The voiceover described them as “the most charming and natural pictures ever taken of our Royal Family”: a husband and wife outdoors with their children feeding the ducks, the children unselfconscious, playing ball games, running, laughing, broad open spaces all around them. Sound familiar?
The film in question was made in 1937. Husband and wife were the new King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, their children 11-year-old Princess Elizabeth, afterwards Elizabeth II, and her sister Margaret Rose. The film was the work of Pathé Gazette, who captioned it “homely pictures”.
For as long as anyone can remember, continuity with change has been key to the royal family’s modus operandi. It was visible in the video message released by the Princess of Wales this week. Correctly, commentators have highlighted what’s new in this follow-up to March’s video, in which the Princess revealed that she had been advised to “undergo a course of preventative chemotherapy”, above all touching evidence of the loving bond between husband and wife, expressed physically and with unaffected joy. But in these candid, carefully casual three minutes of footage are echoes of earlier royal peek-a-boos, beginning almost a century ago.
In these candid, carefully casual three minutes of footage are echoes of earlier royal peek-a-boos, beginning almost a century ago
As a young wife and mother, the late Queen Mother, Prince William’s great-grandmother, crafted a vision of her family’s home life that was simultaneously idyllic and accessible. In black-and-white photographs commissioned from Marcus Adams and Dorothy Wilding, and “intimate” footage of the sort released by Pathé, Queen Elizabeth offered the British people snapshots of the tightly loving bonds that united the King and Queen and their two princesses. The keynote was a cultivated ordinariness, with little to suggest the family’s lofty status. In the troubled decade of the Thirties, it was a reassuring message.
For different reasons, the Princess of Wales’s video also seeks to offer reassurance. As much as her own bravery and the terrors of any cancer journey, what emerges is the straightforward pleasure in one another of a family to whom many of her husband’s future subjects can relate.
There’s a deliberate timelessness — passages of grainy, bright colour that suggest Elizabeth II’s home movies from the Fifties. And there are also other reminders of the late Queen. “Out of darkness can come light,” says the Princess, a conviction the Queen articulated in her lockdown Easter message.
In this week’s “homely pictures” is a portrait of modern monarchy. Its version of the royals’ family life is less new than some suspect.
