A change of monarch does mean change of many things. Even more when the monarchs are of a differing gender. God Save the Queen becomes God Save the King. QCs become KCs. And spare a thought for all the New Yorkers who woke up Friday morning to discover they needed to change their address from Queens to Kings.
Money, stamps, passports and whole load of other stuff has to change. And some stuff will have changes made going forward, but not retrospectively. Royal Mail post boxes for example. They are all embossed with the royal cipher of the sovereign at the time they were cast and installed. New ones will presumably be embossed with CIIIR.
There are tens of thousands of EIIR boxes, for Liz. Over half of all post boxes, in fact. There’s still plenty of GVIR boxes, for her dad. George V post boxes just have the GR, no numeral. A goodly number of EVIIR boxes remain firmly planted in the ground, and there are about 8,000 VR boxes still in use, for which a numeral is obviously unnecessary.
I stopped at a post box with Mrs P at the weekend, to show her how post boxes can be dated by looking at the emblem. It’s a post box on a very posh road, outside a rather nice cottage called The Old Post Office. No doubt, because once upon a time, it was a post office. No longer though.
It still has a post box outside though. And lo and behold, look what I found. The holy grail of post boxes. Hidden in plain sight. Accounting for just 0.09% of the national stock of post boxes, I’d stumbled across an EVIIIR. Our ‘little bit of a Nazi’ king, who took the throne in January 1936 but lasted less than a year, has but 150 post boxes with his emblem in service.
It also transpires that ‘post box spotting’ is a ‘thing’. However, my career in post box spotting begins and ends with this post. What’s the point in going further when you struck gold at the first time of asking? Although, perhaps I will keep an eye out for one of the oldest VR boxes out there. I’m told there’s one just across from the Ritz…
The Mexile 
You’ll also have to get a new curtain for Covent Garden, which has QE II on it. That’s going to cost a fortune right there. Maybe it’s time to switch to something more generic, dunno, like K/Q X, “King or Queen Whoever”.
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The Royal Family is all about tradition, the curtain will be retired and donated to some museum or other and another richer one will be created with the finest silk from Ceylon. The Family will probably have nothing to do with it’s replacement to be honest as Covent Garden is run by CapCo these days.
The Firm is not unlike Disneyland and the family are it’s main cast and as a business it’s a $28 billion dollar machine milking it for all its worth.. and millions come to visit in their droves yearly drinking up the whole experience.
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That’s a pretty reasonable description of how this works. Republicans will point out that people will still come for the palaces, castles and history even without the royals. And that is true. But the Royals do add a certain extra bit of value on top.
Of course, they cost a bit too…
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Alternatively, we could send Charles III off in the same way we did Charles I, and bring the curtain down on this whole crazy business…. 😉
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Wasn’t the first Charles decapitated? That seems a little extreme.
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He was indeed. Lead out of a window in Banqueting Hall on Whitehall onto a scaffold. A place you must visit on your next trip to London, if you haven’t already. It’s one of two sections of Whitehall Palace that still exist, has a Reubens masterpiece on the ceiling, and then there’s the regicide story…
And yes, this would be too extreme an end for Charles III. Perhaps we can send Truss to put a neck on the block instead…
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We don’t really have to change anything. All our paper money is presidents long since dead, except for Franklin, who almost ranks as a president and is certainly dead himself. Most Americans don’t even know where our past presidents are buried, except maybe JFK. Our coins change, but are usually about famous ordinary people, or various states, or various flowers.
We do sometimes change the desks in the Executive Office. I think they store them in the basement. So I suppose you could say we have famous desks.
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That’s a British desk, made from British timber from a British ship, that mostly sits in the Oval Office. Well, a British gifted desk, is perhaps the right term.
We do, after all, need to change our ships from time to time…
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Well, thanks for the desk!
🙂
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