Date: 2024-11-22 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00022495
UNITED KINGDOM
THE ROYAL PLATINUM JUBILEE
The New Yorker flashback to 1952 ... London Salutes the New Queen ... The news of Elizabeth II’s accession reaches a population that no longer believes it is all roses being a queen.
THE ROYAL PLATINUM JUBILEE
The New Yorker flashback to 1952 ... London Salutes the New Queen ... The news of Elizabeth II’s accession reaches a population that no longer believes it is all roses being a queen.
A photograph of soldiers carrying the coffin of George VI ... February 8th ... Photograph by George W. Hales / Getty
Original article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1952/02/16/letter-from-london-245
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I was 12 years old when King George VI died and Princess Elizabeth succeeded to the throne. Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip were in Kenya at the time on the first leg of a 'Royal Tour' staying at a remote safari location called 'Tree-Tops'. The Royal family had a huge role in keeping up the spirits of the British population during the war years together with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. 70 years on, and the Queen still plays a big role in setting the tone for a life well-lived.
Peter Burgess
February 16, 1952 Issue
By Mollie Panter-Downes
February 8, 1952
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of England came to the throne in a way that was peculiarly of her age, which has shrunk the physical boundaries of the world and widened man’s conception of what is humanely due to man, royal or common. For the first time in history, the news of accession was sent by cable to the new sovereign, who hurried home four thousand miles by air to her capital and to a demonstration of almost indignant pity from a population that no longer believes it is all roses being a queen. On the morning the King died, people gathered in groups everywhere to talk of his tragically unexpected death, and then immediately of Elizabeth, without altering the tone of their voices, as though she, too, had been struck down by some grave illness—the malady of sovereignty, which lasts a lifetime. It was a strange, sad day in London.
The news first leaked out into the ordinary working morning in shocked rumors, which started circulating from some of the embassies and then from startled members of clubs who had stopped to take a quick look at City prices on the ticker-tape machine. Out in the streets, the truth got around in the same almost casual way, with people hardly believing their eyes when they caught sight of the scrawled words “The King Dead” on the posters held by the newspaper-sellers at street corners. The early-evening editions, out before noon, carried headlines about the dustup that was expected to break around Mr. Churchill’s head in the foreign-affairs debate in the Commons that afternoon, and the unbelievable bad news was contained only in a bald line in the stop-press section. People stood dazedly watching buildings run out flags and then slowly add mournful confirmation by sinking them to half-mast. Crowds drifted along all day to Buckingham Palace and stood staring at its drawn shades and bare flag standard, as though somehow hoping for more news there.
As the day went on, London quickly arranged itself in mourning. Salesgirls crawled about in shop windows undressing the dummy figures that were sporting the new spring tweeds, colored like daffodil and pussy willow, and reclothing them in black and white and purple. The small, elegant shops around Bond Street hurriedly displayed black and white china, or first editions bound in violet, or laurel wreaths tied with broad mauve satin ribbon. The shops that had no special displays draped wide stripes of crape ribbon from top to bottom of their windows. By evening, the city, with theatres and cinemas closed and the people home indoors, looked empty, as though it were a bad blitz night.
Mr. Churchill had asked the public not to turn out in force to meet the Queen at the airport when she flew in from Africa yesterday. However, a crowd of people that the papers later said numbered about four thousand collected along the Mall (on that broad, tree-lined thoroughfare they made only a fairly thin scatter along the curbs) to watch her arrival with her husband at Clarence House. The most prosperous-looking among the waiting women wore black furs and hats, and the men wore black ties, but the most touching things were the bows of painstakingly tied cheap black ribbon and the homemade crépe-paper armbands pinned on many shabby coats. When the big car flying the Royal Standard eventually came along the cold, darkening street, the crowd gave its occupants the courtesy of utter silence. In the car, the pale girl in black, who must have been dropping with tiredness, had her hand raised in the first of the carefully schooled, carefully gracious queenly gestures it will now be her perhaps dreaded lot to perform.
The public proclamation of the Queen’s accession, which normally would have taken place right after the King’s death but had to be delayed until Elizabeth’s return to London, was made this morning in hearteningly brilliant sunshine, an icy wind that nearly froze the noses off her new subjects’ faces, and a warming blaze of heraldic pageantry. According to the ceremony that has been followed through the centuries, she was proclaimed “Queen of this realm and all her other realms and territories, head of the Commonwealth, defender of the faith” at four points of the city, with fanfares of trumpets—at St. James’s Palace first, and then at Charing Cross, in Chancery Lane, and from the steps of the Royal Exchange. At St. James’s, where the little turreted Palace looked in the sunshine like a child’s toy castle carved out of dark gingerbread, the big crowds entertained themselves by admiring the uniforms and the horses, and by identifying the Ministers and their wives as they appeared on the Palace roof. Unseen by the crowds, two bits of walking history were looking on at yet another bit of history being made—Winston Churchill from a large window inside the courtyard, and the much-loved Queen Mary, who sat at a bedroom window high above the trees in Marlborough House, just across the way, and listened to her granddaughter’s proclamation as she had listened to those of two sons, the exiled and the dead. The ancient words were read by Sir George Bellew, Garter King of Arms, a gorgeous, gold-laced figure sending in the center of the other officers of arms, some of them frail-looking old men whose splendid cocked hats trembled in their hands either from emotion or from cold—the Clarenceux and Norroy and Ulster Kings of Arms, the six heralds, of Lancaster, Chester, York, Richmond, Windsor, and Somerset, and the four pursuivants, whose titles sound as though they were out of an ancient Norman ballad: Rouge Croix, Portcullis, Bluemantle, and Rouge Dragon. After the proclamation had been read, the flag on the Palace and the flags on the towers of Westminster, across St. James’s Park, were broken at full mast to salute the new Queen; they returned to mourning half-mast later, and will stay that way until after the King’s funeral next Friday.
At the moment, there is no other topic of conversation here. Wherever you go, in the streets and in the shops and on the buses, people start talking about the King as though they had suffered a loss in their own families. Some of them say sadly that England has had blows in the last few years but that this is the worst blow of all. Many people think, however, that the young Queen will have a uniting and perhaps inspiring effect on her people as time goes on, and point out hopefully that England has always done famously under her rulers on the distaff side. The events of the last few days have been an enormous national shock, though. When the English sing “Long may she reign” now, they will mean it and wish it with all their hearts. ♦
Published in the print edition of the February 16, 1952, issue, with the headline “Letter from London.”