It was maybe the closest the steadfastly stoic Queen had ever come to a nervous breakdown.
In July 1969, within the wake of the Investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales and a collection of violent threats from Welsh Nationalists, she immediately disappeared from public view.
For the primary time, apart from throughout her pregnancies, she cancelled all her engagements for a complete week, together with a visit to the tennis at Wimbledon.
The Palace put it right down to a “feverish cold”. But a senior official later revealed it had been “nervous exhaustion”.
“I wouldn’t describe it as a collapse,” says one other. “But, whatever it was, she’d got through all this with huge relief and she just didn’t feel like going on for a few days. It was totally unlike her.”
So what had introduced the often unflappable 43-year-old Monarch to such a state of hysteria and nervous exhaustion?
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Charles is invested Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle by the Queen (Image: Getty)
The summer time of 1969 stays one of many nice landmarks of the reign. It wouldn't solely herald a sudden re-engagement with the general public however solid the household in a brand new and fashionable mild, thanks partly to the TV documentary, Royal Family.
A BBC crew had filmed scenes which might as soon as have been deemed sacrosanct – the Queen at her desk, in her practice, on board an aeroplane and, most memorably, on vacation along with her household at Balmoral.
The world would sit open-mouthed, watching the Queen taking Prince Edward to purchase an ice cream on the store on the sting of the property, or the household getting ready a barbecue. Her press secretary William Heseltine recollects comprehensible nerves forward of filming a picnic on the shores of Loch Muick, though everybody quickly relaxed.
“This was later characterised as an event specially set up for the cameras,” he recollects. “This was as far from the truth, as was the suggestion [in the Daily Mirror] that the food, once cooked before the cameras, was thrown out or given to the dogs.
“No one who knew the Queen would have dreamed of suggesting that she was capable of such waste.”
The programme’s screening was essentially the most vital tv second for the reason that Coronation. Lasting an hour and three quarters, it first aired on the BBC on June 21 and was repeated on ITV every week later, reaching almost 70 per cent of the nation.
It meant that significantly extra folks in Britain watched the Queen serving to Prince Charles with the salad dressing on the banks of Loch Muick than the occasion which occurred a month later – Man touchdown on the Moon. Half a century on, some commentators have instructed the household shortly got here to treat all of it as a horrible mistake, by no means to be seen once more.
Those inside the Royal Household bear in mind the exact opposite.
The prince together with his dad and mom and Princess Anne after ceremony (Image: Getty)
The Queen’s non-public secretary Martin Charteris cheerfully renamed it Carry On Reigning (in homage to the Carry On movie franchise, then at its wildly fashionable peak), and the Queen rewarded William Heseltine with a Royal Victorian Order.
A decade later, he was knowledgeable that the movie had turn out to be the most-watched documentary in historical past. It had been screened 11 occasions within the UK and broadcast twice coast-to-coast throughout the USA. It had been offered to 125 nations, incomes such substantial royalties that, when the Queen donated them to BAFTA, the organisation was capable of purchase itself its new headquarters within the coronary heart of London’s West End.
However, from the outset, the movie was solely ever purported to have a restricted timespan earlier than being locked away. Royal Family was not news footage, just like the Coronation or a state go to. Rather, it was seen as a private snapshot of its time. The Queen retained copyright and didn't need the fabric being quarried or tailored for years to return.
To this present day, entry and utilization are strictly managed by the monarch’s non-public secretary, a coverage utilized to all private royal movie footage.
The film-maker and screenwriter Sir Antony Jay, who wrote the script, later defined that the movie had landed “at the end of a very dark period” for the monarchy and that its timing was essential: “Royal Family coincided very closely with the Prince of Wales’s investiture and that provided a trigger for a great resurgence of love for the family which had been in abeyance for about 10 years.”
Indeed, the general public have been quickly glued to their screens once more, days later, to see the Prince of Wales’s investiture in Caernarfon.
While it's largely remembered as a theatrical, even pantomime affair – with the Prince’s coronet topped with what appeared like a golden ping-pong ball – it was happening in opposition to a backdrop of more and more militant Welsh nationalism.
The Prince was effectively conscious of the difficulty, having spent two months studying the Welsh language at college in Aberystwyth, the place he was caught between protests and counter-protests.
Philip and Anne take pleasure in Loch Muick picnic in BBC’s groundbreaking 1969 documentary, Royal Family (Image: BBC)
In the week earlier than his ceremony, he gave a considerate interview to the BBC’s Cliff Michelmore wherein he expressed his sympathy for his critics in Wales: “They are depressed by what might happen if they don’t try to preserve the language and culture which is very special to Wales. On the Celtic fringe, everybody thinks that all the important things go on in England.”
There have been tensions between the outdated palace guard and the brand new because the day approached.
The new Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk, was eager to stick to custom. However, the Queen had appointed her personal brother-in-law, Lord Snowdon, as Constable of Caernarfon Castle and the photographer Earl was decided this needs to be the primary occasion in royal historical past designed, from the outset, with the wants of tv in thoughts.
He didn't need the digital camera angles obscured by a cover of thick purple velvet over the dais, just like the drapes erected for the investiture of the earlier Prince of Wales in 1911. Instead, Snowdon designed a clear, camera-friendly Perspex cover – not that it could present a lot safety from the weather.
Asked what would occur if it rained, the Duke of Norfolk replied tersely: “We all get wet.”
Of a lot larger concern was a very excessive Welsh nationalist motion which had began to undertake terrorist ways.
This could be the 12 months when the Troubles would ignite, in a while, in Northern Ireland.
For the second, the hotspot was Wales, and almost all the Royal Family have been heading there within the royal practice. An ongoing trial of three members of the Free Wales Army in Swansea had heightened tensions.
As the practice made its manner by way of North Wales, two Welsh nationalists have been killed by their very own bomb in Abergele, 40 miles from Caernarfon, and a pretend bomb was discovered hooked up to a bridge over the rail route.
The subsequent morning, the Queen Mother tried to maintain spirits up by cracking jokes, however the temper was lower than jolly. For the Queen, right here was a reminder of the Coronation, with the added stresses of dwell TV, besides that the principle stress, this time, was on her son.
To cap all of it, there have been terrorists at massive making an attempt to kill all her household. Even because the horsedrawn carriages made their manner by way of Caernarfon to the fort, the Prince stated later, he may hear the “crump” of a bomb going off 500 yards away.
An egg missed the Queen and one protestor’s try and make the Household Cavalry slip on a banana pores and skin was no extra profitable. Within the fort, the ceremony itself was nearly a aid.
Queen of Our Times: The Life of Elizabeth II: 1926–2022 by Robert Hardman (Image: )
Yet there was no let-up within the violence. Later that day, a bomb was defused on what was then the A5 at Caergeiliog, 5 minutes earlier than the Prince’s motorcade got here previous.
The identical night, again in Caernarfon, a soldier was killed by a bomb beneath his van.
It was within the aftermath that the Queen took her unprecedented week off work, whereas the newly-invested Prince travelled the size and breadth of Wales.
The Queen could be spared one different job although. It was agreed that there could be no Christmas broadcast. Having taken half in two TV spectaculars throughout that landmark summer time of 1969, royal officers argued Her Majesty had already made sufficient appearances for one 12 months.
Instead of the standard 3pm tackle from the monarch, British TV viewers loved a full repeat of Royal Family as a substitute.
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