Colville’s attitude during the good times made it harder to control things during the bad. During Princess Margaret’s doomed romance with Group Captain Peter Townsend, Palace requests for media calm were ignored. Indeed, upsetting Colville sometimes seemed to be the only way to elicit a response. During the Duke of Edinburgh’s long world tour of 1956–7, the American papers were so full of rumours that Colville took the extraordinary step of issuing a formal Palace denial of a ‘rift’ in the royal marriage. This was a mistake on a number of fronts. The British papers, which had ignored the story, were suddenly forced to explain what it was that they had been ignoring. Their restraint had done them no favours and, worse, had made them look stupid. And it did nothing to dampen speculation.
During the first fifteen years of the Queen’s marriage, the French press alone carried seventy-three reports that she and the Duke were to divorce. There was, however, one news organisation which could be relied upon to ignore all disobliging stories about ‘rifts’ or anything else. But, in time, even the super-loyal BBC would have to move with the times. Through the fifties, it did as it was told. When it was told not to depict Edward VII in a television drama, it obeyed. When it was told that it could not film the Royal Train for children’s television in 1958, it concurred. When the writer Lord Altrincham and the broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge both made disparaging remarks about the Queen in print, the BBC banned them from discussing royal matters on air. It was not a simple matter of deference. There were corporate motives, too. The BBC was keen to prevent the new upstarts of independent television (ITV began broadcasting in 1955) from muscling in on the royal scene.
But the BBC could not ignore the sense of social upheaval as the sixties progressed. By 1963, the monarchy was deemed fair game for the new iconoclasts of television satire. In one famous sketch, a young David Frost ridiculed the fawning tone of royal coverage with a mock commentary of the Royal Barge sinking. Although it appeared on the BBC show That Was The Week That Was, the sketch was still deemed too risque for the London stage. (This was in the days when all theatrical productions still required the approval of Commander Colville’s colleagues in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office.) As far as the Palace was concerned, if the press were unhappy about the level of access and information they were getting, tough luck. If the monarchy was failing to keep up with the times, so be it. There were no great royal crises. In any case, the marriage of Princess Margaret and the birth of her children had introduced a popular new strand to the royal story. Why bother changing things?
Some people attempted to warn the Palace of the dangers of Colville’s complacency. Kenneth Rose recalls: ‘I was so dismayed by this blank-wall approach that I wrote to Michael Adeane [the Queen’s Private Secretary] whom I knew as a friend and said: “Do you know the effect this has on public opinion and the press?” And he wrote back and said: “You may or may not be right but I’m afraid I can’t interfere. It’s not my department.”’ It was, in fact, his department. The Press Office is part of the Private Secretary’s Office. But as long as Colville was enjoying the support of his ultimate bosses, nothing was going to change. Colville was even criticised by the Press Council for his obstructive approach but it did him no harm with his employers. In 1965, he became Sir Richard after the Queen appointed him a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. And she had much to be grateful for. Royal coverage remained, for the most part, worthy and respectful. Amid all the noisy demands for a new world order, there was no overt hostility towards the monarchy. As far as the radicals of the sixties protest movements were concerned, the Windsors were a drearily bourgeois bunch to be placed somewhere between irrelevance and light comedy.
Ron Allison, who would go on to become Press Secretary himself, worked in television throughout the sixties. He once invoked the wrath of Colville simply by speaking to him. ‘I was a BBC correspondent in Southampton and Prince Philip was doing something on the Isle of Wight. I called Colville to check something and he was very courteous but not at all expansive. About five minutes later, my phone went. It was Godfrey Talbot [the BBC’s royal correspondent] and he said Colville had been on to him complaining and saying: “What’s this all about, Talbot? You’re the only person I talk to.” He saw the press as an enemy.’ Yet Allison understands why the Royal Family was happy to stick with Colville for so long. ‘The Queen and the Duke were getting a terrific press in those early years. I mean, if you audited Richard Colville, he was doing a great job in terms of column inches and photo spreads and so on.’
Towards the end of Colville’s tenure, there were signs of a fresh approach to public presentation. When the yachtsman Francis Chichester returned to Britain in 1967 after his solo circumnavigation of the globe, it was decided he should receive a knighthood. Instead of the usual Palace investiture, there was an unexpected dash of romance and swashed buckle. The Queen gave the accolade* next to the Thames at Greenwich using the same sword with which Elizabeth I had knighted Francis Drake. The public loved it.
And then, it seemed, everything changed – if not quite overnight then over a matter of months. Against a global backdrop of assassinations (Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy), conflict (Vietnam, Czechoslovakia) and civic unrest, few in the media paid much attention to an upheaval in relations between the Palace and the press. Yet 1968 was not only the year when the Lord Chamberlain’s Office relinquished its historic role as theatrical censor; it was the one in which Sir Richard Colville uttered his last ‘no comment’ before retiring. His replacement was a young star from the Australian Civil Service called William Heseltine. A new modus operandi developed in no time.
Suddenly, the cameras were no longer an irritant on the sidelines. They were to be exploited. The Queen’s Christmas broadcast was filmed in colour for the first time. The cameras were allowed inside the Palace to film a state banquet for the President of Italy. But Heseltine envisaged a far more ambitious project. Prince Charles was about to come of age and be invested as Prince of Wales. Princess Anne was about to commence public duties, too. A new royal generation was embarking on what might be called active service. Society was changing. Might it not be time for the first television documentary on the monarchy itself?
‘As soon as I became Press Secretary,’ says Heseltine, ‘the investiture was on the horizon and everyone started suggesting things, including a biography of the Prince of Wales which seemed to me to be fairly stupid because there wasn’t much you could say about a twenty-year-old. I had the notion of showing what was in store for him rather than an uneventful programme about his childhood.’ Heseltine also believed that a programme would help to revive the waning public interest in the monarchy.
‘The young ones had been kept far away from publicity while they were at school. And there was a feeling about them at the time that they were pretty dull. At the same time, the Queen and Prince Philip, approaching middle age, were less newsworthy than they had been in the excitement of the early years of the reign. I had a feeling that something between the stilted accounts you found in the Court Circular and the nastiness of the gossip columns would be a corrective – and a help in launching the young ones on the world. It would demonstrate that, very far from being abnormal, they were a bright and attractive couple.’
Two men, he says, would be pivotal to the project. One was Lord [John] Brabourne who was married to the Duke of Edinburgh’s cousin, Lady Patricia Mountbatten. A well-known film producer, he was a trusted royal confidant on media matters and was adamant that the monarchy’s flagging reputation would be restored with some public awareness. He also suggested the right man for the project, an experienced BBC director and producer called Richard Cawston. ‘That was a critical decision,’ says Heseltine, who put the idea to the Queen. Her response was one of cautious enthusiasm: ‘Do it and let’s see.’
By today’s documentary standards, the level of Palace interference would be regarded as intolerable. Once the project had been given the go-ahead, all filming had to be pre-agreed by a committee chai
red by the Duke of Edinburgh. However, the leading lady soon warmed to the idea. ‘From the word go, the Queen was totally cooperative,’ says Heseltine. When watched today, more than forty years later, Royal Family is still a remarkable piece of work. There is a certain innocence about the central players as they make salad dressing, waterski, entertain the British Olympic team to drinks or welcome President Richard Nixon to lunch. Until then, their only experience of microphones and cameras had been when launching or opening things. The Queen clearly becomes more comfortable with the camera as the twelve-month filming period progresses. It is when she is being a mother rather than a head of state that she is most relaxed – positively enjoying herself as she takes Prince Edward to buy an ice cream at Balmoral or as she drives him around the Sandringham Estate with a boisterous Prince Andrew.
World leaders come and go in a collage of grand entrances. We see how royalty can reduce the most distinguished to gibberish as the Queen asks newly installed American ambassador Walter Annenberg how he is finding his new post. ‘We are in the embassy residence, subject of course to some of the discomfiture as a result of the need for elements of refurbishing and rehabilitation …’ The Queen later admitted to Tony Benn that she felt that this sequence should have been edited to spare Annenberg’s blushes. For the first time, viewers see a Prime Minister (Harold Wilson) attending the weekly audience with the Queen. ‘It is the moment when democracy and monarchy meet,’ declares the solemn commentator. The programme was narrated by Michael Flanders (of Flanders and Swann theatrical fame – and father of the present BBC economics editor, Stephanie Flanders). But his commentary was written by the man who would make an important contribution to the royal story two decades later, former BBC producer Antony Jay. He delivered a sparing but authoritative script, carefully draping important constitutional themes over ‘ordinary’ scenes which left the nation agog. ‘The Queen represents not the arguments that divide governments but the sentiments that unite peoples,’ declares Flanders as the Commonwealth leaders come to town. The 110-minute film draws to a close with a piece of non-triumphal Jay analysis: ‘While the Queen occupies the highest office of state, no one else can. While she is head of the law, no politician can take over the courts. While she is head of the state, no generals can take over the government. While she is head of the Services, no wouldbe dictator can turn the Army against the people. The strength of the monarchy does not lie in the power it gives the Sovereign – but in the power it denies to anyone else.’
Most of those old enough to watch it remember it, simply, for the family barbecue – Prince Charles mixing the dressing, the Queen tasting it (‘oily’, she grimaces), Prince Philip flipping steaks and Princess Anne predicting ‘an absolute total guaranteed failure’. The programme was a broadcasting phenomenon. Aside from setting new viewing records around the world – some 350 million saw it – it had also forced the BBC to work in tandem with its rivals at ITV. The film was shown on both networks, on separate nights, and in Britain alone accumulated a total audience of thirty-eight million. It was not without its critics. Some thought it was all stage-managed – just as there were those, that same summer, who doubted that man really had landed on the moon. ‘A lot of people were very sceptical about whether they’d ever had a barbecue before,’ recalls Sir William Heseltine, pointing out that Prince Philip’s tour de force at the grill had been a ritual for years.* Others scoffed at the sight of the Queen paying for an ice cream in a shop – mindful of the myth that she never carries money. ‘I don’t think she was a very frequent visitor to the shop,’ says Heseltine. ‘But it was she herself who suggested it on the basis that she had done it before.’ The Evening Standard’s Milton Shulman (whose daughter, Alexandra, would be the Vogue editor at that aforementioned fashion reception forty-one years later) argued that irreparable damage had been done. ‘It is fortunate at this moment in time that we have a royal family that fits in so splendidly with a public relations man’s dream,’ he wrote. ‘Yet, is it, in the long term, wise for the Queen’s advisers to set as a precdent this right of the television camera to act as an image-making apparatus for the monarchy? Every institution that has so far attempted to use TV to popularise or aggrandise itself has been trivialised by it.’
David Attenborough, television presenter and nature-watching chum of the Duke of Edinburgh, warned that the programme was ‘killing the monarchy’ by breaking a great anthropological taboo. ‘The whole institution depends on mystique and the tribal chief in his hut,’ he said at the time. ‘If any member of the tribe ever sees inside the hut, then the whole system of tribal chiefdom is damaged and the tribe eventually disintegrates.’ Heseltine remains unrepentant to this day: ‘It was a fantastic success. There were one or two voices raised in disapproval. Milton Shulman and one or two of the stuffier Lord-Lieutenants thought this was not a good idea. In later years, when “lack of deference” became a major issue, then a lot of people were prepared to point the finger and say this was “all Heseltine’s fault” and that we shouldn’t have shown Royal Family. I thought then and I think now that was a nonsensical argument because you couldn’t go on into the seventies ignoring television as they’d done in the fifties and sixties.’
The film has since become a broadcasting yeti, world-famous yet unseen on television screens since a repeat during the 1970s. It is in no video libraries. A trawl for a VHS or DVD edition will draw a blank. Today, television researchers are only allowed to access it under close supervision. Copyright is controlled by the Queen’s Private Secretary and successive private secretaries have kept it under lock and key. The occasional clip has been authorised to form part of another documentary but the film itself remains out of bounds to the public. The official reason is that this was a programme of its time and for its time. ‘We put very heavy restrictions on it because we realised it was a huge shift in attitude,’ says Sir William Heseltine. ‘And we thought it was not something which should be quarried for other programmes or be shown every few months.’ Like any home video more than forty years old, it contains scenes which some members of the family would rather keep private – a broken cello string hitting Prince Edward in the face; Prince Charles as a painfully earnest undergraduate; the Queen joking about a diplomat with arms like ‘a gorilla’. To repeat it now would be to invite a degree of ridicule, a lot of nostalgia and many false comparisons with the present day. On the other hand, it would also highlight an interesting royal trend. As the Queen grows older, her staff grow younger. Almost everyone in Royal Family, from pantry to Private Secretary’s Office, seems ready for retirement. Compared to these elderly gents, today’s Royal Household is run by a bunch of teenagers. But is it really so anachronistic? Its central theme has hardly changed: monarchs are born into a contract with the people – and this is how it works.
Royal Family marked a shift not just in the Palace’s relations with the press but in the dynamic between the monarchy and the people. New ideas were no longer career-threatening. They were actively considered. A year later, the Queen’s tour of New Zealand saw the introduction of a minor adjustment to a transport schedule which would redefine the way members of the Royal Family – and, indeed, politicians – would engage with the public thereafter. All of a sudden, the walkabout was born. ‘It didn’t happen by accident,’ says Sir William Heseltine. Following the triumphal tour of 1953–4, the Queen’s follow-up tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1963 was something of a let down. Lower than expected crowds might have been inevitable but there was still a sense of anti-climax. The Palace wanted to breathe fresh life into the 1970 tour. ‘We were thinking, “How can we make this a bit different so it’s not a repeat of the rather anti-climactic visit in 1963?”’ says Heseltine. ‘Out of our deliberations came the idea of closer contact with the public at large – who’d mostly been the recipients of little more than a wave or a smile – rather than just mayors, councillors and politicians.’ But how?
Monarchs had never gone marching up to people for a chat – certainly not with
out an introduction. Patrick O’Dea, the head of New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs, had a solution. ‘Out of those discussions,’ says Heseltine, ‘came the idea that, instead of stopping at the door of a town hall, the car might stop fifty or sixty feet down the road from the town hall and the Queen might get out and walk that stretch, stopping occasionally to say hello along the way’ The police were not keen. But O’Dea and Heseltine put the idea to the Queen and the Duke who were happy to give it a go as they arrived in Wellington. It was an instant success – not just with the people but, crucially, with the press. ‘The most important thing of all was that it got a name – “the walkabout”,’ says Heseltine. ‘The person who gets the credit for that is Vincent Mulchrone, who was there for the Daily Mail. He was a delightful, cynical old boy and he completely misunderstood the significance of the word “walkabout”. It’s an Australian aboriginal phenomenon which involves not walking and chatting among crowds but getting off on your own in the bush and not having anything to do with anybody. But it had a romantic aura and it became universally acknowledged as the term!’ Back home, the Queen undertook her first walkabout in Coventry – a media triumph – and the politicians were soon aping her on the 1970 general election trail. It has been a part of public life ever since.
To his credit, the retired Sir Richard Colville was supportive throughout. ‘I saw quite a bit of him in the years afterwards,’ says Heseltine. ‘He had a lot of ill health but he was always very complimentary and never offered a word of criticism. I think he had the feeling the time was right for a change.’
Heseltine was soon moving onwards and upwards, promoted to the post of Assistant Private Secretary, from where he would eventually progress to the very top of the Royal Household. The Queen’s choice of a replacement Press Secretary marked another substantial break with the Colville era. Ron Allison was the first professional journalist to become a member of the royal team, hired straight from the BBC where he had spent the previous four years as royal correspondent. He remembers the BBC reporting his own appointment on the evening bulletin with the words: ‘… and so Allison will become the first member of the Royal Household to live in a three-bedroomed semi-detached house in Twickenham’. It remained the case as he preferred to commute to the Palace rather than move into grace-and-favour royal digs. Allison says that the switch from poacher to gamekeeper was a relatively easy one as he already knew the Palace and its people. There was, he says, no compromise in terms of his approach to the job. He had played a straight bat in his reporting at the BBC and was now expected to do the same in return. ‘During my time as Press Secretary, I retained my professional integrity,’ he says. ‘And I never knowingly told a lie. In Fleet Street and elsewhere, they welcomed the appointment. The only people who were wary were a few people in the Household and ITN.’ Independent Television News could hardly be pleased that their old opposition from the BBC was now installed at the Palace, but Allison soon had a chance to prove his worth, both to his new boss and to the media. No sooner had he been appointed than wedding preparations were under way for the marriage of Princess Anne to Captain Mark Phillips. ‘I was immediately chucked in at the deep end but it enabled me to demonstrate that I would be totally even-handed.’
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