Radioactive Queen steers Empire to Commonwealth

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

Kwame Kwei-Armah’s four-part series retracing Queen Elizabeth’s 1954 royal trip, On Tour With The Queen, is odd but quietly engaging.

Kwei-Armah seems to have an invisible friend: he never looks straight at camera, talking instead to an off-screen persona. It makes the viewer feel strangely uncomfortable. And some of his judgements are thuddingly banal. Sent around the world to find the legacy and learn the lessons of the longest-ever royal jaunt he takes time off to stand in front of the source of the White Nile and utter that most unilluminating of TV travel programme phrases, “Isn’t it amazing?” That would be a clunker even at your home movie screening, Kwame.

Fortunately, programmes that dig up those relentlessly jolly newsreels of 50 years ago and then talk to the people captured on camera – like the girl who presented flowers to Elizabeth on her arrival at Entebbe airport in Uganda – are always fun, and often interesting. (At this stage of her reign, The Queen is described so frequently as looking radiant that you wonder if she has become radioactive.)

The Ugandan flower girl, for example, remembered being told by the authorities to take off her footwear: “They didn’t let me wear shoes,” because the Governor wanted to portray “a typical African child. I was so embarassed. It wasn’t a nice thing to do at all.” The incident is small but reveals a lot about British racist attitudes, without resorting to the sort of political polemic that programme makers feel might put off British viewers – though Kwei-Armah steers her into saying the word “superiority”, apparently in order to segue to his own judgement that the visit to Uganda was part of a struggle to maintain that superiority.

I am unsure what Kwei-Armah means when he says “Uganda still holds in its heart the legacy of colonialism” – more than any country whose history was disrupted by the British Empire? – and his line that “This is the country that touches me most” deserves more explanation.

Shoes were in issue in the previous country on the tour, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), because Winston Churchill’s government told Elizabeth that rather than suffer the indignity of removing her footwear at the sacred Buddhist Temple of the Tooth she should omit the visit from her itinerary. She ignored the advice. It is from such actions that the Queen has carved the idea that although constitutionally she must do what the British government of the day says, in her role as head of the Commonwealth she retains a degree of independence.

If her job in Sri Lanka was to win the allegiance of the country’s new ruling class, in Fiji there was no such need: the country was loyal unto death, which is why she stopped over (to a totally silent reception, a mark of respect): to maintain the supply of soldiers. Through one of history tricks, coup leader Colonel Sitiveni Rambuka's antics resulted in the country becoming a republic.

"Colonel Rambuka became the first man to oust a British monarch since Oliver Cromwell", says Kwei-Armah. Really? What about India in 1950, and other countries that stayed in the Commonwealth but became republics?

Kwei-Armah is most effective when he sticks to the smaller observations. The Queen's head is still on the currency, Kwei-Armah tells his invisible friend: "I get the impression that this is a country that regrets leaving the fold."

Press announcement for the final programme:

On Tour with the Queen
Transmission: 31 August 2009, 9pm on Channel 4

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 discover how it transformed Britain from a country with a failing Empire to a nation with a lasting place in the world.

The final episode takes Kwame to Libya. The Queen came here for one main purpose – to honour the war dead buried in Tobruk – the site of Britain’s first WW2 battlefield victory and pivotal to winning the Africa campaign, but a triumph which cost the lives of thousands of British and Commonwealth soldiers. Kwame goes to see the cemeteries the Queen visited, where men from every corner of the Commonwealth are buried. The Queen stayed in Libya for just a day – long enough to honour the fallen and to meet briefly with King Idris, who had been hand picked to serve British interests here following Libya’s Independence in 1951. Libya was important for Tobruk harbour and military bases, for the protection of new oil refineries in the Middle East, and access to the Suez Canal. But Britain’s efforts to maintain its influence over Libya would later come to an abrupt end with the emergence of a young Colonel Gaddafi.

As the Queen left Libya, she was reunited with her children, Prince Charles and Princess Anne, after six long months of separation. Together they sailed on to Malta – the gateway to Europe and the site of Britain’s most important Mediterranean naval base, referred to by Churchill as our “unsinkable aircraft carrier”. The Queen came here to honour the sacrifices it had made during the War when it became the most bombed place on earth, at one point enduring 10,300 air raids in just 30 days.

The Queen was also visiting her old home - it was here she spent some of her happiest and most care-free years as a young naval lieutenant’s wife in the late 1940s. Kwame goes to the famous Masa Polo Club where the Queen watched Philip play polo, and meets a Royal Correspondent and photographer who recall the changes they saw in the young woman who went from Princess to Queen. But, despite the nation’s adoration for the Queen, the Maltese began pushing hard for Independence almost as soon as her Coronation Tour visit was over. Kwame meets former Premier Guido d’ Marco to find out what prompted first their declaration of Independence, and later, the move to turn its back totally on the Queen by becoming a Republic.

The final leg finds Kwame on the Rock of Gibraltar, among the tourists and the monkeys. This tiny loyal colony, which Britain had held for 300 years, should have been an easy visit, but it became the centre of a major international row. Spain saw the Queen’s visit as a deliberate provocation and the trip sparked anti-British riots in Spain and the closure of their border with Gibraltar for 16 years. There is still genuine sensitivity to the sovereignty issue, as Kwame’s encounter with Gibraltar’s Chief Minister, demonstrates – an interview that was granted only on condition that Kwame did not talk to anyone Spanish.

The end of the series sees Kwame back in London to attend the 60th anniversary celebrations of the Commonwealth at Westminster Abbey. The occasion allows him to speak in front of - and meet - the person whose footsteps he’s been retracing: the Queen. The event is attended by Heads of State from countries across the Commonwealth, of which there are now nearly twice as many as there were in 1954 – including members who were never even British Colonies.

At the end of his own mammoth journey, Kwame wonders how effective the Queen’s royal charm offensive was in cementing the transition from Empire to Commonwealth. While there’s no denying the many and profound problems caused by Empire, how do the former colonies feel about the Queen and Britain now? And to what extent did that remarkable journey shape modern, multicultural Britain, where people from every place she visited on her Tour are now part of Britain’s own population? Kwame argues that the transition from Colonialism to Commonwealth has in many ways made Britain what it is today: no longer the bombed-out, bankrupt shell it was in 1954, but a diverse modern nation. And this, Kwame argues, is in no small part due to the Queen’s Coronation Tour.