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 Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: ‘According to a legend of the Chippewa tribe, the lake they once called Gitche Gumee never gives up her dead’

It started as a shipwreck, followed by a newsmagazine story in the still-golden age of newsmagazines like Time, U.S. News & World Report and Newsweek. And then a song.

“According to a legend of the Chippewa tribe, the lake they once called Gitche Gumee ‘never gives up her dead.’”

Forty-four years ago today on Nov. 10, 1975, 18 kilometres off Coppermine Point, and 60 kilometres north of Sault Ste Marie, Ont., the 222-metre iron ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald, with a crew of 29 aboard, sank. All were lost to the depths of Lake Superior. The laker, the pride of the American side, was still bigger than most, and had been the largest freighter to sail the Great Lakes when it was launched in 1958.

“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.”

Some of the most famous lyrics in Canadian music history, anchored to what would soon become the most famous shipwreck on the Great Lakes, first appeared as the lede of the bylined story “Great Lakes: The Cruelest Month” by James R. (Jim) Gaines, national affairs writer, and Jon Lowell for a Nov. 24, 1975 Detroit-based story in Newsweek magazine. Gaines, who began is career at the Saturday Review, the storied American weekly magazine that had started out as The Saturday Review of Literature in 1924, is now a Paris-based writer, would go onto become the first editor in chief of People magazine, as well as the editor of Time magazine, and also to serve as regional editor for the Americas, and then global editor-at-large for Reuters.

Lowell, who died in 2016, started out as a journalist in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, and had already covered politics, and civil rights events and disturbances, for the Detroit News, then Newsweek; including events like the 1967 Detroit Riot, the May 1970 Kent State shootings in Ohio, and the September 1971 Attica Prison riot, as well as covering organized crime, labour, and the auto industry, by the time the Edmund Fitzgerald sunk in November 1975. In July 1979, he would go onto co-author the book Great American Dreams: A Portrait of the Way We Are with the Washington Post’s Robert Kaiser.

Inspired in large part by reading Gaines and Lowell’s Newsweek story, Gordon Lightfoot recorded “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” the following month in December 1975 at Eastern Sound, a recording studio made out of two Victorian houses at 48 Yorkville Ave. in downtown Toronto. Ed “Peewee Charles” Ringwald and the late Terry Clements, a Detroit native who had played guitar for Lightfoot since the early 1970s, came up with the haunting guitar and steel riffs. The studio was, yes, indeed, later torn down and replaced by a parking lot. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was released as a 7-inch 45 rpm A-side single in August 1976, taken from Lightfoot’s album “Summertime Dream” released that July. The B-side on the single was “The House You Live In.”

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was also the first commercial early digital multi-track recording tracked on the prototype 3M 32-track digital recorder, a novel technology for the time.

The Headstones – originally hailing from Kingston, Ont. – released a very fine and very different tempo  cover of Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” last March 15. You can listen to it here at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8LBkYjniTU

The final voyage of the Edmund Fitzgerald began Nov. 9, 1975 at the Burlington Northern Railroad Dock No.1 in Superior, Wisconsin, Sean Ley, a development officer at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point Light Station in Whitefish Point on the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan, wrote in a blog post for the museum titled “The Fateful Journey” (https://www.shipwreckmuseum.com/edmund-fitzgerald/the-fateful-journey/?fbclid=IwAR33M-6_G0X15ab73z4KkAIM3owr3GaVpRsHdaE5n_OIbSP3PzX7_FTMIGo).

Don McIsaac observed last July that “Gordon Lightfoot, who wrote ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ is from my hometown, Orillia.” McIsaac, executive vice-president and chief financial officer of Cirrus Aircraft, based at headquarters in Duluth, Minnesota, added, “From where I sit now, I can see the port the ship last left.”

The Edmund Fitzgerald was bound for Zug Island, a heavily industrialized island in River Rouge, Michigan at the mouth of the River Rouge, where it spills into the Detroit River, near Detroit, and where it was set to unload a cargo of taconite iron ore pellets before heading onto Cleveland, her home port, to wait out the winter.

Capt. Ernest M. McSorley had loaded her with 26,116 long tons of taconite pellets, made of processed iron ore, heated and rolled into marble-size balls – 26,116 long tons more than the great iron boat weighed empty. Departing Superior about 2:30 p.m., she was soon joined by the Arthur M. Anderson, which had sailed from Two Harbors, Minnesota under Capt. Bernie Cooper. The two ships were in radio contact. The Fitzgerald being the faster took the lead, with the distance between the vessels ranging from 10 to 15 miles.

McSorley and Cooper agreed to take the northerly course across Lake Superior to avoid a storm that was developing to the southwest, so they would be protected by highlands on the Canadian shore, taking them between Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula.

They passed several miles offshore from Split Rock Lighthouse, on Minnesota’s North Shore. They would later make a turn to the southeast toward Whitefish Point.

“Weather conditions continued to deteriorate,” Ley wrote. Gale warnings had been issued at 7 p.m. on Nov. 9, upgraded to storm warnings early in the morning of Nov. 10. “While conditions were bad, with winds gusting to 50 knots and seas 12 to 16 feet, both captains had often piloted their vessels in similar conditions. In the early afternoon of Nov. 10, the Fitzgerald had passed Michipicoten Island and was approaching Caribou Island, steaming toward Whitefish Bay at Superior’s east end.. The Anderson was just approaching Michipicoten, about three miles off the West End Light.

Cooper later said he watched the Edmund Fitzgerald pass far too close to Six Fathom Shoal to the north of Caribou Island. He could clearly see the ship and the beacon on Caribou on his radar set and could measure the distance between them. “He and his officers watched the Fitzgerald pass right over the dangerous area of shallow water,” Ley wrote. “By this time, snow and rising spray had obscured the Fitzgerald from sight, visible 17 miles ahead on radar.”

The last radio communication between the Fitzgerald and the Anderson was at 7:10 pm. The Fitzgerald was disappearing and reappearing on the Anderson’s radar – the height of the waves was causing interference.

Cooper asked McSorley how they were doing. McSorley replied, “We are holding our own.” A few minutes later, the Fitzgerald disappeared from the radar screen for the last time, sinking without giving a distress signal.

George Stegner recalled last year how he was on duty that night: “I was on duty this night. Stationed at K.I. Sawyer AFB in the UP of Michigan, crew member on a rescue helo. Never could have found any survivors in that storm but we sure tried hour after hour. Was a bad night. Still remember it after all this time.”

Every year since the sinking, the Episcopal Mariners’ Church – the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral – on East Jefferson Avenue in downtown Detroit, along the riverfront, has held a memorial service for the Edmund Fitzgerald crew. This year’s service was held at 11 a.m. this morning, with the bell tolling 29 times for each man on the Fitzgerald.

Dave Sproule, a natural heritage education and marketing specialist with Ontario’s Department of Environment, Conservation and Parks’ Land and Water Division in Sudbury, has written Lake Superior is a “weathermaker … so big it creates its own weather…..”

By late autumn, writes Sproule (http://www.ontarioparks.com/parksblog/edmund-fitzgerald-40-years-later/), the “Gales of November” have usually set in on Superior, creating hazardous conditions for even large modern ships.

The cause of the sinking is still a matter of much historic debate, both Ley and Sproule note.

On April 15, 1977 the U.S. Coast Guard released its official report on “Subject: S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, official number 277437, sinking in Lake Superior on 10 November 1975 with loss of life.” While the Coast Guard said the cause of the sinking could not be conclusively determined, it maintained that “the most probable cause of the sinking of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald was the loss of buoyancy and stability resulting from massive flooding of the cargo hold. The flooding of the cargo hold took place through ineffective hatch closures as boarding seas rolled along the spar deck.”

However, the Westlake, Ohio-based Lake Carriers’ Association, representing U.S.-flag vessel operators on the Great Lakes, responded in a letter to the National Transportation Safety Board in September 1977 disagreeing with the Coast Guard’s suggestion that the lack of attention to properly closing the hatch covers by the crew was responsible for the disaster. They said, however, they were inclined to accept that the Fitzgerald passed over the Six Fathom Shoal Area as reported by Cooper.

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