ROYAL EXPRESS OF EXCESS
By Graham Viney
Her broadcast was watched by baboons Eight-course banquets, an army of flunkies trained not to wobble, 14 ivory and gold carriages ... and free diamonds galore! An enthralling account of the palace on wheels that took the young Elizabeth on her first fabulously extravagant tour ‘We are given so much food,’ the King groaned
eVERY royal tour has its awkward moments, and none more so than when King George VI visited the famous De Beers diamond mine in South Africa, with Queen Elizabeth and the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret.
To mark that momentous day in April 1947, De Beers’ chairman Ernest Oppenheimer had decided to give each princess a glittering bluewhite diamond — a 6.5 carat specimen for Elizabeth and a 4.5 carat for Margaret.
All was going well until, it was said, Princess Margaret realised the Queen was missing out. ‘What about Mummy’s?’ she asked innocently.
Oppenheimer had to dip smartly into his private collection for something suitable for Queen Elizabeth. Unlikely as the story sounded, it was confirmed more than 50 years later by the nonagenarian Queen Mother herself.
By then the diamond had become part of a ring she wore when entertaining Oppenheimer’s grandson Nicholas at Clarence House, recalling what had happened and describing it as ‘a rather embarrassing incident involving one of my girls’.
In De Beers’ defence, it might have seemed that Queen Elizabeth had all the jewels she needed. Adorning her on the tour were gems from a collection bequeathed by friend Margaret Greville, a noted society hostess. Among them was a five-strand diamond necklace said to have been owned by Marie Antoinette.
It’s thought the king vetoed her wearing these gems publicly in the age of wartime austerity. Yet her decision to do so on that twomonth tour of South Africa seems fitting as seldom has a royal progress been conducted on such a spectacular, if exhausting, scale.
It was brilliantly staged and enacted, leading one bemused anti-Imperialist American reporter to write that it was ‘as if the parade of Empire was just beginning’, not just beginning to fade.
Although the tour was intended, in part, as a holiday for the family after the strenuous years of the war, it was anything but.
Even Princess Elizabeth’s 21st birthday on April 21, which she celebrated while away, required her to make a live BBC radio broadcast for well-wishers back home, with a back-up version pre-recorded in
the gardens of a hotel in Victoria Falls, where she was watched by a troop of baboons.
Such duties aside, it was a great adventure for the two princesses, being the first time either had been abroad. For Margaret, barely out of school but on the cusp of becoming a ravishing beauty, there was an added frisson. Wing Commander Peter Townsend, the handsome king’s equerry for whom she was already experiencing the early throes of love, despite him being 16 years her senior, was accompanying them.
Elizabeth’s thoughts had also turned to romance, the trip coming only a few months before her engagement to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten. They would be apart for the duration but, as she later admitted, she was distracted by apprehension about any political demonstrations that might lie ahead as the royals approached Cape Town on HMS Vanguard on the morning of February 17, 1947.
Afrikaner nationalists saw the tour as undermining their efforts to re-establish the Boer Republic the British had cheated them out of 50 years before, while black and Indian politicians hoped to use it to highlight issues of inequality.
Yet fears of protests proved unfounded. The royals were greeted by tens of thousands of people, the biggest crowds Cape Town had seen. At a state banquet that evening there was a murmur of approval as the Queen arrived wearing one of the many crinolines designed for her by couturier Norman Hartnell.
It was heavily boned to accommodate her post-war fuller figure (‘Alas, the silhouette is not quite as it should be,’ commented Winston Churchill’s wife Clementine), but this detracted nothing from her remarkable appeal.
Resplendent with treasures including the diamond and pearl necklace and earrings once given by Edward VII to his beautiful Danish bride Princess Alexandra, she had passed on her flawless complexion and blue eyes to her daughters. Similarly gowned in evening dresses embroidered with sequins, they looked, as everyone excitedly said, exactly like princesses from a fairy tale.
The public’s sense of wonderment continued when, after four days of official engagements in and around Cape Town, the royals boarded the magnificently modern ‘White Train’, their home as they traversed southern Africa over the next 35 days.
A third of a mile long, with 14 ivory and gold-liveried carriages, the train was called a ‘Palace on Wheels’. Leading off the walnutpanelled corridors were separate bedrooms for each member of the family, with soft cornice- level lighting and grey-blue damask curtains chosen by the Queen.
The en-suite bathrooms were all in apple green and cream. The king’s contained a very up-to-date electric gadget that heated his shaving water in a flask, with heaters behind the mirror to prevent it from steaming up.
In his study, he had a telephone which connected him to London, all the capitals in his dominion and even Washington. Princess Elizabeth also availed herself of this to speak to Philip in England.
The splendid dining car could seat 24, eating off white and goldcrested Minton china, and served by a team of 18 young stewards who, like footmen in a grand prewar English house, had been selected to be of approximately the same height and weight.
South African Railways had put them through a strenuous daily training regime and terrifying lessons in deportment, requiring them to walk along a 15ft bar only three inches wide and suspended high above a gymnasium floor.
‘ If they can do that without faltering, the swaying of a wellsprung dining car becomes a minor hardship,’ their instructor told reporters. So keen were the railway’s caterers to impress that an eight- course meal was produced on the first night. For the visitors from a still-rationed Britain facing 35 days cooped up on a train (‘a lovely train, but still a train,’ as Princess Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Margaret Colville, put it), the prospect of this avalanche of railway food, with radish rosettes on top, as it were, was dismaying.
The Queen asked for the forthcoming menus and put a line through several courses. But this was not the only culinary challenge facing the royals.
As visiting English novelist Enid Bagnold explained in a letter home, the king and queen’s every breath and movement was being ‘blown through Africa at all hours on the wireless’ and, at every halt, housewives offered up the results of favourite family recipes for the party to enjoy with their ‘elevenses’ or mid-afternoon tea.
‘We are given so much food,’ wrote the king despairingly to Queen Mary, his mother, describing how they were ‘regaled with all sorts of rich cakes’. More welcome were the mounts provided by local farmers at various points, allowing the two princesses to enjoy rides with Townsend and the king’s assistant private secretary Michael Adeane. ‘We sped in the cool air, across the sands or across the
veldt,’ remembered Townsend. ‘Those were the most glorious moments of the day.’
During two nights above a beach near Port Elizabeth, the South African cabinet minister Harry Lawrence and his wife Jean introduced the princesses to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.
One reporter, on seeing Princess Elizabeth in a bathing costume, noted she had ‘curves in all the right places’. This act of lese-majesty so infuriated the king that he insisted that the crowds be kept back and no photographs permitted when Lawrence gave him and his daughters lessons in surfing.
As Lawrence was emboldened to take the king and later Princess Margaret firmly by the hips and give them and their wooden boards a shove onto promising waves, the queen and her ladies-in-waiting paddled in the shallows. At other times the king and queen would take a brisk evening walk but such relaxation was rare. By the end of the tour, it would be estimated that they had travelled 11,000 miles, visited more than 400 cities, towns and wayside stops, and shaken hands with 25,000 people.
Then, as now, their adage was, ‘We have to be seen to be believed,’ and they were remarkably amenable when town mayors sent telegrams to the train’s mobile post office, requesting that they might make impromptu stops to meet the waiting crowds.‘They never could be sure of a quiet family meal on the train,’ said Lady Margaret, recalling ‘ mouthfuls of soup often hastily swallowed’.
Sometimes their much-needed rest was disturbed by stops at night. If there were sufficient crowds on a platform to warrant it, a station master was allowed to drop the signal to stop the train.
No one thought this would happen in the predominantly Afrikaans- speaking Free State, but they were proved wrong when, at 11 o’clock one night, they came to a halt in the village of Wepener.
Thousands had braved the rain and the sneers of their nationalist neighbours in the hope of seeing their king, but by then the royal couple had retired for the night.
It was down to Major Piet van der Byl, the South African cabinet minister in attendance on the royals that day, to coax the monarch out. After a nerve-racking delay, he appeared. ‘Why was I not warned?’ he asked crossly.
Suddenly behind him was the queen, serene in full evening dress and jewels as she summoned her daughters. They too donned their jewels and followed her and the king on to the muddy platform where, 20 minutes later, duty done, the White Train pulled out to cheers and singing, and gratitude from Van der Byl to the queen.
Unlike her husband, the queen never seemed to flag. ‘Heavens, we haven’t got to get out again?’ an official recalled the king saying on one occasion, but the queen was always ready to put on a show.
‘If they have driven hundreds of miles to see you, it’s up to you to give them what they have come for,’ she would say.
Smiling and always royally dressed — by day in the hydrangea shades and feathered or flowery hats that she favoured, by night in evening dress, jewels and furs — she would appear behind the king at the door of the carriage and pause for dramatic effect before descending on to yet another red carpet with the twirling wave that became her trademark.
Even the most hardened republicans melted before her. When one Boer told her that, while he was happy to welcome the Royal Family, he could never forgive the British for what they had done to his people, she is said to have replied, with smiling equanimity: ‘I quite understand, we feel exactly the same way in Scotland.’
At the end of one particularly gruelling day, Major Harvey, the Queen’s Private Secretary, witnessed, to his amazement, the king suddenly shout out: ‘Off parade at last!’ With that he threw his hat in the air and the queen, spontaneously and triumphantly, kicked it into the dining room.
Such levity aside, the king often appeared exhausted and was losing weight alarmingly. Whether this was the strain of the tour, as was claimed, or the early onset of the cancer that would eventually kill him remains in doubt, but his feeling unwell often expressed itself in irritable outbursts.
Once, when a long and dusty drive from and back to the train for an official engagement resulted in one of these ‘nashes’, as his family called them, the queen suggested that her husband should go for a walk alone, with his detectives following at a distance.
He set off along a winding, unmade road. Soon, on the lonely summit of a mountain pass, he encountered a lone Boer farmer who, clearly unaware who he was talking to, explained that he was waiting for his family to return from nearby Grahamstown where they had gone to see ‘the bloody Royal Family but said if I sat here I might seem them go by’.
‘Well, how do you do?’ His Majesty replied, extending his hand. ‘I am the king.’ There then ensued a few minutes of conversation. When HMS Vanguard began steaming back to Portsmouth on April 24, it was packed with presents given to the royals, among them a gold casket containing 630 diamonds for the king’s Garter Star and another 540 diamonds worth around £8million today.
The latter included South Africa’s official 21st birthday gift to Princess Elizabeth: 21 flawless diamonds, each with 52 facets to maximise their brilliance.
She would refer to them as ‘my best diamonds’, a reflection not just on their quality and beauty but also, perhaps, on her love of the country they came from.
She received 21 diamonds for her birthday