ITN’s Trevor McDonald. ‘I wish you would look after her as w
ell as we do in New Zealand.’

  As in Britain, so in Australia, the warm sunshine that bathed the monarchy all through the Eighties was not to last. The 1991 election of an avowedly republican Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, coincided with the sharp decline in public support for the Royal Family, after its own domestic setbacks. The 1992 ‘annus horribilis’ of collapsed royal marriages, bugged phones, a confessional Princess of Wales and the Windsor Castle fire caused deep and lasting damage to royal reputations in all the realms. ‘It was the damage done to the monarchy by its own younger members in the early 1990s that set the wind behind the real push for a republic,’ says one senior Palace figure from those years. Keating drew up plans for a referendum. There was added momentum in 1993, when Sydney was selected as the host city for the 2000 Olympics because the Olympic charter decreed that the Games should be opened by the ‘head of state’. Keating even came to Balmoral to discuss his plans with the Queen that year. ‘He was extremely courteous to the Queen, he couldn’t have been more so,’ says a member of the party (though one official later revealed that the Queen’s first words after the encounter had been: ‘I really do need a very large drink.’)

  The Queen was hardly going to engage Keating in a debate. Her twin concerns were to ensure that he was genuine and that whatever might happen should happen amicably. Given the political situation, it was deemed inappropriate for the Queen to set foot in Australia until the matter was settled. A tour in the meantime might be embarrassing and could smack of ‘clinging on’. So in 1994, the Prince of Wales spoke on the Queen’s behalf when he made a historic speech in Sydney. ‘Some people will doubtless prefer the stability of a system that has been reasonably well tried and tested over the years, while others will see real advantages in doing things differently,’ he said. ‘Personally, I happen to think that it is a sign of a mature and self-confident nature to debate those issues and to use the democratic process.’ In other words: your call.