Late Queen's sorrow at how walkabouts with well-wishers changed during reign
Queen Elizabeth II expressed her regret that the rise of mobile phones meant she no longer saw well-wishers' faces but a "sea of mobile phones", an award-winning violinist said.
The late monarch talked of going from meeting the public face-to-face on walkabouts to being met with people preoccupied with taking photographs and videos.
She wasn't wholly against the technology as she reportedly got her first mobile in 2001, but she had disclosed her view of the world had been "impacted" by digital devices. The late Queen made the comments to award-winning violinist Nicola Benedetti when she received the Queen's Medal for music in 2017.
Nicola, who became the youngest recipient of that medal, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "I quote our late Queen, who I met after winning the Queen's medal for music. She said her view of the world [had] been impacted so much by digital devices.
"She used to look out into a sea of people and then, in the last ten years or so, she just [looked] out into a sea of phones, she said to me.
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"She was talking about the unbelievable power and importance of music education. But she also said [playing an instrument in an orchestra] was one of the only times when nobody is looking for anything else.
"You've got an instrument in hand and everyone is collectivised around this one thing. It requires you to listen harder than you speak or talk. You have to be part of a bigger organism. To lose that would be such a heartache."
This is reportedly not the first time the late monarch had shared frustrations about the impact of mobile phones.
Ian Lloyd, author of The Queen: 70 Chapters In The Life of Elizabeth II, said: "The walkabouts were set up by the Queen in the 1970s as a way for her to meet and engage with the public, but in the digital era she missed that eye contact, with mobile phones thwarting that genuine connection."
He added: "People would just hold up their camera phones or, even worse, their iPads, so she would be faced with a wall of screens. They just want to record the moment rather than experience it, which is a shame."
In 2022, it was reported that she had two people she regularly speaks to on her mobile phone, but they're not necessarily the people you might expect. Royal expert Jonathan Sacerdoti said the two people who had access to the royal via her mobile were her daughter Princess Anne and her racing manager, John Warren.
Speaking to Royally US, Sacerdoti explained: "Apparently the Queen has two people who she speaks to the most on her phones and she also apparently has a mobile phone which is said to be Samsung packed with anti-hacker encryption by MI6 so nobody can hack into her phone. But the two people she phones the most are said to be her daughter Princess Anne and her racing manager John Warren."
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