What I watched: Two newsreels that aired on BBC television in 1947. The first focused on the Royal Tour of South Africa and aired on June 2, while the second concerned the Royal Wedding, and aired on November 30. Both are available at the BBC Archives here and here.
What happened: These two films do more or less what they say on the tin. In the first, King George VI and his family (including Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret) visit their colony of South Africa. This newsreel is actually a compilation of various film clips that were sent back to be broadcast on the BBC while the tour was in progress. The narrator mentions that these are the most interesting of the shorter films – I’d hate to see the least interesting. It’s a lot of well-dressed people getting in and out of cars, and isn’t even as entertaining as your average vacation slideshow. On the other hand, there are some images of baby ostriches which are absolutely adorable.
Speaking of princesses, the other half of today’s newsreel double-header is video footage of the wedding between Princess Elizabeth (soon to be forever-Queen Elizabeth II) and her consort Philip Mountbatten. Unfortunately, there is no audio, as this was added in live in the studio when the wedding footage was broadcast on TV later that day. But it seems like everything goes off without a hitch. Afterward the official ceremony there’s a procession through the streets for what feels like forever.
What I thought: As mentioned in the last entry, so much of the early BBC is unavailable or lost, including all the live in-studio programs of the 40s. That makes even mundane newsreel footage like this, made to be shown on the then-nascent BBC television service, seem more wondrous than it really is. That’s not to say that these films aren’t interesting – they actually are, but perhaps more because of hindsight than any innate content
Conveying the pomp and circumstance of the royal family seems to be the principal job of these newsreels. After a bleak six years of war, the suggestion is that normality has returned to Britain and all its mightiest traditions. This is captured perfectly in the opening of the South Africa clip, in which the regular chimes of Big Ben – “heard in South Africa throughout the war years” – cut through one of the coldest winters on record. The narrator for the South Africa clip, for example, notes that this is the first royal tour since the end of the war, and that the King is sailing on his traditional ship the Vanguard. Indeed, you would never know from this film that there was strife throughout all of the British colonies, most notably in India – the message is that the glories of the British Empire are back on their regular schedule after an unfortunate interruption.
The elephant in the room when watching this footage is that the South Africa of this period has since become virtually synonymous with racism. The BBC website even feels a need to mitigate the image of such a cheerful tour of South Africa, noting that the apartheid laws did not come into effect until the next year and that they produced significant disagreement between Great Britain and her former colony. But it is not as if the South Africa of 1947 was a paradise of racial integration interrupted by some terrible laws – apartheid was a formalization of the social dynamics of white supremacy that were part and parcel of the colonial project.
The very concept of the British empire, that the King of England had every right to be the King of South Africa, was rooted in racism, so in that way this visit does not surprise. The newsreel itself does not call any attention to South African racial tensions – indeed, outside of a few crowd shots it gives the impression that there are no black people in South Africa at all. The colony is essentially another England, with its own Parliament and crowds of royal admirers, just warmer and more colourful. “Rule Brittania” plays without a hint of irony.
There’s an air of pretension around the wedding that is also present in the trip to South Africa, and really Elizabeth’s who
le life. What was once real power has become a kind of dress-up. The perfect example of this is the armoured men on horses who accompany the bride to the wedding. They look like medieval knights, who would have offered protection through physical force, but now their presence is merely symbolic – everyone knew that calvary can’t stop much of anything anymore, and certainly not a well-placed bullet.
But Elizabeth is not shot, and gets married all according to plan. Such acts are doubtlessly important for the nation-state, communicating that even royalty must be bound by the strictures of the nuclear family and class-conscious marriage. To violate these codes even a little is to forfeit your power, as Edward discovered. And to be fair, the public turns up in mass, unquestionably interested in the fact that their princess is going to have sex that night (and all the other things that marriage entails, I suppose). Weddings of the famous and powerful offer us a romance plot somewhere between fiction and reality, and even without sound this story is pretty clear.
It is only by coincidence, or the whim of a BBC archivist, that we have these two films dealing with the royal family back to back. It’s hard not to read these films in the historical context of the royalty’s declining power and the collapse of the British empire, but these things are wholly outside the text. If you were one of the few Londoners with a television set watching these films, you wouldn’t get an inkling that British power was in any way declining, or that the succession of imperial monarchs would ever end. And maybe those people in the crowd could ignore what they read in the newspapers and believe in the British Empire again, simply from glimpsing some not-particularly-pretty people of German descent.
Coming Up Next: More boxing, with Joe Louis defending his heavyweight title against “Jersey” Joe Walcott. It’s the battle of the Joes!
The Eternal Couch Potato 