1977 – Queen’s Jubilee Confirms Monarchy Still Strongest Form of National Nostalgia

Silver Jubilee Unites Britain Briefly, Punk Movement Files Formal Objection

Queen’s Jubilee Confirms Monarchy Still Strongest Form of National Nostalgia

Silver Jubilee Unites Britain Briefly, Punk Movement Files Formal Objection

In June 1977, Britain celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne with street parties, bunting, commemorative mugs, and a level of national enthusiasm that briefly suspended the decade’s prevailing atmosphere of industrial decline, political crisis, and generalised exhaustion. It was, by most accounts, rather wonderful. It was also, by the accounts of those who were paying close attention, considerably more complicated than the bunting suggested.

The Silver Jubilee of 1977 is one of those events that exists simultaneously as a genuine popular celebration and as a cultural battleground — a moment when the country’s capacity for collective joy was fully demonstrated at exactly the same time as its capacity for collective disagreement was being equally fully demonstrated, by a group of young men with safety pins in their lapels and a record company injunction to contend with.

The Sex Pistols released God Save the Queen on 27 May 1977, one week before the Jubilee celebrations reached their peak. The BBC refused to play it. The Independent Broadcasting Authority refused to play it. Most mainstream radio stations refused to play it. It reached number two in the charts. Many in the industry suspected it had actually reached number one but that the chart compilers had found the prospect of the national anthem’s title being simultaneously the name of the week’s bestselling punk single too symmetrically embarrassing to reflect accurately.

Twenty-Five Years: What the Jubilee Was Celebrating

Queen Elizabeth II had acceded to the throne on 6 February 1952, at twenty-five, on the death of her father in Kenya where she had been on a Commonwealth tour. She had been Queen for the entire postwar reconstruction, for Suez and decolonisation, for the sixties and the three-day weeks and the IMF loan and everything in between. She had worked with nine Prime Ministers by 1977 — Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson twice, Heath, and now Callaghan — and had managed the constitutional relationship with each of them with a discretion so absolute that the content of her weekly audiences remained, and remains, entirely private.

Twenty-five years of monarchy is, by historical standards, not especially long. Victoria reigned for sixty-three years. George III managed fifty-nine. But twenty-five years in 1977 Britain carried a specific weight, because it spanned the entire arc of the postwar period — from the austerity and hope of 1952 to the inflation and disillusionment of 1977 — and the Jubilee invited the country to measure the distance between where it had started and where it had arrived, which was a measurement that produced mixed results depending on how you weighted economic stability against cultural vitality, or imperial prestige against social equality, or the cost of a pound of butter in 1952 against its cost in 1977.

The Street Party as Political Act

The street parties of June 1977 were, at one level, simply parties — trestle tables, sandwiches, homemade cakes, children in red white and blue, neighbours who had not spoken since an argument about the garden in 1974 briefly reconciled by collective festivity. An estimated 12,000 street parties were held across the country, a number that represents a remarkable logistical achievement and an equally remarkable social phenomenon: the spontaneous organisation of communal celebration by people who had not been instructed to celebrate and who chose to do so because the occasion seemed to warrant it.

At another level, the street parties were a statement — about community, about continuity, about the persistence of British social life beneath the political and economic turbulence of the 1970s. The decade had been difficult. The inflation had been real. The power cuts had been real. The three-day week had been real. The IMF loan had been real. And yet here were people putting tables in the road and eating sandwiches together under strings of bunting, which suggested that the social fabric, however strained, had not been torn.

This was, for Callaghan’s government, a genuine political asset. A country that could still hold street parties was a country that had not given up. A country that had not given up was a country that might, with careful management, come through the 1970s in better shape than the present circumstances suggested. The Jubilee did not solve the government’s problems. It reminded the government that the country it was managing had reserves of resilience that the economic indicators did not capture.

God Save the Queen: The Formal Objection

The Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen was not, whatever its reception suggested, a simple act of nihilistic provocation. Johnny Rotten’s lyric — describing England as a fascist regime, the Queen as a figurehead for a system that offered no future — was a coherent if extreme political statement about the gap between the celebratory narrative of the Jubilee and the experience of the young, the unemployed, and those for whom the street party bunting represented not communal celebration but managed distraction.

The punk movement of 1976-77 was, in part, a class phenomenon — the product of an economic situation in which youth unemployment was rising, in which the working-class communities of the industrial cities were beginning to experience the effects of deindustrialisation, and in which the cultural establishment appeared to be celebrating a continuity that had not served everyone equally. The safety pins and the mohawks were not merely fashion statements. They were the aesthetic expression of a generation that had looked at the available models of British identity — the Jubilee bunting, the heritage industry, the nostalgic deference — and found them inadequate to the conditions of their actual lives.

The BBC’s refusal to play the record was, in its way, a greater compliment than playing it would have been. Suppression is the establishment’s acknowledgement that something is powerful enough to require suppression, and the Sex Pistols received from the broadcasting authorities an endorsement of their cultural significance that no positive review could have provided. The record sold on the strength of its unavailability, which is the most satisfying kind of commercial success.

The Jubilee Tour: Sixty Thousand Miles of Constitutional Monarchy

The Queen undertook a Jubilee tour that covered 56,000 miles and visited 36 countries in the Commonwealth and beyond, demonstrating the extraordinary logistical commitment of a monarch who took her role seriously enough to travel its full circumference. The tours of Britain — through Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and England — produced the specific phenomenon of crowds of people waiting for hours to see a figure they would observe for approximately thirty seconds before returning home, which is a form of devotion that secular political culture has never fully managed to replicate.

The crowds were genuine. The enthusiasm was genuine. This is worth noting because the tendency to frame the Jubilee retrospectively as either a simple nationalist celebration or a cynical establishment manipulation misses the reality that ordinary people lined streets because they wanted to, and that their wanting to says something real about the relationship between the British public and the institution of monarchy that cannot be reduced to false consciousness or manufactured consent.

The monarchy in 1977 was, by any institutional measure, remarkably robust. It had adapted to television — the Coronation broadcast of 1953 had made the monarchy a domestic presence in a way that radio had not achieved. It had adapted to decolonisation — the Commonwealth had replaced the Empire as the framework within which royal tours made sense. It had maintained a constitutional discretion that kept it out of the political controversies that had damaged European monarchies in the interwar years. It was, in short, doing its job with considerable skill, which is perhaps why the punk movement’s objection was directed not at the monarch personally but at the system she symbolised.

1977: The Country That Could Still Party

The Silver Jubilee year produced, alongside the celebrations, a cultural inventory of the country’s condition that was more nuanced than either the bunting or the safety pins suggested. Britain in 1977 was a country in genuine difficulty — economically constrained, industrially troubled, politically uncertain, and aware that the 1970s had not delivered the prosperity or the social peace that the postwar settlement had promised.

It was also a country with an extraordinary cultural vitality. Punk was one expression of this. The Jubilee itself was another. The theatre was producing work of European significance. British television was, by any global measure, producing some of the finest drama, comedy, and documentary of the era. The music scene contained multitudes — punk and reggae and prog rock and disco existing simultaneously, feeding off each other, arguing with each other, and collectively producing a soundtrack to the decade that has proved considerably more durable than any of the decade’s political achievements.

Punk and the Jubilee occupied the same cultural moment and expressed the same underlying truth about Britain in 1977: that the country was full of energy, that the energy was looking for expression, and that the official channels were not wide enough to contain it. The street parties and the safety pins were both honest responses to the same situation. The situation was complicated. The responses were vivid. The decade was not over.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee marked twenty-five years on the throne, celebrated with nationwide events in June 1977 including an estimated 12,000 street parties. The Sex Pistols released God Save the Queen on 27 May 1977; it was banned by the BBC and IBA but reached number two in the charts, with widespread belief that chart compilers suppressed its true position of number one. The Queen’s Jubilee tour covered 56,000 miles and 36 countries. James Callaghan was Prime Minister throughout the celebrations, leading a minority Labour government that had lost its majority through by-election defeats and defections. Britain’s economic position was improving through 1977 following the IMF agreement of December 1976, though inflation remained in double figures. Youth unemployment was rising sharply through the late 1970s, providing much of the social context for the punk movement.

ORIGINALY PUBLISHED: 7 June 1977 (London, UK)

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]