Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh, accedes to the throne: ‘WE, therefore, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of this Realm….’

On this day in 1952, Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh, acceded to the throne, becoming Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. She is the longest-reigning monarch in British history, having been Queen for 68 years. Earlier today, soldiers from the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery, in full dress uniform, rode from London’s Wellington Barracks past Buckingham Palace to nearby Green Park.

Seventy-one horses pulled six First World War-era 13-pounder field guns to the north of the park on Thursday, where the 41-gun salute was fired.

The bells of Westminster Abbey, the gothic church where the Queen was married and crowned, also rang out to mark Accession Day.

And at the Tower of London, the Honourable Artillery Company staged a 62-gun salute, with the extra 21 guns demonstrating the City of London’s loyalty to the 93-year-old monarch.

Queen Elizabeth II has ruled for 24,837 days, passing her Silver, Golden, Diamond and Sapphire Jubilees.

She became the United Kingdom and Commonwealth’s longest reigning monarch in September 2015, after overtaking Queen Victoria.

The Queen acceded to the throne on the death of her father King George VI.  Princess Elizabeth was in Kenya on an official royal tour of what was then known as the British Commonwealth, and which was also to take in Australia and New Zealand, when she learnt that she had become Sovereign. It was a tense time for colonial-indigenous relations in many British Commonwealth countries, including Kenya, and the royal tour was aimed at shoring up flagging support for the colonizers from the colonized. By 1952 Kikuyu fighters, along with some Embu and Meru recruits, were attacking political opponents and raiding white settler farms and destroying livestock. Mau Mau supporters took oaths, binding them to their cause. In October 1952, just eight months after the royal visit, the British declared a state of emergency and began moving army reinforcements into Kenya.

Now known simply as the Commonwealth, it is today a voluntary association of 54 independent and equal countries. It is home to 2.4 billion people, and includes both advanced economies and developing countries.  Maldives, a small island nation in South Asia, located in the Arabian Sea of the Indian Ocean, southwest of Sri Lanka and India, and about 1,000 kilometres from the Asian continent, became the the 54th member when it officially re-joined the Commonwealth  last Saturday, having left it in 2016.

On the morning of Feb. 6, 1952, the King’s valet, James McDonald, alongside page Maurice Watts, discovered King George had died in his sleep.  A doctor was called, and after he confirmed the King’s death, “Hyde Park Corner,” the code words to be used in the event of the monarch’s death, were uttered, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was informed at once.

It was Philip who told Elizabeth of her father’s death. They were at Sagana fishing lodge 20 miles away from the Treetops Lodge Nyeri, when he told her. The news had first reached Nairobi at offices of a local newspaper, which informed the royal household. The source of the news from Sandringham came from journalist Granville Roberts, who worked on the East African Standard in Nairobi and was covering the royal visit. Roberts said that Reuters had run a flash simply saying: “The King is dead.”

Roberts immediately asked a receptionist to fetch Lt. Col. Martin Charteris, who was Elizabeth’s private secretary, to inform him of the news the Daily Mail reported in a Jan. 9, 2012 story (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2083889/King-George-VI-True-story-day-Queen-Elizabeth-learned-fathers-death.html)

Asked if the message was correct, he simply replied: “Quite sure.”

Roberts then telephoned  Cmdr. Michael Parker, Philip’s private secretary to deliver the news, which was later confirmed by radio when Parker tuned to the BBC.

Parker awoke the Duke of Edinburgh from an afternoon nap to tell him of the death. He is said to have reacted like he had been hit by a thunderbolt. The official call was routed through a small country post office, as Elizabeth and Philip had spent the night in a jungle tree-top bungalow at Treetops Lodge Nyeri, a tree-house lodge on stilts located in the Aberdare National Park, where Elizabeth, “Clad in brown slacks and a yellow bush shirt … watched by moonlight the parade of African animals which included a rhinoceros,” United Press (UP), later to become United Press International (UPI), reported in a Feb. 6, 1952 story headlined “New ruler weeps at news of king’s death” (https://www.upi.com/Archives/1952/02/06/New-ruler-weeps-at-news-of-kings-death/5417153021042/).

The staff decided not to alarm Elizabeth until confirmation came from Buckingham Palace. It took nearly 30 minutes to get the radiotelephone call from London connection through and four hours in total before the news of her father’s death reached her.

The new Queen personally ordered a plane prepared at once for her departure for London to take her place at the head of the British Commonwealth and Empire. The plane flew them from Nanyuki, a nearby town, to Entebbe where another plane was waiting.

Meanwhile, the ensign aboard the ship Gothic, which was to leave the following day with the royal couple for Australia via Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka, was lowered to half mast, as were all flags throughout Kenya. They were delayed by several hours by a thunderstorm in Entebbe but they left at around midnight.

During the flight, another problem arose in that the Queen’s mourning outfit had already gone ahead and she only had a floral dress to wear.

They decided to land at El Adem, Libya in North Africa to avoid British-occupied Egypt in the wake of the “Cairo Fire” (حريق القاهرة‎), also known as Black Saturday, on Jan. 26, 1952, marked by the burning and looting of some 750 buildings retail shops, cafes, cinemas, hotels, restaurants, theatres, nightclubs, and the city’s opera house in downtown Cairo.

A message was sent ahead and a second black outfit was taken to London airport.

Upon the flight’s arrival, the dress was taken aboard after it stopped in the remote area of the airport.

The Queen changed quickly before emerging, meeting a line-up including her uncle the Duke of Gloucester and Churchill.

Maj. Eric Sherbrooke Walker built the Treetops Lodge Nyeri in 1932 on a “mugumo” (fig) tree for his wife Lady Bettie.

A hotelier and founder also of the Outspan Hotel in Kenya, Walker was a decorated military officer who had run a bootlegging business, smuggling liquor into America during the Prohibition era, while his fiancée Lady Bettie worked as social secretary in the British Embassy in Washington. When Walker shot and wounded a corrupt state trooper who had tried to steal his cache of whiskey, the couple fled to Canada. Walker later wrote The Confessions of a Rum-Runner under the pseudonym of “James Barbican” about his life during this period.

Initially, only open on Wednesday nights to overnight guests as a night-viewing platform, it was purposely built beside a waterhole where animals would come for refreshment and natural salt lick. Treetops opened to the public Nov. 6, 1932 with two beds selling at ₤10 per person. The Treetops Lodge had grown to a three-bedroom, eight-bed lodge when Princess Elizabeth climbed into it almost 20 years later on Feb. 5, 1952 and descended the next day as Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

“For the first time in the history of the world, a young girl climbed into a tree one day a princess and after having what she described as her most thrilling experience she climbed down from the tree next day a queen,” noted Jim Corbett, the famed British hunter, tracker, naturalist, and author, who hunted a number of man-eating tigers and leopards in India, but who had retired to Kenya in 1947, wrote famously in the hotel’s visitors’ register.

Elizabeth, now Queen of Kenya and of Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, as her title was styled in Kenya, immediately flew home. Aged 25, many were initially skeptical about her competency, including Churchill.

Elizabeth’s succession to the throne was proclaimed at an Accession Council. This took place in St James’s Palace and was attended by members of the Privy Council, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London.

The Accession Council met twice at St. James’s Palace: first at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 6, before the new Queen had returned from Kenya, to make their proclamation declaring the accession of the new sovereign, as the late king’s successor in accordance with the line of succession to the British throne.

The Accession Council’s proclamation was published Feb. 6,1952 in a supplement to that day’s London Gazette.

“Upon the intimation that our late Most Gracious Sovereign King George the Sixth had died in his sleep at Sandringham in the early hours of this morning the Lords of the Privy Council assembled this day at St. James’s Palace, and gave orders for proclaiming Her present Majesty.
“WHEREAS it has pleased Almighty God to call to His Mercy our late Sovereign Lord George VI

“— King George the Sixth of Blessed and Glorious memory, by whose Decease the Crown is solely and rightfully come to the High and Mighty Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary:

“WE, therefore, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of this Realm, being here assisted with these His late Majesty’s Privy Council, with representatives of other Members of the Commonwealth, with other Principal Gentlemen of Quality, with the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Citizens of London, do now hereby with one voice and Consent of Tongue and Heart publish and proclaim that the High and Mighty Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary is now, by the death of our late Sovereign of happy memory, become Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of this Realm and of all Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, to whom Her lieges do acknowledge all Faith and constant Obedience with hearty and humble Affection, beseeching God by whom Kings and Queens do reign, to bless the Royal Princess Elizabeth the Second with long and happy Years to reign over us.

“Given at St. James’s Palace this Sixth Day of February in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and fifty-two

“Brief pause for trumpets. And then shouts

“GOD SAVE THE QUEEN.”

The second meeting of the Accession Council began at 10 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 8, when the new Queen was personally present, to receive her oath for the security of the Church of Scotland and her own personal declaration, pledging that she would always work to uphold constitutional government and to advance the happiness and prosperity of her peoples all the world over.

“By the sudden death of my dear father I am called to assume the duties and responsibilities of sovereignty,” said the Queen. “My heart is too full for me to say more to you today than I shall always work, as my father did throughout his reign, to advance the happiness and prosperity of my peoples.”

Her declaration for securing the Protestant succession, as required by the 1689 Bill of Rights and the Accession Declaration Act 1910, was made later, at her first State Opening of Parliament on Nov. 4, 1952.

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The search of the seventh arc and the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370

A single piece of debris recovered last July 29 on the beach at Saint-André Réunion, the sixth-largest commune on Réunion island, a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean situated east of Madagascar and about 175 kilometres southwest of Mauritius, the nearest island.

Almost two years after it vanished into thin air on March 8, 2014, the ongoing search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, with 239 people aboard (227 passengers and 12 crew) remains perhaps the most incredible missing plane aviation story in history. To date all that has been recovered is its right-wing flaperon, bearing serial number 657BB, a control surface on the wing of the aircraft which was intended to help to stabilize the plane during low-speed flying during take-off and landing, combining the functions of flaps, used to create lift or drag depending on their use, and ailerons, which keep the plane from rolling over, and also help reduce weight. A technician from Airbus, which made the part for Boeing, formally identified one of the three numbers found on the flaperon as being the serial number from MH370.

As the whole world knows, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur after midnight Malaysia Time (MYT) on March 8, 2014 and the 200-tonne Boeing BA 777-2H6ER never made it to its 6:30. a.m. arrival in Beijing, disappearing from civilian radar over the Gulf of Thailand as responsibility was being handed from Malaysian ground control to Vietnam.

The closest parallel may be an Argentine military plane carrying 69 people that disappeared in 1965 and has never been found.

The Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappearance is a story where arcane and specialist aviation terms moved far beyond the usual specialist nomenclature and proverbial “black box” flight recorder discussions.

Surely, we have left the realm of what now might be considered even the run-of-the-mill riveting aviation mystery and are now trying to solve the most enigmatic aviation puzzle the world has ever seen.

However, the Australian Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) said Dec. 23 the search will conclude by about June.

More than 77,700 square kilometres of the sea floor have already been searched since the aircraft disappeared, making it the largest and most expensive aviation investigation in history.

“Consistent with the undertaking given by the Governments of Australia, Malaysia and the People’s Republic of China earlier this year, 120,000 square kilometres will be thoroughly searched. It is anticipated this will be completed around June 2016,” the JACC statement said.

Current search efforts continue to be focused along the seventh arc, a 2,160-nautical mile curve in the southern Indian Ocean, associated with the final “handshake” between the aircraft and the satellite ground station.

Two survey vessels – the Dutch-owned Fugro Discovery and its sister ship, the Fugro Equator – are currently deployed for the underwater search. The wide search area is a remote and previously unmapped area 1.1 million square kilometres in size and bathymetric survey work revealed water depths of up to 6,000 metres. The search area contains underwater mountains, crevasses, ridges and 2,000-metre sheer cliffs.

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Soundingsjohnbarker: Blogging by the numbers from Thompson, Manitoba to the European Union to Vatican City

Since starting soundingsjohnbarker last September, WordPress tells me I’ve had readers from 120 of the world’s 196 countries, which seems respectable enough given it is an English-language blog written in Thompson Manitoba, the province’s fourth-largest city of 13,123, according to the most recent revised Statistics Canada census count, and located more or less smack dab in the centre of Manitoba, Canada and North America, for those interested enough to pull out a map.

In that eclectic mix of posts, I’ve made certain observations that have held true from the start. Local stories tend to garner the biggest numbers by a considerable margin and the really big ones take on something like a life of their own, appearing with daily readers months and months after they are first posted, albeit perhaps only a handful some days. Other more esoteric or obscure topics tend to draw a much smaller overall audience, but from a wide range of countries. So while a local story headlined “Lonely Planet, the world-famous travel guide, calls Thompson a town lacking ‘charm’ but ‘a necessary evil for northern itineraries’” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/lonely-planet-the-world-famous-travel-guide-calls-thompson-a-town-lacking-charm-but-a-necessary-evil-for-northern-itineraries/) had about 650 “views” almost out of the gate, so to speak, when it went online around 9 p.m. CDT July 14, my guess is that none of those first wave of readers (and they do often seem to come in waves) were from the European Union, where I’ve garnered 56 views on https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/ (in a tie at the moment with Ireland).

Today, I had my first reader from Vatican City (as opposed to elsewhere in Italy). Pope Francis perhaps? Probably not, but if it was, I expect he might ring me on the telephone to share his thoughts soon enough.

Some countries are special cases. Take Tanzania in east Africa for instance. I’ve had 89 readers from there, which is quite remarkable when you realize Tanzania is a country where electricity, much less Internet connections, can be spotty and unreliable at times. But it so happens that Bishop Prosper Balthazar Lyimo, the new auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Arusha in Tanzania, was posted here in Thompson as a diocesan priest a few years ago, leading me to write a couple of times about him since last November.

While it is easy enough to figure out why more than 31,000 readers have come from Canada, there are some countries, such as Moldova, Curaçao, the Falkland Islands, Georgia, Réunion Island, a French department in the Indian Ocean, and Qatar, that supply a small number of readers, that I have a harder time figuring out, but am glad to have them.

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