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Originally posted by jhe888:

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Originally posted by YooperSigs:
I think the Queen Mum is a class act. I too remember her support during the aftermath of 9-11.
A true overseas supporter of the US and an amazing record of service for country.
I will hate to see her go.

I think you mean the Queen, Elizabeth II. The Queen Mother was her mother, Mary. She, I think, was called "Queen" by courtesy, being married to the King, but wasn't THE Queen, of course. The current Queen is definitely not the Queen Mother.

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Originally posted by tacfoley:

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Originally posted by jhe888:

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Originally posted by YooperSigs:
I think the Queen Mum is a class act. I too remember her support during the aftermath of 9-11.
A true overseas supporter of the US and an amazing record of service for country.
I will hate to see her go.

I think you mean the Queen, Elizabeth II. The Queen Mother was her mother, Mary. She, I think, was called "Queen" by courtesy, being married to the King, but wasn't THE Queen, of course. The current Queen is definitely not the Queen Mother.

HRH Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother was the mother of the present Queen. She was married to King George VI, and bore the title of Queen Elizabeth although she was not an annointed monarch. When her husband George VI died in 1952, the heir to the throne was their eldest daughter, also named Elizabeth, by royal succession. Her mother, widow of the king, became the Queen Mother, titled HRH Elizabeth, The Queen Mother.

Unless the present Queen abdicates in favour of ol' Big Ears, she will never have the title of Queen Mother.

tac

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Originally posted by jhe888:

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Originally posted by trapper189:

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It does beg the question: what is the code phrase if the London Bridge were to collapse?

Oh, shite!

Double shite, since the current London Bridge is a pier and steel girder bridge built in 1973. It is a wholly unremarkable, modern bridge.

Many people think the Tower Bridge is London Bridge, but it isn't. It is the Tower Bridge, which was built at the end of the 19th century, although it looks older in some respects.

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Originally posted by BigNC:
OK, my last off-topic, op, with my apologies.... and nhtagmember's permission.

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Originally posted by nhtagmember:
I will find the photo of myself and HRH and post it

I was very much younger way back then

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Originally posted by YooperSigs:
Thanks for the correction, Tac. And don't let the critical comments put you off of us. You are the established SF voice of reason and facts for all things Brit.

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Originally posted by selogic:
That whole thing sounds like typical Internet fake news .

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'London Bridge is down': the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death

She is venerated around the world. She has outlasted 12 US presidents. She stands for stability and order. But her kingdom is in turmoil, and her subjects are in denial that her reign will ever end. That’s why the palace has a plan.

by Sam Knight

Fri 17 Mar 2017 07.40 GMT
First published on Thu 16 Mar 2017 07.00 GMT

In the plans that exist for the death of the Queen – and there are many versions, held by Buckingham Palace, the government and the BBC – most envisage that she will die after a short illness. Her family and doctors will be there. When the Queen Mother passed away on the afternoon of Easter Saturday, in 2002, at the Royal Lodge in Windsor, she had time to telephone friends to say goodbye, and to give away some of her horses. In these last hours, the Queen’s senior doctor, a gastroenterologist named Professor Huw Thomas, will be in charge. He will look after his patient, control access to her room and consider what information should be made public. The bond between sovereign and subjects is a strange and mostly unknowable thing. A nation’s life becomes a person’s, and then the string must break.

There will be bulletins from the palace – not many, but enough. “The Queen is suffering from great physical prostration, accompanied by symptoms which cause much anxiety,” announced Sir James Reid, Queen Victoria’s physician, two days before her death in 1901. “The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close,” was the final notice issued by George V’s doctor, Lord Dawson, at 9.30pm on the night of 20 January 1936. Not long afterwards, Dawson injected the king with 750mg of morphine and a gram of cocaine – enough to kill him twice over – in order to ease the monarch’s suffering, and to have him expire in time for the printing presses of the Times, which rolled at midnight.

[...]

The rest of us will find out more quickly than before. On 6 February 1952, George VI was found by his valet at Sandringham at 7.30am. The BBC did not broadcast the news until 11.15am, almost four hours later. When Princess Diana died at 4am local time at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris on 31 August 1997, journalists accompanying the former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, on a visit to the Philippines knew within 15 minutes. For many years the BBC was told about royal deaths first, but its monopoly on broadcasting to the empire has gone now. When the Queen dies, the announcement will go out as a newsflash to the Press Association and the rest of the world’s media simultaneously. At the same instant, a footman in mourning clothes will emerge from a door at Buckingham Palace, cross the dull pink gravel and pin a black-edged notice to the gates. While he does this, the palace website will be transformed into a sombre, single page, showing the same text on a dark background.

Screens will glow. There will be tweets. At the BBC, the “radio alert transmission system” (Rats), will be activated – a cold war-era alarm designed to withstand an attack on the nation’s infrastructure. Rats, which is also sometimes referred to as “royal about to snuff it”, is a near mythical part of the intricate architecture of ritual and rehearsals for the death of major royal personalities that the BBC has maintained since the 1930s. Most staff have only ever seen it work in tests; many have never seen it work at all. “Whenever there is a strange noise in the newsroom, someone always asks, ‘Is that the Rats?’ Because we don’t know what it sounds like,” one regional reporter told me.

[...]

For people stuck in traffic, or with Heart FM on in the background, there will only be the subtlest of indications, at first, that something is going on. Britain’s commercial radio stations have a network of blue “obit lights”, which is tested once a week and supposed to light up in the event of a national catastrophe. When the news breaks, these lights will start flashing, to alert DJs to switch to the news in the next few minutes and to play inoffensive music in the meantime. Every station, down to hospital radio, has prepared music lists made up of “Mood 2” (sad) or “Mood 1” (saddest) songs to reach for in times of sudden mourning. “If you ever hear Haunted Dancehall (Nursery Remix) by Sabres of Paradise on daytime Radio 1, turn the TV on,” wrote Chris Price, a BBC radio producer, for the Huffington Post in 2011. “Something terrible has just happened.”

Having plans in place for the death of leading royals is a practice that makes some journalists uncomfortable. “There is one story which is deemed to be so much more important than others,” one former Today programme producer complained to me. For 30 years, BBC news teams were hauled to work on quiet Sunday mornings to perform mock storylines about the Queen Mother choking on a fishbone. There was once a scenario about Princess Diana dying in a car crash on the M4.

These well-laid plans have not always helped. In 2002, when the Queen Mother died, the obit lights didn’t come on because someone failed to push the button down properly. On the BBC, Peter Sissons, the veteran anchor, was criticised for wearing a maroon tie. Sissons was the victim of a BBC policy change, issued after the September 11 attacks, to moderate its coverage and reduce the number of “category one” royals eligible for the full obituary procedure. The last words in Sissons’s ear before going on air were: “Don’t go overboard. She’s a very old woman who had to go some time.”

[...]

For a long time, the art of royal spectacle was for other, weaker peoples: Italians, Russians, and Habsburgs. British ritual occasions were a mess. At the funeral of Princess Charlotte, in 1817, the undertakers were drunk. Ten years later, St George’s Chapel was so cold during the burial of the Duke of York that George Canning, the foreign secretary, contracted rheumatic fever and the bishop of London died. “We never saw so motley, so rude, so ill-managed a body of persons,” reported the Times on the funeral of George IV, in 1830. Victoria’s coronation a few years later was nothing to write home about. The clergy got lost in the words; the singing was awful; and the royal jewellers made the coronation ring for the wrong finger. “Some nations have a gift for ceremonial,” the Marquess of Salisbury wrote in 1860. “In England the case is exactly the reverse.”

What we think of as the ancient rituals of the monarchy were mainly crafted in the late 19th century, towards the end of Victoria’s reign. Courtiers, politicians and constitutional theorists such as Walter Bagehot worried about the dismal sight of the Empress of India trooping around Windsor in her donkey cart. If the crown was going to give up its executive authority, it would have to inspire loyalty and awe by other means – and theatre was part of the answer. “The more democratic we get,” wrote Bagehot in 1867, “the more we shall get to like state and show.”

Obsessed by death, Victoria planned her own funeral with some style. But it was her son, Edward VII, who is largely responsible for reviving royal display. One courtier praised his “curious power of visualising a pageant”. He turned the state opening of parliament and military drills, like the Trooping of the Colour, into full fancy-dress occasions, and at his own passing, resurrected the medieval ritual of lying in state. Hundreds of thousands of subjects filed past his coffin in Westminster Hall in 1910, granting a new sense of intimacy to the body of the sovereign. By 1932, George V was a national father figure, giving the first royal Christmas speech to the nation – a tradition that persists today – in a radio address written for him by Rudyard Kipling.

[...]

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The Queen, by all accounts a practical and unsentimental person, understands the theatrical power of the crown. “I have to be seen to be believed,” is said to be one of her catchphrases.

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Originally posted by nhtagmember:


I was very much younger way back then

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Originally posted by gearhounds:
I don’t understand some of the anti-Brit sentiment expressed in this thread. It seems some folks feel like the revolutionary war took place a few years ago, and that bad feelings should still exist.

Clearly both of our great nations buried the hatchet a long time ago, and have gone on to become two of the closest allies in the world. When the queen dies, I will have nothing but respect for our brothers across the pond, as I suspect freedom loving Brits would show if our president were to fall.

quote:

“If you ever hear Haunted Dancehall (Nursery Remix) by Sabres of Paradise on daytime Radio 1, turn the TV on,” wrote Chris Price, a BBC radio producer, for the Huffington Post in 2011. “Something terrible has just happened.”

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Originally posted by lyman:

quote:

Originally posted by gearhounds:
I don’t understand some of the anti-Brit sentiment expressed in this thread. It seems some folks feel like the revolutionary war took place a few years ago, and that bad feelings should still exist.

Clearly both of our great nations buried the hatchet a long time ago, and have gone on to become two of the closest allies in the world. When the queen dies, I will have nothing but respect for our brothers across the pond, as I suspect freedom loving Brits would show if our president were to fall.

sounds a bit like north vs south right??


saying this as an American (first relative came over in 1610) and an Anglophile,

we fought to get our freedom, so that part will always be a part of our history, and yet sometime later we learned that we actually had a good friend in the UK,,



my Wife is a big fan of the Queen, and will likely have to take the day off when she passes,