The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh continued their 6-month Commonwealth Tour in Jamaica, on this day in 1953, following Tours around the United Kingdom after the Queen’s Coronation. The stops in Bermuda and Jamaica were followed by visits to Fiji, Tonga, New Zealand, Australia, Ceylon, Aden, Uganda, Malta and Gibraltar.
The Queen (wearing the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland Tiara and the Nizam of Hyderabad Necklace) and Duke of Edinburgh attended a spectacular Banquet hosted by the Governor of Jamaica at King’s House in Kingston, where a choir of Jamaican singers gave a Concerts.
The Queen also heard a loyal address from the Speaker during their visit to Headquarters House in Kingston, and also visited the Rodney Memorial at Spanish Town, before knighting Sir Kenneth Kennedy O’Connor
The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh drove around Sabina Park, home of the Jamaican cricket team, to review 20,000 schoolchildren.
“The queen and Prince Philip arrived and I took over from Alice. The program was intense and, of course, run with military precision by Lady Foot, who had produced a forty-three-page booklet of timings, instructions, and endless lists of the people we were due to meet. She seemed to have memorized everything and later, when Alice took out her booklet to check someone’s name, Lady Foot looked at her aghast, exclaiming, “What! You don’t know it?”
As we drove through the streets of Kingston it was as if the whole of Jamaica had turned out to greet the queen and Prince Philip. I traveled in the second open car with the governor and Lady Foot, and the one word you could hear being passed from mouth to mouth was “Sweet!” “Sweet!” The men, it had to be said, were somewhat less excited than the women, who jumped up and down, dancing round and round in circles. I hoped the queen would be able to see some of Jamaica’s natural beauty—the banana groves, the endless sugarcane covered in pink flowers, the tall, slender royal palms—as the streets of Kingston had been festooned with so much royal bunting, it was impossible to see what anything really looked like. At a rally for over forty thousand schoolchildren, I stood next to the immensely tall Chief Minister Bustamante—known as Busta—and as I opened my mouth to remark on how proud he must be, he turned to me and with a huge smile exclaimed, “We are unbeatable!”
The rest of the Jamaican tour was enjoyable and faultlessly precise in its organization and logistics. Even Lady Foot, however, could not have anticipated the scenario at our last event—an inspection of a guard of honor in Port Royal. When it was over, as the queen was making her way to the barge, a man ducked out from under the barrier and threw his white jacket on the ground before her. Actually it missed one of the numerous puddles on the ground but, entering into the spirit, the queen went to step on it when Brigadier Jackson, the garrison commander, dragged it out of the way and hurled the man back into the arms of the police. Later, we were astonished to hear that the man, Warren Kidd, had been arrested on charges of lunacy. However we later learned that he had been found sane by a doctor and was subsequently released.”
The Queen and Duke later paid a visit to Jamaica in 1966, during an extensive Tour of fifteen Commonwealth Realms and Crown Colonies, before their visits in 1975 (for CHOGM), 1983, 1994, and 2002, for her Golden Jubilee.
Royal Visits to Jamaica | Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in Jamaica
