[This was written in 1998, when I was working as a Data Analyst for the Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, to be published in Scope, the hospital’s in-house newsletter. Looking back now, from 25 years later, what I remember best are the conga-line of little brown ducks emerging from the bushes on my right and crossing the path in front of me, and being in this wonderful green, semi-wild oasis, but looking through the trunks of the bushes and the iron fence around the edge of the garden and glimpsing the central London traffic rumbling past just a few feet away on the other side.]
On Tuesday 7th July, from 3pm to 6pm, the Queen gave a Royal Garden Party at Buckingham Palace to celebrate 50 years of the NHS.
Forms had been distributed all round the NHS some months previously, asking all those who wanted to go to send in their details, including their job-description, length of service and place of work. These forms were supposed to be made available to all NHS employees well in advance, but in practice the efficiency of distribution seems to have varied wildly from Trust to Trust.
The completed forms were entered on a computer, which then randomized them and made a two-step selection, the first stage ensuring a fair representation of all types of post, and the second a fair geographical spread. Roughly 8,500 people were invited, including two employees from the Western General: myself and Ian Jamieson, Lothian Linen Services Manager. The Trust very generously paid our expenses provided we promised to tell Clifford Burden all about it for Scope, thus demonstrating one of the pluses of working for the NHS. I may earn less than the equivalent post in industry, but within reason I’d rather be poorly paid somewhere flexible and friendly than well paid somewhere regimented and rigid.
I travelled down by train on the preceding Sunday and stayed in South London with a friend from the National Fancy Rat Society. On the Monday we called in at a local community museum in Blackheath, which turned out to be marking the 50th anniversary with a play reminding people what health-care was like before the NHS (though sadly we didn’t have time to see it). The advertizing poster showed parents hovering anxiously over a sick child, with the title “Can we afford the doctor?”
On the Tuesday I arrived at the palace at 3:05pm, to find the whole area between the palace and the Mall packed with NHS employees and their guests, as gaily coloured as Christmas wrapping. The queues were so long that it took at least fifteen minutes to get in.
After finally making it through the gates, guests cross the gravelled area in front of the palace and then pass through a narrow section of building and out into a broad central courtyard. On the far side of this we enter a glassed-in shelter where the state coaches pull up, like some vast, baroque ambulance port. At the back of this a door leads into the main section of the palace, and we walk through marble halls and then down steps to the garden.
Behind the palace is a wide green lawn on which most of the guests stand chatting and nibbling things. Around the edges of the grass are long, elegantly draped tea-tents from which harassed-looking girls dispense invisibly tiny smoked-salmon-and-cream-cheese sandwiches, enormous slabs of coronary-on-a-plate chocolate fudge cake, little fruit tarts, iced coffee and ultra high quality ice-cream.
Two brass bands on opposite sides of the green play in turn, signalling each other by running flags up poles. I identify “In olden days a glimpse of stocking//Was looked on as something shocking//Now Heaven knows//Anything goes”; London Pride; “They’re changing the guard at Buckingham Palace” and the themes from Star Wars and the original 60s series of Star Trek.
The Queen and Prince Philip arrive at 4pm. Before they emerge the Yeomen of the Guard form a corridor for them to walk through, but the crowd is so dense that at this stage I can see nothing of the Yeomen below the crowns of their hats, though their pikes tower above the press like stalks of wheat.
The weather is mainly hot and bright, with only a few seconds of spitting – fortunately for me, as I am wearing a violet crêpe dress which would shrink-wrap me if it got wet. Most people are beautifully and more or less formally dressed, including a scattering of saris and turbans: though there are a few sartorial mishaps it would be kinder not to describe, and I do notice one white-haired gent who has combined a smart, formal grey suit with a Taz the Tasmanian Devil cartoon tie. There are several men in kilts – most of them from Scotland, including e.g. a dentist from Musselburgh, though the first kiltie I speak to proves to be English and from Barts. The Queen herself is wearing a long open primrose coat (a style which suits her far better than the squarish twin-sets she used to wear all the time) and a rather busy hat in the same colour, and looks fresh and pretty.
After watching the Queen arrive I and many other guests go for a walk around the gardens. The setting is quite strange: close to the palace itself high, grassy banks cut off the view of the city and almost create the illusion of a rural idyll, except that several high buildings and, currently, immensely tall yellow cranes loom above the tops of the trees on all sides. I remark to a fellow guest that this is how I imagine Central Park in New York – the enclave of green land surrounded by sky-scrapers – but she says she’s seen it, and Central Park is far barer.
The palace gardens are really a small, mildly exotic private park. Behind the central lawn is a wide lake, dotted with heavily wooded islands and promontories on which weeping willows and ornamental conifers sweep down to the water. Moorhens and ducks of various kinds skim the surface or scrounge for cake-crumbs: mysterious half-seen brown shapes rustling and scuttling under the bushes are probably also ducks.
As you begin to go clockwise round the outside of the lake, you can still hear the band to your right; but from the left comes the crump and rattle of a major building site. Past that point the music fades altogether – the scenery is pure Botanics, even to the water-lily pond and the discreet species-labels in the plants, but the sound-track is provided by a roaring main road just beyond the trees. The style is pleasantly informal. The open lawns are closely cropped, but the surrounding banks and the woodland areas are left unmowed and misted with long, grey-green grasses, providing wildlife habitat around a decidedly un-natural selection of trees: a monkey-puzzle standing with its feet in an English meadow.
In the centre of the grounds beyond the lake is a massive (10ft high?) limestone urn commemorating the battle of Waterloo, its decoration very badly weathered. As you come round the end of the lakes and back towards the palace you pass a little summerhouse in a would-be Classical style: around and behind this is a collection of roses, many of them presents to the Queen with the names of the donors on labels. Beyond that is a high bank covered with a profusion of flowers of all colours, in the English cottage garden manner. On the far side of a gate marked “Private” a mysterious path winds away through the flowers: it looks like a door into the Hollow Hills, though it’s more likely to lead to a gardener’s hut.
The Queen and Prince Philip move through the crowd, but with 8,500 guests they can speak to only a small proportion, and I’m not one of them. Someone tells me they think that Fergie is also there, but if so I see neither her nor Prince Philip. Towards the end of the afternoon I do see the Queen from close up (surreptitiously using her umbrella as a walking stick – with which I sympathize, since my own mother walks with a stick).
Being a monarchist myself I would normally expect to find the presence of the Queen exciting and impressive, but in this setting she seems almost an afterthought. When I think about it afterwards, it seems to me that when the Queen comes to the Trust she is the guest and we honour her: but on this occasion the Queen is the host and it is the NHS itself which is the honoured guest and therefore the star turn.
I have only one complaint to make about the organization, which is that whoever arranged the loos seems to have forgotten that the NHS is rather more than 50% female. As a result, it takes ten minutes to get into the Ladies’, while there is no queue at all for the Gents’. However, some of the most interesting conversations of the afternoon take place while standing in line with my legs crossed. A GP practice manager from Birmingham, in a pale opal-coloured sari, speaks with passion about the lack of health care she saw in India, and declares that all those who knock the British system should be made to go on a world tour and see how vastly poorer the health provision is elsewhere.
And all the time, on all the roads beyond the garden, over and behind the music of the bands the ambulances wail past, carrying the NHS – and, with any luck, some of its patients – forwards into the future.
As I come away the entrance-hall is lined with the next batch of guests: teenagers in pale brown Scout and Guide uniforms, looking very smart and very young, and reminding me of pale brown photo’s of teenagers in uniform who marched away to the trenches. The platforms of Victoria station are lined with tea-tent clearer-uppers carrying arm-loads of salvaged floral decorations. One of them, an eager young girl of Asian origin, turns out to be a medical student, and we talk about what she might be going to specialize in. Maybe she’ll be a guest at the party that will celebrate 100 years of the NHS.