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from Buckingham Palace. The Palace Steward, who rarely travelled except for the big
occasions, would be there to supervise and bring the necessary staff with him. Often the
royal chef went too. Everything had to be planned for months in advance, not only the
menu but also the plate, the dinner services, the cutlery, candelabra, table decorations,
flower holders and cruets, all of which had to be carefully packed as the items were so
valuable – a dessert plate could be worth £500. This would be done for banquets in
places as diverse as Lusaka and Nepal, a huge feat of organization and logistics.
Elizabeth herself would take care that everything was suitable for the place where the
banquet was to be held. On one occasion when the Steward and his staff disagreed with
their boss, the Master of the Household, over whether some particularly grand
candelabra and gilt service should go, Elizabeth backed their opinion, saying it was too
ostentatious for its destination: – ‘it would be all right for Spain where they expect a
banquet to be a big, lavish event, but not there’.
The most important thing on these occasions is Elizabeth’s health. Although she is very
strong physically and normally suffers only from colds, a carefully planned visit could
be ruined if she went down with food-poisoning. Staff ensure that the ice for her drink is
made with Malvern water and that if there is a tray of glasses she takes the one with the
Malvern cubes. She will give the Steward a quick glance and know that her drink is safe.
For the same reason, she never eats shellfish on tour. Although she occasionally eats
lobster at Balmoral, she doesn’t like oysters or mussels or even avocado pears – ‘they
taste like soap’. She likes chicken, lamb and, in the family tradition, game, particularly
partridge. At Balmoral the late King insisted on grouse almost every night and in postwar
austerity years when meat was rationed, the staff at Balmoral ate so much venison
that, as one remarked, ‘it’s a wonder we didn’t grow antlers’. All over the world people
have marvelled at Elizabeth’s stamina and how she can actually endure the punishing
schedules of these state visits without apparently tiring. ‘She has two great assets,’ said
one of her Private Secretaries, ‘first of all she sleeps very well and secondly she’s got
very good legs and she can stand for a long time… The Queen is as tough as a yak.’
The final scenes of the film were overtly ‘family’ ones with Elizabeth, Philip and their
two elder children sitting round a family lunch table telling not very funny stories.
Elizabeth was talking about Queen Victoria’s ‘incredible control’; when at a Durbar an
Oriental potentate fell over and shot towards her throne feet first, the Queen restrained
her giggles and was seen to give a ‘slight shiver but that was all’. Her own worst
moment, she said, had come at an audience, when the Home Secretary had come in with
his hand over his mouth and said, ‘The next one’s a gorilla. And he was… you know,
long arms hanging down…’ Philip countered with a story about his father-in-law, the
late King: ‘He had very odd habits, sometimes I thought he was mad.’ Once Philip had
gone down to Royal Lodge to see the King and, on asking for him, was told that he was
in the garden. He went out and saw no one, then heard the most incredible explosion of
bad language coming from a rhododendron bush; peering into the centre of the bush, he
saw the King hacking away with a pruning knife and wearing on his head the full
bearskin in which he would have to be on parade for Trooping the Colour.