Hunkered down and Watching The Crown
We’re not big Anglophiles and have never been close watchers of the royal family. But some people in our house are and in the middle of this pandemic they’ve convinced the whole family to dive into The Crown on Netflix. Anyway, it’s pretty compelling!
A core question running through the series is what is the monarchy for. As non-observers over the years, we’ve never understood or even thought about it very much. But the series makes the case that the monarchy exists to provide stability and comfort with a person (for almost the last 70 years, the queen) who transcends politics. The queen can also deploy ceremony to woo foreign leaders when necessary for the United Kingdom’s benefit. As the President Lyndon Johnson character notes in frustration at one point, the Prime Minister and the Queen can even play off of each other when it suits the U.K., deferring difficult tasks to the other when one has become overused. So it’s not nothing.
The queen is also obviously a very public figure and therefore has innumerable opportunities to step into right into dogshit. Fortunately, she has a “private secretary” whose job it is to keep her from doing that. Unfortunately, that role is filled for the first 16 years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign in the dawn of the TV age by the enormously staid and unimaginative Michael Adeane. He is wholly unsuited for the job, he ascended to it only by virtue of seniority, and he has no idea how to adapt to the new media world. His hidebound conservatism paradoxically puts the monarchy at great risk at least twice, and he narrowly misses a third time.
The Jaguar Speech
In one instance, Adeane writes a tone-deaf speech for the queen to deliver at a Jaguar car factory. He has her say: “Perhaps you don’t understand that on your steadfastness and ability to withstand the fatigue of dull, repetitive work, and your great courage in meeting constant small adversities, depend in great measure the happiness and prosperity of the community as a whole.” The speech goes on to call the people “average men and women.” Lower-ranking staff politely warn Adeane that he’s setting the queen up to sound like a condescending, out-of-touch relic. Naturally, he and his senior predecessor flatly dismiss the concerns, and let the queen walk into the beehive. The resulting uproar led to a number of overdue modernizations to royal protocols.
President Kennedy’s Death
Later, the queen entertains President Kennedy and the First Lady on their visit to Europe. Without getting into too many details, the visit is momentous and somewhat significant to 20th Century British history. But the queen is shaken by the President’s assassination and wants to acknowledge it in the most formal way. She tells Adeane to order the bell at Westminster Abbey to be rung each minute for a full hour, a gesture that is typically made only for deaths of the royal family. Taken aback by the divergence from protocol, Adeane looks stricken and says, “Ma’am, custom dictates that the bell only be rung . . . ” She knows what custom dictates. Without saying it exactly, the queen looks at him and tells him he’d better ring the f***ing bell.
Aberfan
In 1966, a coal waste pile in Aberfan, Wales, became saturated by both an underground spring and two weeks of heavy rains, slid down a mountain. The coal slurry hurtled down the mountain in an avalanche and killed 154 people, including 116 schoolchildren. It was a national tragedy and because the coal mine was run by the National Coal Board, implicated national policy. In the show, a junior member of the private secretary staff suggests the queen might go to Aberfan to comfort the affected families. The idea almost makes Adeane’s mustache pop off. “What a question!” he exclaims. The queen doesn’t go. The days tick by for over a week and she doesn’t go. Finally, the finally-in-government Labour Party looks to deflect blame for the catastrophe by pointing to the queen for her failure to express any sympathy at all for the victims. The disaster for residents of Aberfan is now a disaster for the monarchy. The queen flies to Aberfan to meet and grieve with people who had lost children to government negligence and ineptitude. It turns out, doing nothing wasn’t the safest, most conservative answer. It was the dumbest, riskiest, and least human.
So what?
Why do we care if Michael Adeane was bad at his job? We think The Crown offers at least two lessons here for anyone doing any job. First, the apparently safest path can often be the riskiest. Trying to assume no risk at all can lead to absurd contract drafting that tries to account for every possible detail or written instructions that lose the forest for a million tiny trees. At worst, aggressively warding off risk can expose you to a perception that you’re not really human. Second, doing anything well requires adapting to new circumstances. If you’re a lawyer, or a doctor, or a grocery clerk, or a nurse, or a roofer, some situation will arise that you haven’t been explicitly prepared for. What do you do then? To be a good whatever, you have to adapt.
Adeane never did. He fulfilled the role of private secretary as though everything he needed to know was in a single bound volume that only he had access to. Especially these days, though, knowledge is a commodity. Yes, it helps to know the book backwards and forwards. But the world is changing. The value you add is helping others navigate through the changes.