The midshipman who gave our Queen a saucy pat on the bottom
PROTOCOL dictates that no commoner may lay a hand on a royal person. It’s a rule that courtiers occasionally have to impress on presidents and deluded celebs who imagine their status entitles them to a matey hug or a cuddle.
But a rare film clip, shot on board a Navy flagship in 1947 and revealed on The Royal House Of Windsor (C4), showed a cheeky midshipman really chancing his yardarm, by giving the 20-year-old Princess Elizabeth a saucy pat on the bottom.
Note to Young Hornblower: that is not what’s meant by ‘all hands on the lower deck’.
The future Queen and her younger sister, 16-year-old Princess Margaret, were sailing to South Africa with their parents for their first royal tour, aboard HMS Vanguard.
Newsreels captured an exuberant game of tig, with the princesses in floral-print dresses and the officers in immaculate whites, dodging in and out amid fits of giggles.
The heir to the throne couldn’t have objected very much to the hands- on style. She wrote of the 1,700- man crew to her former nanny, Marion Crawford: ‘There are one or two real smashers, and I bet you’d have a wonderful time if you were here.’
Amid the recent glut of royal documentaries and dramatisations, this series stands out for the unexpected excellence of its sources. The archive footage is often being shown on TV for the first time, such as the colour film of the Royal Family’s arrival at Capetown in blistering 40c heat.
Some sizzling quotes have been uncovered, too. We heard Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton’s withering verdict on George VI in 1946: ‘As inanimate as an animate monarch could be.’
But there was also royal photographer Cecil Beaton’s brilliant summary of the Queen Mother’s personality — ‘a marshmallow made on a welding machine’.
The most incisive insights came from the diary of the King’s private secretary, Sir Alan ‘ Tommy’ Lascelles. The handwritten pages, also never seen before on television, described George’s fits of rage and frustration, when he ground his teeth and shook his fists at the heavens.
Lascelles had a codeword for these outbursts: Gnashville.
It was moving to discover that the King’s temper was tried not only by his failing health and fears for the Empire, but by his fury at racial segregation in South Africa.
When he learned he was not permitted to pin medals on the chests of black troops, because they were ‘unclean’, he seethed that the government lackeys were like ‘the Gestapo’ and he wanted ‘ to shoot them all’. Good-humoured and reasonable as always, his wife the Queen soothed him: ‘You can’t shoot all of them.’
At quite the other end of the social scale, the erstwhile queen of Brookside, Doreen Corkhill, made a sparkling turn as Benidorm (ITV) returned.
Actress Kate Fitzgerald, best-known to viewers with long memories as chancer Billy Corkhill’s missus in that longgone Scouse soap, bowled up as a randy gran downing shots at a tacky tourist disco.
The fun of Benidorm is not the set-up, which went stale long ago, or the toilet gags, which were cruder and smellier than ever.
It’s the superb ensemble cast, led by Sherrie Hewson as hotel manager Joyce — by turns snooty and formidable, like the love child of Hyacinth Bucket and Henry Cooper.
Nigel Havers dropped in, as a dodgy dentist. His lounge lizard manner makes anything sound suggestive — Nige was born for Benidorm.