A Queen must do her job without a murmur, and Britain’s Elizabeth did it stoutly when South Africa’s new Governor General, Charles R. Swart, came to pay his first call. After the usual formal audience, she gave a lunch in Swart’s honor at Buckingham Palace.
But the British press was under no such restraint. Said the Daily Mirror: “Mr. Swart is the man who: FLOURISHED a whip to show how he himself would deal with restless Africans. DESCRIBED a wedding photograph of a white girl and an African as disgusting. SAID “when we defend White supremacy we are carrying out the Divine Will.” Her Majesty’s new appointee, noted the Daily Express, “opposed South Africa’s entry into the last war” on Britain’s side.
THE MAN WHO HATES BRITAIN BECOMES GOVERNOR GENERAL, headlined the Daily Mail, and the Daily Herald printed a front-page editorial protest that the Queen should have to receive “the organizer of South Africa’s color bar Police State . . . the man 8,000,000 Africans fear . . . who has preached flogging ever since he became Minister of Justice.” Added the New Statesman: “He does not hide his detestation of the British connection and his determination to break it. This man is now to kiss hands, receive the seal of office and thus become the official repository of British honor and approval” in South Africa.
Through it all, Swart, a onetime Hollywood bit-player cowboy who towers 6 ft. 7 in., managed a perpetual wan smile, and by the time he left for home the hue and cry had died down, even if no one was happy that the Queen’s representative in South Africa should be a Boer with a pronounced anti-British bias (based on childhood memories of being herded into a British prison camp with his mother), dedicated to making his country a republic and taking it out of the Commonwealth. The Labor Party’s executive committee last week passed a resolution urging party members to boycott South African goods for a month in protest at the appointment.
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