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wrote on 29 January 1947, ‘and I am rather afraid that she might not take to the idea
quite as docilely as I do. It is true that I know what is good for me, but don’t forget that
she has not had you as Uncle loco parentis, counsellor and friend as long as I have…’ 5
This letter may have been intended to warn his uncle not to be too bossy when the King,
Queen, Philip and Elizabeth went to dinner with the Mount-battens, their daughter
Patricia and her husband, John Brabourne, at 16 Chester Street two nights before the
royal family set off for their South African tour.
On 1 February 1947 the family sailed from Portsmouth in the Royal Navy’s latest
battleship, HMS Vanguard. The tour had been planned for a year with, as its twin
purpose, the object of helping the King’s friend Field Marshal Jan Smuts against the
Nationalist Party in the forthcoming election and to give the King, exhausted by the
strains of war and in poor health, the chance of a prolonged holiday with his family.
When the time to leave came, however, Britain was in the grip of a fuel crisis after the
worst winter of the century. On 29 January Big Ben struck once and then ground,
symbolically, to a halt; at Windsor the Thames froze over. A financial crisis as severe as
the weather loomed; the King did not want to leave his country at such a time and later
offered to return, but the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, told him that to cut short his
visit would magnify the crisis in international eyes. It was not an auspicious start; the
weather in the Channel was atrocious, so bad that when the French battleship Richelieu
(which His Majesty’s Navy had tried to sink at Oran in 1940) took up station off the
French coast and attempted to fire a salute in his honour, it signally failed to produce
more than a puff of white smoke and the King was unreasonably annoyed. As the
Vanguard sailed southwards across the Equator and the sun shone, the Princesses relaxed
and played deck games with the ships’ officers. Elizabeth wrote regularly to Philip and
occasionally to Crawfie as she and Margaret were in the habit of doing when they were
away or when Crawfie was on holiday. Among the naval officers on Vanguard she told
Crawfie, there were ‘one or two “smashers’”. Also in the party was another ‘smasher’,
the King’s handsome equerry, ex-Battle of Britain ace, Group Captain Peter Townsend,
with whom Margaret was to have a sensational romance.
The South African tour made a tremendous impression on Elizabeth. Not only was it
her first-ever trip outside the British Isles, but it was her first experience of the British
Commonwealth and Empire which was to play such a large part in her life and reign.
The South African part of the visit was tense; the Boer-supported Nationalist Party
remained aloof and unforgiving of the British, their press hostile. Die Burger commented
disapprovingly on the mingling of ‘Europeans and non-Europeans’ in the crowds and
mocked the King’s pronunciation of an Afrikaans sentence at the opening of Parliament.
(The royal visit did not prevent the victory of the Nationalist Party the following year
and the subsequent foundation of an apartheid regime in South Africa.) The King,
according to local (non-Nationalist) reports, became restless at the intense security
designed to keep him away from his African subjects. He was ‘tired to death at being
ordered about and sleuthed by Afrikander policemen wherever they moved’, and on one
occasion, when he thought he was out of earshot, remarked to the Queen, ‘We’ve shaken