11 hours ago
JOHN MACLEOD: What truly lies behind a smile (and how our late Queen had loveliest one I ever saw)
It was a balmy Windsor evening in 1878 and her grandson, Prince William of Prussia, was in attendance as Queen Victoria entertained the distinctly deaf Rear-Admiral The Hon Fitzgerald Algernon Foley to dinner.
Conversation lagging, she asked kindly after his sister, whom said Admiral foggily mistook for the recently wrecked training-ship Eurydice – which he had just raised and salvaged, hence this coveted invitation for soup-to-nuts at the Royal table.
'Well, Ma'am, I am going to turn her over and have her bottom scraped…' As the future Kaiser Wilhelm II would dine out on for the rest of his life, Victoria 'hid her face in her handkerchief and shook and heaved with laughter,' as others present gnawed their napkins, or a knuckle, in desperate suppression of mirth.
'Yet,' as Elizabeth Longford intoned in an early, 1983 biography of our own late Queen, Victoria's great-great-granddaughter, 'only two photographs have ever been published of this amused old lady smiling.'
Smiling is precious, personal – and, on occasion, political. As I thought lately when a text-messaged pinged from my dentist, suggesting I book what said BDS calls my annual check-up and what I like to call smile-maintenance.
I happen to be blessed with a natural lighthouse-smile, at least since I quit smoking in 2014 and my gnashers lost the impression of tenemented Partick c 1969.
And that, bar two wisdom-jobs I wisely had extracted in 2004 - I focused hard on the ceiling as the redoubtable dentist braced his left foot against the chair - all the MacLeod fangs survive and my two lonely fillings have been deftly maintained since the Callaghan administration.
One is, indeed, gold, though you'd need to be tickling my tonsils to have the chance for a glimpse: the queue to do so is oddly short.
But among the things I missed most, amidst the bemasked foggy-specs era of you-know-what half a decade ago, was the inability to lighten or defuse so many social, supermarket-aisle situations simply by beaming.
I ended up hoisting my left hand in a sort of me-Tarzan-you-Jane placatory habit instead, and we were well into 2024 before I finally broke it.
In September 2022, when all was over, I was briefly in sole charge of the family home in Edinburgh and an Amazon delivery dude called just half a minute before I was safely home with the Scottish Daily Mail and my lunch.
I enthused. I sprinted. I gabbled. Moments later, I beheld him. I was late and he was Polish, but I raised an arm and beamed and, in an instant, our lad Zycinski glowed back in parallel ivory-castles.
If you heard that wonderful What's up Doc? episode on Radio Four the other day – presented by identical twins Chris and Xand van Tulleken, still available on BBC Sounds – you will already know that smiling is a gesture both placatory and defensive.
We do not usually switch on the famous grin with people we live with, or see every day. That's a realm of grunts, gurgles and downplayed chuckles.
We smile for sought-after and hopeful significant others, eminent strangers, and potential foes. The gesture – not that I endorse van Tulleken evolutionary nonsense – is, like the chimpanzees recruited of yore for P G Tips ads, actually a fear-based grin.
I am here, this is me, and I am no threat to you. In fact, the loveliest smile I ever saw – personally, and just for me, across St George's Gallery in Windsor Castle – was in April 2002 and from our late Queen, who for the Golden Jubilee had heroically invited the company of 500 of her best friends In the British media.
An experiment she never repeated. To her, the Press was a necessary evil and, though I enjoyed banter with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, to him we were a wholly unnecessary evil.
For half a century on the throne, Elizabeth II had the daunting competition of her mother, her face blessed with a natural smile even in repose.
The Queen's natural expression was earnest. Humourless. Late in life, she managed to make a joke of it. 'Oh, look, Philip, I've got my Miss Piggy face on…'
But, even before she turned thirty – touring Canada and the USA as Princess Elizabeth; the Antipodes in 1953 as new-minted Queen – folk jibed at how often they beheld an unsmiling face.
Even though, as she once justly protested, she would smile till it hurt. 'My mother is a star,' she once flared, around 1985. 'My daughter-in-law is a star. What does that make me?'
Elizabeth the Steadfast, as it proved, beloved and respected – though the Queen was well in her seventies before reaching that haven.
It is striking, looking back and over a longer arc of modern history, how late it is before we actually see many folk smiling.
The Mona Lisa musters the faintest simper. The Laughing Cavalier a predatory smirk.
It is only in the late, late 1700s we actually start to see people allowing the corners of their mouths to turn upwards just a little – in his landmark 1969 TV series, Civilisation, anent the Enlightenment, the late Sir Kenneth Clark enthused of the 'smile of reason' – and, through Victorian times, people never seemed to betray such vulnerability at all.
The two surviving images of Queen Victoria actually looking amused involved, respectively, a grandchild playing up and a 1900 carriage-ride amidst exuberant Dubliners and the real issue was, of course, the slow shutter-speeds of her era.
But there is also the horrific cultural fracture of the Great War.
Before it, we have a gazillion surviving images of boys and youths in happy sporting teams, genial clubs and the Boys Brigade and so on, arms draped over one another, hands on mutual knees, cheek-to-cheek chumship and evidently poised to kick seven bells out of their opponents.
Afterwards, we are suddenly in an era where it is all crossed-arms, upright posture, stern gazes ahead and where you sense – mere opponents duly defeated – said lads might then happily knock seven bells out of each other.
On top of that, we have the ensuing decades of when cameras were still rather slow affairs and when, even in my lifetime, many public figures still had terrible teeth.
Denis Healey, Denis Thatcher, Charlie Haughey, Mick McGahey– yellow, jaggy tartar-clotted leers.
In the vanguard of a new political master-race, John F Kennedy blithely re-invented the modern professional politician as The Beatles recast the pop group.
Hatless, 2-button suited, narrow tie, a glowing grin, permanent tan and a big, newscasterish TV head.
But even Kennedy, as someone once shrewdly observed, was careful whom he was snapped smiling with: no photo-opportunity shared with Nixon or Khruschev betrays more than a scholarly frown.
In 2007, out to neutralise two widely polled negatives, SNP media-handlers gave two flat orders.
'Smart-Alex' Salmond was not to appear on any campaign imagery with a grin; Nicola Sturgeon, 'Nippy Sweetie,' was never to be photographed without one.
Back in 1997, the Tories foolishly declined what could have been their best campaign stroke in the history of ever.
An image of a Colgate ring-of-confidence Tony Blair, exquisitely captioned, 'What lies behind the smile?'
