Noble Blood - Queen Elizabeth II's Greatest Regret

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

The death of Queen Elizabeth is the death of a symbol: after 70 years on the throne, she is the only English monarch many of us have ever known. The story of a disaster in Wales in 1966 highlights that stoic inaction was both the greatest strength, and the greatest weakness, of the late queen.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. On September 8, 2022, Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth realms, died at her summer residence, Ballmorel in Scotland at age 96. She had reigned for seven decades. The queen through the space race and the dawn of the information age, the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the internet. She hosted the Kennedys at Buckingham Palace,

rode horses with Reagan, and sent Dwight Eisenhower a recipe for scones. Fifteen prime ministers formed governments in her name, including Winston Churchill. 70 years on the throne. For most people around the world, she was the only monarch in memory, a constant presence both physically on money and on stamps, but also in the popular imagination,

through jokes, references, songs, and through every mother who had ever corrected the table manners of their child by saying, Would you chew with your mouth open if you are having dinner, with the queen? The monarchy itself is a strange and antiquated institution. If you've listened to this podcast, you understand how odd it is when vast political power is arbitrarily inherited, and inherited by, well, people, who, for all the pomp and ceremony that

tries to turn them into deities, remain at the end of the day, just people, with the normal jealousies, insecurities, vanities, and mistakes that people make. The death of the queen, though, isn't just the death of an individual. It's the death of a symbol. Because in the 21st century with political power almost entirely granted to democratically elected representatives, the monarchy is symbolic. Like Sherlock Holmes or Paddington Bear, the queen, was an institution synonymous with Britishness.

That Paddington comparison becomes all the more self-evident, with reports of mourners leaving marmalade sandwiches as tribute at the gates of Buckingham Palace. She's a symbol of British tea towel kitsch, of a bygone era that we might falsely remember through rose-tinted Downton Abbey lenses, a symbol of happy childhood memories watching Doctor Who. Of course, there are many around the world who understand the Queen. Fairly,

I might add, was also a symbol of an imperialist and colonial power that caused tremendous pain across the globe. For better or for worse, the Queen was a fixture in every sense of the word. She was fixed. I think in a world in which change is near-caused. constant and terrifyingly fast, and the future is, well, pretty scary, there was a comfort in thinking that this one thing was just there, remaining the same, not changing, not doing anything different, just there. The queen understood that that, that fear of change and the need to cling to comfort, was as much the purpose of the monarchy in the 21st century as anything else. Sometimes to her detriment, she refused to bend to modernity.

She did not reveal much of her personality, let alone her political opinions. Whereas Princess Diana was able to captivate attention with her vulnerability and charisma, Queen Elizabeth had an almost opposite strength. She wouldn't burn bright, necessarily, but she would burn long. Inaction was her most powerful action. With that in mind, I want to draw your attention to one particular crisis moment in Queen Elizabeth's reign, a disaster in Wales that tested her instincts as a monarch. In her many years on the throne, the queen would look back to the event that occurred in Aberfan in 1967,

and call her response her greatest regret. The challenge of balancing spontaneous action with one's position as an apolitical fixture is only becoming harder in a world of constant access and social media. If the monarchy is going to survive after Queen Elizabeth's death, perhaps the new King Charles III might learn from his mother, both from her successes and from her failure. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood.

It was before a mid-semester break, and so on October 21st, 1966, the students of Pantclas junior school in Aberfan were only there for half day. They had raced to school in the rain, their boots squelching in the mud and hoods pulled up against the drizzle. That area of Wales is usually wet, getting over six years. 60 inches of rain a year, and so it wouldn't have been abnormal for them to have been shaking off their jackets and stomping the mud away as they settled into their seats to begin their day with the traditional hymn, all things bright and beautiful. It was, in other words, a perfectly normal day, until the students heard a low rumble. The rumble became louder. It would later be described as like the roar of a jet engine.

It was an avalanche approaching, tumbling down the hill nearby faster than anyone could have imagined. But not an avalanche of snow or earth, but the slurry or waste from the coal mine nearby. It happened before anyone knew what to do. The school, and much of the town, was buried. The roar abated, and the town became eerily silent. Aberfan became a mass grave. To understand what happened in Aberfan and why, it's important to go back in time. The Wales became a coal mining center during the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s.

Its true coal heyday was during the 1920s, when more than a quarter of a million workers were making their livelihoods in coal mines. By the 1960s at the Merther Vale Coaliery outside Aberfan, that number was just down to 8,000. But still, it was how those 8,000 men made their living and supported their families. Coal mining is a messy business, and part of the process is that waste rock is generated in the digging. The best way to deal with that waste is to, elegantly enough, stack it up in piles that are referred to,

as tips. In 1966, there were seven tips from the Merther Vale colliery. The seventh, which had begun in 1958, atop a sandstone base above a natural spring, on a hill above Aberfan, was more than 100 feet tall. Of course, in retrospect, it seems obvious that a massive waste pile shouldn't have been built atop a hill with a primary school just below. And citizens in Aberfan complained to the mine and to the national coal board. But nothing was done. And worse than nothing, the response back from the powers that be seemed to be saying in not so many words, keep making a fuss and will close the mine altogether. And then how will you make your living? so the mining continued, and the spoil tip on top of the hill continued to grow.

Later, after the disaster, the National Coal Board would face an examining tribunal, who would report, quote, The Aberfan disaster could and should have been prevented, but it was a matter not of wickedness, but of ignorance, ineptitude, and a failure in communications. End quote. It was a rainy autumn in a rainy place. That day on October, the sludge on the hill became swollen with water,

thick and wet and black, and then the tip gave way. Bulldozers set to work immediately, trying to dig away the 140,000 cubic yards of black sludge that had consumed the primary school and the town. Firefighters, policemen, and countless volunteers began digging at the earth with their bare hands. Horror struck at the faint sounds of wailing they could hear coming from below.

The men digging had come straight from their jobs at the mine. John Humphreys, a Welsh journalist who had been reporting there that day, described them, quote, there they were when I arrived, their faces still black, save for the streaks of white from the sweat and the tears as they dug and prayed and wept. Most of them were digging for their own children, end quote. The community continued their efforts at finding survivors,

digging every single day in the wreckage of the school for a week straight, but after that first day, no more survivors were found. It was a national tragedy. 28 adults were killed in the disaster and 116 children. Half of all of the children in the town of Aberfan were dead. Of course, in moments like that of senseless loss and unimaginable grief, the monarchy is there to offer comfort and to help draw attention to relief efforts. and Prince Philip arrived in Wales the very next day, along with the Prime Minister at the time,

Harold Wilson, and Lord Snowden, the husband of Princess Margaret. But the Queen wasn't there. The question is, why? The answer is, well, we're not sure. It seems a decision was made, and that decision was to dispatch Prince Philip in the Queen's place. But whose decision was it? According to the queen's former private secretary, Lord Charteress, the queen had been given bad advice. Quote, we told her to stay away until the preliminary shock had worn off, end quote. The thought was that if the queen went while the relief effort were still underway, it might cause a distraction,

divert resources among police or security that otherwise might go toward digging. Still, another advisor presents a difference. picture of the discussions happening within the royal inner circle. Biographer Robert Lacey quoted an advisor who said, we kept presenting the argument, but nothing we said could persuade her. Stoicism, an aversion to emotional gestures, was a feature of Queen Elizabeth's reign, not a bug, as they say. She was averse to doing anything that might have an outsized reaction. even if the reaction might be good, because it risks the possibility that it might not be.

Consider that Elizabeth's more, let's say, laissez-faire sister, Princess Margaret, offhandedly remarked that people should be donating toys to Aberfan for the remaining children. The consequence of Princess Margaret's remarks was that toys overwhelmed the town, overflowing from the cinema and the donation centers to the point where, it was a distraction from relief efforts. If you do nothing, the queen seemed to believe, then you can do nothing wrong. Except, of course, sometimes you can.

Inaction is also action, and as the days crept by and the relief efforts became exhausted, eventually it was decided that the queen would visit Aberfan after all. It was eight days after the disaster. The deaths were counted and there was no more digging. When the queen arrived, a young girl approached and presented her with a posy. The note attached read from the remaining children of Aberfan. According to a number of the mourning families, the queen's visit was a great comfort.

She stood with the parents who had lost their children. listened to them, made them feel less anonymous, less alone. The crown was here with them. The country saw their pain. That was what her visit symbolized. Still, she had waited eight days. Maybe it would have been a distraction if she had come earlier. Maybe the grief would have been overwhelming and the relief efforts too chaotic to accommodate a royal visit.

But still, sometimes you can only regret and think what you might have done differently. Queen Elizabeth II certainly did. The queen would return three more times to the village of Aberfan in her reign. Though the power of the monarchy is largely symbolic now, that power is still legitimate. Case in point during one of her later visits, it was revealed that the government had used the Aberfan Disaster Fund in order to fund the removal of the six remaining slag tips.

That sounds all well and good, but that money had actually been set up explicitly to help the bereaved families. Queen Elizabeth's visit helped bring attention to that corruption, which led to the money being repaid to those families. On her final visit to Aberfan in 2012, against the advice of her advisor,

the queen insisted that she take off in a helicopter. The ground was too wet, they said, and the weather too erratic, but she insisted because she thought that the children would like to see it. And so off in a helicopter she went. I highlight the Aberfan disaster because it captures at once what I believe to be the monarchy's greatest weakness, but also their strength. Its weakness is that its stability comes from inaction. The royal family can never be dazzling or unexpected.

There can be no great victories because to achieve any victory is to risk defeat. The queen understood that more than anyone, that her role was to be less a person with whatever wants or desires came from that and instead be an institution. To let her personhood be subsumed by the role, that was her sacrifice and that was her duty.

Elizabeth II was never supposed to be queen. Her father was King George V's second son, and so her uncle had been in line for the throne. He was King Edward V, but for several reasons that we've already discussed on this very podcast, he was entirely unsuited to the position. He abdicated in order to marry an American divorcee in what Elizabeth's family saw as a fundamental betrayal,

a selfish dereliction of duty. She would never do anything like that. She would honor the institution of the crown at all costs. She would do her duty withstanding whatever small humiliations and criticism, it required, she would be the human statue that the nation could look to so that she could be able to achieve what I believe is the monarchy's greatest strength to make people feel seen, comforted. If the queen represents the entire nation, when she is there with you, you know that

the nation is with you too. That's the story of Queen Elizabeth II and the Aberfan disaster, But stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about the human side of the late queen. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Wodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.

I don't know what that means, but I just know the good. groundlings. I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there.

Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and The Big Money Players Network. It's Will Farrell.

Woo-woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with him one day. And I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah.

He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're... banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. The Queen is such an institution that sometimes it's easy to forget that she,

she was, in fact, a real human being. There's one anecdote I love, possibly apocryphal, but that shows her sense of humor. The queen's favorite spot was Balmoral, the castle located in the Scottish countryside, and often she would walk across the hills to take in the views. One morning she was walking when she encountered a pair of hiking tourists. Incredibly, they didn't recognize her and made conversation. They heard that the queen sometimes stayed around there. Was that true? Yes, she replied, it was. The tourists became excited.

Have you ever met her? they asked. No, the queen deadpanned. She pointed to her guard, who was standing nearby at a respectful distance. But he has. Noble Blood is a production of I-Heart Radio and Grimmin-Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz. Additional writing and researching done by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is produced by Rima Il Kiali,

with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions, you can have like a strong stance.

And then there's your body. Having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.