Conclusion

In the last years of King George V’s reign, the royal family developed a new public relations strategy in order to promote a set of moral values that were instrumental in shaping how the monarch’s second son, King George VI, and his granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II, sought to perform their public roles. The BBC television coverage of the 1953 coronation articulated these values, including the Christian ideals of family, duty and self-sacrifice, through the sacred ritual involved in the Westminster abbey service. Television provided royal stage-managers with a new platform through which to popularize among a mass audience the religious symbolism that had come to underpin the crown’s public image in the preceding decades. Where radio had enabled courtiers, clergy and BBC editors to craft broadcasts that immersed listeners in royal events that highlighted the monarchy’s commitment to domesticity and to serving the public, television created a more vivid, immediate and intimate experience for viewers, who were now able to participate in royal family occasions as spectators. However, as we have seen from reports written by Mass Observation respondents who spent coronation day at home with friends and family, watching the events in central London unfold on television sets, it is clear the religious elements of the coronation did not always resonate with audiences. TV could provide new kinds of instruction on the meanings attached to royalty and religion, but it also had the potential to desacralize the crown and Church by facilitating more informal, irreverent patterns of media consumption. This is what the organizers of the coronation had feared when they originally tried to prevent the BBC from televising the crowning ceremony, but now it was too late – the proverbial genie had been let out of the bottle – and from 1953 onwards royal personalities would be subject to new kinds of scrutiny as their images were visually dissected and devoured within the relaxed, communal setting of the post-war home.

Viewers’ responses to the 1953 coronation also reveal that members of the public had forged powerful empathetic relationships with the main protagonists of the House of Windsor. These imagined connections had intensified in the years between 1932 and 1953 with readers, listeners and viewers increasingly identifying with the private lives and feelings of the royal family. This empathy was deliberately fostered by the royal household and allies of the throne, who sought to project an idealized image of royal domestic life to media audiences as part of a wider strategy to strengthen the public’s loyalty to the crown and adherence to the royal status quo through new emotional bonds. In particular, the language used by members of the House of Windsor to communicate with the public in this period became more informal and personal: under the authorship of archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang, royal broadcasts and messages incorporated a more reflective, intimate register that provided audiences with what seemed like insights into the emotions felt by the royal family. The impact this language had on sections of the public is apparent in letters written by listeners in response to broadcasts in which the writer identified with the royal speaker’s feelings. Equally, the public affection that Mass Observation recorded at the time of the 1937 coronation for the forlorn figure of Queen Mary suggests that the kind of expressive, personal messages she issued to the public (the first coming after her husband’s death, the second following the abdication of her eldest son) evoked empathy and support for the royal family – in this case, at an extremely difficult moment of transition.

Courtiers and churchmen quickly came to appreciate the power of mass media for engendering public loyalty to the royal family through a new kind of top-down emotional programming that emerged in other European nations in the interwar years, too. With the outbreak of another global conflict in 1939, the monarchy’s public relations strategy evolved again but this time in response to a rise in criticism and apathy towards the crown, a development the royal household tried to counter by highlighting the monarchy’s contribution to the war effort and the way George VI, Queen Elizabeth and their children seemed to share emotionally in the hardships of the home front alongside their people. This royal media image was shaped by government propagandists, who tried to use the House of Windsor as a mouthpiece in order to further their own aims. However, royal officials ultimately managed to maintain control of the monarchy’s image in order to promote a narrative consistent with the crown’s pre-war activities. In the years immediately before and after the conflict, the palace also had to contend with intrepid news reporters and editors who sought to bring royal personalities and their feelings closer to media audiences through exposés that revealed the House of Windsor’s private life to public view. There was particularly intense media scrutiny of royalty at the time of Princess Elizabeth’s engagement and marriage to Philip Mountbatten and again after the births of their first two children. Tensions therefore existed between the various actors involved in the projection of the House of Windsor’s image, but the intimate vision of royal domesticity that steadily emerged in these years helped to generate a sense of national unity among members of the public through new kinds of affective integration around the focal point of the family monarchy.

The dynamic relationship between British journalists, the public they claim to represent and the royal household has continued to shape the projection of the monarchy’s media image to the present day. Those sections of the popular press that broke the mould by interrogating the royal family’s behaviour in the 1930s and 1940s became even more outspoken as the decline in deference towards elite institutions like the government, Church and crown accelerated through the 1950s and 1960s. No longer did reporters and news editors take for granted royal privilege and power, but instead increasingly questioned the roles that royalty played in society and the wider world and developed a more irreverent approach to royal private life that saw them simultaneously venerating the idealized image of the family monarchy while hunting for scandalous stories to destabilize the domestic narrative. Despite the mixed media coverage that enveloped the House of Windsor in the second half of the twentieth century, many of the trends set in motion in the period from 1932 to 1953 can be seen at work in the methods used by Elizabeth II’s household to try to win the affection and loyalty of her subjects. The queen’s watchword during her reign has been ‘duty’; and the language of self-sacrifice and service has been intrinsic to her public presentation – just as it was for her father and grandfather. Equally, she has repeatedly stressed the importance of ‘the family’ as the key social institution at the heart of the British nation. Whatever reservations critics of monarchy have expressed about the queen, it is clear she has taken these ideas of duty and domesticity seriously and has sought – with varying results – to impart the same values to her children and grandchildren.

The monarchy’s history since Elizabeth II’s coronation has been defined by a group of individuals who have either succeeded in championing the queen’s high moral ideals or who have failed (often very publicly) to live up to them. This story of successes and failures is testament to the durability of the values and contradictions that came to underpin the royal media image in the two decades examined in this book. An important case in point, one in which these values and contradictions came to a head but which also signalled the beginning of a new phase in the monarchy’s evolution and set the course for much of what was to come in the later twentieth century, was the romantic drama involving the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, in the weeks immediately after the coronation. On 14 June 1953 the Sunday newspaper The People announced to British readers that foreign news outlets were claiming Margaret was in love with a divorced man. It was unlikely that the princess, as third in line to the throne, would ever succeed her sister as queen, but if some tragedy befell Elizabeth II and her child heirs then Margaret would become monarch and would be expected to uphold the Christian values required of the defender of the faith.¹ As we have seen, marital impropriety was not tolerated by the Church of England and the archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, was a staunch opponent of divorce and outspoken supporter of the monarchy’s family-centred image. The sections of the media that criticized Margaret’s romantic entanglement with a divorcé noted that it was highly unlikely she would ever be called upon to become queen, but it was the way her behaviour challenged the religious principles embodied by her elder sister that was the sticking point.² However, as one might expect, having witnessed how members of the public responded to the romantic quandaries of King Edward VIII in 1936 and the then Princess Elizabeth in 1947, there was another side to Margaret’s story that once again highlights the significant changes the monarchy and British society underwent in the years between 1932 and 1953.

To begin with, Margaret was a popular figure with the media and, in the vein of younger royals of the interwar generation, she had been transformed into a celebrity who was renowned for her modern style, glamour and dynamic personality.³ As in the case of Edward VIII when he was prince of Wales and Prince George and Princess Marina in 1934, courtiers and the press had encouraged the public to take a personal interest in Margaret’s development: since her father’s coronation sixteen years previously, she had been presented as a charismatic figure to whom the public could relate and whom it could admire. Although she was overshadowed by her sister, especially after Elizabeth started a family, news editors deemed Margaret’s love life to be of great interest to their readerships.⁴ The celebrity journalism of the mid twentieth century placed special emphasis on the revelation of private life as a way of getting to know the ‘real’ person behind the famous individual’s public image. When combined with the more critical attitude developed by left-wing newspapers to the monarchy in the late 1930s, which partly sprung from the uncomfortable knowledge that they had conspired to keep Edward VIII’s relationship with Wallis Simpson concealed from readers, these new kinds of exposure led to increased scrutiny of the personal lives and decisions made by the royal family, as well as a growing disregard for older notions of social propriety.⁵ George V’s monarchy had been revered by the mainstream media and his political contemporaries as sacrosanct; any kind of private royal indiscretion was kept secret out of respect for the king and the gentlemanly codes of decorum that governed upper-class society during his reign. But the post-abdication years were made more difficult for royalty by a decline in deference that coincided with, but was also propelled by, the media’s attempts to democratize national life.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that self-appointed voice of Britain’s post-war social democracy, the Daily Mirror, took the brazen step of polling its readers’ opinions on the issue of Margaret’s romance. In the wake of The People’s exposé and in the absence of any official denial from Buckingham Palace, journalists took a lead in announcing to readers that the man with whom the princess was in a relationship was Group-Captain Peter Townsend, a handsome RAF veteran whose family had long-standing ties to the British military. In 1944 he had been appointed equerry to George VI and had risen through the ranks of the royal household to become comptroller to the king’s consort, Queen Elizabeth, in 1952 – the same year his first marriage ended in divorce. According to Margaret’s biographers, it was in the wake of George VI’s death in February 1952 that she and Townsend began their relationship, with the couple finding comfort in one another’s arms at a difficult time in both their lives.⁶ Following the initial media revelations, Elizabeth II’s private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, hastily arranged with the help of Prime Minister Winston Churchill for the RAF veteran to be posted as an air attaché to the British embassy in Brussels, a move widely interpreted by the popular press as a ham-fisted attempt to separate the lovers. But now the Mirror came to the princess’s rescue, inviting its readers to decide for themselves whether Margaret should be allowed to marry a man whom the newspaper sympathetically described as a heroic ‘Battle of Britain pilot’, as the ‘innocent party in a divorce’ and as father to two children over whom he had retained custody from an ex-wife who had already remarried.⁷

The Mirror’s poll built on the innovations of its sister paper, the Sunday Pictorial, back in 1947 when it canvassed its readers’ opinions on the matter of Princess Elizabeth’s rumoured engagement to Prince Philip of Greece. As in 1947, the Mirror found that its readers supported the royal romance so long as it was a love match, but this time by an overwhelming majority. Whereas members of the public had taken issue with Philip’s foreign background, fearing that his marriage to the heiress to the throne might complicate Britain’s international relations in the first years of the Cold War, no diplomatic obstacles stood in the way of Margaret and Townsend and, for those readers who responded to the Mirror’s poll, the moral questions their relationship raised did not seem to matter much either: out of just over 70,000 responses, more than 68,000 expressed support for the couple.⁸

As The Family Firm has made clear, contradictory ideas of self-fulfilment and self-denial became fundamental to the monarchy’s public image in the mid 1930s. George and Marina’s royal wedding was projected to the public as an event characterized by a more demonstrative form of romance and a new emotional culture which stressed that love and domesticity were key to personal happiness. This emotional culture had extended its reach across society by the end of the Second World War and informed how many respondents to the Pictorial poll and the Mass Observation directive on the 1947 royal engagement and wedding identified with Princess Elizabeth’s apparent desire to marry for love. Indeed, the widespread belief that a happy home life might make up for the onerous nature of her public duties seems to have won the day; and we know that this narrative was actively promoted by the royal household and the media in an effort to generate support for her choice of Philip.

The underlying tension between self-fulfilment and self-sacrifice that characterized Elizabeth and Philip’s royal love story had gathered momentum because of the actions of Edward VIII when he chose to renounce the throne and his duty to his people in order to marry the woman he loved in 1936. The abdication threw into sharp relief not only the increasingly widespread perception that to be royal was to be burdened with heavy responsibilities to the nation and empire, but also that one’s emotional desires were constrained by the strict moral code upheld by the Church. While this was fine for Edward’s father George V, who, in his last years on the throne, vocally championed the virtues of Christian domesticity and public service in order to unite his subjects around the media image of a dutiful family monarchy, for younger royals whose romantic aspirations lay outside this strict moral formula it was much trickier. George VI’s subsequent coronation and reign alongside Queen Elizabeth was characterized by a revived emphasis on constitutionalism and a royal public relations narrative that highlighted the satisfaction the royal family derived from their happy home lives, but which simultaneously stressed that the ostensible burdens of royal public duty worked to circumscribe personal fulfilment. Indeed, this tension was at the heart of the media campaigns waged by stage-managers like Archbishop Cosmo Lang in the lead-up to the king’s crowning in May 1937. During the Second World War, the Ministry of Information and the BBC helped to project a narrative of royal suffering in order to generate popular identification with the House of Windsor’s leadership on the home front. After 1945 this idea was taken a step further by other loyal disciples like The Times journalist Dermot Morrah, who sought to perpetuate the perception that royal life was demanding and unenviable right at the moment when other sections of the media were lending this narrative credibility: the invasive reporting witnessed during Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s honeymoon in 1947 was met with outrage from members of the public who identified with the royal couple’s desire for privacy.

At a time when modern ideas of self-enrichment were gaining ground throughout Britain, and in particular the belief that personal fulfilment could be achieved through domestic private life, a coterie of courtiers, clerics and journalists therefore popularized the idea that the royal family wanted to enjoy ‘ordinary’ home lives but that their ‘extraordinary’ public roles often prevented them from achieving personal fulfilment. This contradictory narrative took on various forms across the period and evoked a potent mixture of empathy and compassion for the House of Windsor from sections of the population, as seen in the many letters, school essays and Mass Observation personal testimonies examined in this book. Indeed, it was a sympathetic kind of emotional identification that characterized many Mirror readers’ responses to Princess Margaret’s romantic dilemma in July 1953.⁹ Moreover, echoing the anger that had been levelled at Lang following Edward VIII’s abdication almost two decades before, it was the Church of England and its teachings on divorce that bore the brunt of the public criticism which erupted when Margaret and Townsend’s relationship came to an end. Two years later, in 1955, following a fleeting reunion after the RAF veteran returned from Belgium and another unparalleled display of frenzied media speculation, the princess finally decided she would not marry him because it would go against her duty, contravening the Christian ideals of marriage, domesticity and self-sacrifice that the family monarchy held so dear.¹⁰

We have seen that from 1932 to 1953 the crown and Church developed a formidable partnership in the way they expertly orchestrated royal occasions as national events that elevated royal family life as a model for popular emulation. However, by the mid 1950s, British people’s views on divorce were rapidly changing and in many ways the public response to the Margaret-Townsend affair seems to have pointed to a deepening disillusionment with the Church’s attitude to the sanctity of marriage that would take on fuller form in the early 1960s. This famous decade witnessed the rise of secular individualism which, although its origins can be located in the interwar years, saw a sudden and irreversible decline in religious observance and church attendance that was matched by a liberalization of Britain’s laws and customs in ways that enabled and encouraged new kinds of self-expression and self-fulfilment.¹¹ At a time when the nation’s political, social and cultural life was characterized by a pervasive sense of progress and modernity, the public image of the self-sacrificing family monarchy seemed old fashioned. However, rather than move with the times, it appears the royal household chose to proceed with caution by instead clinging to many of the traditional moral values upon which the monarchy had for so long relied, while only adapting to wider changes when necessary.

This blend of the old and the new was on show in 1960 when Margaret was finally married – but to the celebrity portrait photographer, Antony Armstrong-Jones – as part of a royal wedding that looked and felt much like those of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1934, BBC broadcasters had worked with the Church and royal household to project George and Marina’s wedding as a nation-building event in an effort to unite the public around the centrepiece of a royal love story at a time of crisis both at home and abroad. To this end, radio provided listeners with a new kind of access to a royal marriage ceremony and enabled shared emotional participation in a royal family event for the first time. Similarly, against the backdrop of post-war austerity Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to Philip Mountbatten was staged in order to brighten hard times and to engender public loyalty to the heiress to the throne through emotional identification with her romantic aspirations. Again, there was notable innovation in 1947 when the king allowed his personal newsreel cameraman to film inside Westminster abbey, providing cinemagoers with memorable scenes of a smiling princess as she walked back down the aisle hand-in-hand with her new husband. Margaret’s marriage to Armstrong-Jones built on the templates established by the earlier events, but there were also differences which included the fact that, despite his recently-acquired fame as part of London’s bohemian set, the bridegroom was a commoner and had no direct blood ties to the British aristocracy or European royalty – the groups that most young Windsor royals had looked to for spouses since 1918. Most notably of all, however, Margaret and Armstrong-Jones’s wedding was the first to be televised to Britain and the rest of the world from the abbey. In keeping with the royal romances of the interwar years, the theme of true love dominated the coverage of the couple’s marriage ceremony, which was expertly choreographed by the BBC, royal household and Church in order to provide media audiences with more intimate access to a royal wedding than ever before: it was also the first time television viewers saw inside Buckingham Palace when the newlyweds arrived there for the marriage reception.¹²

In the mould of earlier royal events, including the 1937 coronation and the VE Day celebrations, the media coverage of Margaret’s wedding was also characterized by a visual and discursive emphasis on mass participation as communicated through the scenes and sounds of large crowds that gathered in central London, a climactic balcony appearance when the royal family group met with a loud roar of cheering and an emotionally expressive couple who, like the princess’s Aunt Marina a quarter of a century before, engaged with the public by smiling and waving to them.¹³ These rituals highlighted the popularity of the crown in the years either side of the Second World War and have remained part of the canon of images associated with the House of Windsor into the twenty-first century. These customs have worked symbolically to convey the nation’s royalism by conjuring an illusion of intimacy between the monarchy and public and yet they crystallized in the 1930s at a time when Britain’s royal democracy seemed threatened by a new wave of totalitarian politics. Indeed, the European fascist regimes, just like the monarchy and its allies, used new kinds of media to create scenes of the ‘masses’ loyally joined together around the focal point of the nation’s leader – be it Adolf Hitler or George V – in order to outwardly communicate the impression that the public supported the status quo.

It might seem strange that this highly-charged imagery has persisted through to the twenty-first century, especially given the fact there has been no existential political, social or economic crisis since 1945 that has required the House of Windsor to adopt such an overt nation-building role as was the case in the years before and during the Second World War. Nevertheless, the monarchy has retained its place at the heart of the British nation’s symbolic economy by offering a sense of continuity with past events through regular repetition of the rituals and public performances that became so essential to its existence in the years between 1932 and 1953, a key example being royal weddings, two of which took place in 2018. Indeed, the royal family’s importance to ideas of national identity and tradition may even have increased since 1953 in response to the significant transformations of the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first century. Decolonization, immigration, affluence, the liberalization of the UK’s laws and customs and, more recently, the reinvention, for good or ill, of politics and the economy in response to technological and globalizing shifts have changed British culture, society and identities almost beyond recognition – and yet the one major constant has been Elizabeth II’s monarchy as the identifiable link with the past that has continued to bring members of the public together.

Given the significant changes of the sixty-five-year period from 1953 to 2018, it is little wonder that the crown has, at times, had to justify its relevance to a more democratic society and people. This is also because, as commentators recorded at the time and as historians have suggested more recently, the years since Elizabeth II’s coronation have witnessed the House of Windsor descend into a kind of ‘soap opera’ in which the dysfunctional elements of the royals’ private lives have routinely been brought into sharp focus through media exposés.¹⁴ Indeed, the royal reportage that increasingly emerged after 1953 had two distinctive and contradictory sides to it: on the one hand, it was reverent, fawning and celebrated the domesticity and duty of the monarch and her family; on the other hand, it was aggressive, disrespectful and set on revealing the behaviour of the personalities who made up the royal group in ways that destabilized the idealized narrative. The first signs of this more combative approach between the media and the royals could be detected back in 1947 during Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s honeymoon, but it was clearly in action again during the Margaret-Townsend episode and led the newly formed press council to publicly condemn the conduct of newspapers like the Mirror.¹⁵

Unfortunately for Princess Margaret, she remained the lead protagonist in the royal soap opera as it unfolded over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. An increasingly hostile popular press, led by The Sun after it was relaunched by the Australian press baron Rupert Murdoch in 1969, reported on her and her husband’s extramarital affairs, which led to their separation and eventual divorce in 1978 – the first ever directly involving a member of the House of Windsor, although by no means the last.¹⁶ Shortly after this, Margaret was succeeded in the principal role by Princess Diana who, following her marriage to Charles, prince of Wales, in what was widely feted as a true love story in 1981, became the centre of a toxic media frenzy as it became apparent that their relationship was, in fact, doomed. In the later 1980s and early 1990s, journalists claimed that the couple were desperately unhappy, with sensational exposés revealing extramarital affairs, along with the princess’s mental health problems and eating disorders.¹⁷ There was also intense media scrutiny of the effect Charles and Diana’s failing marriage was having on their sons, Princes William and Harry, until the couple finally petitioned for divorce in 1996 following a direct intervention from the prince’s mother, Elizabeth II, who wanted to put an end to a scandal that was rapidly undermining the monarchy’s respectability. However, the queen’s second son would also file for divorce later that same year after another series of scandalous revelations, meaning three of her four children had now sought annulments, the first coming when her daughter, Princess Anne, divorced her husband after a prolonged separation in 1992.¹⁸

According to opinion polls, the monarchy’s overall popularity in the period from 1953 to 2018 has never really wavered.¹⁹ Indeed, with the steady rise in divorce among the British public since the 1960s, the defining (and dysfunctional) features of the royal family’s domestic lives have in some ways continued to mirror those of society at large. Nevertheless, it is perhaps unsurprising that the series of scandals that rocked the monarchy in the 1990s, in particular Diana’s famous television interview in 1995 when she talked about the breakdown of her marriage, followed two years later by her sudden death, led to serious questions arising about the future of the crown.²⁰ When the family monarchy has not worked – that is to say, when it is has failed to uphold the moral values that became so central to its public image in the years between 1932 and 1953 – it has met with public disapproval. It is notable that in the decade from 2008 to 2018 the House of Windsor enjoyed a resurgence in its popularity precisely because it was led by a younger generation of individuals who have enthusiastically promoted Christian domesticity in ways reminiscent of the royal family in the mid twentieth century. The royal household’s reorientation of the monarchy’s public image around the figures of Princes William and Harry and their home lives has done much to repair a crown that was deeply shaken by the humiliating exposés of the 1980s and 1990s and has helped to focus positive attention on the future of the Windsor dynasty as the reign of Elizabeth II comes to an end.

William and Harry’s story has also been one of public duty in the face of personal suffering, not only with the loss of their mother but also in their constant (and highly publicized) battle with the press and ‘paparazzi’ – the belligerent group of photographic news reporters that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. As we have seen, the royal public relations narrative that highlighted how the intrusive nature of media coverage prevented younger members of the House of Windsor from enjoying fulfilling personal lives caught on at the time of the royal honeymoon in 1947. However, it has remained an integral part of the royal family’s approach to the media ever since. The notion that royal public life is burdensome has continued to play a crucial part in the strategy and language developed by courtiers in their attempts to foster public emotional identification with individual royals and the monarchy as an institution. The impression that many members of the public are left with is that royal life (despite its huge range of privileges) is in fact unenviable – that it is a ‘rotten job’.²¹ Scholars have suggested that it is this perception of undesirability that has been essential to the way the British public have rationalized supporting a royal family and an elite institution that are economically and socially far-removed from their own, often difficult, everyday lives.²² According to this argument, privilege has come at the price of unrelenting public duties, the prying of reporters into one’s personal life and the constant sense of expectation that comes with being a national celebrity from the moment one is born to the moment one dies, whether one likes it or not.

Mass Observation has provided rich insights into the range of public emotions developed and articulated in relation to royal personalities in the years between 1937 and 1953. Most of these emotions seem to have been positive and were regularly rooted in an empathy with the family-centred trials and tribulations of the House of Windsor. Of course, there was dissent and it has been one of the aims of The Family Firm to highlight conflicting interpretations of the monarchy’s public role that did not align with the media’s largely celebratory narrative or the bulk of public opinion that at least outwardly (and as often measured through emotionally charged polls) seems to have held the crown in high regard. When looked at in connection with other kinds of personal testimony, such as letters written to the royal family, Mass Observation has shown that gender has historically shaped the kinds of emotions that have underpinned the para-social relationships developed by men and women with the House of Windsor. Female writers tended to empathize more readily with the domestic ordeals of the royals, although by the late 1940s young men were also expressing strong feelings in relation to the family monarchy. Meanwhile, school essays have illuminated the way royalist identities were shaped from the earliest stages of life and that boys and girls identified differently with the cast of royal personalities. These personal documents have also shown that the structural properties of different media like photographs, film, radio and television have transformed how readers, listeners and viewers imagined and responded to the royal public image they consumed. In particular, broadcasting created a heightened sense of national participation around radio and television sets, with the temporal simultaneity of the media creating emotional experiences that were highly personal but at the same time collective in nature.

We must not take for granted Mass Observation’s efforts to gauge public opinion. It was clear after the fallout of the abdication crisis that public attitudes to the monarchy had often been misrepresented by the press and politicians in order to maintain a misleading vision of a modern British nation that was peaceable and unified but which paid little heed to the opinions of ordinary people. Mass Observation’s unique approach to ethnography had precursors in the BBC’s attempts to engage with crowds and the newsreel interviews conducted with working-class people in the lead-up to the 1937 coronation. As we have seen, the abdication also encouraged new press-led interventions into public opinion on royal matters via national polls. In this way, then, questions about the monarchy’s place in Britain have had a consistently democratizing influence on society, motiving new kinds of investigation that have tried to understand what the public really think of their royal rulers. Unfortunately for historians, Mass Observation wound down its activities in the mid 1950s, the queen’s coronation being its last major study, although was relaunched as the ‘Mass Observation Project’ in 1981 at the time of Charles and Diana’s wedding (a major royal family event was again judged an opportune moment to gauge the public’s temperament). The Mass Observation Project has undertaken qualitative studies of many royal events from the early 1980s through to the 2018 royal wedding, although there is no Mass Observation evidence for the almost three-decade period that separates Elizabeth II’s coronation from the marriage of her first son and heir. These years were not only defined by post-colonial immigration and significant shifts in the cultural, religious and ethnic make-up of the British population, but also by de-industrialization, a resurgence in Celtic nationalism, advances in gender equality and the emergence of a new identity politics that in many ways superseded older class-based loyalties. In the absence of first-hand evidence like Mass Observation personal testimonies, scholars could look to the methods employed by oral historians in order to gauge how public feelings towards the monarchy evolved in this eventful period.²³

Other histories of the British monarchy also urgently require attention. Analysis of the attitudes and emotions of subjects-cum-citizens towards the royals in the empire and, later, the Commonwealth would complement recent important interventions which have examined how the House of Windsor navigated the reformulation of the imperial state in the wake of two world wars and decolonization. These studies have shown that the monarchy has retained a crucial symbolic role at the centre of a Commonwealth system that now exists only because of the enthusiastic approach that Elizabeth II has adopted to it and, seemingly, the popular respect this has commanded at ground level within the diverse constituent nations of which it is formed.²⁴ More historical attention could also be devoted to analysing the British monarchy’s links to other crowned heads of state in the twentieth century. We hear less and less in the twenty-first century about the royal family’s European cousinhood and yet, as this book has shown, the House of Windsor is connected through ties of kinship to many continental monarchies that still exist, most notably the Scandinavian royal dynasties. The idea that the British monarchy’s survival instinct caused it to distance itself from other royal houses after 1917 is often repeated, but the royal weddings of the 1930s and 1940s, and the care and trouble George VI later took with the exiled kings and queens of northern Europe and the Balkans during the Second World War, suggest that we should not exaggerate the House of Windsor’s insularity in the mid twentieth century. Further analysis of the crown’s ties to the old continental order would enhance our understanding of a complex period when global international relations were undergoing rapid change that dramatically altered the way the British saw themselves in relation to the rest of the world.

Writing at the end of 2018, it seems that the family firm is soon destined to pass from one monarch to another: the current heir to the throne, Prince Charles, will probably become King Charles III and, on succeeding his mother, will doubtless aim to leave his mark on the institution of monarchy. And yet one thing will not change. In light of possible constitutional impropriety involving secret lobbying, or ‘motivating’ as he puts it, of government ministers in his role as prince of Wales on issues close to his heart like the environment, architecture and wildlife, Charles has with increasing vigour projected an image in which he is cast as a loving father figure to his sons, William and Harry, and, more recently, as a devoted grandfather to a growing brood of child princes and princesses.²⁵ This image resembles that of the prince’s great-grandfather George V, who in his final years on the throne spoke to wireless listeners on Christmas Day to tell them that it was his home life and personal relationships with his children and grandchildren that linked him to his subjects, not only through a shared identification with the individual personalities who made up the House of Windsor, but also through a mutual appreciation of domesticity. Family is symbolically and literally the lifeblood of the crown. Since the mid 1930s, Buckingham Palace’s public relations strategy has emphasized that members of the royal family have found it difficult to achieve personal fulfilment in the domestic setting because of their onerous public roles; and this juxtaposition has consistently evoked powerful emotional responses from their subjects and, crucially, adherence to Britain’s unique royal democracy. It is clear that the current group of royals and their advisors working behind the scenes understand the appeal the image of the dutiful family monarchy continues to have among the public. One thing thus remains certain and that is the important role the combination of domesticity and duty will play as the House of Windsor continues to adapt to the metamorphoses of the twenty-first century.

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1 For a good overview of the Margaret-Townsend episode, see B. Pimlott, The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy (London, 2002), pp. 217–20, 232–9.

2 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 236–9.

3 C. Warwick, Princess Margaret: a Life of Contrasts (London, 2002), pp. 137–44.

4 Warwick, Princess Margaret, pp. 135–8.

5 A. Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press, 1918– 1978 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 230, 244–6.

6 Warwick, Princess Margaret, pp. 182–3.

7 Bingham, Family Newspapers?, pp. 246–7; Daily Mirror, 13 July 1953, p. 1.

8 Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 247; Daily Mirror, 17 July 1953, p. 1.

9 E.g., the sample of readers’ letters published by the Daily Mirror on 13 July 1953, p. 2. For other interpretations of public opinion, including that of MO, see C. Langhamer, The English in Love: the Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford, 2013), pp. 2–3.

10 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 236–8; Bingham, Family Newspapers?, pp. 247–50.

11 C. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London, 2009), pp. 6–8.

12 On Margaret and Armstrong-Jones’s engagement and wedding, see Warwick, Princess Margaret, pp. 225–32.

13 E.g., ‘The Wedding of HRH Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones’, British Movietone News, 9 May 1960.

14 J. Richards, ‘The monarchy and film, 1900–2006’, in The Monarchy and the British Nation 1780 to the Present, ed. A. Olechnowicz (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 258–79, at pp. 278–9; R. Coward, ‘The royals’, in Female Desire, ed. R. Coward (London, 1984), pp. 161–71, at p. 171; M. Muggeridge, ‘Royal Soap Opera’, New Statesman and Nation, l, 22 Oct. 1955, pp. 499–500.

15 Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 247.

16 Warwick, Princess Margaret, pp. 245–59; A. Bingham and M. Conboy, Tabloid Century: the Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present (Oxford, 2015), pp. 121–2.

17 Bingham and Conboy, Tabloid Century, pp. 123–4.

18 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 548–55.

19 A. Olechnowicz, ‘“A jealous hatred”: royal popularity and social inequality’, in Olechnowicz, The Monarchy and the British Nation, pp. 280–314, at pp. 291–2.

20 Olechnowicz, ‘“Jealous hatred”’, pp. 291–3.

21 Observation of a fifty-year-old male MO respondent (MOA, TC/14 154-186, M50C, p. 3); see ch. 4.

22 Olechnowicz, ‘“Jealous hatred”’, pp. 305–7; M. Billig, Talking of the Royal Family (London, 1992), pp. 124–5, 140–2.

23 For more information on the Mass Observation Project, see <http://www.massobs.org.uk/about/mass-observation-project> [accessed 12 Oct. 2018].

24 F. Mort, ‘On tour with the prince: monarchy, imperial politics and publicity in the prince of Wales’s dominion tours 1919–20’, Twentieth Century British Hist., xxix (2018), 25– 57; P. Murphy, Monarchy and the End of Empire: the House of Windsor, the British Government, and the Postwar Commonwealth (Oxford, 2013).

25 ‘Prince, Son and Heir: Charles at 70’, dir. John Bridcut (Crux Productions Ltd., BBC 1, 8 Nov. 2018).