night, he died in his sleep.
When did Elizabeth succeed? ‘She became Queen,’ wrote Harold Nicolson, ‘while perched in a tree in Africa watching the rhinoceros come down to the pool to drink.’41 This became the legend, and it was not far from the truth. When the King’s fatal heart attack occurred in the early hours of the morning, the Princess was either asleep or eating breakfast (watching, not rhinoceros, but baboons) or taking pictures of the sunrise. Mike Parker, a member of the royal party, believes he was with her at the precise moment when her reign began. He had invited her to climb up to a look-out point at the top of the tree to watch the dawn coming up over the jungle. While they looked at the iridescent light that preceded the sunrise, they saw an eagle hovering just above their heads. For a moment, he was frightened that it would dive onto them. ‘I never thought about it until later’, he recalled, ‘but that was roughly the time when the King died.’42
Although for several months his death had been a medical inevitability, the news of it came as a surprise both to the public and to the Royal Family. ‘He died as he was getting better,’ says Princess Margaret.43 Remarkably, the ground had not been prepared and the arrangements for telling key people had rapidly to be improvised. The Queen had been the first to know, after the King’s valet had discovered his body, at 7.30 a.m. An hour or more elapsed before Edward Ford, the assistant private secretary, was sent by Sir Alan Lascelles to tell the Prime Minister and the King’s mother. Ford drove to Downing Street, and was shown up to Churchill’s bedroom. The premier was propped up in bed writing, surrounded by paperwork and a candle for his cigar. ‘I’ve got bad news,’ Ford recalls saying, ‘– the King died this morning.’ Churchill seemed shaken. ‘Bad news?’ he exclaimed. ‘The worst!’ He flung aside the papers. ‘How unimportant these matters seem. Get me Anthony Eden.’ Then, according to Ford, ‘he got onto the phone and said, in an absurd attempt at security, “Anthony, can we scramble?” But they couldn’t scramble. He went on in a kind of code, “Our big chief has gone – we must have a Cabinet.”’44 The Prime Minister’s distress was more than momentary. Jock Colville – who, with the change of Government, had been brought back into No 10 as Churchill’s joint private secretary – found him in tears. When he tried to cheer the premier by saying how well he would get on with the new Queen, ‘all he could say was that he did not know her and that she was only a child’.45
Getting hold of the Prime Minister was a great deal easier than finding the new Monarch, who had returned from Treetops to Sagana Lodge. It was more than four hours before the Queen knew that she had succeeded. ‘Because of where we were,’ says Pamela Hicks, who was in the party as a lady-in-waiting, ‘we were almost the last people in the world to know.’ Another lady-in-waiting – aboard the Gothic at Mombasa in anticipation of the royal party – only learnt of the King’s death when she asked why people were taking down the decorations.46 Eventually the story was picked up from the radio by Martin Charteris, a few miles away at the Outspan Hotel. He telephoned Sagana Lodge and spoke to Parker. There was no way to check officially. It was confirmed, however, when Mike Parker switched on his own radio, and heard the announcement on the overseas wavelength of the BBC.47 Parker told Philip who – at about 2.45 p.m., 11.45 a.m. London time – told his wife.48 ‘He took her up to the garden,’ according to Parker, ‘and they walked slowly up and down the lawn while he talked and talked and talked to her.’49
THE DEATH of a British monarch changes little in practical terms. It does not shift a Prime Minister, alter the party of Government, reverse its policies, or influence the economy. Yet – in a way that is hard to define – it affects the mood. This is because the British public relates to its kings and queens, who it regards with a variety of emotions, but always with interest. It even imagines that the relationship works both ways: the question in A. A. Milne’s rhyme about changing the guard at Buckingham Palace – ‘Do you think the King knows about me?’ – is an adult fancy, as well as a childhood one. Hence such an event is often experienced with genuine grief, as a family loss. But there is also a wider, social relationship, which makes a change of reign more than a nominal transition. It is not just for convenience that the culture, mores, architecture, style of dress of a period have often been identified by the name of the monarch – ‘Victorian’, ‘Edwardian’ and so on. A link is made between the supposed character of the titular ruler, and some facet of the age. Even in the mid-twentieth century, after the abandonment of this kind of epochal labelling, monarchs still give a flavour to the attitudes and outlook of the episode over which they formally preside.
Politically, there was little to bind the reign of George VI together. Spanning a turbulent fifteen and a half years from the Depression and the rise of fascism, through a world war, to post-war austerity, the building of the welfare state, Indian independence, the Cold War, and the beginnings of consumer affluence, it had no single theme. Yet its very instability gave the King’s nervous courage and mule-like conservatism an historical role. Indeed, his lack of imagination was seen by many as an advantage, placing him below statesmen and closer to the bewildered common man. In private, prime ministers found him almost intolerably slow, yet they respected his honesty and decency, and his desire to do his best, and they felt protective towards him. There was also relief, and gratitude, that he should have provided the most domestically admirable ‘Royal Family’ since the days of Prince Albert.
The press became filled with images of black drapery, coffins, tombs and catafalques. Even the New Statesman – whose editor, Kingsley Martin, was a rare critic of Monarchy – became convulsed by an argument about whether the front page should have a black band around it. However, the mourning was not just a media indulgence. Affection for George VI was felt everywhere. A few days after the death, Richard Crossman, a left-wing MP and iconoclast, recorded his impression of a ‘hard-boiled’ attitude in Parliament, but ‘directly you got outside, you certainly realised that the newspapers were not sentimentalizing when they described the nation’s feeling of personal loss’.50 The feeling was intensified by the King’s relatively young age, and by sympathy for his widow; and by a mixture of concern and excited, expectant curiosity towards his elder daughter, who had been so closely watched since childhood, who had recently become an almost mythic being, but about whom very little was yet known. It was around this small and mysterious person that the national sentiment rapidly became – in the unironic phrase of the Annual Register for 1952 – ‘a religion of royalism’.51
A variety of procedures automatically followed the King’s death, even before Elizabeth – now the Queen – knew of it. An emergency Cabinet met at 11 a.m., and decided to hold an Accession Council the same afternoon. There was a discussion of the wording of the Proclamation, which had important long-term effects. It was also decided to extend the Council’s composition. ‘Representatives of other members of the Commonwealth’ were now to join the ‘Lords Spiritual and Temporal, members of the Privy Council, and other Principal Gentlemen of Quality, with the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens of London’.52 At the Council later in the day, the Lord President, Lord Woolton, read the draft declaration proclaiming the new Monarch as Queen Elizabeth the Second – the first to have been proclaimed in absentia since the accession of George I.
Proclamations echoed around the world, as never before – and never again, for the phenomenon of one individual as hereditary Head of State in so many different colonies and self-governing states is unlikely to be repeated. There was a plethora of invented traditions. In Australia, for example, the proclamation of George VI in 1936 had been read by a secretary in the Prime Minister’s department to a handful of people assembled in the King’s Hall at Parliament House. His daughter’s proclamation was read by the Governor-General from the steps of Parliament House, and similar ceremonies were conducted before large crowds in state capitals around the country.53 In some places, the implications of what was proclaimed caused local difficulties. A particular complaint was made in Scotland, where the National Committee of the Scottish Covenant Association pointed out that, north of the border, she was Elizabeth I. There was a fierce legal argument. On February 20th the Edinburgh Court of Sessions resolved the matter by announcing that, as far as official documents and declarations were concerned, she would be styled ‘the Second’. The result was a grievance against the British Monarchy that