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Speechless and wordless
BILL KIRKMAN
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The death of the Queen Mother saw the media out of touch with the public mood. Neither was the whole country in mourning nor was there a major discussion on the relevance of the monarchy. Rather, the mood was one of reflection.
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A morale booster during World War II ... The Queen Mother touring bombed areas with her husband King George VI .
PUBLIC reactions in Britain to the death of the Queen Mother surprised most people. They certainly surprised the press and broadcast media, which badly misjudged the public mood. More than a million people lined the streets of London to watch the Queen Mother's funeral procession, and many thousands in the days between her death and the funeral went to Westminster Hall to pay their last respects as she lay in state.
The fact of great public interest clearly had to be recognised by the journalists who had predicted that there would be little. Initially, many of the comments had missed the point. At the extremes, there were in effect two views. One was that for most people the monarchy was irrelevant, and had nothing to do with life in modern Britain. At the other extreme was the view that "the whole nation was in mourning". Neither of these extremes expressed anything like the truth.
As to the first, it is clearly true that the future of the monarchy has for a long time been a topic of discussion: should we continue to be a monarchy? If so, how should the nature of the monarchy change? If not, what should replace it? The death at the age of 101 of the former Queen consort after 50 years of widowhood since the death of King George Vl, however, was not an appropriate peg for such discussion.
The view that the whole nation was in mourning was well wide off the mark. The death of someone at the age of 101 is, when all is said and done, hardly a tragedy, and hardly unexpected. It was apparent that the mood of the crowds, and certainly the mood of the funeral service, was one of celebration of a long life. It was also apparent that the public recognised that the death of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, was an event of significance in the history of the nation.
Missed by the young and the old ...
She had been in public life through a period of enormous change. People of my generation and older remember her morale-boosting role during the World War II, when she and the King remained in London with their children (the present Queen, and her sister Princess Margaret who died recently) throughout the bombing, sharing the risks and dangers of people at a time when the very existence of the nation was under threat.
She was the last "Queen Empress", before the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. In her lifetime the British Empire ended as the colonies gained independence. She lived through major changes in the nature of British society — from a period of traditional deference to authority to an era of self-confident open criticism, and from a largely White to a multi-cultural population. The royal family itself changed dramatically during her lifetime, with its members divorcing and its activities under public scrutiny and criticism to an extent, which would have been unthinkable when she became Queen in 1937. Her death, therefore, genuinely marked the passing of an era. For once that cliché is the simple truth. This goes a long way to explain why so many — young as well as old — chose to be there. One does not have to be an ardent royalist to have reacted in that way. Nor does one have to live in a kind of nostalgic fantasy world.
Most of us, I imagine, are generally positive about the changes of the past 100 years. Most of us are not over-awed (as many of our parents' generation were — and, it must be said, some people still are) by the panoply of pomp that goes with formal royal occasions. Most of us, though impressed by the well-organised military pageantry of great occasions like the funeral, do not yearn for an imaginary golden age. We are more likely to ask sardonically why a country, which can put on such an event, cannot run its trains on time. And we may question the judgment, which led the Prime Minister to arrange the recall of Parliament to mark the Queen Mother's death but not to discuss the crisis in the Middle East. The death was a reminder that important constitutional issues are a concomitant of the rapid change, which our society is experiencing. The public reaction to it suggests that people are far better than the media at recognising that.
The mood was one of reflection, which was not captured in the many snide and shallow comments, which filled many of the newspapers — until they caught up with the reality.
The writer is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. E-mail him at wpk1000@cam.ac.uk.
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