Book review: You could blame seasickness. You could blame sunstroke. Or too much ice cream. I blamed the monarchy. It was February 13, 1963. Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh were leaving Picton aboard the royal yacht Britannia, and I was watching the festivities from a small boat. As the long day closed, the combination of sea, sun and sugar proved too much, and I was violently ill on the floor of the local movie theatre (Lawrence of Arabia, as I recall – an odd choice for a 6-year-old). Ever since, I’ve been unable to think of royalty without feeling queasy.
I’m rather sorry I couldn’t have shared that memory with Craig Brown. I’m sure he would have included it in this madly marvellous account of the life and times of the late HRH. After all, he’s included plenty of stories from people whose association with Her Majesty was only marginally closer than mine.
All of them add up to something that isn’t exactly a biography – more a collection of impressions from people who met the Queen, dreamed about her, saw her on the telly, worked for her, waved as she drove past, were terrorised by her corgis or otherwise had some association, however tenuous, with the late monarch.
Brown drags in everyone from Anne Frank (in her famous diary, she mused about the young Princess Elizabeth) to Elton John (he danced with Princess Anne and her mother, who kept a firm grip on her handbag throughout), Paul McCartney (aged 10, he won an essay competition on the coronation) and Richard Gere and Sylvester Stallone (they almost came to blows over Diana). He also mentions Nazis (too many of those in Prince Philip’s family) and Rolf Harris (far too familiar as he painted the Queen’s portrait, but the less said about him the better).
In collecting these impressions, Brown seems to have exhaustively mined everything ever written about the Windsors. The bibliography’s vastness is terrifying for the royal-allergic. I don’t know Brown’s attitude to royal honours, but he deserves one for wading through treacle like All the Queen’s Corgis, or the collected works of Sarah, Duchess of York, so that we don’t have to.
The result is a big book, but don’t let that put you off – it fair races along, helped by Brown’s keen eye for the sheer weirdness of royal life. Take, for example, the challenging manoeuvre known as the curtsy, which comes with rules that make quantum physics look straightforward. Despite three readings, I may still have this wrong, but after Prince William’s marriage to Kate Middleton, the protocol was thus: Kate had to curtsy to Anne and Camilla; in turn, Kate would be curtsied to by Beatrice and Eugenie; and of course, all the women curtsied to the Queen. If Prince William was absent, Kate would have to curtsy to all the blood princesses; but if William was present, she only had to curtsy to Anne and Alexandra. Got that?
The Queen, apparently, took this sort of thing very seriously indeed.
By the way, Meghan Markle absolutely nailed the curtsy on her first try, not that it did her much good with the royal family.
More weirdness: the Queen’s guests were sometimes confused by the little brown biscuits served with their tea. The joke – for this was indeed an example of sophisticated royal humour – was to wait until someone raised a biscuit to their lips, before the Queen or Queen Mother shouted: “No, no, no. They’re for the dogs.” Life at the palace must have been a laugh a minute.
There’s rather a lot about dogs. Appropriately so, given the joke about the four things the Queen cared about most: horses, dogs, Prince Philip and her children, in that order. It all began with corgi Susan (1944-59), who got together with Rozavel Lucky Strike, producing Honey and Sugar, and on and on through 14 generations of corgis and the occasional corgi/dachshund cross.
I’m told there are people who find corgis appealing, but they do have their challenges in the temperament department. “The Corleones of the dog world,” Brown calls them, cuddly one minute, psycho the next. When the Queen’s corgis weren’t chewing on the furniture, they were savaging unfortunate passers-by, though at least they were equal-opportunity maulers, biting commoners and royals alike.
Sensitive readers may wish to skip the horrifying tale of Jolly, the royal princes’ corgi, her stomach torn open by the Queen’s slavering beasts. There’s more bloodshed when Princess Anne’s bull terriers pay a visit and promptly savages one of the Queen’s corgis so badly that it has to be put down.
Handy tip: like sensible people, even psychopathic corgis become weak and run away at the sound of bagpipes, or so the Queen’s piper reckoned.
The stories are fun, but the Queen herself remains about as knowable as the Mona Lisa. She met four million people, according to one estimate of questionable reliability, but the remarkable thing is how many of those people later remembered nothing of what she said. It was, says Brown, “almost as though her conversations were written in disappearing ink”. To the extent that they were remembered, royal exchanges seem to have run the gamut from “have you come far?”, or “and what do you do?” to “how interesting”, or in moments of extreme excitement, “how very, very interesting”.
On the other side of the encounter, what’s equally remarkable is the strange effect she had on many of the people she met, rendering confident, articulate citizens either tongue-tied or liable to blurt out something wildly inappropriate.
She seemed to have few passions, apart from the aforementioned horses, dogs, Philip and family – though she was clearly passionate about the business of being Queen, and maintaining the status of her role.
This is a satirical book, but it’s not cruel. The tone is more bafflement at a life so singular. How very, very interesting it all seems.
A Voyage Around the Queen, by Craig Brown (Fourth Estate), is out now.
