During her 70 years on the throne, Queen Elizabeth experienced great transformations in both society and technology, yet the public’s yearning to catch a glimpse of her remained unwavering. In his recent book, Q: A Voyage Around The Queen, author Craig Brown shares a story about royal meet-and-greets that highlights Her Majesty’s views on smartphones.
Reflecting on the era when “women with floral hats” waved “hankies” at the royals, Brown pondered, “when did crowds stop waving their handkerchiefs?” This thought prompted him to recall a story first published by Tatler in a 2014 interview with U.S. ambassador Matthew Barzun.
Queen Elizabeth recalled with nostalgia how handkerchief-waving crowds once felt more personal than today’s phone-filled gatherings
The Queen remarked, “There have always been tourists, and they always used to have regular cameras. They’d put them up, take a picture and then put them down.”
With the advent of smartphones, however, Her Majesty encountered a wave of hands raised to capture the perfect social media moment. “Now they put these things up and they never take them down. And I miss seeing their eyes,” she expressed to the ambassador.
Brown noted that handkerchief waving was “altogether friendlier than our contemporary practice of shielding our faces with iPhones.” Despite her concerns regarding smartphones, Queen Elizabeth II embraced the evolving landscape.
She endorsed the Royal Family’s engagement on social media and supported the modernization of royal communications, even making her inaugural Instagram post in 2019.
Although she had her own phone—”a Samsung model outfitted with anti-hacker encryption by MI6,” according to commentator Jonathan Sacerdoti—she only answered calls from two individuals: Princess Anne and her racing manager, John Warren, which seemed fitting for the renowned horse enthusiast.
