The Queen of England and the Unknown Schoolboy

The year 2012 is the year of the Queen of England’s Diamond Jubilee, which makes the timely publication of The Queen of England and the Unknown Schoolboy in 2011 both relevant and interesting, because it recalls a distant time when Queen Elizabeth II first came to her throne, almost sixty years ago, when she and British society were so very different. We are reminded by this novel that, for most people today, the unrecognisable past is not only a different country but also, in so many respects, a different planet! As we travel back in time in these atmospheric pages we often cannot believe our eyes, as all sorts of mysteries and interesting surprises gradually emerge from the gathering mists of time in which they disappeared, once upon a scarcely remembered time. Whilst Britain’s new young Queen had her head and shoulders printed on British postage stamps, there were few in the British working classes who used these stamps very often, either because they had nobody to write to on a regular basis, or because they were counting their pennies and shillings and had better things to do with their money (some 60 years before emails). These were the days when a precious penny went quite a long way. Children could get a pennyworth or farthing’s worth of sweets back then, not that their parents had too many pennies to give them. A farthing was one quarter of a penny and there was in Yorkshire a Penny Bank that encouraged people to save their pennies for a rainy day (with similar banks elsewhere across the country, including the home town of the unknown schoolboy). This is an impressive and very readable historical novel that intriguingly invokes the atmosphere of the past with a rich cast of royal and everyday characters, including an unknown schoolboy who won the Queen of England’s Coronation Prize shortly after she came to her throne in 1952, followed by her Coronation in 1953. In the 21st century this is an almost forgotten prize, but much was made of it at the time when British schools and the Queen of England had a very clear idea of what they expected from their children. One of the schoolboy winners of this prize in those far-off days was the future pop-star Paul McCartney of the Beatles. The charm of this novel is that it refreshingly invokes the spirit as well as the factual events of past times with an emotional honesty all its own, whilst also capturing and detailing the character of different people in postwar Britain. It reminds us of the very different person that the present-day Queen of England used to be and of the opposition to her marriage to the Duke of Edinburgh when she first fell for him. Fictional representations of Princess Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Viscount Mountbatten and Winston Churchill all come alive with some revealing dialogue, as do many school teachers, a fascinating headmaster, and a working-class family of which the unknown schoolboy is a member. Queen Elizabeth II’s 1953 Coronation also comes colourfully alive with brilliantly descriptive and very detailed narrative. Verifiable factual information in this well-informed and carefully researched story, full of fascinating historical detail, can be confirmed in the press and the history books of the period, as well as in encyclopaedia. This is a must-read historical novel, especially for this year and/or next, given the Queen of England’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012. This novel is as much about the Unknown Schoolboy and postwar Britain as it is about the Queen of England. It is about what it was like to be a growing ‘war baby’ back then and what the Queen of England meant and did not mean to her subjects. This is a novel, not only about her, but also about books and publishing, 1950s schools, education, school teachers and postwar attitudes.