Read Online Elizabeth the Queen by Sally Bedell Smith - Free Book Online
Authors: Sally Bedell Smith
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wide-eyed as five thousand half-naked warriors wearing loincloths, animal skins, beads, and feathers brandished their spears and shields, chanting and stomping in a great tribal dance. The princesses gaped at Victoria Falls, marveled at wildlife in the Kruger National Park, hiked the trails in the Drakensberg mountains of the Natal National Park, and clipped the feathers off ostriches. Yet Elizabeth couldn’t help feeling “guilty that we had got away to the sun while everyone else was freezing,” she wrote to Queen Mary. “We hear such terrible stories of the weather and fuel situation at home.… I do hope you have not suffered too much.”
The royal party followed a relentless schedule, including thirty-five days on the “White Train” of fourteen air-conditioned railway carriages painted ivory and gold. Elizabeth watched her parents make their rounds, displaying lively interest as they endured endless receiving lines and tributes, taking in all manner of performances and celebrations. The strain of being on constant display—of feeling “quite sucked dry sometimes,” as her mother described it to a niece midway through the tour—she now saw firsthand. She witnessed her father’s short fuse when he was exhausted or tense, and her mother’s ability to still his “gnashes” with a deft touch on his arm. Either from some unknown underlying illness or the toll of his exertions, the King was visibly losing weight.
There were serious tensions in South Africa, a predominantly black country controlled by a white minority that was itself divided between the Afrikaners of mainly Dutch descent and the English-speaking population—the angry legacy of the nineteenth-century Boer wars in which the British brutally suppressed the Dutch settlers’ rebellions and created British colonies. In part, the royal family’s trip was an effort by the King to promote reconciliation and to support the prime minister, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, an Afrikaner educated in England.
As Smuts faced a general election in 1948, many Afrikaners felt he was too close to Britain and too sympathetic to blacks. While he opposed giving blacks political power, Smuts favored paternalistic policies to help improve their lives. The opposition Afrikaner National Party, however, advocated apartheid policies of racial separation and subjugation. The pro-apartheid extremists eventually prevailed over Smuts and his party, setting South Africa on an isolationist course for nearly half a century. Lilibet saw how onlookers at events were segregated by race, and she understood the political divisions among the whites. Her insights into the repressive policies in South Africa and neighboring Rhodesia later proved invaluable when she dealt with racial questions that threatened to tear apart the Commonwealth.
* * *
T HE HIGH POINT of the journey for Elizabeth was her twenty-first birthday on April 21. South Africa celebrated her coming of age as a national holiday with military reviews, a ball in her honor, fireworks, and a necklace of twenty-one diamonds presented by Smuts. She marked the milestone with an eloquent speech dedicated to the young people who had shared her experience of the “terrible and glorious years of the second world war.” The address was written by Dermot Morrah, a historian sympathetic to the monarchy and an editorial writer for The Times , and polished by Tommy Lascelles, who thought it had “the trumpet-ring of the other Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech, combined with the immortal simplicity of Victoria’s ‘I will be good.’ ”
Reading the text for the first time brought Elizabeth to tears. While she hadn’t crafted the words she spoke, her emotional reaction explains why her delivery was so authentic, and why her sentiments still strike a powerful chord and define her to this day. Lascelles told her that if “200 million other people cry when they hear you deliver it … that is what we want.”
Her remarks, which were
The royal party followed a relentless schedule, including thirty-five days on the “White Train” of fourteen air-conditioned railway carriages painted ivory and gold. Elizabeth watched her parents make their rounds, displaying lively interest as they endured endless receiving lines and tributes, taking in all manner of performances and celebrations. The strain of being on constant display—of feeling “quite sucked dry sometimes,” as her mother described it to a niece midway through the tour—she now saw firsthand. She witnessed her father’s short fuse when he was exhausted or tense, and her mother’s ability to still his “gnashes” with a deft touch on his arm. Either from some unknown underlying illness or the toll of his exertions, the King was visibly losing weight.
There were serious tensions in South Africa, a predominantly black country controlled by a white minority that was itself divided between the Afrikaners of mainly Dutch descent and the English-speaking population—the angry legacy of the nineteenth-century Boer wars in which the British brutally suppressed the Dutch settlers’ rebellions and created British colonies. In part, the royal family’s trip was an effort by the King to promote reconciliation and to support the prime minister, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, an Afrikaner educated in England.
As Smuts faced a general election in 1948, many Afrikaners felt he was too close to Britain and too sympathetic to blacks. While he opposed giving blacks political power, Smuts favored paternalistic policies to help improve their lives. The opposition Afrikaner National Party, however, advocated apartheid policies of racial separation and subjugation. The pro-apartheid extremists eventually prevailed over Smuts and his party, setting South Africa on an isolationist course for nearly half a century. Lilibet saw how onlookers at events were segregated by race, and she understood the political divisions among the whites. Her insights into the repressive policies in South Africa and neighboring Rhodesia later proved invaluable when she dealt with racial questions that threatened to tear apart the Commonwealth.
* * *
T HE HIGH POINT of the journey for Elizabeth was her twenty-first birthday on April 21. South Africa celebrated her coming of age as a national holiday with military reviews, a ball in her honor, fireworks, and a necklace of twenty-one diamonds presented by Smuts. She marked the milestone with an eloquent speech dedicated to the young people who had shared her experience of the “terrible and glorious years of the second world war.” The address was written by Dermot Morrah, a historian sympathetic to the monarchy and an editorial writer for The Times , and polished by Tommy Lascelles, who thought it had “the trumpet-ring of the other Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech, combined with the immortal simplicity of Victoria’s ‘I will be good.’ ”
Reading the text for the first time brought Elizabeth to tears. While she hadn’t crafted the words she spoke, her emotional reaction explains why her delivery was so authentic, and why her sentiments still strike a powerful chord and define her to this day. Lascelles told her that if “200 million other people cry when they hear you deliver it … that is what we want.”
Her remarks, which were
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