In memoriam, the Queen Mother - Why the death of the Queen Mum failed to move blacks

Not too long before Bernie Grant, the black Labour MP for Tottenham, died, he declared his support for the monarchy. He explained that a vast phalanx among Caribbean peoples here in England, and by implication back in the Caribbean itself, were royalists. It was a tradition deeply implanted in the West Indian psyche, he said.

After the Queen Mother's death, and the surrounding drama, ritual and ceremony, Grant would have had serious difficulty in trying to establish his speculation as fact. Among the thousands lined up to pay their respects as she lay in state at Westminster Hall, the West Indian population was all but absent. The crowds were white and largely middle-aged.

Black republicans had not campaigned for blacks to stay away. Blacks did that of their own accord. If republicanism has not been actively pursued throughout the Caribbean, it is because the monarchy is merely ceremonial and bears no relation to government.

Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana are already republics. There was not even a whiff of protest, though it was once held - Latin America being offered as an example of the dangers of republicanism - that a ceremonial monarchy acted as a bulwark against chaos and guaranteed stability.

In the other independent Caribbean countries, the monarchy survives only because the parliamentary agenda is too crowded for anybody to find time to abolish it. There are more important matters that need legislation.

In the period before independence, not even the white colonials showed much support for monarchism. I spent seven years at Queens Royal College in Trinidad and not for one single moment did the authorities fly the Union flag.

Only once did the governor, the Queen's representative, visit. It was our annual sports day. The big race, discussed all over the island in the days running up to the event, was the 200 metres, in which the leading contenders were Wendell Mottley, later an Olympic medallist, and my friend Harold Ian "Sam" Jones.

I gathered a posse in Sam's support. The governor turned up just as the starting pistol went off. And there I was with my mates at the final bend, our backs to the governor, shouting: "Kick it, Sam Jones." I appeared before the principal on a charge of "sedition" and was given six strokes and, as he would say, "full measure pressed down and running over".

Even so, the general attitude among the colonials was "we will be leaving soon; we have done our job and it is up to you now to run your lives".

I related here how my history teacher, white and from Cambridge University, emptied my tiny colonial mind of all ideas of religion and the monarchy. I remember telling my mother about his renegade views. She said quietly and simply that such men had fought in a war of extreme violence and carnage. In those circumstances, the monarchy and God were both relegated into nothingness.

So I arrived here 40 years ago a complete republican, as I am sure did many others. This is not to say that there were no sentiments for royalty. My grandmother, who died aged 98 in 1979, felt deeply about Princess Margaret's not being allowed to marry the man she loved. Her generation knew very little else but kings and queens and the empire.

But I have seen no evidence that such attitudes have carried over here to England. I have no problem in sharing the sentiment of a man who has lost his granny and a woman who has lost her "beloved mother". That is a civilised response, in spite of the bigotry and racialism of the Queen Mother, who questioned the capacity of blacks to rule themselves. In her lifetime, between 1914 and 1945, she witnessed the death of 50 million people. Whites were in charge then, but she did not wonder about the ability of whites to rule themselves.

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