Joyous day I proved the Guardian’s street party sneerers so very wrong
Two powerful voices – with two personal reasons to celebrate the Jubilee
MY MATERNAL grandfather’s earliest memory, he once told me, was of walking miserably upstairs on the day Queen Victoria died, and shedding tears of grief in front of her portrait in the nursery. The date was January 22, 1901, and Grandpa was four years old.
As I never tire of boasting, that tearful monarchist toddler grew up to write one of our present Queen’s most famous and moving speeches, which has been much quoted during this Platinum Jubilee year.
This was the speech, broadcast to mark her 21st birthday in 1947, in which the then Princess Elizabeth pledged to devote her life, ‘whether it be long or short’, to the service of her listeners and of ‘our great imperial family to which we all belong’.
It has often crossed my mind that dear old Grandpa had a lot to answer for. By putting those words into his future sovereign’s mouth, after all, he had committed the Queen to a marathon 70 years — and counting — of incessant, often dreary royal duties; from working through her official red boxes to opening bridges, motorways and community centres.
But of course we can’t really blame my grandfather for keeping her nose to the grindstone, decades after all but a handful of her contemporaries have either retired or died.
He included that pledge in her speech because she wanted him to. It was how the dutiful young princess felt at the time — and to all appearances, it is exactly how, at 96, she still feels today.
Unforgettable
Nor can he have imagined when writing those words, five years before the untimely death of George VI, that the Queen‘s reign would be the longest in British history.
As one of the last of the Victorians, Grandpa had lived under six monarchs by the time he died in 1974. As one of the first of the New Elizabethans, born in Coronation year 1953, I — like the great majority of my fellow Britons alive today — have known only one.
Well, I say I’ve known her, but during my 68 years I’ve only glimpsed her in the flesh on four occasions, as she has gone about her official duties.
As just about everyone else who has seen her will testify — and that means countless millions of us — the experience was unforgettable. It was a feeling of huge love and respect. If you’ll forgive a lapse from my habitual journalistic cynicism, each time I saw her I was conscious of being in the presence of majesty.
God alone knows how long the British monarchy will survive after her reign, which I hope will last for a long time yet. What I do know is that people were predicting the imminent demise of the institution throughout my late grandfather’s lifetime.
There were many who said, after Victoria’s death, that the accession of her sexually incontinent, bon viveur son Edward VII would be the kiss of death to the Crown.
Scroll forward to 1936, and many more were equally sure that the monarchy wouldn’t survive the abdication crisis, which led to the reluctant accession of the Queen’s nervous, stammering father.
History proved them all spectacularly wrong, as the nation took both Edward VII and George VI to their hearts.
In my lifetime, too, know-alls have long assured us that public affection for the Crown is evaporating fast. Indeed, I had some personal experience of this at the time of the Golden Jubilee, 20 years ago.
I had written a column elsewhere, saying how much I was looking forward to the celebrations and the chance they would give us all to show our appreciation of the Queen.
Although as a rule I was not much of an enthusiast for communal fun and games, I wrote, I would certainly attend a street party on the great day, then six months ahead.
To my astonishment, those musings prompted a series of sneering articles in the Guardian diary. Under the headline ‘Up the Bunting with Tom Utley’, they confidently predicted nobody would be interested in the Jubilee, and that any plans for a party in my street would come to nothing.
At one stage, the Guardian’s diarist mockingly offered me a case of champagne if I helped organise the party, adding that he looked forward to an article by me, headed: ‘Nobody gives a toss about the Queen. Why I was wrong, by Tom Utley.’
Triumphant
Well, the offer of champagne for something I was going to do anyway seemed too good to be true, and I took up the challenge with gusto. (OK, Mrs U did most of the work, making coleslaw for 100 people, organising a coconut shy and ferrying supplies and bales of hay from all over London in our battered Renault Espace.)
Like so many street parties all over the country that day in 2002, ours was hugely oversubscribed. Indeed, it was a triumphant success, made all the sweeter for Mrs U and me by being able to toast Her Majesty’s health in the Guardian’s champagne (though that cheapskate diarist sent me only two bottles, instead of the promised 12).
As you read this, my wife will be making sandwiches and baking cakes for a repeat performance in our street this afternoon. This time, our job is to help hang up the bunting and to run a Platinum Jubilee bake-off competition, to be judged by a local councillor.
If anything, the response has been even more enthusiastic than 20 years ago, with neighbours queuing up to run a Pimp Your Prosecco stall, a bouncy castle, a potterythrowing demonstration, a quiz, karaoke and other attractions too numerous to mention here. I confidently predict that it will be another glorious success.
Whatever the tribulations of the Royal Family over recent years, there’s life in the monarchy yet.
Oh, and 20 years on, I’m still awaiting an article by the Guardian’s diarist, headed: ‘Why I was wrong: almost everyone loves the Queen.’