by Paul James
April 30 2006
On 21 April 2006, live images of a smiling and still-spirited eighty-year-old queen flashed into homes across the World, her large picture filled the front pages of magazines and newspapers, as messages of congratulations flooded Buckingham Palace from computers in living rooms, bedrooms, libraries, and offices in her sixteen independent realms, Commonwealth republics and nations beyond.
The Prince of Wales, having recently celebrated the first anniversary of his marriage to his former mistress, recorded a video from his home in Scotland in which he spoke of “dear Mama.” Meanwhile, his elder son prepared to join the birthday party with his live-in girlfriend, while the younger son was reportedly threatening to throw in his uniform if he wasn’t allowed to fight on the frontline as part of the junior force in the occupation of what was once British Mesopotamia.
Today, it is a different World from that in which the eighty-year-old lady, Elizabeth II, was born! Readers of The Times learned of her birth if they turned to page fourteen and saw the small announcement at the top-right of the page:
THE DUCHESS OF YORK
BIRTH OF A DAUGHTER
“The Press Association is officially informed that Her Royal Highness The Duchess of York was safely delivered of a Princess at 2.40 this morning. Both mother and daughter are doing well.”
If they had started their reading of the morning paper on the front page, they wouldn’t have read about the daily news, but rather the Classified Advertisements: £3 reward for the return of a black chow bitch called Sally, lost in Hyde Park. “Wanted, two strong young gentlemen for housework, and to help in the kitchen”, “Wanted, a very good home for cat – Mrs. Benyon, 33 Upper Berkeley Street”. All this in the premier national newspaper! Two royals found their way into the personal advertisements:
“HRH PRINCE HENRY’S SPECIAL COMMITTEE has RECEIVED £48,247 towards the £87,500 required: £39,253 still wanted to complete scheme for CURING CRIPPLED CHILDREN.”
“HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES in writing to the Treasurer says “Knowing as I do how essential such support is to enable the work done by the Homes and Ship to be carried on, I am glad, as President, to be able to wish the appeal every success” …
Prince Henry had yet to become Duke of Gloucester. The “Homes and Ship” was the Shaftesbury Homes and Arethusa Training Ship children’s charity, which still operates today.
Royal news on that day included the announcement that Princess Victoria, the King’s spinster sister, “is making very good progress towards recovery and has driven out for a short period each day this week.” She was “probably” going to go to Bournemouth for two or three weeks to recuperate. She had been suffering from “influenzal pneumonia”, which had caused considerable anxiety. Victoria had been the constant companion of her mother, Queen Alexandra, who had died in November 1925. Alexandra, the much-loved nineteenth-century Princess of Wales had missed meeting Elizabeth, the much loved twenty-first-century Queen, by only five months. There was foreign royal news too – in Germany, the Reichstag was debating measures to decide upon the fate of the assets of the country’s former royal families. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria was rumoured to be plotting a coup to reclaim his throne. It had been less than a decade since the great imperial crowns of Germany, Russia, and Austria, and the many lesser royal, ducal and princely crowns, had fallen in the wake of the Great War.
But in victorious Britain, from Buckingham Palace, the infant princess’s grandfather reigned as King and Emperor of a quarter of humanity. No monarch in history had reigned over so many people or such vast territories, on every continent and in almost every time zone. The sun never set on the British Empire.
When Elizabeth was born, George V had one title and the entire empire was still, to varying extents, subject to British sovereignty, especially in the conduct of foreign affairs. A declaration of war by His Majesty in the UK was a declaration of war by the whole Empire. The first significant step in the change from Empire to modern Commonwealth occurred in the year of Her Majesty’s birth. She was seven months old when the Imperial Conference of leaders from the empire declared that Great Britain and the dominions “are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown”. From this came the redefinition of Governor-Generals’ roles as representatives of the sovereign alone, and not of the British government as well, and from there it was a natural development to separate crowns, in which, two decades later, the Queen’s father as king in right of India could go to war with himself as king in right of Pakistan. After that came the acceptance of republics in the Commonwealth, and then the adoption of a separate title in each realm, and the formal title of Head of the Commonwealth.
Prince Charles might have liked 1926 – no Sun newspaper, no independent television (no television!), and not even a British Broadcasting Corporation. The privately-owned British Broadcasting Company had been broadcasting on radio since 1922, but it was in the year of Her Majesty’s birth that Parliament decided to turn it into a Crown-chartered corporation, and the transformation took place at the end of the year.
As the Queen was born, the Prime Minister, Mr Baldwin, was embroiled in negotiations to try to settle the dispute between mine-owners and mineworkers, over proposed wage reductions. The negotiations failed, and within two weeks of Elizabeth’s birth, the General Strike began in support of the mineworkers. The government had prepared for this moment and implemented emergency plans which kept the country from being completely crippled. The strike collapsed after nine days, although the mineworkers themselves held out for several more months. The little girl in Bruton Street was to see plenty more such conflict. The mineworkers brought her government down 48 years later, before being all but crushed by her first female Prime Minister in the 1980s.
In the more formal ways of 1926, the Royal Family went about much the same business as it does today. Troops were inspected, charities visited, and overseas dignitaries entertained. The Prince of Wales addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science, eulogizing science more positively than our modern Prince is inclined to do today. Edward seemed to be a bit accident-prone. On January 27, he was bruised while riding with the Belvoir Hounds: his horse fell down dead under him. On the following day, he was thrown from another horse and broke a collar bone while out with the Fernie Hounds! Throughout it all, he had his long-term mistress – Freda Dudley Ward – although it was another mistress whom he would eventually marry.
Towards the end of the year, the 1927 edition of the annual reference book, Whitaker’s Almanack, was published. Its section on Questions of the Day included an entry entitled “Succession to the Throne”, which began “The birth in April of Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York, had an interesting bearing on the succession to the throne.” It went on to discuss how she preceded her uncles and aunt in the succession but would be displaced by children of the Prince of Wales or by the birth of a brother. Eighty years on, a nation and Commonwealth are grateful that neither event came to pass.