POLITICS-BRITAIN: The Queen did not Give as Good as She Got

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Aug 4 2002 (IPS) - Some of them were, maybe, gifts fit for a Queen. But the exhibition of gifts to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth that went on show for the first time at Buckingham Palace Sunday show that they came as messages of goodwill, but also of much else.

The exhibition of 50 Years of Royal Gifts, to mark 50 years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, is being held at the Ball Supper Room in the palace, thrown open to visitors at 18 dollars a ticket.

The exhibition makes no mention of what the Queen ever gave as presents; that question itself shocked many of the staff at the Palace. But by all indications at the Palace, Her Majesty got better than she gave.

But the display of gifts indicates that the business of gifting is not entirely separate from the world of politics. For a start, most gifts seem to have come from the governments of countries that were former British colonies. The polite word for them is Commonwealth.

The Palace continues to see these countries as a quite separate lot. A press note from the Palace says: “Accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh (her husband Prince Phillip), Her Majesty has made 76 state visits abroad and 149 visits to Commonwealth countries.” A visit to a former colony is still not quite a visit abroad.

So who gave what? And how far is a gift more than just a statement of goodwill?

Finally the public may never know. About 200 of these gifts have been exhibited. That is one in ten of the gifts the Queen was given. That leaves the possibility that there could have been symbolic gifts the public might never know about.

But the gifts that have gone on display include some of the larger gifts Her Majesty was given. And those that make you think what the Palace might have thought.

Perhaps Nelson Mandela meant well when he presented to Her Majesty a silk scarf with an ancient cow printed on it. Perhaps the children of Perth in Australia meant well when they presented the Queen with a boomerang in 1963, at a time when rumblings had begun over the continuance of the Queen as head of state of Australia.

The Australians have persisted with that boomerang. Another group gifted one to her in 1992 in Perth, and yet another boomerang was offered to her in Sydney that year.

The Duke of Edinburgh is celebrated in Britain for placing the royal foot in his mouth. That reputation cannot have been unknown to the Americans when former President Ronald Reagan presented the Duke of Edinburgh with a computer.

Or when someone in Texas presented him cowboy boots on a royal tour of Houston in 1991. Or when the royal couple were presented a foghorn fit for a ship by an American company. Cameroon presented to the Duke of Edinburgh a bronze mask with a grin.

It was all right for the people of Berlin to present her with a piece of the Berlin Wall on a plaque with its life dated 1961-1989. But when Pope John Paul II presented a copy of the New Testament to her Majesty, who heads the Church of England, the two could hardly have been unaware of the little matter that arose when Henry VIII broke away from the Vatican and the Pope.

But as with gifts among commoners, the gifts often seem to say more about those giving them than about those they were given to. The single largest gift Queen Elizabeth ever got is a huge writing desk with a chair from the Shah of Iran in 1961. The ornate chair has never been sat upon, nor the ornate desk written upon. They take up considerable space in some palace room, as they do at the exhibition now.

The most opulent of the gifts come from the Arab world. A golden palm tree from the United Arab Emirates, a huge golden model of the British state coach from Saudi Arabia, more from Saudi Arabia by way of golden camels under golden palm trees, and the model of a desert oasis from Qatar, all in gold of course.

From France came a five-feet long model of a grasshopper, really a wine cooler. Surprise! Surprise!

One whole section of the gifts is the ivory Her Majesty was gifted. The wildlife protection movement was not in the sixties of the last century what it is today.

But somebody might well ask a question or two about the ethics of showing off the royal ivory, however intricate its carvings, in gifts from Germany, India, Zambia, Ghana, Sudan and others.

The wildlife conservationist who spends those 18 dollars might be surprised also at the exhibition of a whale’s tooth gifted by the Fiji government in 1963, or a sword made of shark’s teeth from Kiribati in 1982.

Daniel T. arap Moi, president of Kenya, gifted to Her Majesty a studded treasure chest. Why a box to put treasures in? The Pakistani government presented a desk set with two feather-shaped pens to symbolise freedom of expression.

But there were other gifts you did not need to think about, like seashells from Seychelles.

Not a bad collection for a Queen that the Palace says has “travelled further than any monarch in history, circling the globe several times.” And when counting gifts, do not forget that she has received 75 Heads of State on visits to Britain over her 50 years as Queen. With them come the gifts.

There have been some gifts the royal couple have been given that were never likely to be displayed at the Palace. Like sunglasses, a pair of sandals, pineapples, two-and-a-half dozen eggs, a dozen tins of tuna, seven kilograms of prawns, two giant turtles from Seychelles, an elephant from Cameroon and a baby crocodile from the Gambia.

These days 18 dollars per head to walk in and look at those gifts is not a bad gift either.