The Queen Mother (131 page)

Typically, she saw the incessant delays in her flight home more as an adventure than as a setback. She had reason to be pleased with her trip; in one letter home she wrote, ‘I have been deeply touched by
their very true feelings of love, &
amazed
at their enthusiastic reception.’
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A
LL IN ALL
the Queen Mother was becoming an avid traveller. She had enjoyed flying since her first flight in 1935, and she loved to be the Royal Family’s pioneer in the air. She was one of the first in the family to fly by helicopter, which she loved – indeed it became a method of transport she enjoyed till the very end of her life.

She was also gaining confidence in her own ability to represent her country abroad. She was widely, visibly present in Africa as what Harold Macmillan later called ‘the winds of change’ swept through the continent, fanning nationalist sentiments and removing British colonial rule. Ghana was the first African colony to become independent, in 1957, and it was followed by Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika (Tanzania), Uganda, Kenya, Nyasaland (Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) through the 1960s. All became members of the British Commonwealth. Its growth, as the Queen herself later said, marked ‘the transformation of the Crown from an emblem of dominion into a symbol of free and voluntary association. In all history this has no precedent.’
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In early 1959 Queen Elizabeth made an official tour to Kenya and Uganda. It was nostalgic for her, the first time she had been to Kenya since she and the Duke of York had been there in 1924–5. The visit to Kenya was arranged partly in order to make up for the previous year’s cancelled visit to open Nairobi Airport. This time the British government considered cancelling the visit again, because of political unrest in the colony. The African elected members of the Kenya Legislative Council had decided to boycott any official functions during the visit, but their leader Dr Kiano sent Queen Elizabeth a personal message assuring her of their esteem for her and the Royal Family.
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The authorities in Nairobi were unworried, and persuaded the Colonial Office that cancellation was unnecessary.
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She was met at Nairobi airport on the afternoon of 5 February by the Governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, and his wife Molly. The Governor had devised a sophisticated programme for her and his efficient staff guided her with care around the country.

East Africa had been suffering serious drought, but, soon after she arrived in the almost waterless Masai district of Narok, not for the first
time in royal history fate obligingly took a hand. At a picturesque
baraza
with Masai tribesmen, some in lion-skin headdresses, Queen Elizabeth made a speech expressing a hope for rain. ‘An hour later the skies opened & an inch fell in 20 minutes,’ recorded her lady in waiting. ‘The Masai were convinced that HM had magic powers.’
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Princess Margaret congratulated her on being a rain-maker: ‘The BBC man read it out quite seriously and dead-pan which made it sound even more unbelievable. It reminded me so much of when Papa said “Pula” in Bechuanaland. That worked too!’
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Queen Elizabeth travelled widely through Kenya by train, sitting for hours on the observation platform and being welcomed with huge enthusiasm at every halt and road crossing, where hundreds of people had gathered and waited to glimpse her, even at night.
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Evelyn Baring commented that from the train she had a real glimpse of true rural Kenya. ‘There were European farmers, Asian traders, Africans working on farms or in forest villages, and the forest officers in charge of them.’ At one station there was a farmer with five couple of fox hounds which he hunted himself, ‘since in Kenya the eccentric English individualist is not yet a thing of the past’.
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On Valentine’s Day the train crew sent her cards. The best was hand drawn, with a background of a smiling sun above mountains and a little train weaving past hearts and cherubs:

At the bottom of the card was a line of black Africans waving Union flags and a fat bald white man, also waving his flag.
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She drove through the Nyeri Reserve, past crowds of cheering Kikuyu tribesmen, to spend a night in the new Treetops Hotel (the original cabin in which Princess Elizabeth had stayed in 1952 had been burned down in the Mau Mau revolt in 1954) and enjoyed the wild animals. Rhino, buffalo, baboon, the rare giant forest hog and many shapes and sizes of antelope appeared that night for her and her party – but, alas, no elephants.

Next day she spoke for some time with a group of Kikuyu chiefs before flying back to Nairobi. Baring was struck that the Kikuyu were more enthusiastic than almost any of the other African tribes and that
the cheering in Nyeri ‘was the loudest heard during the visit’. It was particularly remarkable because this was an area ‘where the struggle against the Mau Mau had been at its hottest’. The Governor believed that Queen Elizabeth’s presence in their lands ‘gave to many Kikuyu there a feeling that the bitter story of the past was closed, and she appeared as a symbol of a new and a better era’.
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Similarly the two
barazas
held with the Masai and with the Elgeyo and Marakwet tribes seemed great successes. ‘Here there was no sign of political trouble and there were no dark memories of the Emergency to forget. The people received Her Majesty with great enthusiasm.’
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African nationalist politicians had tried to persuade the citizens of Nairobi not to turn out in the streets to cheer her. To the great relief of the Governor their attempts failed; she was welcomed heartily everywhere, and by everyone – Africans, Asians and Europeans. In Mombasa the Arab population greeted her with courtesy. There were dances in her honour at a reception for women of all races.
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She was struck by the achievements of the colony. In Nairobi she visited the King George VI Hospital for Africans and, according to the Governor, was impressed by the standard of medical care dispensed. Everywhere she went she seemed to be delighted – and this in turn pleased everyone she met. The Governor concluded that her visit was ‘a most outstanding success. It made a profound impression on all the people of Kenya. In my view it has, in an indirect but a powerful way, assisted the recent more hopeful political developments in this complex and often troubled country.’
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Lady Baring wrote to the Queen Mother, ‘There has been a most genuine drawing together of all sorts of people & races & groups as a direct result of your coming.’
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‘Kenya was very crowded as to programme,’ Queen Elizabeth wrote to Princess Margaret, ‘but goodness, what a
beautiful
country it is!’ The only drawback, she said, was that people constantly told her how much they had enjoyed Princess Margaret’s own visit two years before. The sheikhs in Mombasa had ‘looked gravely at my flushed & streaming face, & red eyes (v. small too) and said “We
DID
so love having
Princess Margaret
here – I
do
hope she comes again soon, soon.” ’
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On 18 February she flew from Nairobi to Kisumu on Lake Victoria for a brief visit, and then on to Entebbe, the capital of neighbouring Uganda, still a British protectorate. In Kampala, as chancellor of the University of London she visited the University College of Makerere,
which had a close relationship with her university. There, suffering from the heat in her Chancellor’s robes, she presented doctorates and opened the new University Library. On the green college lawns she was surrounded by students and academics in coloured robes, all anxious to talk to or at least glimpse her. It was a relaxed occasion.

That afternoon she opened the new headquarters of the Uganda Sports Union, and watched boxing, athletics, hockey, tennis and cricket. Everyone was impressed when the Kabaka’s brother, Prince George Mawanda, hit two magnificent sixes clean out of the ground. This was followed in the evening by the Uganda Royal Tattoo in a crowded stadium. Among the displays the Queen Mother watched was, rather astonishingly, a reconstruction of the Battle of Leik Hill in Burma, during the last war, by the 4th King’s African Rifles. This was followed by African, Indian and Scottish dancing, and music by military and police bands. The whole Tattoo, she told Princess Margaret, was ‘so gloriously English that it was almost funny’. All was most enjoyable except, she wrote, ‘I had a lizard in my room all night, & it hung over my bed looking at me with bulging eyes. I felt quite embarrassed.’
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She visited the Western, Northern and Eastern provinces of Uganda, travelled to two national parks and sailed on Lake Victoria, Lake Albert and the Nile, spotting birds, hippos and crocodiles. She was pleased that she was often taken on the same route and to the same places that she and the Duke had visited in 1925 – the trip that she later described as the best time of their lives. In each province she listened to kind addresses of welcome.

At Paraa in the Murchison Falls National Park a special cottage overlooking the Nile had been built for her visit; there she watched a spectacular display by Acholi dancers, each of whom wore a large headdress of ostrich feathers. To general delight she repaid the compliment by wearing her tiara.
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In Jinja, in the Eastern Province, the welcome was even more enthusiastic with thousands of people lining the streets. She was presented with many gifts, including a bag of coffee from Bugisu, accompanied by a plea that Her Majesty ‘influence the British people to take to drinking more coffee and less tea’. She loved it all, and in her farewell speech said that the ‘spirit of courage, confidence and enterprise’ she had seen ‘bodes well for the future of Uganda’.
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As she left, the
East African Standard
asserted that her tour was one of the most successful ever undertaken by a member of the Royal
Family. In his report to Alan Lennox-Boyd, the Colonial Secretary, the Governor praised Queen Elizabeth’s demeanour throughout, stressing that ‘the unqualified success of the visit was attributable above all to the Queen Mother herself, to Her Majesty’s visible affection for and interest in all those she met and to her gracious and friendly manner to all on all occasions’. Over 950 people were presented formally to her and the Governor noted that she had ‘a friendly and informal word for scores of others and a gracious smile and wave for thousands’. He thought that it all amounted to ‘a personal triumph’.
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It was not just loyal colonial administrators who thought this. George Thomas, the Labour Member of Parliament for Cardiff West and future Speaker of the House of Commons, returning from a trip to Kenya, wrote to Martin Gilliat that everywhere he had heard ‘profound appreciation’ of the good the Queen Mother had done. The Arab community in Mombasa ‘were quite ecstatic’ at the interest she had shown in them, and all other races felt the same. ‘It is not my habit to write to pay this sort of tribute but in view of the tremendous surge of appreciation of this Royal visit I am breaking a rule! It will do no harm for you to know that people like myself feel the impact of what this visit meant. Above all I felt that it had been a real tonic for those folk who have the sticky job of everyday administration in that difficult country’.
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S
OON AFTER
Queen Elizabeth’s return from Africa she prepared for a trip to Rome with Princess Margaret. It was an unofficial visit but she was to have an audience with Pope John XXIII and unveil a monument to Byron in the Borghese Gardens. She wrote a happy letter to D’Arcy Osborne, saying, ‘I can’t believe that at last I am coming to Rome! It really is too exciting, and I am looking forward to it all so much – It is the first time in my life that I am to visit a place just for pleasure.’
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She told him that she had already been inundated with anxious letters from Protestants about her visit to the Pope. ‘I wish that one could convey to these people (who are simple & good) that if one goes to Rome, the Pope, being a Sovereign, must be visited out of politeness if nothing else. There is great ignorance & fear still about the R. Catholic religion – possibly because they are so well organised.’
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The visit went well and included lunch with D’Arcy Osborne and a lunch at a trattoria on the Via Appia Antica. The British Ambassador to Italy, Ashley
Clarke, reported that the Romans were usually cynical about distinguished foreign visitors to the city. But the warmth of the welcome given to the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret was striking.
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On the way home they stopped in Paris at the suggestion of Lady Jebb, whose husband was still British ambassador. She had proposed that the Queen Mother visit the International Floral Exhibition and the exhibition of British furniture, ‘The Century of Elegance in England’, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.
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Queen Elizabeth rarely needed encouragement to visit Paris, one of her favourite cities, and, while there, she was pleased to have lunch with General de Gaulle, now President of France.

In her published diaries, Lady Jebb painted an unflattering portrait of Princess Margaret, whose ‘disagreeable’ behaviour she contrasted with her mother’s ‘sparkling and delightful’ manners. The Princess, she said, ‘wishes to convey that she is very much the Princess, but at the same time she is not prepared to stick to the rules if they bore or annoy her, such as being polite to people.’ She claimed that the Princess faked a cold to get out of engagements and that her only interests were to have her hair coiffed by the famous hairdresser Alexandre and to have a fitting for a Dior dress. Lady Jebb complained about the Princess to the Queen Mother’s lady in waiting, Patricia Hambleden, who, she claimed, was not surprised and observed that the Queen Mother would not be concerned in any way by her daughter’s behaviour: ‘Nothing will disturb her happiness.’ Lady Jebb asked if Queen Elizabeth had always been so philosophical and Lady Hambleden replied, ‘Yes, I think she always had this quality. And a sort of serenity, and of being unhurried.’
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