The Queen

The Queen’s VC-10 at Lexington Bluegrass Airport

They buried Queen Elizabeth II of England yesterday. My wife has been grieving ever since we got word of her passing almost two weeks ago. We’ve been watching all the drama created by Meghan Markle, the two-bit actress who somehow managed to snag Prince Harry. We’ve been impressed by how the former Prince Charles, now King Charles III, has been handling himself. Poor Charles has been standing on the sidelines waiting for his mother to pass on and assume his role as king for years. Now, at age 73, he is king and Prince William, the new Prince of Wales, is in waiting to take his place with the little Prince George in line behind him. Oh, the drama of it all!

Queen Elizabeth is somewhat personal to my family, and not because my first wife was descended from King Henry VIII (which explains a lot.) One of the stories my dad used to tell when we were in the cotton patch in an attempt to get me to keep up was about how he met the young princesses in the spring of 1944 when he was serving at Hardwick with the 93rd Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force. Sometime in April King George and his two daughters, who were teenagers at the time, visited Hardwick to see one of my dad’s squadron’s B-24s off as it prepared to depart England for the United States on a savings bond tour after it became the first Eighth Air Force bomber to complete fifty missions. The bomber, Bomerang, although Daddy and apparently everyone else pronounced it Boomerang, flew on the first mission flown by Eighth Air Force B-24s and came back so badly damaged that the group was going to scrap it. However, the airplane’s crew chief, later Master Sergeant Chambers, insisted that he could restore it to a combat worthy condition. Chambers, who was later crew chief on one of the B-24s my dad’s crew flew, was successful and Bomerang went on to complete more than fifty missions, including the famous low-level raid on the Ploesti oil fields on August 1, 1943. If I remember the story correctly, the King and the two girls met the men of the 328th Bombardment Squadron, including my dad. Daddy always talked about how he signed his name right above the future queen’s and her sister’s. I believe he said the names were in front of the left waist window. Sadly, that piece of history was lost to the world when Bomerang was scrapped.

I remember watching Elizabeth’s coronation on my grandmother’s TV. We didn’t have TV at our house yet. TV was just becoming available in West Tennessee as stations in Memphis were coming online. My main recollection is of the carriage as it pulled away from Westminster Abbey after the coronation. Elizabeth had already been queen for almost a year by the time she was crowned. It never registered on me until fairly recently that Elizabeth was never intended to be queen. He father, King George, was second in line for the throne after his brother Edward, but Edward abdicated the throne in order to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson in 1936 and ten-year-old Elizabeth suddenly found herself as first-in-line for the British monarchy. It has been said that when she and her six-year-old sister Margaret learned that their father had become king, Margaret allegedly commented, “then you will someday be queen.” Elizabeth said she guessed so and Margaret replied, “poor you.” Sixteen years later Elizabeth found herself to be queen when she got word while on a trip to Africa that her ailing father had passed away.

I don’t think I ever saw Queen Elizabeth, although I might have seen her from a distance – more about that later – but I did have some association with her. In the summer of 1972 I was at Norton AFB, California attending the Military Airlift Command NCO Academy. A Royal Air Force VC-10 came in. I’m not certain if I knew it was her airplane or not until that night. After we finished our day’s training, I went to the NCO club in my uniform. There were about half a dozen RAF enlisted people in the club, two women and at least three men. I don’t remember how we got together but we did. They may have noticed my wings. I don’t recall but at any rate I ended up sitting with them. It turned out that the two women and two of the men were loadmasters, the same as I was, so we had an instant camaraderie. One of the men was actually a warrant officer and he was the senior loadmaster in the entire Royal Air Force. The two women and the other male loadmaster were lower ranking, corporals or sergeants. They were interested in me because I had flown C-130s in Vietnam and was on C-5s. Some or all of them had flown on C-130s and they were interested in the C-5 because it was new and massive. The two women were a really cute brunette and a sort of dumpy blonde. The lower ranking male loadmaster told me the blonde was a lesbian. I danced with both of them. I told the cute brunette I’d never danced with another loadmaster before.  

It was through talking to the RAF crew, particularly the warrant officer, that I learned that the Queen often visited the United States without the fanfare of a state visit. The royal family is wealthy and their wealth includes properties in countries other than the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth. I don’t remember why she had flown into Norton, but it is just outside Los Angeles. I seem to remember them telling me why they were there but if they did, I’ve forgotten what they said. I do remember that they told me that their airplane was set up to carry both passengers and cargo. I think I was more impressed that the RAF had female loadmasters while women were barred from aircrew duty in the United States and would be until after I got out in 1975.

I next became aware of the Queen’s non-state visits to the United States when I was employed by a company in Kentucky. One of our frequent destinations was the airport at Lexington. I saw an RAF VC-10 sitting on the parking ramp numerous times. (This brings me to one of my pet peeves – airport parking ramps are made of concrete or asphalt, NOT Tarmac, which is an outdated method of construction that has NEVER been used on airports in the United States and probably not anywhere since Tarmac came along early in the Twentieth Century when a company named Tar Macadam registered Tarmac as a trademark. Listen folks, Tarmac is NOT in use today! It’s NEVER been used in airport construction. It’s the parking ramp, stupid!!) It is a known fact that the Queen owned a stable of Thoroughbreds, but it’s not known that some of them are on a horse farm in Kentucky. Kentucky media claims the Queen visited Kentucky five times but it was probably more often than that. I saw her VC-10 at Lexington’s Bluegrass Airport more than once. I took the photograph of it in 1991 or 92. I was told that she came in quite often to check on her horses and the media was not informed. I seem to recall being told that she owned a horse farm in the Lexington area. None of the articles I have read acknowledge this; rather they refer to her visits to check on her horses at other’s farms and to look at stallions to breed her mares. I seem to recall seeing the VC-10 at Bluegrass at least twice and possibly three times. I doubt that I was there every time she was.

Although the media often criticized the Queen and the royal family, particularly in reference to the late Princess Diana, but I never had any ill-feelings toward her or any of them. My ancestry is largely from what is now the UK but the last of my ancestors were in the United States by 1840 and I have no allegiance to any of the British Isles or Ireland. (I have Irish ancestry but I’m not sure if it’s Irish or Scots-Irish.) I do have some German ancestry but the British Royal Family has ties to Germany as well. My dad spent some seven or eight months in England during World War II and I have been to several English airfields during my Air Force service. I even flew a load of British gold from Fort Knox to a RAF base back in 1968 in a secret operation most Americans know nothing about. There were rumors that LBJ was giving the British US gold to prop up the pound but it was actually British gold that had been brought to the United States for protection at the beginning of World War II. I will say one thing – the golden hue of 70,000 pounds of gold bars in the lights inside a C-141 was something to behold.

My wife has had a hard time accepting the Queen’s passing, at least she did at first. Apparently, she was in good company. Her passing shouldn’t have come as a shock to anyone. She was 96 years old for crying out loud! She was also suffering from various ailments even though she was getting around pretty good for a woman her age – which isn’t saying a lot. There has been a lot of speculation that her death means the end of the British monarchy. I doubt it. Britain has only had a monarchy since at least the 10th century when William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings and established Norman rule. It’ll take a revolution to overturn the British monarchy, a revolution that’s not going to happen.