The Family Firm

The continued popularity of the monarchy in twentieth-century Britain is commonly attributed to the character and prominence of its presentation in the mass media. Numerous studies have commented on aspects of the extensive and intensive coverage of royal events and the royal family by the popular and illustrated press, in newsreels and in documentary and feature films, and on radio and television. Edward Owens has now undertaken the first systematic examination of what he terms ‘the emergence of a mass media monarchy’. In the inaugural volume in the Royal Historical Society’s open access book series for early-career researchers, ‘New Historical Perspectives’, he brings together approaches from histories of the monarchy, media, popular opinion and emotions. His period reaches from the broadcast on radio of the first royal Christmas message in 1932, to the first televised royal occasion, the coronation of 1953. The chief themes are set out in a lengthy introduction. Radio and television were, he argues, transformative in giving public audiences the impression of closeness to royal events and statements, of participation and immediacy or ‘temporal simultaneity’. But his study does not turn just on innovations in broadcasting technology. Shifts in popular culture which placed greater emphasis on emotional lives, and new forms of print journalism which were more concerned with ‘human interest stories’, made it possible to create a ‘national emotional community’, in a ‘distinctly modern process’ of ‘affective integration’. All these changes were exploited by ‘royal stage-managers’—actual and tacit alliances among palace officials, archbishops of Canterbury and media controllers—in a ‘public relations strategy’ which aimed, during the inter-war period of social and political strain, to present the monarchy as the unifying symbol of British democracy and Christian values. Empathetic relationships between royalty and people were generated in several ways. Emphasis was placed on the shared experience of domesticity: the mass media monarchy was also a ‘family monarchy’. Royal persons were presented both as committed to public service and as possessing private lives, generating an implication that royal duties involved a form of personal sacrifice. Considered in such terms, a royal wedding was ‘a nation-building exercise designed to create loyal subjects of the crown’, and Edward VIII’s reign exposed the tension between the public and the personal in the new royal images. The chapters focus on the marriage in 1934 of the Duke of Kent and Princess Marina, interpreted as novel in its public presentation; on George V’s radio broadcasts, with Archbishop Lang credited, as a leading draftsman, with introducing a new emotional register to royal language; on preparations for the 1937 coronation as a matter of royal ‘crisis management’ after the abdication; on the preservation of a distinctive royal image during the Second World War under pressure from government efforts to control all forms of propaganda; on the 1947 wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten as a story of young love for the post-war generation; and on televised home viewing of the 1953 coronation as transforming ‘the emotional dimensions of monarchy’

Genealogy · Mass media · Monarchy · Political science · Australian History and Society · European history and politics · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law