Daughter of Empire

by Pamela Hicks

  This was a royal visit with a difference, all aspects of our daily routine seemingly on show. Later that evening, intending to make my way over to the bathroom, I found so many prostrate bodies sleeping on the staircase and in passages that the only means of getting to the bathroom was through Mike’s room. I bumped into the Queen, who was also tiptoeing through Mike’s room. When she turned on the light in the bathroom she found that its other door had been thrown open to the garden and that she was now in full view of the town and the four hundred or so men who were sitting around campfires in the garden. Even the next morning, a Sunday, when we had hoped to have a bit of a lie-in, the Queen and Prince Philip were woken at dawn by four men blowing nose flutes in their honour.

  Before we left we were presented with grass skirts and garlands. The men put theirs on rather willingly – and were immediately transformed – and we were amused to note that the admiral was particularly gifted in the hula motion of the hips. Rather more reserved, we women wore our garlands but carried our grass skirts over our arms. As we said goodbye, Queen Salote had tears running down her cheeks, and while we settled ourselves in Gothic, she and her family sailed five miles out to sea so that they could wave to us as we passed. We took with us the memory of a surprisingly shy woman who possessed enormous talent, charm and ability, and an island whose people had given us a welcome and hospitality that we would never forget.

  It was approaching Christmas, and as we knew we wouldn’t get a chance to celebrate properly once the New Zealand leg began, we had a crazy festive dinner party. Prince Philip excelled himself, managing to use three cracker blowers at once – one in his mouth and one up each nostril, the shiny rolls unravelling simultaneously. On 23 December, as we docked in Auckland, the more formal part of the royal tour began. This was also when the private secretaries took over the schedule, each moment timed to within a second of its existence, and what better start, I thought, than the Governor-General and his wife, who were allocated precisely three minutes on board. There was a busy schedule ahead of us in New Zealand; even Christmas was to be spent on duty. The morning of Christmas Eve was spent at Auckland Hospital, but the populace was apparently so healthy there had been a certain amount of difficulty filling it up for the visit. In the afternoon the Queen addressed a crowd of children, which later, in private, she said was a waste of time for the poor children as her speech had been so pompous.

  Then tragically, on Christmas Day, there was a terrible rail disaster, the worst in New Zealand’s history. The night express from Wellington to Auckland crashed through a weakened bridge spanning a river swollen by flood water at Tangiwai. Prince Philip accompanied the prime minister to Wellington to attend the funeral of the victims. The mood was subdued as the Queen made her Christmas broadcast, and being so far from our families made us all a bit miserable. I thought of my parents, my sister, my nephews and John as the Queen said, ‘Of course we all want our children at Christmas time – for that is the season above all when each family gathers at its own hearth. I hope that perhaps mine are listening to me now.’ I realised how difficult it was for her to be apart from her children for so long.

  By this point in the tour, I had resigned myself to the repetition of ceremonies. The public welcomes lasted only fifteen minutes, consisting of the national anthem, the presentation of a bouquet, followed by a gift from the town, the presentation of the town council and local dignitaries, the signing of the town hall visitors’ book and lastly the hip-hooraying or three cheers. The welcome had been excellently devised to keep the Queen and Prince Philip occupied so that everybody could gaze at them for a quarter of an hour. A civic reception was the same, with the addition of an address by the mayor and a reply by the Queen, and so lasted around twenty minutes. Everything was formulaic by necessity, and I would find myself looking for something to distract me such as the entry of an inevitable stray dog or someone’s hat blowing off. Prince Philip always acted as master of ceremonies, prompting the mayor with ‘Would you like to present your councillors?’ And if both the mayor and the town clerk forgot, he would ask, ‘And are you going to have three cheers?’

  One of the strangest phenomena we noticed was crowd laughter. Whenever Prince Philip, or sometimes the Queen, tried to make the ceremony a little more human by talking to one of the people being presented, the crowd would go into shrieks of laughter. It wasn’t as if Prince Philip had said anything particularly funny – the crowd probably just did so through over-excitement or nervous strain. The other strange thing was that people being presented to the royal couple had such little expectation of being spoken to that they either rushed away before the Queen or Prince Philip got a chance to stop them or else they made little sense. Eventually, the laughter so embarrassed Prince Philip, or the person he was trying to talk to, that he felt he had to give up the practice.

  This leg of the tour was busy, the New Zealanders welcoming wherever we went. On our way out to Hamilton I spotted three painted sheep in a field: one red, one white and one blue, and later one painted red, white and blue. There were signs that made us laugh – ‘God Bless the Queen and Keep an Eye on the Duke’ was my favourite. Driving around, we heard ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ or ‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’ or with a screech of delight ‘She waved at me!’, but what made us smile was the day that the prime minister, Sidney Holland, added his car to the long procession and as we crawled through a small town, a man popped his head into his car and exclaimed: ‘Cor! Bloody old Sid!’ We visited the chief of the Waikato tribe, enjoyed flowery and poetic Maori welcomes (though sadly we had to leave just as the hakas were starting) and watched in amazement as two great war canoes, each over a hundred feet long, carrying one hundred chanting warriors, paddled down the river.

  We were now a month and a half into the tour and all of the staff were getting tired and crotchety. I don’t know how Prince Philip and the Queen survived, continuing to wave as happily as they had done since our arrival – indeed, the Queen had developed tremendous muscles in her arm as a result – but they could never relax. On several occasions, when the Queen said to her husband ‘Look to your right’, wanting to point something out to him, he automatically started waving, even if it was to a rather surprised animal minding its own business in a field.

  At last, in the New Year, we got two very welcome days off at Moose Lodge near Rotorua – happily far enough away from the horrid sulphurous smell left by the eruption of Mount Tarawera many years before. I spent them catching up with letters both official and personal, waterskiing with Prince Philip and rowing around on the lake. From there, we drove 160 miles to Napier, nearly half that distance on dirt roads, the dust conjuring memories of the unsurfaced road trip in Kenya. As the Queen and Prince Philip and some of the staff continued onwards by train, Miss Bramford and I travelled by car to Wellington along beautiful avenues of poplars and weeping willows, and the road seemed so inviting that I asked whether I could take over the wheel. There was so little traffic and the roads were so wide and open that I made it in record time, keeping to 80 mph all the way. Pleased with my driving prowess, I was somewhat taken aback when the officials at Government House told me there was a strict 50 mph speed limit throughout New Zealand.

  We got through the State Opening of Parliament – I felt ludicrous climbing into a long dress and tiara in broad daylight and suffered a fit of nerves at the formality of the event – and then left the dairy farms, weird land formations and capital city of North Island for the natural grandeur of the mountains, lakes, glaciers, fjords and sheep farms of South Island. Here the civic reception was lightened by a little dog that ran out of the crowd, leapt up the steps and, when Prince Philip and the Queen stood during the presentations, jumped up on to one of the vacant chairs and raised its paw to the crowd as though acknowledging their cheers.

  Thankfully, as South Island had many country towns and districts that were inaccessible to our large party, the succession of public welcomes lasted only two days. Most of our remaining time was spent in Ch
ristchurch – English in nature – and Dunedin – Scottish – where we were greeted by pipe bands in full Highland dress.

  The New Zealand tour was a great success, excellently planned and efficiently executed. It was nothing short of a miracle that, thanks to Sergeant Footman Oulton, not a single piece of luggage had been lost from the stacks that we carried around with us. I had kept up pretty well myself, receiving compliments, via Alice, from the Queen, although I had been told off after a very formal dinner party on Gothic. The guests had left the large drawing room but the door was not quite closed. I flopped down on a sofa and exclaimed, ‘What a relief they’ve all gone!’ The Queen was very stern. ‘Pammy, that may be so. But not while they might hear.’ The Queen was always impeccable in her behaviour and demeanour, performing her duties so perfectly and conscientiously that she always put the rest of us to shame. It was also clear to everyone by now that Prince Philip played an enormous part in the tour’s success. I loved his mix of teasing and humour with unexpected kindness and thoughtfulness. It was easy to see why he was so tremendously popular wherever we went. At our farewell party in Invercargill, one of the New Zealand typists said to Alice, ‘The best investment that the royal family has ever made in all its history is the Duke of Edinburgh.’

  17

  We spent four days at sea sailing to Sydney. I needed the time to recharge my batteries, for there were going to be as many people in Sydney as there had been in total during the whole month in New Zealand. Our entry into Sydney harbour was unforgettable. It was a glorious day, and the sight of this fantastic harbour with its 150 miles of shoreline was breathtaking. The whole place was alive with small boats, motorboats, speedboats, sailing boats and ferries festooned with people, and so top-heavy on the side nearest Gothic that it seemed preposterous they did not sink. In addition, careering through the tangle, speedboats towed waterskiers in open defiance of the sharks and the more imminent danger of being mown down by other boats, as were the canoeists who had ventured out. In addition to the inevitable church bells and cheering, the sound of the ships’ hooters and sirens was deafening. Indeed, sirens hooting in warning were indistinguishable from the hoots of jubilation, and we watched a number of collisions occur.

  Eventually, we piled into the procession of cars for the royal progress through the city. In each state visit in Australia we were to have 96 cars with 114 army drivers. After New Zealand it seemed strange to be in an enormous cosmopolitan city with tall buildings and wide streets. There was a tumultuous welcome from the crowds as a shower of streamers, rose petals and confetti was thrown down from the roofs and windows or straight into the cars by those in the crowd who were near enough. The city was wonderfully decorated, with endless varieties of triumphal arches, including arches made to look like giant crossed boomerangs and even one immense, slowly rotating sham tree trunk.

  We plunged headlong into the usual schedule of receptions, inspections, dinners and drive-throughs. We had all become used to people throwing bunches of flowers into the Queen’s open car, but in Sydney a new danger presented itself when the overexcited crowd started to throw small flags. The sticks came hurtling in at such speed that they hurt the Queen and we were convinced she was going to be blinded. Sydney was abuzz with our visit and we were amused to see women run out of hairdressers’ with their hair in pins and nets, the cotton wool that had been protecting their ears from the dryers still in place. We saw men come tumbling out of pubs five minutes before closing time as we drove by, and we were told that this was considered by the authorities to be the greatest triumph of the royal tour. One night we passed a drunk clinging to a lamp-post. Prince Philip waved to him and nearly died laughing at the man’s agonised expression as he tried to make up his mind whether to wave back or keep his hands safely in place.

  As my job demanded, I was very much in the background. In fact so much so that at the Lord Mayor’s Ball I was asked to dance, and when I returned to the dais, instead of pushing and shoving my way back, I asked a dignified-looking gentleman if he minded if I passed in front of him. Glaring at me in fury he said: ‘I most certainly would, young lady. You haven’t a hope in hell of queue-barging here.’ I did attract some attention along the way, however. In New Zealand a man had appeared running next to the car shouting for me, as I sat beside the Queen driving to a women’s lunch, and she asked me who my friend was. Then Johnny returned one evening to report the sighting of a man sitting forlornly on the dais where the civic welcome had taken place earlier. He was muttering disconsolately to himself, and when Johnny drew near he could hear what the man was saying. ‘Where’s Pamela? Why didn’t she come? Oh, Pamela, I love you so much. Why didn’t you come?’

  I had been invited by the Osborne family – I had met two of the sons earlier in the tour – to visit their old homestead in Currandooley outside Canberra and rather hoped to take up the offer. As it was Alice’s turn for duty that Sunday I didn’t think it would matter if I missed church and set off for the sheep station. I had invited Johnny to come with me and we were just getting into the car when Michael sent for him. He came back gloomy, reporting that Michael and Martin insisted we go to church. As the sheep station was thirty miles away, the prospect of this delay completely wrecked our plans for the day. Feeling exactly as though I were back at school, I dashed upstairs and found Michael and Martin sitting at their desks in their morning coats and top hats, their faces like thunder. I received a tremendous lecture about setting the public a good example when one is in the royal entourage and a stern reminder that everyone at Sandringham and Balmoral always went to church. I protested, arguing that if all ten of us turned up in Canberra’s tiny church we would displace the locals, who longed for the opportunity to worship with the Queen. The secretaries were apoplectic: ‘Well, then you had better go and tell the archdeacon that you are dead.’ I protested that the whole point was that I was not dead, intending to be seen very much alive at Currandooley. They told me to ‘fix it with the archdeacon, then’, which of course was their mistake, as I rushed off and spoke to a delighted archdeacon – my space for one of his favourite parishioners – who then thanked me profusely. And so I went off to Currandooley feeling smug and guilty by turns, leaving the others fuming and Johnny being meekly led off to church. Alice couldn’t resist telling the Queen immediately after the service that I had ‘got the better of the private secretaries’. So strong was the school atmosphere that my small victory was considered a major triumph. Thankfully the sheep station was worth it: stunning countryside, overlooking a lake, and as we rode white cockatoos flew out of the trees with angry squawks, which reminded me of Michael and Martin.

  In Sydney we attended a garden party for eight thousand people at Government House. As usual, several minutes before the Queen and Prince Philip were scheduled to emerge to greet the guests, the equerry and I went to stand outside the bedrooms so that the second they emerged we would form a little procession. The Queen was always punctual, but this time we waited and waited. No one came to tell us why there was a delay and no one had the faintest idea as to what was causing it. But as soon as the Queen came out of her bedroom, I could see why. She looked fantastic, and very different from usual. Instead of the customary Norman Hartnell tight waist and full skirt, she was wearing a sophisticated, pencil-slim white lace dress designed by Hardy Amies. The new look was completed by a black cartwheel picture hat with a transparent brim around which lay four brightly coloured feathers. Apparently the delay was caused by the milliner, Aage Thaarup’s, large label, which had been clearly visible and was tricky for Bobo to remove. When the Queen appeared on the terrace there was an audible gasp from the assembled guests. The Australian fashion correspondents were completely beside themselves and went into a frenzy.

  Unusually, I was looking forward to this garden party because my father had written to inform me that Grandpapa’s former orderly on board The Implacable, back in the early 1900s, was now living in Sydney and had been invited to the garden party. I had made valiant attem
pts to arrange for him to be presented to Prince Philip, Grandpapa’s other grandchild, but been warned by the private secretaries – too professional to bear me any sheep-station grudge – that the list of essential people was already far too long, but they would do their best. When I found out afterwards that Mr Wallace Bevan had not been presented, I wrote to him saying how sorry I was and that I regretted very much not having had a chance to meet him myself. A few days later I received an enchanting reply in which he explained that he and his wife had been introduced to the Queen and in shaking hands had seen me standing just behind her – ‘in fact we could have touched you when you passed along,’ he wrote. ‘I just did not like to worry the officials who were conducting her Majesty.’ He then described my grandfather as ‘the most loveable man I have ever met and so understanding. Everyone in The Implacable was very fond of him. Of course I had more to do with him than any of the other crew as I was his special Staff Orderly. I was also very much attached to the whole family and I used to escort the family when they went ashore. I had a very special pleasing duty in caring for your father. When he went ashore I carried him most of the time. I also used to carry him up and down the gangway and often took the liberty of taking him forward so the lads could have a look at him. I think he used to enjoy it as young as he was he generally had a very nice broad grin if the boys spoke to him. Oh well, I suppose it would be a bit of a struggle for me now if I had to carry him around. I think he is even taller than his father was and must be fairly heavy.’ His sentiments were very touching, and I could tell that the glamour of meeting the Queen was nothing compared to meeting the grandchildren of his beloved captain.