Craig Brown’s new book uncovers Queen’s Elizabeth II’s memorable moments in Auckland

A new biography on the late Queen Elizabeth II reveals new information about her life and connections, including a surprising revelation about a visit to Auckland. Photo / Getty Images

A Voyage Around the Queen explores the Queen’s life through those who encountered her, author Craig Brown tells Penny Lewis.

“My husband and I” might be the late Queen Elizabeth II’s most well-known phrase. What’s not so well-known about these parroted - and much parodied - words is that she was in Auckland when she said them. In late 1953, the Queen and Prince Philip were at Government House in Epsom two months into a half-year-long tour of the Commonwealth when the Queen used those famous words in her radio-broadcast Christmas speech (the Queen’s first televised Christmas message was in 1957).

The Auckland connection is mentioned in a new book, A Voyage Around the Queen, by award-winning British author, critic and satirist Craig Brown. The book is rich with fascinating details, including a section on the Queen’s many, many corgis, an account of 10-year-old Liverpudlian Sir Paul McCartney winning an essay-writing contest about the coronation, as well as what the Queen said about a service dog that barked at Putin.

A Voyage Around the Queen looks at Britain’s longest-reigning monarch through the eyes of those who encountered her. The result is a 639-page combination of biography, essays, cultural history, travelogues and comedy. The satire never crosses the line from wit to cruelty - what Brown does is report what others have observed.

Craig Brown, author of A Voyage Around the Queen.

“My aim has been to write a different kind of royal book, to broaden the usual focus and create a panorama of the late Queen and the strange and fascinating place she occupied not only in the world but in our national psyche,” the author says in the book’s media release.

A columnist for the Times, Private Eye and the Daily Mail, this is Brown’s 18th book. He was in a sound booth recording an audio version of his previous book, Haywire: The Best of Craig Brown, when a young audio technician told him about seeing news of the Queen’s death on social media. It was September 8, 2022, and Brown had spent the past year researching her life.

“I said, ‘Oh no, of course she hasn’t died’. But of course, she had. Nobody expected her to die, even though she was 96. Hardly anyone in the world could remember a time she hadn’t been in their lives. You would have to have been about 101 to remember a time without the Queen,” Brown says over Zoom from the UK.

It’s estimated the Queen met more people than any other human in history. “David Cameron, the former Prime Minister [of England], said in his eulogy to the Queen that he reckoned the Queen had personally met four million people in her life, and he said, ‘That’s the population of New Zealand’. Even if he was a million out, it is rather extraordinary,” Brown says.

So, with the late monarch’s long and much-chronicled life, why did Brown decide to write a book about her? A Voyage Around the Queen is his third biography, after 2017′s Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, about the Queen’s sister, and One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, released in 2020. Both earlier books follow the same kaleidoscopic, non-linear approach.

“I wanted to do a properly world-famous figure that everyone had an idea about. I didn’t really want to do a member of the royal family again, but it just seemed the Queen was the obvious one,” he says. “In some ways, the Beatles are closer to the Queen than Princess Margaret was, because they influenced everyone around the globe. Princess Margaret was a more marginal figure.”

Brown, 67, is married to author Frances Welch, whose niece is Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine fame. The couple live in Suffolk and have two adult children, Tallulah and Silus, and three young grandchildren, new baby Martha, grandson Bram and 3-month-old Iris.

“Frances writes books. I tend to write comedy. She writes tragedy. She writes books about the Romanovs - it was only eight years after the Romanovs were assassinated that the Queen was born.”

Brown was born in Surrey and was sent to boarding school at the age of 7. “Whenever I said [I was] 7, my mother would say, ‘Well, you were very nearly 8’. I think she felt guilty about it, but all her friends did the same. I went to Eton and then for a while I did drama at the University of Bristol.”

A Voyage Around The Queen, the new book by Craig Brown.

He did meet the Queen once. “I was a [university] student, and I had a friend, actually, from Eton, whose parents were very much in with the royal family. He invited me to his parents’ 25th wedding anniversary [celebration] in their London house. A group of us, five drunken students who were all 19, were part of this rather grand party. I wasn’t expecting to meet her, but I was crossing this quite large room, and the host, my friend’s father, said, ‘Would you like to be presented?’ And then suddenly I was faced with this woman I’d seen virtually every day of my life on stamps, and in the newspapers and on television. It was very, very discombobulating.”

“I think the host said something like, ‘Craig’s studying drama’, and she said, ‘Oh, very interesting’. And I went on about the plays of [German theatre practitioner] Bertolt Brecht, one of the world’s most boring playwrights. She kept saying, ‘Oh, very interesting’, which was her way of signalling the end of a conversation. But I wasn’t having any of it. I carried on telling her more about Bertolt Brecht. And then she was taking steps backwards, which was another way of signalling the end of a conversation, but I was taking steps forward. Over her shoulder, I could see my friends pointing and giggling.”

Brown says he used to wake up in the early hours of the morning and wonder why he behaved the way he did. “I found out from doing this book that [Irish-British broadcaster] Terry Wogan called it the ‘royal effect’.”

Wogan was once in a receiving line with [musician] Phil Collins, who started whistling the theme tune of Close Encounters of the Third Kind when the Queen was still in earshot. “He said to Wogan afterwards, ‘What was I doing whistling that?’” Brown says.

“Wogan said to him, ‘It’s the royal effect. People go mad when they meet the Queen’. I’d say a majority of people would just talk nonsense to her. She must have thought the world was a very odd place.”

A Voyage Around the Queen by Craig Brown (HarperCollins Publishers), RRP $39.99, releases on September 4, 2024.