Thoughts On The Death of Queen Elizabeth II
What can you say about a dead monarch? At times like this it's my blessing to have no television. Nowhere on that poisonous, degraded medium could you hope to find sanity or detachment. I never could stomach the faked emotional responses and celebrity piffle that swim in the wake of every major fatality. But in this age of rapid response, a dead queen births a thousand live reactions; it's all so Instagrammy. I wasn't a fan of the woman, but the Britain we loved and lost was a maze of royal things -so lets remember some of them.
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At the age of 19, I was singing in a London punk-rock band. The four of us lived together at number 69 Royal Hill in the Royal Borough of Greenwich.(Pictured above) About twelve feet from our front door stood two pubs: the Richard I and the Prince Albert. You could have made it to or from these taverns on your hands and knees, and more than once we did. A pint of bitter cost 46p then, so with four ten pees, one five p and a penny, you held in your hand no less than six embossed portraits of the woman who died yesterday. Every banknote I have ever spent featured her face.
Around the corner was the Royal Park, at the very top of which stands the Royal Observatory. On warm summer nights I'd gatecrash the Park, climb the hill and gaze down over the Royal Borough and the Royal Naval College in the distance, smoking dope and dreaming common dreams. The royal family itself interested me not at all; a Catholic mother and communist father had seen to that. The queen and her sort were on another planet, I believed. But I was wrong. I would come to realise they were kind of everywhere, from the coins in my pocket to the future into which I would stumble.
In the 1980's I discovered the joys of gambling and spent the next ten years on the racetrack merry-go-round that encircles London: Sandown, Lingfield, Kempton and, naturally, Ascot. My first glimpse of royalty in the flesh was at the four-day June jamboree of Royal Ascot. Each afternoon began with various groups of Windsors trundling down the straight in ornate wooden horse-drawn carriages, with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh beaming and waving from the biggest and best. Nice work if you can get it, I thought.
Royal Ascot was already a bit of a moth-eared circus, however. The racetrack in those days was a crumbling, red-brick relic with rusty turnstiles -for the likes of me, at least. Worse still, for all the retro-glamour of their gilded carriages and strutting horses, the Queen's racehorses were no longer centre-stage in the races themselves.
Royalty of a different stripe were winning all the big-money prizes. The world of thoroughbred racing had become dominated by Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum and his brothers, all billionaire princes in their own right. Another Muslim potentate-the Aga Khan- was picking up the crumbs, and the Windsor's relatively cheap horses were retreating down the prizewinner's table. I must have seen the Queen mother at twenty different racetracks, where she -like me- seemed to be spending her entire life.
By the 1990's I knew London like the back of my hand -too well, in fact, and was looking for an escape route. I was living in Royal Greenwich again, running a vintage shop and escaping to racetracks for fun. In summer, Monday nights meant a trip down the Thames to Windsor -another royal racecourse of unbelievable shabbiness and threadbare facilities.
I'd hop an afternoon train to Windsor station, stroll round the castle walls, neck a couple of pints and take the ferryboat downriver which dropped you by the winning post. The boats and the grandstands were crowded with Londoners -city boys and their molls, bookies and burglars, plus every other brand of dodgy geezer the capital attracted.
None of the royal family patronised the track on their doorstep -it really was a dump- but I never missed my racenight amble round the massive edifice of the castle. It's larger than life; a real, proper fuck-off fortress and sometimes the Windsors actually lived there. (In 1992, serious flames broke out in the castle. It was rumoured in Westminster that Tony Blair had organised an arson attack, to pressure the royals into paying tax. It's hard to know one way or the other, but it wasn't long afterwards that a new revenue-deal was struck between Parliament and the Crown. One wonders quite how Blair eventually managed to gouge his knighthood out of Her Majesty, who did everything possible to avoid enobling the bastard.)
Beyond doubt Britain's professional talking heads will spend the next week or two barking that syrupy-sour mixture of grovel and hype reserved for royalty, living or dead. That's their job: to big up the already big, to sell the myths, salute the flags and sing the songs. Cast your mind back to the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and the months of gibbering hysteria that followed. London was like a city in shock -largely due to a media-induced frenzy that drove many to insane levels of unwarranted despair.
When the news first broke, I was hustling for bargains at Brick Lane market, haggling with the last of the cockney dealers at the cobbled East-end street-stalls. Under the notorious arches at East Street, people wept openly for the dead princess. Mysterious, dimly lit junk-shops still lingered between alleyways and tenements that were already filling up with much more colourful Asian businesses.
Cold winds were blowing from the East. Queen Elizabeth, as horsey a monarch as you could wish for, had become a side-show at her own, beloved Ascot. Every June now, those unspeakably wealthy and powerful Maktoums would appear in a swarm of Lear-jets from Dubai, descend upon private airfields and install themselves in the huge mansions they bought in the woods and farmlands of Ascot and nearby Bagshot. (These days the Arabs' next-door neighbours are murderous Russian oligarchs).
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| THE ROYAL FAMILY OF QATAR |
I have often wondered what dark clouds crossed the mind of our monarch when another arab -the playboy Dodi Fayed- plucked her own daughter-in-law from the arms of her eldest son? As with the castle fire, it's easier to speculate than explore.
On the final evening of the 20th century, I walked up the length of Royal Hill, then up again to the top of Point Hill, to a millennial New Year's Eve party. The garden overlooked the Thames, where a million fireworks roared and coloured searchlights danced on the clouds. Within weeks I had left London for good, heading for a new life in the countryside and a new career as a writer.
Within three years I was spending every other weekend at Horse Driving Trials, watching fanatics in steel racing-carriages drive teams of horses across country and through obstacle-courses, racing against the clock. It was a sport for adrenalin-junkies and monomaniacs; complex, dangerous and extremely expensive. It was invented by George Bowman, a millionaire scrap-dealer from Cumbria, and his horsey chum Prince Philip...His Royal Highness...The Duke of Edinburgh - Phil the Greek if you dared.
Horse & Hound magazine had discovered that my lack of hands-on equine experience was heavily offset by my way with words. The editors were cursed with a stableful of horse-wise scribes with only a tentative grip on the reins of the English language. Among other tasks, I became the H&H chief carriage-driving reporter and was pulled into the royal orbit before you could say "God Bless Your Majesty!"
Which is something I never actually did say, as dad had raised me to scoff and sneer where royalty was concerned. I bow to no man and all that. Dad, on the other hand, was never handed a really cushy job where meeting with and -being civil towards- royalty was a central part of the gig. I won't dwell on the subject, but interested readers can revisit my last royal obituary post from April 2021:"My Secret Life with The Duke of Edinburgh" (CLICK TO READ)
The Queen, however, never attended any of Phil's three-day horse-driving jaunts. The reason was simple: during those weekends her husband was bonking the chic, petite Lady Penny Romsey. Everyone at the driving-trials knew it; drivers, grooms, judges, the burger-van-man, even the uniquely privileged reporter from Nag & Dog (the horsey-club's nickname for Horse & Hound magazine). Penny was a lot younger and prettier than Liz, and the driving Dook was a notorious legover bandit.
Once a year, however, the queen would turn up at Smith's Lawn -a private royal paradise in the grounds of Windsor Great Park- and award the prizes at the annual British Driving Society bash. The BDS was for show-ponies, not amateur chariot-racing. Nevertheless it was a fantastical, surreal event, with everyone in arch-Victorian costumes, steering authentic vintage carriages from milk-floats to Hackney taxicabs. It was like falling through a wormhole in the space/time continuum and waking up in Covent garden in 1898.
After a few years of plying my trade I was a very familiar face on the horsey circuit. As a result, the discreet but ever-present security-goons that attend royals-at-play had grown more permissive, and almost no areas seemed off-limits. I had, I suppose, been assimilated. I didn't think twice about quizzing Penny Romsey or the Dook during competitions, nor did I stoop to calling him Sir, either; he didn't give a hoot. Royals were very horsey; I was very horsey; horses were our shared world.
It was in this realm of fantasy -and this frame of mind- that I had my last and closest encounter with the queen herself. It was at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, where both the 'dress-up' drivers and the Driving Trial maniacs were gathered. The Victoriana gang were done and dusted within a couple of hours, so I consulted my show map -several square miles of showground were involved- and struck off towards the Driving Trial dressage arena, travelling as the crow flies.
Crows, of course, can navigate through a wood, and finding a large copse between me and my goal, I did likewise. Soon I could vaguely see horses through the trees, and a sleek carriage. Straightening my hat and tie (I tackled Royal Windsor in a grey suit and fedora) I emerged from between some beech trees, crunching twigs underfoot, and found myself staring at several dozen members of the World's Press, bristling with cameras and notebooks. They were penned into a tiny, roped enclosure, and to my bewilderment, photographers began snapping away at me, their great zoom lenses extending like cannons. WTF?
Glancing to my right, I saw the explanation: the unmistakeable face of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, standing about a yard away, head tilted and observing me closely, with an air of serene composure. Behind her, two suited bodyguards with pistols under their armpits were poised to spring into action. In a combination of fear and hope, I smiled. The queen, holding my gaze, smiled broadly back and moved a finger that somehow chilled the attack-dogs. She nodded at my official Horse & Hound badge and calmly returned her gaze to the arena, where a team of black Fell ponies were wheeling their carriage through a difficult turn.
The gunnies gave up frowning at me and went back to glaring at the Japanese paparazzi who were gnawing at the rope barrier. I decided to stay put until the ponies finished, then escape into the stands via the arena itself. I was forever crossing arenas. I watched the clever animals change their legs, shift their paces and begin the final manoeuvre: I knew their entire routine by heart. Very elegant they looked too -as did the diminutive figure of Lady Penny Romsey impeccably balanced in the driving seat, threading the heavy leather reins with ease.
Later that day, I was sat in a marquee drinking champagne with an aged horsey American heiress. She was running with the idea that her stable star deserved a feature article in Nag & Dog, and in a haze of Bollinger, I was letting her run. "I saw you at the dressage arena joking with the Queen," she gushed. "Isn't she just FAB-yoo-luss?!" I had to agree.
When you think about it, Mrs Windsor put up with rather a lot in her 96 years. World war two got off to a bad start for her family, several of whom appeared a bit too keen on Der Fuhrer. Her Greek husband looked promising; a handsome catch, but remained a faithless cad right to the last. The family racetrack was gradually co-opted by Arabs with better horses, somebody torched their riverside castle and then her daughter-in-law got whacked like Sonny Corleone in the Godfather. For decades her London palace was crawling with the world's most noxious pedophiles, from Jeffrey Epstein to the ever-present walking nightmare of Jummy Saville -to whom she awarded a knighthood. She had to smile in the face of an endless procession of ugly presidents and premiers, halfwit potentates and mad monarchs, not to mention 16 consecutive UK Prime Ministers, most of whom she despised. Her sons were second-raters, and as for the ginger grandchild...well, you can comb the tabloids for that kind of dirt.
Elizabeth II survived three generations of royal scandals, none of which left a single smear of mud on her lily-white personal reputation. I'm not at all sure that was down to her being so terribly decent, although I strongly suspect she was a lot smarter than those surrounding her, and probably a lot tougher as well. Unlike many of the dimwits she spawned, she never let anyone outside the family know what she was thinking. I imagine she knew where more than a few bodies were buried, and that certain individuals will have been somewhat relieved at her passing. They don't call it the The Firm for nothing, and above all else QE2 understood that one must never allow anything to become personal. They should put that on her tombstone: "It was only business, Charles, it was never personal."
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