Queen and Commonwealth: a royal tour de force

By Daniel Nelson It’s certainly a good idea: 56 years after the newly-crowned Queen Elizabeth’s six-month, 45,000 mile royal tour – still the most ambitious ever undertaken – Kwame Kwei-Armah retraces her journey to see what it meant, then and now. The question is: does On Tour With The Queen make good TV? Yes, but. For a start, having a black Briton in charge feels right. A playwright, broadcaster and actor, Kwei-Armah is an intelligent and charismatic guide in his own right, but his very presence underlines how far the world has shifted since the 1953 tour. Secondly, the programmes are undoubtedly fun to watch. The first – to be screened on Channel 4 on 10 August – contains delightful archive newsreel footage from Bermuda, Tonga and Jamaica. It also has entertaining interviews with the islands’ movers and fixers who helped choreograph the royal visit, as well as with the elites who have stepped into their shoes. History and politics have a place, too, alongside the breezily self-confident newsreel commentaries. For example, Kwei-Armah links the visit to the subsequent boom in Caribbean migration to Britain, and reminds us that the tour was a test for the 27-year-old Elizabeth, whose performance on an earlier trip to Canada had been criticised for lack of queenly professionalism (one complainant said she looked bored). His central argument is that Britain could no longer afford its Caribbean colonies but wanted to retain influence – in a way never previously attempted by any empire – and that the tour was a global charm offensive, a display of soft power, cooked up by Winston Churchill and colleagues in London. I have seen only the first programme, which was screened at the Royal Society of Arts in London, but I am worried that the darker and less publicly known side of decolonisation – Britain’s use of threats and naked power to ensure that “radical” governments did not inherit power in countries such as Guyana – is submerged beneath the pictures of flag-waving children, the jovial jolliness of the newsreels and by Kwei-Armah’s determinedly cool dude approach, with his I’m-not-in-awe-of-royalty references to the “Queen’s gig” and to “Prince Philip scrubbing up well”. It’s not that Kwei-Armah is in thrall to the tale of the beautiful young Queen (after the Australia leg of the trip he says he experienced “Queen fatigue”, though he also admits to finding “a new regard for her work ethic”): it’s that TV is so dependent on available images and so poor at complex historical analysis that the medium is always in danger of messing with the message. In a discussion after the Royal Society preview, he emphasised that he saw the series as an investigation, not a celebration, of the Queen’s tour, and that subsequent programmes reflect angrier sentiments in Uganda and Sri Lanka. And when questioners at the preview raised issues such as the discrimination on which picturesque Barbados was built and the Jamaica sequence in which radio phone-in callers backed colonisation over independence, he insisted that the series was not a documentary about colonialism. Nevertheless, the 1953 tour did not take place in a vacuum and I hope the rest of the series does not miss the chance to at least place the royal fairytale in the context of the machinations for which previous and later governments were responsible, such as the combustible legacy in Uganda of an army made up predominantly of one ethnic group and a civil service dominated by another. And though the series is focused on events that took place half a century ago, I hope that it will make a stab at surmising whether the strategy of using the Queen to retain British influence outlasted the independence generation. At the Royal Society meeting, Kwei-Armah said he did not believe the Commonwealth was dead – “but when Elizabeth dies everything is up for grabs”. Press release: On Tour with the Queen In 1953, the newly-crowned Queen Elizabeth set off on a 6-month, 45,000 mile, round-the-world journey. This Coronation Tour of the Empire was the most ambitious royal tour ever undertaken, and would change Britain’s relationship with the world forever. Actor and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah retraces the young Queen’s journey across five continents. Intercut with rarely seen archive footage, Kwame will examine the enduring significance of the tour for the countries she visited and for Britain, discovering how it transformed us from a country with a failing Empire to a nation with a lasting place in the world. Episode two sees Kwame take on Australia and New Zealand, which the Queen visited ten weeks into her tour. For the 27-year-old Elizabeth, Australia was the biggest stage of all - the largest, richest, most demanding nation of the whole tour, and an entire continent to cover in just eight weeks. Her mission was primarily to thank the country for its war effort and reward the Australians’ continued loyalty to Britain with a gruelling two-month transcontinental charm offensive, by the end of which she’d have been seen by an estimated 75% of the population. Australia today is known for its growing republican sentiment, which Kwame samples first hand on the streets of Sydney. But given Australians have yet to make the break, could the Queen have had a longer-lasting effect back then than we realise? How much, if at all, was the famously irreverent Aussie seduced by Elizabeth’s presence? Kwame visits Bondi beach to meet some of the surfers and lifeguards who staged a 200-man display for the Queen. He then travels into the outback where the Queen broadcast an address highlighting Australia’s need to populate its vast desert interior. It wasn’t just Australians they were trying to attract out here; her speech was also ‘selling’ Australia to British immigrants – the famous “ten pound Poms”. For Kwame this epitomises the quid pro quo approach to Australia. Between 1949 and 1959, nearly half a million Brits emigrated to this golden land - with the advantage that these immigrants helped keep Australia British. Britain also needed to keep Australia on side – for its strategic position, resources, and even its vast outback where Britain was testing its first atom bombs. He also discovers that thanks to the country’s “White Australia” policy, only white immigrants were welcome here in the 1950s. Kwame moves on to New Zealand where the Queen spent a month. Britain was still under food rationing, and relied heavily on New Zealand as ‘Britain’s larder’ - so much of the Queen’s time here was spent visiting farms - where she felt very much at home. Kwame meets the descendants of those 1950s farmers and takes on the ultimate challenge for a city boy - to shear his own sheep. For the white population of New Zealand, the Queen’s visit was meant to reassure them that the bond with Britain would remain unchanged. But for the Maori people, her visit presented a vital chance to settle an historic grievance. Kwame discovers how in one single, emotionally charged encounter, Elizabeth negotiated a critical path between the Maori people and the New Zealand Government that re-shaped the nation’s destiny. For Kwame, this is a seminal moment, when the young Queen begins to discover her own diplomatic strength. Episode three will find Kwame in Fiji, where he’ll struggle with a traditional ocean canoe and investigate the Pacific island’s seemingly unbreakable bond with the monarchy despite sacking her as Head of State. He’ll then travel on to Sri Lanka - Britain’s last reminder of the glories of the Raj - and Uganda, where the Winds of Change blew in the face of Britain’s grand exit strategy.

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