The Queen's State Visit to Iran

While the commentary regularly stresses the close historical links between the two countries, it unsurprisingly doesn’t mention Britain’s extensive (albeit undercover) involvement in the coup d’état of 1953 that saw the overthrow of Iran’s nationalist Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh and the Shah’s elevation from constitutional to absolute monarch. He was understandably grateful to Britain, but many Iranians were considerably less so, and after the Islamic revolution of 1979, the UK would be widely regarded as ‘the little Satan’ (with the US as its bigger brother), with diplomatic relations rarely better than poor, frequently abysmal, and sometimes formally non-existent.

As a result, this film has inescapably become a fascinating time capsule. The commentary is at pains to give the Shah his full imperial title (‘Shahanshah’, literally ‘King of Kings’), and the Shah himself is equally keen to emphasise pomp and ceremony, state coaches and crown jewels. The Queen visits organisations with a strong British connection (the Church of England Missionary Society, the Princess Ashraf School of Nursing), though it’s Prince Philip’s tour of the CENTO Institute of Nuclear Science at Tehran University that is most eye-catching given that Iran’s nuclear ambitions have rarely been out of 21st century headlines. The Shah was keen on developing civilian nuclear energy in order to place less domestic reliance on oil (already a valuable export in 1961, even more so after the 1973 price shock), and Iran was one of the first beneficiaries of President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace programme, which provided technical assistance in exchange for sharing research about nuclear power’s peaceful benefits. The royal party is also given guided tours of Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and the ruins of Persepolis, with much stress laid on Iran’s longevity as a civilisation, and the magnificence of its ancient architecture. Sights include the Golestan (or Rose Garden) Palace, the tomb of Reza Shah the Great (the Shah’s father), the sixteenth-century mosques of Sheikh Lotf Allah and Shah Abbas, the Ali Qapu (or Lofty Gateway), and a large-scale sports display at the Amjadieh stadium (now the Shahid Shiroudi stadium) involving dancing, traditional Iranian exercises and an impressively synchronised display of calisthenics.