An Author Writes
Platinum Queen’s golden smile
TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
How she’s changed – from serious princess to beaming monarch Robert Hardman
Call of duty: Princess Elizabeth’s 21st-birthday broadcast, Victoria Falls, April 1947
Gathering his thoughts at the end of Princess Elizabeth’s international debut, one of the great courtiers of the 20th century offered his verdict on the future Queen. Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, who would serve four monarchs, wrote home to his wife that the heir presumptive was made of the right stuff. ‘She has come on in the most surprising way,’ noted the King’s Private Secretary. ‘Not a great sense of humour, but a healthy sense of fun… For a child of her years, she has got an astonishing solicitude for other people’s comfort; such unselfishness is not a normal characteristic of that family.’ Lascelles had just spent the early part of 1947 travelling around southern Africa with the King and Queen, plus the two Princesses who were making their first overseas tour. The trip is best remembered for the future monarch’s still-moving pledge to serve her peoples – for ‘my whole life, whether it be short or long’ – during her 21st-birthday celebrations in Cape Town (even though I have now learned that it was prerecorded in a hotel garden in Victoria Falls in what is now Zimbabwe). Though the Queen has now comfortably outlived all her predecessors on the throne, both her pledge and Lascelles’s analysis still hold true in almost every regard, as I have discovered while writing my biography. The one exception is his observation about humour. It is certainly true that she was a serious and conscientious child. As a young woman, Cynthia Gladwyn noted in 1949, she still retained ‘a charming diffidence’ while being ‘seriously aware of her rank and responsibility’. One striking change through the decades is the way in which the Queen has been seen to smile more and more as the years have progressed. Back in the early stages of her The Oldie Spring 2022 57
