During a trip to Montreal and Quebec for the Queen’s visit in September 1964, I spent a week with Richard Dimbleby watching the entire coverage of the event by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It was only his second visit to Canada since he’d covered the journey of the King and Queen in 1939. Throughout the week he contrasted the mood of the two Royal Tours: in 1964 it was one of danger and hostility; in 1939 the Royal Tour was in the warm glow of Empire, when the Monarchy represented a great power on the American continent. It was the stuff of boys’ magazines, when Toronto and Banff seemed as far as the Mountains of the Moon and when the coverage of distance itself was an adventure for the intrepid.
During a long lunch at the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec – long, because the food was good and the weather was fine – he told me of an evening in the Banff Springs Hotel with the pressmen and photographers covering the 1939 tour. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth had been with them in the earlier part of the evening, talking informally. But after they went the party continued and grew in volume of numbers and of sound, with Richard at the piano. As the day drew to 11 o’clock or so, the King appeared in the room and asked if they minded his rejoining them: this he did and the party continued with no change of mood or style. A contrast, said Dimbleby, to the Mounties stationed above the Café de Paris and at every rooftop and naked window in Quebec for the present tour.
After finishing lunch, Richard Dimbleby took me through the heavy security of the 1964 Press Office and headed unerringly for the trestle table with piles of red and blue books on it – each embossed with the royal standard. ‘The Book of the Tour’, he whispered. ‘Must get the one issued to the royal entourage: gives you everything – people on parade grounds, in processions, upstairs, downstairs, who the Queen is meeting, what time she starts on the lobster – it’s invaluable.’ He pocketed one, greeted every journalist he knew with the unique delight he reserved openly for everybody, and we left the hotel.
The flight to Quebec from Montreal was undertaken just for the day so that Richard Dimbleby could feel the atmosphere of this expected centre of French-Canadian hostility to the British Monarchy. He found the day totally rewarding because he was able to see the royal car, guarded by police and Mounties, on the quayside where the Queen would disembark the next day; because he was able to remind himself of how undramatic and essentially dull the Heights of Abraham are; because he discovered the names of the paintings in the Quebec Parliament Chamber, and experienced an overpowering smell of newly polished wood in the entrance hall of the Parliament building. And he saw the stunning colours of the Canadian Fall. But the smell was the important moment – and it emerged when he finally did his commentary to the edited film of the week’s tour. ‘When those pictures of her visit to the Quebec Parliament pop up,’ he said, ‘I shall be able to tell people at home exactly what was the most immediate sensation experienced by the Queen at that moment.’