Tag: Queen Elizabeth II

salute
American schoolchildren performing the Bellamy Salute, 1915. (Wikimedia Commons)
HM’s Nazi Salute: Relevant to What?

HM’s Nazi Salute: Relevant to What?

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Stiff-Arm Salute: Must We Know Everything?

Claim­ing it is “his­tor­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant,” the Sun defend­ed pub­li­ca­tion of a six-year-old Princess Eliz­a­beth, coached by her moth­er the future Queen Eliz­a­beth and her uncle the Prince of Wales (lat­er Edward VIII, still lat­er the Duke of Wind­sor) rais­ing her arm in the stiff salute now iden­ti­fied with the Nazi par­ty. It’s “in the pub­lic inter­est,” wails the Sun.

It’s in the inter­est of sell­ing news­pa­pers. Buck­ing­ham Palace respond­ed:

“Most peo­ple will see these pic­tures in their prop­er con­text and time. This is a fam­i­ly play­ing and momen­tar­i­ly ref­er­enc­ing a ges­ture many would have seen from con­tem­po­rary news reels. No one at that time had any sense how the salute would evolve.…

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60 Years On: “A Sparkling Presence at its Summit”

60 Years On: “A Sparkling Presence at its Summit”

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“We may think of Churchill as an ami­able or even rev­er­ent agnos­tic, who con­ceived of him­self not as a pil­lar of the church but per­haps as a fly­ing but­tress. He did not invoke the Deity casu­al­ly or cyn­i­cal­ly, a fact which con­fers its own inter­est upon his touch­ing and heart­felt reply to the Queen’s let­ter fol­low­ing his retire­ment as prime min­is­ter in April 1955.

“The monar­chy sig­ni­fied for Churchill some­thing of infi­nite val­ue, at once numi­nous and lumi­nous; and if you will allow the remark in paren­the­sis, ladies and gen­tle­men, do you not some­times long for some­one at the sum­mit of our pub­lic life who can think and write at that lev­el?” —Pro­fes­sor David Dilks

Our Island no longer holds the same author­i­ty or pow­er that it did in the days of Queen Vic­to­ria.…

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