Sunday June 5, 2022
England is having a grand party to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s platinum anniversary – 70 years on the throne. (TV doesn’t tell me how enthusiastically the Scots and Welsh are joining in.)
“Lillibet” and I don’t have a long personal history. Minimal, in fact. Our life stories intersect at only two points.
I saw her once, when she was still Princess Elizabeth. Her father, King George, was scheduled to visit Canada in 1951. Because of ill-health – he died the next year – his daughter and her husband made the trip instead.
It may have been the most successful royal visit ever.
Elizabeth and Philip toured all the way across Canada, for 33 days, from coast to coast.
By the time the royal couple reached Vancouver, Elizabeth had mastered that wobbly hand wave to the adoring crowds.
I was 15 years old. I had an afternoon paper route, where I rode down the sidewalk slinging folded newspapers in the general direction of my subscribers’ front porches.
On that day, Elizabeth and Philip would be driving down the East Mall at the University of British Columbia, for a football game at the UBC stadium. I abandoned my subscribers. They weren’t home anyway. They jammed the roadsides, hoping to see the future Queen.
So did I. I parked my bicycle against one of the maple trees along the boulevard. Perhaps motivated by the biblical story of Jesus and Zacchaeus, I climbed the tree, and edged out along a lower limb.
Her Cadillac convertible passed right underneath me.
She looked up. For an instant, that almost automated hand wave faltered. Her fingers opened wider. And she smiled at me – that beatific smile that has captivated people for almost 100 years.
I treasure the memory.
The other connection
In fact, we had an older connection too.
My uncle, Dr. A.C. Taylor, had been the personal surgeon to Prince Philip’s uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India before Independence in 1947.
Born in India of missionary parents – as was I – Uncle Andy originally returned as a mission doctor. When mission funding dried up during the pre-war depression, he had a choice of coming home, or finding some other means of staying in India. He joined the British Army.
When World War II broke out, he found himself in Burma, in charge of a 1,000-bed military hospital. If you saw the movie Bridge on the River Kwai, you’ll have seen a romanticized version of the wat in Burma. It was hell.
When Japanese forces neared, Andrew Taylor found himself the senior officer shepherding a train of British sick and wounded across the Irrawaddy River to safety in India. Sappers blew up the bridges after he crossed them.
I’ve been told he was under order to shoot any soldiers who couldn’t keep up, to prevent them from falling into the not-so-gentle hands of the Japanese. He didn’t. He kept treating the sick and wounded, as the dwindling procession finally had to walk, through ankle-deep mud, for two months.
He finally reached safety in British India, about 30 pounds lighter, emaciated, with malaria and dysentery. He was fortunate. Some 30,000 British soldiers never made it out of Burma.
Inside knowledge
After his recovery, my uncle was appointed personal surgeon to Lord Mountbatten. Although the records show he was present at meetings between Mountbatten, Gandhi, and Nehru, he was sworn to secrecy. He knew what went on behind closed doors, too. But he never broke that vow of silence. Not even to his children.
During that 1951 royal tour, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip specifically requested personal time with only one Canadian -- Dr. Andrew Copeland Taylor, then chief of surgery in Regina. On behalf of her father, King George VI, she presented him with the highest award that can be made to a civilian, the OBE, Order of the British Empire.
King George is long gone, Lord Louis Mountbatten is dead, too, blown up in 1979 by an IRA bomb. His nephew Prince Philip died two years ago. Elizabeth, Queen since 1952, is nearing the end of her career.
In a few more years, there will be no one left who can treasure these memories.
No one knows that will become of the monarchy when Queen Elizabeth is gone too.
Prince Charles, as one commentator noted acidly, is “not as unpopular as he was a few years ago.” Prince William seems groomed to carry eventually.
Monarchy may seem like an unnecessary luxury these days. And yet we do treasure our memories….
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Copyright © 2022 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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Your turn
A wide range of responses to last week’s column about labels like right and left, conservative and liberal.
Vera Gottlieb in Switzerland: “Residing in Europe I only follow this sad story rather loosely… But I could not help notice that a number of Latino names were mentioned and this made me look up Wikipedia. From what I read… the town’s population is up to 78% Latino so, to me, racism is part of this picture -- the ‘whites’ against the Latinos. How can a nation be so filled with hatred?”
Tom Watson: “We have used labels -- left, right, liberal, conservative, et al -- to try to understand. Sometimes these labels help our understanding and sometimes, as you point out, they distract. If we're to discard the old off-the-shelf labels, can you flesh out a little more fully what that means and how that provides a new way for us to understand things?”
Steve Roney: “I agree with you that it is almost nonsensical to try to define mass shooters in political terms, as either ‘left’ or ‘right.’ They are obviously outside the bounds of any conventional political discourse. Their views, when we know them, are almost always unclassifiable in these terms.
“You are correct that what we currently call the ‘right’ emphasizes the individual, and the ‘left’ the group, when it comes to political questions.
“You are wrong to say the right distrusts anything organized. That would be nihilism, which is on the left. The right loves organization: church groups, the common law, parliamentary procedure, the dictionary, the constitution, the local community and neighbourhood, traditional moral codes, law and order…
“It is more accurate to see the right as resisting the use of compulsion when not necessary.”
James Russell: “I think you have the wrong terms. The right worships ego – (the ‘individual’ worships himself); the left considers the context. Different verbs for different actions. It’s also why ‘left’ ideas are at least occasionally appropriate, if not exactly right.”
Cliff Boldt: Your column gets to the heart of what I am struggling with these days: the world is changing around me, what was no longer is. I don’t know how this happened and what I can do about it.
“Your blog this morning is a good starting point for the debate. It gets a discussion going, something I like -- does that make me a leftie?
“You are suggesting that the language we use is key. But the language I use is based on my life experiences for the last 80 years. If my language is the problem, I’m really in the soup. I am still mired in my past.
“Conclusion: God isn’t finished with me. I continue to be a work in progress.”
Isabel Gibson: “By your reasoning, helping a neighbour directly (as opposed, say, to advocating for higher taxes to pay for more social services) would also be right-wing thinking.
“It sure seems to me that Canadians lean left and Americans lean right in this sense.
“I appreciate G.K. Chesterton's perspective: ‘The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.’”
Sue Moshier: “While I understood what you’re saying about labels being meaningless, the bottom line is ALL of us collectively ought to want to protect our children and keep them from any harm (liberals, conservatives, libertarians, alt right, etc.) These senseless tragedies (including the most recent one in Buffalo) clearly point out that our gun laws are not strict enough. If you read the Trump, Cruz,mand Howley responses following the Uvalde shooting you would certainly know they have no interest in introducing legislation to protect anyone. As long as they are in the pockets of the NRA, politicians will continue to dig their heels in. And guess which party receives the most NRA money? Republicans. There, I used a label and used it correctly.”
Greg Milne: “Right on, Lefty!! You are surely right about greatness emerging from chaos. Winston Churchill was a somewhat inept politician who was thrust onto greatness by the chaos of war, becoming the almost spiritual leader of what was left of the free world at that time. Volodomyr Zelenskiyy, a former comedic actor, entered politics as a sort of joke, and has been thrust into true greatness by his absolutely heroic leadership of his nation in the present chaos. I pray for that man every day (even hourly). I see the signs of his fatigue. and hope that it does not result in the same sort of ‘Black Dog’ depression that Churchill experienced under that enormous pressure.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns