5. ‘A happy queen is a good queen’: the 1947 royal love story

The 1947 royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip of Greece has received more scholarly attention than the interwar marriages of King George V’s children. Historians have situated Elizabeth’s marriage against the backdrop of post-war austerity and the imperial set-back of Indian independence, while royal biographers have supported Winston Churchill’s characterization of the wedding as a ‘splash of colour’ that brightened hard economic times and represented a British propaganda triumph against Soviet totalitarianism at the beginning of the Cold War.¹ Historians who have looked at Mass Observation records and opinion polls conducted before the wedding have noted some popular dissent, including initial indifference and criticism of the event’s anticipated cost at a time of strict rationing and controls.² As the last chapter demonstrated, this strain of public hostility was characteristic of a growing opposition to royal privilege that had gained ground during the Second World War because many British people faced very real material privation. While members of the public might have empathized with the family-centred story of suffering projected by the House of Windsor during the conflict, they were less convinced by the ‘fair shares for all’ narrative which officials manufactured around the royals and distrust persisted into peacetime, with sections of the media and population questioning whether money should be spent on royal events at a time of continued national hardship.³

This chapter offers the first major examination of the media coverage of Elizabeth and Philip’s romance, the staging of their wedding and public responses to the event in 360 Mass Observation reports that have never been analysed before.⁴ The 1947 royal love story initially met with a very mixed response from a less deferential media and public who opposed royal decision-making in new ways; and this threw up a challenge to the palace, which, in response, worked to popularize a romantic and egalitarian image of the princess and prince that was designed to appeal to popular sensibilities. The royal household was largely successful in creating an image of the royal lovers that engendered strong, positive forms of empathy with them among media audiences, an empathy which, in turn, worked to offset criticism of the suitability of the relationship and the material costs involved in the wedding. Courtiers also viewed the romance as an opportunity to re-energize the monarchy’s moral influence in Britain: the 1940s were characterized by deep concerns that the nation’s family life was in decline and so the palace worked in tandem with the Church of England and journalists to project Elizabeth and Philip’s domesticity as an antidote to moral decay.⁵ They were presented as exemplars of Christian family life and representatives of their generation in terms of their personalities, hopes and desires in order to encourage popular emotional identification and emulation by the rest of the nation.

The first part of this chapter examines the pioneering opinion poll conducted by the Sunday Pictorial in January 1947 which sought to assess the public response to early rumours of a royal engagement. Framing its investigation into the romance as part of its self-professed democratic duty to represent the views of the British people, the newspaper championed the role of the media as the key arbitrator in the sounding of post-war public opinion and, as such, it marked a significant break with the way Britain’s political elite had previously managed and interpreted the public’s views before 1945.⁶ The Pictorial’s poll identified some concern about Philip’s suitability as husband to the future queen, with criticism aimed at his Greek background and association with a disreputable dynasty that had ties to fascism. These dissenting voices were ultimately drowned out by a loud chorus of approval for the princess’s desire to marry someone she loved. The examination presented here of the enthusiasm for the love story thus substantiates the idea that romantic self-fulfilment was deemed to be a fundamental tenet of personal development in post-war Britain.⁷ Moreover, the fact that a majority of the poll’s respondents thought Elizabeth’s emotional enrichment was more important than the constitutional implications of her marriage to a Greek prince reveals the strength of the empathetic bonds that members of the public forged with her in this period.

Although love won out over politics in the Pictorial’s poll, royal officials proved to be more responsive to public opinion than before the war and were shaken into action by the criticism of the monarchy unearthed by the newspaper. The second part of this chapter examines how, working in close collaboration with journalists, the royal household elevated a public image of the princess that stressed her ‘ordinary’ ambition to find true love and happy domesticity as a young woman, as well as the heavy burdens of the royal duties imposed on her by birth that limited her ability to live a ‘normal’ life. These deliberately conflicting messages, which placed Elizabeth’s ordinary desires in tension with her extraordinary responsibilities, worked to evoke the sympathy of media audiences in the run-up to the official announcement of her engagement to Philip in mid July. Meanwhile, the prince’s leading supporter, his uncle Louis Mountbatten, had been busily engaging with Fleet Street journalists in order to secure his nephew a good write-up, which led to the transformation of Philip’s public image: newspapers and newsreels presented him as a likeable young man who exercised an innovative common touch and was more English than foreigner. Mass Observation reports show that the public internalized these public images of the prince and princess and, when their betrothal was finally announced, the media maintained its positive coverage of the couple by presenting them as exemplars of a post-war culture of love in order to emphasize that the relationship was a true romance and not a political move.

The third section examines how courtiers, the new archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, and loyal media organizations choreographed Elizabeth’s royal wedding to communicate an image of the royal couple as archetypes of a post-war generation with whom members of the public could identify. Partly by design and partly as a result of the constraints imposed on the orchestrators by austerity, the young lovers were projected as symbols of an intimate, family-centred national culture underpinned by Christian morality, with new media technologies working to bring this image closer to readers, listeners and viewers than ever before. Again, this narrative appealed to many Mass Observation respondents and women, in particular, who were targeted by the media, with many elements of the wedding specifically presented to appeal to feminine sensibilities as in the interwar years. The final section takes these ideas one step further by exploring how the Mass Observation panel perceived the royal lovers’ lives as unenviable. The intrusive media coverage of Elizabeth and Philip’s honeymoon generated sympathy for them among respondents, who believed that they, like every other young couple, were entitled to a private domestic life. Although some writers expressed anger or envy at the way the princess and prince had enjoyed an elaborate and expensive wedding, these feelings came second to the compassion many felt for the lovers because of the invasion of their privacy, with the media’s more intrusive approach to royal family life leading to the emergence of a new version of the oppressed, suffering royal.

‘Should our future queen wed Philip?’

Rumours of a marriage between Elizabeth and Philip had first arisen in 1941 when Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, Tory politician, gossip and man-about-town, commented on a story circulated by the Greek royal family that the prince was intended for the princess.⁸ A friendship had blossomed between the couple in 1943, with the ambitious Lord Mountbatten staging meetings between his nephew (Philip was his sister’s son) and Elizabeth, heiress presumptive to the throne. Mountbatten also made the prince apply for British citizenship and, as Philip had enjoyed a distinguished career in the Royal Navy during the war, he was a strong candidate for British nationality. However, when the government discussed the prince’s naturalization in October 1945, British Balkan diplomacy prevented his application from progressing. If he had been naturalized, it might have been construed either as an act in support of the Greek royalists, who were then engaged in a civil war with Greek communists, or as a sign that the Greek royal family wanted to flee abroad. On 1 September 1946 a plebiscite officially reinstated the Greek monarchy, but the vote only drew attention to George II of Greece’s authoritarian reputation, further complicating any union with the Greek royal family and once again delaying Philip’s naturalization.

Royal biographer William Shawcross has suggested it was in the autumn of 1946 that Elizabeth and Philip became ‘unofficially engaged’ during a holiday at Balmoral.⁹ Rumours of a royal betrothal soon appeared in newspaper gossip columns and it was immediately clear from the press’s reaction to these reports that British news editors were more willing to challenge royal decision-making than they had been before 1939.¹⁰ The liberal newspapers called for greater transparency in relation to what they interpreted as a proposed marriage alliance with the Greek monarchy, the Manchester Guardian stating that if ‘such an engagement were contemplated the Government would have to consider the political implications, and at present these would be vexatious since Greek affairs are the subject of so much controversy’. It stressed that Prime Minister Clement Attlee had to make his government’s views known to George VI and that the dominions needed to be consulted too.¹¹ The News Chronicle’s respected political columnist A. J. Cummings smuggled a similar critique of the rumoured betrothal into a report under cover of safeguarding the ‘strong links of mutual confidence’ between Britain and the dominions and added that the royals would welcome their subjects’ thoughts on the engagement: ‘[T]he King and Queen, it cannot be doubted, are fully conscious of the wisdom of learning in due course what is the public sentiment on the proposal of the Heiress Presumptive’.¹²

In a post-war world where the behaviour of the ruling elite was to be held up to greater scrutiny by the media, this appeal to ‘public sentiment’ created a real problem for the House of Windsor. It threatened to expose anti-royal feeling among the public, which could in turn undermine the narrative of inclusive royal populism that had been diligently promoted by the mainstream media before and during the war. The 1930s had witnessed the first experiments with ‘public sentiment’ as a barometer for testing issues of national interest and the News Chronicle had been the first newspaper to publish British Institute of Public Opinion surveys under the heading ‘What Britain Thinks’ in 1938.¹³ The commercialization of the popular press after 1945 and the political parties’ growing interest in the demographics they claimed to represent combined to increase the influence of public opinion in post-war Britain.¹⁴ Moreover, as historian Adrian Bingham has noted, after the abdication of Edward VIII the left-wing Daily Mirror and its sister paper the Sunday Pictorial became more critical of the monarchy and other established hierarchies, which they accused of impeding social progress and of misrepresenting public views.¹⁵ Against this backdrop of declining deference, the Pictorial decided to respond to the Chronicle’s invitation to test public opinion on the princess’s rumoured betrothal and took the unprecedented step of conducting a royal public poll, which it announced to readers in a daring front-page headline: ‘SHOULD OUR FUTURE QUEEN WED PHILIP?’¹⁶ (Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1. ‘Should Our Future Queen Wed Philip?’, Sunday Pictorial, 5 January 1947, p. 1. © The British Library Board.

It was the first time that a British newspaper had purposely canvassed readers’ opinions on a royal issue but, despite its provocative headline, the Pictorial was cautious in presenting any criticism of the crown, its guarded approach indicative of how unusual media scrutiny of the monarchy was in this period. It hid behind the Guardian and Chronicle’s earlier editorials by quoting them at length and backed their ‘demand for a franker approach to the whole question’ of the rumoured engagement. In establishing its motives for testing public opinion, the Pictorial also referred to a Guardian article that had quoted Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s speech from the House of Commons debate on Edward’s abdication ten years previously, when the prime minister had remarked that ‘the King’s wife was different from the position of the wife of any other citizen in the country; it was part of the price which the King has to pay’.¹⁷ The Pictorial thus signalled its agreement with the Guardian that the same rules applied to the heiress presumptive to the throne and, again citing Baldwin, that ‘it is essentially a matter in which the voice of the people must be heard’.

In discussing the constitutional issue of Elizabeth’s engagement, the Pictorial highlighted ‘the political consequences of so strong a link between the British and Greek Royal House at this stage’.¹⁸ There was, of course, recent precedent of inter-marriage between the dynasties with Prince George and Princess Marina’s wedding in 1934. But the international situation had changed by 1947 and, conscious of the onset of the Cold War, the Pictorial worried about the Soviet Union’s reaction to the engagement. As already noted, Greek royalists were embroiled in a civil war with Greek communists at this time and it was felt that a betrothal between Elizabeth and Philip would signal British support for the Greek king and his authoritarian legacy, offending the Soviets in the ‘game of Power Politics’.¹⁹ However, while the left-wing Pictorial recognized in the royal betrothal the same political complexities as the liberal Guardian and Chronicle, it also raised the possibility that it was a true romance between two young lovers: ‘[M]any people believe that if the Princess and Prince are in love, then nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of their marriage’. The Pictorial thus established the social binaries through which the public would consistently be invited to make sense of the 1947 royal romance and wedding: true love was presented as reason enough to overlook the constitutional implications of the relationship.

The special significance that the Pictorial attributed to a romance fitted with a post-war emotional culture in which love was fast becoming central to concepts of self-fulfilment.²⁰ Of course, this trade-off between love and public duty had a longer history, too, in a royal context, echoing the duke of Windsor’s romance with Wallis Simpson a decade earlier. However, while Baldwin had deliberately marginalized public support for Edward in 1936, the Pictorial adopted the stance that ‘above all, the loyal people over whom the young Princess will one day rule as Queen must also be afforded the opportunity of expressing their views’. Using bold capital letters to emphasize its point, the newspaper asserted that the public’s views needed to be determined ‘NOT AFTER THE EVENT, AS WAS THE CASE WITH ANOTHER ROYAL CRISIS IN 1936, BUT BEFORE IT’.²¹

As Bingham has noted, this was ‘a powerful rhetoric of popular democracy’ and typical of the way the Pictorial and the Mirror campaigned for a more equal society in which ‘the palace and the politicians would not be able to ignore the voice of the people’.²² Before the war the mainstream media had introduced ‘ordinary’ and ‘representative’ voices to news coverage in an attempt to create an image of a British people contentedly united around the focal point of the monarchy. But the Pictorial’s ground-breaking 1947 poll promised more complex insights into public attitudes towards royalty; and the uproar it caused on Fleet Street can be interpreted as evidence of its radical ambition. The proprietor of the Picture Post, Edward Hulton, was ‘one of those appalled by the exercise’: ‘The journalism of the Sunday Pictorial has reached a new low. It is difficult to write with any restraint about this latest effort by this self-appointed voice of the people, which is as genuinely mischievous and politically harmful as it is in gross bad taste, and infinitely wounding to the feelings of all those concerned’.²³ The language Hulton used to criticize the Pictorial reflected the high esteem in which he held the royal family’s private life and his belief that ordinary people had no right to cast judgement on their social superiors. The royalist Daily Mail also criticized the Pictorial’s decision to canvass public opinion on a royal family matter, downplaying the international elements of the story when it remarked that ‘the days are past when dynastic marriages meant Power politics … The King and Queen … can surely be trusted to safeguard the future of their elder daughter, who will one day be our Queen’.²⁴ However, members of the public did want their voices heard, believing that it was not simply a private royal issue: within a week, 6,100 letters had poured into the offices of the Pictorial from all sections of society and, on the following Sunday, the newspaper was able to announce to its readers that 55 per cent of respondents favoured the marriage on the grounds that it was indeed a love match, 40 per cent were opposed to it, and 5 per cent believed Elizabeth should not be prevented from marrying the Greek prince for political reasons but should renounce her right to the throne if she chose this course of action (Figure 5.2).²⁵

Figure 5.2. ‘The Princess and the People’, Sunday Pictorial, 12 January 1947, p. 1. © The British Library Board.

Once again, the Pictorial was careful in the way it communicated criticism of royalty. Both the headline of the report, ‘The Princess and the People’, and the large photograph of Philip smiling next to it conveyed the impression that the public had agreed he was suitable for Elizabeth. The opening lines of the article also softened the newspaper’s critique of the crown: ‘The huge number of letters received confirms beyond all question the immense popularity of the Royal Family as a whole and of the Princess in particular’. The newspaper also announced that it had omitted fifty-seven ‘irresponsibly anti-Royalist’ letters to signal its pro-monarchy stance and, in defending its polling exercise, argued that it was ‘among the functions of a newspaper in an ordered democracy’ to present ‘the truest reflection of public opinion on the controversies of the day’.²⁶

Over a central double-page spread the Pictorial also offered ‘a full analysis of the results so far achieved’ and published a ‘representative sample’ of the letters it had received. According to its analysis, women formed an ‘overwhelming majority’ of those who supported the marriage – ‘provided the two young people are in love’ – and this ‘feminine support’ mainly came from those aged fourteen to thirty and older than fifty. The newspaper stated that ‘strong objection is taken by the majority of those readers [in favour] to any “appeasement” of foreign Powers in this “purely domestic” issue’; and it noted that phrases such as ‘the right to live their own lives’, ‘a purely private matter’ and ‘no interference in the dictates of Princess Elizabeth’s heart’ recurred in many letters.²⁷ These sorts of phrases suggest that supporters of the engagement believed the princess’s role as a political figurehead should not impinge upon her private life.

The ‘representative’ letters published by the Pictorial in support of a betrothal also reveal that some respondents adopted a liberal, egalitarian attitude to the engagement. The mayor and mayoress of Winchester, Mr and Mrs Charles Sankey, advised ‘let Royalty be the same as their subjects in “affairs of the heart” – let them choose for themselves’. Nancy Harman from Hastings agreed, stating that the princess ‘should be able to marry the man she loves whether he be of Royal Birth or a commoner’ and included the caveat that ‘in her choice of a husband she should be guided only by her father and mother’. Mrs D. Morson of the London suburb Thornton Heath neatly summarized this view when she compared Elizabeth to her own kin, describing how, as a family, they had agreed that she ‘should have the same privileges as our own daughters – of choosing her own husband with her parents’ advice and consent’.²⁸ The parallels these letter writers drew between the princess and other young women show what great importance was attached to choosing one’s partner, with Elizabeth’s ability to marry for love conforming to wider post-war codes of feminine desire.

Other respondents contested this domestic, depoliticized version of the rumoured betrothal. The Pictorial stated that the letters it received opposing the engagement had mainly been written by ‘politically-minded people, men just outnumbering women’. Of the 40 per cent against the marriage, ‘one letter in six was from a soldier or an ex-Serviceman who has fought overseas’, often writing on behalf of barracks or clubs to declare ‘let’s have no more foreigners in England’.²⁹ We can interpret comments like these as indicative of the wave of xenophobia that gripped much of Britain in the immediate aftermath of the war but they should also be viewed as part of a deeper strain of criticism that targeted the crown’s European ties, which dated back to the nineteenth century.³⁰ Other respondents were particularly against allying with Greece or any foreign dynasty and argued that the days of royal inter-marriage were over, with an ‘impressive majority’ claiming the engagement was a ‘political move’.³¹ In this way opponents also seemed to be committed to a love match – just not with a foreign prince. They did not believe that Elizabeth was in love and advised that she ‘follow in the footsteps of her father’ by marrying a commoner.

Letters from respondents averse to the engagement were printed to support this position. While some critics expressed prejudice and opposed the relationship on grounds of Philip’s ‘foreignness’, others took aim at the political standing of Greece, noting that it ‘will always be in trouble with someone’ or that a marriage was unwise ‘in view of the present world situation’. For example, one man from London echoed the Pictorial’s original concern about the Soviet Union’s attitude when he stated that any link with the Greek royal family would be ‘eyed with suspicion’ abroad, creating international tension’.³² This writer believed that ‘the ruler of England and the British Empire has to make certain personal sacrifices for the benefit of the people. Where a match such as this one occurs the choice for Princess Elizabeth will be to sacrifice love for the future of her people’.

This writer formulated a critique of the betrothal that resonated with the popular idea that royal status was burdensome, an idea which also linked to the abdication story: the princess’s future position as the nation’s symbolic figurehead demanded that she sacrifice her personal fulfilment. However, many respondents in favour of the engagement took the exact opposite view, namely, that her personal happiness was paramount to her ability to perform her public role. A teenage girl from Portsmouth decided with her friends that Elizabeth ‘should be free to marry whom she pleases if she loves him [because] we think a happy queen is a good queen’.³³ Phyllis Jones of London similarly noted that ‘if her private life is happy it is reasonable to suppose that Princess Elizabeth will make a better Queen than if she were unhappily married’.³⁴ Comments like these reveal how the post-war culture of romantic realization worked to frame Elizabeth’s constitutional position as part of a powerful emotional discourse: only by finding true love and happiness would she achieve her full potential as future monarch.

In scrutinizing the results it had gathered after the first week of the poll, the Pictorial reaffirmed the divide along which the royal betrothal would be judged: it was a story of true love versus duty. The newspaper emphasized the importance of romantic fulfilment when it continued its poll a second week and, aiming to obtain ‘the truest possible reflection of mass opinion’, issued readers with a coupon that gave them two answers from which to choose: ‘Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip should marry if they are in love and no obstacle should be placed in their way’; or, ‘There should be no royal marriage between Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip of Greece’.³⁵ This narrowing of options crystallized a story split between romance and constitutional politics, which was again amplified when the newspaper disclosed the final results the following Sunday: 64 per cent of respondents supported the marriage if it was a love match and 32 per cent opposed it.³⁶ The Pictorial published a selection of mainly positive letters from the ‘thousands upon thousands’ it claimed to have received ‘from all classes’ to reiterate the same set of messages from the previous week.³⁷ One letter again focused on the idea that Elizabeth’s personal fulfilment would make up for the demanding tasks she faced, Mrs M. I. Tebble from Shropshire presenting love as a reward for royal duty:

As well as noting the high regard in which she held Princess Marina, Mrs Tebble expressed the view that Elizabeth’s personal fulfilment would compensate for a life of public service. One of the main duties she identified was the requirement to produce heirs, revealing how the princess’s gender shaped the public’s constitutional expectations of her. Indeed, as a young woman who entertained domestic aspirations, Elizabeth may have been better placed to have her way in these circumstances than a male heir apparent would have been. Emotional control was deemed to be vital to public deportment in the masculine world of high politics and a male heir might have been expected to forsake love and place politics ahead of personal fulfilment.³⁹

What clearly emerged from the Pictorial’s poll was the belief that Elizabeth’s role was unenviable and that her future happiness hinged on her finding love. This consolatory motif became increasingly important to the official projection and public reception of the romance as it played out over the course of 1947. The empathy expressed by members of the public for the princess had its roots in the romantic culture of the interwar period, but in the more democratic atmosphere of the post-war years it became more important than ever before that royalty was perceived as engaging in the same ‘companionate’ forms of love that were valued by the rest of society.⁴⁰ In this way, then, self-fulfilment in domestic life became closely integrated into the constitutional identities of the protagonists of the House of Windsor.

The Pictorial praised its readers for rendering a ‘valuable service to our democratic system [having] provided the authorities with a gauge of popular feeling should a marriage with Prince Philip be contemplated’.⁴¹ Notably, its poll initiated a new wave of media scrutiny of the monarchy’s national role. When the engagement was officially announced later in July, the popular press interrogated other potentially contentious aspects of the wedding arrangements via the same medium of public opinion. The Daily Express ‘invited’ its readers to take part in a ‘national poll’ asking ‘Should the Princess’s wedding day be selected as the first postwar occasion to restore to Britain the traditional gaiety of a gala public event’ or ‘Should the Princess be an austerity bride?’.⁴² Four days later the newspaper declared that for every six replies it received ‘overwhelmingly in favour of a gala wedding’, it received just one against it.⁴³ The battle lines were thus drawn. Shortly afterwards the much less deferential Daily Mirror published its own interpretation of public opinion when it presented a selection of readers’ letters that questioned the expense of the wedding, protested at the civil-list annuities that were to be granted Elizabeth and Philip and expressed concern that the princess would receive additional ration coupons from the government for her wedding dress.⁴⁴ To judge from the Mass Observation reports compiled at the end of 1947, it seems that many of these material concerns persisted. More than thirty respondents opposed the royal wedding on the basis of the amount of money spent on it, while a further twenty expressed unease with either the new home, allowances or wedding presents given to the bridal couple. These writers believed that the privileges enjoyed by royalty did not suit the hardships that characterized the austerity of the immediate post-war years.⁴⁵

‘I couldn’t marry a man I didn’t love’

It seems that the Pictorial’s royal poll spurred the monarchy’s image-makers into action to counter the negative public opinion that the newspaper had uncovered. The royal household and the media built on the positive reactions to the rumoured engagement by projecting a public image of the princess that focused on how her personal fulfilment would make up for the demanding nature of her royal duties. Mass Observation evidence reveals that this compensatory message worked to foster popular support for her choice of husband. The most notable instance when officials mobilized this idea was in the broadcast the princess delivered to coincide with her twenty-first birthday. At the end of January 1947 Elizabeth left London with her family for a four-month tour of the Union of South Africa. They arrived in Cape Town in mid February and embarked on an extensive trip around South Africa in an effort to calm the rising tide of nationalism that had undermined the country’s political stability. The tour demonstrated what royal biographer Ben Pimlott described as the crown’s value as a ‘link in an association of nations and territories whose ties had become tenuous, because of war, British economic weakness, and nascent nationalism’.⁴⁶ As a youthful symbol of the strength of the monarchy, Princess Elizabeth, like her uncle Edward, who had toured the white dominions as his father’s ambassador, helped to promote an image of the House of Windsor as the personal link that bound together disparate imperial peoples.⁴⁷ The princess’s twenty-first birthday fell on 21 April, three days before she was due to return to England. As the climax to the royal visit she broadcast a special message to the Commonwealth and empire, which Pimlott has suggested became the most important public address of her life.⁴⁸ The message was written for Elizabeth by the journalist and royal chronicler Dermot Morrah, who reported on the South African tour for The Times while acting as unofficial royal speechwriter. Morrah had distinguished himself for his writing on royal events in the eighteen months after George V’s death, penning a series of important leader articles on Edward VIII’s abdication and George VI’s coronation for editor Geoffrey Dawson that helped to set the high moral tone of The Times’s coverage of the monarchy.⁴⁹ As the newspaper’s constitutional expert, Morrah had a keen understanding of the crown’s modern symbolism as well as its relationship with the empire and he seems to have known exactly what was required of him when it came to writing the princess’s 1947 broadcast. George VI’s private secretary, Alan Lascelles, remarked in a letter to Morrah that he could ‘not recall one [draft broadcast] that has so completely satisfied me and left me feeling that no single word should be altered’.⁵⁰ Indeed, the broadcast bore all the hallmarks of the royal public language which Lascelles and Cosmo Lang had carefully crafted throughout the 1930s and early 1940s.

As well as being transmitted by radio, a version of the princess’s birthday broadcast was recorded by the newsreels and Graham Thompson was once again behind the film camera, having accompanied the royal party to South Africa at the king’s request.⁵¹ In the message Elizabeth thanked her subjects for their good wishes and, speaking on behalf of all the young men and women of the Commonwealth and empire, told her listeners and viewers that they needed to work together to ensure the prosperity of the constituent nations of the British world. Then, in a manner reminiscent of both her father and grandfather, the princess pledged her life to the empire and its people before stressing that she required their mutual support in order to fulfil her role:

Pimlott suggested that the princess’s account of the enduring vitality of imperial relations inspired British audiences who were ‘exasperated by restrictions, and worn out after the added hardships of a terrible winter’.⁵³ However, he did not address the way in which the message was designed to engender public support for the princess in anticipation of the announcement of her engagement to Philip on her return home. The language used by Morrah sought to evoke empathy from media audiences for Elizabeth, inviting them to support her in her burdensome role. As Lascelles confided in Morrah before the princess delivered her pledge, ‘the speaker herself told me that it had made her cry. Good, said I, for if it makes you cry now, it will make 200 million other people cry when they hear you deliver it, and that is what we want’.⁵⁴ With these words the courtier demonstrated that he was conscious of the intimate register of the princess’s broadcast and believed it would stir strong feelings among its audiences.

One woman from Watford who responded to the Mass Observation directive on the 1947 royal wedding noted that she was so moved by Elizabeth’s broadcast from South Africa that she felt the princess deserved a happy home life: ‘I find the Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh an attractive couple, I believe it is a love match and I feel that after her “dedication” of herself to our service on the occasion of her 21st birthday the Princess is deserving of the best that this country and its people can give her. Theirs is no enviable task and the public is very thoughtless in its demands’.⁵⁵ This quotation suggests that the princess’s ‘dedication’ to serve her subjects evoked in the writer sympathy for Elizabeth and identification with her difficult role. Indeed, this respondent was one of more than forty Mass Observation writers who noted that they perceived the princess’s ‘life of service’ and ‘trying public duties’ as unenviable and therefore supported the royal marriage and Elizabeth’s desire to marry the man she loved.⁵⁶ Two respondents even went so far as to characterize the princess and her family as ‘public servants’.⁵⁷ Phrases like these reveal the enduring legacy of the language of the burdens of royal duty first formulated by Lang, Lascelles and other officials in the 1930s. However, the frequency of sentiments like these in the 1947 Mass Observation personal testimonies is evidence of the way this language was both forcefully promoted by the palace in the lead up to the announcement of the princess’s engagement and readily taken up and recirculated by the British media.

Notably, the royal household also tasked Morrah with preparing a biography of Elizabeth – published by Odhams Press in collaboration with the Council of King George’s Jubilee Trust – to celebrate her twenty-first birthday.⁵⁸ As with the official souvenir the Trust produced to commemorate the royal family’s wartime activities and the 1937 coronation, we should view this book as a public manual on monarchy and as evidence of the way the House of Windsor wished to project its image outwardly.⁵⁹ The blurb inside the book’s dust jacket captures the tone and content of this piece of official propaganda:

Throughout the biography there is an emphasis on the demanding nature of royal public life and the concluding section explores the ‘steady programme of duty’ on which the princess had already embarked.⁶⁰ This analysis of the demands of royal public life was complemented by other, more explicit references to Elizabeth’s burdens. Morrah told his readers that the king had been reluctant ‘to sentence his daughter to the unremitting service, without hope of retirement even in old age’; and explained, in words echoing the birthday broadcast that he had prepared for the princess, that ‘she needs the personal sympathy of all those who will one day be her subjects. The task that awaits her in life is as exacting as can confront any human being; she can only discharge it with the constant goodwill and support of all peoples in whose cause it is undertaken’.⁶¹

As well as stressing Elizabeth’s duty and self-discipline, Morrah impressed upon his readers her ‘normal’ qualities and suggested that she was representative of all women her age: ‘simple, warm-hearted, hard-working, painstaking, cultivated, humorous and above all friendly’, she was ‘a typical daughter of the Britain of her time’.⁶² He explained that she had ‘to sum up for her future subjects all that is most characteristic of their own lives, the normal life of normal people’. Photographs and other descriptions helped to convey the impression that she had a ‘natural, homely’ upbringing, that she enjoyed ‘ordinary’ pleasures and was ‘unpretentious’ in her interests, having developed a liking for dancing, the theatre and sport.⁶³ Morrah’s biography thus oscillated between the image of a princess who desired an ordinary life and an image that highlighted the challenges of her extraordinary public role, implicitly signalling to readers that it was impossible for her to lead the kind of ‘normal’ existence she purportedly craved. Royal officials and their allies worked to transform Elizabeth into a symbol of self-sacrifice set apart from a national culture in which self-fulfilment was prized more highly than ever before. This self-denying image was powerful and designed to elicit the empathy of British subjects, as it had done for her grandfather and father, but it was against the backdrop of a post-war emotional culture in which love was deemed to be central to personal fulfilment that the princess’s sacrifice took on added meaning because of her rumoured romance with Prince Philip.

Morrah’s biography became the authoritative source on Elizabeth’s personality, with the media taking its cues from his portrayal of her in their birthday messages to the princess. The Daily Mail praised the biography and quoted Morrah in characterizing Elizabeth as ‘a girl of the age’ who enjoyed modern pastimes such as dancing, the cinema and dining out.⁶⁴ It also impressed upon readers that the princess ‘faces a vocation and a career without parallel in the world today’. The other leading royalist newspaper, the Daily Express, similarly noted that ‘the happiness of being a lovely young woman in an admiring world will be tempered more and more by the demands of the office for which she is destined’.⁶⁵ Newsreels were even more direct in juxtaposing Elizabeth’s desire for self-fulfilment with accounts of the oppressive nature of her royal station. In its birthday coverage, Pathé News extended its congratulations to the princess and explained that Philip had been linked to her as a suitor but that Buckingham Palace had denied all rumours. The story ended by focusing on the burdens that lay ahead of the princess:

In this way, then, loyal newsreels and newspapers worked to engender public support for Elizabeth and, tacitly, her decision to marry Philip, offsetting the public criticism of the latter that had been exposed by the Sunday Pictorial’s poll in January.

*

Back in Britain, Lord Mountbatten had managed to have his nephew naturalized as a British subject and was now secretly overseeing a media campaign to publicize a likeable, egalitarian and Anglicized public image of Philip.⁶⁷ Since August 1946 Mountbatten had been corresponding with the Labour MP and Reynolds News gossip columnist Tom Driberg, asking that he give Philip a good write-up. Addressing Driberg as ‘My dear Tom’, he wrote that ‘it is most kind of you to say that you will help to give the right line in the Press when the news of [Philip’s] naturalisation is officially announced’.⁶⁸ Mountbatten was concerned about the negative impact the Greek civil war would have on his nephew’s image and encouraged Driberg to dissuade other writers on the political left from criticizing Philip’s connections to the Greek royal family: ‘[A]nything you can do to get your Left Wing friends to realise that [Philip] has absolutely nothing whatever to do with the political set-up in Greece, or any of our reactionaries, will be to the good, provided this is done verbally and not in your newspaper’.⁶⁹ He stressed to Driberg that he should focus instead on his nephew’s ‘English’ credentials – ‘I have tried to show that he really is more English than any other nationality’ – and provided the columnist with a biographical information pack that outlined the fact that the prince had spent most of his early and educational life in the United Kingdom before joining the British navy, where he had enjoyed a stellar career.⁷⁰

Writing to his boss, Lord Beaverbrook, in December 1946, just as the first rumours of a royal engagement were gaining traction, the editor of the Daily Express, Arthur Christiansen, expressed astonishment at the success of Mountbatten’s lobbying of British journalists and in particular Driberg:

Christiansen’s words indicate that Mountbatten had also reached out to him, along with John Gordon, the editor of the Sunday Express, and E. J. Robertson, who was Beaverbrook’s general manager of Express News. The Driberg article to which Christiansen referred had been published the previous Sunday in Reynolds News and repeated almost verbatim the profile prepared by Mountbatten as part of his biographical information pack.⁷² The extent of Mountbatten’s campaign suggests he knew Philip’s foreignness would sit uncomfortably with some sections of the British public, but his lobbying may have also concealed a deeper uncertainty regarding his nephew’s chances with Princess Elizabeth. According to royal biographers, concerns about Philip were not restricted to the political left and members of the public: George VI and Queen Elizabeth were also initially worried about his character.⁷³ Sarah Bradford quotes a courtier who claimed that ‘the family were at first horrified when they saw that Prince Philip was making up to Princess Elizabeth. They felt he was rough, ill-mannered, uneducated and would probably not be faithful’.⁷⁴ Indeed, during their courtship, Philip penned several letters to the princess’s mother apologizing for his behaviour during their stays together. In late 1946 he wrote to the queen, contrite for a ‘rather heated discussion’ he had started at dinner with the family, stating that he hoped she did not think him ‘violently argumentative and an exponent of socialism’.⁷⁵ Yet, while forthright and progressive in his views, the Greek prince’s good looks, common touch and matter-of-fact demeanour suited the more democratic times and proved very popular with the media when, on 9 July 1947, it was officially announced that he and the princess were engaged.

Figure 5.3. ‘The King Has Gladly Given Consent’, Daily Express, 10 July 1947, p. 1. © The British Library Board.

The press reaction was very positive, with nearly every newspaper publicizing the engagement in front-page headlines (Figure 5.3).⁷⁶ The only notable exception was the Daily Mirror, which, in keeping with its own and the Pictorial’s less deferential attitude towards old hierarchies, published a front-page editorial calling on readers to work together in order to save the economy – the implication being that Britain was run by its people, not the social elite.⁷⁷ The press and newsreels otherwise tended to overlook the expressions of opposition to the match that had arisen six months earlier. On becoming a British national Philip had renounced his royal title, given up his claim to the Greek throne and had taken his uncle Louis’s name to become Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten. Newspapers now referred to him using only his new name and, as was the case with his first cousin Marina in 1934, journalists repeatedly stressed that he was an anglophile. However, whereas Marina had, as a figure on the fringe of the royal family, been able to remain a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, this was not an option for Philip, who was marrying the future supreme governor of the Church of England. As Pimlott noted, in September 1947 Philip’s ‘transmogrification into an Englishman was completed with his formal reception into the Anglican Church by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the chapel at Lambeth Palace’.⁷⁸

The news coverage of Philip was informed by the biographical information that Mountbatten had supplied to journalists. Newspapers toed the line that he was British in all but birth, the Daily Sketch typical in its analysis: while at school at Gordonstoun in Scotland he had ‘always attended Church of England services, and regard[ed] himself as a good member of the Church … Although he was born on the island of Corfu, that is his only real link with Greece’.⁷⁹ Despite its criticism of the rumoured engagement back in January, the Guardian similarly noted Philip’s Greek origins, only to stress that he was ‘half English and half Danish, and has enjoyed a typically English education to which his career in the Royal Navy in which he holds a permanent commission, is a natural and fitting outcome’.⁸⁰ The press also reproduced photographs of him in which he smilingly posed in his naval uniform. One of these photographs formed part of a series of six pictures used by the Daily Express to map the prince’s development from infancy to manhood. The other pictures included Philip as a baby; as a schoolboy performing in a typically British re-enactment of Macbeth; alongside Elizabeth at a social engagement; and playing skittles with men at his local pub, the Methuen Arms, which was close to his shore station in Corsham, Wiltshire (Figure 5.4).⁸¹

Figure 5.4. ‘The Man She Will Marry’, Daily Express, 10 July 1947, p. 3. © The British Library Board.

We should interpret the press’s emphasis on Philip’s Britishness as indicative of the lengths to which news editors were willing to go in responding to Mountbatten’s concerns that members of the public would criticize his nephew because of his past. Notably, his biographical pack also helped to remodel the kind of celebrity associated with the House of Windsor. Mountbatten emphasized that his nephew was very down-to-earth by stating that, on first meeting Philip, other sailors did not believe he was royal on account of his unpretentious personality.⁸² This image of the classless prince who easily traversed social boundaries was also projected in the final scenes of a Pathé newsreel story on the royal engagement. A cameraman and reporter had journeyed to the Methuen Arms to interview some of the villagers who had played skittles with Philip. The commentator remarked that ‘all the locals knew him – and our reporter learnt how much they admired him’. Pathé’s scenes inside the pub showed the interviewer drinking from a pint of beer with a man named Joe, who then, speaking directly to the cameraman, remarked that Philip was ‘the most charming fellow’ and that they had enjoyed ‘many a tussle’ on the skittles alley together. The reporter then asked a man called Paul what he thought of the prince’s engagement. The latter replied that he was ‘highly delighted to hear about it’ and the men then toasted the royal couple’s health. Another skittles player concluded with an anecdote about Philip’s unassuming qualities, stating that he had visited the pub ‘for about three or four weeks before [he] knew he was a prince’.⁸³

The pub sequence presented Philip as an affable, everyman figure who enjoyed the company of other ordinary men. In media portrayals like this one, royal celebrity took on a much more democratic character than before 1939, with Philip personifying the more egalitarian post-war social order. Pathé’s exposure of the Wiltshire skittles players’ opinions echoed the interwar human-interest focus on the House of Windsor but combined it with a new kind of ‘bottom-up’ royal coverage that explored ‘ordinary’ people’s views on royalty.

Philip simultaneously embodied other forms of royal celebrity, with newspapers and newsreels focusing attention on his good looks. This attention reflected a wider, growing obsession with physical attraction as a defining feature of British celebrity culture.⁸⁴ The Daily Sketch noted that the American press had labelled Philip ‘a handsome guy’, while the usually sober British Movietone News referred to him as the princess’s ‘very good-looking husband-to-be’.⁸⁵ His attractive appearance sat comfortably alongside his persona as a fashionable modernizer who enjoyed the pursuits of driving, dancing and drinking cocktails. Philip’s multifaceted public image thus drew on the symbolic economy of what historian Martin Francis has termed ‘romantic Toryism’. Like his uncle Lord Mountbatten, Philip was celebrated for his patrician elegance and military prowess.⁸⁶ The Sunday Express compared the prince’s glamour to that of the late duke of Kent, who, the newspaper stated, had been ‘one of the most popular of the Royal Family’.⁸⁷ Moreover, as with Prince George’s celebrity and that of the prince of Wales in the 1930s, part of Philip’s charisma lay in his outgoing behaviour. The newsreels that filmed him at the navy training school in Corsham presented viewers with scenes of him joking with his colleagues over lunch. The Gaumont British News commentator stated that, ‘chatting with fellow officers in the wardroom, Lieutenant Mountbatten seems to be glad to be back at work again after a very happy leave’.⁸⁸ Notably, a Pathé news editor prepared a list of camera shots for the same story and remarked on the ‘good informal shots of Philip in the wardroom, chatting to companions between mouthfuls of food’, which suggests that he thought the scene conveyed a natural image.⁸⁹

Lord Mountbatten and the media thus worked in tandem to promote Philip’s popular image by combining traditional and newer forms of royal celebrity to fashion a reputation that was distinguished by its modern style and egalitarianism. The prince seemed to mix as easily with West Country villagers as with royalty at Buckingham Palace. Moreover, to judge from Mass Observation personal testimonies, members of the public appear to have responded positively to this image as well, with more than twenty respondents remarking on him in admiring terms and invoking in their descriptions phrases used by the media. One thirty-year-old female secretary commented: ‘I think Philip an ideal choice – a Prince, and far more important an English gentleman in education and career’.⁹⁰ Similarly, a man from London suggested that ‘Philip … even tho’ Greek by birth is probably as British as any of us by reason of his upbringing and for my part I look on him as English’.⁹¹ While Philip’s schooling at Gordonstoun and Royal Navy career appealed to some of the Mass Observation panel and helped to eclipse his foreign background, other respondents seemed to admire him for his egalitarian personality. One woman from Wembley approved of him because he was ‘young and personable and not too rich’; and a female civil servant commented that, ‘I think Philip is very suitable as he is very handsome and a good sort. He seems to have a great sense of humour, he isn’t a snob and I think he will keep Elizabeth in her place if she gets carried away by her important position’.⁹² While this woman’s remarks conveyed her concern about upper-class snobbery, her descriptions of Philip’s likeable character and good looks were echoed in other respondents’ comments on the way he had appeared to them in visual media: he ‘looked’ a ‘delightful person’, a ‘nice lad’, a ‘decent chap’ and a ‘sport’. But, most of all, he was ‘attractive’ and ‘handsome’.⁹³

A minority of twelve Mass Observation respondents recorded either a mild uncertainty about Philip, or a stronger dislike of him. There was some cynicism about how the media had tried to disguise his foreign connections which echoed the public distrust of official propaganda during the Second World War.⁹⁴ One man stated that he did not believe the ‘drivel’ published about Philip.⁹⁵ Another man from Thetford in Norfolk thought it was ‘strange … that Prince Philip, who, despite his relationship to the Royal Family, is a foreigner, should be so readily acclaimed as one of the figureheads of all that is British, because he happens to marry the Heir to the throne’.⁹⁶ Some Mass Observation respondents were more explicit in criticizing his background, however, a young housewife from Bradford labelling him a ‘ruddy Greek’, while a forty-two-year-old domestic worker from Dartmouth in Devon noted that she was ‘disgusted’ with the royal wedding, labelling Philip ‘a Greek of the parasitic class’: ‘Because of him and his relative Marina, Duchess of Kent, this country finds itself against the Greek patriots. The royal couple will be over-paid and under-worked and live luxuriously; also they will breed child parasites who will be granted huge allowances and be reared expensively’.⁹⁷ This woman drew on the kind of language used by the Daily Worker in its criticism of the monarchy in the 1930s to present a broader socialist attack on the prince and the House of Windsor’s privileges. She also thought that because of the royal wedding Britain found itself aligned against the Greek communists – referred to here as ‘patriots’.

International politics did, therefore, continue to shape some people’s attitudes to the royal romance as it played out over the course of 1947. It is significant that the Daily Mirror, with its high circulation figures, maintained an ambiguous stance towards the marriage from the announcement of the engagement right through to the wedding itself.⁹⁸ Ten days before the marriage the Mirror published front-page photographs of Greek communists who had been beheaded by royalist forces in the civil war.⁹⁹ Carrying the headline ‘What are We British Doing?’, the Mirror’s report complained that British troops stationed in Greece were ‘standing by’ as ‘cruelties and atrocities [were] taking place around them’. This coverage could be interpreted as a coded criticism of the royal wedding with its implicit questioning of the marriage links between the British and Greek royal families. In a similar way, the Mirror was the only mainstream newspaper to publish a picture of Philip as a boy wearing traditional Greek national dress on the day of his wedding.¹⁰⁰

The royal biographer, Philip Ziegler, has claimed there was ‘widespread’ belief that Philip was ‘amiable but dim’; however, this is not supported by the Mass Observation evidence. Descriptions of the prince’s ‘dimness’, or similar traits, do not feature at all in the personal testimonies.¹⁰¹ Anxieties about Philip’s German connections (all his sisters had married German aristocrats who had supported the Nazis) also remained the concern of the few rather than the many: just two Mass Observation respondents criticized his ties to Germany.¹⁰² This silence on Philip’s Teutonic links is significant and again attests to the media’s power in suppressing negative details. At a time when there was severe anti-German sentiment in Britain, the media chose not to dwell on Philip’s relatives.¹⁰³ In all the 1947 news reports surveyed here, there were just four references to the prince’s German associations, all from the left-wing or liberal press and published either before the engagement or on the day it was officially announced. After this there were no more references, which may indicate that royal officials or Lord Mountbatten successfully prevented further inquiries into the prince’s family connections. This fact was not lost on everyone, though, with one Mass Observation respondent remarking that the Daily Mail had conveniently erased from its picture of Philip’s family tree the relatives ‘who helped Germany during the war’.¹⁰⁴

*

Following the royal engagement, the British media projected Elizabeth and Philip as exemplars of a post-war culture of love and domesticity to sustain the idea first mobilized by the Pictorial that the relationship was a true romance and not a political move. Historians who have explored the meanings of companionate marriage in the post-war period have argued that it prioritized mutual emotional and sexual satisfaction and was located within an increasingly private conception of the home.¹⁰⁵ With the help of courtiers, the media projected an idealized image of companionate love around Elizabeth and Philip to emphasize the emotional reality of their romance in order to encourage media audiences to empathize with them. Louis Wulff, the Press Association’s accredited court correspondent, led in publicizing this narrative through a ‘behind-the-scenes’ article that was printed in the Sunday Express.¹⁰⁶ Given Wulff’s close links to the palace, we might assume that George VI and his advisers approved the article before publication. Like Morrah, Wulff promoted the public image of a down-to-earth, fun-loving princess who was ‘as romantic as any girl’ and well matched in the modern, good-looking prince. The Express published the article the Sunday after the engagement was announced and it included an intimate portrayal of the princess’s thoughts on love that set the tone for what was to come:

Wulff’s commentary on the princess’s romantic ideals was innovative: his first-hand revelations ascribed direct speech to Elizabeth to emphasize both her ‘normality’ and her desire to find love with a suitable partner. Like ‘all girls’ she talked about ‘young men’ with her friends and placed special importance on ‘good looks’. Furthermore, these insights substantiated the idea that Elizabeth’s romantic ambitions were more important than constitutional politics. Subsequent press reports echoed Wulff’s stories and he prepared a series of articles for the Sunday Express in the weeks leading up to the wedding that struck the same revelatory notes as his earlier exposé.¹⁰⁸

The royal household also helped the media to construct visual images that conveyed an idealized love story to audiences. The day after the couple’s engagement was announced, courtiers arranged for Elizabeth and Philip to be filmed and photographed at a special sitting in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. All five major newsreel distributors used Graham Thompson’s footage from this sitting and, in keeping with the cameraman’s intimate style, it included new emotional gestures that would have been deemed unsuitable thirteen years earlier in 1934. George and Marina had readily posed for the newsreels, but had not initially physically touched one another. Now, in the more expressive mid 1940s, the princess and her naval-officer fiancé strolled together arm-in-arm, exchanged smiles, laughed inaudibly and talked between glances at the camera (Figure 5.5).¹⁰⁹ The newsreels used romantic soundtracks to heighten the ambiance of these scenes, which included close-up images of the engagement ring worn by Elizabeth. The British Movietone News commentator drew special attention to the princess’s facial expression: ‘In these, the first special studies of the pair since the news of their engagement, it is easy to see the radiant happiness of the princess’. Elizabeth’s smile received extensive coverage in the press as well, with popular and quality newspapers often noting and illustrating how happy she looked.¹¹⁰ In this way, then, her smile became a symbol of her emotional transformation and some members of the public interpreted it as such. One seventy-two-year-old widow from London who responded to the Mass Observation survey on the royal wedding commented that she was ‘glad Princess Elizabeth married such a good man, for rumour had it that he was objected to at first, hence the sullen looks when abroad. Her happy marriage has completely changed her look’.¹¹¹ This woman had detected from pictures of the princess taken during the South Africa tour that she was ‘sullen’ because of complications with her engagement and contrasted this downcast appearance to her happier ‘look’ since her marriage. Another female respondent similarly described how visual media had evoked in her an empathy for Elizabeth and Philip. Despite her misgivings about Britain’s new links to Greece, she noted that, ‘when I look at their photographs they look such a nice couple – I just have to wish them joy’.¹¹² These examples demonstrated how media audiences sought to comprehend the royal protagonists’ inner feelings from pictures and suggest that the emphasis which commentators like Movietone’s Lionel Gamlin placed on the princess’s facial expressions may have helped to influence public attitudes.

Figure 5.5 ‘It is easy to see the radiant happiness of the princess’, 10 July 1947 (RCIN 2002364). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

The royal lovers also made a balcony appearance together with the princess’s family on the evening their engagement was announced. The newsreel coverage of this interaction was again designed to convey the couple’s happiness to audiences while dispelling any lingering doubt about the prince’s suitability. Boasting to cinema viewers that it had waited ‘with the film industry’s biggest lens trained on the palace balcony’, Pathé News presented audiences with images of the couple stepping out onto the veranda and waving to the crowds that had assembled outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. These scenes were interspersed with images of the large crowd waving back at the royals. The commentator remarked over a soundtrack of cheering that the ‘heiress to the throne and her future husband met the British people’ and added that George VI looked ‘particularly happy’ as he, the queen and Princess Margaret joined the couple on the balcony.¹¹³ As with the press reports that highlighted how the king had ‘gladly given his consent’ to the marriage, this comment acted as a seal of approval designed to ease public anxieties about the international politics involved.¹¹⁴

The media would repeatedly emphasize the emotional dimensions of the royal romance until the couple’s wedding day and a number of Mass Observation respondents notably commented on how this worked to evoke their empathy for the couple. One man from Nottingham recorded that he was ‘pleased and proud that a Princess of England … had married someone of her choice’; and although ‘naturally sceptical of this true love in Royal marriages … eventually the Daily Press broke a lot of that down. The newsreel in the cinema also helped … Gradually there emerged a feeling that behind the pageantry there was just a domestic family celebrating a great event in their private lives’.¹¹⁵ A woman from London similarly noted that ‘the little I have read about the Royal Couple gives me the impression that they are genuinely in love’.¹¹⁶ The emotional focus of the media’s royal love story thus helped to dissipate lingering concerns about the possible dynastic motives that had brought Elizabeth and Philip together. Out of 360 directive replies, more than fifty respondents commented that the prince and princess ‘suited one another’, that their relationship was ‘not of political significance’ or an ‘arranged marriage’ but instead the outcome of ‘genuine’ affection and a ‘real love match’.¹¹⁷

The fact that the couple looked as though they were in love appealed to Mass Observation respondents who identified with free choice and emotional fulfilment in marriage. The recurrence of positive expressions like these in the Mass Observation files pointed to the importance of new companionate forms of love in influencing both the projection and reception of the romance. With the help of the media, royal aides and the shadowy figure of Lord Mountbatten, Elizabeth and Philip were made to appear like-minded, well-suited, good-looking and as though they would love and support each other.¹¹⁸ In contrast with the many positive responses, only eleven Mass Observation respondents expressed uncertainly over whether Elizabeth and Philip were in love (and, indeed, most hoped they were) and just three recorded complete disbelief that it was a real romance.¹¹⁹ The relatively small size of this section of opinion suggests that the official narrative on the emotional authenticity of the princess and prince’s love story, which was popularized by the media, resonated with members of the public and helped to generate support for the royal couple.

‘Part of that great British family tradition’

One of the messages at the heart of post-war reconstruction was that family life was central to both social order and citizenship, with the home presented as a crucial space for adult and child socialization.¹²⁰ Moral campaigners argued that domesticity had always been a key tenet of the national character and that it helped to account for the country’s strength. For example, the general secretary of the National Marriage Guidance Council proclaimed in 1946 that ‘Britain has always been proud of her family life. It has been the backbone of her national greatness ... the only lasting foundation for a sound national life is sound family life’.¹²¹ This polemic was indicative of a post-war political culture that sought to impress upon the working classes in particular the value of the nuclear family in order to reverse the rise in divorce and illegitimacy and the decline in population.¹²² Sensitive to these social and moral changes, the royal household saw the 1947 royal wedding as an opportunity to reaffirm the House of Windsor’s role as a symbol of domestic virtue by promoting Christian family values to new audiences. Supported by the Church of England, which was also keen to reassert its function as a moral guiding force, royal officials elevated Elizabeth and Philip as a model couple in order to appeal to a less deferential and more democratic generation.¹²³

The monarchy’s successful orchestration of a family-centred royal wedding relied on courtiers navigating the competing demands of different interest groups. The royalist media spearheaded the campaign for a day of popular celebration and the BBC and newsreels fought to bring their audiences a visual illustration of the wedding from inside Westminster abbey. Meanwhile, the liberal and left-wing press expressed concerns about the economic costs of the wedding at a time of austerity, some of which were shared by a Labour administration that was torn between thrift and a desire to put on a good show should it help to boost national morale.¹²⁴ A notable example of these tensions coming to a head was the government’s decision that it would not call a public holiday to celebrate the wedding. Clement Attlee’s private secretary, Laurence Helsby, wrote to Alan Lascelles confirming this position:

The letter indicates that the king had previously advised Attlee that he and the princess thought a public holiday would be out of step with the austere times. This approach was in keeping with a royal public relations strategy that sought to prevent criticism of royal profligacy arising by limiting both the expense and scale of the wedding. At a time when the British press were diligently reporting on the additional ration coupons the princess would receive for her dress, the new home she and Philip would live in and the large annuity payments the couple would receive from the government, it was crucial for the royal family to avoid controversy wherever possible.¹²⁶ Lascelles was naturally of this mind, too. He telephoned Helsby to inform him that, while it was customary to announce a holiday for schoolchildren in connection with royal weddings, there was no precedent for calling a national holiday and ‘that The King did not favour the [Prime Minister’s] suggestion that Princess Elizabeth might express a wish that there should be no public holiday … this threw upon her the responsibility for a decision which expressed in this form might arouse criticism’.¹²⁷ This conversation reveals that George VI and his courtiers sought to protect Elizabeth’s reputation from adverse public reaction; and it was decided that the Ministry of Education would announce the school holiday in a press release which would include a short reference to the fact that there would not be a national holiday.

The official emphasis on moderation not only accorded with the nation’s economic circumstances but also contributed to the idea that the princess and prince entertained the same ‘normal’ domestic aspirations as other young British people and would be married with the same ritual that united other Christian couples. This was, of course, all relative. The royals would still parade through central London to the cheering of thousands of excited spectators; the bridal couple would participate in all the usual ceremonial customs associated with royal occasions, including the now obligatory balcony appearance; and the marriage would be consecrated in the nation’s symbolic spiritual centre, Westminster abbey. And yet, despite what was clearly the extraordinary nature of the royal wedding and its protagonists, the notion that Elizabeth and Philip were ordinary people, representative of their generation in their hopes and desires, left a deep impression on many Mass Observation respondents who went on to write about the marriage. To understand the popular appeal of this message, we must look beyond press discourse to the wider chorus of voices that championed this idea in order to generate personal identification with the royal lovers.

The archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, was a conservative moralist who championed a traditional vision of family life and he became a vocal proponent of the notion that Elizabeth and Philip were characteristic of other couples their age.¹²⁸ In a speech he delivered as part of the House of Lords’ address of congratulation to George VI on the forthcoming marriage of his daughter, he drew attention to the modern emotional dimensions of Elizabeth and Philip’s relationship: ‘It is no politically arranged marriage such as the past once knew. It springs from a true accord of hearts between two young persons who have grown up together, knowing each other well, and have made their own decisions’.¹²⁹ Fisher thus projected an image of the royal couple as exemplars of their generation in their desire for personal enrichment, but he also seized on the wedding as an opportunity to promote a model of Christian family life to the nation at large. The secretary of King George’s Jubilee Trust, Commander J. B. Adams, wrote to the archbishop a week after the royal engagement was announced, stating that the king had authorized the publication of a souvenir programme like the ones produced for the 1935 silver jubilee and 1937 coronation.¹³⁰ Adams asked Fisher if he would write an introduction to the wedding ceremony ‘underlining its religious significance as did the late Archbishop of Canterbury on the Coronation Service’. In reply, Fisher initially indicated that he did not think an introduction necessary as ‘the Marriage Service will be precisely the same Marriage Service as everybody is married with in every church in the land’.¹³¹ However, after finally agreeing to write the piece, he chose to use the introduction to expand on the very idea that marriage was a common rite of passage shared by Christians and that it was of great importance to British national life:

Fisher’s words presented Elizabeth and Philip as a model Christian couple and he used a progressive sociological lexicon to draw a direct link between the importance of the family ‘unit’ and the well-being of the entire nation.¹³³ This message was also promoted by the archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, who delivered a sermon as part of the 1947 royal wedding ceremony, which was broadcast live to listeners, and emphasized that the bride and groom were no different to other couples:

The archbishop’s famous likening of the royal wedding to that of a ‘cottager’ received much media attention the day after the service.¹³⁵ As well as printing the sermon, the Daily Mirror presented an article on the ‘simple story’ at the centre of the wedding which began with the line, ‘A young English girl was married yesterday in the family church’.¹³⁶ Reports like this one compared the princess’s experience to that of other young women, with Westminster abbey characterized as the nation’s ‘family church’. Hannen Swaffer, writing for the left-wing Daily Herald, also claimed that royalty shared in a common domesticity with their subjects when he stated that Elizabeth’s nuptials ‘differed’ from earlier royal weddings because ‘in spite of the pageantry and pomp, there was such an emphasis laid upon the fact that the marriage, in its significance, differed in no way from one in which two of the humblest folk were united in matrimony’.¹³⁷

*

The BBC and newsreel companies joined with the Church of England in projecting an image of the prince and princess as exemplars of a national culture of Christian marriage and romantic fulfilment. In its coverage the broadcaster sought to balance the dignity of the occasion with its desire to bring audiences closer to proceedings and to convey to them the celebratory mood of the event. In particular, it wanted to use its new television service to bring viewers a live programme of the royal wedding.¹³⁸ The immediate post-war years witnessed a growing tension emerge between the BBC and the Newsreel Association as the broadcaster sought to bring its viewers visual news – the traditional terrain of the newsreels. To begin with, the BBC applied to the NRA to use Graham Thompson’s accredited footage of royal events as part of its television coverage, but newsreel officials consistently rejected the BBC’s requests, a revealing entry in the NRA’s minute books recording that the managing director of British Movietone, Sir Ernest Gordon Craig, met with Buckingham Palace’s new press secretary, Richard Colville, to explain that the newsreel companies were ‘fundamentally opposed to any co-operation with the BBC’.¹³⁹ This policy of non-cooperation ultimately led the broadcaster to establish its own film unit, which accompanied the royal family on their 1947 tour of South Africa.

In a memo dated 4 September 1947 the head of outside television broadcasts, Ian (later Lord) Orr-Ewing, noted that ‘following a chance meeting with Cmdr. Colville’ (‘an old school acquaintance’), he had ‘visited Buckingham Palace to explain further what the televising of the Royal Wedding really involved’. Colville had asked that ‘nothing should at present leak out to the press’, clearly anxious to prevent the kind of disclosure that had pre-empted the announcement of the sound broadcast of the 1934 royal wedding thirteen years previously. Orr-Ewing outlined that Colville thought it ‘probable that the King would agree to television and newsreels, but would not agree to a full length Technicolor film, in view of the extra lighting required. [Colville] also confirmed that the King has an inherent objection to having spotlights focused on him, general lighting being much more acceptable, but we would have to keep the intensity within reasonable limits’.¹⁴⁰ This memo is worth quoting at length as it demonstrates how George VI’s aversion to artificial lighting dictated the media’s access to royal events in the immediate post-war years. Indeed, the BBC files for the wedding reveal that the broadcaster entered into protracted negotiations to acquire highly sensitive ‘image-orthicon’ television cameras – which required less light – as part of its campaign to secure permission to televise the marriage ceremony.¹⁴¹ However, when Orr-Ewing filed his next memorandum on 8 September it was to report a telephone call with Colville, the latter having informed him that George VI ‘considered the wedding of his daughter to be a private and religious matter which should not, under present conditions, form a subject to be taken by newsreels and television cameras’.¹⁴² Like his father before him, the king was concerned about the technical arrangements for royal events. Not only did he forbid the filming of the service, he also prevented HMV and the BBC from making recordings of the ceremony for commercial sale, thus preserving the sacred and intimate character of the occasion.¹⁴³

George VI’s attitude accorded with his vision of his daughter’s wedding as a more modest event compared to the royal spectacles of the interwar years. Still, Graham Thompson managed to use his influence within the royal household to persuade the king to allow him to arrange the filming of the return procession up the aisle after the marriage service had ended. In his 1992 interview Thompson described how he had resorted to deceit and ‘quite a bit of trickery’ in convincing the dean of Westminster, who acted as the king’s proxy, that additional lighting at the abbey’s west door would be acceptable. Thompson had dimmers installed on his lighting rig to disguise the full extent of the artificial illumination required to record the wedding procession as it left the abbey and Dean Alan Don unwittingly agreed that the system could remain in place.¹⁴⁴ The result was that the newsreels presented to cinemagoers scenes of a royal wedding from inside Westminster abbey for the first time.¹⁴⁵ However, arguably a more significant innovation resulted from Orr-Ewing’s successful application to Colville for a camera position on Thompson’s platform, something which enabled the BBC to transmit live television images of the return procession to those viewers watching at home. The estimated number of people who tuned in for the BBC’s television coverage of the royal wedding was 500,000 and included one Mass Observation respondent – a forty-one-year-old clerk from north-west London – whose remarks on the effect television had in making her feel included in a national event anticipated the responses of viewers to the 1953 coronation: ‘I saw and heard it on the television, and was excited and moved as if I’d been there. I think it was a very impressive occasion, beautifully arranged and worthy of all the best British traditions. The simplicity of the ceremony was exactly right in perfect taste and so was the glorious pageantry’.¹⁴⁶

The restrictions on the filming of Elizabeth and Philip’s wedding meant the BBC’s main focus was its radio coverage of the ceremony, which was officially sanctioned by the king.¹⁴⁷ Here, again, the BBC seems to have succeeded in projecting an image of the couple that encouraged listeners to identify with them and their marriage as symbolic of a national culture. The broadcaster’s elaborate technical preparations were key to the transmission of an intimate scene from the abbey which defined how many experienced the event. Seymour de Lotbinière, who had succeeded Gerald Cock as director of outside broadcasts, oversaw the installation of thirty-two microphones in the abbey, roughly the same number as used during the 1937 coronation.¹⁴⁸ Whereas just one microphone had been used at the wedding of George and Marina to record their words in reply to Cosmo Lang’s prompts, four microphones were installed in 1947 to cover Archbishop Fisher’s voice and the royal responses. The mics were displayed more prominently, too, enabling better sound transmission than at George VI’s coronation because there was no need to conceal them for fear they would be caught on camera. These important improvements in the quality of the broadcast helped to create a strong connection between listeners and the royal couple as they recited their marriage vows.

Historians who have studied soundscapes have suggested that listening differs from viewing in that sound places the subject at the centre of the sensory experience, while the visual form is consumed from a peripheral position, looking on.¹⁴⁹ According to this argument, radio can be a highly immersive experience. These ideas find some support in more than twenty reports by Mass Observation respondents, who admitted that the sound broadcast of the 1947 wedding service had exercised a powerful effect on them, several noting they were ‘moved’ by it, others saying they were ‘touched emotionally’.¹⁵⁰ The princess’s marriage vows were the most commented-on feature of the broadcast and evoked empathy for her among listeners. The experience of a woman from London who was ‘just a bit’ older than Elizabeth and who listened to the service at her home in Twickenham attested to the affective dimensions of the broadcast. She originally thought that the princess ‘through no particular inherent quality of her own, but through being born to the right parents, had had the sort of wedding that every girl dreams of but few obtain’. However, she went on to explain how the broadcast had quickly dispelled her jealous feelings:

This respondent’s description of Elizabeth as a ‘young girl’ and of her ‘frightened schoolgirl “I will”’ shows the writer empathized with the princess because of the vulnerable image conveyed by the radio as she recited her vows. Indeed, these emotions were strong enough to dispel her grudge about royal privilege and her socialist concerns about the cost of the event. A forty-four-year-old woman from Beckenham expressed a similar empathy for Elizabeth: ‘[Hearing the princess] say the response in rather a trembling voice, I realised for the first time that she is only just twenty-one, and the whole thing must have been a bit of an ordeal for her. I felt almost as if she was being sacrificed to make the nation prosperous and happy’.¹⁵² This woman drew on the pre-war imagery of the suffering royal to describe how she identified with the vulnerable character of the princess as communicated by radio. This type of response suggests that the broadcast enabled listeners to experience intimate moments of the wedding service, with the audial exposure of Elizabeth’s emotions intensifying the empathy many felt for her. Crucially, this kind of reaction was not restricted to a female listenership, either. A married man from Nottingham, who felt ‘ashamed’ of his behaviour, recorded that he had tuned into the broadcast in a ‘casual state of mind’, only to find himself ‘in a highly emotional state and … on the verge of tears during the whole of the ceremony in the Abbey. Fortunately, I was alone, my wife was busy in the kitchen’.¹⁵³ While this respondent thought his crying would undermine his masculinity, his report signalled the profound emotional impact that radio could have on male and female listeners alike.

The sound broadcast also evoked personal forms of identification with the House of Windsor as a family group. A sixty-three-year-old woman noted that she thought the ceremony a ‘heart-warming showing of a natural and necessary stage in the life of Elizabeth and the Royal Family as to remind us of their humanness. All married women knew how she felt and all parents with married daughters knew how the King and Queen felt’.¹⁵⁴ This description again reveals that members of the public identified with royalty through the emotions associated with common rites of passage like marriage. A housewife from Truro in Cornwall recorded that she became very interested as the wedding day approached, planning her work so that she ‘could listen to almost all of it’ on the radio:

This respondent revealed that the broadcast evoked from her an empathy for the princess and a nostalgia about marriage in general which she felt she shared with ‘millions’ of other people who she imagined were listening. The broadcast thus encouraged affective integration around Elizabeth, with the listener experiencing a sense of collective emotional identification which she believed was particularly strong among older people and women.

One sixty-year-old woman from Coventry who sympathized politically with communism but was disappointed at the way the Daily Worker had criticized the royal wedding, described how the emotional ‘reality’ of the marriage influenced her feelings: ‘I think the Royal Wedding demonstrates a hunger for something beautiful and real as against the eternal phoney sentiment of films. A real princess, really in love with a real prince, married with a real service, with real royalty for parents and relations’.¹⁵⁶ For her, the ostensible emotional authenticity of this family occasion set it apart from the ‘unreality’ of popular films. She went onto note that she and two elderly female friends had tearfully listened ‘as the responses of Philip and Elizabeth came through’ and even invoked the old adage that the media had repeatedly used to describe the royal love stories of the interwar period when she proclaimed that ‘in fact, all the world loves a lover, which I suppose sums it up’.

We might interpret this woman’s response as evidence of both the impact of the prolonged media campaign that drew attention to the ‘true love match’ in 1947 and the success of radio in communicating what sounded like the feelings of the royal couple during their marriage ceremony. In the lead-up to the wedding, BBC executives had also planned the sound broadcast to ensure it conveyed some of the emotions expressed by the crowds. It now had an ‘Actuality Unit’ in charge of ‘effects’ microphones which would record ‘the cheers of the crowd and the noise of trotting horses’ on the processional route and outside Buckingham Palace.¹⁵⁷ The celebratory mood of the royal wedding broadcast was captured in the way it was designed to mirror the Victory Day programmes, with the BBC calling in the same team of ‘observers’ to offer commentary on the wedding that had contributed to its VE and VJ Day coverage.¹⁵⁸ Furthermore, these speakers were instructed to address a ‘non-London audience’ in order to appeal to listeners in the regions who might otherwise feel excluded from the national social imaginary constructed by the broadcast.¹⁵⁹

It was, perhaps, testament to the success of these policies that a thirty-three-year-old Scottish housewife noted that, despite not ‘car[ing] two pins about [the royal wedding]’, to her ‘astonishment’ she was powerfully affected by the broadcast: ‘[S]o tense and electric was the emotion of the crowds, that the microphones picked it up and transmitted it, so that I, doing a prosaic morning’s ironing in Glasgow, was moved to tears. I discussed this afterwards with some friends of mine, and they admitted to the same experience’. She went on to explain that the ‘sensation wasn’t nearly so strong’ when she watched the newsreel coverage of the wedding and questioned whether the ‘emotion [was] lost in the canning of the soundtrack’ or ‘because I knew it was coming’.¹⁶⁰ Her words suggest that the immediacy of radio with its successful transmission of the atmosphere in London on wedding day had had a profound emotional impact that had caught her off guard.

The Glaswegian housewife was not very impressed by the film record of the wedding, but it is worth noting that most Mass Observation respondents who watched newsreel coverage of the event commented positively on it (this was not the case with the Technicolor film that was made).¹⁶¹ One fifty-six-year-old housewife from Burnley in Lancashire remarked on the inclusive effects of newsreel: ‘I felt sure that I watching the film saw more than any spectator at one particular point on the route’.¹⁶² Editors went to special lengths to convey to newsreel viewers an image of a nation joined in celebration of the marriage. British Paramount News’s commentary was typical in highlighting royalty’s symbolic association with the nation’s domestic culture: ‘This day Great Britain rejoiced and lifted up its heart. A harassed nation forgot its worries. The twin appeal of Monarchy and Marriage was a reminder, welcome indeed, of all that is fundamental and enduring in a world of change’.¹⁶³ As with earlier royal events, newsreel cameras also captured vast panoramas of the crowds that assembled in central London and imposed on these scenes soundtracks of wild cheering’; and, as with the interwar coverage of the crowds that gathered outside Buckingham Palace for the royal balcony appearance, newsreels placed special emphasis on the breaking of the police cordon and the rush to the palace gates as visual indicators of royal popularity. British Paramount’s commentator exclaimed to cinemagoers that, ‘strong as was the police cordon outside the Palace, the great mass of people overcame it in their determination to be as near as possible when the bride and bridegroom and other members of the royal family should appear on the balcony’.¹⁶⁴

The newsreels used other narrative devices to communicate the impression that the entire country had gathered to participate in the wedding. Pathé News included scenes of women and men gathered in shops and other public spaces listening to the marriage service by way of the broadcast: ‘In this moment, charged with great meaning, the people of Britain and the Commonwealth joined. They listened, and remembered in towns and villages, in shops, in streets, in homes’.¹⁶⁵ Pathé then juxtaposed footage of a normal-looking family listening to the broadcast in their living room with still photographs of the royal wedding ceremony. Choral music played over this sequence to create a seamless story connecting the royal wedding to the domesticity of an ‘ordinary’ British home. The accompanying shot list shows that the Pathé editor sought to create this image of normality through the scenes he selected: ‘A married couple, and small daughter listening to the service. Fire burns in the grate (a typical family scene)’. In this way, then, newsreels projected the message that Elizabeth and Philip’s wedding was symbolic of a national culture of domesticity and that their marriage was fundamentally British in nature and heritage. As Movietone told its viewers: ‘This day will long be remembered as a vivid and important episode in the story of the nation’.¹⁶⁶

*

Approximately two thirds of the Mass Observation respondents who remarked on the emotional dimensions of either the BBC radio broadcast or the newsreel films were women. To some extent this gendered disparity reflected the straightforward fact that, for most men and some women, the royal wedding day was a normal working day, meaning that a greater number of women, like the aforementioned housewives, were able to listen live to the marriage ceremony within their homes. As noted in chapter 2 in relation to King George V’s Christmas messages, the ability to listen to broadcasts at home with one’s family or friends enabled personal forms of listening, something which may help to account for some of the emotionally engaged responses that Mass Observation respondents recorded in 1947. However, as with George and Marina’s wedding in 1934, the media targeted women more than men as an audience susceptible to the appeal of the royal romance. The wedding dress that would be worn by the princess was the main topic of interest used by the media to achieve this kind of audience identification. The senior controller of the BBC, Basil (later Sir Basil) Nicolls, corresponded with Richard Colville at the palace to gain details about the dress from designer Norman Hartnell. Colville granted the BBC an exclusive preview of the dress on the condition that it withhold all its information until the official press release date on wedding day.¹⁶⁷ The BBC recruited Audrey Russell from its eastern service to ‘give a woman’s point of view’ and she visited Hartnell’s studio to prepare the descriptions of the dress that she would use in her commentary in the wedding broadcast.¹⁶⁸ BBC production files show that the broadcaster positioned another female observer, Joan Gilbert, inside Westminster abbey ‘so that the ladies in our audience may hear all about the dresses’ she saw from her vantage point;¹⁶⁹ and the BBC’s Welsh division also managed to obtain a place in the abbey for Myfanwy Howell, the editor of its regional women’s programme, so that she could later broadcast an eyewitness account of the event (she would sit next to the Women’s Hour correspondent, who would go on to do the same for a national audience).¹⁷⁰

As with Marina’s marriage thirteen years earlier, the BBC thus helped to frame the 1947 royal wedding as a feminine occasion by encouraging women to take an active interest in the event through consumer fantasies connected to fashion. Newspapers also helped to perpetuate this gendered emphasis, with journalists resorting to subterfuge in order to gain access to information on the wedding dress. Writing to Lord Beaverbrook in mid October, the editor of the Sunday Express, John Gordon, noted that:

Gordon’s words hinted at the journalistic resentment that royal secrecy aroused – indeed, Richard Colville’s policy of keeping the British press firmly at arm’s length was quickly to become the norm.¹⁷²

Another of Beaverbrook’s editors, Herbert Gunn at the Evening Standard, reported to his employer the day before the wedding that he had secured the popular novelist and author Rebecca West to write the newspaper’s main story on the event – again signalling the importance of reaching a female audience – and noted that the palace had finally circulated information on the dress to newspapers:

Despite his cynicism Gunn’s letter again attests to the significance of Elizabeth’s dress as a newsworthy item and shows how his sense of the popular anticipation which had built up around her marriage informed his decision to withhold pictures of the robe until wedding day. Even the Labour government expressed an interest in the dress. Spotting a public relations opportunity, the MP and president of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, entered into negotiations with the princess’s private secretary, Sir John Colville, to have the dress – ‘which is not only an object of loyal interest to the people of Great Britain but also one of the finest examples of British art, skill and workmanship’ – displayed in the UK’s main textile centres and in the Celtic nations’ capitals in the months after the marriage, believing that it would ‘arouse pride and interest in the industries which contributed to its production’ and act as ‘an invaluable stimulant to morale and recruitment in the textile industries’.¹⁷⁴ At a time when the government was investing heavily in British manufacturing and exports, Wilson’s message was taken up and promoted by the media and the public seem to have responded positively: one Mass Observation respondent echoed the Labour MP’s words in her appraisal of the dress as a ‘magnificent example of the best artistry and workmanship in the world, and [it] shows what can be done in this country if we try’.¹⁷⁵

Although Mass Observation personal testimonies revealed a heightened interest among female respondents in the heavily gendered elements of the royal wedding, such as the princess’s clothing, men and women alike proved to be deeply invested in the idea that Elizabeth and Philip’s marriage symbolized a family-centred national culture. At a time when men, as well as women, increasingly saw the home as an important space for emotional enrichment, the royal wedding provided a spectacular and reassuring example of what many people perceived to be a pillar of modern British life.¹⁷⁶ More than twenty Mass Observation respondents noted that they thought the royal marriage symbolized a national moral culture focused on domesticity. One twenty-seven-year-old research worker recorded that ‘regarding Royalty mainly as a symbol of Respectability and Permanence and Family Institutions seems the most sensible attitude’.¹⁷⁷ A twenty-six-year-old man also interpreted the wedding as ‘part of that great British family tradition’, while a forest worker of the same age from Newmarket wrote that he thought ‘these things tend to endear the family to us, and that in turn strengthens and supports the British way of life’.¹⁷⁸ Another young man, aged twenty-five, similarly thought that the royal wedding set a good example in an ‘age of increasing divorce and domestic unrest’.¹⁷⁹ And, despite expressing the view that monarchy was incompatible with his left-wing republican politics, a twenty-six-year-old railway clerk from Northwich recorded that ‘as a firm believer in the value of the family and monogamy as the basis for communal order and social progress I wish the newly married couple well’.¹⁸⁰

It is tempting to argue, based on these men’s testimonies, that the younger generation in particular had internalized the symbolic association of monarchy with family life that was elevated through the palace’s media strategy in the 1930s and 1940s. The most similar sentiment articulated by an older male respondent came from a forty-six-year-old chemist who expressed irritation at the ‘humbug which suggests that [the princess] fares no better than I’ – signalling that the public relations effort to equate the bridal couple with ordinary people was by no means entirely successful – but then went onto note that without royalty ‘there could be a regrettable decline of sentimental association’ as they offered a ‘backbone of stability and an atmosphere of tradition and history in times of change’.¹⁸¹ Although the Mass Observation sample is too small to make any definite assertions, it could well be that younger men, who more readily identified with a domesticated masculinity than their fathers’ generation, valued the House of Windsor’s promotion of family values particularly highly.¹⁸²

Female respondents identified with the family model set by royalty but tended to express less specific sentiments in connecting the wedding to national life. A bank clerk from London described how the royal family ‘do somehow represent a certain spiritual value of family life in this country’, while a fifty-six-year-old poultry farmer from Arborfield Cross in Berkshire expressed her delight that Elizabeth had married for love and presented the royal nuptials as an ‘epitome of all the lovely weddings that one would like every pretty girl to have – and indeed, any girl pretty or otherwise’.¹⁸³ Meanwhile, a forty-two-year-old schoolmistress from East Sussex noted the wedding’s ‘symbolic value – of family life, of youth growing up and taking responsibilities, of plans for the future’. She continued by remarking on both the political value of monarchy and the role the media played in influencing her emotions:

The broadcast enabled the schoolteacher to identify with a wider community, constituted of ‘ordinary people’, to whom she thought the wedding really ‘mattered’. Significantly, her appreciation of the royal wedding was influenced by the shadow of wartime losses, with the symbolism of Elizabeth’s marriage evoking optimism in her through its representation of family and ‘new life’. This view was shared by a fifty-four-year-old farmer’s wife from Wrexham in North Wales, who noted that she and her husband ‘listened to the broadcast from start to finish and were very impressed and found it very moving. The whole thing was so completely British and would only have happened here – it was so sane and human, so like things ought to be if more were decent, friendly and honest’.¹⁸⁵

These upbeat appraisals were echoed in other Mass Observation testimonies which either presented the wedding as a turning point in the nation’s fortunes or contrasted Britain’s celebratory mood with national cultures abroad. A twenty-four-year-old Cambridge student described her sense of pride in the wedding, noting that ‘[w]e, Britain, could produce something lovely and fairy tale in spite of war and aftermath, that the USA with all wealth and self-assurance just couldn’t. Of course the whole thing was lit up from within by the fact that Liz and Phil seemed so gorgeously happy and genuine about it’.¹⁸⁶ Although the student’s words betrayed an anxiety about Britain’s diminished status as a world power following the war, a fifty-seven-year-old man from Colwyn Bay in North Wales was full of confidence when he described how he was ‘proud to belong at this time to the one nation in the whole world which can stage a Royal Wedding like ours, the nation to which all the world at this time looks up’.¹⁸⁷ A thirty-four-year-old production manager from Caerleon in South Wales noted his ‘feeling that in later years we will be able to look back and point to this occasion as the moment when for no precise reason people felt things were going to get better for the first time’.¹⁸⁸ This view was shared by a forty-six-year-old woman from Birmingham who looked back further than the war to 1936 and the abdication crisis as the key moment when Britain’s fortunes began to slide: ‘I feel the Royal Wedding has put us back where we were in the world’s estimation before the Duke of Windsor threw his crown away. I feel it was the beginning of a new era. Already the impetus to do better, to create, to start, to live, not exist from day to day, has begun to manifest itself ’.¹⁸⁹ While this woman’s response hints at a longer-term sense of British decline that stemmed from Edward VIII’s sudden departure, these personal testimonies point to a perception of national renewal associated with Elizabeth and Philip which would find wider popular resonance when the princess acceded to the throne in 1952.

It is significant that even negative reactions recorded by the Mass Observation panel about the wedding attested to the pervasive symbolism of royal domesticity and the public image of the ‘ordinary’ princess. A twenty-two-year-old General Post Office engineer remarked that he thought ‘the whole performance is staged by Church and State to enhance the concept of family life, yet what relation the general standard of family life has to a couple who start with every circumstance of wealth and luxury is never questioned’.¹⁹⁰ A thirty-five-year-old journalist seemed to share in the belief that officials had staged the wedding to set a moral example to the nation when she wrote that ‘royal functions’ were used to ‘foster fake sentiments’ and that the ‘symbols of family are all nonsense’.¹⁹¹ A forty-seven-year-old housewife from Otley in West Yorkshire detected a similar inconsistency between the House of Windsor’s mode of living and that of other British families. She criticized ‘the attempt that was made to glamourise the whole affair and at the same time to make people believe that it was just an ordinary wedding and that the royal family practically had to make do and mend like other people’.¹⁹² An elderly woman from the same area also thought that an ‘absurd fuss [had] been made about the Royal family, a very ordinary set of people really’. She continued:

This complex, shifting personal testimony, with its presentation of the princess as ‘plain’ and her voice as ‘ugly’, ran counter to the vast majority of opinion recorded by Mass Observation. The elderly writer also expressed her cynicism at the way shadowy officials had ‘worked up’ the royal wedding to generate popular support for the House of Windsor, comparing it unfavourably to the way royalty had been promoted by the media in the early 1930s. Like several others, this respondent saw the wedding for what it was: an attempt by an elite to reassert the cultural power of the royal family at a time of significant social and political change. However, it is important that we place these critical, discerning voices in context, as a large majority of Mass Observation commentators did not question the meaning of the wedding but instead remarked positively on the ‘real family feeling’ it created and the way it helped to crystallize their awareness of a national emotional community that seemed united in its appreciation of domesticity and companionate love.¹⁹⁴

‘Honeymooning “in a gold-fish bowl”’

The single most commented-on feature in all the Mass Observation personal testimonies written in reply to the December 1947 directive was the way the media coverage of the royal wedding and subsequent honeymoon intruded on Elizabeth and Philip’s private lives. Nearly a fifth of all respondents either recorded their sympathy for ‘the couple having to suffer all that publicity’, expressed revulsion at the media’s ‘vulgar curiosity’ about a ‘purely private family affair’ or vehemently castigated the press for publishing ‘sordid details’.¹⁹⁵ While this criticism forms part of the wider disapproval voiced by Mass Observation respondents about the scale of the royal wedding coverage, it also reveals a strong attachment to the family values exemplified by the House of Windsor as part of Britain’s culture of domesticity. This was particularly the case with the issue of sex: within the chorus of outrage there were forty comments aimed at the media-led interest in the royal couple’s honeymoon activities. The honeymoon was a rite of passage defined by private conjugal happiness and consummation; and the Mass Observation panel’s criticism of the media’s prurient coverage of the honeymoon (and the public’s interest in the royal honeymooners) suggests there was a deep concern for Elizabeth and Philip’s intimate lives. This moment was significant as it witnessed the merging of an older belief in the burdens of royal public life with a new concept of royal suffering that was rooted in the over-exposure of royal private life. This media-induced narrative of suffering was not only symptomatic of the more irreverent post-war press culture, with news editors becoming increasingly brazen in revealing royal intimacy, but also reflected the growing popular belief that private home life was sacrosanct and a right to which everyone was entitled.¹⁹⁶

Elizabeth and Philip left London on the afternoon of their wedding day for Lord Mountbatten’s Broadlands country home in Romsey, Hampshire. The wife of the archbishop of Canterbury, Mrs Rosamond Fisher, went to watch the couple on their drive to Waterloo station. She recorded that ‘it was very romantic to see them come by in the open landau … They both looked very gay and jolly. She was in a powder-blue hat and coat. I should think they must have been thankful to reach the sanctuary of their train and have an hour or so’s quiet before facing crowds again at Winchester’. Mrs Fisher also reported that her husband had enjoyed a ‘very nice meal’ as part of the wedding breakfast served at the palace, but that the Mirror had published a ‘speech which the Princess never made and presumably … invented the other speeches as well, as there were no Press men present’.¹⁹⁷ This kind of misreporting would come to define the media coverage of the royal honeymoon. In 1934 courtiers had managed to limit press coverage of George and Marina’s honeymoon through negotiations with the chairman of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, but this was not an option in the less deferential atmosphere of 1947.¹⁹⁸ Under the enticing headline, ‘My Wonderful Wedding’, the Daily Mail provided a moment-by-moment account of the royal couple’s arrival at Broadlands:

These allegedly first-hand insights were augmented by descriptions of the layout of the house and the food the lovers ate on their arrival. The intimate perspective the Mail offered into the honeymoon retreat was notably captured in the conversation between the royal lovers: it is highly unlikely it ever took place but it provided a personal view into the princess’s emotional state and this kind of revelation persisted for several days in the popular press.²⁰⁰

It was not to everyone’s liking, though. One twenty-year-old Mass Observation respondent who studied at Bristol university noted that she was ‘really cross’ with ‘the pursuing of the Duke of Edinburgh and the Princess at Broadlands. The “Daily Mirror” was guilty of the most deplorable lack of taste in publishing descriptions of the Royal couple’s room, their arrival, and hour-by-hour accounts of the first few days after their arrival’.²⁰¹ A male Mass Observation respondent, who criticized what he saw as the ‘nauseating publicity’, wryly commented that the prince and princess should have gone ‘to bed together in the Glass Coach in full public view’ as part of a ‘fertility ceremony’ in an effort to satiate the media-led interest in their honeymoon activities.²⁰² A housewife from Buckingham similarly stated that she was ‘sure that many would have entered the bedroom before their curiosity had been alleviated – if then’.²⁰³

The many responses like these demonstrate that members of the public were concerned about the royal lovers’ domestic lives. Two days into their honeymoon the BBC revealed that Elizabeth and Philip would be attending the local Sunday church service at Romsey abbey. As one Mass Observation respondent remarked, this was a ‘mistake’, because tens of thousands of people flocked to the abbey to participate in the service with the princess and prince.²⁰⁴ The Mirror described how ‘when regular church-goers reached the Abbey they found that enthusiastic sightseers from all parts of England had forestalled them. Many were unable to get into the service, because visitors filled the pews’.²⁰⁵ Most of those who had travelled long distances to the abbey found they were spectators to the event, newsreels showing that multitudes of people clambered onto gravestones and climbed up trees in order to glimpse the royal couple on their entry to and exit from the service.²⁰⁶ The commentator on the British Paramount newsreel told cinemagoers that the princess and prince ‘might well have resented a mass intrusion on their honeymoon but very graciously accepted it all as perfectly natural. To be royal is to be denied the full advantage of private life’.²⁰⁷ Reports like this one communicated the idea that the House of Windsor readily engaged with their people despite the imposition this placed on them personally. However, this perspective, which sought to justify and legitimize the media’s intrusive coverage of the royal couple, was contested by many Mass Observation respondents, who voiced stern opposition to the scenes at Romsey.

One schoolmistress from London ‘deplored the bad behaviour at Romsey Abbey’ while a schoolmaster from Manchester noted it was a ‘pity’ the church service had become an event for a ‘sightseeing mob’.²⁰⁸ A twenty-one-year-old man from Nottingham recorded his disapproval in similar terms: ‘I deplore the publicity given to the young couple’s romance and to the prying, sightseeing and reporting carried out on their honeymoon. To spoil the privacy of two young people – who probably would gladly be common citizens rather than royal personages – just for the sake of tradition and “glorious” ceremony is cruel’.²⁰⁹ This respondent viewed royal life as unenviable because of its public nature and the way publicity constrained a normal existence. A teacher from Brighton was among several on the Mass Observation panel who expressed the same view, recording that he was ‘sorry for the couple honeymooning “in a gold-fish bowl”’.²¹⁰ These sorts of comment clearly show that some Mass Observation respondents sympathized with royalty because of their perceived lack of privacy.

This type of sympathy was most strongly articulated by a group of female Mass Observation respondents, all aged below thirty, who wrote that they would ‘hate to have been born in to such a public position’ as Elizabeth.²¹¹ As seen in some of the letters that were published by the Sunday Pictorial at the beginning of 1947, this compassion seems to have stemmed from a wider concern about the princess’s emotional fulfilment; and, as with the Pictorial’s poll, many women who responded to Mass Observation’s directive thought the princess’s personal happiness in marriage would help to compensate for her difficult role. A twenty-nine-year-old woman from Cambridge was clearly heartened by the companionate partnership she detected between the royal couple when she stated that ‘there seems little doubt that [Elizabeth and Philip] are in love. This makes me glad for the Princess’s sake, for her job is difficult enough and her chance of privacy and personal joy so small it is good to know she has someone for whom she has an affection to stand by her’.²¹² A thirty-year-old woman from Oxford similarly expressed that she was ‘glad that Princess Elizabeth has married young and apparently happily so that she can have some home life and probably be with her children before she need assume even greater responsibility’.²¹³ As the next chapter argues, the image of Queen Elizabeth II as a wife and mother evoked a range of emotional responses from British television viewers who tuned in to watch the new monarch’s coronation on 2 June 1953. However, one of the recurrent reactions was that the queen’s emotional fulfilment was eclipsed by increasingly heavy duties made worse by the increased media exposure of her personal life. In tracing the emergence of these kinds of sentiment, we should look to the events of 1947 as a key moment of change when a new, media-inspired discourse of royal suffering helped to transform how members of the public perceived royalty.

Conclusion

Mass Observation respondents invested Princess Elizabeth’s position as heiress presumptive to the throne with emotional meaning that centred on her achieving personal fulfilment at home. The many reports which included the view that she had a ‘rotten job’, a ‘rotten sort of life’, ‘trying public duties’ and a ‘harder task than any previous ruler’ reveal the kind of anxiety that sections of the public expressed about the princess’s private life.²¹⁴ Women of a similar age to Elizabeth in particular seem to have articulated this kind of sympathy because they identified closely with her domestic ambitions. However, it also connected with a broader public belief, uninfluenced by gender, that royalty had a right to enjoy a private home life at a time when this was a central tenet of a national culture of domesticity. Notably, more than double the number of Mass Observation respondents criticized the intrusion into the royal honeymoon than opposed the expense of Elizabeth and Philip’s wedding, demonstrating the special concern that members of the public had for the princess and prince’s personal fulfilment.

The emergence of a powerful emotional identification with royal domesticity can be located to the early 1930s and wartime, with members of the British public equating the royal family’s suffering with that of the nation at large. However, we should see 1947 as a crucial moment when the Church, crown and royalist media renewed their triumvirate in order to promote the House of Windsor’s symbolic leadership of the nation’s family-centred culture against a backdrop of declining deference, increasingly critical media coverage and anxieties regarding the British public’s morality. Writing to George VI after the wedding, the archbishop of Canterbury boasted of this triumvirate’s achievement:

As we have seen, the emphasis not only on the religiosity of the event but also its ‘simplicity’ and egalitarian appeal to ordinary British people was a note regularly sounded by officials and the media in the build up to the marriage and the coverage of the wedding day itself. Although there was some dissent on the Mass Observation panel, the overwhelming belief contained in the personal testimonies was that the wedding did indeed reinvigorate royalty’s moral and emotional role at the heart of society. New broadcasting techniques immersed listeners more deeply in a royal wedding programme than ever before and strengthened the empathetic feelings that linked them to the bridal couple. And, at a time not only of austerity but also of growing concern about public morality, the blanket media coverage heightened public awareness of a nation united around the monarchy, with Mass Observation respondents conflating royal family life with the symbolic continuity of national life.

The journalist Harry Hopkins later stated that ‘in a febrile world of apparently collapsing moral values, the unselfconscious picture of domestic normality presented [by the royal family] was inevitably reassuring’.²¹⁶ The ‘normality’ he singled out is significant because, as this chapter has shown, it was part of a carefully crafted public image designed to enhance the House of Windsor’s popular appeal. In part, the emphasis on royal ‘ordinariness’ seems to have come in response to attacks on Philip’s ‘foreignness’. Lord Mountbatten understood that, following a socially levelling war, the monarchy needed to extend its reach through new democratic channels if it was to overcome public criticism both of older hierarchies and its dynastic links to Europe. As we have seen, a number of the Mass Observation panel responded positively to the prince’s public image as an ‘ordinary’ English naval officer. Mountbatten’s public relations triumph was mirrored in the success of courtiers and the journalist Dermot Morrah in projecting an image of Elizabeth that deliberately paired her apparent desire for an ‘ordinary’ fulfilling home life with a discursive emphasis on the ‘extraordinary’ onerous duties bequeathed on her by birth. These characteristics naturally existed in an uneasy tension and evoked deep public sympathy for the princess and her ostensibly inhibited existence.

The Sunday Pictorial’s poll on the rumoured royal engagement in January 1947 had first uncovered this kind of empathy for Elizabeth, as well as some initial opposition to her relationship with Philip which hinged on the constitutional question of whether it was sensible for the British monarchy once again to tie itself to Greek royalty. However, from the many responses to the Mass Observation royal wedding directive of December 1947 it appears that, where opposition persisted, it tended to do so in relation to the economic advantages afforded the royal lovers, while the prevailing attitude was one of sympathy for a couple whose personal enrichment was constrained not only by their demanding public lives but also by an increasingly outspoken media that seemed intent on exposing royal private life at all costs.

___________

1 J. Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI: His Life and Reign (London, 1958), pp. 75–24; R. Lacey, Majesty: Elizabeth II and the House of Windsor (London, 1979), pp. 202–3; S. Bradford, George VI (London, 2011), pp. 559–62; B. Pimlott, The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy (London, 2002), pp. 110–1, 132–3 and 142–3.

2 P. Ziegler, Crown and People (London, 1978), pp. 69–79 and 80–4; I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Royal rations’, History Today, xliii (1993), pp. 13–5; D. Kynaston, Austerity Britain: 1945–51 (London, 2008), pp. 243–5.

3 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Royal rations’, pp. 14–5.

4 More than 360 MO respondents answered the question, ‘How do you feel about the royal wedding?’ It was the last question in a 4-part directive sent out to the MO panel in December 1947 which also included questions on the topics of the cost of living, funny jokes and Christmas festivities. As is always the case with MO, it seems likely that answering these initial questions, especially the one on the respondent’s financial resources, affected how participants answered the question on the royal wedding. This might account for some of the concerns expressed by more than 60 respondents about the cost of the wedding. The directive replies can be located in the online Mass Observation archive using the keyword search ‘1947 royal wedding’ and are filed under ‘Directive Questionnaire December 1947’. They are referred to here using their respondent numbers. The responses can also be found as hard copies in the MO archive at The Keep (University of Sussex): see SxMOA1/3/106.

5 G. G. Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil: Remaking the British Working Class, 1939–1945 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 183–216; C. Langhamer, ‘The meanings of home in postwar Britain’, Jour. Contemp. Hist., xl (2005), 341–62, at pp. 345–7; P. Thane, ‘Unmarried motherhood in twentieth-century England’, Women’s Hist. Rev., xx (2011), 11–29, at pp. 19–21.

6 A. Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press, 1918– 1978 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 241–6; L. Beers, ‘Whose opinion? Changing attitudes towards opinion polling in British politics, 1937–1964’, Twentieth Century British Hist., xvii (2006), 177–205, at pp. 185–90; D. Hucker, Public Opinion and the End of Appeasement in Britain and France (Farnham, 2011), pp. 10–2; J. Thompson, British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion’, 1867–1914 (Cambridge, 2013).

7 C. Langhamer, The English in Love: the Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford, 2013), pp. 3–7 and 23–5; C. Langhamer, ‘Love, selfhood and authenticity in post-war Britain’, Cult. and Soc. History, ix (2012), 277–97, esp. at pp. 277–82.

8 For an excellent discussion of the Greek royal family’s reputation in this period and the negotiations between the British government, the House of Windsor and Lord Mountbatten regarding Prince Philip’s naturalization, see B. Pimlott, The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy (London, 2002), pp. 94–101.

9 W. Shawcross, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: an Official Biography (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 625.

10 For one of the first press rumours regarding the engagement, see Daily Express, 9 Nov. 1946, p. 2.

11 Manchester Guardian, 2 Jan. 1947, p. 4.

12 News Chronicle, 3 Jan. 1947, as quoted in Sunday Pictorial, 5 Jan. 1947, p. 1.

13 Bingham, Family Newspapers?, pp. 97–8.

14 Beers, ‘Whose opinion?’, p. 195.

15 Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 244.

16 Sunday Pictorial, 5 Jan. 1947, p. 1.

17 Sunday Pictorial, 5 Jan. 1947, p. 1.

18 Sunday Pictorial, 5 Jan. 1947, p. 1.

19 Sunday Pictorial, 5 Jan. 1947, p. 1.

20 Langhamer, The English in Love, pp. 3–5.

21 Sunday Pictorial, 5 Jan. 1947, p. 1.

22 Bingham, Family Newspapers?, pp. 244–5.

23 Quoted in Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 245.

24 Daily Mail, 6 Jan. 1947, p. 2.

25 Sunday Pictorial, 12 Jan. 1947, p. 1. This number of letters is quoted in a letter from A. Christiansen to Lord Beaverbrook, 17 Jan. 1947 (PA, BBK/H/120).

26 Sunday Pictorial, 12 Jan. 1947, p. 1.

27 Sunday Pictorial, 12 Jan. 1947, pp. 4–5. It is possible that the Pictorial fabricated the results it published, either to make the betrothal seem more contentious than it actually was or to disguise overwhelming hostility to the marriage in order to avoid the royal household’s disapproval. However, given the sensitivity of the topic, it seems likely the newspaper would not have risked excessive manipulation for fear of discovery and the results have therefore been interpreted at face value.

28 Sunday Pictorial, 12 Jan. 1947, p. 4.

29 Sunday Pictorial, 12 Jan. 1947, p. 4.

30 T. Kushner, We Europeans? Mass-Observation, ‘Race’ and British Identity in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2004), pp. 166–88; D. M. Craig, ‘The crowned republic? Monarchy and anti-monarchy in Britain, 1760–1901’, Hist. Jour., xlvi (2003), 167–85, at p. 179.

31 Sunday Pictorial, 12 Jan. 1947, p. 4.

32 Sunday Pictorial, 12 Jan. 1947, p. 5.

33 Sunday Pictorial, 12 Jan. 1947, p. 5.

34 Sunday Pictorial, 12 Jan. 1947, p. 4.

35 Sunday Pictorial, 12 Jan. 1947, p. 5.

36 Sunday Pictorial, 19 Jan. 1947, p. 1.

37 Sunday Pictorial, 19 Jan. 1947, p. 7.

38 Sunday Pictorial, 19 Jan. 1947, p. 7. The newspaper included this italicized emphasis.

39 M. Francis, ‘Tears, tantrums, and bared teeth: the emotional economy of three Conservative prime ministers, 1951–1963’, Jour. Brit. Stud., xli (2002), 354–87, esp. at pp. 358–63.

40 Langhamer, The English in Love, p. 6. See also J. Finch and P. Summerfield, ‘Social reconstruction and the emergence of companionate marriage, 1945–1959’, in Marriage, Domestic Life and Social Change: Writings for Jacqueline Burgoyne, ed. D. Clark (London, 1991), pp. 7–32.

41 Sunday Pictorial, 19 Jan. 1947, p. 7.

42 Daily Express, 11 July 1947, p. 4.

43 Daily Express, 15 July 1947, p. 4.

44 Daily Mirror, 16 July 1947, p. 2 and 21 July 1947, p. 2.

45 E.g., MOA, 1079, 2427, 3848, 3116, 3827, 3820, 4213, 4022, 3524, 3808, 3653, 3667, 4301.

46 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, p. 118.

47 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.

48 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, p. 115.

49 BOD, MS. Dawson 40, fos. 19, 22, 180 (diary entries on 21 and 27 Jan., 9 Dec. 1936); MS. Dawson 40, fo. 70 (diary entry on 5 May 1937).

50 A. Lascelles to D. Morrah, 10 March 1947, in T. Utley, ‘Grandad’s words made Churchill and the Queen cry. How sad Beardy misquoted them this week ...’, Daily Mail, 8 June 2012 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2156173/Grandads-words-Churchill-Queen-How-sad-Beardy-misquoted-week-.html> [accessed 21 Feb. 2017].

51 Interview with G. Thompson, British Movietone News, 28 Jan. 1992, side 2 (24:45–29:04) <https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/graham-thompson> [accessed 25 Apr. 2017]. For Thompson’s coverage, see ‘Princess’s Birthday Message’, British Movietone News, 24 Apr. 1947.

52 Quoted in Pimlott, Elizabeth II, p. 117. The speech can be heard at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUlToHE_27U> [accessed 27 March 2019].

53 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, p. 118.

54 Lascelles to Morrah, 10 March 1947, in Utley, ‘Grandad’s words’.

55 MOA, 3418.

56 MOA, 3388. For other examples, see MOA, 1061, 4186, 4299, 4221, 4223, 4241, 1095, 4235, 3434, 1034, 4161, 4279, 3900, 2511.

57 MOA, 3426 and 3945.

58 D. Morrah, Princess Elizabeth: the Illustrated Story of Twenty-One Years in the Life of the Heir Presumptive (London, 1947).

59 See chs. 3 and 4.

60 Morrah, Princess Elizabeth, pp. 93–128.

61 Morrah, Princess Elizabeth, pp. 12 and 62.

62 Morrah, Princess Elizabeth, p. 128.

63 Morrah, Princess Elizabeth, pp. 7, 46, 62, 112.

64 Daily Mail, 21 Apr. 1947, p. 2.

65 Daily Express, 21 Apr. 1947, p. 2.

66 ‘Princess Elizabeth is 21: The Girl Who Will Be Queen’, Pathé News, 21 Apr. 1947; ‘Heiress to the Throne’, British Paramount News, 21 Apr. 1947.

67 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 99–101.

68 CC, SOC. Driberg Supplementary 4, Lord Mountbatten to T. Driberg, 14 Aug. 1946.

69 CC, SOC. Driberg Supplementary 4, Lord Mountbatten to T. Driberg, 4 Dec. 1946.

70 CC, SOC. Driberg Supplementary 4, Lord Mountbatten to T. Driberg, 14 Aug. 1946 and ‘Notes on Prince Philip’.

71 PA, BBK/H/115, A. Christiansen to Lord Beaverbrook, 12 Dec. 1946.

72 Reynolds News, 8 Dec. 1946, p. 3. Driberg penned a follow-up article which was published in the Reynolds News on 15 Dec. 1946, p. 4.

73 On the royal family’s attitude to Philip, see Bradford, George VI, pp. 556–9; Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 86–105; and Shawcross, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, pp. 623–6.

74 Bradford, George VI, p. 556.

75 Shawcross, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, p. 625.

76 E.g., News Chronicle, 10 July 1947, p. 1; Daily Sketch, 10 July 1947, p. 1; Daily Herald, 10 July 1947, p. 1.

77 Daily Mirror, 10 July 1947, p. 1.

78 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, p. 137. Current restrictions on the archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher’s files in Lambeth Palace regarding Elizabeth II and Prince Philip prohibit any deep investigation of the official discussions concerning the latter’s reception into the Church of England. The only reference to it is in LPL, Fisher 34, fo. 54, A. Lascelles to G. Fisher, 29 July 1947.

79 Daily Sketch, 10 July 1947, p. 12. For similar examples, see Daily Telegraph 10 July 1947, p. 4; and Daily Herald, 10 July 1947, p. 2.

80 Manchester Guardian, 10 July 1947, p. 3. The News Chronicle similarly softened its original criticism of the rumoured royal betrothal in January (News Chronicle, 10 July 1947, p. 2).

81 Daily Express, 10 July 1947, p. 2; Daily Telegraph, 10 July 1947, p. 1.

82 CC, SOC. Driberg Supplementary 4, ‘Notes on Prince Philip’.

83 ‘The Royal Romance’, Pathé News, 14 July 1947.

84 On post-war physical and sexual culture, see S. Szreter and K. Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England, 1918–1963 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 286–93; I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939– 1955 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 91–2.

85 Daily Sketch, 10 July 1947, p. 12; ‘Royal Betrothal’, British Movietone News, 14 July 1947. See also ‘The Royal Wedding’, Gaumont British News, 24 Nov. 1947; News Chronicle, 20 Nov. 1947, p. 6; Sunday Pictorial, 13 July 1947, p. 7.

86 M. Francis, ‘Cecil Beaton’s romantic Toryism and the symbolic economy of wartime Britain’, Jour. Brit. Stud., xlv (2006), 90–117.

87 Sunday Express, 16 Nov. 1947, p. 2. For other media examples of Philip’s highly modern persona, see Manchester Guardian, 10 July 1947, p. 5; Daily Herald, 10 July 1947, p. 2.

88 ‘Lieutenant Mountbatten Returns to Duty’, Gaumont British News, 7 Aug. 1947. See also ‘Lieut. Mountbatten Back at Duty’, British Movietone News, 7 Aug. 1947; ‘Philip Mountbatten Goes Back to Work’, Pathé News, 7 Aug. 1947.

89 <http://bufvc.ac.uk/newsonscreen/search/index.php/document/101910_shotlist> [accessed 12 Aug. 2018].

90 MOA, 4223.

91 MOA, 3887.

92 MOA, 3034 and 4271.

93 E.g., MOA, 4203, 4273, 3015, 3121, 3642, 3816, 3434, 4153.

94 See ch. 4.

95 MOA, 3841.

96 MOA, 3808.

97 MOA, 1642 and 4214. For other concerns about Philip’s Greek background, see MOA, 3893, 1980, 2567, 3790.

98 See n. 77.

99 Daily Mirror, 10 Nov. 1947, p. 1; Daily Mirror, 11 Nov. 1947.

100 Daily Mirror, 20 Nov. 1947, p. 1. For a discussion of the circulation of the Mirror in these years, see Bingham, Family Newspapers?, pp. 7–9 and 16–20.

101 Ziegler, Crown and People, p. 81.

102 MOA, 1654 and 3893. On elite concerns about Philip’s German links, see Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 104–5.

103 B. Harrison, Seeking a Role: the United Kingdom, 1951–1970 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 536–7; Kushner, We Europeans?, pp. 192–201.

104 MOA, 3893. This might have referred to the family tree presented in the Daily Mail, 10 July 1947, p. 4.

105 Langhamer, The English in Love, pp. 47–8; Finch and Summerfield, ‘Social reconstruction’.

106 Sunday Express, 13 July 1947, p. 2.

107 Sunday Express, 13 July 1947, p. 2.

108 Sunday Express, 9 Nov. 1947, p. 2 and 16 Nov. 1947, p. 2.

109 Compare ‘The Royal Engagement’, Gaumont British News, 14 July 1947, in which Philip and Elizabeth strolled arm-in-arm, with the film of George and Marina from 1934 that showed the couple walking side-by-side but not physically touching one another (‘Royal Honeymoon’, British Movietone News, 6 Dec. 1934).

110 ‘Royal Betrothal’, British Movietone News; Daily Telegraph, 10 July 1947, p. 1; Daily Mail, 11 July 1947, p. 5; Daily Mirror, 21 Nov. 1947, p. 1.

111 MOA, 1015.

112 MOA, 4161.

113 ‘The Royal Romance’, Pathé News. See also ‘The Royal Engagement’, Gaumont British News, 14 July 1947.

114 Daily Express, 10 July 1947, p. 1; Daily Mail, 10 July 1947, p. 1; Daily Telegraph, 10 July 1947, p. 1; News Chronicle, 10 July 1947, p. 1.

115 MOA, 4303.

116 MOA, 4202.

117 E.g., MOA, 3840, 1325, 2984, 3796, 4008, 4223, 3121, 4292, 4267, 4246, 3005, 3806, 3810. The following accounts are typical. One 55-year-old woman from Morcambe (Lancashire) (MOA, 2675) stated: ‘I’m very pleased that it is a real love match and not a diplomatic one; and I think they really are a lovely couple’. A woman from Truro (Cornwall) (MOA, 4247) noted that she was ‘glad Princess Elizabeth was marrying someone she loved [instead of ] having one of these arranged marriages which has so often been the lot of heir and heiresses to the throne’. One (MOA, 2068) of the 20 men who empathized with the royal romance described how, despite having originally been troubled by Philip’s Greek background, he realized that ‘political marriages were out of date and could no longer determine political allegiances’. He concluded that ‘Elizabeth was lucky to find a man with whom she was in love and who was eligible to marry her’.

118 A good example of this came from a middle-aged woman from Watford (MOA, 4203) who wrote that ‘the young couple should be very happy, the bridegroom seems gay, looks attractive and should be a source of strength to the Princess as she undertakes more of the causes of the State’.

119 For examples of uncertain respondents, see MOA, 3913, 2475, 1099. For disbelievers, see MOA, 3009, 3667, 3789.

120 C. Langhamer, ‘The meanings of home in postwar Britain’, Jour. Contemp. Hist., xl (2005), 341–62, at pp. 342–4.

121 Langhamer, The English in Love, p. 10.

122 Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil, p. 216; ‘Thane, ‘Unmarried motherhood’, pp. 20–3; Langhamer, ‘The meanings of home’, p. 345.

123 E.g., the 3 opinion polls conducted by the weekly magazine News Review on the role and relevance of the Church of England in post-war Britain: News Review, 23 Oct. 1947, pp. 1, 5, 19–22; 30 Oct. 1947, pp. 22–4; 6 Nov. 1947, pp. 22–4. The pessimistic findings of the News Review’s opinion polls complemented the analysis of Mass Observation’s own study of the religiosity of a metropolitan district in Puzzled People: a Study in Popular Attitudes to Religion, Ethics, Progress and Politics in a London Borough (London, 1947). For a more optimistic historical perspective, see C. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London, 2009), pp. 170–5.

124 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 132–3 and 142–3.

125 TNA, PREM 8/656, L. N. Helsby to A. Lascelles, 22 Sept. 1947.

126 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 127–36. Also see Sunday Pictorial, 16 Nov. 1947, p. 1; Manchester Guardian, 23 Oct. 1947, p. 5 and 20 Nov. 1947, p. 3; Daily Mirror, 20 Nov. 1947, p. 2.

127 TNA, PREM 8/656, L. N. Helsby’s written record of conversation with A. Lascelles, 25 Sept. 1947.

128 A. Webster, ‘Fisher, Geoffrey Francis, Baron Fisher of Lambeth’, in ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/31108> [accessed 12 Oct. 2018].

129 LPL, Fisher 34, fo. 93, ‘Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech in support of the House of Lords’ Address of Congratulations on 22nd October 1947’.

130 LPL, Fisher 34, fo. 51, J. B. Adams to G. Fisher, 18 July 1947.

131 LPL, Fisher 34, fo. 53, G. Fisher to J. B. Adams, 25 July 1947.

132 King George’s Jubilee Trust, The Wedding of Her Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten (London, 1947), p. 19.

133 E.g., M. Young and P. Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London, 1957), appendix 4: ‘Kinship terms used in the study’.

134 Quoted in The Times, 21 Nov. 1947, p. 4.

135 E.g., Daily Mirror, 21 Nov. 1947, p. 2; Daily Mail, 21 Nov. 1947, p. 2.

136 Daily Mirror, 21 Nov. 1947, p. 2.

137 Daily Herald, 21 Nov. 1947, p. 2. For similar examples, see Daily Express, 21 Nov. 1947, p. 2; Daily Sketch, 20 Nov. 1947, p. 6.

138 BBCWA, R30/845/1-3 and T14/1350/1-2.

139 BFINA, NRA vol. 3, m.2511, ‘Television and the Royal Rota’, 26 Feb. 1948. See also m.2236, ‘Buckingham Palace and Television’, 26 Sept. 1946.

140 BBCWA, T14/1350/1, Record of Interview at Buckingham Palace on 4th September with Cmdr. R. Colville, Press Secretary to H.M. King on the subject of Televising the Royal Wedding, 22nd Nov. 1947.

141 BBCWA, T14/1350/1, Private memo from P. H. Dorté, 16 Sept. 1947.

142 BBCWA, T14/1350/1, private memo from C. I. Orr-Ewing, 8 Sept. 1947.

143 BBCWA, R30/845/2, R. Colville to B. E. Nicolls, 10 Oct. 1947; ‘The Royal Wedding: Prospective Unauthorised Commercial Recordings’, 17 Oct. 1947.

144 Interview with G. Thompson, 28 Jan. 1992, side 2 (08:45–15:00).

145 ‘The Royal Wedding’, British Movietone News, 24 Nov. 1947; ‘The Princess Weds’, Pathé News, 21 Nov. 1947.

146 MOA, 4182. On the BBC’s televising of the return procession up the aisle to viewers, see BBCWA, T14/1350/2, C. I. Orr-Ewing to R. Colville, 26 Nov. 1947.

147 BBCWA, R30/845/1, E. Ford to B. E. Nicolls, 13 Sept. 1947.

148 BBCWA, R30/845/2, ‘Royal Wedding Notes on Engineering Arrangements’, undated.

149 R. M. Schafer, ‘Acoustic space’, in Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World, ed. D. Seamon and R. Mugerauer (New York, 1989), pp. 87–99.

150 E.g., MOA, 3815, 3371, 3589.

151 MOA, 4162. For other expressions of jealousy, see MOA, 4301, 3817, 3635.

152 MOA, 1054.

153 MOA, 4383.

154 MOA, 1014 (respondent’s own underlining). For other descriptions of the ‘humanness’ of the event, see MOA, 3426, 3371, 3391.

155 MOA, 4247.

156 MOA, 1644 (original emphasis).

157 BBCWA, R30/845/2, E. M. Peacock to Mr Glassborow, 24 Oct. 1947; R30/845/3, ‘Royal Wedding Appendix’, 14. Nov. 1947.

158 BBCWA, R30/845/1, Memo from Senior Superintendent Engineer, 5 Sept. 1947; R30/845/3, ‘The Royal Wedding’, undated.

159 BBCWA, R30/845/3, ‘Draft Lay-out for Royal Wedding Broadcast’.

160 MOA, 4153.

161 Those who recorded seeing newsreel coverage of the royal wedding included MOA, 3388, 4292, 4322, 4004, 4160, 2895, 3957, 4255, 3827, 3853, 3188, 4383. Those who recorded seeing the Technicolor film included MOA, 4317, 3053, 4301, 3815, 2899, 4123, 4230, 3873.

162 MOA, 1032.

163 ‘The Royal Wedding’, British Paramount News, 24 Nov. 1947. See also ‘The Royal Wedding’, British Movietone News, 24 Nov. 1947; ‘The Princess Weds’, Pathé News, 21 Nov. 1947.

164 The aforementioned housewife from Burnley (MOA, 1032) commented on these scenes: ‘The most interesting part of the film was where the crowd breaks through the police cordon and rushes up near the Palace and the Royal group appears. This must be puzzling to foreigners. These are not victorious captains, famous actors or writers or singers, to be acclaimed by the crowd’. Her words attested to the enduring nature of this ritual between crown and people and what she perceived as its peculiarly British quality.

165 ‘The Princess Weds’, Pathé News. For the accompanying shot list, see <http://bufvc.ac.uk/newsonscreen/search/index.php/document/102085_shotlist> [accessed 6 Oct. 2018].

166 ‘The Royal Wedding’, British Movietone News, 24 Nov. 1947. See also Daily Telegraph, 21 Nov. 1947, p. 1; The Times, 21 Nov. 1947, p. 1; Daily Mail, 21 Nov. 1947, p. 1.

167 BBCWA, R30/845/1, B. E. Nicolls to R. Colville, 25 Sept. 1947 and reply on 25 Sept. 1947; R30/845/2, C. Max-Muller to J. Dunbar, 16 Oct. 1947.

168 BBCWA, R30/845/3, ‘The Royal Wedding’, undated.

169 BBCWA, R30/845/3, ‘The Royal Wedding – draft programme’, p. 5.

170 BBCWA, R30/845/2, Memo from A. Llywelyn-Williams to G. M. Bowen, 8 Oct. 1947, ‘Seats for Broadcasters at the Royal Wedding’, 16 Oct. 1947.

171 PA, BBK/H/121, J. Gordon to Lord Beaverbrook, 10 Oct. 1947.

172 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, p. 165.

173 PA, BBK/H/250, H. Gunn to Lord Beaverbrook, 19 Nov. 1947.

174 TNA, BT 64/1026, J. H. Wilson to J. Colville, 3 Feb. 1948 and reply on 4 Feb. 1948.

175 MOA, 4182.

176 C. Langhamer, ‘Love and courtship in mid-twentieth-century England’, Hist. Jour., l (2007), 173–96, at p. 179; L. King, Family Men: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Britain, 1914–1960 (Oxford, 2015), pp. 5–7.

177 MOA, 3434.

178 MOA, 1388 and 2511.

179 MOA, 2921.

180 MOA, 4098.

181 MOA, 3009. For similar examples, see MOA, 4186, 4202, 4269, 4383.

182 King, Family Men, pp. 117–8.

183 MOA, 4202 and 3388.

184 MOA, 4256.

185 MOA, 3371.

186 MOA, 3005. See also MOA, 4271, 3015, 2746, 4236.

187 MOA, 1679.

188 MOA, 3878.

189 MOA, 2253.

190 MOA, 3795.

191 MOA, 3320.

192 MOA, 1362.

193 MOA, 3120 (original emphasis).

194 MOA, 3900. See also Ziegler, Crown and People, pp. 83–4; and MOA, 4221.

195 E.g., MOA, 1682, 3810, 3891, 4172, 3856, 3891, 2142, 4308, 4236, 3895, 2979, 3960, 4247.

196 Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, pp. 36 and 348–62.

197 LPL, Fisher 276, fos. 1–11, ‘An Account of the Wedding of HRH Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh’ (original emphasis).

198 RA, PS/PSO/GV/MAN/SS340, F. H. Mitchell to T. McAra, 20 Nov. 1934.

199 Daily Mail, 21 Nov. 1947, p. 1.

200 For similar examples, see Daily Sketch, 21 Nov. 1947, p. 1; Daily Mirror, 22 Nov. 1947, pp. 1 and 8.

201 MOA, 4170.

202 MOA, 3806.

203 MOA, 4260.

204 MOA, 3572.

205 Daily Mirror, 24 Nov. 1947, p. 1. See also Daily Express, 24 Nov. 1947, p. 1.

206 ‘Royal Honeymooners Attend Romsey Abbey’, British Movietone News, 27 Nov. 1947.

207 ‘The Royal Honeymoon – A Glimpse’, British Paramount News, 27 Nov. 1947.

208 MOA, 246 and 1118. For other, similar examples, see MOA, 3462, 2267, 1066, 2475, 4186, 3799, 1014, 4419.

209 MOA, 3820.

210 MOA, 3920. For similar examples, see MOA, 1054, 3913, 3841, 4260, 2694, 3856, 4186.

211 MOA, 1668; also MOA, 4161, 3462, 4247.

212 MOA, 4186.

213 MOA, 4299.

214 E.g., MOA, 1061, 3388, 4221, 4223, 4241, 1095, 4235, 3434, 1034, 4161, 4279, 3900, 2511.

215 LPL, Fisher 34, fo. 557, G. Fisher to King George VI, 27 Nov. 1947.

216 H. Hopkins, The New Look: a Social History of the Forties and Fifties in Britain (London, 1963), p. 290.