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member of the Nazi league of German Girls although she had had an English governess
and had attended a well-known English girls’ boarding-school, North Foreland Lodge.
Recently, a newspaper editor who had printed gossip about her difficult relations with
her eccentric mother, the old Duchess of Brunswick, had been jailed. Queen Frederika
was outspoken, tactless and interfering and, therefore, unpopular in political circles in
Athens. As a descendant on her father’s side of Queen Victoria’s uncle, the King of
Hanover, and on her mother’s as a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she was
doubly related to Elizabeth while King Paul was Philip’s first cousin.
The demonstrators, described by the fiercely anti-Communist Time as a ‘motley
collection of Communists, Socialists, anti-monarchists, ban the bombers [headed by
Bertrand Russell] and beatniks’, were initially given some countenance by the Labour
Party’s leader and deputy leader, Harold Wilson and George Brown, who boycotted a
state banquet for the Greek royal couple. On the first night a chanting crowd of 1,500
people wearing black sashes demonstrated in Whitehall, but were prevented by police
from reaching Buckingham Palace where Elizabeth was giving a banquet. The Foreign
Office had taken the precaution of buying up every ticket for a special performance of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream on the following evening, but when the royal party arrived
and left they were greeted by a chorus of boos and shouts of ‘Sieg heil!’ Elizabeth herself
was described as looking ‘startled and dismayed’ despite a volume of counter-cheering.
It was the first time a British monarch had been subjected to such treatment since
Edward VII had been hissed at Ascot by racegoers shocked by his part in a recent divorce
scandal. In general the press condemned the demonstrators; the Daily Mirror took the
leaders of the Committee of 100 to task for ‘providing a shield for mischievous
Communist agitation’ and pointed out that Greece was practically the only country in
eastern Europe not ruled by a totalitarian dictatorship.
Reminders of the royal family’s foreign blood were not popular in Britain. In 1958
when President Heuss of West Germany came to London on an official visit, the
reception was noticeably cool with most commentators harking back to the war. The
President’s gift of £5,000 towards the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral was greeted with
a snarl from the Daily Mirror’s star columnist, Cassandra: ‘We want no apologetic tips on
our national tombs… All I want of them is to wait for a generation to pass before they
come sidling up to us saying it was all just a big mistake.’ Elizabeth’s speech at the state
banquet at Buckingham Palace in the President’s honour recalling her own and her
husband’s German ancestry went down badly with the public. ‘Our German Blood’ was
the headline in the Daily Express next morning; it was not meant politely. The visit of
King Paul and Queen Frederika was yet another reminder. The new satirical magazine,
Private Eye, liked to refer to Philip as ‘Phil the Greek’. Another visit by a head of state
which roused a certain amount of hostility was that of the Emperor of Japan, Hirohito,
in October 1971. Elizabeth, seated beside the Emperor as they drove up the Mall in an
open carriage smiling and waving in customary fashion, could hear the comments of the
crowd all too clearly. ‘I’m glad the Emperor couldn’t understand English…,’ she confided
later.