The Queen Mother (85 page)
Authors: William Shawcross
After lunch, the King and Queen drove round the city to a warm, if quiet, welcome. But crowds of excited children in the Parc des Champs de Bataille on the Plains of Abraham, site of the bloody battle between the armies of General Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm in 1759, cheered loudly and waved flags; others sang ‘Dieu bénisse notre Roi et notre Reine’.
Yousuf Karsh, the Governor General’s official photographer for the tour, photographed the party. For tea at the residence of the Lieutenant Governor of Quebec the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu in the city had worked for a month creating two towering cakes surmounted by replicas of the King’s and Queen’s Coronation crowns. At Château Frontenac in the evening, the Queen wore a diamond tiara and a pink crinoline dress adorned with gold sequins and ‘La France’ roses. The Lieutenant Governor, Esioff-Léon Patenaude, seated next to her, was struck when she correctly identified three guests as having the air of ‘educators’ – they were all heads of universities – and two others as judges; she asked to meet them, and they were sought out after dinner. Only the intervention of Lascelles, announcing that it was time for the King and Queen to leave, prevented further presentations at the end of this exhausting first day.
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They spent the night at the Citadel, the Governor General’s Quebec residence.
The first twenty-four hours had certainly been a success. One observer commented, ‘Sa Majesté la Reine avait conquis tous les Québécois.’
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Asked what impression the King and Queen had made in Quebec, and whether French Canadians were loyal to England, Patenaude replied that less than 5 per cent of the French Canadian population shared the anti-British feelings expressed by certain soapbox orators, and that it had been a great thing for the people to see the King: they now felt that he belonged to them, as king of Canada. Indeed, French Canadians were eager to play a part in the visit. They clamoured for invitations to Château Frontenac; a country priest wrote to ask for commemorative medallions for the schoolchildren in his parish, although they would not see the King and Queen; a mayor begged for the couple to stop at his town.
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At Quebec the King and Queen embarked on a train which was to be their base for most of the rest of the tour, covering some 9,510
miles in twenty-nine days. It was the Governor General’s official train, which had been redecorated and extended to twelve carriages to carry the large party. The two royal carriages were painted in silver and blue, with the royal arms on each; the bedrooms were furnished in grey-blue and pink for the Queen and blue and white for the King. There was a wood-panelled office for the King, sitting rooms and a handsome dining room; and pull-down maps on rollers to follow their route across Canada. There was a carriage for the Prime Minister, who accompanied them throughout the tour. The train was comfortably, indeed luxuriously, appointed, although there was scarcely room for the Queen’s clothes: she needed a prodigious wardrobe for the multiple occasions and climate changes ahead, and Norman Hartnell had provided for all.
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Towards the end of the tour, one of the accompanying journalists calculated that she had made forty-eight appearances in thirty-two different outfits.
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The royal staff of nineteen included three British police officers. But at the King’s special request there were also four stalwart Royal Canadian Mounted Police orderlies in the party. Their task was to act as bodyguards in case of over-enthusiastic crowds.
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Eight more Mounties travelled with the train.
After a brief stop at Trois Rivières, where the King and Queen alighted to meet the Mayor and City Council, they arrived at Montreal in the early afternoon of 18 May, to a welcome as warm as that in Quebec City but far noisier. ‘So far, this tour is a roaring success,’ Tommy Lascelles reported. ‘I’ve never seen such splendid crowds … we must have seen well over a million people in Montreal alone.’
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The guard of honour was provided by the Black Watch of Canada,
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affiliated to the British regiment of which Queen Elizabeth had become colonel-in-chief in 1937. She became colonel-in-chief of the Canadian regiment ten years later, and maintained a close interest in it throughout her life.
Montreal had been preparing for the nine-hour royal visit for months, and the arrangements were lavish. The street decorations alone cost hundreds of thousands of dollars – the city was decked with floral arches,
royal portraits and immense pylons covered with coloured bunting. Houses were painted and balconies rented out to spectators. As the King and Queen arrived, the schoolchildren massed in the East Baseball Park forgot to sing the National Anthem and burst out into spontaneous cheering instead.
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Their host in Montreal was the Mayor, Camillien Houde, a colourful character. Earlier in the year he had made a speech asserting that if there were a war between England and Italy, the French Canadians, who were Roman Catholics, Latins and natural fascists, would side with Italy.
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He posed the kind of challenge that the Queen enjoyed – she had charmed hostile ‘Bolshevik’ politicians in Australia; a maverick right-winger should prove no more difficult. Houde was indeed entranced by her and he is reputed to have said to the King, as huge crowds cheered them, ‘You know, Your Majesty, some of this is for you.’
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The thousand guests bidden to the dinner given by the City of Montreal had kept dressmakers and tailors employed for weeks, according to the local press. The Queen, this time, wore not a crinoline but a close-fitting silver-blue brocade gown embroidered with silver sequins and rhinestones, and a diamond tiara, three-strand necklace and earrings. When she and the King entered the hall, the guests abandoned protocol and broke into applause and cheers. Thereafter the dinner proceeded with much gaiety through its six courses and vintage champagne. The Quatuor Alouette sang traditional French Canadian folk songs as well as Scottish, Irish and English tunes, and the press reported that the King and Queen joined in with ‘Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes’ and ‘Alouette, Gentille Alouette’, of which the Queen asked for a copy of the lyrics to take home.
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Next morning, 19 May, the royal train arrived in Ottawa, to be greeted by Lord and Lady Tweedsmuir. The Governor General’s role in the tour was small: as the King’s representative he stepped down, symbolically, while the King himself was in Canada. But during the two and a half days the King and Queen spent in Ottawa, days crammed with pomp and ceremony, Lord Tweedsmuir was able to observe them at first hand, and his comments were perceptive, particularly about the Queen. The city was thronged with spectators who had come in from the surrounding countryside;
thousands of Americans also came. The principal event of the first day in Ottawa was the session of Parliament over which the King presided. For the ceremony the Queen wore one of the more spectacular crinolines designed for her by Hartnell, with a long golden train.
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‘The Q. is looking radiantly beautiful, & has them all gasping like goldfish – particularly the American press-men,’ Tommy Lascelles reported.
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Saturday 20 May had been designated the King’s official birthday, since he would be in the United States on 8 June, the date on which the birthday was normally celebrated. To mark the day, Trooping the Colour was held on Parliament Hill. While the King took the salute, the Queen watched from a window with Lord Tweedsmuir. ‘When the crowd saw her,’ Tweedsmuir observed, ‘nothing would induce several thousand of them to look at the Trooping. They simply kept their eyes glued on Her Majesty and shouted like dervishes.’
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The Canadian government had been anxious for her to perform a ceremony to commemorate her visit, so after the Trooping she laid the foundation stone of the Supreme Court Building. Her deftly worded speech acknowledged the compliment to women which the ceremony represented, and also used her Scottish heritage to advantage. ‘Perhaps it is not inappropriate that this task should be performed by a woman, for woman’s position in civilized society has depended upon the growth of law,’ she began. She continued in French, pointing out that Scottish and French Canadian law shared their source in Roman law.
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Afterwards, showing her instinct for the unexpected but welcome gesture, the Queen asked Lord Tweedsmuir to take her and the King to meet the masons working on the building. Some of them were Scots, and, as Tweedsmuir recorded, ‘they spent at least ten minutes in Scottish reminiscences, in full view of 70,000 people, who went mad!’
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This episode has been seen as the first instance of a royal ‘walkabout’, though it is worth remembering that the King and Queen had done much the same as Duke and Duchess of York in Australia in 1927. The following day, in beautiful weather, the King unveiled the National War Memorial – and then, Tweedsmuir reported,
A most extraordinary scene followed. The King and Queen, and my wife and myself were absorbed in a crowd of six or seven thousand ex-soldiers, who kept the most perfect order among themselves, and opened up lanes for Their Majesties to pass through. There was no need of the police, and indeed the police would have had no chance. It was a wonderful example of what a people’s king means, and it would have been impossible anywhere else in the world. One old fellow shouted to me, ‘Ay, man, if Hitler could see this!’ It was also extraordinarily moving, because most of these old fellows were weeping.
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Writing to a friend about these two occasions, Tweedsmuir declared that the Queen had ‘a perfect genius for the right kind of publicity. The unrehearsed episodes here were marvellous.’
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Both King and Queen, he remarked to Hardinge, had an infallible instinct for ‘the small unscheduled things that count most’.
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Throughout the tour, the press reports are peppered with accounts of impromptu breaks in the official programme when the pair stopped to talk to individuals, or appeared unannounced from the royal train. One Ottawa journal described the royal couple as ‘democracy enthroned, not enthralled’.
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At the garden party at Government House on their second day in Ottawa, Lord Tweedsmuir was amazed to see, among the cheering guests, the Archbishop and other French Canadian ecclesiastics shouting, ‘Vive le Roi!’ and ‘Vive la Reine!’ This was followed by a Parliamentary dinner at Château Laurier. After it the King and Queen appeared on the balcony to acknowledge the cheers of a crowd of some 100,000 in the central square, and then surprised officials by returning to shake the hands of all 800 of the guests at the dinner.
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Rufus Pope, one of the Senators, said to the Queen, ‘Ma’am I would fight for you. Yes I would fight for you until hell is frozen.’
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All this was noticed in Europe. Georges Vanier,
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the Canadian Minister in Paris, reported on the close attention the royal visit was receiving in France. ‘The departure of the King and Queen from England at a time of acute national anxiety is seen as a proof of the cool, phlegmatic, and solid character of their Anglo-Saxon ally,’ he wrote. Accounts of the King’s speeches in French were well received,
as was the attention paid to French Canadians.
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In Italy, predictably, reactions were less favourable. The Italian press ‘has paid studiously little attention’ to the visit, the British Ambassador wrote, and such reports as it published were derogatory. Some newspapers mocked the idea that the visit augured well for Anglo-French collaboration, expressing surprise that the French had ever given up this former possession.
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In Germany, meanwhile, having reported that the bad weather in the North Atlantic had spoiled the trip, the press did its best to play it down.
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‘Their Majesties are very well, and in excellent spirits,’ commented Lord Tweedsmuir the day after their departure from Ottawa. ‘I am just a little doubtful as to how they will last the course. Canada has given them a pretty heavy programme, but they seem to want to add to it.’
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On the way to Toronto, the King and Queen waved to the crowds from the rear platform of the train as it ran slowly through towns; this was often repeated as they travelled west.
In Toronto next day, in addition to the provincial and municipal welcoming ceremonies, the Queen had another engagement of her own. She had accepted the colonelcy-in-chief of the Toronto Scottish Regiment in 1937; now she inspected her regiment and presented them with new colours, making a short speech alluding to the ties uniting Canada and her native Scotland. ‘Rousing Cheers Given for “Girl from Glamis” ’ announced the Toronto
Globe and Mail
.
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There were more echoes of Scotland: while officially the King and Queen were enjoying periods of rest in the Lieutenant Governor’s Chambers in the Legislative Buildings that day, they were in fact receiving individuals privately, including the son of a shepherd at Glamis whom the Queen had asked to meet,
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and Sir William Mulock, a distinguished Canadian elder statesman, who presented her with funds collected by the Black Watch in Toronto to endow beds at a Black Watch Home in Scotland.
She had also asked to meet in Toronto the President of the Canadian Mothercraft Society. This was the only Canadian society to which she had as yet given her patronage, underlining the importance
she attached to the teaching of maternal skills, for the Mothercraft Training Society was one of her earliest patronages in England. The Queen’s public role in promoting charitable work was, in theory, suspended during the Canadian tour, but in this way she contrived to give a favourite cause a private boost;
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she did the same for the Canadian Toc H League of Women Helpers in various cities across the country.
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