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Macmillan’s trump card.
Elizabeth insisted on going. She had given Nkrumah her word that she would and she
saw it as her duty to do everything possible to keep Ghana in the Commonwealth. ‘How
silly I should look’, she said, ‘if I was scared to visit Ghana and then Khruschev went and
had a good reception.’ As Macmillan wrote in his diary:
The Queen has been absolutely determined all through. She is grateful for MPs’ and Press concern about her
safety, but she is impatient of the attitude towards her to treat her as a woman, and a film star or mascot…
She has great faith in the work she can do in the Commonwealth especially… she loves her duty and means
to be a Queen and not a puppet. 4
This was the first-ever visit to Ghana by a British sovereign. The British Government
had taken care to smooth her way by returning the ceremonial stools and chairs
captured by British soldiers in the Ashanti wars during her great-great-grandmother’s
reign. There was huge public excitement over the visit. The Principal Secretary of the
State Functions Secretariat, Dr David Awotwi, in charge of the social side, was forced to
go to ground in a secret office to escape pressure from the politicians who wanted
themselves, their families and friends included in everything. On the eve of the visit a
junior minister stole several hundred tickets to the most coveted event, the ‘High Life’
ball, and gave them to his friends so all the tickets had to be reissued in another form.
At Kumasi in the central part of the country there was a magnificent Durbar of chiefs
hosted by the Asantehene, Otumfuo Sir Osei Agyeman Prempeh II, King of Ashanti, who
brought with him in a huge black Rolls-Royce the Golden Stool of the Ashanti rarely seen
in public. At Accra Hospital Elizabeth and Philip managed to visit the seven-year-old
Kwame Appiah, son of the imprisoned Opposition leader and his English wife, Peggy,
daughter of the former Labour Chancellor, Sir Stafford Cripps. ‘Last time I was here,’
Philip told the boy, ‘I had luncheon with your mother. Give her my regards.’ Nkrumah
was less than pleased.
The Government-directed local press called the tour ‘Our Greatest Hour’ and hailed it
as heralding a ‘fascinating change’ in the current of relations between Great Britain, the
Commonwealth and Ghana, ‘a bridge over which the traffic of the future will pass
toward the building of a new and more prosperous world’. All Ghana, the neo-Marxist
Evening Newsdeclared, had been moved by this ‘most modest, lovable of Sovereigns’. It
bestowed on her the ultimate accolade – ‘the world’s greatest Socialist Monarch in
history’. The British press, however, according to the report of the Acting High
Commissioner, did their best to stir up trouble ‘in their customary surly manner’,
abusing Nkrumah and reporting scare stories of alleged bomb plots including one to
attach a limpet mine to Britannia, which so enraged the Ghanaian Government that the
correspondents of the Daily Mail and the Daily Express were prevented from leaving the
country and had to be bailed out by the High Commissioner.
The Acting High Commissioner’s report reflected the exasperation of officialdom with
what it regarded as the irresponsible attitudes of the British press and its increasingly
anti-establishment stance. This attitude on the part of the press was a new factor which