Introduction

Addressing a gathering of delegates and journalists at the annual conference of the University of Nottingham’s Labour Federation on the evening of 6 January 1934, the barrister and MP for Bristol East, Sir Stafford Cripps, publicly bolstered his reputation as an outspoken radical who was committed to a programme of state-led socialism when he criticized what he saw as an obstructionist establishment, comprising bankers, peers and malign influences at court, which he believed would oppose the implementation of left-wing policies should the Labour party succeed in forming another government. His oblique allusion to the machinations of the royal household was political dynamite and ignited a national furore, with almost every major British newspaper reproducing his words alongside articles that questioned the speaker’s motives and denounced the way he had dragged the king’s name into politics. In the days that followed, Cripps’s political opponents added their voices to the chorus of criticism, while his Labour colleagues sought to distance themselves from the inflammatory speech. He was then forced publicly to clarify what he had meant when he referred to the palace and, in an attempt to explain away his earlier remarks, he told reporters that he had not been referring to George V but to the ‘officials and other people who surround the king’.² He also went on to reassure his detractors that he had full confidence in Britain’s constitutional monarchy as an essentially fair political system and, at another public meeting, he toasted the sovereign’s good health in a very deliberate act of contrition. However, it was too late: Cripps’s about-face was derided by many journalists, who mocked his reference to the shadowy figures who lurked behind the throne in their descriptions of ‘royal bogeymen’ and scornfully accused him of wanting to overthrow Britain’s political system in order to set up a socialist dictatorship under his authority.³

Cripps’s ‘Buckingham Palace speech’ (as it became known) and the media’s response to his words reveal four important things. First of all, it is clear from the outrage of the press and politicians that, for the opinion-formers and law-makers, the crown occupied a near-sacred place in national life in the mid 1930s. The media and political elite revered the monarchy as the institution that had anchored Britain’s evolution from feudalism to modern democracy, something which chimed with the ideas vigorously promoted by courtiers and allies of the throne that the crown stood above party politics and that the constitutional sovereign was the unifying symbol of the British people’s political freedoms.⁴ This mattered more than ever after 1918 because it was the year that witnessed the enfranchisement of all working-class voters for the first time following the passage of the Fourth Reform Act. In the new age of mass politics and social democracy, King George V was celebrated for his impartiality when he oversaw the formation of Britain’s first Labour government in 1924; and for the way he backed constitutional progress as the shape of the nation and empire was transformed by the secession of the Free Irish State in 1922 and the emergence of a Commonwealth comprising autonomous white dominions after 1931 (Figure 0.1). Furthermore, in a very popular move that began in the years immediately before the First World War but accelerated into the interwar period, the king and his family demonstrated a keener interest in the lives of their working-class subjects and engaged with the media more readily in order to publicize their commitment to ‘serving’ their people.⁵ The royals embarked on good-will tours of hard-hit industrial areas, sponsored charitable initiatives aimed at alleviating the material hardships that beset working-class communities and even sought to become patrons of the proletariat through visible support of their cultural pastimes and sports: for example, in 1923 the king attended a Wembley FA Cup final for the first time and presented the victors, Bolton Wanderers, with the trophy.⁶

Figure 0.1. King George V, 1931 (RCIN 2107940). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

George V’s reign of almost twenty-six years (1910–36) thus witnessed the monarchy outwardly focusing its attention on the British ‘masses’. When combined with the king’s symbolic leadership of the nation and empire through the First World War, his close association with the cultures of commemoration and remembrance that resulted from the conflict and the royal family’s more traditional role as promoters of a Christian family-centred morality, this royal ‘democratization’ worked to invest the House of Windsor with the sacrosanct character that was loudly championed by British public commentators in the last years of George V’s reign.⁷ Notably, the monarchy’s democratic qualities also took shape in relation to the forward march of totalitarianism in Europe. Indeed, the second key thing to acknowledge in connection with the media’s response to Cripps’s speech and the misleading accusation that he was planning on establishing a dictatorship of his own is the way that dissenting voices, like his, which dared to criticize the palace or question the virtues of Britain’s royal democracy, were ostracized to the fringes of acceptable public debate and labelled extremist. The mainstream politics of the 1920s and 1930s were defined by a discursive emphasis on the strengths of the nation’s constitutional system and on the vitality of the empire – both ideas that gained even greater traction following the emergence of continental dictatorships that were anti-democratic and intent on extending their territorial influence.⁸ Thus, at the same time that journalists anxiously reported on the rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany, they presented George V’s monarchy as the benevolent, democratic antidote to totalitarianism and as the nation’s constitutional safeguard against the new fascist ideology that was proving so popular in Europe.

However, the third important thing to note in relation to Cripps’s speech was the way his criticism of the royal household made it clear that not everybody in Britain was convinced the monarchy had the national interest at heart in these years. In fact, George V’s promotion of constitutional democracy can be interpreted in a very different light, one which contrasts with the altruistic narrative championed by his supporters. Unbeknownst to almost all of his subjects, the king and his closest advisors could best be characterized as conservative reactionaries. They privately dreaded what the future held and adapted the crown’s role and public image to suit the more democratic times in an attempt to appeal to the sensibilities of working-class people whom they inherently feared and distrusted.⁹ Endowed with new voting powers and a greater sense of confidence, the proletariat could, should they so choose, challenge the political status quo. The House of Windsor was sensitive to these changes, having watched aghast as other European crowned heads of state were toppled by the revolutionary forces unleashed by the First World War; and it was therefore crucial that the monarchy make itself more relevant to the ordinary man, woman and child if it was to win their loyalty and affection.¹⁰ One of the strategies implemented at the suggestion of the king’s advisors witnessed the crown become ‘a living power for good’ among those industrial communities represented by an increasingly outspoken Labour movement.¹¹ Hence the royal tours of the factories and mines, the charitable schemes designed to help disabled veteran servicemen return to work, the sponsorship of hospitals for patients involved in industrial accidents and the promotion of health and fitness among working-class boys and girls – all these and other royal philanthropic initiatives can be viewed as part of a very deliberate campaign to strengthen the royalist sympathies of the masses while checking the progress of socialism among its natural supporters.

More controversially still, George V had actively tried to prop up the status quo through calculated interventions in party politics which tested the limits of his constitutional powers. In the role of mediator, the king had overseen the conferences between the three party leaders that had led to the formation of a National Government in 1931 in an effort to bring some stability to the country’s finances.¹² The monarch managed to persuade his Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, to stay on and lead this cross-party alliance – an act that brought about a dramatic split in the Labour party’s leadership, with the prime minister’s colleagues-turned-critics interpreting his acquiescence to the king’s wishes as a betrayal of the interests of working-class voters, who stood to lose from the National Government’s retrenchment policies.¹³ One such friend-turned-foe was Cripps, who sympathized with MacDonald’s difficult position but, after politely declining the prime minister’s offer of ministerial office in the new coalition administration, returned to a diminished Labour party that went on to lose the subsequent general election of October 1931 to the National Government by the greatest electoral landslide witnessed in recent British history.¹⁴

The seismic political events of 1931 inevitably intensified socialist critiques of the influence that the king and his aides could bring to bear on the machinery of government. When Cripps delivered his infamous speech in 1934, he would have known from the experiences of the left-wing intellectual and politician Harold Laski, who had publicly challenged the king’s actions in 1931, that to criticize the monarchy was to court controversy and invite censure.¹⁵ Nevertheless, this did not prevent him from committing what was, by the standards of the day, a serious faux pas; and the sharp rebuke issued by the media was intended to defend the crown against his attack and to reestablish its inviolable character in the eyes of the public.¹⁶ Indeed, the motivation of the journalists and news editors who sprang to the monarchy’s defence is the fourth and final thing to acknowledge in relation to Cripps’s ill-chosen words in 1934. It was certainly the case that many public commentators respected George V and therefore loyally promoted the idea that the monarchy was a progressive and unifying force in Britain’s royal democracy. But in mocking Cripps’s reference to the royal officials at work behind the scenes, reporters also downplayed the role of Buckingham Palace in government decision-making, toeing the official line that the crown was an impartial political actor, while simultaneously perpetuating the secrecy of the elite networks through which the king and his advisors sought to influence national and imperial affairs.

During and after the First World War, courtiers forged new alliances with some of the most important individuals who made up Britain’s religious and political establishments. These relationships were defined by shared interests that cohered around upholding the social and economic status quo in a period marked by significant change.¹⁷ Despite regular fears arising at court about the journalistic overexposure of the royal family, palace officials also developed a mutually beneficial alliance with the media. By the 1920s the monarchy was reliant on news reporters, photographers and filmmakers to publicize its activities as part of its wider campaign to transform the royal family’s role and image in society. At the same time, the media operated in the belief that the activities of the House of Windsor were of interest to its audiences and thus sought access to royal events and personalities, often via private lines of communication with court officials. These opaque channels were hidden from public view behind the glowing façade of a royal family who, at least outwardly, appeared to be in touch with the interests and needs of their subjects. But they were also governed by the gentlemanly codes of discretion that characterized the upper classes – hence, social etiquette decreed that the strategic activities of courtiers were kept a closely guarded secret and the palace’s campaign to democratize the monarchy’s image was not openly discussed for what it was.¹⁸

These relationships were instrumental in the emergence of a mass media monarchy in the mid twentieth century and yet their significance has been almost entirely neglected by historians of modern Britain. Additionally, scholars have not systematically analysed how the media projected the House of Windsor’s image through the various channels of publicity that existed in these decades or, more importantly still, how members of the public received and made sense of the royal media image.¹⁹ It is with these absences in mind that The Family Firm sets out to map the evolution of the relationship between the monarchy, mass media and the British public from the end of George V’s reign, which, as we have seen, was a period marked by an elite reverence for the crown as an institution that seemed ‘popular’ and ‘democratic’ in its reach and appeal; through the crisis years that witnessed King Edward VIII’s abdication, the collapse of the conventional wisdoms that had underpinned the monarchy and the reimagining of kingship via the complex figure of King George VI; to the more egalitarian, less deferential post-war world and the beginning of the reign of the current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II.

The Family Firm shows how, beginning with George V’s first Christmas radio broadcast in 1932, the royal household worked in tandem with new allies in the media and older partners from the Church of England to initiate a new phase in the House of Windsor’s public relations strategy. Courtiers, clerics and news editors elevated the royal family’s domesticity as a focal-point for national identification by projecting a more intimate and familiar media image of the House of Windsor which was designed to engender strong emotional bonds between British subjects and their royal rulers. Negotiations between these royal ‘stage-managers’ were often tense and characterized by discord, especially when media coverage threatened to undermine the crown as a result of reporters’ efforts to bring audiences closer to the royal family. However, the stage-managers ultimately worked to enhance the relationship between the public and the monarchy in order to unite the population around the focal point of the crown in the unstable years during and either side of the Second World War. In this way the projection of the House of Windsor’s family-centred image can be interpreted as a deliberate political strategy that was comparable to earlier attempts to cultivate the loyalty of the public through new kinds of interaction, such as the highly publicized tours of industrial areas that began before 1914. But, whereas the earlier campaign was motivated by a royal fear of revolutionary socialism, the public relations strategy that developed in the 1930s and evolved through the 1940s and 1950s took shape in response to a number of key events in these decades as well as a wider range of social, cultural and political changes. It is the House of Windsor’s adaptation to these dramatic developments that forms the subject of this book.

A family on the throne

The projection of the family life of the monarchy in the years between 1932 and 1953 was not entirely novel. In the mid nineteenth century Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert, had sought to take on the symbolic leadership of the British middle classes by projecting that social group’s particular values – including domesticity, modesty and religious piety – through new kinds of media such as collectible photographic cartes de visite.²⁰ This move to make the monarchy’s public image appear more bourgeois distanced the royal family from the dissolute aristocratic legacy of the queen’s Hanoverian predecessors. However, it was also motivated by the fact that many middle-class men had gained the vote in 1832, which saw them become the most influential political force in public life; and, at Albert’s insistence, the monarchy thus tried to set a moral example to the rest of the nation in order to engender the loyalty and admiration of the newly empowered bourgeoisie.²¹ The prince consort also helped the crown to take a crucial step forward on its journey towards modern constitutional monarchy when he advocated that the sovereign embrace an impartial role in overseeing the day-to-day business of government, henceforth avoiding controversial entanglements with party politicians which might otherwise alienate sections of the largely middle-class electorate.²²

Although the public image of the Victorian family monarchy encountered setbacks with Albert’s untimely death in 1861 and the queen’s prolonged period of mourning, the major royal events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries celebrated and embellished this domestic narrative. These state occasions were also made more visible to media audiences by the emergence of a national newspaper industry in the 1880s and 1890s which superseded the localized, provincial news networks that had existed before then.²³ National daily newspapers provided the new crucial channel through which royal jubilees, funerals and coronations were projected to a nationwide readership.²⁴ While these events were partly staged as public spectacles that celebrated Britain’s imperial power and military might, they also promoted a royal national identity that centred on identification with the figurehead of the monarch and his or her family. As historian David Cannadine first noted in his observations on the royal ‘invention of tradition’, this national identity was not only meant to find favour with the British middle classes but also with an increasingly restless industrial proletariat, who were encouraged to identify with the symbol of the monarchy as part of a larger national collective.²⁵ Indeed, the idea of the unifying family monarchy owes its origins to the essayist and political theorist Walter Bagehot, who, in his 1867 exposition on the nature of Britain’s government, advised that the crown embrace its role as the ‘dignified’ theatrical part of the constitution. He argued that the ‘ family on the throne’ was an appealing symbol with which the public could identify emotionally and could thus engender adherence to the nation’s parliamentary system among the masses.²⁶ Bagehot called himself a reformer, but he was anxious about the prospect of working-class people gaining the vote and thought that if they were instead given a royal symbol to venerate it would ensure their loyalty to the socio-political hierarchy while delaying their calls for greater electoral representation.²⁷ He also thought that, if the monarchy fully embraced its symbolic role, this would enable politicians to exercise direct political power as part of the ‘efficient’ machinery of government.

Bagehot’s division of royal symbolic power from the ‘real’ political power wielded by Britain’s elected representatives has had an important influence on the way scholars have approached the history of the modern constitutional monarchy. To what extent royal officials actually heeded Bagehot’s advice is unknown, but every monarch since George V is supposed to have been guided by his constitutional principles and it is notable that royal events like those mentioned above were staged more publicly, more frequently and with greater aplomb to make Britain’s family monarchy more visible to the nation at a time when there was growing social and political unrest.²⁸ It is also significant that there developed an intense interest among media audiences in the personalities that made up the royal family in these years. Improving literacy rates and technological advancements in printing gave rise to the so-called ‘new journalism’, which aimed to cater to the popular tastes of an expanding working-and lower-middle-class readership.²⁹ One of the mainstays of new ‘popular’ newspapers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express were human-interest stories which presented intimate details about the lives of the rich and famous. The popular press developed a keen interest in the goings-on at court and found that readers were very receptive to coverage of the lives, loves and losses of the royal family. Hence media reports on the funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901, the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, his death in 1910 and the coronation of his son and heir, George V, in 1911 were characterized by a focus on the human qualities of the monarchs, their distinctive characters and their family relationships.³⁰ Another example from George V’s early reign that witnessed the new human-interest focus come together with the monarchy’s nation-building role was the formal investiture of his eldest son, Edward, then aged seventeen, as prince of Wales in 1911. As part of an elaborate ceremony that was staged in Caernarfon castle, courtiers worked with the Liberal government, the clergy, local officials and news editors to project the investiture as an intimate act of union between the prince and his father in order to promote an inclusive British national identity that recognized Wales’s distinctive cultural heritage.³¹

The image of the family monarchy was also part of the crown’s public relations strategy during the First World War. At a time of national crisis that was marked by an upsurge in public criticism of the inequalities of the British class system and of the royal family’s German and Russian relations, George V further democratized his dynasty’s image by developing more informal relationships with those of his subjects who were serving their country, either on the Western Front or through their work in the factories, mines and hospitals back in Britain. This was achieved through tours of inspection, medal investitures and good-will visits undertaken by the monarch and his consort, Queen Mary, on Europe’s battlefields and on the home front. Posing for government-sponsored newsreel crews and carefully selected groups of reporters, the royal couple engaged personally, sympathetically and without ceremony with the men and women who were contributing to the war effort.³² It was in the fraught years of 1917–18, which witnessed a rise in industrial disorder back in Britain and an increase in anti-royal sentiment, that the king and queen also started to engage more directly with film crews, smiling and half-glancing at the camera lens in order to convey a more human image to cinema-goers who saw the newsreels.³³ However, the existential threat the crown appeared to face in this period required more drastic innovation, too, and it is significant that at the suggestion of his private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, George V took the unprecedented decision to rename his family the ‘House of Windsor’ in an attempt to silence those critics who had publicly condemned the Teutonic sounding ‘House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha’.³⁴

George V’s children also played a symbolic part in the First World War, either through philanthropic roles, like Princess Mary, who was the patron of a number of charitable schemes designed to help and hearten servicemen and their families; or as active participants, as in the case of her elder brothers, Prince Albert, later duke of York, and Edward, prince of Wales. Heather Jones has noted in her work on the monarchy’s role in the war years that it was through the personality and image of Edward that the more egalitarian relationship between royalty, the media and the public came of age. The king was feted by the press when he allowed his eldest son to join Sir John French’s staff on the Western Front at the end of 1914; and, although the prince was prevented from actually fighting against the enemy, he spent four years either engaged in the same hard, physical work as other servicemen or on inspections and touring trenches as his father’s surrogate.³⁵ Media coverage of the prince’s wartime activities notably highlighted the personal interest that he took in the lives and welfare of his fellow soldiers, with news reporters emphasizing how, through the horizontal bonds of military comradeship, he became a symbol of the monarchy’s increasingly democratic relationship with its British and imperial subjects.

The idea that the war had a class-levelling effect in the way it brought monarchy and people together under unique circumstances was a powerful one and was carried forward into the 1920s, when, again as his father’s representative, the prince of Wales toured the dominions and colonies to acknowledge their contribution and sacrifices as part of the war effort. As Frank Mort has discussed, it was during these trips that Edward established himself as a world-famous figure and consolidated his constitutional authority as a future king and the personal link that connected Britain to its far-flung empire (Figure 0.2).³⁶ While touring the dominions he was accompanied by journalists and film crews who presented him to media audiences back home as a democratic prince: he was handsome, smiling and willing to engage in close physical contact with the ordinary people he met. His military service earned him a special place in the lives of veterans and bereaved families in the years after 1918; and the relationships he worked to forge with these constituencies while on his imperial tours were given personal meaning through the media coverage of his informal interactions with them.³⁷ This was also the case back home in Britain, where Edward joined his parents and siblings in promoting and publicizing the many civic and philanthropic ventures led by the House of Windsor after the war, which aimed to foster social cohesion and deepen the royalist sympathies of the proletariat through patronage of working-class culture and the targeted alleviation of the economic hardships that afflicted the masses in the 1920s and early 1930s.³⁸

Figure 0.2. King Edward VIII as prince of Wales, April 1935 (NPG x27929). © National Portrait Gallery, London.

The legacy of the First World War also loomed large as part of George V’s reputation in the years after the conflict, with his titular positions as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and supreme governor of the Church of England invested with new, powerful symbolism in a period marked by mass mourning and the commemoration of the war dead.³⁹ In his first years on the throne the king readily championed the Christian moral values that he had absorbed as a young Victorian man, but these took on added meaning as a result of the war. The nineteenth-century ideals of duty and self-sacrifice were of particular importance to a world that sought to understand and justify the death and destruction wrought by more than four years of conflict. As Philip Williamson has noted, the royal family spoke publicly and with increasing zeal of the ‘service’ they performed on behalf of their subjects as they embarked on the new activities that redefined their official roles after 1918.⁴⁰ This concept of royal service was underpinned by the idea of reciprocity: it was performed in acknowledgement of the sacrifices made by the people who had contributed to the war effort; and was performed for their benefit now in the belief it would meet with their admiration and set a good example to the public, instructing them in the kinds of duty that they, as political citizens, also owed society.

At the same time as this public language of royal duty was taking root, the king worked to promote Christian moral values by staging the marriages of his children Princess Mary and the duke of York as national celebrations in 1922 and 1923 respectively. According to his biographers, George V was, however, troubled by the fact that his eldest son and heir, the prince of Wales, showed no such inclination to settle down; and the king’s fears about the impending succession escalated after he almost died of septicaemia in the winter of 1928/29.⁴¹ Despite the broad royalist consensus that seems to have defined British political life in the early 1930s, there were grave doubts at court and in official circles about Edward’s suitability as future king.⁴² Unlike his father he was not a pious man and could even be openly disdainful of religious ceremony, which infuriated the clergy.⁴³ More problematical still was the fact that since the end of the war the prince had, in his almost constant pursuit of the fast life, engaged in a series of reckless love affairs with married women.⁴⁴ Although he would inherit the title of supreme governor of the Church of England on becoming king, it was clear to those who knew him personally that he lacked the moral scruples required of the ‘defender of the faith’, given the Church’s strict teachings on the indissolubility of marriage. When George V finally died on 20 January 1936 and the prince succeeded to the throne as Edward VIII, he did so as an unmarried forty-one-year-old and was ill-equipped to lead a dynasty which, as we shall see, had worked extremely hard in the early 1930s to present itself as a unifying symbol of Christian family life.

Importantly for the new king, his moral shortcomings were initially kept hidden from his subjects by a tight-lipped elite who had admired his father and who initially hoped that Edward would grow into his new role.⁴⁵ Ultimately, though, the gentlemanly codes of discretion that defined upper-class society could not withstand the pressures of the modern media exposé and, when it was finally announced less than eleven months into his reign that the king was in a relationship with an American woman called Wallis Simpson, who had already been married to two other men, both of whom were still alive, the repressive silence that had for so long guarded the crown against public criticism was instead filled with an overwhelming howl of shock, outrage and disbelief.⁴⁶ In the days that followed many of Edward’s subjects wrote to him to demand that he give up the woman he loved in order to carry out his duties as king, but he opted instead to renounce the throne and marry her and was encouraged to follow his heart by other members of the public who wrote to tell him that he deserved personal happiness.⁴⁷ In order to understand the range of public responses to the events of December 1936, we need to consider the way that new kinds of journalism shaped how members of the royal family became celebrities after 1918 and the way new media technologies combined with the rise of popular cultures of domesticity and self-fulfilment to transform the emotional dimensions of modern British society. It is to these that we must now turn in order to contextualize the major historical shifts at the heart of The Family Firm.

Fame, family and emotion in mid twentieth-century Britain

As we have seen, the monarchy was imbued with a complex assortment of meanings in the mid 1930s: the king was the symbolic leader of a burgeoning constitutional democracy and was publicly elevated as the safeguard of the nation’s political freedoms; he was the figurehead that held together an empire in a period marked by the loosening of the formal political bonds that had enabled the British government to exert control over the colonies and dominions; he and his family were at the centre of the nation’s philanthropic and civic cultures; and, in promoting Christianity’s teachings on marriage, service and duty, the House of Windsor had become the head of the country’s morality. However, the royal family were also modern celebrities who owed their fame both to the new kinds of media exposure engineered by reporters and news editors intent on commodifying royal life for public consumption and to courtiers who discerned value in popularizing the royal personalities who made up the House of Windsor. The leading figure here was Edward, prince of Wales, who, in the years before his accession and abdication, was turned into a celebrity through the media coverage of his activities, both as the jet-setting tourist of empire and as a regular on London’s fashionable nightclub scene.⁴⁸ Although part of his celebrity lay in the fact that, as heir to the throne, he was a symbol of national and imperial continuity, he was also Britain’s answer to the Hollywood stars of the 1920s. A new kind of media exposure that grew out of the human-interest journalism of the early twentieth century worked to reveal, with increasing levels of intensity, the private man behind the royal public image. The result was that Edward became one of the best-known figures in the English-speaking world, with the press following his every move and at times relentlessly pursuing him for exclusive stories or photographs that would further illuminate his personality.⁴⁹

This emphasis on royal revelation accorded with a significant shift in Britain’s celebrity culture in the 1920s. Reporters and media audiences desired more intimate access to the famous because they had become accustomed to the idea that a celebrity’s public image was just that – a manufactured fantasy created for public consumption – as opposed to an individual’s ‘real’ self, which was deemed to exist only in private. Given how human-interest journalists regularly hounded their famous subjects for ‘scoops’, many celebrities found it expedient to self-expose by providing reporters and photographers with titbit stories and scenes from their personal lives which they hoped would satisfy the public’s appetite for information about their private selves. Self-exposure therefore often involved celebrities revealing glimpses of their home lives and personal relationships to public view in an attempt outwardly to project what appeared to be more intimate and more ‘authentic’ information about themselves.⁵⁰

The significance of this celebrity culture for the House of Windsor was that it encouraged the British public to forge para-social (one-way) emotional relationships with their royal rulers. For example, having access to information about the prince of Wales’s private life, such as the fact that he enjoyed dancing with glamorous women, drinking cocktails and driving fast cars, made him seem more affable and relatable. Indeed, the close sense of proximity that developed between Edward and his subjects-turned-fans due to this kind of media coverage ensured that many felt compelled to write to him in highly personal terms at the time of his abdication.⁵¹ However, it was the home lives of Edward’s closest relatives that became essential to the way the monarchy’s media image was projected to the British public from the early 1930s onwards. The royal household worked with its allies to elevate a family-centred vision of the House of Windsor that presented the royals as celebrities who were defined by their personal lives and domestic aspirations. As we have seen, there were precedents for this kind of public image that stretched back almost a century; and the virtuous version of bourgeois domesticity projected by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert was notably given a new lease of life in the 1920s when George V and his family posed for photographic portraits that were published by newspapers and mass-produced as souvenirs in order to foster emotional bonds between the viewer and the royal person(s) on display – a development that was mirrored in the appearance of a spate of official and unofficial royal biographies that provided readers with behind-the-scenes (but not always authentic) glimpses of life at court.⁵²

However, as historians Laura King and Claire Langhamer have shown, there emerged a new, popular culture of love and domesticity in 1930s Britain, where romance, family and home life became more intrinsic to ordinary people’s identities and desires.⁵³ This popular culture was distinguished by an increased emphasis on personal intimacy, emotional expression and the belief that self-fulfilment lay in the private domestic setting. Although this culture did not take on a truly national character until after the Second World War, the transformation of the House of Windsor’s public image between the 1930s and 1950s mirrored its development, with royal men, women and children presented by officials and the media in more familial, relatable ways. Furthermore, as The Family Firm demonstrates, it is clear that royal stage-managers elevated the monarchy’s domesticity as a focal point for popular emotional identification in a deliberate attempt to unite the British nation around the crown in a period marked by considerable social and political change.

It is also clear that the model of Christian family life promoted by the House of Windsor in this period was intended to set an example to the public. With the exception of Edward VIII’s aberration, royal domesticity provided a high moral standard that members of the public were encouraged to emulate at a time when religious and political leaders were worrying about the shape of British households.⁵⁴ As this book shows, courtiers and the media worked with the Church of England to promote Christian family life as an intrinsic part of the monarchy’s public image and, in doing so, helped to popularize older religious symbols and values that would continue to shape moral attitudes well into the post-war period. Callum Brown has argued in his history of secularization in Britain that the early 1960s witnessed the sudden collapse of a Christian belief-system that had governed personal identities up until then and its replacement with a secular individualism that prized self-fulfilment ahead of everything else.⁵⁵ However, as Edward VIII’s abdication made clear, as far back as the 1930s new concepts of self-fulfilment that emphasized the importance of romantic love to one’s personal happiness had existed in uneasy tension with the kinds of self-denial at the heart of religious teaching. The 1936 constitutional crisis was not just a battle between a king and his ministers over who had the right to choose the monarch’s wife and queen: it also witnessed a traditional royal moral code, which only tolerated love within the confines of Christian marriage, clash with a new, emotional culture that celebrated self-realization and individual happiness through the pursuit of romance, in whatever form it might take.⁵⁶

It is also the case that the royal language of public service and self-sacrifice, so integral to George V’s later reign, was at odds with the new culture of self-fulfilment. As The Family Firm suggests, what steadily emerged in the years from the early 1930s to the early 1950s was the idea that the royal family wished to lead emotionally enriched private lives but that their onerous public roles acted to circumscribe their individual freedom and happiness. This idea took on greater meaning with the dramatic events of December 1936, when one king gave up his ‘heavy burden of responsibility’ in order to marry the woman he loved and another, his younger brother, reluctantly took up the mantle in his place.⁵⁷ The increasing value that British society attached to notions of individualism and self-fulfilment thus helped to engender public sympathy for a royal family who often seemed unable to realize their personal desires because of their outward commitment to religious concepts of self-sacrifice and public duty that dated back to the Victorian period.

While the idea of royal suffering may well have reflected the realities of life at court, it is clear that the royal household deliberately promoted a narrative of royal hardship in order to generate popular emotional identification with the protagonists of the House of Windsor. Just as royal officials worked to create a public image of the monarchy that highlighted the happy feelings experienced by the royal family during festive occasions like weddings, jubilees and coronations, so, too, were they responsible for creating an image that emphasized the unhappiness which could accompany life in the public eye or attended other, less joyous family events like funerals. When we think about the way royal feelings were projected via the media to the public, we can look to recent scholarship on the history of the emotions to make sense of the actions of royal stage-managers and the reactions of the media audiences on the receiving end of those royal feelings. The Family Firm builds on Joe Perry’s study of the ‘affective’ dimensions of life in Nazi Germany by using three key concepts from the history of the emotions in order to explore the emotional economy that connected royal stage-managers, the media and the British population.⁵⁸ The first of these is the idea that although emotions are physiological phenomena expressed and experienced by human bodies, they are also socio-cultural constructs that are specific to time and place. An example relevant to this book, one which has already received some attention here, is love: the way love was expressed and experienced in twentieth-century Britain was constantly changing and was different to the way love was expressed and experienced by other societies at different stages of their development.⁵⁹ Notably, the emotion at the heart of the royal celebrity culture that emerged in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s was empathy, with media audiences identifying with the feelings of the royal family – just as they identified with the feelings of other famous people – despite the fact that they did not know these celebrities in reality and were never likely to do so. The vertical displacement of emotion onto public figures is something we take for granted in the twenty-first century, but it is the fundamental element of a modern celebrity culture which has developed over more than three centuries and which, due to the new kinds of media exposure that emerged between the wars, restructured the relationship between the public and their royal rulers.⁶⁰

The second idea from the history of the emotions applicable here relates to ‘emotional regimes’.⁶¹ In the role of emotional engineers, the royal household and its allies projected royal feelings in order to elicit specific emotional responses from the public. The palace’s emotional regime witnessed the leading figures who made up the House of Windsor purposely displaying or vocalizing some of those aforementioned emotions – joy, sadness, love and grief – and this formed part of a public relations strategy intended to encourage ordinary British people to empathize with the royal family, thus strengthening the emotional bonds that linked them to the monarchy. Older notions of royalism were thus reconceptualized as part of more direct and more personal (imagined) relationships between British subjects and royalty. However, though royal stage-managers tried to create a top-down system of feeling that would engender loyalty to the crown through new kinds of emotional identification, their strategies were not always successful. Some members of the public were simply not affected by the new kinds of emotion mobilized by the royal family; others, meanwhile, could empathize with the emotions expressed by the personalities of the House of Windsor but at the same time experienced other feelings – such as anger or jealousy – because they took issue with royal privilege, disingenuousness or specific weaknesses.⁶² As The Family Firm suggests, sometimes negative feelings won out in these emotional contests and this could translate into a deeper criticism of the monarchy – as was the case at the time of Edward VIII’s abdication and George VI’s succession. However, it does seem that for the most part the projection of royal emotions evoked positive responses from many members of the public, who, through the empathetic relationships they forged with the House of Windsor, came loyally to conform to the royal status quo.

Emotional engineering was not unique to Britain. Nazi leaders sought to strengthen the hold that the Third Reich had over hearts and minds through similar kinds of manipulation of the German people’s feelings.⁶³ Indeed, the period between the wars was a key turning point in many advanced industrial nations because new types of media enabled wide-scale emotional reprogramming from above. This brings us to the third concept from the history of the emotions which is used throughout The Family Firm with the aim of bridging the divide that separates the fields of mass media and affect. Barbara Rosenwein’s idea of ‘emotional communities’ – that is, social groups which have, across time, been linked together by shared systems of feeling – can be seen on a national scale in modern mass-communication societies like Britain in the mid twentieth century.⁶⁴ Whereas Rosenwein’s work focuses on medieval and early modern communities that were linked together through collective cultures of emotion that determined what feelings were expressed and experienced in these societies, new kinds of media like radio, sound newsreels and television conveyed stories about the royal family and their feelings in more immediate and vivid ways which transformed how the public empathized with royalty. Modern mass communication has, therefore, enabled the formation of what we might term national emotional communities, in which publics have been encouraged to share in (and conform to) a dominant system of feeling around the focal point of national events or well-known individuals like royalty. As already noted, The Family Firm shows that some members of the public did not feel part of, or actively resisted becoming part of, an emotional community linked around the centrepiece of the monarchy. However, as we shall see, with the start of live broadcasting British media audiences were invited to partake in royal events as part of a national collective: radio, and later television, created a heightened sense of temporal simultaneity (the sharing of time among a people) that worked to unite audiences as they imagined themselves forming part of a national emotional community knit together through the empathetic bonds they forged with the family monarchy. This kind of ‘affective integration’ was a distinctly modern process that not only transformed how people saw themselves in relation to the House of Windsor but also changed how they conceived of their identities in relation to the wider British nation.⁶⁵

Sources and methodology

Historians have sometimes presented George V as a sovereign who was personally averse to the press, but his actions throughout his reign suggest otherwise.⁶⁶ He oversaw the development of a mass media monarchy that relied on the new channels of publicity to convey to the British public its relevance to the modern world. Bagehot wrote of the Victorian royal family that ‘[t]o be invisible is to be forgotten. To be a symbol, and an effective symbol, you must be vividly and often seen’.⁶⁷ George V and his courtiers came to appreciate the validity of this statement during a long twenty-six-year reign, which not only witnessed the birth of the public relations profession in Britain but also the interconnected rise of a political culture in which politicians had to carefully manage their media images in order to have successful careers – a fact that seems initially to have been lost on Sir Stafford Cripps.⁶⁸ In presenting the first major analysis of the popular projection and reception of the monarchy’s media image from the last years of George V’s life to the start of his granddaughter’s reign in 1953, The Family Firm examines how a succession of royal weddings, coronations and broadcasts were staged to familiarize the public with the lives and feelings of the individual royals who made up the House of Windsor. These events were key moments when palace, Church and media negotiated the monarchy’s publicity strategy. Indeed, the first major body of sources The Family Firm uses are official documents which reveal, through confidential discussions between the various royal stage-managers, how courtiers sought to balance the growing demands of media audiences, who desired a more intimate knowledge of their rulers, with the need for deferential publicity that would enhance the crown’s moral authority in society. Faced with a human-interest news culture that aimed to bring the royals closer to readers, listeners and viewers, the palace regularly had to fight to maintain the monarchy’s dignity by resisting coverage that it deemed too informal or irreverent.

The Royal Archives provide access to files that illuminate how courtiers and members of the House of Windsor worked to stage royal family life for the audiences of mass media. Notably, these documents reveal a professionalization in the crown’s public relations strategy across the period in question. The position of palace press secretary was instituted in 1918, officially relinquished in 1931 and then revived in 1944.⁶⁹ However, it is clear that this post never really fell into abeyance. Rather, after 1931 there was a strengthening of the relationship that linked courtiers to sections of the media as they orchestrated royal family events for the public; and there was also a consolidation of the emotional language that members of the House of Windsor used to communicate with their subjects. Files in the Royal Archives also reveal how pressures exerted on the palace by government propagandists during the Second World War, along with the social upheaval created by the conflict, accelerated the process of professionalization, with courtiers taking on more active roles in managing the monarchy’s relationship with the media in order to better promote the royal family’s public image. The most important officials involved in this process in the years from 1932 to 1953 were Sir Clive Wigram, Sir Alexander Hardinge and Sir Alan Lascelles. These men each held in succession the position of principal private secretary to the monarch and all were influenced by Wigram’s predecessor, Sir Arthur Bigge, also known as Lord Stamfordham, who had overseen George V’s public relations strategy until his death while in office in 1931.⁷⁰ Chapter 4 uses Lascelles’s published diaries, which, while often taciturn and sometimes unreliable, help to illuminate the courtier’s role in managing the monarchy’s media strategy from 1939 to 1945. His important influence at this time led to the restoration of the palace’s press office as part of a wider wartime strategy to tighten the controls that courtiers exercised over publicity; and, throughout his career in royal service, he proved committed to strengthening the monarchy’s position at the heart of the British nation, remaining in post to see Elizabeth II crowned before retiring from his royal duties in 1953 (Figure 0.3).⁷¹

The material from the Royal Archives examined in The Family Firm is rich but limited in terms of the researcher’s rights of access. Documents relating to Elizabeth II’s reign and early life are often judged by archivists to be too sensitive for historical research or have not yet been officially deposited in the archive, so the later chapters of this book, which deal with the transformation of her media image as a princess and, later, as queen, have had to look further afield.⁷² The BBC Written Archives Centre and the Church of England Record Centre provide historians with freer access to sources that document these institutions’ links to the crown – although neither is entirely without restrictions.⁷³ The Family Firm examines communications sent by BBC editors and producers to palace officials, as well as incoming correspondence from courtiers, which reveal how both parties sought to shape the monarchy’s image. The Written Archives Centre also holds large files of internal production documents and memoranda that show how BBC broadcasters sought to project royal events in increasingly personal ways. Lambeth Palace Library, meanwhile, contains the papers of the archbishops of Canterbury, including those of Cosmo Gordon Lang and Geoffrey Francis Fisher. Lang is an important figure in the first half of this book because he played a significant role in developing the monarchy’s family-centred public image from 1934 to the early 1940s. With his Anglo-Catholic background, he had a taste and talent for staging royal ritual and, working in tandem with George V, courtiers and other Church officials, he intensified the theatrical and spiritual elements of national royal events like weddings, jubilees and coronations.⁷⁴

Figure 0.3. Sir Alan Lascelles, October 1943 (NPG x169268). © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Lang acceded to the diocese of Canterbury in 1928 but before this, as archbishop of York, he had encouraged George V to embark on the first royal good-will tours of industrial Britain in 1912 in the belief that the monarch needed to spend more time among his poorest subjects, bridging class divisions by forsaking the pomp and splendour that usually attended royalty. With his strong belief in the monarchy’s nation-building role, Lang became a trusted friend and spiritual counsellor to George V and later even occupied the small office within the royal household of lord high almoner. In time, the archbishop forged strong relationships with Queen Mary, George VI and his consort, Queen Elizabeth, too, and as a close ally of the throne worked with the palace in order to enhance the crown’s symbolic moral role in society. Indeed, his commitment to upholding Christian family values saw him come into direct conflict with Edward VIII. Chapter 3 discusses how Lang fell out with the king and then conspired in his downfall at the time of the abdication crisis – a move that irreparably damaged the archbishop’s public standing (Figure 0.4).⁷⁵

While Geoffrey Fisher was not as influential as Lang, he was Alan Lascelles’s and George VI’s first choice for the position of archbishop of Canterbury after William Temple suddenly died in 1944 after only two years in office.⁷⁶ Like Lang, Fisher valued the moral symbolism of royal family life and made this felt through his involvement in the 1947 royal wedding and the 1953 coronation (Figure 0.5). Notably, documents from Westminster Abbey Library have also made it possible to examine how a coterie of other churchmen took on active roles in staging royal events for the British public and in managing the media’s access to the ‘nation’s shrine’.⁷⁷ The final body of official sources The Family Firm uses are government documents located in The National Archives, Kew, which reveal how cabinet ministers and civil servants worked with palace officials – sometimes in tandem and at other times in tension – to project the royal family’s public image.

Figure 0.4. Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang (NPG x90191). © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Figure 0.5. Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher (NPG x12227). © National Portrait Gallery, London.

The second main group of sources examined here are mass media texts, including ‘popular’ and ‘quality’ national newspapers, the five main newsreels from the period and the actual programmes broadcast by the BBC on wireless and television. In comparison with their counterparts in broadcasting and film, newspaper journalists and photographers were usually the most intrepid when it came to reporting on royal family life. This was partly due to the fact that it was easier for the curious journalist or candid photographer – unencumbered by large pieces of technical equipment – to spy on or even infiltrate life at court in order to provide newspaper readers with more intimate access to the House of Windsor. This kind of unofficial coverage could disrupt the otherwise stable public image of the family monarchy, as was the case when Edward VIII was secretly photographed holidaying with Wallis Simpson on the Mediterranean coast in summer 1936, an incident that led to an eruption of international speculation about the couple’s relationship in the months before the news broke in Britain.⁷⁸ However, the press and, in particular, popular newspapers also sought greater access to the private lives of the House of Windsor in these years because of the competitive news environment: different newspapers not only vied with each other for exclusive ‘scoops’ but also with newsreels and, from the early 1920s, the BBC, with film and radio offering new kinds of access to the royal family.⁷⁹ Throughout the period in question the press’s impulse towards revelation existed in uneasy tension with the need to maintain the monarchy’s dignified public image: if a journalist or editor overstepped the mark, he or she could be prevented from covering future royal events. It was also the case that the elites who controlled most of Britain’s newspaper industry believed the monarchy was a force for good. Even political rebels like the press barons Lord Northcliffe, Lord Rothermere and the mischievous Lord Beaverbrook, each of whom exercised significant power over the reading public between the wars and who regularly challenged the policies of the nation’s elected representatives, could agree that the crown was an esteemed institution that played an important role in uniting Britain and the empire at a time of widespread change.⁸⁰

As Adrian Bingham has noted in his work on the popular press, the abdication crisis was a turning-point in the relationship between the monarchy and some of Britain’s newspapers. When it was finally announced in early December 1936 that Edward VIII was in love with a married woman, the public realized that the couple’s affair had been deliberately concealed from them for months by deferential Fleet Street journalists and newspaper editors who had not wanted to tarnish the crown’s reputation with scandalous revelations. On recognizing they had lost the trust of their readers, some newspapers began to scrutinize the private lives of the royal family more closely, often adopting a more critical perspective on royal matters in order to re-establish public confidence in the role of the press as purveyors of truth.⁸¹ Although the official censorship that limited the dissemination of factual information during the Second World War also strained the relationship between newspapers and the public, it is clear there was a shift towards more informal and often more irreverent kinds of royal news coverage after 1936. The Family Firm examines this shift and the way it mirrored a wider decline in deference among some sections of the press, which worked harder to hold the social elite to account and to sound out the diverse range of opinions of readers on the royal family. However, despite the fact that journalists were more outspoken when it came to the House of Windsor after the abdication, it is notable that the majority of newspapers continued to project royal domestic life as a national rallying point for collective emotion and unity.

The interwar years witnessed the circulation wars of the major Fleet Street dailies, which had a combined readership of more than ten million by the mid 1930s. The sample of popular and quality titles examined in The Family Firm reflects a wide spectrum of class and political affiliations and includes all the market-leading dailies: the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, News Chronicle and the left-wing Daily Herald, the latter being the first to achieve a circulation of more than two million in 1932.⁸² The readership of these popular titles was ten times greater than that shared by the quality newspapers from the period, some of which are used here, including The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Manchester Guardian. By 1940, over 80 per cent of all British families read one of the popular London dailies and this figure continued to rise after the war, with the Daily Mirror and Sunday News of the World favourites among the public.⁸³ In the interests of balance, The Family Firm also examines the only anti-royal paper from this period, the communist Daily Worker, which, while representing a small minority’s political interests, took a leading role in opposing royal events in the inter- and early post-war periods.⁸⁴

The royal family quickly became a mainstay of the newsreels following their arrival in the early 1910s: pre-planned royal events – be they ceremonial or more informal – made for easy filming and good watching. And, from 1917 onwards, newsreel film crews found that the royals were increasingly forthcoming as subjects: the palace saw clear potential in using the new medium to publicize the House of Windsor’s official activities at home and abroad.⁸⁵ The filmic focus on the monarchy also accorded with the newsreel companies’ policy of projecting what was an essentially conservative vision of Britain, which celebrated its national institutions in order to promote public order and prop up the socio-political hierarchy.⁸⁶ The propaganda value of newsreels was enhanced when sound entered the cinema in the late 1920s, changing how audiences experienced film.⁸⁷ Moving images of the royals undertaking visits to different parts of the country, embarking on tours to the empire or Commonwealth, delivering speeches at official functions or going about what appeared to be their everyday lives now played to soundtracks and spoken commentaries that explained their activities to audiences who were also able to absorb the atmosphere of the crowds that gathered at royal events. The Family Firm shows that film crews and newsreel editors developed an advanced visual language, one which combined new kinds of close-up images with panoramas and an emphasis on the wide range of sounds captured during royal occasions, as part of a deliberate strategy to convey to viewers the centrality of royal family life to the nation. This was partly achieved through the manipulation of stock footage and audio recordings, but technological innovations also enabled filmmakers to present their audiences with more intimate scenes of the House of Windsor in these years.⁸⁸ Furthermore, the royal family were often complicit in this campaign to make the crown more visually accessible. Rosalind Brunt has discussed how, after Edward VIII’s reign, the newsreels switched their attention to George VI’s family, presenting cinemagoers with intimate scenes of idealized domesticity in order to stabilize the House of Windsor’s reputation after the moral turbulence created by the abdication.⁸⁹ As we shall see, numerous royals engaged with cameramen in order to fashion their reputations and George VI in particular sought to exercise tighter control over his filmic image in order to shore up his authority as monarch (Figure 0.6).

The five newsreels that cinemas presented to audiences in these years were distributed (under changing titles) by Pathé, Movietone, Gaumont, Paramount and Universal. The film archives of all five companies have been digitized and are either free to access or available via online subscription services.⁹⁰ All the newsreels used in this book have been located using the British Universities Film and Video Council’s ‘News on Screen’ search facility, which has equipped researchers with a comprehensive database and guide to all available digital newsreel footage.⁹¹ There is little historical scholarship on the audiences who watched newsreels, but we know that they were an important source of information among working-class people in particular, who frequented cinemas more regularly than any other social demographic in this period. In 1934 the newsreels shared a weekly audience in England, Scotland and Wales of more than 18.5 million and this figure had risen to twenty million by the end of the decade, where it remained well into the 1950s despite popular concerns arising during the war regarding the government’s propagandistic efforts to control newsreel content.⁹²

Figure 0.6. King George VI and his family at Windsor, April 1940 (RCIN 2108362), Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

This book also maps an important shift towards a more intimate, family-centred image in the radio and television coverage of the monarchy after 1932. The voice of a reigning sovereign was first heard by media audiences when George V and his wife, Queen Mary, recorded for gramophone an ‘Empire Day message to the boys and girls of the British empire’ in 1923.⁹³ The following year, the BBC broadcast the monarch’s voice live to listeners in Britain and across the world for the first time when he delivered his speech to those who had gathered for the opening of the Wembley empire exhibition – a new kind of public performance that he would go on to repeat for BBC radio audiences at thirteen separate official events over the next decade.⁹⁴ However, this media innovation was taken one step further in 1932 when the king broadcast his first live Christmas message from Sandringham, greeting listeners gathered around radio sets in their own homes in Britain and the empire. This was a key moment in the history of the monarchy’s relationship with radio and helped to create a stronger, more direct link between George V and his subjects. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska is among a number of historians who have studied these changes and has suggested that radio brought people closer to royalty than ever before, encouraging engaged citizenship by creating a new democratic space in which listeners could affirm their loyalty to the crown by joining in nationally shared experiences.⁹⁵ The Family Firm builds on this idea by examining how the emotional register of the royal public language broadcast by radio changed in this period and how listeners’ feelings were transformed by the experience of hearing royal speakers talking to them. It also shows that the BBC, the palace and religious officials specially choreographed royal ceremonial events in order to enhance the intimacy of the images carried over the airwaves. In the context of the listening cultures that characterized the inter- and post-war periods, royal family life was staged more publicly and personally than ever before, encouraging listeners to conceive of themselves as a national community united around the House of Windsor. Similarly, while historians have previously suggested that the focus of the 1953 coronation celebrations was Britain’s relationship with the Commonwealth, this book argues that the family image of Elizabeth II was just as, if not more, important to the television coverage of the occasion and that the BBC deliberately elevated royal domesticity as part of its broadcast in order to foster new kinds of emotional identification with the queen and her family among viewers.⁹⁶

The physical and imagined properties of new mass media like radio and television radically changed the emotional dimensions of public and private life in the mid twentieth century. The popularity of the wireless in these decades helps to explain its wide-ranging effect in engendering affective integration around the focal point of the monarchy among the population. When the BBC became a corporation in 1926 there were more than two million licence holders registered. This number climbed steeply through the 1930s and historians have estimated that, by the beginning of the Second World War, there were more than nine million licence holders, which equated to a national listenership of at least thirty-four million out of a total population of roughly forty-eight million. These numbers – estimated to be even higher by other historians – continued to climb through the war years, with radio becoming an essential part of everyday life for most of the public as cheap wireless sets made the airwaves accessible to all.⁹⁷ This increase in popularity was also driven by a significant change in the types of programme produced by broadcasters. Although the BBC remained staunchly middle-class in its tone and world view, it tried to reach out to new audiences in the late 1920s and early 1930s, in particular women and working-class people, through new programming that placed entertainment ahead of the educative impulse that shaped much of its earlier output.⁹⁸ As a patriotic institution led by elite ex-servicemen like the first director general, Sir John Reith, the BBC loyally promoted the crown’s nation-building activities in this period but also sought new kinds of access to the royal family in order to establish its own credentials as the nation’s leading provider of news.

In seeking to explain why sections of the media presented royalty in the ways they did, The Family Firm also examines documents pertaining to the production of media texts. These include the papers of Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times newspaper, which are located in the Bodleian Library; the papers of Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Express news group, which can be found in the Parliamentary Archives; the personal correspondence of gossip columnist and Labour MP, Tom Driberg, at Christ Church College, Oxford; and the minute books of the Newsreel Association – the newsreel companies’ trade body that was set up in late 1937 – which form part of the BFI’s special collections. By combining an analysis of press, newsreel and broadcasting content with an examination of the behind-the-scenes discussions that went into producing that content, this book has developed a holistic approach to Britain’s media sphere in the inter- and post-war periods in response to historian Siân Nicholas’s recent criticism of scholars for the way they have tended to treat different media discretely. Nicholas has noted that, by the interwar period, there existed an ‘interrelated and multi-layered mass media culture’ in which ‘engagement in one medium routinely overlapped with others’.⁹⁹ Wherever possible, The Family Firm highlights how the different media of newspaper, newsreel, radio and television presented royal events and personalities; how modes of coverage either overlapped or contrasted; and how audiences responded to the different media images of the monarchy they consumed, often privileging certain sources of information ahead of others. Finally, in addition to mainstream media coverage, this book has drawn on a range of other media texts, including official photographs of royal persons and pictorial souvenirs either from the National Portrait Gallery’s online archive or the Royal Collection’s digital database, as well as a large number of official royal commemorative souvenirs that were published from the mid 1930s to the early 1950s with the express aim of popularizing a specific set of messages that underpinned the monarchy’s public image, one of which stressed the domesticity of the House of Windsor.

As already noted above, the media tended to present the monarchy as a unifying force in British society and regularly constructed images and narratives that characterized the public as a homogenous group integrated through their loyalty to the crown. The third and final category of sources examined here are personal testimonies, which allow us to complicate the media’s representation of public feeling. In his overview of the historiography of the modern British monarchy, Andrzej Olechnowicz noted that historians have failed to engage with the popular reception of royalty in any meaningful way and advised that a future research agenda focus on the way the monarchy has been interpreted and understood by the public.¹⁰⁰ The Family Firm responds to his prompting by presenting an analysis of personal documents that show how the intimate, family-centred image of the royals worked to strengthen the emotional connections that many ordinary people forged with the House of Windsor, and how these connections took formation in relation to new concepts of fame, family life and emotional fulfilment that first arose between the wars. At the same time, it is clear that the royal family did not find favour with everyone and this book sheds some light on the discordant voices that sought to question or challenge the royal status quo. It is important to note that it is difficult to locate dissenting opinion for the period before the abdication crisis: the archival research conducted for this book did not turn up any significant body of sources that directly contradicted the popular image of George V’s family monarchy. For example, the letters written by members of the public to the royal household, clergy and newspapers in relation to the royal events discussed in chapters 1 and 2 tend to be positive in tone (which may account for their archival preservation) and speak to the success of the monarchy, media and other royal stage-managers in projecting the crown’s unifying role in society. It is sometimes possible to identify conflicting views by reading between the lines of sources, but we have to accept that while critical or ambivalent voices were almost certainly heard among the public, they have left little tangible trace in the historical record.

The key archive that reveals a broader complexion of public feeling after 1936 is that of the social research organization Mass Observation. The history of Mass Observation is integrally linked to that of the monarchy. Charles Madge, Humphrey Jennings and Tom Harrisson established the organization because of their concerns that the British press and politicians had misjudged and misrepresented public opinion during the abdication crisis.¹⁰¹ Through ethnographic research into ‘ordinary’ people’s lives, Mass Observation set out to investigate what the masses ‘really thought’ while encouraging their panel of volunteer writers to engage in the public sphere with an enhanced self-awareness. As Penny Summerfield has discussed, this educative urge was characteristic of the founders’ and many participants’ left-of-centre desire to contribute to a movement that was working towards a better understanding of current political events.¹⁰² Summerfield and other historians, including James Hinton, have noted that Mass Observation’s respondents do not provide access to ‘typical’ experience in their writings but rather present accounts of everyday life that were influenced by a personal commitment to new kinds of creative self-expression.¹⁰³ Nor did the volunteer panel evenly reflect the social make-up of Britain: instead it mainly comprised lower-middle-class women and men, as well as some upper-working-class people, with most living in England and fewer contributions coming from people in the Celtic nations.¹⁰⁴

In spite of the issues inherent in the sources, Mass Observation has provided historians with a unique window into the nature of public opinion in mid twentieth-century Britain, with respondents’ personal testimonies telling us a great deal about the emotional worlds and social settings they inhabited.¹⁰⁵ Notably, many of the volunteers recorded highly personal responses to royal personalities or events either in special day diaries or in response to questionnaires sent to them by the Mass Observation organizers between 1937 and 1953. Many also noted that other people around them expressed personal thoughts and feelings about royalty, either in the crowds that gathered in British towns and cities to celebrate coronations or royal weddings, as part of special interviews conducted by Mass Observation volunteers on the public’s response to royal broadcasts at the height of the Blitz, or in living rooms where media audiences gathered together first to listen to and later to watch royal events unfold as they happened. The range of material collected by the panel of volunteers poses some difficulties to the historian. When Mass Observation respondents directly engaged with, or observed, other members of the public, asking them questions about or listening into their conversations on the royal family, the public nature of these interactions inevitably shaped the kind of thing people were willing to say about the monarchy. Tom Harrisson recognized the problems of what he termed ‘social sanction’ – the social pressure exerted on people to conform to what seemed acceptable and respectable in public – and the way this prevented them from openly voicing their ‘private’ (real) opinions on topics like royalty, particularly at a time when, as we have seen, to criticize the monarchy was to transgress social norms.¹⁰⁶ The Family Firm is sensitive to the strands of opinion captured by Mass Observation and argues that, despite the complexity, a number of important trends can be identified to link the empathetic responses articulated by the panel of volunteer respondents and those around them in relation to the royal family. While some of the Mass Observation personal testimonies reveal indifference or hostility towards royalty, the vast majority show that people’s feelings were transformed through new kinds of personal identification with the monarchy’s family-centred image. Given Mass Observation’s left-of-centre origins and the anti-establishment inclinations of many of its contributors, the fact that the royal family were often the recipients of positive forms of empathy suggests a much wider emotional culture existed in British society that centred on the House of Windsor.

Chapters 3 to 6 of this book either draw on previously neglected Mass Observation sources for the first time or reinterpret sources that have been discussed elsewhere. The first major study that Mass Observation organized on the monarchy recorded volunteers’ responses to George VI’s coronation and resulted in a published book, May the Twelfth (1937).¹⁰⁷ Coronations and royal weddings provided the Mass Observation organizers with an opportunity to gauge public reactions to events that were presented by officials and the media as important national occasions; and similar archives thus exist for the 1947 marriage of the then Princess Elizabeth and her crowning six years later. Royal biographer Philip Ziegler produced a study of some of the Mass Observation personal testimonies on the monarchy to argue that, despite persistent concerns arising about the large costs involved in staging royal events, the British population has historically warmed to, and engaged in, the celebrations.¹⁰⁸ His interpretation accords with the wider field of official royal biography, which has tended to perpetuate narratives of royal popularity and progressive constitutionalism at the expense of more critical approaches to the public relations campaigns developed by the royal family as part of their twentieth-century survival strategy.¹⁰⁹ Equally, Ziegler’s work does not systematically analyse how Mass Observation respondents articulated their imagined relationships with the House of Windsor and it does not consider the large archives of school essays collected by Mass Observation on royal personalities. Chapters 2 and 6 of The Family Firm examine essays written by groups of schoolchildren on George V and Elizabeth II respectively. School essays are complex forms of personal testimony that reflect the dynamic processes through which young royalist identities were forged in relation to both social experiences outside the classroom and educative discourses inside the classroom.¹¹⁰ They can illuminate the dominant narratives through which children and adolescents were encouraged to make sense of the monarchy and their own subject positions in relation to the crown as part of Britain’s royal democracy.

School essays also reveal how emotions articulated in connection with royalty were different for boys and girls. This is perhaps unsurprising: since the nineteenth century, British women had been encouraged to nurture and express their feelings, whereas men were meant to be more emotionally reserved.¹¹¹ Equally, with the expansion of the national media in the 1880s and 1890s, the press had commodified royal human-interest stories for consumption primarily by a growing female audience. This does not mean that men and boys did not engage with these stories or feel strongly towards royalty – they frequently did, but in different ways and through different emotional registers. Gender also shaped the letters written by members of the public to the royal family, with women tending to express their inner thoughts and feelings more freely than their male counterparts. Historian Julie Gottlieb has suggested that we can explain this with reference to a wider culture of female letter writing in mid twentieth-century Britain that witnessed women trying to reach out and achieve new kinds of intimacy with otherwise remote public figures through the epistolary form.¹¹² But men wrote too and in increasingly informal ways, possibly inspired by modern media technologies that had encouraged a relaxation in the relationship between the public and the monarchy. The Family Firm draws on letters written by both sexes in order to examine how and why readers, listeners and viewers forged emotional bonds with their royal rulers between 1932 and 1953. Taken together with the Mass Observation evidence, these personal testimonies suggest that while women may have been quicker to relate to the House of Windsor through the family-centred imagery they consumed via the media before the Second World War, by the late 1940s young men had also developed strong emotional identification with the domestic aspirations of the royals, indicative of the growth of a national culture of family life among the post-war generation.

Structure of the book

The royal weddings of the 1920s and 1930s were nation-building exercises that were designed to create loyal subjects of the crown. Chapter 1 focuses on the 1934 wedding of the duke and duchess of Kent and shows how, more than ever before, royal intimacy was staged on a spectacular scale via the new channels of mass media to foster emotional identification between the public and the House of Windsor. The lead actors – Prince George and Princess Marina of Greece – proved more willing than any previous members of the royal family to distinguish themselves as modern celebrities, publicizing an idealized romance to draw attention to their compatibility, feelings and glamour (Figure 0.7). They became the first royals to agree to filmed interviews, to wave to crowds and to kiss on camera; and their wedding in Westminster abbey was the first to be broadcast live by the BBC to listeners at home. This chapter explores how these transgressive innovations played out at the palace, with the press and among the public in a period marked by widespread social and political unrest both in Britain and in Europe.

Chapter 2 examines how George V’s broadcasts recalibrated his relationship with his subjects along contours that emphasized a personal loyalty to him and the royal family. The king described his people at home and abroad as uniquely connected to him in the common enterprise of promoting social welfare, Christian family life and empire. Under the influence of the archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, the emotional language used by the monarch to communicate publicly also changed significantly between 1932 and 1935. At a time of deep anxiety relating to the economic insecurity of large sections of the population and the failure of the League of Nations to secure a lasting peace in Europe, the king and prelate elevated a vision of a family-centred monarch dutifully committed to the care of the nation and to maintaining Britain’s place in the world. Letters written to George V in his lifetime and school essays composed after his death reveal that this image of the compassionate king was internalized by listeners, who expressed strong emotional identification with him because of the way he had spoken to them across the airwaves.

Figure 0.7. Prince George and Princess Marina, duke and duchess of Kent, 1934 (NPG x135528). © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Edward VIII’s abdication and George VI’s coronation in his brother’s place transformed the role and public image of the monarchy in Britain. Edward’s renunciation of the throne brought to an end a dynamic style of kingship based on the assertive masculinity of an individual figure and he was replaced by a monarch who seemed to take on the burdens of royal duty against his will. Chapter 3 examines the projection and reception of George VI’s crowning to uncover the official and popular attitudes towards royalty following the turbulence of the abdication. It argues that the new king met with muted public enthusiasm which persisted until, and beyond, his coronation. Fortunately for him, his mother, Queen Mary, was close at hand to lend the first six months of his reign an emotional continuity with the past (Figure 0.8). The royal household also spearheaded a media campaign to generate sympathy for a monarch who, unlike his older brother, appeared to put public service ahead of private happiness. However, Edward’s shadow loomed over the coronation; and officials and news editors had to work hard to fill the charisma vacuum created by his abdication with forceful meaning, presenting George VI as the defender of the nation’s and empire’s political freedoms and his crowning as a symbol of the inexorable progress of constitutional democracy, in direct contrast to continental despotism.

Figure 0.8. Queen Mary, 1937 (RCIN 2808286). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

Since 1945 royal biographers and public commentators have mythologized the morale-boosting function played by George VI and his family on the home front during the Second World War. Chapter 4 proposes a more complex story. The king and his advisors understood the need for the monarchy to take on a more overt propaganda role at a time of national crisis and, responding to requests from government departments, agreed to a number of royal broadcasts that were designed to sustain public confidence. However, throughout the war the royal household proved determined to maintain control over the crown’s media strategy, notably pursuing its own aims in launching a series of royal tours of bombed-out urban areas during the Blitz. Faced with new challenges to the established social hierarchy, not least of which was a burgeoning popular culture that valorized the wartime sacrifices of ordinary people and criticized the old ruling classes, palace officials elevated a public image of the royal family that emphasized how the exigencies of war had challenged their domesticity and that they, like other families, suffered emotionally because of the conflict. George VI’s consort, Queen Elizabeth, was the leading proponent of this narrative of shared sacrifice, which was subsequently taken up by loyal media organizations and became central to the public relations campaign developed by the royal household in mythologizing the monarchy’s wartime role as soon as the allied victory was secure.

The Second World War witnessed an important cultural shift among some left-wing newspapers, which became more outspoken in their criticism of the royal family. At the beginning of 1947 the press published the rumour that Princess Elizabeth – elder daughter of George VI – was engaged to Prince Philip of Greece (Figure 0.9). The Sunday Pictorial took the brazen and unprecedented step of polling its readers’ opinions on the suitability of the match and went on to announce that the public were split over whether the prince was fit for the princess. Chapter 5 shows that the royal household and its allies were successful in generating support for Elizabeth and her fiancé by fashioning likeable media images of the couple that drew attention to the princess’s commitment to her ‘extraordinary’ public duties and her ‘ordinary’ ambition as a young woman to marry someone she loved. This chapter also examines how the staging of their royal wedding strengthened the crown and Church’s moral leadership of the nation by promoting an exemplary image of family life at a time when there was growing concern about the rise in cases of divorce and single mothers. Indeed, members of the public proved to be protective of this image, with many criticizing the intrusive media coverage of the royal lovers’ honeymoon.

Chapter 6 focuses on emotional responses to the televised coronation of Queen Elizabeth II to argue that the new technology transformed how media audiences experienced the royal family. In the months leading up to the coronation, debates erupted in public and in private over whether or not the BBC should be able to televise the Westminster abbey service. However, the broadcaster did eventually receive permission and its coronation coverage enhanced many viewers’ sense of national participation by bridging geographical divides and enabling a more intimate involvement in a royal ceremony than ever before. The 1950s culture of domesticity, which witnessed new kinds of popular consumption and home-based sociability, simultaneously undermined older, socially deferential kinds of participation in royal events, such as churchgoing or community-centred activities, while strengthening the collective emotional meanings associated with the monarchy that linked media audiences together. Furthermore, the defining feature of the day was neither the Commonwealth nor national renewal, as historians have suggested. Rather, it was royal maternalism: television images of the queen separated from and then reunited with her two children – in particular, her son and heir Prince Charles – evoked powerful feelings from viewers who sympathized with the way her public role seemed to prevent her enjoying the freedoms of a normal family life (Figure 0.10).

Figure 0.9. Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant (Prince) Philip Mountbatten, November 1947 (RCIN 2805935). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

Television portrayals of a young queen’s coronation had been a long way from anyone’s mind two decades previously in 1934. The queen’s grandfather, by now an old man nearing the end of his life, still sat on the throne and the seismic events of the abdication crisis, the Second World War and the premature death of George VI seemed inconceivable. Yet, this was the year that the trajectory of a mass media monarchy that combined elite status and modern celebrity with personal intimacy and domestic vulnerability began and it is therefore where the story of The Family Firm begins.

Figure 0.10. Princess Elizabeth and Prince Charles as a baby, 1949 (RCIN 2081606). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

___________

1 Morning Post, 8 Jan. 1934, as quoted in C. Cooke, The Life of Richard Stafford Cripps (London, 1957), p. 159.

2 E.g., Sunday Times, 7 Jan. 1934, p. 17; Daily Mail, 8 Jan. 1934, p. 3; Daily Telegraph, 8 Jan. 1934, p. 12 and 9 Jan. 1934, p. 7; Daily Mirror, 8 Jan. 1934, p. 3; Manchester Guardian, 8 Jan. 1934, p. 9 and 10 Jan. 1934, p. 11.

3 Daily Mail, 11 Jan. 1934, p. 11; Daily Mirror, 11 Jan. 1934, p. 13; Manchester Guardian, 11 Jan. 1934, p. 10; The Times, 12 Jan. 1934, p. 14; Daily Telegraph, 20 Jan. 1934, p. 12.

4 J. Parry, ‘Whig monarchy, whig nation: crown politics and representativeness, 1800– 2000’, in The Monarchy and the British Nation 1780 to the Present, ed. A. Olechnowicz (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 47–75, at pp. 66–9; P. Williamson, ‘The monarchy and public values, 1900–1953’, in Olechnowicz, Monarchy and the British Nation, pp. 223–57, at pp. 236–45.

5 Williamson, ‘Monarchy and public values’, pp. 252–5; R. Brazier, ‘The monarchy’, in The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century, ed. V. Bogdanor (Oxford, 2007), pp. 69–98, at pp. 76–7; B. Harrison, The Transformation of British Politics, 1860–1995 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 334–5; F. Prochaska, Royal Bounty: the Making of a Welfare Monarchy (New Haven, Conn., 1995), pp. 170–5.

6 Parry, ‘Whig monarchy’, p. 70; Williamson, ‘Monarchy and public values’, pp. 239–41; R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 7–9; I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Keep fit and play the game: George VI, outdoor recreation and social cohesion in interwar Britain’, Cult. and Soc. Hist., xi (2014), 111–29, at p. 111.

7 H. Jones, ‘The nature of kingship in First World War Britain’, in The Windsor Dynasty 1910 to the Present: ‘Long to Reign Over Us’?, ed. M. Glencross, J. Rowbottom and M. D. Kandiah (Basingstoke, 2016), pp. 195–216; H. Jones, ‘A prince in the trenches? Edward VIII and the First World War’, in Sons and Heirs: Succession and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. F. L. Müller and H. Mehrkens (Basingstoke, 2016), pp. 229–46; Williamson, ‘Monarchy and public values’, pp. 247–51.

8 B. Schwarz, ‘The language of constitutionalism: Baldwinite Conservatism’, in Formations of Nations and People, ed. B. Schwarz et al. (London, 1984), pp. 1–18, at pp. 11–6; P. Williamson, ‘The doctrinal politics of Stanley Baldwin’, in Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History Presented to Michael Cowling, ed. M. Bentley (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 181–208, at pp. 190–1; P. Mandler, The English National Character: the History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (London, 2006), pp. 149–52; Parry, ‘Whig monarchy’, pp. 66–7.

9 Prochaska, Royal Bounty, pp. 169–201; F. Prochaska, ‘George V and republicanism, 1917–1919’, Twentieth Century British Hist., x (1999), 27–51.

10 Prochaska, ‘George V’, pp. 45–7.

11 Lord Stamfordham to Bishop of Chelmsford, 25 Nov. 1918 (RA GV 01106/65), quoted in Prochaska, ‘George V’, p. 48.

12 V. Bogdanor, The Monarchy and the Constitution (Oxford, 1995), pp. 104–12, 153, 166, 179; P. Williamson, National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy and Empire, 1926–1932 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 333–43.

13 B. Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 11–3.

14 Collectively, the parties forming the National Government won 554 seats out of a total of 615, while the Labour party won just 52 (Williamson, National Crisis, pp. 372–3, 455; R. Toye and P. Clarke, ‘Cripps, Sir (Richard) Stafford’, in ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/32630> [accessed 12 Oct. 2018]).

15 Bogdanor, Monarchy and the Constitution, p. 112; K. O. Morgan, ‘The Labour party and British republicanism’, E-rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde Anglophone, i (2003) <https://journals.openedition.org/erea/347> [accessed 12 Oct. 2018].

16 Cooke, Richard Stafford Cripps, pp. 159–64. Cripps’s knowledge of the inner workings of the royal household was not only informed by recent political events, but also by a personal knowledge inherited from his father, Sir Charles Cripps, who, as another esteemed lawyer and politician, had served as attorney general to three princes of Wales – an appointment he had taken up in 1895 under the future Edward VII, before going on to serve both George V and a young Edward VIII until 1914 (P. Williamson, ‘Cripps, Charles Alfred, first Baron Parmoor’, in ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/32629> [accessed 12 Oct. 2018]).

17 Prochaska, ‘George V’, pp. 31–48.

18 M. Houlbrook, Prince of Tricksters: the Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook (Chicago, Ill., 2016), pp. 223–76.

19 For recent historical work that has begun to address this scholarly lacuna, see F. Mort, ‘Love in a cold climate: letters, public opinion and monarchy in the 1936 abdication crisis’, Twentieth Century British Hist., xxv (2014), 30–62.

20 J. Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford, 2003), pp. 143–53.

21 Bogdanor, Monarchy and the Constitution, pp. 16–9; J. Plunkett, ‘A media monarchy? Queen Victoria and the radical press, 1837–1901’, Media History, ix (2003), 3–18, at pp. 3–4; S. K. Kent, Queen Victoria: Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2016), pp. 36–59.

22 Bogdanor, Monarchy and the Constitution, pp. 19–26.

23 M. Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain (Chicago, Ill., 2004), p. 28; J. Wolffe, ‘The people’s king: the crowd and the media at the funeral of Edward VII, May 1910’, Court Historian, viii (2003), 23–30.

24 D. Cannadine, ‘The context, performance and meaning of ritual: the British monarchy and the “invention of tradition”, c. 1820–1977’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 101–64, at pp. 122–5.

25 Cannadine, ‘Context, performance and meaning’, pp. 122–3. See also J. Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2000), pp. 223–6.

26 W. Bagehot, The English Constitution (London, 1867), pp. 62–3 (Bagehot’s italics); Bogdanor, Monarchy and the Constitution, p. 62.

27 M. Taylor, ‘Introduction’, in W. Bagehot, The English Constitution, ed. M. Taylor (Oxford, 2001), pp. vii–xxx, at pp. ix–xi, xxv–xxvii.

28 Bogdanor, Monarchy and the Constitution, pp. 27–41, 133; Brazier, ‘The monarchy’, pp. 69–83; Cannadine, ‘Context, performance and meaning’, p. 134.

29 A. Bingham and M. Conboy, Tabloid Century: the Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present (Oxford, 2015), pp. 3–10; K. Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain (Abingdon, 2018), p. 113; J. Wiener, ‘How new was the new journalism?’, in Papers for the Millions: the New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914, ed. J. Wiener (New York, 1988), pp. 47–71.

30 Plunkett, Queen Victoria, pp. 205, 237–8; Wolffe, Great Deaths, pp. 243–6; Wolffe, ‘The people’s king’, pp. 23–30; Bingham and Conboy, Tabloid Century, pp. 97–130.

31 J. S. Ellis, ‘Reconciling the Celt: British national identity, empire, and the 1911 investiture of the prince of Wales’, Jour. Brit. Stud., xxxvii (1998), 391–418.

32 Jones, ‘Nature of kingship’, pp. 202–6.

33 L. McKernan, ‘The finest cinema performers we possess: British royalty and the newsreels, 1910–37’, Court Historian, viii (2003), 59–71, at pp. 63–4.

34 Prochaska, ‘George V’, pp. 37–8.

35 Jones, ‘Prince in the trenches’, pp. 233–41; Prochaska, Royal Bounty, pp. 179–81.

36 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.

37 Mort, ‘On tour with the prince’, pp. 39–43.

38 Prochaska, Royal Bounty, pp. 190–4; Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Keep fit’, pp. 113–5.

39 Jones, ‘Nature of kingship’, pp. 206–11.

40 Williamson, ‘Monarchy and public values’, pp. 252–5.

41 K. Rose, King George V (London, 1983), pp. 308–9, 355–8.

42 P. Ziegler, King Edward VIII (London, 2012), pp. 193–5.

43 Williamson, ‘Monarchy and public values’, p. 250.

44 McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, p. 4.

45 Ziegler, King Edward VIII, pp. 281, 287.

46 Ziegler, King Edward VIII, pp. 308–10.

47 Mort, ‘Love in a cold climate’, pp. 41–53.

48 Mort, ‘On tour with the prince’; L. N. Mayhall, ‘The prince of Wales versus Clark Gable: anglophone celebrity and citizenship between the wars’, Cult. and Soc. Hist., iv (2007), 529–43.

49 Mort, ‘On tour with the prince’, pp. 46–55; Mayhall, ‘The prince of Wales’, pp. 532–40.

50 C. L. Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940 (London, 2002), pp. 40–1; L. Beers, ‘A model MP? Ellen Wilkinson, gender, politics and celebrity culture in interwar Britain’, Cult. and Soc. Hist., x (2013), 231–50, at pp. 238–41; E. Owens, ‘The changing media representation of T. E. Lawrence and celebrity culture in Britain, 1919–1935’, Cult. and Soc. Hist., xii (2015), 465–88. On ‘authenticity’, see P. Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice (London, 2019), pp. 168–72.

51 Mort, ‘Love in a cold climate’, pp. 39–42.

52 A. Schwarzenbach, ‘Royal photographs: emotions for the people’, Contemporary European Hist., xiii (2004), pp. 255–80; Houlbrook, Prince of Tricksters, pp. 223–53.

53 L. King, Family Men: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Britain, 1914–1960 (Oxford, 2015), pp. 5–7; C. Langhamer, The English in Love: the Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford, 2013), pp. 6–7. See also M. Francis, The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force 1939–1945 (Oxford, 2008); S. Szreter and K. Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England, 1918–1963 (Cambridge, 2010), p. 29; J. Lewis, ‘Marriage’, in Women in Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska (Harlow, 2001), pp. 69–85; L. Davidoff et al., The Family Story: Blood, Contract, and Intimacy, 1830–1960 (London, 1999), p. 18; 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.

54 P. Thane and T. Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England (Oxford, 2012), pp. 29–106.

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

56 Mort, ‘Love in a cold climate’, pp. 34, 47–8.

57 Edward VIII used this phrase in his abdication broadcast, which he delivered on the evening of 11 Dec. 1936 (Ziegler, King Edward VIII, pp. 331–3).

58 J. Perry, ‘Christmas as Nazi holiday: colonising the Christmas mood’, in Life and Times in Nazi Germany, ed. L. Pine (London, 2016), pp. 263–89.

59 Langhamer, The English in Love, p. 4; J. Plamper, The History of Emotions: an Introduction (Oxford, 2015); S. J. Matt, ‘Current emotion research in history: or, doing history from the inside out’, Emotion Rev., iii (2011), 117–24; W. M. Reddy, ‘The rule of love: the history of Western romantic love in comparative perspective’, in New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century, ed. L. Passerini, L. Ellena and A. C. T. Geppert (Oxford, 2010), pp. 33–57.

60 D. Giles, Illusions of Immortality: a Psychology of Fame and Celebrity (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 71–4; F. Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Oxford, 2010); S. Morgan, ‘Celebrity: academic “pseudo-event” or a useful concept for historians?’, Cult. and Soc. Hist., viii (2011), 95–114.

61 W. M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: a Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001).

62 For the competing nature of feelings in a late twentieth-century context, see M. Billig, Talking of the Royal Family (London, 1992), pp. 128–30; A. Olechnowicz, ‘“A jealous hatred”: royal popularity and social inequality’, in Olechnowicz, Monarchy and the British Nation, pp. 280–314; J. Thomas, ‘Beneath the mourning veil: Mass-Observation and the death of Diana’, pp. 8–9 <http://www.massobs.org.uk/images/occasional_papers/no12_thomas.pdf> [accessed 12 Oct. 2018].

63 As with the House of Windsor, the Nazis’ emotional engineering met with mixed results (Perry, ‘Christmas as Nazi holiday’, pp. 265–6).

64 B. Rosenwein, ‘Problems and methods in the history of emotions’, Passions in Context, i (2010), 1–32. J. Plamper noted in his recent historiographical overview of the history of emotions that very little research has been conducted on the way ‘affect’ and ‘feeling’ have been transformed by mass media in the context of the modern nation (Plamper, History of Emotions, pp. 285–7, 293–4).

65 For the term ‘affective integration’, see Perry, ‘Christmas as Nazi Holiday’, p. 264.

66 McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, pp. 8–9.

67 The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. Norman St John‐Stevas (15 vols., London, 1965–86), v. 419, as quoted in Bogdanor, Monarchy and the Constitution, p. 30.

68 S. Anthony, Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain: Stephen Tallents and the Birth of a Progressive Media Profession (Manchester, 2012), pp. 65–8; A. Taylor, ‘Speaking to democracy: the Conservative party and mass opinion from the 1920s to the 1950s’, in Mass Conservatism: the Conservatives and the Public since the 1880s, ed. S. Ball and I. Holliday (London, 2002), pp. 78–99.

69 McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, p. 8.

70 J. Gore, ‘Wigram, Clive, 1873–1960’, in Royal Lives: Portraits of the Past Royals by Those in the Know, ed. F. Prochaska (Oxford, 2002), pp. 557–9; F. Prochaska, ‘Wigram, Clive, first Baron Wigram’, in ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36890> [accessed 12 Oct. 2018]. Each of these men served as assistant private secretary to the monarch before taking up the position of principal private secretary. For a discussion of the role that courtiers played in the royal household, see D. Cannadine, ‘From biography to history: writing the modern British monarchy’, Hist. Research, lxxvii (2004), 289–312, at pp. 294–6.

71 M. Maclagan, ‘Alan Frederick Lascelles’, in Prochaska, Royal Lives, pp. 570–2; King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War: the Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles, ed. D. Hart-Davis (London, 2006).

72 The Royal Archives do not maintain a catalogue of the Archives’ holdings that is accessible to researchers. Instead, speculative requests to view material (often identified in the footnotes of royal biographers) have met with mixed results.

73 The BBC Written Archives Centre exercises a vetting policy on all files related to the British monarchy. Many have already been opened up for research and are therefore freely accessible, but restrictions are now in place on files that have not been examined before, many of which relate to the post-1945 period. It is also the case that some sensitive documents relating to the Church’s relationship with the crown have not yet been deposited in the archives of Lambeth Palace Library, or have been deliberately held back from researchers out of respect for the royal family.

74 A. Wilkinson, ‘Lang, (William) Cosmo Gordon, Baron Lang of Lambeth’, in ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/34398> [accessed 12 Oct. 2018].

75 R. Beaken, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis (London, 2012), pp. 66–142.

76 Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, pp. 266–8.

77 R. Jenkyns, Westminster Abbey: a Thousand Years of National Pageantry (London, 2011), p. 148.

78 R. Linkof, ‘“The photographic attack on his royal highness”: the prince of Wales, Wallis Simpson and the prehistory of the paparazzi’, Photography and Culture, iv (2011), 277–92; N. Hiley, ‘The candid camera of the Edwardian tabloids’, History Today, xliii (1993), 16–22.

79 A. Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press, 1918– 1978 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 239–44; Mort, ‘Love in a cold climate’, pp. 56–7.

80 The belief of the press barons in the crown’s sacrosanct character was evident in the gentleman’s agreement arranged by Rothermere and Beaverbook at the request of Edward VIII that ensured no British newspapers revealed the king’s relationship with Wallis Simpson to the public until they were eventually forced to break cover on 2 Dec. 1936.

81 Bingham, Family Newspapers?, pp. 241–50.

82 Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 19. The following 17 daily and weekly national newspapers were sampled as primary sources: Daily Express, Daily Herald, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Sketch, Daily Telegraph, Daily Worker, Manchester Guardian, News Chronicle, News of the World, Reynolds News, Sunday Express, Sunday Pictorial, Sunday Times, The Observer, The People, The Times. On sampling newspapers and British press culture, see A. Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford, 2004), pp. 12–5.

83 Bingham, Gender, pp. 8–15; Bingham, Family Newspapers?, pp. 19–22; L. Beers, Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), pp. 18–21.

84 This author’s research of newspapers initially consisted of targeted searches of digital newspaper archives; this subsequently informed the research conducted in the British Library’s Newsroom. The main limitation of this study of media texts is that sources from the Celtic nations have not been systematically analysed. Rather, the focus has been on self-professed ‘national’ media texts: the Fleet Street press, BBC radio and television and the 5 major British newsreels. The absence of regional media forms is important because, as Bingham has discussed in relation to Scottish newspaper readers, the Celtic nations have at times proved resistant to London-based media, opting instead for regional sources of information. He has noted that, in 1935, 43% of the Scottish population purchased a Fleet Street daily, while 60% bought Scottish morning papers (Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 17). Although parts of this book examine how national media organizations mobilized an inclusive language of ‘Britishness’ in reports on the monarchy, further research needs to be devoted to analysing how regional media presented royal events and personalities. This research could productively explore whether these localized representations conflicted or complemented the public image of the royal family disseminated by the national media; it could also question to what extent these local images were regionally tailored to appeal to communities in the Celtic nations.

85 McKernan, ‘The finest cinema performers’, pp. 59–71.

86 T. Aldgate, ‘The newsreels, public order, and the projection of Britain’, in Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power in the Twentieth Century, ed. J. Curran, A. Smith and P. Wingate (London, 1987), pp. 145–56; J. Hulbert, ‘Right-wing propaganda or reporting history?: the newsreels and the Suez crisis of 1956’, Film History, xiv (2002), 261–81; G. Turvey, ‘Ideological contradictions: the film topicals of the British and Colonial Kinematograph Company’, Early Popular Visual Culture, v (2007), 41–56, at pp. 51–3.

87 J. Richards, ‘The monarchy and film, 1900–2006’, in Olechnowicz, Monarchy and the British Nation, pp. 258–79, at p. 262.

88 On issues of style and technology, see N. Pronay, ‘The newsreels: the illusion of actuality’, in The Historian and Film, ed. P. Smith (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 95–119.

89 R. Brunt, ‘The family firm restored: newsreel coverage of the British monarchy 1936– 45’, in Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War, ed. C. Gledhill and G. Swanson (Manchester, 1996), pp. 140–51.

90 For a discussion of the implications of the digitization of newsreel archives, see N. Hiley and L. McKernan, ‘Reconstructing the news: British newsreel documentation and the British universities newsreel project’, Film History, xiii (2001), 185–99.

91 British Universities Film and Video Council, ‘News on Screen’ <http://bufvc.ac.uk/newsonscreen/search> [accessed 27 Feb. 2019]. All the newsreels examined in this book are referred to using the original titles and dates assigned to them by the BUFVC’s ‘News on Screen’ database.

92 Pronay, ‘Newsreels’, pp. 112–3; J. Richards and D. Sheridan, Mass-Observation at the Movies (London, 1987), pp. 381–400; L. McKernan, ‘The newsreel audience’, in Researching Newsreels: Local, National, and Transnational Case Studies, ed. C. Chambers, M. Jönsson and M. Vande Winkel (Basingstoke, 2018), pp. 35–50.

93 Encyclopaedia of Recorded Sound, ed. F. Hoffman (2 vols., New York and London, 2005), i. 1880. The recording (#19072) can be heard at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JyC6qw2D_s> [accessed 1 Feb. 2018].

94 Richards, ‘Monarchy and film’, p. 263.

95 I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Royal death and living memorials: the funerals and commemoration of George V and George VI, 1936–52’, Hist. Research, lxxxix (2015), 158–75. See also P. P. Scannell and D. Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, i. 1922–1939, Serving the Nation (Oxford, 1991), 280–1; S. Potter, Broadcasting Empire: the BBC and the British World, 1922–1970 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 59–64; Williamson, ‘Monarchy and public values’, pp. 225–8.

96 W. Webster, Englishness and Empire, 1939–1965 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 92–118; T. Hajkowski, The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 1922–53 (Manchester, 2010), pp. 100–4.

97 S. Nicholas, The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939–45 (Manchester, 1996), pp. 12–5; A. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (5 vols., Oxford, 1965–95), ii. 253–6.

98 Nicholas, Echo of War, p. 13; D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain in Between the Wars (Oxford, 1998).

99 S. Nicholas, ‘Media history or media histories? Re-addressing the history of the mass media in inter-war Britain’, Media History, xviii (2012), 379–94, at p. 390.

100 A. Olechnowicz, ‘Historians and the modern British monarchy’, in Olechnowicz, Monarchy and the British Nation, pp. 6–44, at p. 44.

101 N. Hubble, Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 5–7.

102 P. Summerfield, ‘Mass-Observation: social research or social movement?’, Jour. Contemp. Hist., xx (1985), 439–52, at p. 442.

103 J. Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (Oxford, 2010), p. 17; J. Hinton, ‘Self-reflections in the mass’, History Workshop Jour., lxxv (2013), 251–9, at pp. 256–7; Langhamer, The English in Love, pp. xv–xxi; Summerfield, ‘Mass-Observation’, pp. 441–4. See also T. Harrisson, Living Through the Blitz (London, 1978), p. 254.

104 Summerfield, ‘Mass-Observation’, p. 441.

105 Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives, p. 6.

106 T. Harrisson, ‘What is public opinion?’, Political Quart., xi (1940), 368–83.

107 Mass Observation, May the Twelfth: Mass Observation Day-Surveys 1937, by over Two Hundred Observers, ed. H. Jennings et al. (London, 1937; 2nd edn., 1987).

108 P. Ziegler, Crown and People (London, 1978).

109 E.g., H. Nicolson, King George the Fifth: His Life and Reign (London, 1952); J. Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI: His Life and Reign (London, 1958); W. Shawcross, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: the Official Biography (Basingstoke, 2009). For discussion of the merits and pitfalls of official royal biography, see Cannadine, ‘From biography to history’, pp. 9–15.

110 For recent discussion regarding using school essays as sources, see H. Barron and C. Langhamer, ‘Children, class, and the search for security: writing the future in 1930s Britain’, Twentieth Century British Hist., xxviii (2017), 367–89; H. Barron and C. Langhamer, ‘Feeling through practice: subjectivity and emotion in children’s writing’, Jour. Social Hist., li (2017), 101–23, at pp. 103–6; J. Greenhalgh, ‘“Till we hear the last all clear”: gender and the presentation of self in young girls’ writing about the bombing of Hull during the Second World War’, Gender & History, xxvi (2014), 167–83, at pp. 169–71.

111 T. Dixon, Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (Oxford, 2015), pp. 202–12.

112 J. V. Gottlieb, ‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (Basingstoke, 2015), p. 186. See also Mort, ‘Love in a cold climate’, pp. 40–1.