Dennis Roddy: Queen's death sends Britain into muted mourning

LONDON —

Queen Elizabeth’s death came off flawlessly, a passing anticipated for so long that it was code-named for a landmark the British sold to a wealthy American who moved it to Arizona and turned it into a tourist attraction 50 years ago.

London Bridge still stands, albeit in Arizona. The monarch, alas, rests in state, and will receive visitors at the crypt at Windsor next tourist season.

The monarchy preceded the bridge as a tourist attraction sometime in the 1930s when Elizabeth’s uncle rejected the crown in favor of a divorcee, transforming the ageless symbol of government into a consolation prize.

Nonetheless, “Operation London Bridge” swung into full and serious operation well before Her Majesty reached room temperature. The British can’t assemble a decent car, but their rituals of mourning remain the envy of the world. If you want to be taken seriously here, die.

At the BBC, news presenters slid into black suits and matching ties kept on the studio costume rack for decades — tailored, pressed and altered over the years as personnel came and went, and as waistlines expanded and contracted during a reign that seemed unending.

I was standing in Trafalgar Square when Buckingham Palace announced the queen’s death at 6:30 p.m. local time. By the time I reached the plaza outside Buckingham Palace, the Union Jack was at half-staff and the official bulletin was bolted to the front gate — beaten there by a royal tweet.

On a side road, a 7-year-old girl named Fidela had hand-drawn a sign in crayon

“Queen Elizabeth, I will remember you,” she wrote above a rainbow of black and purple.

Hers was the first public display of mourning I witnessed that did not have an official sponsor. Indeed, as I walked to my hotel, a digital billboard at Piccadilly displayed a giant photograph of Elizabeth and her years of birth and death.

The newspapers and commentators expressed the obligatory rage at Carnegie Mellon professor Uju Anya for her post calling Elizabeth the head of a “thieving, raping, genocidal empire” and wishing her an “excruciating” death.

To judge from the utterly ceremonial role of the queen— whose role in governance has had no agency since the 19th century — Anya’s tweet held its own quaintness. Think of an Irishman wishing her good riddance because of The Troubles, as if she could have changed anything.

In the House of Commons, newly minted Prime Minister Liz Truss, who once advocated abolishing the monarchy, praised the dead queen unstintingly.

Truss quoted Churchill, who said the death of Elizabeth’s father, King George, had “stilled the clatter and traffic of 20th century life in many modern lands.” But, save for some canceled football matches, Britain clattered on.

West End theaters continued their performances. Pubs and restaurants hummed. Young people treated the moment as an interesting interlude, but unlikely to touch them in any real way.

BBC radio, the dominant medium when Elizabeth’s father died, explained that it was shifting to a subdued play list more appropriate to the national pain.

It offered up “Imagine,” by John Lennon, Bette Miller’s “Wind Beneath My Wings,” and James Taylor crooning “You’ve Got A Friend.”

Photographers at the prayer service at St. Paul’s appeared to be hard-pressed to find suitable shots of anyone weeping.

Doubtless, the British felt sorrow, but it was the modern sorrow subsumed by self-regard, constant distraction and the nagging sense that it was all pantomime and had been so well before the official notice was bolted to the palace gates, beaten to the punch by Twitter.

In a moment with little to say, eloquence must suffice.

Dennis Roddy is a retired journalist and Pittsburgh-based communications consultant.