WORLD NEWS & PROPHECY
70 Years of Elizabeth II,
The Servant Queen In the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee year, we reflect on a beloved figure exemplifying dignity and devotion yet sadly not preserving her realms from moral plummet and decline. by Melvin Rhodes
I
grew up with Elizabeth II, turning one year old a few days before the Queen ascended the throne. When I was seven in 1958, she visited my hometown of Grimsby. I have no idea why she was there. Presumably some of the people in the massive, wall-towall crowd did. A man, a stranger, offered to put me on his shoulders so I could get a better view. It was a really warm day, and I remember the Red Cross having to pull a woman out of the crowd who had fainted in the heat. At my school we used to march into a big hall for an assembly every morning for a daily scriptural reading and a hymn. As we turned to actually enter the hall, there was a beautiful portrait of the Queen— Pietro Annigoni’s masterpiece, still one of my favorite paintings. We always marched to classical music. Often it was “royal” music, having been specially written for royal occasions. Handel was one of
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the composers, a German who had settled in England in 1712, taking British citizenship 15 years later. We didn’t grow up blindly loyal to the Queen—my father being very much against royalty—but she was always there, the symbol of the nation. I remember later hearing while on a visit to San Francisco in 1977 that hers was the most distributed vignette in history. After all, she was on all our coins and bank notes and on every postage stamp. Other nations also have the Queen’s image on coins and bank notes. In 1964 Britain elected a Labor (socialist) government. I remember two years later, when many thought socialism was the way to go, a cartoon in one of our newspapers showing the Queen and her husband, Prince Philip, standing on the balcony at Buckingham Palace with a thin crowd in the Mall, the roadway leading up to palace. Philip turned to his wife and said: “Never mind,
B Tm a g a z i n e . o r g
dear. You’re still top of the pops in Australia.” At that time, 56 years ago, the monarchy was more popular in Australia than it was at home in England. Today, at 96, the Queen herself has a consistent popularity rating of over 70 percent, higher than any politician on either side of the Atlantic. Even at the lowest point, following the death of Princess Diana in 1997, there was no widespread thought of turning Britain into a republic with a figurehead president replacing the monarch. Throughout my life, she has always been there. When we lived in Rhodesia all the coins had Elizabeth II on them. When we moved to Ghana the meeting hall we used for church services had a plaque on the wall saying it was opened by the Queen in 1961. What has made her so popular? Princess Elizabeth’s promise I think it goes back in large measure
