‘In my opinion the Queen and David Bowie have more in common than either might realise,’ claimed Janet Street-Porter in the Observer Magazine on 18 April 1976, in a story marking her late Majesty’s 50th birthday. She saw Elizabeth II as a creature, like Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, looking like us, more or less, but in all other respects living entirely removed from ordinary life.
Street-Porter wondered at the ‘unhuman task’: the absence of privacy, the burden of being an irreproachable figurehead and the fact that ‘it wouldn’t matter a jot if she did not speak in public again.’ This had been thrown into sharp relief by the 1969 TV documentary on the royal family, which had given a glimpse of ‘a rather nice jolly middle-aged lady in trousers.’
Street-Porter dismissed most criticisms of the expense of the monarchy. The Queen was ‘doing a job that took up more hours and more responsibility than any other woman in the country’. The monotony and strain, though, would be familiar to many: ‘Your legs ache whether you are handing out OBEs or wrapping up loaves of bread.’
Britons telling of their in-person encounters gave other insights. A train driver who took the Queen for a ride-along said she was ‘very dainty’ and quite like ‘my good lady at home’. For a colliery manager, she was ‘more homely than I had expected’ – she asked if she could take a lump of coal home for Prince Edward. He hadn’t, he said, told his wife most of what the Queen and he had talked about – it was ‘intimate, personal’.
A woman whose home – cleaned to within an inch of its life – the Queen passed briefly through admired her tree-planting: ‘She shovels away, she really does.’ She pondered putting up a sign reading: ‘The Queen’s umbrella dripped here.’ A schoolteacher overheard giving a pupil a roasting for not standing up on her Majesty’s arrival, received a discreetly murmured message: ‘Don’t worry, the Queen says she understands.’ Human after all.
