Very charmingly, the Honorary Frederica Tuita, great granddaughter of Queen Salote of Tonga, wished the Queen a happy anniversary. Then, in the depths of the Tongan night, she stood back while local Boy Scouts and Girl Guides lit a large bonfire with coconut sheath torches.
It seems churlish to note, but while this festive tribute from one of the easternmost Commonwealth states captured the spirit of the Jubilee, it missed the point of lighting a beacon.
In 1588, when word reached Sir Francis Drake at Plymouth Hoe that the Spanish Armada had been spotted in the English Channel, a line of hill-top beacons stretching across southern England carried the news to London in hours, rather than the days it would have taken a messenger to cover the distance on horseback. But for the human delay in lighting the fire on each beacon the task would have been accomplished even quicker, for the genius of beacon communication is that when the information is moving, it is moving at the speed of light.
This was the Elizabethans’ precursor to fibre optic cables, passed down to them from Norman times. It was hampered by what would nowadays be called extremely narrow bandwidth, in that each line of bonfires could convey only a single byte of information; a positive answer to a predetermined question which could usually be reduced to “Are they coming?” Even then, each hilltop had to be manned and each bonfire site fuelled in advance for the system to work. One broken link, and the message would stall. No one could sleep on the job and low cloud made it pointless anyway. And when it did work, it worked because each hilltop could be seen by its neighbours. Tonga is in the middle of the Pacific.
Miss Tuita’s tribute was, of course, a metaphor; a symbol of gratitude and an acknowledgment of shared heritage, transmitted by satellite video uplink. The same motives led Julia Gillard, the Australian Prime Minister and a Republican, to light a torch in the Queen’s honour as night fell over Canberra. Hours later, another was lit at Treetops in the Kenyan highlands, where Princess Elizabeth was told 60 years ago that her father had died.
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Britain’s bonfire builders were preparing to light more than 4,000 beacons last night, twice as many as organisers expected. Technically, it was less complicated than Sunday’s Thames river pageant. Geographically, it was more ambitious: 60 beacons were to be lit in sequence along Hadrian’s Wall, where forecasters predicted excellent visibility. One each were planned for the summits of Ben Nevis, Snowdon, Scafell Pike and Slieve Donard in County Down. Special permission had been obtained from conservancy officials for a blaze atop the Malvern Hills, from which Thomas Babington Macaulay pictured flames streaming “crimson on the wind” to warn of the Armada.
In London, the Queen was to place a giant diamond-shaped crystal in an ignition device to light the final flame, which is not to be confused with the still-travelling Olympic torch. A visiting Martian might take us all for pyromaniacs, but then Martians do not know what stirs us.