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9
‘The World’s Sweetheart’
‘England now had three assets: her Queen, “the world’s sweetheart”, Winston Churchill, and her glorious
historical past.’
Bernard Baruch in conversation with Jock Colville, 5 January 1953
On 24 November 1953, just over five months after millions of people worldwide had
seen her crowned, Elizabeth set off on a six-month grand tour of the Commonwealth,
her first step towards the fulfilment of the speech of dedication which she had made on
her twenty-first birthday in 1947. For Elizabeth, her role as head of the Commonwealth
was as important as her position as Queen of Great Britain. Where her parents had been
Empire-minded, Elizabeth was Commonwealth-orientated and would remain steadfastly
so, sometimes in conflict with the views of her British prime ministers. Since 1949 the
sovereign of Great Britain had been designated as ‘Head of the Commonwealth’ and
would be acknowledged as such in member countries which, like India, were republics.
In 1953 the Royal Titles Act had reflected the fact that the other members of the
Commonwealth were full and equal members with the United Kingdom, so that
Elizabeth as she was in Britain was equally queen of each of her separate realms, acting
on the advice of her ministers there, and legislation on the royal title was to be enacted
by each country’s parliament.
Travelling with Philip on the SS Gothic, she covered some 43,000 miles in her sixmonth
tour, beginning in Bermuda and going on via the Bahamas and Jamaica to
Belize, then through the Panama Canal to Fiji and Tonga, where she renewed her
acquaintance with the giant Queen Salote and the equally giant turtle, Tuimalila, which
had been introduced to Captain Cook nearly 200 years before. At Christmas she was in
New Zealand, hailed by the Maoris as ‘The rare White Heron of the Single Flight’. Later
on the Gothic, Elizabeth had the other members of the party in stitches as she did the
haka in evening dress complete with grunts and exaggerated gestures. Wearing her
Coronation dress she opened the parliaments of New Zealand, Australia and Ceylon. In
Ceylon, after protracted intergovernmental discussions as to whether or not she should
remove her shoes when entering the Sacred Shrine at the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy
(where a tooth held to have belonged to the Buddha was exhibited), she visited the
shrine – removing her shoes – and then witnessed the Royal Perahera, a procession of
some 600 Kandyan chiefs with 125 ‘lavishly-caparisoned’ elephants, 1,000 torchbearers