Amid royal hoopla, the Queen (and her hat) stood out
Elizabeth II was not classic celebrity material but such was her strength of character and duty she avoided becoming an anachronism in a world so in thrall to the young and the new.
If you thought royal celebrity began with Diana or Kate, you’d be wrong.
Fifty or 60 years ago, Australian women – and it was mainly women back then – hung out for a weekly diet of the Windsors via colour magazines like The Women’s Weekly, Woman’s Day and New Idea.
Who would it be this week? The newly minted Princess Grace of Monaco? The glamorous Princess Margaret, so popular that many of our mothers gave us her name as our middle name? Or would it be the Royal Family (anything other than capital letters being a treasonable offence) with our beautiful young Queen, her handsome Philip, and the children, Charles and Anne?
Thanks in large part to those magazines, the Windsors were part of our social fabric (although we didn’t use that moniker, many of us reaching adulthood believing the British royals were the only people on the planet without surnames).
In the past 24 hours, many have pointed out that nine out of 10 people on that planet were not even born when Elizabeth became Regina.
Only a handful of people, my 99-year-old neighbour being one of them, can remember the Queen’s grandfather, King George V. A few more have a clear sense of her father King George VI. But for anyone under about 80, it’s the Queen what does it for us.
They say most British people have dreamt at some point about having afternoon tea with Her Majesty, or of the monarch ringing the doorbell and sailing into the front room.
Australians, being a more multicultural lot, may not experience these culturally embedded dreams but our waking moments have been deeply coloured by royalty over the years, even if our interest has gone through various iterations.
When the Queen began her reign in 1952 no one was talking about a republic and a country that was still overwhelmingly Anglo and Protestant found an easy affinity with the royal narrative. A more radical Sixties generation was anti-Establishment rather than anti-royal but it was enough for the Queen and her crew to be subjected to satire, irony, parody and send-up from her more irreverent subjects.
The shift in the Zeitgeist in the 1980s to near-obsession with Diana and increased coverage of royal stories in the quality broadsheets, even as Australia seriously debated the republican cause, is easily understood, given the glamour of key players and the growth of “confessional” journalism. That interest has never abated, with the Windsors and the Cambridges and the Sussexes investing heavily in social media to spread their aura. And of course, loving the royals, identifying with Kate or Will or the kids has little to do with your views on the republic or whether your parents were Cambodian or Lebanese or Irish.
But applying that lens of celebrity to the Queen’s place in our culture doesn’t really work. She was first in class, certainly, the matriarch who became more revered the older she got. Such is the appeal of the heroically old, we figured the Queen deserved one of her own telegrams for simply clocking up the years.
But Elizabeth II was not classic celeb material as she eased into middle age, and then into her 70s, and 80s, and 90s. Her hats and coats and shoes defied fashion, her handbags just too much. (It’s only recently we’ve learnt the reason for all that vibrant block colour and those rather outsized hats was so the Queen could be easily identified in a crowd, that more of us could say that we did, indeed, see her passing by.)
But no, not glamorous, or even contemporary. Indeed, it was amazing that the Queen avoided becoming an anachronism in a world so in thrall to the young and the new.
No TikToker is hanging out to see a Queen meme but the respect being accorded her in death is only partly a result of a carefully crafted and extended public goodbye in the UK and around the Commonwealth that she so assiduously nurtured.
Others have noted her stoicism, and she became something of a role model for how our own elders might confront their dysfunctional families and their deteriorating mobility.
But the Queen’s real success was in somehow meeting the need across many age groups, but perhaps particularly among the young, for the known and the familiar to run alongside the volatile and the transient
In that sense, Her Majesty resonated, and she rocked. To our surprise in many ways, she not only grew old, but she grew on us.
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