The Queen Mother (147 page)

Embarking on the yacht was ‘rather a splendid moment, a little like arriving home’, wrote Frances Campbell-Preston, doubtless echoing the Queen Mother’s own views.
⁴¹
On Easter Saturday the ship docked in Suva for the formal welcome from a Fijian chief. The short formal visit to Suva was somewhat spoiled by rain, but Queen Elizabeth held a reception and a dinner aboard the yacht before sailing for New Zealand. She landed at Bluff on 16 April in pouring rain, and was greeted by the Governor General, Sir Bernard Fergusson, his wife Laura – Frances Campbell-Preston’s sister – and the Prime Minister and his wife.

Her punishing schedule over the coming weeks was made possible by
Britannia
, both an agreeable means of transport and a refuge after long days of exposure to the crowds and the elements. When there were evenings in the yacht with no engagements, Queen Elizabeth encouraged everyone to let their hair down. Laura Fergusson had
heard that after-dinner games were obligatory and was daunted, but they turned out to be both silly and easy, ‘and she is such enormous fun playing them. It’s gloriously childish and very restful as a result.’
⁴²

In town after town across New Zealand, the Queen Mother was greeted by huge crowds, of all ages, cheering her along streets from one civic reception to another. In Wellington on 25 April she marked Anzac Day at the National War Memorial in Wellington – she always found such moments of remembrance for the war dead intensely moving. The engagements continued. On 1 May, after Sunday service in St John’s Anglican Church at Te Awamutu, she flew to Auckland where, despite torrential rain, the crowds packing the streets and the wharf by
Britannia
were so dense that it took an hour for her car to reach the yacht. Next day there was a civic reception and a performance by children dancing and doing gymnastics in Eden Park.

On one quiet day off, there was enough sunshine to go fishing on Lake Wanaka. Queen Elizabeth was not greatly amused by having to pose, in waders, tweed jacket, a green felt hat and pearls, casting with an unfamiliar rod, for a horde of photographers. They ‘looked as though they were going to swallow her’, according to Laura Fergusson, but the deal was that they would then leave her alone, and they did.
⁴³

Near the end of her trip, she received a contingent of London Scottish Old Comrades, was greeted by ‘26,000 children yelling their heads off quite uninhibitedly’,
⁴⁴
made a quick private visit to a stud and attended a reception at Government House. On her last day, she opened a new Science Building at the University of Auckland and received an honorary degree. She went to the races at Ellerslie, and gave a dinner in
Britannia
followed by a reception on board for 300 people, as rain leaked through the awning.

Next morning there was long ‘farewelling’ (a term they had picked up in Australia), to the officers and crew of the yacht before Queen Elizabeth left for the airport. Admiral Morgan had organized the Royal Marine Band to play ‘Will Ye No Come Back Again?’ while the entire ship’s company stood and saluted on the top deck. ‘There was hardly a dry eye,’ wrote Frances Campbell-Preston.
⁴⁵
Once again the roads to the airport were lined with thousands of people.

Queen Elizabeth’s enjoyment is evident from the letter recalling the best moments that she wrote to thank the Fergussons. There were some things that really mattered to her in the fast-changing world of
the 1960s. ‘The love & loyalty of the NZ people is something I shall always treasure – long may it be part of their philosophy of life.’
⁴⁶

The flight home was long; the aircraft landed to refuel in both Honululu (where she joined in a dance by hula girls in her honour) and Vancouver (where, during her one-day stopover, she visited City Hall and attended a formal lunch). She arrived back in England to find, to her joy, that spring was there – ‘the cherries are bowed down with blossom, & the birches & chestnuts a most tender green.’
⁴⁷

Politics was another matter. Towards the end of her trip she had written to her son-in-law Lord Snowdon, saying that she loved New Zealand’s great mountains and lakes and rivers’ but was rather longing to get home ‘and hear those yelling dogs, and play with the grandchildren and burn with rage at politics!’
⁴⁸
She disliked the Labour government’s mishandling – as she saw it – of taxation. Harold Wilson’s administration was into its second year of reforms and was now planning a selective employment tax which she feared would ‘hit many excellent institutions very hard’.
⁴⁹
And she hated what she saw as the government’s ‘mismanagement of the Rhodesia question’.
⁵⁰
In November 1965 the white Rhodesian government had made its unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) rather than move swiftly towards black majority rule, as demanded by the British government.

*

O
N HER RETURN
she resumed her round of public engagements. She presided at the presentation of degrees of the University of London at the Albert Hall; she went to Cardiff for the service of dedication of the Welsh National Book of Remembrance in Llandaff Cathedral and the opening of an extension to the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport. In Sheffield she received an honorary doctorate of music and visited her regiment, the Queen’s Own Hussars, at Catterick Camp. In Northern Ireland in early July she visited another of her regiments, 1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards, at Omagh. Such visits had their own protocol and form – there was a regimental dismounted parade, during which the Queen Mother addressed the regiment; an inspection of the Old Comrades; photographs with the warrant officers and sergeants and with the officers; luncheon in the officers’ mess; and finally informal meetings and chats with the NCOs and troopers and their wives.

At the end of July, as usual, she attended the King’s Lynn Festival, which included a thrilling performance of Benjamin Britten’s
The Burning Fiery Furnace
given by the English National Opera at St Margaret’s Church, with Peter Pears singing Nebuchadnezzar. Afterwards Pears and Britten stayed with her at Sandringham. She celebrated her sixty-sixth birthday in London and went with her daughters to the theatre to see
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
. Next day she flew up to Wick for her summer visit to the Castle of Mey and Birkhall.

In September 1966 she launched HMS
Resolution
, the first of Britain’s Polaris-class nuclear submarines, now to be the front line of the country’s independent nuclear deterrent, and a few days later flew by helicopter to land on the deck of one of her favourite ships, HMS
Ark Royal
, which she had launched in 1950. She enjoyed her day watching various types of aircraft landing and being catapulted off the deck, the firing of live ordnance, air-sea rescue and mid-air refuelling. On her departure her helicopter circled the carrier and, the lady in waiting recorded, ‘Queen Elizabeth waved her scarf through the open door. A Russian trawler snooped about all day & had to be warned off because of the firing. It was a very special day.’
⁵¹

After a busy autumn, filled with engagements, on 6 December she gave a lunch party at Clarence House and attended a reception given by the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service
^*
at St James’s Palace. After dinner that evening she checked quietly into the King Edward VII Hospital.

Queen Elizabeth had been diagnosed with cancer of the colon. The tumour was successfully excised in an operation on 10 December.
^52
†
Members of her family visited her and from Gordonstoun Prince Charles wrote, ‘I hope they re looking after you well. Mummy said that you had difficulty getting around two gi-normous policemen wedged into the corridor outside your room.’
⁵³
She was still in hospital over Christmas and so, on Christmas Day, the Queen, with Princess Margaret, Prince Charles and Princess Anne drove down from Sandringham to see her. She left hospital on 28 December and convalesced at Clarence House until she felt well enough to travel to
Sandringham in the middle of January. She had no recurrence of the disease.

Rumours subsequently spread that she had had a colostomy. This was not true. Her office was careful to say very little on the subject, but some years later Sir Richard Bayliss, physician to the Queen, wrote to Queen Elizabeth’s lady in waiting, Olivia Mulholland: ‘I understand that there have been a number of letters about the colostomy operation which Queen Elizabeth is alleged to have had. We of course know that this is incorrect and I think it is time that as unobtrusively as possible this lie is countered.’
⁵⁴
But the rumours that the operation had included a colostomy persisted. Many people who had to endure that operation themselves derived comfort from the belief that even someone with as active a life as Queen Elizabeth could manage so well after such a difficult procedure.

It is perhaps worth pointing out that, even though the operation did not include a colostomy, the cancer from which she had suffered was serious. The illness crystallized concerns within her family and Household about the pace at which she was still performing her duties as she approached her seventieth birthday.

In most respects her health remained remarkably good. She no longer suffered from the frequent bouts of tonsillitis that she had endured as a young woman. She still believed in the power of homeopathy. Sir John Weir had been succeeded by Dr Marjorie Blackie as her homeopathic doctor, and, after Dr Blackie died, Dr Anita Davies, who was a conventional as well as a homeopathic doctor, took over. Dr Davies would create an individual mix of constitutional powders’ for each patient. She also treated Queen Elizabeth for the painful ulcers which developed on her legs with propolis, a resinous mixture produced by bees which is thought to reduce inflammation naturally. She prescribed hawthorn for blood pressure and belladonna for sore throats. Queen Elizabeth also continued to swear by the healing power of arnica – in both tablet and ointment form. She handed it to any of her guests who bruised themselves.

Following her operation, she cancelled nine engagements during the first three months of 1967. Altogether that year her public engagements were down to fifty-two, which included eight for the University of London. She spent January as usual at Sandringham where, she said, the Norfolk air made her feel much better, then February and March at Clarence House and Royal Lodge, with frequent expeditions
to race meetings. Her first public engagement was the annual meeting of Queen Mary’s London Needlework Guild at St James’s Palace on 21 March, and on 27 April she dined with the London Scottish Regiment.

That May she made a significant broadcast to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the enrolment of women on active service. In her address, heard throughout much of the world on the British Forces Broadcasting Service, she referred to the ‘pioneers’ of the First World War and told of her own memories of women serving in the Second – ‘of WREN Boat-Crews, who never failed in their task, regardless of the weather; of cheerful girls of the ATS, on bleak Anti-Aircraft Gun sites; of WAAF Radio Operators, who were on watch – night and day – detecting the approach of enemy aircraft’.
⁵⁵

After her spring holiday at Birkhall she left for another tour of Canada, this time of the Maritime Provinces. (Martin Gilliat had at first turned down the invitation but the Governor General and the Prime Minister of Canada had begged the Queen Mother to reconsider.
⁵⁶
She did, and kept to her promise despite her cancer operation.) She flew first to New Brunswick to join
Britannia
, which was in Canada for the Queen’s visit to Expo 67, the world’s fair at Montreal. Once again, her trip was crowded in every sense. On the first day, at St John, after a mayoral lunch she visited the Veterans Hospital, where she talked to patients lying on their beds in the sunshine and then – although it was not on the programme – agreed to the Mayor’s request to unveil a plaque to open Rockwood Park, where she was ‘like the Pied Piper’ surrounded by thousands of children, according to the lady in waiting’s diary.
⁵⁷
Next day, among other engagements in Fredericton, she was given an official welcome at the Legislative Building and watched a parade of the Canadian Black Watch. That evening
Britannia
sailed from St John and the Queen Mother came on deck in a pale-yellow evening gown and, while the band played ‘Auld Lang Syne’, waved to the large crowds on the dockside.

The next few days brought thick fog which made navigation difficult, and rain which forced changes of plan at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia – an open-air ceremony had to be moved into an overheated ice rink. Voyages from port to port in
Britannia
and car journeys as often as possible in open cars made this a pleasurable visit. On Sunday 16 July she and her party attended St
Andrew’s Anglican Church at Sydney and then the yacht anchored off a deserted island on which the company picnicked and spent an afternoon enjoying wild flowers, walking, fishing and even water-skiing. The Queen Mother presided benignly and signed the book of the island’s only inhabitants, the lighthouse keeper, his wife and baby.

After the yacht had berthed at Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island, the Queen Mother opened the new Provincial Government Building. The royal party was then offered a mammoth lunch of soup, lobster and an entire stuffed chicken each. A garden party at Government House took place in a rainstorm which apparently daunted neither guests nor the Queen Mother, who walked around the garden talking to people under an umbrella. That evening she saw a musical version of L. M. Montgomery’s
Anne of Green Gables
, which is set in the island.

In St John’s, Newfoundland, the Queen Mother was greeted by at least a thousand children yelling and cheering in the Memorial Stadium; she pleased them by giving an unscheduled address. After a good lunch, a hot afternoon watching Trooping the Colour by the Royal Newfoundland Regiment was followed by an even muggier ordeal in a sweltering marquee while more than a hundred officers, wives and officials were presented to her. The day ended with a reception on board the yacht.