The Windsor Dynasty 1910 to the Present by Matthew Glencross Judith Rowbotham & Michael D. Kandiah

Author:Matthew Glencross, Judith Rowbotham & Michael D. Kandiah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

The Early History of Royal Polling

In the first decades in which opinion polls were conducted in Britain, the questions very rarely touched on royal issues or personalities. It does not seem that the lack of polling stemmed entirely, as is sometimes supposed, from either the pollsters or the public viewing such issues as taboo and so making such polls impractical—they were a perfectly practical proposition, but nobody commissioned them. Britain’s first polling company, the British Institute of Public Opinion (usually known as ‘Gallup’ after its American parent) was set up at the start of 1937. As early as June of that year, it had asked its first royalty-related question (on whether the Duke and Duchess of Windsor should be invited to return to England to live). There is no indication that the public felt offended to be asked or inhibited to answer (the tiny proportion of those polled who failed to answer the question was fully in line with the numbers reacting in the same way to questions on other subjects).5 Certainly it was not felt to have caused any insuperable problems, since it was repeated in the November poll.6

Probably the explanation for the sparsity of royal polling after this rests not with the pollsters but with their press clients. In June 1937, Gallup still had to find a press sponsor who would commission and publish its polls, and was polling primarily so as to have wares with which to interest potential media partners.7 No doubt in such circumstances it made sense to cover as wide a range of subject matter as possible, if only to demonstrate what could be achieved. But when Gallup eventually found publications interested in paying for polls—first the magazine Cavalcade, then the News Chronicle newspaper—their editors were more interested in other subjects.8 Probably, as the editors of a later compilation of Gallup data explained, ‘survey questions were seldom asked about the monarchy as an institution and about the Royal Family as part of that institution. Both seemed too stable and secure to warrant detailed enquiry.’9 But possibly also there was some reluctance to commission polls that seemed to question the existence of the monarchy because such things were ‘not done’.

Nevertheless, royal topics were not entirely ignored over the succeeding decades. While there seems to have been no formal polling on the popularity of George VI, or of support for the monarchy during his reign, government researchers exploring morale on the Home Front during the Second World War made occasional mention of public reactions to news about the King and Queen in their reports. Notably, the Ministry of Information’s network of public opinion monitors were clearly asked to gauge reactions to the King’s Empire Day broadcast on 24 May 1940 (in which he spoke of Hitler’s intention to conquer the world). Although their reports were impressionistic rather than a quantitative measurement, their unanimity that the speech was well received is convincing. It was also variously described as ‘moving’, a ‘grand effort’ and ‘just what was wanted’,

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