‘Confound their politics’: The political uses of ‘god save the king-queen’

God save great GEORGE our king, Long live our noble king. God save the king. Send him victorious, Happy and Glorious, God save the king. Gentleman’s Magazine, 1745 God prosper, speed, and save, God raise from England’s grave Her murdered Queen! Pave with swift victory The steps of Liberty, Whom Britons own to be Immortal Queen. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘To Liberty’ God save the queen The fascist regime They made you a moron Potential H-bomb God save the queen She ain’t no human being ‘N’ there’s no future In England’s dreaming. Johnny Rotten [John Lydon], ‘God save the Queen’ Located on the Crescent in the heartland of gritty Salford, in Lancashire, Jubilee House was built in 1897 to celebrate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. For many years, the red brick building, replete with faux Elizabethan gables, housed the Salford Royal Nurses’ Home, but since 1987 it has been home to the Working Class Movement Library. The genesis of the library was a lifelong partnership between two young Communists, Eddie Frow and Ruth Haines. The Frows’ legendary passion for books was as abiding as their love for each other and as ardent as their politics. Their book collecting began in earnest in the 1950s and by the early 1960s they had begun to open their home in Trafford and their unmatched collection to academics and labour enthusiasts conducting research. By the mid-1980s, however, Eddie’s and Ruth’s collection had long since outgrown their humble abode and it was at this time that the City of Salford offered them Jubilee House to establish a library proper. Scholars fortunate enough to have visited their home or studied in the library’s welcoming reading rooms will attest to the fact that the wonderfully eclectic stockpile contains a plethora of materials, the contents of which would have outraged the monarch whose long ‘reign over us’ the building was constructed to celebrate. Indeed, every shelf contains a promise of rebellion, revolution or republicanism. Among the literary cornucopia on the Frows’ shelves is a careworn copy of an iconic nineteenth-century songster, Edward Carpenter’s Chants of Labour: A Song Book of the People. Carpenter’s collection was published in 1888 by William Swan Sonnenschein, a bookseller in Paternoster Row, nestled in the heartland of the London book trade.