Fifty Years the Queen. Arthur Bousfield
CHAPTER TEN
The Golden Jubilee
2001–2002
Australian portrait of the Queen by Sir William Dargie, featured Her Majesty dressed in the colours of Australia and wearing the wattle flower, the national emblem of the country, on her shoulder.
1
“I Greet You As Your Queen”
Ottawa, 1957
Canada is a majestic land! Flanked by the awesomeness of the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, and crowned by the forbidding and austere beauty of the Arctic, it is embellished by natural jewels of diverse charm. One thinks of the impressive Bedford Basin or the Annapolis Valley fruit orchards, the magnificent St Lawrence River opening the hinterland to the world, or the oceanic proportions of the Great Lakes linked by the thundering roar of the mighty Niagara. There is the austere stone face of the Canadian shield, the haunting vastness of the prairie wheat fields, the aristocratic grandeur of the Rocky Mountains and the lordly rivers that traverse the land. Majestic is the only word that comes close to doing justice to this land.
The Great Seal of Canada is the symbol of the Queen's authority and used to autheiiticate all government documents. Elizabeth IFs Great Seal was issued in 1955 and depicts Her Majesty crowned and seated in St Edward's Chair, with her Royal Arms for Canada in front. The Queen exercised her authority in person on the 1957 tour.
And what does the land expect of human society? Republicanism is unworthy. No president, elected or appointed, however admirable an individual, could merit governing such a country. Man's response to the land, that is, the way human society is ordered, must be as majestic as the land itself.
God has established a unity between His creations in this world. Only a king or queen, the product of Man's history and God's anointing, can presume to stand before the Canadian land as an equal, to personify the Canadian state and lead the Canadian people. Only a monarchical people, who acknowledge, that while they have power, they are accountable to an authority outside of and above their own will, can comprehend and live with a land that mocks Man's power. Canadians have always been such a people and had such a king or queen.
On her arrival in Ottawa the Queen was greeted by Rt Ron, Vincent Massey, the Governor-General Mr Massey was appointed by the Queen's father, King George VI, just before his death in 1952, and was the first Governor-General of the Queen's reign in Canada. He was also the first Canadian-born Governor-General since the French regime.
When the early European explorers landed in Canada they recognised this fact. They gave the land names such as “Kingdom of the Saguenay” and instinctively acknowledged the aboriginal chiefs as “kings”.
And the Dominion of the North is at its most majestic in October, when the land dons a multi-coloured mantle of maple brilliance, grander than any mantle imagined by fabled monarchs of antiquity. It beckons its people to celebrate and add to its royal scene.
On an October day in 1957, Monday 14 October—appropriately Thanksgiving Day in Canada that year—Canadians responded to the majesty of God's land with the grandest majesty they could muster around God's anointed. Four short years earlier, on 2 June 1953, Elizabeth II had been anointed and crowned with the title “Queen of Canada” in St Peter's, the ancient Abbey of St Edward the Confessor in Westminster, England. She was the first monarch officially to be crowned with the title “Queen of Canada” and now she was to confirm her title in the Parliament Building of her Canadian realm.
Two days earlier Her Majesty had arrived in Ottawa, capital of Canada and one of the prettiest capitals in the world, transformed by edict of Queen Victoria a century before from a rough lumbering town into a city of government. Ten thousand had turned out in perfect autumn weather at Uplands Airport to greet their Queen. In a North American combination of egalitarianism and status, the crowds awaited her arrival in temporary bleachers set up at the hanger, as at a football game, but the bleachers were assigned according to rank or position—one for ministers of state and high officials, one for diplomats, and, most importantly, one for school children.
The National War Memorial, unveiled by King George VI in 1939, has always been the focus of remembrance in Canada. The Queen laid a special wreath, made by disabled veterans from oak and maple, on her 1957 stay in Ottawa.
At 4:30 p.m., after a fourteen-hour flight, the British Overseas Airways DC-7C landed at Uplands, and, iollowing a fanfare by the seven Coronation Trumpeters of the Royal Canadian Air Force Central Band, the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh came down the ramp, and Elizabeth II returned as Queen to the country she had left six years before as a Princess. After being greeted by the Governor-General, Rt Hon. Vincent Massey, and the Prime Minister, Rt Hon. John Diefenbaker and Mrs Diefenbaker and other dignitaries, the royal party left by automobile on the fifteen-mile ride to Government House (Rideau Hall). It was a slow ride for the streets were lined by 500,000 of the Queen's Canadian subjects, out to welcome her back to her home in the New World.
Ottawa was the scene of the Queen's first ever television broadcast on 13 October It was delivered in both English and French and was a prelude to her annual TV Christmas broadcasts.
Rideau Hall was her home, as much as Buckingham Palace in London or Holyroodhouse Palace in Edinburgh. The three services of Canada—the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force—took turns mounting guard at her Ottawa residence, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would look after escorts and security. A reception at Rideau Hall for the press writers and photographers, the largest number ever to gather for an event in Canada, completed the first day's public activities.
The second day in Canada was a Sunday so, appropriately, it was allocated to remembrance and contemplation. The public day began at 10:00 a.m. when the Queen and Duke laid a wreath at the National War Memorial, as they had done in 1951. The nine-pound wreath had been created by disabled war veterans from the leaves of Canada's history and identity—oak and maple. After the ceremony the royal couple spoke with the veterans—from the two World Wars, the South African War and even from earlier nineteenth century battles. The Duke himself was a veteran of the Second World War.
The ceremony was followed by a Thanksgiving Service at Christ Church Anglican Cathedral. In his sermon the dean of the cathedral spoke of the first thanksgiving in Canada, held by the men of Martin Frobisher's expedition over four hundred years before in the reign of the first Elizabeth, and how the Queen's great-great-uncle, the Marquis of Lorne, as Governor-General of Canada, had officially proclaimed Thanksgiving a holiday in Canada in 1879.
At 9:00 o'clock in the evening Her Majesty was able to bring the spirit of Thanksgiving to all her people in Canada via the innovation of a live television broadcast, prelude to her annual televised Christmas messages that would begin in December. The new medium was supplanting the radio broadcasts which in their turn had supplanted written communications.
In her address the Queen said “I want you to know how happy I am to be in Canada once again, particularly at Thanksgiving”, and promised that “one day we shall bring our children here to see this wonderful and exhilarating country”. It was a promise that would be fulfilled many times over, not only for her two children of the time but also for her two sons to be born in the next decade.
In the address Her Majesty also described her pride in the diversity of Canada: “Industry and commerce may bring wealth to a country, but the character of a nation is formed