Category: History Publisher: Halsgrove
ISBN-10: 1841141674
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 160
Copyright: May 1 2002
Images from the Western Morning News and Evening Herald, supplemented with photographs from other collections
This pictorial celebration of royal visits to Devon and Cornwall is a timely memento of royal connections with the westcountry in England, in the year of Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee. The 200 photographs selected include royal visits from 1865 to 1999, as well as of celebrations for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee and King George VI's Coronation.
The late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and the Prince of Wales (whose other titles include Duke of Cornwall) were regular visitors and are seen in many of the pictures. Other members of the royal family in these pages include not only Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh, but also King Edward VII, his eldest sister Victoria, Princess Royal, and his wife Queen Alexandra; Edward, Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII and subsequently Duke of Windsor; George and Marina, Duke and Duchess of Kent, their son Edward, Duke of Kent and their daughter Alexandra; Anne, Princess Royal; Diana, Princess of Wales; and Andrew, Duke of York.
Excerpt
Perhaps no royal visit to Devon will live in popular memory more than the appearance of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in Plymouth on 20 March 1941, as they visited dockyards, royal marine and naval barracks, hospitals, and the YMCA in some of the darkest days of World War II. An air-raid warden of a bombed street, standing in the debris of his own home, assured the Queen that “we are keeping our chins up”. She promptly congratulated him; “Well done. It is only by keeping our chins up, as we are doing, that we shall win the war.” During their afternoon tour an air-raid warning was sounded, but the programme continued as if nothing had happened. Only a couple of hours after they returned to London, thousands of fire bombs, followed by high explosives, rained down on the city. Within two months, heavy raids had destroyed the centre of Plymouth, much of Devonport, and severely damaged the dockyards. The offices of the Western Morning News were among the buildings which suffered, and a vast store of irreplaceable photographic records was lost to posterity.
Thirty-six years later, the contrast could hardly have been greater. In the summer of 1977 Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her Silver Jubilee and came to the westcountry in the first week of August. “Plymouth had seldom seen so much flag-waving as yesterday,” wrote a reporter, “when the Queen made her walkabout of the City Centre, meeting the people from city, country and overseas who were there in thousands to declare their Silver Jubilee joy and greetings. It was a day of contrasts from the unrehearsed informality of the walkabout to the precision and ceremonial when the Royal Marines were inspected on Plymouth Hoe. But through it all ran the thread of loyalty and affection for the Queen.” The present writer will never forget being one of those enthusiastic thousands waiting patiently in Royal Parade for his first-ever sight of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Another journalist for the paper that same week noted that “in just 25 minutes the Queen gave Falmouth enough happy memories to last a lifetime” when she and the Duke of Edinburgh came west of the Tamar to resume the tour.
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