The Queen Mother (130 page)
Authors: William Shawcross
On 10 July she took a ‘bumpy flight in a small and not very comfortable plane’, a Heron, to the town of Broken Hill where there was a reception and a lunch and she then decided to do a spontaneous ‘walkabout’ – such as she and her husband had first done in New Zealand in 1927. ‘This produced immense enthusiasm and she was given an ecstatic welcome.’ Back in Lusaka she received a deputation
from Queen Elizabeth’s Colonial Nursing Service,
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and then unveiled a plaque at the High Courts of Justice. She laid the foundation stone for the new Anglican cathedral, attended a garden party at Government House and presented Silver Drums to the 1st Battalion The Northern Rhodesia Regiment and watched the Beating Retreat – ‘a ceremony quite beautifully carried out, and the bugle calls most moving and romantic as the African light began to fail’.
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Next morning, 12 July, she was on another flight, this time to Chileke, where she was met by the Governor of Nyasaland and Lady Armitage; she visited and named the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, had lunch with the Chief Justice, attended a garden party at the Limbe Country Club and then had a pleasant evening drive to Government House in Zomba, pronounced by Olivia Mulholland the most beautiful place they had yet visited, with glorious views of the surrounding mountains.
At a state
baraza
(an open public meeting) for African chiefs from the whole territory, she delighted the crowd by appearing in a blue and white evening dress with a sparkling tiara, a mass of diamond jewellery and the Garter ribbon over her shoulder. More than a hundred chiefs took part in a colourful and impressive ceremony and the Queen Mother shook hands with each of them. In the evening she decided to drive up the hair-raising road to the top of the Zomba Mountain to see the view and the profusion of wild flowers; the whole party repeated the experience the next day in convoy, raising clouds of red dust, for a picnic tea. ‘There were unanimous regrets at leaving such a lovely spot,’ Olivia Mulholland recorded. They would have enjoyed a rest, but they had to return to Salisbury next morning.
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The last day, 16 July, was particularly exhausting with several public engagements, a hot and dusty race meeting and a state banquet. After that the party was driven straight to the airport with the Queen Mother still in evening dress and tiara. ‘A most romantic departure as HM boarded the plane with the floodlights on, the whole thing looking like a scene from a musical comedy.’
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They landed at London Airport in the pouring rain and were met by Princess Margaret. The Queen
and Prince Philip came to Clarence House and they all dined together before dispersing, exhausted and somewhat dazed but confident that the trip had been a great success.
The acting British High Commissioner reported home that Queen Elizabeth’s tour had had a positive effect on race relations in the Federation. Her engagements had been very much multi-racial, sometimes in spite of opposition. ‘For her part, Her Majesty emphasised again and again the pleasure with which she saw the representatives of all races, and this gracious influence in favour of racial tolerance cannot fail to be of effect throughout the country … now that these barriers of race prejudice have once been lowered other people will be less fearful of trying to behave in a liberal way in future.’
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Q
UEEN
E
LIZABETH
undertook her longest tour at the beginning of 1958. It gave her considerable pleasure that as a result she would fly right around the world before her very modern son-in-law Prince Philip had done so. She left feeling unwell, after she and other members of the family had contracted a rather vicious form of flu at Sandringham.
She had been invited by the government of Australia to open the British Empire Service League biennial conference in Canberra on 17 February, and preceded this with a ten-day visit to New Zealand. She flew out of London on a BOAC DC-7 on the morning of 28 January. Her first brief stop was Montreal where the plane landed to refuel in a blinding snowstorm. Her flight continued across the Prairies and the Rockies to Vancouver, where she arrived at 11.30 p.m. local time. The snow had been replaced by drenching rain. Almost twenty-four hours after leaving London, she was tired, but when she landed she said she was ‘so glad to be here’.
Travelling via Honolulu and crossing the international dateline, she touched down in Fiji on the afternoon of Friday 31 January. There was no question of rest – instead she was accorded a formal reception first by the Governor and then by the Mayor of Lautoka, and was asked to watch a display of Fijian song and dance. After a short night’s sleep, she took off for the last leg of the journey out to New Zealand, arriving in the afternoon of 1 February. There, after a journey of 12,700 miles, she was greeted by the Governor General and Lady Cobham.
Throughout February and the first week of March she conducted an extensive and relentlessly busy tour of New Zealand and Australia. It included all the usual paraphernalia of royal tours – civic receptions, garden parties, inspections of schools and universities, farms and showgrounds; the presentation of colours to military units, luncheons and dinners with local and national politicians, church services, drives from airport to hotel, hotel to airport in long convoys of cars. Sir James Scholtens, the assistant director of the Australian tour, later recalled that her programme was indeed very heavy and was ‘saturated with’ events.
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Still exhausted by the journey out, she had a nasty recurrence of her flu symptoms in the Cathedral Church of St Paul at Wellington. As she described it to the Queen, ‘My head started to go round just like it did in London before I left, & my knees trembled so much that the service paper rattled & rustled! It was really an agony, & the first time in my life that such a thing has happened to me.’ She found that the worst thing was being alone without anyone in the family. ‘When one has someone either to help, or be helped by, nothing seems quite so devastating – Luckily, I shall be far too old soon for any more Australasian tours!’
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When she finally shook off her illness, the Queen Mother enjoyed herself much more and wrote home saying how touching her welcome had been. The Australian papers were gossipy, but ‘so far they are quite polite, & go on the old stories of how tired I am, & how much my feet hurt, & how tired the staff is, & how I
must
dye my hair otherwise how could it still be dark etc etc!! Quite harmless, & quite funny sometimes.’
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Later she described herself as ‘just hanging on’; the tour was so packed that there was hardly time for breathing. But luckily the weather was lovely ‘and one feels revived’.
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She found the loyalty to the Crown and to Britain ‘burning’.
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She was annoyed to think that the English newspapers were not covering her efforts, but in fact the British press followed her tour quite extensively and both her daughters told her so. Princess Margaret wrote, ‘We see nothing but delicious hot sunny photographs of you with millions & millions of people waving. I can almost hear that exhausting noise!’
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There were compensations. Queen Elizabeth wrote to her unmarried daughter that on a sheep station she had met the owners’ ‘very beautiful nephews, all called Bill. The real country Australian is really a knock out. Very tall,
with long legs encased in tight trousers, blue eyes, a drawl and a Stetson – they are too charming for words and the American cowboy is a mere nothing compared.’
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Sydney was another matter. The city, she said, ‘nearly killed me!’ The organizers kept slotting in new events – on one morning she had three children’s rallies ‘in boiling sun’, then visits to a factory and a housing estate, followed by a garden party, after which she had to give out presents to people who had helped with the tour. She did not like this ritual – it was ‘always at the end of a busy day, & one gradually thanks them less & less, until the poor deputy transport officer gets a mere whisper’.
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On one memorable day, because of the intense rivalry between the two towns, she had to fit in both Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, and Launceston, a hundred miles away, on a day trip by air from Melbourne. Her entourage was daunted; but the Queen Mother, rarely unable to enjoy herself, found it hilarious.
I went to Tasmania for lunch yesterday. That’s the form! It was a gloriously crazy day, & I haven’t laughed so much for years! First of all, we arrived in a howling gale, which is always faintly funny.
Sir Ronald Cross had an A.D.C. from the Grenadiers who was having ghastly trouble with a huge bearskin, & I thought he had gone mad when he conducted me firmly to the
back
of the Guard of Honour – I had visions of inspecting their backs, when on a word of command, they revolved, & we faced each other bravely. Then on arrival at their house, there was drawn up a lot of Army nurses to inspect. As I started down the line, a particularly vicious blast took
all
their hats off, & being round & flat, they rolled away like little bicycles!
Then the public address system broke down when I was making my very boring speech, & then we had a mad chauffeur who obediently slowed down on approaching a group of people, and then accelerated violently when passing them, so all the poor things saw was a pair of white shoes, as I was thrown back against the seat & my feet shot into the air. Let us hope that they thought they saw little white hands waving.
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There were some days off and the relaxation that she enjoyed the most was visiting studs or going to the races. Early in the trip around New Zealand, at Trentham racecourse, near Wellington, she presented
the St James’s Cup to Sir Ernest Davies, a colourful businessman and former mayor of Auckland, whose horse Bali Ha’i had just won. To her astonishment, ‘he roared up to the microphone’ and announced that he wanted to give her the horse ‘as a present from all the sports people of New Zealand!! You can imagine my feelings!’ she wrote to the Queen. ‘And at once I thought of you and Margaret saying, “what has Mummy done now”.’
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She wrote also to her trainer Cecil Boyd-Rochfort asking him to take the gift horse into his stable.
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In the event, Bali Ha’i was an excellent horse and raced well for her after he had arrived in England.
Right through to the end came more civic ceremonies, more mayoral receptions, more awards to be given, parades of ambulance workers, tours of housing projects, inspections of factories, more garden parties, further civic receptions, meetings of youth organizations and attendance at a schoolchildren’s rally in Perth, until on the evening of Friday 7 March Queen Elizabeth left on one of Qantas’s best planes, a Super Constellation named
Southern Star
, bound for London. As she flew north and west, she was pleased with her tour and was looking forward to dinner with her family on Monday night (she never liked being alone on the evening she returned from a trip). And then the unforeseen happened.
The refuelling in the Cocos Islands was without incident. But about two hours before arriving in Mauritius for another fuelling, a cylinder seized in one of the plane’s four engines. Serious damage was caused. Cyclones in the Mauritius area added to anxiety about a safe landing. To everyone’s relief they made it into Plaisance airport, but it then became clear that the engine’s cowling needed to be replaced. The intended one-hour stopover had to be extended – and extended. In the end the necessary repairs delayed them for three nights. The weather was dreadful: airless and steamy, crackling with violent electrical storms or pouring with rain. But Queen Elizabeth made the best of her enforced holiday. The Governor concocted an impromptu programme and she was cheered by crowds of delighted Mauritians wherever she went. She toured Port Louis, and at Pamplemousses she inspected the araucaria tree she had planted in 1927 on the way back from Australia; she drove up into the mountains for a picnic. Everywhere she went, she met with enthusiastic crowds.
She was offered another aircraft to continue, but knowing how upset her Qantas crew (and their superiors back home) already were,
she said that she preferred to stay with her Qantas flight. Back in Australia Sir Allen Brown, the director general of her visit and a keen writer of rhymes, concocted a telegram about her plight:
A cowling’s just a piece of tin
To keep the aircraft engine in
But without it one gets vicious
Especially if in Mauritius
Anticipating that Martin Gilliat would be more upset than his mistress, he added,
I fear the rage of Comrade Martin,
Because the aircraft won’t get startin’
Yet tell him that the loudest howling
Will not replace the missing cowling
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On 11 March, after a new cowling had eventually arrived from Australia, she flew away, church bells pealing, people shouting farewells as she waved goodbye from the steps of the plane.
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Her greatest concern was for Kenya where she had been scheduled to open Nairobi’s new airport during another stopover. The delays had made this impossible and she sent a message to the Governor of Kenya saying how sad she was about this, but expressing confidence that ‘on another voyage, which I hope will not be too far in the future, my aircraft will land at your new airport’.
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It happened just one year later.
Instead of Nairobi, her plane was routed by Entebbe where she landed in the middle of the night. Once again, engine trouble prolonged what was to have been a refuelling stop. Once again, she was offered another aircraft but declined. A further eighteen hours late, she took off for Malta. She was almost home but even here there was trouble and another delay of at least twelve hours was promised. So finally she agreed to transfer to a BOAC plane and completed the journey to London, landing on the morning of 13 March, sixty-eight hours late. When the desolate Qantas manager in London apologized, she reassured him, ‘It could have happened to anyone. I feel very sorry for the crew; they all worked so hard.’
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