If you were saddened to learn of the death of Queen Elizabeth II (and evidently very few people on the planet weren’t), spare a thought for Mary Reynolds and Jeanette Charles.
Their names may not ring a bell, but their faces certainly would – as would their hair, their hats, and their handbags.
And, however hostile you might be to accident-of-birth white privilege, if you’re over forty these two women would have caused you to suspend judgment on more than one occasion.
For the last 30 years of the pre-Netflix era, they were the go-to girls for casting directors in need of a comedy Queen. And they competed for the fictional crown for as long as any two people have contended for the real one.
A trained actor, Ms Charles often got the movie gigs, stealing scenes from the likes of Roger Moore, Leslie Nielsen, and Mike Myers. While Reynolds, whose spooky physiological resemblance to HRH in early middle age only got spookier in subsequent decades, landed the lion’s share of the usually non-speaking advertisement cameos (which means that as well as having an Elizabeth credit on her Wikipedia page, she might also be remembered as Mary Queen of Spots. Boom tish.)
It is ten years since Ms Charles relinquished her royal replication duties, but Ms Reynolds, like her subject, kept queening ‘til the end, and in an interview she has since given, revealed that she’d just taken delivery of a complete facsimile set of the Queen’s jubilee hats when she heard the news.
She has more cause to be devastated than most, but her stoicism about those unrecoverable hat costs, as much as her failure to weep on camera, suggest it wasn’t just the appearance and the body language of her subject that she’d been studying all those years.
She knows that the ‘outpouring of emotion’ which the mainstream media has been at such pains to encourage and exploit – and, in the case of certain breakfast show presenters, contribute to – would be utterly abhorrent to the woman whose passing they purport to mourn.
When Princess Diana, Princess Margaret, and the Duke of Edinburgh died, we have no reason to doubt that the Queen was as devastated as any other bereaved parent, sibling, or spouse would be. But those of us who had been paying attention knew that she felt the outward display of that grief to be incompatible with what she regarded as her most important role. So much so that in the case of Diana, her refusal to join the orgy of public lamentation came close to provoking a constitutional crisis.
Surely, the best way to honour the memory of this admirable woman would be to exercise a little of the stoicism and dignified self-restraint which were hallmarks of her glorious reign.
Some older Australians rationalise their ‘outpouring of emotion’ by saying that because the Queen was such an unchangeable presence for so long their lives will now be somehow diminished.
With the possible exception of my Speccie Australia stablemate Professor David Flint (who, significantly, has not yet blubbed on camera) I suspect most of these people will find a way to cope. Even most Brits would go weeks without thinking about their sovereign, and even then it was usually to sympathise with her about the behaviour of her progeny.
Her death at 96 could hardly be called untimely, and while certainly a shock to the system, won’t change the system. And it won’t change the day-to-day lives of her subjects any more than if they’d woken up one day last week to discover that milk had suddenly turned yellow, as tennis balls did in the 1980s, or that Sir David Attenborough – who led the campaign to change the colour of tennis balls when he realised yellow was easier to see than white on a colour television – had suddenly identified as a woman.
While writing this piece I had a conversation with a friend who reminded me that today was the anniversary of 9/11, a far more unexpected and shocking event which really did have profound and permanent consequences for every one of us. Yet this year’s anniversary barely got a mention in Australian newspapers.
So yes, some sports events have been cancelled, and in the coming months some babies will be christened Elizabeth, and people may think twice about retweeting Queen jokes. But the Post Office won’t issue a recall for stamps, and we will learn how to say King Charles without mentally adding the word ‘spaniel’ and life will go on.
And I fear that all too soon in Sydney and Melbourne and Auckland and Toronto – and even in London – our longest-serving and arguably best-loved monarch will just be another statue to be toppled.
