HOW TO COVER A ROYAL VISIT IN 1951
Hint: it involves learning to curtsy, and shrugging off put-downs of your paper
Kathleen Dunphy is 90 but she still has a clear recollection of meeting Princess Elizabeth in the fall of 1951, when both women were only 25.
Dunphy was a reporter in the Star’s social section. The princess and her husband, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, were on their first big tour of Canada, filling in for her mother, Queen Elizabeth, and her father, King George VI. They had cancelled because of the king’s health.
“Everybody knew the king was dying,” Dunphy said of Elizabeth’s father. “And that she was being primed for the throne.”
Her meeting revealed how painfully shy the princess was.
“You know how some people, when they’re shy or embarrassed, their throats get all red? She was red right up to here,” says Dunphy, gesturing to just under her own chin.
Pierre Berton would later write in his book about the couple’s 33-day tour that when Elizabeth was greeted by 15,000 people on her arrival in Montreal, the handbag on her arm trembled and “only an iron self-control hid her overwhelming nervousness,” according to a CBC story.
Dunphy was one of three female reporters who had been sent by rival newspapers to greet the princess at Queen’s Park during an event hosted by Lt.-Gov. Ray Lawson and his wife, Helen.
The reporters had a 10-minute primer on how to curtsy and walk back three steps before turning away from the princess. And they had a chance to meet separately with Philip.
“He put us all at ease right away and talked about their trip,” she recalled.
Then the reporters went to another room to meet the princess, who was flanked on one side by Helen Lawson.
“The Telegram went ahead of me. I didn’t like that too much, but anyway,” Dunphy recalled, sitting in her apartment in a Toronto retirement residence. “We’re the bigger paper . . . we should have gone first. But I couldn’t elbow her out of my way.”
It appears Dunphy wasn’t the only one who thought the paper was big — or too big for its britches, anyway.
During her introduction, when Elizabeth noted the Star was the largest paper in Canada, the lieutenant-governor’s wife chimed in and said, “Yes. Too large, we think.”
“I was just astounded,” Dunphy said. “I wouldn’t expect that kind of thing for an introduction to the princess.” The slight almost overtook the story, but she said that Star editors kept the focus on the princess.
Dunphy said the meeting gave her an appreciation for royalty that she never had growing up in New York state after her parents moved from Montreal. “I really got an idea of everything that went on around it. The security, the pomp. I liked it.”
By the end of the tour the princess was a pro. Berton wrote that she returned to Britain “a laughing, relaxed figure.” Her father would die just months later, in February 1952.
Dunphy would leave the Star the same year. Newly pregnant with her oldest — Noreen — when she met Elizabeth, Dunphy kept working until she caught the notice of longtime editor Harry Hindmarsh Sr., who worried about her condition.
A memo from him, accidentally delivered to Dunphy, said she “looks very pregnant and she’s walking rapidly around the halls. Are we liable if she falls?”
When she left the paper, her reference letter from managing editor J.V. Kingsbury said the reason for her departure was that “she married and decided to take up housekeeping.” But Dunphy said even though few women, married or not, were at the Star, there was no suggestion she couldn’t have come back.
The paper offered her a job editing freelance stories for Star Weekly from home for the next year and Dunphy was grateful for the “connection.”
After that, she and her husband, William Dunphy, moved to Long Island, N.Y. The couple came back to Canada 10 years later when William was offered a job teaching philosophy at the University of Toronto, the couple’s alma mater.
Kathleen Dunphy went on to have nine children. At age 55, when her three youngest were teenagers, she moved into residence for a year to study nursing.
“The two things I ever wanted to be were a journalist and a nurse,” Dunphy said. She graduated and went on work at the former Queen Street Mental Health Centre and the former Clarke Institute of Psychiatry.
In the 1980s, Dunphy was a founding nurse for Casey House, which cares for people with HIV/AIDS.
She retired at 70. But she said it was only because her employer had caught on to just how old she was.