The King is dead!

Like the then Princess Elizabeth, I was in Africa on 6th February 1952 enjoying the great outdoors when King George VI died. The future Queen was in Kenya staying  at the famous Treetops safari lodge. I was in the grounds of the Luanshya Club (on the Copper Belt of Northern Rhodesia) in a 'tree top' of kinds -  playing with some other kids on some jacaranda trees. 

I don't recall us being particularly noisy, but no doubt we were, as children do, shouting out words of encouragement, challenge or claiming some bragging rights as to who had climbed highest as 'King of the Castle.' However, our game was abruptly interrupted when a woman - politeness being very much the order of the day, we would have said 'a lady' - in the then standard floral summer dress ran out to us and ordered us to be quiet.

King George VI

'Be quiet, children! No more shouting - and get out of the tree! The King is dead!'

There was instant quiet. We'd heard those awful words, 'The King is dead.' 

I recall a sense of shock. We knew who the king was and it was hard to believe that he could be dead. We all collected stamps in those days, and most stamps, particularly those steamed off envelopes and parcels from 'Home' seemed to bear the silhouette head of King George VI. 



And we knew the pomp and circumstance of kingship too from the Pathe newsreels at the Bioscope (as the Luanshya cinema was called). And at the end of each picture show we would stand and sing'God Save The King.'

The king was dead and it took some time in my young mind to realise that his daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was in fact no longer 'princess' but the new monarch, Queen Elizabeth. About two weeks later (the film reels would be sent out on Union Castle mail ships and then sent by rail from Capetown) we saw Queen Elizabeth for the first time as she descended from the BOAC airliner to be greeted by Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill on the tarmac runway. The aged PM's appearance accentuating the youthful image of the new Queen.

However, despite the age-old tradition of 'The King is dead, long live the King (or in this case the queen)' it was difficult for me to think of anyone else as the King (or Queen) other than George VI - something was accentuated by the newsreel of his funeral at Windsor. It wasn't until the preparations for the coronation the following year that the Queen became The Queen. By that time, the insistence on her being called Queen Elizabeth the Second was offending our sense of Scottish identity and history (she was after all the first Queen Elizabeth of Scotland) - and as a family we followed with excitement the story of the 'stolen' Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey. For the first time,  I felt stirrings of Scottish nationalism.