What the snobs will never understand about the thrill of meeting the Queen – and I’ve done it THREE times
The date was April 3, 1993 and, for the first time in its history, the Grand National had been declared void. There had been a false start, a warning flag unfurled late, yet 30 of the 39 runners still thundered off down the course.
‘It was such a mess!’ the Queen told us, clenching her fist in frustration. ‘They didn’t see the flag!’ Here was a lively 67-year-old who loved horses, knew their form, and looked forward to the excitement of that national event at Aintree. Her eyes gleamed as she named one or two of her favourites among the runners and it was easy to imagine her giving useful tips to her staff.
The occasion was a small private drinks party given by the Prince of Wales at Sandringham. For me, a passionate monarchist, it was thrilling to see the Queen at her most natural, so unguarded — like any grandmother who might have had a flutter and was cross that her fun was spoilt.
‘So frustrating! So frustrating!’ But she saw the amusing side of it too. ‘They just carried on!’ she exclaimed in disbelief, an unmistakable twinkle in her eye.
Made confident by a glass of gin and tonic, I said one or two things to her about horses and, if she thought me foolish (since my equine knowledge could be written on my little fingernail), she didn’t show it. That smile was dazzling.
This photo, taken in 1972, shows a group of young boys aged between eight and ten years, belonging to the choir school of Westminster Abbey, were wowed as the photographed the Queen leaving the Abbey with an obliging smile
Thrilled children wave flags to greet the late Queen Elizabeth II as she arrives for a reception at the Ambassador’s residence on November 27, 2010 in Muscat, Oman
Alone later, I spoke aloud to my own grandmother, who had died in 1971. I know that many people who write to my advice column about their losses find comfort in speaking to the beloved dead, and I am no exception.
‘Are you proud of me, Nan?’ I whispered to the air — and truly I felt her spirit with me, her little granddaughter, under the same roof as Royalty.
Of course my beloved ghost was proud. My grandmother was a dinner lady who also cleaned people’s houses for a living and each weekend, when I was a child, we would sit together and cut out pictures of the Royal Family from newspapers and magazines.
I learned my deep love of the Queen and her family at her knee and, embedded in my DNA, it still fills me with a mixture of love and awe.
Love for the human side of the Royal Family and awe at the monarchy’s unassailable mystique.
I know many middle class members of the intelligentsia find it impossible to understand why ‘ordinary’ people would care about the Queen, why they bother to crowd in front of Buckingham Place in tears, just as they thronged the Mall with joy at Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee.
Republicans sneer when working class people say sadly that the Queen ‘reminded me of my Nan’ — when obviously the immensely rich head of State inhabited a totally different, ‘posh’ world.
Yet she was indeed a devoted mother, grandmother and great grandmother as well as matriarch to a nation. She combined empathy for her people in bad times — who can forget her during the Covid lockdown? — with a profound sense of a calling from a higher power.
Yes, as she grew older she increasingly resembled everybody’s granny, slightly stooped, in sensible shoes. But how miraculous that she could arouse that personal affection yet still instil in people a sense of awe, so that the most sceptical of politicians would feel nervous to meet her and privileged to shake her hand.
Well-wishers and members of the public are overjoyed to meet the Queen on her visit to Federation Square in downtown Melbourne on October 26, 2011
They say the age of deference is over, but why should we not feel due deference to those who have lived so long, seen so much?
My own mother (two years older than the Queen) died earlier this year and in mourning her, as I am now mourning the Queen, I am expressing love but also a deep respect for that wartime generation which embodied stoicism, loyalty, faith, love of country, service, a sense of duty, tolerance and great kindness. We shall not see their like again.
Just six when the new Elizabethan Age began, I belong to the post-war generation which remembers respectfully standing up for the National Anthem in the cinema when the film or cartoon had ended. Nobody ever scuttled out. We saw television for the first time when the Queen was crowned and my working- class grandparents bought their first set (with doors that closed) specially for the occasion.
With other family members we all crowded round that tiny, flickering grey screen in the living room of their rented house in Liverpool, the whole thing feeling more personal because my father had actually travelled all the way to London (no motorways then, remember) with two friends — ‘blue-collar’ workers all three — to join the massive crowds.
‘Dad’s there!’ we cried out in excitement, peering at the screen as if we might pick him out. Next day he brought back the red-white-and-blue striped cardboard periscope bought from a souvenir booth: an angled mirror each end to afford a glimpse of a golden coach and horses in the distance.
My brother and I played with it until it fell apart.
Watching the news coverage, listening to the voices of people thronging the streets of London to mourn the Queen and to welcome their new king, I was struck by the sense of ownership people expressed: the Queen was ours.
Respected all over the world she might have been, but to loyalists the Queen has always been focus for our patriotism, our belief (yes, deep down) in exceptional Britannia, our conviction that our monarchy matters as a force for good.
Again and again, watching television and listening to the radio, you heard little personal stories of how exciting it was for ordinary men and women once to see the Queen or even shake her hand. It’s as if those brief encounters transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary — and that was the magic of Elizabeth II.
Queen Elizabeth II meets ecstatic the public as she visits the new health building of the Brunel University, Hillingdon
I’m happy to share my own anecdotes because at this strange time of sadness and change they give me happiness and comfort. For that informal meeting in 1993 was, in fact, the third time I met Her Majesty.
In February 1968, I married my fellow student at University College London, Jonathan Dimbleby, whose father Richard had been an intrepid war reporter, a political TV presenter and ‘the voice of the nation,’ commentating on Royal occasions with famous fluency.
At a time when television was new, he brought it alive for millions and was revered. It was his unmistakable, mellifluous voice we had heard on that first TV set at the Coronation in 1953.
When Richard died of cancer in 1966, the Dimbleby family set up a fund in his name and, five days after my wedding, the Queen was to open the Richard Dimbleby Cancer Unit at St Thomas’s Hospital, London.
I stood in the family line, wearing a black and white mini-dress, and waited to curtsey and shake her hand. You can imagine how amazing it was for a student — just 21 and from a very ordinary background — to have the Queen stop and say, ‘I hear you’ve just got married. I hope you will be very happy.’ At her side, Prince Philip beamed and it felt like a blessing.
The second occasion was on November 8, 1984, and the Silver Jubilee of the bereavement charity CRUSE, celebrated at the Albert Hall. The Queen, as Patron of the charity, was to preside, make a speech and present awards.
Mine (I still have it in my office) was ‘for the special contribution to public understand of bereavement through articles in the national Press.’ A great honour. Allowed one guest, I took my dear dad to see me shake his beloved Queen’s hand.
I’d watched nervously from the side of the stage as others walked across (such a long walk it seemed too, with the dread of tripping up), bowed or curtseyed, briefly shook the royal hand, accepted the rolled scroll, then moved on. She rarely said anything other than the obvious congratulations.
But when my name and citation boomed out across that vast, packed space, the Queen seemed to hold my hand for a few seconds longer as she said, with grave sweetness: ‘There isn’t a more important subject for you to write about. Well done.’
The Queen meets a humble aboriginal artist Edwin Pareroultja when she visited the Tmar Mara Art Gallery at Alice Springs, Australia in 1963
Just as I had felt she had blessed my marriage fourteen years earlier, now it seemed she was blessing my work.
All these years later, writing this on a day of national mourning, I find my eyes filling up at the memory of her words, her touch. Yes, my memories are personal — but they also convey a universal emotion of gratitude.
When the Queen suffered her own setbacks and experienced the sadness and acute disappointment of witnessing the marriage splits of three of her children, I always thought, ‘She is feeling this just as we all do.’ No amount of privilege can shield you from personal pain.
In 1992, the Queen gave a speech in London to mark the 40th anniversary of her accession to the throne, in which she famously defined the year in Latin as an ‘annus horribilis’ — horrible year. In the same way, many of us will recall a time in our lives when just about everything seemed to go wrong and we could do nothing about it.
When people write to my column sharing problems concerning a partner, or bereavement, or a difficult son letting you down, or a feeling of being trapped in a job, or the painful end of a marriage, or dealing with illness or frailty, they are sharing emotions which the Queen herself knew. After all, she experienced all those aspects of life herself. We all have family troubles, even if they are not (luckily for us) played out in the public eye.
When I counsel forgiveness (and we must forgive, or we hurt ourselves) I always have the Queen as an example. I don’t believe she ever had anything but love in her heart for Princes Andrew and Harry.
Sometimes people write to me with a tired sense that they just cannot see the point in carrying on. And nobody can tell me that the Queen never once became weary of peering into those red boxes, shaking hands and presenting awards, or sharing small talk with dignitaries. The woman with her own problems must have been fed up at times, but the Queen had to do her duty.
She would, of course, say what my mother always told me, repeating it even when she was near the end of her life: ‘You just have to get on with it.’ That stoicism was the signature of those who witnessed the Blitz, whether in Liverpool or London, and knew there was no choice but to pull together in the cause of a greater good.
Queen Elizabeth II meets a prize winner as she inspects the champion pigs. She shakes hands with Mrs Leatham owner of the the supreme champion of Finchampstead Berkshire in 1961
The Queen’s whole life was devoted to that greater good — service to our country — and that is why she was such an inspiration, even to the teenagers in tears in front of Buckingham Palace on Thursday night.
People need role models and, in this age of often tawdry celebrity culture, the Queen, as matriarch, showed us what it is to ‘keep calm and carry on’ without complaint.
To me, that resilience, combined with her radiance, was the greatest gift she gave us.
Yet what of the concept of ‘majesty’? In the end, we knew the Queen was not ‘just like us’, no matter what personal sorrows she suffered. When, at the Coronation, the Queen was anointed with holy oil (as King Charles III will also be), the symbolism is profound.
The holy oil, blessed by the church, is a sign of God’s favour and of the Monarch’s difference from other men and women. The moment is sacred — and the Queen’s deep Christian faith will have felt it most strongly, consecrating her in her duty.
That duty now passes to her son, a man whose whole life has been devoted to public good. None of us will ever bear such a heavy burden of responsibility and I believe that in our hearts we know our Queen, and now King Charles III, take up that burden on behalf of us all.
The 17th-century English poet John Dryden wrote, ‘Kings cannot reign unless their subjects give’ — and in the past two days we have witnessed the love given by that public to their late Queen and their new King, which will enable the monarchy to survive, even through these turbulent times.
It has survived before and I believe there is enough love and loyalty in the British people to keep it going.
Our late Queen and our new King need us as much as we need them, and the sacred bond between Monarch and People has a power and a beauty which is almost beyond words.
It arched over Buckingham Palace between drenching showers, the rainbow of hope for us all.
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