Talking of the Royal Family

Prof Michael Billig, Michael Billig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134917662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

To talk about royalty is to talk of many things: privilege, equality, nationality, morality, family life, parenting, divorce, the media and more. Important themes and issues flow through the seemingly trivial everyday chatter about royalty.
Now with a new preface, Talking of the Royal Family was the first serious full-length study of royalty to emerge from this rhetorical perspective and remains relevant today.

1

INTRODUCTION:
THE PROBLEM OF MONARCHY

The survival of monarchy in late twentieth century Britain is a sociopsychological phenomenon of strange proportions. In a country supposedly imbued with the values of democracy—indeed, in the country which proclaims itself to be the home of democracy—this ancient institution of inherited status still persists. It does not survive as an embarrassing relic, shuffling along like an elderly relative, conscious of being in the way of the younger generation. Quite the contrary, it survives by being noticed, over and over again. Sixty years ago, George V’s second son apparently hurried on to a train at Grantham and started to pull down blinds. His wife, aware of the crowds on the platform, is said to have snapped ‘Bertie, you must wave’ (Thornton, 1986, p.70). In July 1986, another Duke of York, also the second son of the ruling sovereign, stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, having earlier that day been married. He needed no whispered reminder to wave to the crowd of thousands and to the television audience of millions. The Times reported the event: ‘The Duke broadly cupped his ear to the chanting of: “Give her a kiss, then.” So he gave her a kiss: not a moth’s kiss, but a smacking naval kiss, like a tyre explosion, or as if he were trying to clear the drains’ (23 August 1986).

This report in The Times reveals the sociological and psychological strangeness of the phenomenon. There was no hushed reverence, as the crowd gazed upwards towards the royal balcony. Instead, there was cheeky familiarity, and the prince was obliging the crowd. The Times, the self-proclaimed voice of establishment Britain, was also enjoying itself: reader and writer could smile at the drain-clearing kiss and at the lèse-majesté of the event’s retelling. The twentieth century has seen monarchies disappear in Portugal, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy and Turkey. In other European countries, monarchies might survive by discreet use of regal carriages and by ostentatious use of public transport But in Britain, you must wave, you must kiss. Or so it appears.

In a literal sense, monarchy is neither a sociological nor a psychological phenomenon, for the experts in sociology and psychology have not pronounced it such. Nowhere is the disparity between social scientific writing and popular writing more evident. The royal books, which are published by the pile, can be considered for a moment. Go to any high-street sale of unsold new books. There on display will be the hardback volumes of last year. The topics will reflect the interests of middle-brow publishing. There will be illustrated books about military transport, cookery and gardens. Perhaps there will also be some volumes about zodiacal signs. Shoppers looking for books about royalty are unlikely to be disappointed. Big, glossy volumes, with plenty of colour photographs, will record the lives of royals. Some publishers, combining various marketable interests, will offer insights into royal cookery, royal gardens or royal zodiacal signs. Wilson (1989) estimates that there are ‘approximately 240 books about the Monarchy in print of generally uncritical, inane and sycophantic sorts, and just one critical work’ (p. 1). In 1989, one book club was advertising nationally a book entitled Royal Knits: ‘Clothes and accessories for home and family all with a “royal” theme—from corgi slippers to an “ermine” trimmed loo’.

Repeat the search for royal volumes at an academic bookshop, or better still in a university library, and the results will be different. Walk along the shelves reserved for the sociology or psychology volumes. There will be titles about all manner of aspects of contemporary life, but, odds on, there will not be a single volume about the sociology or psychology of the British monarchy. Try leafing through recent editions of the British Journal of Sociology or of the British Journal of Social Psychology, and the quest will be as barren. There will be articles about race prejudice, sexual behaviour and misconduct at sporting occasions, but about interest in royalty, even about royalty itself, there will be nothing. Royalty is not an approved sociopsychological phenomenon. This adds to the strangeness of the matter.

The present book is about the interest in royalty, or, to be more precise, about what ordinary English families have to say about the Royal Family. The topic is not the Royal Family itself. The distinction can be illustrated by the example of the Duchess of York at Grantham station all those years ago. As far as the present investigation is concerned, the interest would not be in the Duchess’s actions, nor in her relationship with her husband. It would be in the crowd and what its members might say, not while waiting for the blinds to be raised, but later when discussing royal matters in general. An analogy might be made with sociologists or psychologists studying religious beliefs. They can put aside theological questions about the existence of gods, while studying what people believe. So the student of royal beliefs can avoid making judgements about the ‘true’ characteristics of various royal persona. However, the investigator of royal mythology has less room for doubt than does the examiner of religious mythology. Neither the existence of royal figures, nor the general conditions of their life are to be doubted. It must be remembered that the object of the popular interest is a family, which possesses immense wealth and which numbers amongst its members the constitutional head of the United Kingdom.

AN INTERESTING IDEA

Over a hundred years ago, Walter Bagehot wrote in The English Constitution that ‘a family on the throne is an interesting idea’ (1867/1965, p. 85). The extent to which the Royal Family has become interesting today must have exceeded all the imaginings of the Victorian commentator. Bagehot had foreseen that monarchy, once it had lost its political power, needed to be transformed, if it were to survive usefully. Responsibility for the ‘efficient’ aspects of the state—for raising taxes and for passing legislation—had passed to the politicians. Royalty, argued Bagehot, should concentrate on the ‘dignified’ ceremonial aspects, because no common politician could command the sort of loyalty which the masses would show to a king or queen. This split between the ‘efficient’ and the ‘ceremonial’ aspects of state provided an opportunity to expand the cast of royal actors. Once the sovereign had relinquished the political power, which made him or her such a compelling figure, public interest could be directed on to the whole family. The public would be interested, deeply interested, if royalty were to display themselves as the first family of the nation. Bagehot’s argument was barbed. He was slyly criticising the semi-retirement to which Queen Victoria had retreated since the death of Prince Albert. And he was hinting that the Prince of Wales would be best advised to cease frequenting gaming tables, race tracks and married women.

Today, the faces of the British Royal Family are to be seen in newspaper and television pictures around the globe, making it the best known family of the world No other family can claim such celebrity. In a MORI survey of January 1990, British respondents were shown pictures of members of the Royal Family and were asked to identify them. An extraordinary hundred percent identified the Queen Mother correctly. The figures dropped to ninety-nine percent for Prince Charles and Princess Diana, with ninety-eight percent identifying the Queen. The fame of the family cuts across distinctions of class, gender and age.

There is massive popular interest in the great royal occasions. With the advent of television, a royal wave can be seen by millions (Dayan and Katz, 1985; see also Chaney, 1983). David Cannadine (1983) has shown how coronations, royal weddings and funerals have been transformed into public spectacles in the last two hundred years. Previously, such ceremonies were witnessed by the privileged few. Without a mass audience, these occasions had lacked the slickness of the modern televised presentation. Queen Victoria wrote in her journal that her Coronation was the ‘proudest’ day of her life, but her jottings captured the chaos of the great moment: ‘The Archbishop came in and ought to have delivered the Orb to me, but I had already got it, and he (as usual) was so confused and puzzled and knew nothing, and—went away’ (The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1, p. 123, emphasis in original; see also Lant, 1979). Such confusion is not permitted to mar today’s professionally organised royal rituals, which, nevertheless, are presented as if they were exact repetitions of ancient ones (Cannadine, 1983).

A disproportionate number of the few academic studies investigating contemporary monarchy have focussed upon the great ceremonial events. Blumler et al. (1971) examined the effect of Prince Charles’s Investiture on public attitudes. Bocock (1974) discusses more generally the place of royal ritual in industrialised society (see also Lukes, 1977). Reactions to royal ceremonies have been documented by Mass Observation. For over fifty years, this project has been compiling a record of life in modern Britain, by recruiting ordinary individuals to record day-to-day observations. The directors of Mass Observation have appreciated the importance of common feelings towards royalty: diaries of the great royal days have been specifically collected. Jennings and Madge’s book May 12 1937 is a fascinating collage of material relating to the Coronation of George VI. Ziegler (1977) used the Mass Observation archive to compare popular reactions to various royal events. One enduring factor has been the public’s keen interest. There might be initial indifference, but, as the great day approaches, this typically gives way to mounting excitement.

The Mass Observation programme has always been on the periphery of academic social science. This is not true of Shils and Young (1953) who provided one of the few mainstream sociological studies of a royal event. They analysed the 1953 Coronation, depicting a nation enthralled by the antiquity of the proceedings and collectively reaffirming its sacred values. This essentially uncritical image of the nation at one with itself was not without its opponents (Birnbaum, 1955; Lukes, 1977). Recently, it has taken a severe assault from Tom Nairn’s superb analysis of British monarchy, The Enchanted Glass (1988), a book which is unlikely to be recognised as properly sociological by the disciplinary experts.

The studies of the great events will be somewhat misleading if they give the impression that public interest in royalty is tidal, with its water-line receding between the gaps in the irregular calender of ceremonial occasions. On the contrary, the interest is sustained daily. Practically every edition of the popular press brings information about the life of the royals (Edley, 1991). These items are not tucked away on the inside pages, but insignificant episodes will be blazoned across front pages. To give a single example: on 23 May 1987, the frontpage headline of the Daily Mirror, occupying more space than the words of the story itself, was ‘Bottoms Up Ma’am’. Princess Anne had fallen from a horse in the view of the paper’s photographer. She had been completely unharmed. The angle of the camera and the words of the headline drew attention to the curve of the tumbling princess’s buttocks. ‘Furious Anne Comes A Cropper’, declared the sub-heading. Bagehot may have predicted an interest in the royal personages, but he foresaw a dignified interest. Royal bottoms would be seated upon the throne, not tilted upwards for public entertainment.

The tabloid papers can publish such items regularly, because they retain staff specialising in royal matters. Papers, which think it unnecessary to have foreign correspondents stationed in major capital cities, employ permanent staff to chronicle the movements of royalty. Martin Walker, a Guardian reporter, followed these specialists during a royal visit to the United States. He commented that if this team of journalists were assigned to cover politics, ‘the cabinet would hardly have a secret left by tea-time’ (Guardian, 13 February 1989). A tenuous connection with royalty can transform journalistic dross into headline gold. The Sun specialises in such alchemy. ‘Queen’s Guards Eat Pub Pet Fish’ screamed its front-page headline on 22 May 1990, pushing foreign and political news on to inside pages. Drunken soldiers eating tropical fish in a Home Counties public house are hardly newsworthy: but add the information that they are the Queen’s soldiers, then the other news of the day is dimmed.

The television does not lag far behind the popular newspapers. Hugh Stephenson and a team of researchers from City University analysed the contents of BBC and ITV news for a week. The rationale for the survey had nothing to do with royalty, for it was reacting to complaints from senior Conservative politicians, particularly Norman Tebbit, that the BBC news had a ‘left-wing bias’. The results, reported at length in the Guardian (16 March 1987), showed the frequency and prominence of royal news. On three of the five days, the BBC news presented royal stories in its headlines. One of these stories was that Prince Charles had visited a public house whilst foxhunting. The Guardian itself demonstrated the allure of the royal dimension. The report was accompanied by a photograph, not of Norman Tebbit, but of Prince Charles. ‘In The News Out Foxhunting’ was the caption. Once again, the Prince was in the news: this time, he was in the news for being in the news.

A royal dimension multiplies public interest exponentially. The viewing figures for the modest television game show, ‘It’s A Knockout’, soared when younger royals participated in a special edition. That week the show became the single most watched programme on British television (Daily Telegraph, 30 June 1987). The story did not end when the credits rolled. The following morning, there were headlines about Prince Edward’s comments at a press conference. Several books were planned to record the great event (Observer, 7 July 1987).

During the past twenty-five years the volume of press coverage has substantially increased. The Sun Book of Royalty reproduced the ‘Royal Front Pages’ during the first fourteen years of the paper’s tabloid existence. For the first three years (1970–2) there were only nine royal front pages. The years 1981–3 produced nineteen. The upward graph has continued through the eighties. Edley (1991) conducted a survey of royal press coverage during a three-month period in 1988. He found that twelve percent of Sun issues had a royal story as the main front-page story. Thirty-five percent of issues had something about the royals on the front page, not necessarily the headline story.

If the amount of media coverage has increased in the past twenty-five years, then Buckingham Palace has not exactly been passive itself. It has deliberately sought to join the modern world of image-marketing. John Pearson, in The Ultimate Family (1986), documents the steps taken by royalty to employ professional press secretaries and publicity agents. Information-releases and photo-opportunities are regularly provided. The princes and princesses will even grant the occasional interview to chosen, trusted, reporters. The Palace and its professional publicists do their bit to ensure the continuing high profile of the product.

In short, royalty and the professionals working in the media act as if the public has an insatiable hunger for royal information. Psychological words spring easily to mind. Professor Stephenson, describing the results of his television survey, commented that ‘both the BBC and ITN seem to share the obsession of the tabloid press with Royal stories and non-stories’ (Guardian, 16 March 1987). However, this is an ‘obsession’ with a difference. It has not troubled psychologists. None has bothered to design a therapeutic treatment for the suffering nation.

ALL PROBLEMS—NO PROBLEM

The nature of the so-called obsession is related to its neglect by academic sociologists and psychologists. Social scientists have a tendency to study issues which are publicly declared to be ‘problems’, especially by government departments. They will be encouraged by funding agencies to conduct research on such identified ‘problems’ and they will hope that their findings will help in the search for ‘solutions’. However, there seems to be no corresponding ‘Monarchy Problem’. There is no popular movement for republicanism. In answer to pollsters’ questions, around ninety percent of the British population agree that the country should have a sovereign (for summaries of the poll data, see Harris, 1966; Rose, 1965; Rose and Kavanagh, 1976; Ziegler, 1977). MORI, January 1990, reports that only six percent of the population responded that Britain would be better off if monarchy were abolished. The support for monarchy comes from all sections of the population: young and old, male and female, rich and poor. The British Social Attitudes Survey, which was designed to assess public opinion annually, initially included a general question about monarchy. The results were clear: ‘Attitudes to the monarchy are strongly in the direction of uncritical support among all social groups’ (Young, 1984, p.30). No identifiable section of the population defines monarchy as a problem. That being so, it was recommended that ‘this question clearly need not be repeated annually’ (p.30). If there is no ‘Monarchy Problem’ to be solved, then there is no need for expert advice and specialist research findings.

Certainly, no major political party in Britain puts republicanism on its policy agenda. That is left for the fringe Marxist groups. Even republicans in Northern Ireland do not campaign on the general principle of republicanism, but they advocate a re-drawing of the boundary between the Irish republic and the British monarchy. By the same token, nationalists in Scotland and Wales tend to advocate national boundaries between two adjacent monarchies sharing the same monarch. The case of the Labour Party is instructive. This is an avowedly socialist party, whose written constitution asserts the principle of equality. However, the party does not care to tackle the symbol of inherited privilege at the centre of the nation’s unwritten constitution. In 1923, the Party Conference overwhelmingly rejected republicanism, and, as Schwartz (1986) comments, ‘this appeared to close the issue once and for all’ (p. 177). Willie Hamilton, who for years was a lonely advocate of republicanism on the Labour parliamentary benches, criticised his party’s timidity. ‘Openly denouncing the monarchy could be political suicide’, he wrote in his book My Queen and I (1975, p. 117).

Diaries published by former Labour ministers show the weakness of the republican impulse in the governments of the socialist party. In the 1960s, Richard Crossman, cabinet minister and editor of Bagehot’s The English Constitution, was confiding his republicanism quietly to his diary. Only feeble gestures were possible. In 1967, he declared that he would not attend the State Opening of Parliament. A discrete, even sympathetic, word from the Palace (‘the Queen has as strong a feeling of dislike of public ceremonies as you do’), and the rebel dutifully attended (1979, pp. 387–8).

Another diarist, and closet republican, during the first Wilson administration was Tony Benn. His republicanism was reduced to matters philatelic. As Postmaster General, he tried to broaden the range of stamp design. He records strenuous, time-consuming battles, as he struggled to get the Palace even to consider the possibility of stamps without the monarch’s head. When, finally, he was permitted to present to the Queen designs, which omitted her profile, it was ‘the best day since I took office’ (Benn, 1988, p. 232). Needless to say, all the headless designs were decisively rejected by the monarch. But she had seen them. It had been a victory of sorts.

During the Thatcher years, the room for republican manoeuvre within the Labour Party was further diminished. In newspapers, both serious and tabloid, there were rumours of rifts between monarch and prime minister, with the Queen allegedly objecting to Mrs Thatcher’s regal style. The prime minister’s grammar—‘We have become a grandmother’—hinted at pretensions beyond a common politician’s station (see, for instance, Georgina Howell’s ‘The Queening of Mrs Thatcher’ in the Correspondent, 22 April 1990). More seriously, there were stories that the Queen was anxious lest Mrs Thatcher’s policies harmed the unity of nation and Commonwealth. In July 1986, The Times claimed authoritatively that the Queen was concerned about the British government’s opposition to sanctions against South Africa and its effect upon the Commonwealth. The Queen’s press secretary was l...