God save the Queen: When royalty came to town
Sunday, 28 June 2026
Mike White is a senior writer and columnist.
OPINION: I met the Queen once.
It was fleeting, and memorable for only one of us.
In my recollection of the glancing interaction, I was about nine or 10, but history reveals I’d actually just turned 13.
The Queen was on her silver jubilee tour of New Zealand after a quarter century on the throne. Once more to the colonies she came, to eat pavlova and reinforce bonds connecting countries at alternate ends of the Earth.
It was quite a big deal.
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She was trolled around 11 towns and cities, held a state banquet, opened the Beehive - and came to Blenheim.
I have no idea how my home town came to be on the royal itinerary.
But the plan was for the Queen and Prince Phillip to walk around a paddock beside the airport, a provincial perambulation in New Zealand’s sunshine capital at the end of summer.
Of course, it hosed down.
The weather gods were obviously not monarchist, the Queen’s heels sank into the turf, and Blenheim’s reputation took a right royal hammering.
There’s a wonderful picture taken by an Evening Post photographer of the Queen that day.
She’s dressed in cape and gloves, and a hat that looks a bit like the top of a Twister ice block. She’s holding a posie of flowers and a taut black umbrella.
To her right is Blenheim’s mayor, Sid Harling, all suit and chains.
To her left are rows of smiling, camera-clutching locals, and a helmeted policeman. He is not smiling. He is stern and standing to attention.
In front of her is a large puddle.
The Queen has a slightly nervous grin on her face as she looks at the water that has pooled on a roadway.
Her dilemma of how to cross it is reflected in the puddle.
Now, at this point, I would love local legend to recall that some chivalrous farmer or somesuch swept in and laid down his oilskin across the small lake for the Queen, in the same way Walter Raleigh did for the Queen’s namesake and predecessor nearly 400 years before.
There are two problems with this.
One, Raleigh never did this - it’s historical poppycock.
Two, you’d have needed a chain gang of devoted do-gooders to lay down their oilskins to keep the Queen’s feet dry, so wide was the water in front of her. Lake Elizabeth required a punt, or at least a pair of Red Bands.
So, with no assistance in sight, the Queen ploughed on, pleated skirt and pumps, across Lake Elizabeth, and on to more waiting wellwishers, her feet squelching.
At some stage, she paused in front of me.
I was there with the rest of our scout troop, wearing a green shirt festooned in badges denoting excellence in boiling an egg, and needlework. I would have also had a scout scarf, fastened with the mysteriously named woggle.
The Queen, obliged to make small talk with the sodden masses, asked airily and to nobody in particular if we were all from the same troop, or region, or somethingorother.
Wanting to avoid the impression she’d stumbled on the world’s only troop of mute scouts, I eventually spoke up, and told her where we were from. She nodded, and carried on.
Immediately a flock of reporters descended on me like seagulls on fish and chip crumbs, asking what we’d spoken about. My banality made the papers.
I was reminded of this tiny, tedious moment the other day as I walked through our village. It was Thursday morning, the day after the rubbish truck had been.
And there in the gutter, presumably slipped from the bin as it was emptied, was an old Kodachrome slide.
I popped it in my pocket, and when I got home, tried to decipher the handwriting on the cardboard surround. Eventually I worked it out. “Queen Mother”, it said.
Holding it up to the light, you could make out what seemed to be a pipe band on a rugby field, with a grandstand in the background, the whole place packed.
I think it’s from the Queen Mother’s 1958 visit to Carisbrook in Dunedin on a spectacularly sunny February day, when 30,000 people turned out to glimpse royalty.
For nearly 70 years this moment from the terraces beyond the touchline had been kept, a simple snap becoming an artefact, but eventually an irrelevancy to be discarded during a spring clean.
For a second, I thought of the person who’d taken the photo, proudly preserving their brush with royalty for so long, and felt sad it had ended in the gutter.
But then realism grabbed me. Slides, like the royals to an extent, were things of the past, I told myself. Once wildly popular, they had become things of dated curiosity and largely niche nerdity.
I took another glimpse of yesteryear, and then consigned it to history, and the kitchen rubbish bin.