How to take a royal tour of one’s own
The Queen’s state visits around the world have inspired our travels for 70 years, says Camilla Tominey – plus eight regal escapes to book now
From shaking hands with a newly freed Nelson Mandela to chinking champagne glasses with Russian president Boris Yeltsin following the fall of the Soviet Union, the Queen’s royal tours have always packed a diplomatic punch.
Over the course of Her Majesty’s seven decades on the throne, marked by today’s Platinum Jubilee, many of her subjects have not only been enthralled by the exotic locations she has visited and the rare glimpse her travels have provided into her private world – they have also been inspired to follow suit.
When her reign began, the idea of jetting off to exotic, far-flung spots was unthinkable for most. But the decade that saw her ascend to the throne also saw the advent of the package holiday: suddenly, Her Majesty’s glamorous and once intrepid tours became something that the public could emulate, booking one day and jetting off the next. It made the Queen’s epic travels an even greater source of fascination.
As the most well-travelled British monarch in history, the 95-year-old great-grandmother has visited every country in the Commonwealth and many more besides, clocking up an astonishing 290 state visits to 117 different nations since 1952. (Her first as Queen was meeting governor of Kenya Sir Philip Mitchell on February 6 1952, upon hearing the news of her father George VI’s death while staying at the Tree Tops Lodge in Aberdare National Park.) She went on to circumnavigate the globe 42 times, travelling an estimated 1,032,513 miles, before completing her last tour, a trip to Malta with Prince Philip, in 2015 – thought likely to have been her final overseas trip and a fitting end, since it was where they lived when they first married in 1947.
Declaring on her 21st birthday that, “My whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial
family to which we all belong,” the Queen made it her mission to meet as many of her subjects as possible – wherever they were on the planet.
As she said in her 1953 Christmas broadcast, recorded in Auckland, New Zealand: “I set out on this journey in order to see as much as possible of the people and countries of the Commonwealth and Empire. I want to show that the Crown is not merely an abstract symbol of our unity, but a personal and living bond between you and me.”
Always dressed in bright colours so that she would be “seen to be believed”, she ensured that she carried out lengthy royal walkabouts wherever possible, meeting millions in the process.
Behind the scenes, royal tours would be meticulously planned in advance with military precision. All members of the entourage would carry a pocketsized rundown of events, timetabled to the nearest minute to ensure the tour ran as smoothly as possible. However, as her grandsons Princes William and Harry admitted in a TV documentary to mark the Duke of Edinburgh’s death last year, she and Philip would always enjoy it “when things went wrong”.
One of the funniest aspects of touring the Commonwealth for them must surely have been visiting the tiny Pacific island of Tanna in Vanuatu, where the Yaohnanen tribe worshipped the Duke as a god, believing him to be the son of an ancient mountain spirit.
The 1970s saw the Queen take on the most foreign travel: she packed in an astonishing 52 Commonwealth visits and a further 21 trips to non-Commonwealth countries over the decade, largely to mark her Silver Jubilee in 1977. Back then, the royal couple would spend months abroad, often travelling the seas on the Royal Yacht Britannia. With all its home comforts, including mahogany woodwork and chintzy sofas and armchairs, it became their preferred method of travel (being a former Royal Navy officer, Philip was in his element).
The royals completed 968 official voyages on Britannia during more than a million miles and nearly 44 years of service before it was decommissioned in 1997. It is now permanently berthed at Leith in Edinburgh, where it draws more than 300,000 tourists each year.
Soon, long-haul travel was transferred to air, with the Queen accompanied by an entourage including a hairdresser, surgeon and chauffeur. As the years went on, tours became shorter (though the luggage no less extensive, with the sovereign taking an average 30 outfits for a 10-day tour), but they never became less important: in 1986, the Queen became the first British monarch to visit China, and in 2011, the first in a century to tour the Republic of Ireland.
Throughout the past seven decades, the Queen’s overseas tours have been symbolic not only of the groundbreaking nature of her historic reign, but also of her personal curiosity in the world and its people – a curiosity she has shared with us all.