Isla Campbell on the institutional memory of the monarchy, the working life of an equerry, and why the most powerful files in Buckingham Palace are kept in three-ring binders
Somewhere in Buckingham Palace, in an office whose location is not, as far as I have been able to discover, in the public domain, there is a set of black ring-binders that constitute the institutional memory of the modern monarchy. They are known, in the trade, as the Black Books. Building on my earlier dispatches at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, I want to tell you about them.
What the Black Books Are
The Black Books are, in essence, a record of every person the senior royals have ever met. The record includes, where relevant, the date of the meeting, the location, the substance of the encounter, and any personal details that the royal might wish to remember at a subsequent meeting. If the King has met you in 2018 and discussed your daughter’s interest in marine biology, this fact is, somewhere in the Black Books, recorded. If you meet him again in 2026 and he asks, with apparent spontaneity, how the marine biology is going, this is the reason.
This is not, dear reader, a sinister surveillance operation. It is, in fact, the precise opposite. It is the institutional infrastructure that allows the monarchy to do, at scale, the thing the monarchy is supposed to do, which is to make individual people feel individually noticed. According to The Guardian, recent reporting on the modern royal household has documented the substantial administrative apparatus that supports the senior royals’ public engagements, of which the Black Books are, in effect, the central nervous system.
The Equerry Question
The Black Books are maintained, on a day-to-day basis, by the office of the equerry. The equerry is, structurally, the senior aide who travels with the royal on engagements, takes notes during the engagements, and updates the relevant entries in the Black Books at the end of the day. The equerry is, in the typical case, a serving military officer on a two-year secondment from one of the armed forces, and is selected from a list of candidates that has, by the time it reaches the Royal Household, been substantially pre-vetted.
The equerry’s job is, in many ways, the strangest job in British government service. It involves substantial proximity to power, in the form of literal physical proximity to the monarch. It involves no formal political authority. It involves, however, an extraordinary amount of personal trust, because the equerry is, in many cases, the person who knows what the monarch said in private, who said what to the monarch in private, and what the monarch made of it.
The Personal Detail
The Black Books contain, alongside the institutional record, what the Palace calls the personal detail. The personal detail is the small thing about you that the monarch should remember if you meet again. It might be, as in my marine biology example, a fact about a member of your family. It might be that you have, since the last meeting, recovered from a serious illness. It might be that you are a regimental representative whose particular regiment has, since the last meeting, been on a notable tour. It might be that you, in passing, mentioned that you were a fan of a particular composer.
The recall of these personal details is, I should say, not photographic. The royal is, in the moment, briefed by the equerry, who has, in the moments before the engagement, run through the relevant pages of the Black Books. The royal then deploys the personal detail in conversation. The well-wisher, on the other end, experiences this as the monarch personally remembering them. The monarch is, in fact, doing something more impressive than that, which is functioning as the public face of an institution that has, between it, the apparatus to remember everyone.
Why It Is Three-Ring Binders
The Black Books are, despite the digital age, still substantially maintained on paper. There are, I am told by people who would know, digital systems that supplement them, but the central record is still in the binders. The reason for this is, in part, security. Paper does not get hacked. Paper does not, in the worst case, leak by ten thousand pages at once. Paper requires, to extract, a person to physically be in the office where the paper is.
The reason is also, in part, institutional conservatism. The Royal Household, as The Evening Standard has reported in the past, is in many respects a deeply traditional bureaucracy that changes its working practices slowly and only when forced to. The binders work. The binders have worked since the binders were introduced, which I am told was in the 1960s, replacing a previous system based on index cards. The institutional muscle memory is around the binders. There is, in the Royal Household view, no reason to fix what is not broken.
The Succession Question
What happens to the Black Books at a succession is, I have come to understand, one of the more delicate logistical questions of the modern monarchy. The new monarch inherits, in addition to everything else, the institutional memory of the previous monarch. The Black Books, as maintained for the late Queen, contained, by the end of her reign, the records of approximately seventy years of public engagement. They were, in physical terms, an enormous archive.
I have written before, in my previous columns on royal continuity, about how the King has, in his first years on the throne, navigated the question of which elements of his late mother’s institutional infrastructure to retain and which to adapt. The Black Books, as far as I have been able to discover, have substantially been retained. The new entries are being added in a slightly different format, reflecting the King’s own preferences, but the substantial archive of his mother’s reign remains the institutional foundation of his own engagement work.
What This Means
The Black Books are, in the end, a piece of evidence for a thesis I find myself returning to more and more often as a royal correspondent, which is that the modern British monarchy is substantially less about the individual royals than it is about the institutional infrastructure that surrounds them. The infrastructure makes the monarchy work. The infrastructure makes the seventy-year reign possible. The infrastructure makes the seven-second handshake feel personal.
This is, you might think, a deflating thesis. It is not, in fact, deflating. The infrastructure is, itself, an extraordinary thing. It is the accumulated craft of generations of household staff who have, between them, worked out how a public institution can, despite its scale, treat each member of the public it encounters as if they mattered. The Black Books, considered in this light, are not a piece of bureaucracy. They are a piece of civic art.
For more of my dispatches on the institutional life of the modern monarchy, you can find me at my page on The London Prat.
For satirical takes on royal-bureaucracy-as-cultural-question, see Private Eye.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
