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The Sunday Graphic's 1953 Royal Tour Picture Album ... "The tour seems
to have been
a strange affair, a tour of places rarely visited by
royalty alongside some more important,
but equally far-flung outposts of
the Commonwealth. It was rather like
Iron Maiden playing in Christchurch
or Caracas." IMAGE: PJR screenshot |
As global tributes pour in for Queen Elizabeth II, who has died at 96 after an extraordinary reign of 70 years, my colleague PHILIP CASS, editor of Pacific Journalism Review, reflects on the late Queen’s first — of many — royal tours of the Pacific and what it reveals about colonial attitudes of the time.
One of the joys of travelling the world and collecting books is the
historical oddities that turn up in the most unexpected places.
I have a splendid copy of the complete works of Shakespeare dating to
the Second World War, completely re-set, so the frontispiece notes, due
to the original plates having been “destroyed by enemy action”. One
wonders at the perfidy of the Luftwaffe in trying to blow up the Bard.
I have a copy of Grove’s encyclopaedia of music from the 1930s which
notes with disdain that attempts to make jazz respectable by using an
orchestra have failed—and this written several years after Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.
The same volume also contains a section on the influence of Jews in
classical music, noting such important ‘Hebrew’ composers as Mahler.
Both these volumes came from a secondhand bookseller near the bus
station in Suva: relics, I suppose, of a long departed British colonial
administrator.
Each of these volumes is a window into the past and into attitudes and ideas that have long vanished.
In the year of the Platinum Jubilee of the late Queen Elizabeth
II—who died yesterday aged 96 after a 70-year reign—it was therefore
timely to find a copy of the Royal Tour Picture Album, a lavishly illustrated record of her 1953 tour of the Commonwealth in my local Salvation Army shop.
The 1953 tour seems to have been a strange affair, a tour of places
rarely visited by royalty alongside some more important, but equally
far-flung outposts of the Commonwealth. It was rather like Iron Maiden
playing in Christchurch or Caracas.
