Letter from a reader: How Elizabeth heard she was Queen
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John Newton recalls the hours before Elizabeth II ascended to the throne, on February 6, 1952, when she was visiting Kenya.
He said: “The Princess had been staying with Prince Philip in the Sagana Royal Lodge, in the forested foothills of the Aberdare Mountains near Mount Kenya, but moved to the Treetops Hotel, built in the branches of an ancient tree of enormous height and spread for a night of game viewing.“The area around that massive tree had been cleared and made suitable for mountain animals to arrive after dark to lick at the specially built salt pit, drink from a mountain waterhole and eat fodder left out every night. Mountain elephant, rhino, warthog, and various antelope, and a variety of other animals fed in turns during the night.“When the Royal party moved to Treetops their security detail of four young European Kenya police inspectors returned to The Lodge, driven by African constables in land rovers. What happened next was told to me at one of our Kenya Police Association Reunions back in Britain, many years later, by one of those young policemen, at that time well into his eighties.“He and the other three were sitting around chatting after dinner when a call came through from Police Headquarters in Nairobi with the news that Princess Elizabeth’s father, King George VI, had died in his sleep at Sandringham and she had acceded to the throne. They were ordered to get the news to Treetops immediately.”“The difficulty facing the four young men, that, living in an era with not many cars around, none of them knew how to drive. Their constables had returned to the Police Lines for the night and the inspectors would never have found them in the pitch-black Kenya mountain forest night of the police camp.“After a few minutes’ discussion, my storyteller volunteered to have a go, saying he had watched how his constable made the vehicle move. So, he took the key, worked out how to switch on the Land Rover and set off along the fifteen miles of dark narrow dirt forest road and managed to reach Treetops without mishap.“Entering the simple ground floor reception area, he told the African manager he had an important message for the Royal party. A short phone call brought an equerry from the lift. He listened to the news and said, ‘Please stay here.’“Two minutes later Prince Philip strode from the lift, towered over my quite short friend, and demanded, ‘Well. What is it you have to tell me?’“It seemed that the equerry wanted the Royal couple to hear direct from the bearer of the nso my then young Inspector repeated that the King had died in his sleep at an unknown time, and the Princess had acceded to the throne several hours ago.“After a moment’s silence, Prince Philip said, ‘Oh bloody hell. I’d better go and tell her.’ He turned and marched back into the lift, leaving my friend to make his way carefully back to Sagana.”