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off the Gestapo at last.’ One incident showed the extent of the King’s irritation at the
way he was being ‘driven’ on his visit to his South African kingdom and, equally,
Elizabeth’s awareness and her attempts at damage limitation. At the state banquet in
Pretoria, an official forgot to switch off the microphone following Smuts’s introductory
speech. Smuts invited the King to follow him, whereupon the King replied crossly: ‘I’ll
speak when I’ve had my coffee and the waiters have left the room.’
Smuts urged him, ‘They’re waiting for you now in England, Sir.’
The King, mutinously, ‘Well, let them wait. I have said I will speak when the waiters
have left the room.’
Elizabeth (intervening anxiously), ‘Can’t we be heard?’
Alerted by his daughter’s intervention, the King relented, stood up and made his
speech. ‘Well, I suppose I may now have my coffee,’ he said as he sat down. 6
Tension led to a sad, unpleasant incident at Benoni on the Rand, when the King,
claustrophobic and unnerved by the crowds pressing in on the car, began to get in a
rage, shouting at the driver. The Queen attempted to soothe him and the two Princesses
were trying to make light of things when a man broke from the crowd and raced after
the car; clutching something in one hand, he grabbed the car with the other. The Queen,
fearing some kind of attack, beat him with her parasol while the attendant policemen
leapt on him and roughed him up. It turned out that the man had been clutching not a
weapon but a ten-shilling note as a birthday present for Elizabeth. The King, appalled,
sent to ask if the man was all right and even apologized for his own behaviour to the
equerry who had been present, Group Captain Peter Townsend. ‘I’m sorry about today,’
he said, ‘I was very tired…’ 7
Once beyond the confines of South Africa the tour became more relaxed in atmosphere
and the King schoolboyish in his relief at escaping the strict regimentation and often
hostile scrutiny to which he had been subjected in his ‘Kingdom’. In southern Rhodesia
before setting out for a picnic he teased the Governor’s ADC: ‘Do ADCs always wear ties
for picnics?’ he said, giving it a sharp tug; later, at the picnic, when handed an
enormous tomato, he remarked, ‘What am I to do with this – throw it at you?’ With his
usual sharp eye for details of dress and decoration he told off the Governor for wearing
one of his stars in the wrong place and his miniature medals overlapping the wrong
way. The Governor looked down his nose for a minute or two before replying coolly,
‘That’s funny, Sir, because they are on the same way as yours.’ ‘Oh,’ said the King, ‘of
course I always look at mine in the mirror.’ 8 The family climbed to visit Cecil Rhodes’s
grave in the Matopos hills. Characteristically, the Queen wore her usual high-heeled
shoes and when even she realized that she could not make it wearing them, dutiful
Elizabeth handed over her more sensible pair and made the climb in stockinged feet. On
his return from this solemn occasion the King shouted ‘Off parade at last’ and threw his
hat at the ceiling, which was caught by the ADC and returned to him; he then threw it
on to the floor and the Queen kicked it into the dining-room. The King then seized the
gong and went round the house beating it before trying to hang it round one official’s