A speech by Her Majesty The Queen at a reception for winners of The Queen's Commonwealth Essay Competition 2024 at Buckingham Palace

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is a huge pleasure to welcome you to Buckingham Palace today, to congratulate and thank all of you who participated in this year’s Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition. Yet again, we have had a record-breaking year, with 35,000 entries from 54 Commonwealth countries, including 11 from Samoa and over 200 from Australia: two places that my husband and I were lucky enough to visit last month. 

While I was in Sydney, I couldn’t help but think of a young woman named Pamela who, exactly 100 years ago, left that beautiful city to travel to London. She did so when she was only a little older than Evangeline Khoo and, like each one of you here, she loved to write. For a decade, she wrote poems, stories and reviews of plays, until from her pen sprang one of the best-loved characters in literature and certainly everybody’s favourite nanny… None other than Mary Poppins, who was and is practically perfect in every way. I have a copy of the book from 1934, the year it was published, that belonged to my husband’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, which, in a moment, you can all have a look at. 

Pamela Travers (or PL Travers, as it says on the cover of this book) once said something very astute about writing that I remembered when I read your brilliant entries. She said, “A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader”. I think that by this she meant that a really good piece of writing stirs up the reader and, by some strange magic, makes the reader part of the story. 

This is definitely true of our wonderful finalists: thanks to your talents, your readers are taken on amazing journeys with you across the Commonwealth, from Gambia to Grenada, from Bangladesh to Botswana, from Malta to Malaysia. You make us part of your story; you invite us to share your concerns and your passions; and you eloquently express the power of “Our Common Wealth”. I am full of admiration for you all. You make me proud to be a member of the Commonwealth and you fill me with hope for its future. 

Now, if Mary Poppins were here, I wonder if she would be telling me to hurry up with a brisk “Spit Spot” so that we can get on to the prize giving. I will therefore end by saying that there is just one word to describe you all – but I might need some help from Gyles to get it right. You are utterly supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! 

Thank you very much.