official confirmation followed, and the couple kept up an active social life. Elizabeth’s guardsmen friends served as her escorts to restaurants and fashionable clubs like The 400, and Philip would take Elizabeth and Margaret out to a party or the theater. But he was only one among many young men to dance with the heiress presumptive.
LILIBET HAD A growing number of official duties in what her father wryly called the “Royal Firm” (later shortened to the “Firm”). In July 1945, her parents took her to Northern Ireland—her first flight on an airplane. Eight months later she returned for her first solo visit to the six predominantly Protestant counties that were created when Ireland was divided by the British government in 1922. Ireland had been a British colony since England’s King Henry II invaded in the twelfth century. After more than eight centuries of oppressive British rule, Irish nationalists rebelled in 1916, resulting in the violent six-year war for independence that led to partition. While the north (also to be known as Ulster) remained within the United Kingdom, the predominantly Catholic twenty-six counties in the south became the self-governing Irish Free State, a British dominion (similar to Canada and Australia) that grudgingly recognized the British monarch as its head of state.
George VI continued to be his daughter’s most important tutor. During long walks at Sandringham, Balmoral, and Windsor Home Park, he gave her advice and shared his views on government and politics.
The King’s popularity was at its peak, but the postwar years proved difficult for him. In the July 1945 election, the Labour Party won control of Parliament. After heroically leading Britain through the war, Winston Churchill, the King’s confidant and valued partner, was replaced at 10 Downing Street by Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour party. Not only was Attlee taciturn and reserved, his socialist policies—an ambitious Labour platform to create a far-reaching welfare state, nationalize industry, and redistribute wealth—were anathema to both the King and Queen (although Queen Elizabeth shrewdly sized him up as “a practical little man … quite cagey … difficult to get along with, but he soon melted”). The King didn’t hesitate to express his outrage in private, but publicly he remained rigorously neutral. His elder daughter could also see how the strain of his job was wearing her father down. He had begun to suffer from arteriosclerosis, which affected the circulation in his legs and gave him considerable pain. But instead of pacing himself, he kept late hours, chain-smoking as he worked.
On February 1, 1947, King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Elizabeth, and Princess Margaret embarked on their first official overseas trip together—three months in the British colonies of South Africa and Rhodesia, plus a month for the round-trip ocean voyage on the forty-thousand-ton battleship HMS
The journey marked Lilibet’s emergence as a major presence in the royal family and introduced her to the distant reaches of British power. The idea of the British Commonwealth began taking shape in the early twentieth century to describe colonies in the empire making the transition to independence but keeping their connection to the crown. What would become the modern Commonwealth in 1949 was still inchoate, but George VI wanted to transmit to the heiress presumptive his devotion to the countries of the formerly robust British Empire. On a personal level, her time away from Philip would be a final test of her commitment and some time for “we four,” the affectionate name King George VI had given to his family, to spend their last stretch of time together.
The first several days shipboard left the entire royal party seasick and confined to their cabins in heavy swells and gales so fierce that the Royal Standard—the sovereign’s red, gold, and blue flag bearing lions passant and rampant as well as a gold harp—was torn to shreds. When the sun came out as they cruised into the tropics, the princesses leaned hatless against the rails in their flowered dresses, lay on the deck of the rifle range to compete in shooting contests, and dashed around playing tag with the boisterous naval officers. The King, in shirtsleeves and shorts displaying spindly legs, played deck tennis with midshipmen while the women watched. When the ship passed the equator, the crew staged a “Crossing the Line” ceremony featuring sailors dressed in wigs, falsies, and skirts, presided over by Father Neptune with his trident. The “novices” crossing for the first time were dunked and otherwise tormented, although the two princesses only had their faces dabbed with outsized powder puffs.
Elizabeth carried a photograph of her fiance and kept a steady correspondence with him throughout the trip, recounting their adventures. The princesses were enchanted by the beauty of southern Africa’s dramatic vistas, and amazed by the abundance of food and profusion of goods in shop windows compared to the deprivation in London. Sitting in an aerodrome in the Zulu territory, Lilibet and Margaret stared wide-eyed as five thousand half-naked warriors wearing loincloths, animal skins, beads, and feathers brandished their spears and shields, chanting and stomping in a great tribal dance. The princesses gaped at Victoria Falls, marveled at wildlife in the Kruger National Park, hiked the trails in the Drakensberg mountains of the Natal National Park, and clipped the feathers off ostriches. Yet Elizabeth couldn’t help feeling “guilty that we had got away to the sun while everyone else was freezing,” she wrote to Queen Mary. “We hear such terrible stories of the weather and fuel situation at home.… I do hope you have not suffered too much.”
The royal party followed a relentless schedule, including thirty-five days on the “White Train” of fourteen air- conditioned railway carriages painted ivory and gold. Elizabeth watched her parents make their rounds, displaying lively interest as they endured endless receiving lines and tributes, taking in all manner of performances and celebrations. The strain of being on constant display—of feeling “quite sucked dry sometimes,” as her mother described it to a niece midway through the tour—she now saw firsthand. She witnessed her father’s short fuse when he was exhausted or tense, and her mother’s ability to still his “gnashes” with a deft touch on his arm. Either from some unknown underlying illness or the toll of his exertions, the King was visibly losing weight.
There were serious tensions in South Africa, a predominantly black country controlled by a white minority that was itself divided between the Afrikaners of mainly Dutch descent and the English-speaking population—the angry legacy of the nineteenth-century Boer wars in which the British brutally suppressed the Dutch settlers’ rebellions and created British colonies. In part, the royal family’s trip was an effort by the King to promote reconciliation and to support the prime minister, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, an Afrikaner educated in England.
As Smuts faced a general election in 1948, many Afrikaners felt he was too close to Britain and too sympathetic to blacks. While he opposed giving blacks political power, Smuts favored paternalistic policies to help improve their lives. The opposition Afrikaner National Party, however, advocated apartheid policies of racial separation and subjugation. The pro-apartheid extremists eventually prevailed over Smuts and his party, setting South Africa on an isolationist course for nearly half a century. Lilibet saw how onlookers at events were segregated by race, and she understood the political divisions among the whites. Her insights into the repressive policies in South Africa and neighboring Rhodesia later proved invaluable when she dealt with racial questions that threatened to tear apart the Commonwealth.
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THE HIGH POINT of the journey for Elizabeth was her twenty-first birthday on April 21. South Africa celebrated her coming of age as a national holiday with military reviews, a ball in her honor, fireworks, and a necklace of twenty-one diamonds presented by Smuts. She marked the milestone with an eloquent speech dedicated to the young people who had shared her experience of the “terrible and glorious years of the second world war.” The address was written by Dermot Morrah, a historian sympathetic to the monarchy and an editorial writer for
Reading the text for the first time brought Elizabeth to tears. While she hadn’t crafted the words she spoke, her emotional reaction explains why her delivery was so authentic, and why her sentiments still strike a powerful chord and define her to this day. Lascelles told her that if “200 million other people cry when they hear you deliver it … that is what we want.”
Her remarks, which were broadcast from Cape Town “to all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire,” lasted six minutes. In a piping voice, she spoke of the Commonwealth countries as her “home,” and challenged her contemporaries to lift the “burden” from their elders who had “fought and worked and suffered to protect our childhood” and to take on the challenges of the postwar world. “If we all go forward together with an unwavering faith, a high courage, and a quiet heart,” she said, “we shall be able to make of this ancient Commonwealth … an even grander thing—more free, more prosperous, more happy, and a more powerful influence for good in the world.” This turned out to be her credo for the Commonwealth, and it took root during her three months in Africa, just as her father intended.
