“I am going to be sitting outside the doors of the Abbey on a hugely enlarged trestle table commentating to 300 million Americans about this,” one told me.įor 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. At Sky News and ITN, which for years rehearsed the death of the Queen substituting the name “Mrs Robinson”, calls will go out to royal experts who have already signed contracts to speak exclusively on those channels. The Times is said to have 11 days of coverage ready to go. At the Guardian, the deputy editor has a list of prepared stories pinned to his wall. “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.Īll news organisations will scramble to get films on air and obituaries online. Most staff have only ever seen it work in tests many have never seen it work at all. 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. 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. While he does this, the palace website will be transformed into a sombre, single page, showing the same text on a dark background. 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. 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. For many years the BBC was told about royal deaths first, but its monopoly on broadcasting to the empire has gone now. 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. The BBC did not broadcast the news until 11.15am, almost four hours later. On 6 February 1952, George VI was found by his valet at Sandringham at 7.30am. The rest of us will find out more quickly than before. Cupboards will be opened in search of black armbands, three-and-a-quarter inches wide, to be worn on the left arm. Governors general, ambassadors and prime ministers will learn first. The information will travel like the compressional wave ahead of an earthquake, detectable only by special equipment. 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.įor a time, she will be gone without our knowing it. “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. “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. There will be bulletins from the palace – not many, but enough. A nation’s life becomes a person’s, and then the string must break. The bond between sovereign and subjects is a strange and mostly unknowable thing. He will look after his patient, control access to her room and consider what information should be made public. In these last hours, the Queen’s senior doctor, a gastroenterologist named Professor Huw Thomas, will be in charge. 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. I n 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.
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