"The real Royalists": folk performance and civil religion at royal visits

Folklore, Annual, 1998 by Anne Rowbottom

Introduction

In the study of cultures other than our own, high levels of interest (whether positive or negative) are taken as indicators of a culturally significant phenomenon worthy of serious investigation (Ortner 1979). Somewhat surprisingly in our own culture, despite the high levels of media and public interest in the monarchy, there has been a distinct lack of academic interest in popular royalism. Since 1953, the year of the present Queen's coronation, the body of specific academic literature generated amounts to little more than a handful of books and a relatively small number of articles. These have been spread over a range of disciplines; for example, anthropology, sociology, history, social psychology and political science. Recent years have seen what may be the start of a more sustained interest in the topic with the publishing of books dealing specifically with the modern monarchy (for example, Hayden 1987; Nairn 1988; Wilson 1989; Billig 1992; Prochaska 1995). Most recently the scale of public mourning for Diana Princess of Wales has produced a flurry of academic work, but whether this develops into a sustained interest in the monarchy remains to be seen.

If commentaries on popular monarchy are scarce, then qualitative studies of how people actually interact with the monarchy are very scarce indeed. Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge have republished the Mass Observation diaries for the Coronation of George VI but, although fascinating, this material is now over sixty years old Jennings and Madge 1987). Michael Billig provides a recent exception, but he is concerned with everyday conversation rather than responses to ceremonial (Billig 1992). Therefore, information on the experience of how the public actually interact with royal ceremonial is seriously lacking. This paper addresses, but does not claim to fill, this gap. Rather, by describing how one particular group of people interact with the monarchy, the aim is to illustrate the richness of the material and in doing so to suggest the value of developing this field of research further.

The Royalists

The "real royalists" who are the focus of the paper are people who regularly travel the United Kingdom, to stand for hours, in all weathers, to greet members of the Royal Family during royal visits. Though living in different parts of the country, they have come to know each other through regular attendance at these events. However, the size and composition of the group attending a particular visit varies according to family, employment and financial circumstances, and the time and location of the event.

Before I met them, my expectations of what constituted a royalist conformed to a common stereotype of middle-aged, middle-class, married, white and female (cf. Rose and Kavanagh 1976). I found, however, that their ages range from mid-teens to late-sixties, and that there are almost as many men as women. The majority of the women are married with older children; the majority of the men are single. Occupations range from a florist (male) to a civil engineer (female), and include a shop keeper, a clerical worker, a secretary, a cook, a postman, a nurse, a teacher, housewives and the retired.

The royalists claim that "there is no such thing as a typical royalist, we are a very mixed bunch." However, this is not quite the case. Class, religion, political and value orientations provide common factors underlying their surface diversities. Although religion and party politics are not often discussed amongst them, the majority affiliation is towards the Church of England and the Conservative Party. As well as sharing these underlying value orientations, through their occupations they share a predominantly lower-middle-class status. One explanation for this may be that their conditions of employment give them the flexibility to take holiday leave, or time off in lieu of overtime, or to re-organise working hours without loss of income or disruption to colleagues, employers or production. Only in gender and age-range do they actually challenge the stereotype. Their assertion that they are a "mixed bunch," therefore, actually runs counter to their sociological profile. However, the claim should not be taken literally, but as indicating an important aspect of their own self-image as a socially diverse group brought together by their support for the monarchy.

Methods

This paper draws upon extensive fieldwork which began in the autumn of 1988 as part of a doctoral thesis on royal symbolism (Rowbottom 1994). As an anthropologist, my interest lies not only in the official presentations of the monarchy, but also in the way the royals' audiences invest these presentations with personal meaning. As royal visits bring together the monarchy and the public they provide not only a relevant field of study, but a readily accessible one. Studying the presentational aspect of the visit involved in-depth interviews with officials of the various agencies responsible for their organisation, and with officials of the recipient organisations, commercial, charitable and civic. I gained further insider knowledge when on two occasions I participated as an invited guest. On one of these occasions, a visit by the Prince and Princess of Wales to the Anthropology Department at the University of Manchester, I was presented to the Princess and showed her video extracts from my fieldwork. In exploring audience interpretations, I began undertaking participant observation amongst the crowds to gather data partly on the way the monarchy was officially displayed and partly on the way the public involved themselves in the event.