The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy
Ben Pimlott
An updated edition of Ben Pimlott’s classic biography of the Queen: ‘There is no better biography of Elizabeth II.’ PETER HENNESSY, Independent on SundayThe royal family have been through a tumultuous decade, but with the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton, Prince Philip’s 90th birthday and the forthcoming Diamond Jubilee celebrations, there is renewed interest and appreciation of our monarchy. The Queen is an in-depth look at the woman at the centre of it all and is the only biography to take Elizabeth II seriously as the subject of historical biography, or to examine the influences that formed her and the ideas she represents.Ben Pimlott (described by Andrew Marr in the Independent as ‘the best writer of political biography now writing’) treats the Head of State to the rigorous and objective scrutiny he applied to major political personalities, using a wide range of sources, including interviews, diaries and letters, and papers in the Royal Archives.The Queen looks at the social, political and psychological aspects of his subject in detail, as well as at the changing role of Monarchy in the British Constitution. In the process, the book displays all the author’s formidable analytic and narrative skills, and provides a gripping yet sensitive account of one of the most publicised – yet least known – figures of our time. It is vital reading for all those who care about public life in Britain – past, present and to come.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.
THE QUEEN
Elizabeth II
and the Monarchy
Diamond Jubilee Edition
BEN PIMLOTT
Dedication
To my family
Contents
Cover (#u2dcc11bf-33c5-50c1-8e8d-908671271581)
Title Page (#udbb63f7a-1548-56e6-b69c-d178a0ac561b)
Dedication
LIST OF PLATES
CARTOONS
QUEEN ELIZABETH II 1926
FOREWORD - TO THE DIAMOND JUBILEE EDITION
FOREWORD - TO THE GOLDEN JUBILEE EDITION
PREFACE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
AFTERWORD - JEAN SEATON
NOTES
SOURCES AND SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
About the Author
Praise for The Queen
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
LIST OF PLATES
Princess Elizabeth on a tricycle, 1931 (Hulton Archive)
Earl and Countess of Strathmore, September 1931 (Hulton Archive)
Princess Elizabeth with George V and Queen Mary at Bognor, 1929 (The Royal Archives © 2001 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
145 Piccadilly (Hulton Archive)
Princess Elizabeth in the Quadrangle at Windsor Castle watching a military parade and saluting the Commanding Officer, May 1929 (The Royal Archives © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
Duke and Duchess of York, George V, Queen Mary, Princess Elizabeth and Alla at Balmoral, 1927 (Hulton Archive)
Edward VIII, Princess Elizabeth, Princess Margaret and the Duke of York at Balmoral, 1933 (Popperfoto)
Princess Elizabeth, Princess Margaret and ‘Crawfie’ leaving the YMCA, May 1939 (Hulton Archive)
George VI, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret at Abergeldie, August 1939 (The Royal Archives © 2001 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
The Coronation of George VI, 1937 (Hulton Archive)
Princess Elizabeth and Philip at Dartmouth, July 1939 (Sir William Peek)
Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret driving a pony and trap, August 1940 (Hulton Archive)
Princess Elizabeth as a member of the ATS, April 1945 (Hulton Archive)
George VI, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Elizabeth, Princess Margaret and Sir Winston Churchill on VE-Day 1945 (Hulton Archive)
Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth at the wedding of Lord Brabourne and Patricia Mountbatten at Romsey, 1946 (Topham)
Princess Elizabeth during a deck game on HMS Vanguard, April 1947 (Popperfoto)
Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret riding on the seashore in South Africa, 1947 (The Royal Archives © 2001 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip on their wedding day, November 1947 (Hulton Archive)
Princess Elizabeth arriving at Westminster Abbey with her father for her marriage to Prince Philip, November 1947 (Hulton Archive)
Prince Charles with Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip, July 1949 (Hulton Archive)
Princess Elizabeth and the Queen at Hurst Park Races, January 1952 (Hulton Archive)
Princess Elizabeth with Mountbatten at a ball at the Savoy, 3rd July 1951 (Hulton Archive)
The Queen arriving at Clarence House after her father’s death, 7th February 1952 (Hulton Archive)
The Queen as she drives to Westminster for the State Opening of Parliament, 1952 (Hulton Archive)
The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II showing the Queen wearing her crown and preparing to receive homage, 2nd June 1953 (Hulton Archive)
The Queen Mother with Prince Charles at the Coronation, 2nd June 1953 (Hulton Archive)
Queen Elizabeth holding a model zebra with Princess Elizabeth, Peter Townsend and Princess Margaret in South Africa, 1947 (Popperfoto)
The Queen, and the Duke of Edinburgh with Sir Anthony and Lady Eden, 25th July 1955 (Popperfoto)
Daily Mirror front page ‘Smack! Lord A. gets his face slapped,’ 7th August 1957 (By permission of the British Library/Mirror Syndication)
Sir Michael Adeane (Godfrey Argent for the Archives of the National Portrait Gallery/Camera Press London)
The Queen with various members of the Government including Harold Macmillan, 16th February 1957 (Hulton Archive)
The Queen with Charles de Gaulle at Covent Garden, April 1960 (Hulton Archive)
The Queen with her corgis, 8th February 1968 (Hulton Archive)
The Queen on Britannia, 1972 (Patrick Lichfield/Camera Press London)
The Queen with Princess Anne, 1965 (Camera Press London)
The Investiture of the Prince of Wales, 1st July 1969 (Hulton Archive)
The Queen with Lord Porchester, 1966 (Hulton Archive)
The Queen at Aberfan, 29th October 1966 (Hulton Archive)
A student drinks from a bottle in front of the Queen at Stirling University, 12th October 1972 (© Scotsman Publications)
The Queen with Sir Martin Charteris on board Britannia, 31st October 1972 (Patrick Lichfield/Camera Press London)
The Queen on a Jubilee walkabout, 20th June 1977 (Ian Berry/Magnum Photos)
The Queen, Prince Philip and Prince Charles in Australia, 1970: ‘as short as we dared’ (by permission of Sir Hardy Amies)
The Queen with Harold Wilson, 24th March 1976 (Hulton Archive)
Prince Andrew returns from the Falklands, 1982 (Bryn Colton/Camera Press London)
The Queen with Margaret Thatcher and Hastings Banda, 3rd August 1979 (Hulton Archive)
Princess Elizabeth with President Truman, 4th November 1951 (Hulton Archive)
The Queen with Prince Philip and the Kennedys, 6th June 1961 (Hulton Archive)
The Queen with President Carter and Prince Philip, 10th May 1977 (Hulton Archive)
The Queen riding with President Reagan in Windsor Great Park, 1982 (Tim Graham)
The Queen and Prince Philip with the Clintons, 29th November 1995 (Tim Graham)
The Queen with a fireman at Windsor Castle, 21st November 1992 (Hulton Archive)
‘HM The Queen’ by Antony Williams 1995 (Mall Galleries)
Detail from a painting by Michael Noakes. Study for a group portrait commissioned by the Corporation of London 1972.(Reproduced by kind permission of HRH The Prince of Wales)
Princess Elizabeth seen through syringa, 8th July 1941 (Hulton Archive)
Princess Elizabeth and her mother at the Derby, 4th June 1948 (Hulton Archive)
Richard Nixon is filmed shaking Prince Charles’s hand for the Royal Family film (BBC © Crown)
The Queen visits the Children’s Palace, Canton, October 1986 (Tim Graham)
It’s a Royal Knockout! June 1987 (Photographers International Picture Library)
The Queen and the Princess of Wales with bridesmaids, 1981 (Patrick Lichfield/Camera Press London)
The Princess of Wales in New York 1995 (Tim Graham)
Welcome the Queen (British Pathe plc/National Portrait Gallery, London)
Andy Warhol painting of the Queen (Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom 1985 by Andy Warhol © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, NY and DACS, London 2002)
Sticker artwork for single ‘God Save The Queen’, 1977 by Jamie Reid
The Queen as depicted by Spitting Image, 1985 (Spitting Image Productions)
Detail of Trooping the Colour by William Roberts (© Tate London 2001)
Queen Anne touching Dr Johnson, when a boy, to cure him of Scrofula or ‘King’s Evil’ (Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library)
The Princess of Wales meets a resident of the Lord Gage Centre, Newham, East London, September 1990 (Tim Graham)
‘The Apotheosis of Princess Charlotte’, oil painting by Henry Howard, 1818 (National Trust Photographic Library)
The sea of flowers and bouquets outside Kensington Palace after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, September 1997 (Justin G. Thomas/Camera Press)
The Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, September 1997 (Mark Stewart/ Camera Press)
Mourners in Hyde Park during the funeral service of Diana, Princess of Wales, September 1997 (© Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum Photos)
The Queen leaving HMY Britannia for the last time, 11 December 1997 (Tim Graham)
The Queen and Donald Dewar after the Scottish Parliament was officially opened in Edinburgh, 1 July 1999 (Roger Donovan/PA Photos)
The Queen joined Mrs Susan McCarron (front left), her son James and Liz McGinniss for tea in their home in the Castlemilk area of Glasgow, 7 July 1999 (Dave Cheskin/PA Photos)
The Queen gives Maundy Money to 150 Christian pensioners at Westminster Abbey, 12 April 2001 (Camera Press)
The Queen picks up a shot pheasant and rings its neck while out on a shoot on the Sandringham Estate, 18 November 2000 (Alban Donohoe Picture Service)
‘The Queen and I’ by Sue Townsend, March 1994 (Donald Cooper/ Photostage)
Camilla Parker-Bowles at Somerset House in London for a party hosted by the Press Complaints Commission, 7 February 2001 (Tim Graham)
The Queen and Pope John Paul II exchanging gifts in his private office in the Vatican City in Rome, 17 October 2000 (Tim Graham)
The Moon Against the Monarchy protest, 3 June 2000 (Stefan Rousseau/ PA Photos)
The State Opening of Parliament, 20 June 2001 (Tim Graham)
Prince William during his Raleigh International expedition in southern Chile, 11 December 2000 (Tim Graham Picture Library)
The Queen visits Kingsbury High School in Brent to launch the Royal web site, 6 July 1997 (Tim Graham Picture Library)
CARTOONS
The Flowers and the Princesses (Reproduced by permission of Punch. Published on 28th April 1937)
Birthday Greetings (Reproduced by permission of Punch. Published 23rd April 1947)
Vicky on the Altrincham affair (Mirror Syndication/Centre for the Study of Cartoons, University of Kent. Published in the Daily Mirror 14th August 1957)
Jak ‘Your Move!’ (Atlantic/Centre for the Study of Cartoons, University of Kent. Published in the Evening Standard 5th March 1968)
Steadman ‘Up the Mall’ (Ralph Steadman. Published in Private Eye 4th July 1969)
Rigby ‘And Treble time . . .’ (News International Newspapers Ltd./Centre for the Study of Cartoons, University of Kent. Published in the Sun, 3rd December 1971)
Franklin ‘Singing in the Reign’ (News International Newspapers Ltd./John Frost Historical Newspaper Service. Published in the Sun 30th December 1976)
Cummings ‘I love red but not red carpets’ (Express Newspapers/Centre for the Study of Cartoons, University of Kent. Published in the Daily Express 31st July 1981)
Kal on the Commonwealth (Kevin Kallaugher/Centre for the Study of Cartoons, University of Kent. Published in Today 16th July 1986)
Johnston ‘Toe Sucking’ (News International Newspapers Ltd./John Frost Historical Newspaper Service. Published in the Sun 20th August 1992)
Franklin on the popularity of the Monarchy in Australia (News International Newspapers Ltd./John Frost Historical Newspaper Service. Published in the Sun 29th February 1992)
Bell ‘Orff with her ring!’ (Steve Bell. Published in the Guardian 22nd December 1995)
Bell ‘The way ahead senior royals think tank’ (Steve Bell/Centre for the Study of Cartoons, University of Kent. Published in the Guardian, 20 August 1996)
Cummings ‘I’m having a ghastly nightmare that the photographers stopped invading my privacy!’ (Mrs M. Cummings/Centre for the Study of Cartoons, University of Kent. Published in The Times, 16th August 1997)
Griffin ‘The Queen of all our hearts’ (Express Newspapers/Centre for the Study of Cartoons, University of Kent. Published in The Daily Express, 1st September 1997)
Gerald Scarfe ‘The Tidal Wave’ (Centre for the Study of Cartoons, University of Kent. Published in the Sunday Times, 7 September 1997)
Unny on the Queen (The Indian Express (Bombay). Published in The Indian Express, 12th October 1997)
Trog on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales (Wally Faukes/Centre for the Study of Cartoons, University of Kent. Published in the Sunday Telegraph, 7th September 1997)
Gerald Scarfe on the Australian referendum (Centre for the Study of Cartoons, University of Kent. Published in the Sunday Times, 7th November 1999)
Mac ‘So Sophie. After that absolutely abysmal performance, you are the weakest link – goodbye’ (Atlantic/Centre for the Study of Cartoons, University of Kent. Published in the Daily Mail, 9th April 2001)
Queen Elizabeth II 1926
FOREWORD
TO THE DIAMOND JUBILEE EDITION
Had Ben Pimlott been with us in the run-up to 2012, the print and electronic media would have made his telephone number and email the first to which they turned for a Diamond Jubilee assessment of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. To understand why is captured between these covers. The pages to come are the product of what happened when a leading political biographer and a top-flight historian of the twentieth century, the gifts combined in Ben’s person, took a long and serious look at the formation, the functions, the style and the adaptability of the lady whom we Brits of the post-war era were, and are, so fortunate to have as our Head of State.
Ben was naturally superb at calibrating the fluidities of our political and constitutional streams as they touched and occasionally refashioned the ancient banks of the Monarchy. He set the Queen’s reign in the context of all the wider changes to her UK realm on her road from 1952 – withdrawal from Empire; the long, reluctant retreat from great powerdom; our emotional deficit with Europe; a social revolution or two; and considerable changes in the size and make-up of our population. Through all these shifts, the Queen has been a gilt-edged constant who, in my judgement, has never put a court shoe wrong as a constitutional sovereign even though as a country we are entirely without a written highway code for Monarchy, relying on conventions and a constitution which, as Mr Gladstone wrote, ‘presumes more boldly than any other the good sense and good faith of those who work it’. Good sense and good faith are the prime requirements of a British and Commonwealth constitutional monarch and the Queen possesses both in abundance.
Ben Pimlott understood all this and illustrated it through all his pages, not one of which was dully written. He also had a sure touch when it came to the emotional geography of the wider landscapes where the Sovereign, the Royal Family and the people meet. He, for example, was the pilot we – and future historians – needed through the days and the swirls and the eddies that followed the death of Princess Diana in 1997. I have a suspicion that it was Ben who gave Alastair Campbell the description ‘the People’s Princess’ which the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, took up in his reaction to the tragedy in Paris. Ben was very good at mapping the Queen’s and the Palace’s recovery from the wobble in public esteem of September 1997. And it’s fascinating to think what Ben might have made now of the sixty-year spectrum of the Queen’s reign – of the self-restoring powers of the British Monarchy and of the enduring qualities of Queen Elizabeth which have always been a lustrous asset in tough times as well as the easier stretches in the life of her nation.
It is always difficult to winnow out the personal premium from the good standing of the institution of Monarchy (there are usually two-thirds of those polled in the United Kingdom in favour of it). The Queen came to the throne at a time when we were dripping with deference as a society. We are scarcely moist now. Yet the esteem for the Queen remains. As Head of State, she has always enhanced the great office she holds. The same cannot be said of others – not least some of those who have held the headship of government as Prime Minister in No. 10 Downing Street. And one scans the world in vain for another sixty-year example of faultless public duty. The Queen could not have had better personal trainers than her father, King George VI, and her mother, Queen Elizabeth. But, in sporting terms, it’s as if she had won gold at every Olympics from Helsinki in 1952 to London in 2012.
Ben Pimlott, too, won gold by writing this book and gold standard it will remain. For I will be surprised if, when the Queen’s official biographer is appointed, it’s not Pimlott on Elizabeth II that’s the first book for which he or she will reach on the shelf.
Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, FBA
Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History
School of History, Queen Mary, University of London
LondonMarch 2012
FOREWORD
TO THE GOLDEN JUBILEE EDITION
In my Preface to the paperback edition of The Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth II, published a year after the hardback, I excused myself for not adding new material by saying that ‘an extra chapter would be part of another book’. I meant that any historical account is a snapshot, not just of its subject matter, but of the attitudes of the author when it is written. In this sense, The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy is another book. The first edition of The Queen was researched and written in the mid-nineties. It appeared in 1996, the year of the divorce of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and doubtless reflects that timing. This Golden Jubilee edition has been prepared several years later. It contains not one additional chapter, but five. The result is a book which has an altered shape from the original, while at the same time offering in the extra chapters a different snapshot.
Chapters 1 to 23 are little changed. There are a few corrections and stylistic tightenings, but I have not attempted to revise my interpretation. The new material is contained in Chapters 24 to 28. Here I have examined post-1996 events and sought to place them in the context of the Queen’s life and reign as a whole. I have also looked more closely – partly in the light of ‘Diana week’ – at aspects of the Monarch’s role that go beyond the purely constitutional or symbolic. If there is a new theme, it has to do with the ancient (but also apparently continuing) concept of ‘royalty’. At the same time, I have tried to integrate the added chapters so that the reader who comes to the book afresh can take it as a single work, and move from old to new without too great a sense of the division. The revised title is intended to indicate the shift in the book’s centre of gravity, and also to distinguish this edition from earlier ones.
I have included the original (hardback) Preface, and I would like to repeat my thanks to the people listed there, many of whom have been re-interviewed or who have given help with this edition in other ways. In particular, I would like to record my unique debt to the late Lord Charteris – a great royal and public servant with whom I spent many happy, instructive and sometimes hilarious hours in the cell-like interview rooms of the Palace of Westminster, and whose voice I often used to illuminate my text. In addition, I should like to thank the staff of the Buckingham Palace press office, and especially Geoff Crawford and Penny Russell-Smith, successively Press Secretaries to the Queen; together with Mary Francis, Peter Galloway, David Hill, Stephen Lamport, Robin Ludlow, Lady Penn, Frank Prochaska and a number of others who prefer not to be named. I should once again like to give my special thanks to Arabella Pike of HarperCollins, for her encouragement and ever incisive advice. I should also like to thank Aisha Rahman for her care and efficiency in guiding the Golden Jubilee edition through to publication. Caroline Wood has again provided invaluable help as picture researcher. At Goldsmiths, I am extremely grateful to Edna Pellett for typing an illegible (sometimes even to the author) manuscript with astonishing skill and without reproach. I would also like to thank Jef McAllister, London Bureau Chief of Time Magazine, and the staff at the Australian High Commission, for their kindness in providing access to newspaper and other files; and Dan and Nat Pimlott for their resourcefulness in sifting through them.
New Cross, London SE14 September 2001
PREFACE
‘What a marvellous way of looking at the history of Britain’, said Raphael Samuel, when I told him about this book. Others expressed surprise, wondering whether a study of the Head of State and Head of the Commonwealth could be a serious or worthwhile enterprise. Whether or not they are right, it has certainly been an extraordinary and fascinating adventure: partly because of the fresh perspective on familiar events it has given me, after years of writing about Labour politicians; partly because of the human drama of a life so exceptionally privileged, and so exceptionally constrained; and partly because of the obsession with royalty of the British public, of which I am a member. Perhaps the last has interested me most of all. To some extent, therefore, this is a book about the Queen in people’s heads, as well as at Buckingham Palace. It is, of course, incomplete – no work could be more ‘interim’ than an account of a monarch who may still have decades to reign. However, because the story is still going on with critical chapters yet to come, it is also – more than most biographies – concerned with now.
It is an ‘unofficial’ study, and draws eclectically on a variety of sources. For the period up to 1952, the Royal Archives have been invaluable; documentation up to the mid or late 1960s has been provided by the Public Record Office and the BBC Written Archive Centre, alongside a number of private collections of papers, listed at the end of this book. For later years, interviews have been particularly helpful. In addition, there is a wealth of published material.
I have a great many individual debts. I am extremely grateful to Sir Robert Fellowes (Private Secretary to the Queen and Keeper of the Royal Archives, Charles Anson (Press Secretary to the Queen), Oliver Everett (Assistant Keeper of the Royal Archives) and Sheila de Bellaigue (Registrar of the Royal Archives) for assisting with my requests whenever it was possible to do so.
I would like to thank Anne Pimlott Baker, principal researcher for the book, for the care and resourcefulness of her inquiries, and for her skilful digests and research notes; Andrew Chadwick, for research into the archives of The Times and News of the World; Sarah Benton, for reading the whole text in draft and making many perceptive comments on it; Anne-Marie Rule for typing the manuscript with her usual combination of speed, precision and good-natured tolerance of unreasonable demands – the fifth time she has typed a book for me (am I the last author, incidentally, who still uses a pen and has his drafts typed on a pre-electric typewriter?); Terry Mayer and Jane Tinkler for their help in typing, and retyping, some of the chapters, and for many kindnesses; and my colleagues and students at Birkbeck, for their forebearance, interest and encouragement.
I am grateful to the many librarians and archivists, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, who have helped me in person, on the telephone, or by correspondence. In addition to those already mentioned, I would especially like to thank Jacquie Kavanagh at the BBC Written Archive Centre at Caver-sham Park, Helen Langley at the Bodleian Library and the library staff of The Times Newspapers and the Guardian. I am also particularly grateful to Sir Hardy Amies, for generously making available to me his corespondence with the Queen and members of the Royal Family over a period of more than forty years; to Phillip Whitehead, for letting me see the unedited transcripts of interviews for his television documentary, The Windsors; and Vernon Bogdanor and Frank Prochaska for showing me the text of their excellent recent books, before publication. I am deeply indebted to the staff of the British Library at Bloomsbury, who continue to provide an outstanding service, despite trying conditions during the countdown to the move (regretted by so many) to St Pancras.
I am grateful to the following for permission to quote copyright material: Arrow Books (D. Morrah To Be a King); Collins (H. Nicolson Diaries and Letters 1930–1939); Duckworth (M. Crawford The Little Princesses); Hamish Hamilton (R. Crossman The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman; The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister 1964–66); Hutchinson (T. Benn Out of the Wilderness: Diaries 1963–67); Macmillan (J. Wheeler-Bennett George VI: His Life and Reign).
I would like to acknowledge the gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen for allowing me the privilege of using the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, and for granting me permission to quote from papers in the Archives. For the use of other unpublished papers and documents I am grateful to: Sir Hardy Amies (Amies papers); Lady Avon (Avon papers); Balliol College, Oxford (Nicolson papers); BBC Written Archive Centre (BBC Written Archives); British Library of Political and Economic Science (Dalton papers); Christ Church, Oxford (Bradwell papers); Churchill College, Cambridge (Alexander papers; Chartwell papers; Swinton papers); Lady Margaret Colville (Colville papers); Dwight D. Eisenhower Library (Eisenhower papers); Mrs Caroline Erskine (Lascelles papers); House of Lords (Beaverbrook papers); John F. Kennedy Library (Kennedy papers); Lambeth Palace (Fisher papers); F. D. Roosevelt Library (Roosevelt papers); Harry S. Truman Library (Truman papers); University College, Oxford (Attlee papers); University of Southampton (Mountbatten papers).
I would like to thank the following people who have taken the time to talk to me about different aspects of this book: Lord Airlie, Lady Airlie, Ronald Allison, Sir Hardy Amies, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, Sir Shane Blewitt, Lord Brabourne, Sir Alistair Burnet, Lord Buxton, Lord Callaghan, Lord Carnarvon, Lady Carnarvon, Lord Carrington, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, Lord Charteris, Lord Cranborne, Jonathan Dimbleby, Lord Egremont, Sir Edward Ford, Princess George of Hanover, The Duchess of Grafton, John Grigg, Joe Haines, David Hicks, Lady Pamela Hicks, Anthony Holden, Angela Howard-Johnston, Lord Howe, Lord Hunt of Tamworth, Douglas Hurd, Sir Bernard Ingham, Michael Jones, Robin Janvrin, Lord Limerick, Lady Long-ford, Brian MacArthur, Lord McNally, HRH Princess Margaret, Sir John Miller, Sir Derek Mitchell, Lady Mountbatten, Michael Noakes, The Duke of Norfolk, Commander Michael Parker, Michael Peat, Rt Rev Simon Phipps, Sir Edward Pickering, Sir David Pitblado, Sir Charles Powell, Enoch Powell, Sir Sonny Ramphal, Sir John Riddell, Kenneth Rose, Lord Runcie, Sir Kenneth Scott, Michael Shea, Phillip Whitehead, Sir Clive Whitmore and Mrs Woodroffe. I also spoke to others who prefer not to be named. Where it has not been possible to give the source of a quotation in the text or notes, I have used the words ‘Confidential interview’. None of these people, or anybody else apart from the author, is responsible for how the material has been interpreted.
HarperCollins has once again proved itself the Rolls Royce of British non-fiction publishing. I am particularly indebted to Stuart Proffitt, my publisher, for his persistent faith in the project and his shrewd author management, and to my incomparable editor, Arabella Pike, for whom my admiration has no bounds. I am also grateful to Caroline Wood for her inspired picture research, and to Anne O’Brien for vital last-minute help. Giles Gordon, my literary agent, has been a constant source of practical wisdom and advice.
Finally, I thank the people to whom the book is dedicated: my children, for keeping my spirits up; and my wife, Jean Seaton, for whom all my books are really written, whose thoughts about monarchy and royalty are now inextricably bound up with my own, and whose fertile historical imagination has been a daily quarry.
Bloomsbury, WC1 August 1996
Chapter 1
APRIL 1926 was a busy month for every member of the Conservative Government, but for few ministers more than the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks. A long, bitter dispute in the coalfields was moving rapidly towards its climax – with drastic implications for the nation.
‘We are going to be slaves no longer and our men will starve before they accept any reductions in wages,’ the miners’ leader, A. J. Cook, had declared in an angry speech that crystallized the mood in the collieries, while the men resolved: ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’. On 14 April, the TUC leadership asked the Prime Minister to intervene. A week later the owners and men met, but failed to reach agreement. Thereafter, the chance of a compromise diminished, and the prospect grew closer of a terrifying industrial shutdown which – for the first time in British history – seemed likely to affect the majority of British manual workers. Alarm affected all levels of society. Even King George V – mindful of his right to be consulted, and his duty both to encourage and above all to warn – discreetly urged his ministers to show caution. Alas, royal counsels were in vain, and the General Strike began at midnight on 3rd May 1926, threatening not just economic paralysis and bankruptcy, but the constitution itself.
‘Jix’ Joynson-Hicks – best known to history for his zeal in ordering police raids on the decadent writings of D.H. Lawrence and Radclyffe Hall, and for the part he later played in defeating the 1927 Bill to revise the Prayer Book – was scarcely an outstanding or memorable holder of his post. This, however, was his most splendid hour. In swashbuckling alliance with Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, Quintin Hogg and Leo Amery, the Home Secretary was a Cabinet hawk, in the thick of the fight, a scourge of the miners, opposed to an easy settlement.
If nothing else – it was said – he had nerve. It was Jix who, just after the Strike began, appealed for 50,000 volunteers for the special constables, in order to protect essential vehicles – and thereby raised the temperature of the dispute. For several critical weeks, Jix was at the heart of the nation’s events, in constant touch with the Metropolitan Police, and sometimes with the Prime Minister as well.
Sleep was at a premium, snatched between night-time Downing Street parleys and daytime consultations with officials. A call in the early hours of 21 April to attend a royal birth, shortly before one of the most critical meetings in the entire dispute between the Prime Minister and the coal owners, was therefore not entirely a cause for celebration. But it was a duty not to be shirked, and Joynson-Hicks was equal to it. He hurried to the bedside of the twenty-five-year-old Duchess of York, wife of the King’s second son, at 17 Bruton Street – the London home of the Duchess’s parents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, who happened to be among the most prominent coal owners in the United Kingdom. The child was born at 2.40 a.m., and named Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, after the Duchess and two Queens.
Why the Home Secretary needed to attend the birth of the child of a minor member of the Royal Family was one of the mysteries of the British Monarchy. Later, when Princess Elizabeth herself became pregnant, an inquiry was launched at the instigation of the then Labour Home Secretary, Chuter Ede. Inspecting the archives, Home Office researchers rejected as myth a quaint belief, fondly held by the Royal Household and the public alike, that it had something to do with verification, James II and warming pans. After taking expert advice, Ede informed Sir Alan Lascelles, Private Secretary to George VI, that it was no more than ‘the custom of past ages by which ministers thronged the private apartments of royalty daily, and particularly at moments of special significance such as births, marriages and deaths’.
In 1926, however, it was enough that it was customary – Jix was not the kind of man to question it. According to The Times the next day, Sir William ‘was present in the house at the time of the birth’ and conveyed the news by special messenger to the Lord Mayor.
It was a difficult delivery, despite the best attention. Not until 10 a.m. did the Duchess’s doctors issue a guarded statement which revealed what had happened. ‘Previous to the confinement a consultation took place,’ it declared, ‘. . . and a certain line of treatment’ – decorous code for a Caesarean section – ‘was successfully adopted’.
The announcement had more than a purely medical significance. The risks such an operation then entailed, and would again entail in the event of subsequent pregnancies, made it unlikely that the Duchess would have a large family, and hence reduced the chances of a future male heir.
At the time, however, few regarded the Princess’s proximity to the throne as important. Some later writers, looking back, argued that her succession was always likely.
But this was post hoc: in 1926 the Duke of York’s elder brother was young and healthy, and was expected to marry and have issue. When Princess Elizabeth was born she was third in line for the throne after her uncle, the Prince of Wales, and her father, and under the 1701 Act of Settlement she took precedence over her father’s young brothers – just as Queen Victoria had taken precedence over the Duke of Cumberland, younger brother of William IV, in 1837, even though her own father, the Duke of Kent, had predeceased him. Therefore, until either her uncle had a legitimate heir, or her father had a son, Elizabeth’s eventual succession was possible, and she had a special standing as a result. But this chance initially seemed remote, and the Princess was much less afflicted during her earliest years by the isolating sense of an inescapable destiny than either her eldest uncle, or her own eldest son.
Despite the distance of the child from the throne, the newspapers took a keen interest in the birth. Perhaps they were responding to the deepening crisis with a bromide, or perhaps it was part of a patriotic reaction. Whatever the cause, far more attention was paid to Princess Elizabeth in 1926 than to George V’s first two grandsons, George and Gerald Lascelles, sons of the Princess Royal, in 1923 and 1924, even though at the time of their births they had been similarly placed in the line of succession. Such, indeed, was the excitement that a crowd swiftly gathered in Bruton Street in the hope of seeing the Princess, to greet the messenger boys who arrived with telegrams and presents, and to cheer the Duchess’s royal callers.
Among the first to arrive were the King and Queen. ‘Such a relief and joy,’ wrote Queen Mary in her diary, noting that the baby was ‘a little darling with lovely complexion & pretty fair hair’. The Duke of York was beside himself. ‘We always wanted a child to make our happiness complete,’ he wrote to his mother. Kings, however, prefer male descendants. The Duke therefore added a little anxiously, ‘I do hope that you & Papa are as delighted as we are, to have a granddaughter, or would you sooner have another grandson. I know Elizabeth wanted a daughter.’
Then the nation was plunged into turmoil and uncertainty as, for six bewildering days, industries and services were halted, and workers took to the streets. The Duke of York attended debates daily at the House of Commons; at Buckingham Palace, sentries exchanged their red coats for khaki; and the royal entourage was cut to a minimum as an emergency measure, to allow the lords-in-waiting and most of the equerries to take up duties in Jix’s army of special constables. Yet public interest in the royal baby was unabated. On 14 May, just after the ending of the Strike, Queen Mary’s lady-in-waiting and friend, the Countess of Airlie, visited 17 Bruton Street to deliver the gift of a bottle of ‘Jordan water’ from the Holy Land, for use at the christening. She found such a throng in the street that the infant had to be taken out for her morning airing by a back entrance.
The christening took place at Buckingham Palace at the end of May, attended by ten ‘children of the Chapel Royal’ – small boys clad in crimson and gold, with neck jabots of old lace. The Princess wore a skirt several feet in length. She cried so much during the service that immediately after it her old-fashioned nurse surprised ‘the modern young mothers present’ (as Lady Airlie described some of the Duchess’s friends), and much amused the Prince of Wales, by dosing her heavily from a bottle of dill water.
In spite of the puckering of the royal features, great interest was shown in the infant’s physical appearance. One resourceful sketch-writer wrote of the Princess’s ‘pure cream complexion and blue eyes fringed with long, dark lashes’.
The baby was no sooner baptized than an active debate began in the press about how she should, and would, be brought up. The issue of modernity versus tradition became a matter of particular concern, especially to women writers in the popular magazines, where prejudice and preference tended to merge with the little evidence that was available about what actually went on. There was also the question of whether royal child-rearing should be special – given the future responsibilities of a member of the Royal Family – or follow a pattern which any mother should treat as the ideal. Most commentators opted for the latter. ‘Sensible’ was a much favoured word: a sensible nursery regime involved strict, no-nonsense orderliness, with an emphasis on routine, and the avoidance of fads.
Above all – a point on which all agreed – there must be no excessive luxury. A distinction was made between the opulent symbols of royal status, which were considered both acceptable and desirable; and any kind of physical or especially dietary indulgence. Thus, the National Jewellers’ Association was applauded for presenting the Princess with a silver porringer, with ivory handles carved in the form of thistles and a cover surmounted by an ivory and silver coronet. There were no objections when the chairman of the Association, Mr G. L. Joseph, declared after a little ceremony at Bruton Street his hope that the porringer would take its place ‘upon the breakfast table of the first baby in the land, and may even be banged upon the table by her infant hands’.
It was also felt appropriate that royal baby clothes should be hand-made from the finest materials; and there was wide approval at the news that the Queen of England herself, together with Lady Strathmore and the Duchess of York, had personally stitched the Princess’s layette, assisted by the inmates of charitable institutions where relevant skills were to be found. ‘Many poor gentlewomen,’ it was reported, ‘have profited by the Duchess’s order for fine lawn and muslin frocks, little bonnets and jackets, and all the delightful accessories of baby’s toilet.’ However, it was simultaneously claimed that, as ‘a great believer in modern methods of bringing up infants,’ the Duchess of York rejected the arguments of those who favoured long skirts for ordinary use.
Long skirts meant unnecessary waste. Yet if the Duchess was modern on the subject of skirts, she was old-fashioned on the matter of cloth. A battle raged in the 1920s between mothers and nurses who held to the tradition of clothing babies in cotton garments, and progressive advocates of warm, soft, cosy and absorptive wool.
The Duchess firmly rejected wool. After visiting a welfare centre where ‘woolly babies’ were the rule, she admitted that such apparel might be convenient and comfortable, but laughingly said that the infants ‘looked rather like little gnomes, and that she preferred “frilly babies”’.
Yet she also rejected self-consciously showy clothes for children. Frilliness meant femininity, not unnecessary adornment. Cotton meant cleanliness and purity. The Duchess, suggested one account, had ‘definite ideas about dressing a child, and they can be summed up in the single word Simplicity’.
When the Princess was a baby and toddler, she was dressed predominantly in white; when she grew older, she and her sister ‘could not have been more simply dressed,’ according to their governess.
Simplicity was linked to a sturdy, even spartan, approach: simple, sensible clothes as a feature of a simple, sensible upbringing. ‘They don’t wear hats at play, even on the coldest and windiest days,’ wrote one commentator.
The Duchess’s attitude seemed to rub off on her daughter who, in adolescence, ‘never cared a fig’ about what she wore.
Such an approach seemed both patriotic and morally proper at a time when British was deemed best in the nursery, as everywhere else. At first, the Princess occupied a room at 17 Bruton Street which had been used by her mother before her marriage. Here, Lady Strathmore had made sure that ‘in all the personal details that give character to a room,’ the surroundings were ‘typically English’.
After a few months, the nursery and its establishment of custodians moved to the Yorks’ new residence at 145 Piccadilly, a tall, solid-looking building, later destroyed by a wartime bomb, close to Hyde Park Corner, and almost opposite St George’s Hospital.
145 Piccadilly was a town house of the kind often maintained as a London base by aristocratic and other wealthy families who were happiest in the country. It was spacious (an estate agent’s advertisement claimed that including servants’ quarters, there were 25 bedrooms)
but unremarkable. When they were there, the standard of living of the King’s second son and his wife was far from meagre. According to one account in 1936, staff kept at 145 Piccadilly included a steward, a housekeeper, the Duchess’s personal maid, the Duke’s valet, two footmen, three maids, a cook and two kitchen maids, a nurse, a nursery-maid, a boy and a night-watchman. A few years earlier, there had been an under-nurse as well.
Nevertheless, the Yorks’ existence – cheek-by-jowl with the establishments of rich professionals, bankers and businessmen, as well as of landowners – was not unusual in aristocratic or plutocratic terms.
The photographer Lisa Sheridan first visited the Piccadilly house in the late 1920s (her mother happened to be a friend of the housekeeper). She later recalled a white terraced building, indistinguishable from those on either side of it. There was a semi-basement kitchen, ‘like the giant’s kitchen in a pantomime with its immense shiny copper pots and great fire-range’. The upstairs interior style reflected the taste of the Duchess more than of the Duke. Vast oil paintings, including a picture of horses, hung in heavy gilt frames in the dim, over-furnished entrance hall, alongside huge elephant tusks, mementoes of somebody’s big game hunt. There was also a painted, life-size statue of a black boy.
An extensive garden at the back, shared with other houses, added an element of community. As the Princess grew older she was able to play on the lawns and paths with the children of the merely well-to-do, although a zoo-like atmosphere developed, as members of the public, tipped off by the press, acquired the habit of peering through the railings.
Elizabeth lived in a suite of rooms at the top of the house, consisting of a day nursery, a night nursery and a bathroom linked by a landing, with wide windows looking down on the park. Here Mrs Sheridan remembered seeing the Princess, ‘her pretty doll-like face . . . framed in soft silky curls’. Around her were the typical accoutrements of an inter-war upper-class infant’s lair: a rocking horse, baby clothes hung up to dry, a nanny knitting in a rocking chair. The impression was of devotion and reassurance, but also of order, neatness and discipline; the Princess, at the crawling stage, was only allowed to play with one toy at a time.
There was no question about who was in charge. The Yorks’ governess later aptly described the regime as ‘a state within a state,’ with the nanny, Clara Knight (known as ‘Alla’), as ever-present benign dictator, ‘a shoulder to weep on, a bosom to fall asleep on,’ who ‘would sit at evening in the rocker . . . mending or knitting and telling stories of “when Mummie was a little girl”’.
Alla was a former Strathmore retainer who had looked after the Duchess and her brother: Elizabeth Cavendish, a contemporary of the Princess, remembers her, from children’s parties, as a ‘formidable’ figure.
Unmodern to a fault, she controlled the life of the Princess – health, dress and bath.
The tiny Princess, half-royal by birth, lived in her earliest years a half-royal existence. At first, much of it was spent with her parents, as they travelled restlessly around the great houses of people to whom they were related, like members of any great family. Soon, however, the requirements of royalty produced long parental absences, and the role of Alla and her assistants grew.
From babyhood, Princess Elizabeth was often in Scotland, either staying with her Strathmore (Bowes-Lyon) grandparents at Glamis Castle in Forfarshire, or with her royal ones at Balmoral Castle in Aberdeenshire. She spent much of her first summer in an ancient nursery wing at Glamis, or sleeping in the Castle garden ‘to the rhythmic sound of tennis balls on hard courts where her elders played, and to the song of laden bees. And when she awoke it was to smile at her father and mother as they started off on some fishing expedition . . .’ At the end of August, when Elizabeth was four months old, the Duke and Duchess of York left her in the care of the Countess of Strathmore while they went, like most of the young mothers and fathers, modern and unmodern, who were known to them, on ‘a round of visits to friends’.
This was the prelude to a much longer parting. Earlier in the year, the Duke of York had accepted an invitation to open the Commonwealth Parliament in the new Australian capital of Canberra. It was taken for granted both that his wife would accompany him and that their baby daughter would not. After Christmas, therefore, the Yorks took the Princess to the Strathmores’ Hertfordshire home at St Paul’s Walden Bury, and there they left her, for the duration of the royal tour. After they had sailed from Portsmouth early in January 1927, the Duchess wrote from on board the battle cruiser Renown to her mother-in-law that she had ‘felt very much leaving on Thursday, and the baby was so sweet playing with the buttons on Bertie’s uniform that it quite broke me up’.
Neither the King, nor the Queen, nor the Duke, however, would have seen anything unusual about such a trip. As Prince of Wales, George V had himself taken his wife on several foreign or imperial tours, without the encumbrance of their young children.
In any case, there was much to take the minds of the Duke and Duchess off their baby daughter. Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George, known as ‘Bertie’ to his family, had been made Duke of York in 1920, at the age of twenty-five. Yet he had not at that time sought a prominent royal role, and no exacting royal responsibilities had so far been asked of him. Shy and slow as a child, and the victim of a stammer since the age of seven or eight, he disliked and avoided occasions when he might be required to speak – so much so, that some had regarded him as not only reclusive, but intellectually backward. There had been some recent improvement. His marriage to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1923 had increased his confidence. So too, during the months before the voyage, had a course of instruction from an Australian speech therapist. But his appearances before large audiences had been infrequent, and – except over events like weddings and births – the public had taken less interest in him and his wife than in other members of the Royal Family. ‘The news-reels didn’t bother them very much,’ noted one commentator, a few years later, ‘and the press left them pretty much alone.’
Australia, where the Duke was to represent his father before the people of an intensely loyal dominion, was his first major testing ground.
The tour was exacting, psychologically as well as physically, for it aroused huge public curiosity. The Yorks’ itinerary involved going, via Panama, to Fiji and New Zealand before they reached Sydney. In Australia, a programme of visits took them to cities around the country, culminating in their arrival at Canberra for Bertie’s painfully rehearsed, much feared speech at the opening ceremony. During the ominous build-up, the Duke and Duchess were fêted at each stop. The local press eagerly examined every available detail of the lives of the previously little-known couple, who seemed to embody the mother country, for which sentimental and nostalgic feelings remained strong. As the tour progressed, fascination increased, especially for the most humanizing detail of all: the distant and as yet inarticulate Princess. ‘Wherever we go cheers are given for her as well,’ Bertie wrote to his mother, ‘& the children write to us about her.’
The newspapers dubbed her ‘Betty,’ and she became the tour’s unofficial mascot. The Duke and Duchess were soon besieged with questions about ‘the World’s Best Known Baby’. They were also loaded with gifts for her, each locality or association vying with its rivals to produce the most loving, ingenious and appropriate present. The Brownies of Auckland delivered a large doll, the children of Fremantle gave a miniature bed, together with a box of miniature clothes, the National Council of Women sent a gold porringer, and the Melbourne Arts and Crafts Society proudly proffered an Australian Noah’s Ark, complete with kangaroos, wallabies and other antipodean survivors of the Flood. In May 1927, it was estimated that three tons of toys had so far been presented for Betty, in absentia. The soldier who guarded them reputedly said there were more dolls in the collection than there were men in his regiment.
At home, however, Alla’s one-toy-at-a-time regime did not alter. The Princess’s first day without her parents was reported by the newspapers to be just like any other. Though it was the depth of winter, her nanny took her in a pram on a two-hour walk through Mayfair into Hyde Park, where she appeared perfectly content, fast asleep, and (suitably, for the granddaughter of a King-Emperor) clutching a golliwog under the covers. Supposedly, she ‘seemed to miss her mother’s regular morning visit to the nursery,’ though how anyone could tell was not revealed.
In February, the Alla establishment joined George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace, and in April they followed the Court to Windsor, where the Princess spent her first birthday. The King and Queen enjoyed the idea of being in loco parentis (although it involved little contact with the child) and the Queen, particularly, took it very seriously. There was a daily ritual. Every afternoon, Alla would bring Princess Elizabeth down to her grandparents, ‘and the appearance at the door of a very little person in a white gown and fringed sash would be greeted by the Queen’s delighted cry of “Here comes the Bambino!”’
Photographs and written reports of the baby’s progress were sent to her parents. ‘She has 4 teeth now,’ the King told them in March, ‘which is quite good at eleven months, she is very happy and drives in a carriage every afternoon, which amuses her’.
The Strathmores were able to tell of other accomplishments. During the last two months of the Yorks’ absence, the Princess stayed at St Paul’s Walden Bury. Here, Alla patiently taught her to enunciate the word ‘Mummy’. Since, however, there was nobody to whom the word could be accurately applied, she greeted everybody she came across, including family portraits, ‘with the salutation “Mummy, Mummy!”’
As one writer observed later in the Princess’s childhood, ‘the parents who came back to her from the other end of the earth were strangers’.
The Duke and Duchess returned in June after six months away, laden with toys, to greet a child they barely recognized, who was almost twice the age she had been when they departed. The reunion involved a poignant little ceremony in the Grand Hall at Buckingham Palace where the King and Queen and the Earl and Countess of Strathmore had assembled with the Household staff to provide a welcoming party. The Duchess, seeing the baby in its nurse’s arms, rushed forward, exclaiming ‘Oh you little darling’, and kissed and hugged it repeatedly.
Glad to be home, flushed with the unexpected triumph of their tour, and delighted to see their daughter, the Yorks were happy to relax for a while in London after such an arduous journey. However, they did not stay still for long. Within a few weeks, they had left the capital for the shooting season – the Duke to join the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, the Duchess to visit her parents at Glamis. At first, Princess Elizabeth stayed in London, but after another short separation, she was dispatched to Scotland, where a mother-daughter relationship was re-established. ‘Elizabeth is learning to walk – very dangerous!’ wrote the Duchess of York at Glamis. In September 1927, the whole family joined the King and Queen at Balmoral. Then they returned south for the autumn months, in order to settle properly into their house in Piccadilly.
IN ALL ACCOUNTS of Princess Elizabeth as a child, legend and reality are inseparable. The observations of those with direct knowledge were fed, not just by what they saw, but also by popular beliefs and idealizations, colouring the way they treated her, and shaping the stories they passed on which, in turn, fed the myths. Two themes stand out in the early tales. According to the first, the Princess was an unusually bright and interesting child, as well as an exceptionally pleasing, generous, and sunny-natured one. According to the second, she was the essence of normality, and of a typically balanced yet fallible British girlhood. These contradictory versions – the ideal and the archetype – were held simultaneously and provided the frame on which every narrative of the Princess’s childhood was built, including the anecdotes of those close to her. They also shaped the way the world came to see her as an adult and as a monarch.
The manufacture of a publicly known personality for the Princess began with her appearance. The world, peering into the royal perambulator, detected an ethereal quality. After a visit to the Bruton Street nursery, one early eulogizer wrote that the infant Elizabeth had ‘the sweetest air of complete serenity about her. While we were talking, her nurse came in to fetch her, and the Duchess threw round her daughter’s head . . . a filmy veil of gossamer, from which she looked down out of her nurse’s arms smiling angelically at her mother, like a cherub out of a cloud’.
Yet if the Princess’s blond Botticelli curls, blue eyes and plump cheeks made it easy to cast her as an angel, it was important that she should also be seen as a mischievous one. After a Christmas party in 1927 for four hundred tenants on the Sandringham Estate, the press reported that the twenty-one-month-old apparition, wearing a white dress, silk socks and white shoes, suddenly materialized, standing upright on the table, ‘chattering and bombarding the guests with crackers handed to her by her mother.’
There was also another version of the image of a small person bombarding big ones with harmless objects. At 145 Piccadilly, the Princess would allegedly get a small toy, such as a teddy bear or a ball, and drop it from the nursery landing down the stairwell onto visitors as they arrived at the house.
Other stories also emphasized that, for all the other-worldliness, the child was cheeringly imperfect. Ruth St Mawr, a friend of Lady Strathmore, told a story about taking tea at Glamis Castle when Princess Elizabeth, by then three, bounded in. ‘You can’t think how naughty I’ve been,’ declared the child. ‘Oh, so naughty, you don’t know.’ ‘Well then tell me,’ said Lady Strathmore, ‘and I shall know.’ ‘No,’ said Princess Elizabeth – and that was that.
Normality required a pet-name and this, the press was delighted to discover, Princess Elizabeth herself provided early on. At two and a half, she was reported to be calling herself ‘Tillabet’.
Later, this became ‘Lisabet’ or ‘Lilliebeth,’ before settling down as ‘Lilibet,’ the name her close family have continued to call her all her life. Normality also required a passion, and this, too, the Princess obligingly furnished in her lifelong love of horses and dogs, which could be dated to the autumn of 1928, when the Duke of York took Naseby Hall in Northamptonshire for the hunting season, and Elizabeth accompanied her parents there for much of the winter. According to one inter-war chronicler, it was at Naseby ‘that Lisabet really fell in love with beautiful horses’. She enjoyed patting her father’s animals, and her nurse had to watch her closely, because of her habit of running off to the stables at the slightest excuse at any time of day.
In addition, apparently, ‘she especially loved the hounds with their nervous erect tails and their elemental eagerness to be off’.
Horses and dogs had to be trained, and from a tender age, Princess Elizabeth was often portrayed in appropriate roles of command and authority in relation to them. But royal children required training too, and it was made clear, in every tale, that the Princess’s mischief was never allowed to get out of hand. If Elizabeth had a sense of fun, it was also (commentators took care to point out) kept in check. ‘Uncurbed without being spoilt’ was how the Sunday Dispatch described the barely walking child in an article entitled ‘The Roguish Princess’.
‘Roguish’ was a favourite term in such accounts: it implied misbehaviour within acceptable and endearing limits. According to Alice Ring’s royally sanctioned description of the Princess, published in 1930, on one occasion Elizabeth said ‘My Goodness!’ in the hearing of her mother. She was ‘at once told that this was not pretty and mustn’t be repeated’. However, if she heard an adult use the unseemly expression, ‘up go her small arms in a gesture of mock amazement, and she presses her palms tightly over her mouth while her blue eyes are full of roguish laughter’.
Uncurbed was never allowed to mean over-indulged. ‘I don’t think any child could be more sensibly bought up,’ Queen Mary remarked. ‘She leads such a simple life and she’s always punished when she’s naughty.’
Here was a useful moral tale, for the edification of millions. ‘Once Lisbet had been naughty, for even princesses can be naughty, you know,’ wrote Captain Eric Acland, author of a particularly cloying biography published when Elizabeth was twelve, ‘and her mother, to punish her, refused to tell the usual bedtime story.’
According to another writer, if the Duchess of York was asked what her main duty was, ‘she would reply, “Bringing up my children”. She brings them up as she herself was brought up, with unremitting care and great practical intelligence.’
It was the accepted view. ‘No child of Queen Elizabeth’s will ever be spoilt,’ the writer Stephen King-Hall summed up, at the time of George VI’s Coronation.
But how could any child receive so much attention, and be the object of so many admiring glances, yet not be spoilt, even allowing for parental firmness? Here was an even deeper paradox in the iconography, never satisfactorily resolved. The usual answer – and the one that dominated characterizations of the Princess until her adolescence – was that her innocence was protected, as if by wall and moat, from the corrupting effects of vulgar fame and even of excessive loyal adoration. Chocolates, china sets and children’s hospital wards, even a territory in Antarctica, were named after her; the people of Newfoundland had her image on their postage stamps; songs were written in her honour, and sung by large assemblies of her contemporaries; while Madame Tussaud’s displayed a wax model of her astride a pony. However, according to one chronicler in the early 1930s, ‘of all this she is unconscious, it passes her completely by – and she remains just a little girl, like any other little girl . . . and passionately fond of her parents’.
There was also the idea of a fairy-tale insulation from the projected thoughts and fantasies of the outside world – a ‘normal’ childhood preserved, by an abnormal caesura, from public wonder. ‘In those days we lived in an ivory tower’ wrote Elizabeth’s governess, many years later, ‘removed from the real world’.
Yet the very protection of the Princess, the notion of her as an innocent, unknowing, unsophisticated child who, but for her royal status, might be anybody’s daughter, niece or little sister, helped to sustain the popular idea of her as a ray of sunshine in a troubled world, a talisman of health and happiness. This particular quality was often illustrated by tales of her special, even curative, relationship with the King, which juxtaposed youth and old age, gaiety and wisdom, the future and the past, in a heavily symbolic manner. From the time of the Yorks’ Australian tour, when the Princess was fostered at Buckingham Palace, it had been observed that the ailing Monarch, whose health was becoming a matter of concern throughout the Empire, derived a special pleasure from the company of his granddaughter.
There were many accounts which brought this out. ‘He was fond of his two grandsons, Princess Mary’s sons,’ the Countess of Airlie recalled, ‘but Lilibet always came first in his affections. He used to play with her – a thing I never saw him do with his own children – and loved to have her with him’.
Others observed the same curious phenomenon: on one occasion, the Archbishop of Canterbury was startled to encounter the elderly Monarch acting the part of a horse, with the Princess as his groom, ‘the King-Emperor shuffling on hands and knees along the floor, while the little Princess led him by the beard’.
When she was scarcely out of her pram, a visitor to Sandringham reported watching the King ‘chortling with little jokes with her – she just struggling with a few words, “Grandpa” and “Granny”’.
The Princess’s governess recalled seeing them together, near the end of the King’s life, ‘the bearded old man and the polite little girl holding on to one of his fingers’. Later, it was claimed that the King was ‘almost as devoted a slave to her as her favourite uncle, the Prince of Wales’.
Yet it was also stressed that she was taught to know her place. Deferential manners were an ingredient of the anecdotes, alongside the spontaneity. One guest noted that after a game of toy bricks on the floor with an equerry, she was fetched by her nurse, ‘and made a perfectly sweet little curtsey to the King and Queen and then to the company as she departed’. This vital piece of royal etiquette had been perfected before her third birthday. When it was time to bid her grandfather goodnight, she would retreat backwards to the door, curtsey and say, ‘I trust your Majesty will sleep well’.
Some accounts took the Princess’s concern beyond mere politeness. For example, it was said that when the King was sick, she asked after him, and, on seeing her grandmother, ‘flung herself into the Queen’s arms and cried: “Lillybet to see Grandpar today?”’
There were also reports that when the royal landau passed down Piccadilly a shrill cry was heard from the balcony at No. 145: ‘Here comes Grandpa!’ – causing the crowd to roar with loyal delight.
There was much approval, too, for her name for the King: ‘Grandpa England’.
But the most celebrated aspect of the relationship concerned the Princess’s prophylactic powers during the King’s convalescence from a near-fatal illness in the winter of 1928–9. During this anxious time, the little girl ‘acted as a useful emollient to jaded nerves,’
a kind of harp-playing David to the troubled Monarch’s Saul.
In March 1929, the Empire learnt that the Princess, not yet three, was being encouraged to spend much of the morning with the recuperating King in his room at Craigweil House in Bognor, in order to raise his spirits. For an hour or so, she would sit with him by his chair at the window, making ‘the most amusing and original comments on people and events’.
The King recovered, and his granddaughter was popularly believed to have played a part in bringing this about. Many years later, Princess Elizabeth told a courtier that the old Monarch’s manner ‘was very abrupt, some people thought he was being rude’.
The fact that he terrified his sons, and barked at his staff, gave the stories of the little girl’s fearless enchantments an even sharper significance.
For her fourth birthday in 1930, the doting old man made Elizabeth the special gift of a pony. At this news public adoration, both of the giver and the recipient, literally overflowed. The same day, the Princess, in a yellow coat trimmed with fur, was seen walking across the square at Windsor Castle, with a band of the Scots Guards providing an accompaniment. Women waved their handkerchiefs and threw kisses. The Princess waved back, and ‘her curly locks fluttered in the breeze’. The sight was too much for the crowd. People outside the Castle gate suddenly pressed forward, and swept the police officer on duty off his feet.
Chapter 2
THE DUCHESS OF YORK gave birth to a second child at Glamis Castle in August 1930. Although a Labour Government was now in office, traditional proprieties were once again observed – this time at even greater inconvenience to the new Home Secretary, J. R. Clynes, than to his predecessor. Summoned north for the expected event, Clynes was kept waiting for five days as a guest of the Countess of Airlie, at Cortachy Castle. He made no complaint, and seems to have enjoyed his part in the ritual. Later he described how, after the announcement, ‘the countryside was made vivid with the red glow of a hundred bonfires, while sturdy kilted men with flaming torches ran like gnomes from place to place through the darkness’.
The arrival of Princess Margaret Rose had several effects. One was to reinforce public awareness of her sister. The child was not a boy, the King’s health remained uncertain, and the Prince of Wales showed no sign of taking a wife. A minor constitutional controversy, following the birth, helped to remind the public that Elizabeth’s position was an increasingly interesting one. Although common sense indicated that, after the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, she remained next in line, doubts were raised about whether this was really the case. Some experts argued that legally the two sisters enjoyed equal rights to the succession: there was nothing, in law, to say that they did not, and the precedence of an elder sister over a younger had never been tested. The King ordered a special investigation. The matter was soon settled, to the satisfaction of the Court, and as the Sovereign himself no doubt wished.
Another effect was to give Elizabeth a companion, and the public an additional character on which to build an ever-evolving fantasy. The Yorks were now a neatly symmetrical family, the inter-war ideal. There were no more children to spoil the balance, or dilute the cast. After the birth of Margaret Rose, 145 Piccadilly acquired a settled, tranquil, comforting air, and the image of it became a fixed point in the national and imperial psyche. When people imagined getting married and setting up a home, they thought of the Yorks. The modest, reserved, quietly proud father, the practical, child-centred mother, the well-mannered, well-groomed daughters; the ponies, dogs and open air; the servants dealing with the chores, tactfully out of sight; the lack of vanity, ambition, or doubt – all represented, for Middle England and its agents overseas, a distillation of British wholesomeness.
It did not matter that the Yorks were not ‘the Royal Family’ – that the Duke was not the King, or ever likely to be. Indeed, it helped that they were sufficiently removed from the ceremonial and servility of the Court to lead comprehensible lives, and for their daughters to have the kind of fancy-filled yet soundly based childhood that every boy and girl, and many adults, yearned for. At a time of poverty and uncertainty for millions, the York princesses in their J. M. Barrie-like London home and country castles stood for safety and permanence. The picture magazines showed them laughing, relaxed, perpetually hugging or stroking pets, always apart from their peers, doll-like mascots to adorn school and bedroom walls. Children often wrote to them, as if they were playmates, or sisters: little girls they already knew. Story books spun homely little tales around their lives, helping to incorporate them as imaginary friends in ordinary families.
The most dramatic attempt to appropriate them for ordinariness occurred in 1932, with the erection of a thatched cottage, two-thirds natural size, by ‘the people of Wales,’ as a present for Princess Elizabeth on her sixth birthday. This remarkable object made an implicit point, for no part of the United Kingdom had suffered more terrible unemployment than the mining valleys of the principality. Built exclusively by Welsh labour out of Welsh materials, it provided a stirring demonstration of the ingenuity of a workforce whose skills were tragically wasted. At the same time – loyally and movingly – its creators sought to connect the lives of the little Princess and her baby sister to those of thousands of children who inhabited real cottages. The point, however, could not be too political, and an abode, even an imitation one, intended for a princess had to be filled with greater luxuries than average families ever experienced.
Great efforts were made to ensure that it conformed to the specifications of a real home. Electric lights were installed, and the contents included a tiny radio, a little oak dresser and tiny china set, linen with the initial ‘E’, and a portrait of the Duchess of York over the dining-room mantelpiece. The house also contained little books, pots and pans, food cans, brooms, and a packet of Epsom salts, a radio licence and an insurance policy, all made to scale. The bathroom had a heated towel rail. In the kitchen, the reduced-size gas cooker, copper and refrigerator worked, and hot water came out of the tap in the sink.
It was scarcely a surprise present. Months of publicity preceded its completion. There was also a near-disastrous mishap. When the house was finished and in transit, the tarpaulin protecting it caught fire, and the thatched roof and many of the timbers were destroyed. Though some felt it lucky that the incendiary nature of the materials had been discovered before, and not after, the Princess was inside, the project was not abandoned. Instead, indefatigable craftsmen worked day and night to repair the damage and apply a fire-resistant coating, in time to display the renovated house at the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia.
Then it was reconstructed in Windsor Great Park for the birthday girl, and became a favourite plaything.
Whatever Elizabeth may have made of the house’s message, she and her sister were soon using it for the purpose for which it was intended: to exercise and display their ordinariness. Elizabeth was ‘a very neat child,’ according to her governess, and the Welsh house provided an excellent opportunity to show it. The two girls spent happy hours cleaning, dusting and tidying their special home.
Thousands of people who had experienced a vicarious contact with royalty by inspecting the cottage when it was on public show, were later able to enjoy a series of photographs of the elfin princesses, filling the doorway of ‘Y Bwthyn Bach’ – the Little House – not just as children but as Peter Pan adults, miniaturized in a securely diminutive world, the perfect setting for the fantasy of ‘royal simplicity’. The contrast between the oriental extravagance of the structure – fabulously costly in design, equipment, production and delivery – and the games that were to be played in it, highlighted the triumphant paradox.
It was also, of course, a female artefact, a point made by Lisa Sheridan, when the children proudly took her on a tour in 1936:
In the delightful panelled living-room everything was in its proper place. Not a speck of dust anywhere! Brass and silver shone brilliantly. Everything which could be folded was neatly put away. The household brushes and the pots and pans all hung in their places. Surely this inspired toy provided an ideal domestic training for children in an enchanted world . . . Everything in the elegantly furnished house had been reduced, as if by magic, to those enchanting proportions so endearing to the heart of a woman. How much more so to those young princesses whose status fitted so perfectly the surroundings?
Y Bwthyn Bach gave Elizabeth a Welsh dimension. A Scottish one was provided shortly afterwards by the appointment, early in 1933, of a governess from north of the border, Marion Crawford. In a sense, of course, Elizabeth was already half-Scottish, and it was the Scottish networks of the Duchess of York that had led to the appointment. However Miss Crawford belonged to a different kind of Scotland from the one known to the Bowes-Lyons, or – for that matter – to the kilt-wearing Windsor dynasty. A twenty-two-year-old recent graduate of the Moray House Training College in Edinburgh, she came from a formidable stratum: the presbyterian lower middle class.
Miss Crawford stayed with the Yorks, later the Royal Family, teaching, guiding and providing companionship to both girls for fourteen years, until she married in 1947, shortly before the wedding of Princess Elizabeth. Three years later, she published a detailed account of her experiences in the royal service, against the express wishes of the Palace. ‘She snaked,’ is how a member of the Royal Family describes her behaviour today.
Perhaps it was the incongruity of a woman from such a background betraying, for financial gain, the trust that had been placed in her (as her employers came to see it) which accounted for the anger that was felt. She was not the last to snake, but she was the pioneer. Marion Crawford was soon known as ‘Crawfie’ to the princesses: ‘doing a Crawfie’ became an expression for selling family secrets, especially royal ones, acquired during a period of personal service. To the modern reader, however, Miss Crawford’s Little Princesses is a singularly inoffensive work. Composed with the help of a ghost writer in a gushing Enid Blyton, or possibly Beverley Nichols, style, it does not destroy the Never-Never-Land mythology of 145 Piccadilly, but embraces it. Love, duty and sacrifice are the currency of daily life, and everybody always acts from the best of motives. Yet the book also has perceptiveness – and the ring of authenticity. Although effusively loyal in tone, it reveals a sharp and sometimes critical eye, and opinions which were not always official ones.
It shows a character with just enough of a rebellious edge to make the subsequent ‘betrayal’ explicable. Until she became notorious, Crawfie and her presence at the Yorks’ hearth were regarded in the press (perhaps rightly) as evidence of the Bowes-Lyon belief in no-nonsense training for young girls. According to The Times on the occasion of Princess Elizabeth’s eighteenth birthday, Miss Crawford ‘upheld through the years of tutelage the standards of simple living and honest thinking that Scotland peculiarly respects’.
When the Duke of York became King, she was also felt to provide a politically useful bond between the kingdoms. The most important point about Crawfie, however, which escaped public attention at the time, was that she had aspirations, both for her charges and for herself.
She was no scholar, and seemed to share the Royal Family’s indifference to academic and aesthetic values. Yet she did not share its lack of curiosity, and she had a strong, indignant sense of the Court as old-fashioned and remote. She deplored what she saw as the children’s ignorance of the world, and her book – perhaps this was the most infuriating thing about it – describes her personal crusade to widen the little girls’ horizons. There was a Jean Brodie, charismatic aspect to Miss Crawford, both in the power of her passionate yet selfishly demanding personality (sometimes she seemed to forget who was the princess) and in her evangelical determination to make contact with life outside. Although for part of the time she had Queen Mary as an ally, it was an uphill struggle. She did, however, take the children on educational trips, and conspired to satisfy their desire to travel on the London tube; and her greatest triumph was to persuade her employers, by then King and Queen, to allow a Girl Guide Company to be set up at Buckingham Palace. She was also a woman of her age: her other ambition was to get married, something which was incompatible with her employment and – if her own account is to be believed – one which her employers could never understand.
Crawfie was not a contented person. Indeed, the self-portrait unwittingly contained in her book suggests a rather lonely and restless one, an immigrant to England and an outsider to a strange tribe whose members, though friendly, persisted in their unusual and disturbing customs. She was a taker as much as a giver. But she was interesting, intelligent and forceful. Patricia (now Lady) Mountbatten – daughter of Louis and Edwina, and a second cousin of the princesses – remembers her from Guide meetings in the Buckingham Palace gardens as a tall, attractive, highly competent woman, ‘with a good personality for bringing out somebody like Princess Elizabeth, who had a stiff upper lip ingrained from birth.’
There seems to have developed a mutual dependence, as she became, during critical years, the princesses’ confidante and friend.
PRINCESS ELIZABETH’S earliest years had been spent at 145 Piccadilly with her parents, at Glamis Castle and St. Paul’s Walden Bury with one set of grandparents, or at Balmoral and Sandringham with the other. In 1931, the Yorks were granted Royal Lodge, in Windsor Great Park, by the King, and in the following year they took it over as their private country residence. Thereafter, the adapted remnant of George IV’s cottage orné designed by John Nash, with its large, circular garden, screening of trees, and air of rustic simplicity, became one of Princess Elizabeth’s most familiar homes. More than anywhere, Royal Lodge provided the setting for the Yorks’ domestic idyll. Summers were spent there with a minimum of staff.
From the point of view of family life, it was an advantage (not mentioned in the newspaper profiles) that the Duke had little to do. He went on the occasional overseas visit, though never again, as Duke of York, on the scale of the 1927 Australian tour; he exchanged hospitality with relatives and friends; he gardened, he rode, and he shot. With time on his hands, he was often at home during the day and able to take luncheon with his family, and to play tag or hide-and-seek with his daughters in Hamilton Gardens. Until 1936 he and his wife seemed perfectly content with the undemanding routines of a minor member of the Royal Family, of whom little was required or expected. The Duchess had been a society beauty, fêted and wooed in her youth. After contracting a surprising if elevated marriage, however, she appeared to have no ambitions beyond the settled rhythms of an unremarkable aristocratic life, and the enjoyment of her children. Though her wit and charm made her friends wherever she went, and endeared her to other members of the Royal Family, she and her husband were not a fashionable couple, and they had little contact with the café society which held such a fascination for the Prince of Wales.
Crawfie, who disapproved of some of the grander and crustier aspects of the royal way of life, repeatedly stressed in her book that the York establishment concentrated on the children. ‘It was a home-like and unpretentious household I found myself in,’ she wrote. Life at 145 Piccadilly, at least as seen from the perspective of the governess, revolved around the nursery landing, or around the sleeping quarters of the Duke and Duchess. ‘No matter how busy the day, how early the start that had to be made,’ according to Crawfie, ‘each morning began with high jinks in their parents’ bedroom.’ This was a daily ritual which continued up to the morning of Princess Elizabeth’s marriage. The day ended with a bath and a bedtime ritual, also involving parental high jinks. ‘Nothing was ever allowed to stand in the way of these family sessions.’
Sandwiched between morning and evening high jinks came the Princess’s education – or, as many observers have wryly observed – the lack of it. After breakfast with Alla in the nursery, Elizabeth would start lessons in a little boudoir off the main drawing-room, under the supervision of her governess. Later, she would make remarks (sometimes to put nervous, successful people at their ease) about her lack of proper schooling; and it is true that, even for a princess born out of direct line of succession to the throne, her curriculum was far from exacting.
According to a tactfully understated assessment in the 1950s, it was ‘wide rather than deep’ without any forcing, or subjection to a classical discipline.
It was, perhaps, a misfortune that there were no peers to offer competition, or examinations to provide an incentive. Most time was spent on English, French and history.
Elizabeth’s dependence on a single instructor for a range of subjects was a limitation, especially as the instructor’s own education went no further than a training college diploma. Other future Queens of England, also born out of the direct line, had been better served. Nevertheless, in the first half of the twentieth century a home-based education for upper class girls was normal rather than exceptional – the British equivalent of binding feet.
There were two rival versions of the Yorks’ approach to the education of their daughters, and we may dismiss one of them, at least in its simple form. According to the first, semi-official, account the Duchess herself closely supervised her daughters’ lessons, and personally devised a timetable which concentrated on relevant subjects, such as foreign languages, scripture, geography, imperial and constitutional history. This account was the one given to the press, especially after the Abdication. According to the second, the Duchess was quite properly concerned that Elizabeth and Margaret should not regard themselves as different from any other children of their background. ‘She never aimed at bringing her daughters up to be more than nicely behaved young ladies,’ reflected Randolph Churchill, after the war.
Sometimes the two versions were combined: the best training for a royal life, it was suggested, was a non-fussy, practical education.
Both, however, agreed on one point: the Duke and Duchess were determined, in the best traditions of the British Royal Family and aristocracy, that their children should not be intellectual. According to a newspaper report, when Elizabeth was ten, a regime which involved only seven and a half hours per week in the schoolroom had been designed with a purpose: to ensure that the elder Princess should avoid becoming a ‘blue-stocking’, with all the terrible consequences that that term of derision implied. With the avoidance of such a fate in mind, her studies had been planned ‘in consultation with the leading educationalists in the country,’ and after consideration by the Cabinet.
If Crawfie is to be believed, the truth was actually more mundane. Whether or not the topic was ever seriously discussed in the Cabinet Room, it caused little anxiety at 145 Piccadilly. The attitude in the York household towards education seems, in general, to have been one of genial casualness, undisturbed in the early years by any premonition of what lay ahead. Crawfie stressed this last point: perhaps seeking a justification for the lack of pedagogic rigour. Nothing seemed less likely, she insisted, than that the two girls would ever have to play an important role in their adult lives, and consequently their parents’ main concern was to give them ‘a happy childhood, with lots of pleasant memories stored up against the days that might come and, later, happy marriages.’
If the governess had little choice but to accept the relaxed view of her employers, the same was not true of the children’s formidable royal grandmother. Queen Mary – the most serious member of the Royal Family – made purposeful forays into the Piccadilly schoolroom, and was perturbed by what she found. In an attempt to improve matters, she demanded to see a schedule of lessons, urged that Princess Elizabeth should read ‘the best type of children’s books,’ and often chose them for her. She also thought up ‘instructive amusements’ for the children, like a visit to the Tower of London. ‘It would have been impossible for anyone so devoted to the Monarchy as Queen Mary to lose sight of the future Queen in this favourite grandchild,’ recalled the Countess of Airlie.
This, however, was after the Abdication. Until then, the impact of the Queen’s concern was limited, partly because the Duke took as little active interest in his daughters’ book-learning as the Duchess.
The Duke’s relaxed attitude to female education did not mean, however, that he lacked a social conscience, or sense of royal responsibility. On the contrary: a willingness to keep his own daughters socially cocooned was combined with a strong, even progressive, interest in the plight of children from the urban slums. Before becoming King, as President of the Industrial Welfare (formerly Boys’ Welfare) Association, he was involved in schemes to benefit working-class youth, and he lent his name to the pioneering Duke of York’s Camp – a part paternalist, part egalitarian experiment much in the spirit of the East End universities’ and public schools’ settlements. Each year a hundred public schools and a hundred industrial concerns were invited to send two boys each to a summer holiday camp ‘where all would be on equal terms’.
The aim, in the words of the organizer, Robert Hyde, was to ‘tame young Bolshevists,’
by social mingling: each side of the divide would get to know the other and appreciate its qualities. The Duke made a practice of coming for a day or two and, appropriately clad in shorts and open-necked shirt, joining in the games and singsongs. ‘Class distinction was left outside the camp boundaries,’ observed an admiring journalist.
At the last of the camps, at Abergeldie near Balmoral in 1939, the princesses came daily to take part. One of the happiest and most natural of pre-war royal film clips shows the four of them, parents and daughters, sitting in a throng of laughing, chanting adolescents. It was the kind of educational activity – boisterous, slapstick, communitarian, classless – that appealed to the Duke and he was proud to show it off to his daughters.
This was as close as the princesses ever got, before the war, to any proper contact with ordinary children, middle or working class, of their own age. The question of whether a wider experience might be desirable was discussed, but discarded. For several years, there was whimsical newspaper speculation that Elizabeth might be sent to a girls’ boarding school. When she was seven, the press reported a rumour that – in a daring break with royal precedent – the Princess was about to be enrolled at a preparatory establishment near London, and, furthermore, that ‘one of our larger public schools’ would be her eventual destination.
There was nothing in the story, though it is conceivable that the Duchess, who had spent two terms in her own adolescence at a day school in Chelsea, may have been behind it. A few weeks after the initial report, the Sunday Express announced under the headline ‘Will Never Go to School: Too Embarrassing,’ that the Duchess of York had asked that her elder daughter should go to school, so that she would be ‘brought up like any normal girl’. But after discussion with the King, Queen and Prince of Wales, and consultation with Cabinet ministers – according to the paper – she had been forced to back down.
Such an account is supported by the recollection of Lisa Sheridan, who remembered the Duchess telling her, just before the Abdication, that ‘she regretted her own daughters would not be able to go to school,’ and was concerned that they should grow up naturally and unspoilt.
This conversation, which took place during the brief reign of Edward VIII, coincided with fresh reports of a regal veto. The new King, it was stated, had decided against a school for Elizabeth, in accordance with the wishes of his father who had always been opposed. In addition to deference to a dead Monarch, three other arguments were reckoned to have weighed with the Princess’s uncle: the jealousy the choice of any particular school would cause among schools not so favoured, ‘the question of who would be her schoolmates’ – that is, whether she could be protected from bad influences – and, even more spuriously, her need to study different subjects from those taken by most other girls.
However, neither George V nor his eldest son deserve exclusive blame for the denial to the Princess of the mixed benefits of 1930s boarding school normality. Indeed, their attitude may have been an excuse. Although it would have been difficult for the Duke and Duchess to defy the Head of State, there is no reason why, after his own accession, George VI and his wife could not have reversed the earlier decision, either for their ten-year-old daughter or their six-year-old one, if they had wished to do so.
But there was one aspect of the Princess’s education that was not neglected: in view of the sporting pursuits of her parents, it would have been remarkable if it had been. Surrounded from earliest childhood by horses, and by servants who trained, fed and groomed, and relatives who owned, rode and talked about them, Elizabeth, like many aristocratic little girls, became a keen equestrian. Every account of her infancy suggests that an interest in horses and ponies was almost innate. George V, player of nursery equestrian games, was one influence: it may not be coincidence that Elizabeth’s early interest in horses and ponies followed her grandfather’s greatest racing success, when his filly Scuttle won the 1,000 Guineas in 1928. Her first reported riding ‘lesson’ took place in the private riding school in Buckingham Palace Mews in January 1930, when she was three and a half, under the supervision of the Crown Equerry, Colonel A. E. Erskine.
It was her parents, however, who became her first serious teachers. When she was five, the Duchess led her on Peggy, the Shetland pony given by the King, to a meet of the Pytchley Hounds at Boughton Cover. For a time the stud groom at the Royal Mews took charge of the children’s riding. ‘The Princess will undoubtedly be a keen horse-woman when she grows up,’ it was accurately predicted when she was ten.
In 1938, the royal riding instructor, Horace Smith, took over and began giving the two girls twice-weekly lessons at the Palace, accompanied by his own daughter. Training included mounting exercises, like touching their toes and leaning backwards until they were lying down on their ponies’ backs, to improve their balance and confidence. Smith found Elizabeth, in particular, a good and eager pupil – a conscientious listener, and keen to improve her skills. He also noticed something else: she was as interested in the business of looking after horses as in riding them; and she would ply him with questions about their feeding and management. ‘I think that in those days, when she was twelve years old, her chief interest in life lay in horses,’ Smith later recalled. On one occasion she told him, a sentiment often later repeated, that ‘had she not been who she was, she would like to be a lady living in the country with lots of horses and dogs’.
Dogs mattered almost as much as horses: a point which also did not escape royal observers of the day. As ordinary children more often owned dogs than horses, the princesses’ canine interest provided, in some ways, a stronger bond. It quickly became established that not only did Elizabeth and Margaret Rose like dogs, they had a special feeling, and even an empathy, for them. Articles and books about royal caninism became a genre. ‘. . . [F]ew people realise the marked similarity between the unaffected sincerity that so delightfully characterizes these royal but very human children, and the cheerful contentment of their dogs,’ reflected an especially liquid work called Our Princesses and their Dogs in 1936. ‘I doubt if I have ever encountered dogs who shared with their owners a quieter or serener companionship.’
Photographs of the children mercilessly mothering plump corgis – the family’s favourite breed – filled the picture papers.
But it was the horse world that always took precedence. With Princess Elizabeth, horses were more than an interest: they became a passion, even an obsession. Rooms and corridors, first at 145 Piccadilly, then at Buckingham Palace, were filled with an expanding collection of toy and ornamental horses, of every material and size. Not just the indulgent old King but the governess as well were cajoled into the performance of equine role-play. A favourite game was to harness Crawfie with reins, as if she were pulling a grocery cart. Then she would be patted, given a nosebag, jerked to a standstill, or instructed to paw the ground. If the weather was cold enough for her nostrils to steam, so much the better. Sometimes, however, Elizabeth would weary of this ritual. She herself would become the horse, and make ‘convincing little whinnying noises’. At other times, she and her sister would sit for hours at the window at 145 Piccadilly, watching for horses in the street.
Were animals a substitute for other children? Her governess, in describing such pursuits, clearly implied that they were – indeed the idea of a ‘poor little rich girl’ who lived a well-ordered, comfortable, but isolated life is central to her account. The two images of simplicity and loneliness are juxtaposed. On the one hand, there is a stress on the gap between the luxury people imagined royalty to enjoy, and their disciplined real lives; on the other, Crawfie often describes the yearning of the girls to be just like other children, with the same kind of fun. In her version of the princesses’ childhood, bedtimes were early, treats were few, seaside holidays rare, pantomimes visited only once a year. Other children seldom came to tea. For a time, Elizabeth made ‘rather special friends’ with the daughter of an eminent radiologist who happened to be a neighbour, but this unusual relationship ended when the child was sent away to school. It was, according to Crawfie, difficult for the children to gain other companions. The Duke of York was a private and unassuming man who, although he did not shun social life, did not seek it either. He and his wife rarely dined out or went to the cinema or theatre, and he was perfectly content to spend the evening at the family hearth, with his wife and daughters, indulging his hobby of needlework, pursued with such diligence that, during one burst of embroidering activity, he made a dozen chair covers in petit point for Royal Lodge. The impression is of cosiness, but also of domestic claustrophobia.
Perhaps such a picture of seclusion was exaggerated, and related as much to Miss Crawford’s home-sickness for Scotland as to the actual feelings of her charges. Meetings with the offspring of suitable parents, mostly relatives and courtiers, did occur. Elizabeth seemed to mix with them happily and naturally. Yet there seems always to have been a gulf, unavoidably imposed by convention, which stood in the way of equality. Patricia Mountbatten remembers Elizabeth coming to tea as a little girl of five or six with curly blonde hair, at her parents’ London home. She recalls a child like any other – except that she attracted special interest among the adults. There was a buzz of excitement among the nannies and governesses. ‘She wasn’t just another child of friends of my parents. She created a little flutter.’
An aristocratic contemporary remembers meeting Elizabeth for the first time at his birthday party when they were both three. He had received a pedal car as a present, and his father insisted that he should let her ride in it. ‘She was a princess,’ he says. ‘You knew she was different.’
AS ELIZABETH grew, interest in her increased. Visitors inspected her closely and seldom failed to remark afterwards on her beauty and poise, and on a precocious maturity achieved (so it was said) without loss of childish innocence. At the same time, a constitutionally convenient contrast was drawn between her own character, and that of her younger sister. Crawfie was later blamed for inventing this distinction, but that is unfair. Long before the publication of her book, it had been firmly implanted in the public mind. The roguishness of Elizabeth faded, especially as her destiny became apparent, and weightier qualities took over. Early in the reign of George VI, one writer compared the artistic and musical leanings of Margaret with the ‘serious turn of mind’ of Elizabeth, who also had an aptitude for languages. In disposition, it was noted, the elder Princess was ‘quiet, unassuming and friendly, yet she has inherited a dignity which properly becomes her position.’
In a book published in 1939, the journalist Beverley Baxter wrote of Margaret’s talents as a mimic, and Elizabeth’s tendency to frown on ‘her sister’s instinct to burlesque, while secretly enjoying it’.
Margaret was presented as impish and whimsical, Elizabeth as dutiful and responsible. ‘Margaret’s capacity for mischief, practical joking and mimicry,’ maintained a typical account in 1940, produced an elder-sister sense in Elizabeth.
On one point there was unanimity: individually and together, roguish and responsible, the princesses were a credit to their parents and the nation. ‘A perfectly delicious pair,’ wrote the diplomat Miles Lampson in his diary in 1934 after seeing the two girls at Birkhall, the Georgian house above the river Muick on the Balmoral Estate, lent by the King to the Duke and Duchess of York four years earlier. ‘I have seldom seen such an enchanting child as Princess Elizabeth.’
Their ageing royal grandfather felt the same. ‘All the children looked so nice,’ he wrote after the celebration of his Silver Jubilee in July 1935, ‘but none prettier than Lilibet and Margaret.’
The prettiness of the royal little girls – much more than the handsomeness of the Lascelles little boys – represented youth and renewal, and became one of the symbols of the Jubilee. It was a carnival time, but also a display of recovered national confidence, after the worst of the economic crisis. At the heart of the festivities was the King who – in his proud virtue, sound political judgement, unrelenting philistinism and limited intelligence – stood for so much in an Empire that stretched around the globe: country, deity, family and social order. The crowds were hard to contain.
The nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth was photographed in a carriage with the rheumy-eyed Monarch, grandfather to his peoples as well as to the child beside him. Not since the reign of Queen Victoria, and seldom even then, had a sovereign been so revered (and never, a sceptic might have remarked, on the basis of so modest an achievement). Yet the reverence pointed backwards: Elizabeth stood for the future beyond the present reign. Her portrait appeared on Jubilee stamps, and her personality and looks were compared with those of the erect, austere figure of the Queen. Her appearance, and character, were moulded in the press accounts to fit the requirements of the hour. ‘Fair-skinned, blue-eyed, with regular features,’ was an appropriate assessment, ‘happy-natured but serious and quietly dignified.’
Observing the enthusiasm of the massed well-wishers, the King was reported to be deeply moved. An uplifting year, however, had also worn him out. On Christmas Day he delivered his crackling wireless message to subjects all over the world, but with a noticeably weak voice. Over the next few days, he walked painfully in the estate at Sandringham, stopping every hundred yards to catch his breath. In the evenings, he had just enough energy left to play with his granddaughters.
Elizabeth had brought cheer to George V during his illness seven years earlier: once again, she appears in the stories told about him. Lord Dawson, the King’s physician, later recounted how, as the end approached, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, asked the Princess if she would like to walk with him in the garden at Sandringham. ‘Yes, very much,’ she supposedly replied, ‘but please do not tell me anything more about God. I know all about him already.’
F. J. Corbett, formerly Deputy Comptroller of Supply at Buckingham Palace, wrote that the last time he saw George V was on the private golf course at Sandringham, a few days after Christmas. ‘Out of the mist came the King, mounted on his white pony, Jock,’ he recalled. ‘Walking by the head of the pony, as if leading it along, was the little figure of Princess Elizabeth. She was taking her grandfather back to the house.’
On 17 January the princesses returned to Royal Lodge. The Duke of York had his own cause for anxiety in an age before antibiotics, for the Duchess was recovering from an attack of pneumonia. They had barely got home, however, when the Duke was summoned to his father’s bedside. On 20 January, the King died, surrounded by the Queen and his children. Three days later his body was brought with great solemnity to London, and laid in state in the Palace of Westminster, where hundreds of thousands of mourners filed past. Four officers of the Brigade of Guards stood at the corners of the catafalque. On the last night, these were replaced by the dead King’s four sons, including his successor and the Duke of York, each in uniform. Princess Elizabeth was taken by her mother to witness this extraordinary vigil, and to contemplate the coffin of her ‘Grandpa England’. On 29 January, she attended the funeral at Windsor.
The accession of Princess Elizabeth’s young, popular, forward-looking Uncle David as Edward VIII revived the monarchical excitement of the Jubilee. Such an event brings turmoil at Court, similar to the ferment at No. 10 Downing Street caused by the change of a Prime Minister. The hierarchy is turned upside down. Established officials fear for their jobs, or wonder whether the time has come to retire from them. The transition from the predictable George V to his febrile son was a particularly traumatic break, and it sent a tremor through the ranks of the old courtiers. Ancient customs were abandoned, rules and formalities were impatiently relaxed. The Queen was dispatched to live in Marlborough House, and unexpected faces appeared at the Palace.
The new reign also focused attention, with added intensity, on the Yorks. On the margins of the main performance, they continued to enjoy an adequate privacy. A few weeks into the new reign, Harold Nicolson, official biographer of George V, spoke to the Duchess of York at the house of a mutual friend. He talked to her for some time, without recognizing her.
However, such anonymity could not last long, for the death of the old King, and the persistent bachelorhood of his replacement, brought the Duke of York a step closer to the throne. It also aroused a new kind of interest in his elder daughter. There was still no publicly acknowledgeable reason for expecting Elizabeth ever to become Queen. Yet her place in the line of succession had become much more than a statistic. It began to give rise to speculation, and romantic projection.
What if the King never married? In the run-up to the Coronation, such a possibility was tentatively aired. One commentator suggested that a female Sovereign would be rapturously welcomed, and argued that this in itself was a reason why meddlers into the King’s private affairs should not seek to push him into matrimony. ‘They do not realise how many of their fellow-subjects would, however respectfully, feel half sorry at such an event, however auspicious. It might deprive us of Elizabeth II.’
A similar thought may have occurred to Archbishop Lang, who had discussed (or refrained from discussing) theology with the Princess at Sandringham in January, and who stayed as a guest of the Yorks at Birkhall in the summer. At a time when the new King was becoming a serious worry, he was reassured by what he saw. ‘The children – Lilliebet, Margaret Rose and Margaret Elphinstone – joined us,’ he recorded. ‘They sang some action-songs most charmingly. It was strange to think of the destiny which may be awaiting the little Elizabeth, at present second from the Throne. She and her lively little sister are certainly most entrancing children.’
Yet, at first, life for ‘the little ladies of 145 Piccadilly’ did not alter. It may have been a symptom of her upward mobility that a marble portrait bust of Princess Elizabeth was commissioned in the spring of 1936. Over the next two years, Miss Crawford accompanied the child no fewer than eighteen times to the studio of the Hungarian sculptor Zsigmond Strobl in Pembroke Walk. Lajos Lederer, a Hungarian journalist employed to make conversation with her during these tedious sessions, recalled her as highly talkative, and extremely knowledgeable on the subject of thoroughbred horses.
Otherwise, the only direct effect on the princesses of the accession seemed to be that they saw less of their uncle, previously one of the Yorks’ few frequent callers. The Duke and Duchess, though aware of gathering clouds, continued to ride, garden and embroider, much as before. Lisa Sheridan, visiting their London house before they left for Scotland, was led by a footman into the garden, where she found Princess Elizabeth and her mother feeding a family of ducklings which had wandered in through the railings from the adjoining park.
There was no immediate mention of Wallis Simpson. When, eventually, the King’s American companion was invited to tea at Royal Lodge, nothing was said about the significance of the visit. But Uncle David seemed to have lost interest in his nieces.
For some time, there had been ‘King-tattle’ – gossip which, as one loyalist claimed indignantly, ‘rages without respect to decency and perhaps probability,’ but which did not get into print.
The reason was not so much the laws of libel, as the fear of breaking a taboo. Editors and proprietors calculated that the opportunity was not worth the short-term boost in sales. ‘No respectable paper would have thought it good circulation policy to print scandalous news about the Royal Family,’ observed the anti-monarchist editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, afterwards. ‘It would no doubt have sold for the moment, but it would have led to a storm of protest from readers.’
There was also a gap between the business side of running newspapers – whose circulation policy made use of incentives like free gifts and insurance policies to attract readers – and the editorial side, which held aloof. ‘Editors were a traditional lot,’ says Sir Edward Pickering, then on the Mirror, and later a leading editor and newspaper director. ‘They didn’t look on circulation in the way they do today. They felt themselves above all that.’
On this occasion they were also afraid of a backlash, in view of the popularity of a Monarch who, as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, ‘was idolized as few men outside the Orient ever have been’.
Yet the gossip was pervasive, the more virulent because of the gap between what those in the King’s circle knew and the messages of the headlines and newsreels. ‘Those who most strenuously maintained a decorous loyalty in public,’ recalled Martin, ‘were the most avaricious of scandal about the Monarchy in private.’
Princess Elizabeth may have been ignorant of what was going on, and the Duke and Duchess never spoke of it, but according to Crawfie, ‘it was plain to everyone there was a sudden shadow over the house’.
The whole Royal Family, together with the whole political and Church Establishment, and many ordinary people, were shocked and appalled by the prospect of an abdication, which seemed to strike at the heart of the constitution. But nowhere was it viewed with greater abhorrence than at 145 Piccadilly. According to his official biographer, the Duke of York viewed the possibility, and then the likelihood, of his own succession with ‘unrelieved gloom’.
The accounts of witnesses suggest that this is a gross understatement: desperation and near-panic would be more accurate. To succeed to a throne you neither expected nor wanted, because of the chance of birth and the irresponsibility of a brother! Apart from the accidents of poverty and ill health, it is hard to think of a more terrible and unjust fate.
Alan (‘Tommy’) Lascelles, assistant private secretary to Edward VIII and later private secretary to George VI, wrote privately that he feared Bertie would be so upset by the news, he might break down.
There were lurid stories: that the Duke of York had refused to succeed, and that Queen Mary had agreed to act as Regent for Princess Elizabeth.
Rumours circulated in the American press that the Duke was epileptic (and that Princess Margaret was deaf and dumb).
There was also a whispering campaign, in which Wallis Simpson played a part, that he had ‘a slow brain’ which did not take on ideas quickly and that he was mentally unfit for the job.
On 27th October, when Mrs Simpson obtained a decree nisi, the shadow darkened. The Duke braced himself for the catastrophe, as he saw it, that was about to befall his family and himself. ‘If the worst happens & I have to take over,’ he wrote, with courage, to a courtier on 25 November, ‘you can be assured that I will do my best to clear up the inevitable mess, if the whole fabric does not crumble under the shock and strain of it all.’
Meanwhile, Crawfie and the children took refuge from the atmosphere of tension by attending swimming lessons at the Bath Club, with the Duke and Duchess sometimes turning up to watch.
A week later, the press’s self-imposed embargo on ‘King-tattle’ broke, and the headlines blazoned the name of Mrs Simpson. The Royal Archives contain a chronicle, written by Bertie, which shows the extent of his misery, bordering on hysteria, as he awaited what felt like an execution. In it, he describes a meeting with his mother on December 9th, when the Abdication had become inevitable, and how ‘when I told her what had happened I broke down and sobbed like a child’. There are few more poignant testimonies in the annals of the modern Monarchy than George VI’s account of the occasion he most feared, but could do nothing to prevent:
‘I . . . was present at the fateful moment which made me D’s successor to the Throne. Perfectly calm D signed 5 or 6 copies of the instrument of Abdication & then 5 copies of his message to Parliament, one for each Dominion Parliament. It was a dreadful moment & one never to be forgotten by those present . . . I went to R.L. [Royal Lodge] for a rest . . . But I could not rest alone & returned to the Fort at 5.45. Wigram was present at a terrible lawyer interview . . . I later went to London where I found a large crowd outside my house cheering madly. I was overwhelmed.’
A kind of fatalism took over the Duke, now the King, as the Court which had surrounded – and sought to protect and restrain – his brother, enveloped him, guiding him through the ceremonies of the next few days. There was nothing he could do, except what he was told, and nothing for his family to do except offer sympathy. According to Crawfie’s account, the princesses hugged their father before he left 145 Piccadilly, ‘pale and haggard,’ for the Privy Council in the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet.
To Parliament and the Empire, and the man now called Duke of Windsor, the Abdication Crisis was over. But for King George VI and, though she did not yet appreciate it, his elder daughter, Heiress Presumptive to the Throne, it had just begun.
Chapter 3
SIXTY YEARS LATER, it is still hard to assess the impact of the Abdication of Edward VIII. Arguably it had very little. In the short run, politics was barely affected; there was no last minute appeal by the resigning Monarch for public support, as some had feared there might be; no ‘King’s party’ was put together to back him. Indeed, the smooth management of the transition was a cause for congratulation, and was taken to show the resilience of the Monarchy, and the adaptability of the constitution. Even social critics regarded it as evidence of English establishment solidarity. ‘To engineer the abdication of one King and the enthronement of another in six days,’ wrote Beatrice Webb, ‘without a ripple of mutual abuse within the Royal Family or between it and the Government, or between the Government and the Opposition, or between the governing classes and the workers, was a splendid achievement, accepted by the Dominions and watched by the entire world of foreign states with amazed admiration.’
Nevertheless, it has always been treated as a turning point, and in an important sense it was one. It broke a spell.
In the past, public treatment of the private behaviour of members of the Royal Family had contained a double standard. Since the days of Victoria and Albert, the personal life of royalty had been regarded as, by definition, irreproachable; while at the same time occasionally giving cause for disapproval or hilarity – as in the case of Edward VII when Prince of Wales, and his elder son, the Duke of Clarence. Not since the early nineteenth century, however, had it been a serious constitutional issue. The Abdication made it one – giving to divorce, and to sexual misconduct and marital breakdown, a resonance in the context of royalty, which by the 1930s it was beginning to lose among the upper classes at large. At the same time the dismissal of a King provided a sharp reminder that British monarchs reigned on sufferance, and that the pomp and sycophancy counted for nothing if the rules were disobeyed. During the crisis, there was talk of the greater suitability for the throne of the Duke of Kent – as if the Monarchy was by appointment. It came to nothing, but the mooting of such a notion indicated what the great reigns of the past hundred years had tended to obscure – that Parliament had absolute rights, and that the domestic affections of the Royal Family were as much a part of the tacit contract between Crown and people as everything else.
In theory, the British Monarchy was already, and had long been, little more than a constitutional convenience. How could it be otherwise, with a Royal Family whose position had so frequently depended on parliamentary buttressing, or on a parliamentary decision to pass over a natural claimant in favour of a more appropriate minor branch? ‘If there was a mystic right in any one,’ as Walter Bagehot put it dryly in 1867, ‘that right was plainly in James II.’
Yet, in practice, there had been accretions of sentiment and loyalty which had allowed the obscure origins of the reigning dynasty to be forgotten. As a result, a traditional right or legitimacy had replaced a ‘divine’ one, and a great sanctity had attached to laws of succession unbroken for more than two centuries. The Abdication cut through all this like a knife – taking the Monarchy back as far as 1688, when Parliament had deprived a King of his throne on the grounds of his unfitness for it.
On that occasion, the official explanation was that James II had run away – though in reality there were other reasons for wishing to dispose of a monarch who caused political and sectarian division. In 1936, the ostensible cause of the King’s departure was his refusal to accept the advice of his ministers that he could not marry a divorced woman. Yet the Government’s position was also regarded as a moral, and not just a technical or legalistic one. The King’s relationship with Mrs Simpson was seen as symptomatic. The nation, as one commentator put it, took a dim view of tales of frivolity, luxury and ‘an un-English set of nonceurs’, associated with the new King and minded seeing its throne ‘provide a music-hall turn for low foreign newspapers’.
Although the decision to force Edward VIII to choose between marriage and his crown was reluctant, it was accompanied by a hope and belief that his successor – well-married, and with a family life that commanded wide approval – would set a better example.
But the Monarchy would never be the same again. ‘All the King’s horses and all the King’s men,’ Jimmy Maxton, leader of the left-wing Independent Labour Party, reminded the House of Commons, ‘could not put Humpty-Dumpty back again.’
Not only was the experience regarded, by all concerned, as chastening: there was also a feeling that, though the Monarchy would survive, it had been irrevocably scrambled. Even if George VI had possessed a more forceful character, the circumstances of his accession would have taken from the institution much of its former authority. As it was, the Monarchy could never again be (in the words of a contemporary writer) ‘so socially aggressive, so pushy’ as under George V;
nor could it be so brash as under Edward VIII, whose arrival ‘hatless from the air,’ in John Betjeman’s words, had signalled a desire to innovate. After the Abdication, George VI felt a need to provide reassurance, and to behave with a maximum of caution, as if the vulgar lifting of skirts in the autumn of 1936 had never happened. Yet there could be no simple return to the old position of the Monarch as morally powerful arbitrator, a role played by George V as recently as 1931. Under George VI, royal interventions, even minor ones, diminished. The acceptance of a cypher-monarchy, almost devoid of political independence, began in 1936.
If the Abdication was seen as a success, this was partly because of an accurate assessment that the genetic dice had serendipitously provided a man who would perform the functions of his office in the dutifully subdued way required of him. Indeed, not only the disposition of the Duke of York but the familial virtues of both himself and his wife had been a key element in the equation. The point had been made by Edward VIII in his farewell broadcast, to soften the blow of his departure, when he declared that his brother ‘has one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you and not bestowed on me – a happy home with his wife and children.’
It was also stressed by Queen Mary, when she commended her daughter-in-law as well as her second son to the nation. ‘I know,’ she said with feeling and with meaning, ‘that you have already taken her children to your hearts.’
Everybody appreciated that if the next in line had happened to be a footloose bachelor or wastrel, the outcome might have been very different. As it was, the Duke of York – despite, but perhaps also because of, his personal uncertainties – turned out to be well suited to the difficult task of doing very little conscientiously: a man, in the words of a contemporary eulogizer, ‘ordinary enough, amazing enough, to find it natural and sufficient all his life to know only the sort of people a Symbol King ought to know,’ and, moreover, one who ‘needs no private life different from what it ought to be.’
To restore a faith in the Royal Family’s dedication to duty: that was George VI’s single most important task. There was a sense of treading on eggshells, and banishing the past. As the Coronation approached, the regrettable reason for the King’s accession was glossed over in the souvenir books, and delicately avoided in speeches. The monarchist historian Sir Charles Petrie observed a few years later that there was a tendency to forget all about it, ‘and particularly has this been the case in what may be described as official circles’.
It was partly because the memory of the episode was acutely painful to the King and Queen, as well as to Queen Mary, but it was also because of the embarrassment Edward VIII’s abdication caused to the dynasty, and the difficulty of incorporating an act of selfishness into the seamless royal image. Burying the trauma, however, did not dispose of it, and the physical survival of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor – unprotected by a Court, and often teetering on the brink of indiscretion or indecorum – provided a disquieting shadow, reminding the world of an alternative dynastic story.
By contrast, the existence of ‘the little ladies of 145 Piccadilly’ gave the new Royal Family a trump card. If, in the eyes of the public, the Duchess of Windsor was cast as a seductress, the little ladies offered cotton-clad purity, innocence and, in the case of Princess Elizabeth, hope. It greatly helped that her virtues, described by the press since babyhood, were already well-known. What if she had inherited her uncle’s characteristics instead of her father’s? Fortunately the stock of attributes provided by the sketch-writers did not admit of such a possibility. The ten-and-a-half-year-old Heiress Presumptive, it was confidently observed, possessed ‘great charm and a natural unassuming dignity’. The world not only already knew, but already loved her, and hoped that one day she would ‘rule the world’s greatest Empire’ as Queen.
The discovery that she had become a likely future Monarch, instead of somebody close to the throne with an outside chance of becoming one, seems to have been absorbed by Princess Elizabeth gradually. Although her father’s accession, and the elimination of doubt about the equal rights of royal daughters, placed her first in line, it was not yet certain that she would ever succeed. When Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent was told of her expectations at almost precisely the same age in March 1830, she was reported by her governess to have replied ‘I will be good’. According to Lady Strathmore, when Princess Elizabeth received the news, she ‘was ardently praying for a brother’.
It was still imaginable: the Queen was only thirty-six at the time of the Coronation in May 1937, and shortly before it a rumour spread that she was pregnant.
Increasingly, however, a view of the future with Princess Elizabeth as Monarch was widely accepted. There was even some speculation that Elizabeth might be given the title of Princess of Wales.
According to her sister, the change of status was something they knew about, but did not discuss. ‘When our father became King,’ recalls Princess Margaret, ‘I said to her, “Does that mean you’re going to be Queen?” She replied, “Yes, I suppose it does.” She didn’t mention it again.’
There was also the matter of where they lived. According to Crawfie, Princess Elizabeth reacted with horror when she was told that they were moving to Buckingham Palace. ‘What – you mean for ever?’ According to Princess Margaret, the element of physical disruption was limited. 145 Piccadilly was only a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace, and they had often gone over to see their grandparents, and to play in the garden.
Perhaps the distrust was more in the mind of the governess, who likened setting up home in the Palace to ‘camping in a museum’.
The living quarters were, in any case, soon domesticated after the long era of elderly kings and queens. Elizabeth’s menagerie of toy horses acquired a new setting; and a room overlooking the Palace lawns, which had briefly been her nursery in 1927, was established as a schoolroom.
More important than the change of location was the ending of a way of life. In the months before the Coronation, public attention became unrelenting. Outside the railings at Buckingham Palace, a permanent crowd formed. Inside them, it was impossible to keep up the illusion of being an ordinary family. At 145 Piccadilly, there had been few visitors, most of whom were personal friends. At the Palace, the King had to see visitors or take part in functions for much of the day, and the Queen was busy every afternoon. Before, the little girls had been able to take walks in the park and play with the children of neighbours. At the Palace, royal headquarters of an Empire, there were no neighbours and different standards applied. A famous anecdote illustrated the change. Princess Elizabeth discovered that merely by walking in front of a sentry on ceremonial duty, she could make him present arms; and having made the discovery, she could not resist walking backwards and forwards to see it repeated.
There was a sense of constraint, as well as of power. According to Lajos Lederer, the accession brought an immediate change to Princess Elizabeth’s previously relaxed sittings for Strobl. A detective now accompanied her everywhere, a policeman was always outside, and she ‘no longer referred to Mummy and Papa, but spoke of the King and Queen’.
The Queen seems to have been responsible for taking customary formalities seriously, and seeing that her children did so too. According to Dermot Morrah (a trusted royal chronicler), she insisted ‘that even in the nursery some touches of majesty were not out of place, an argument that had the full approval of Queen Mary’.
One ‘touch of majesty’ involved the serving of nursery meals by two scarlet-liveried footmen. In addition, though nursery food was mainly ‘plain English cooking,’ the menu, for some reason, was in French.
The biggest strain for the Royal Family, however, was the almost intolerable pressure placed upon the new King as he came to terms with his unsought and unwelcome role. ‘It totally altered their lives,’ according to Lady Mountbatten. ‘To begin with, the King would come home very worried and upset.’
George VI’s speech impediment, always a handicap, became a nightmare, and every public appearance a cause of suffering. Although British journalists tactfully avoided mentioning it, foreign ones were less reticent. To the American press, suspicious that the real reason for the Abdication was Mrs Simpson’s American nationality, he remained ‘the stuttering Duke of York’.
The Queen had always taken pleasure from public occasions, and continued to display a much-admired serenity: but the King at first seemed so gauche and unhappy that doubts were raised about whether he could get through his Coronation.
HE MANAGED it none the less. In the early spring of 1937, British newspapers which had loyally kept silent about Mrs Simpson, now loyally built up George VI as a ‘George V second edition’.
Yet there was a sense of him not just as the substitute but also as a reluctant Monarch. Kingsley Martin summed up the mood thus, apostrophizing the thoughts of a supposedly typical member of the public: ‘We would still prefer to cheer Edward, but we know that we’ve got to cheer George. After all, it’s Edward’s fault that he’s not on the throne, and George didn’t ask to get there. He’s only doing his duty, and it’s up to us to show that we appreciate it.’
Martin noted a feeling of relief and sympathy, as much as of rejoicing, and of healing a personal wound.
The Coronation itself had a wider function than the consecration of a new King. It was also Britain putting its best face to the world – the more urgently so because of the international crisis which overshadowed the royal one. Many commentators, viewing the celebration with its hotch-potch of religion, nostalgia, mumbo-jumbo and military display, saw it simultaneously as a reminder to potential aggressors of British imperial might and a reaffirmation of British freedom. For such purposes, the Empire was unblinkingly described as if it were a democratic, almost a voluntary, association.
Comparisons were proudly drawn between the symbols of liberty parading through the streets of London, and the choreographed vulgarities of European fascism. One fervent royalist saw George VI’s Coronation as ‘a pageant more splendid than any dictators can put on: beating Rome and Nuremberg hollow at their own bewildering best, and with no obverse side of compulsion or horror’.
The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski reckoned it a sound investment, as ‘a ceremonial display of the greatness, power and wealth of Britain,’ generating ‘an increased feeling of security, of stability, and the permanence of the British Empire’.
Even the Left was impressed. Kingsley Martin agreed with the view that the British Establishment had upstaged Goebbels – and suggested that the propaganda purpose of the procession and festivities was to show that the Empire was still as strong and united as in 1914, and that Britain suffered from less class conflict than any other nation.
Much depended on the central actor, who made little secret of his deep anxiety about the whole proceeding. Afterwards the King told the former Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, that he had been so dazed by fear for much of the ceremony that he was unaware of what was happening.
However, the Westminster Abbey service went without a hitch, and the Monarch performed his part in it with appropriate gravitas. ‘He carried himself well,’ judged Chips Channon, who witnessed the ceremony as one of several thousand MPs, peers and other dignitaries in the congregation.
A more privileged position among the spectators was given to the two princesses, who sat in the royal box with Queen Mary. For Elizabeth, particularly, the day was an important part of her education. Her governess prepared her for it by reading her Queen Victoria’s account of her own Coronation, written exactly a century before, which began, ‘I was awoke by the guns in the Park and could not get much sleep afterwards on account of the people, bands etc.’ According to Crawfie, the elder princess took such a deep interest that she became ‘one of the greatest living experts on Coronations’.
The girls rode to the Abbey in a glass coach. Chips Channon looked on as they ‘whipped their robes on to their left arms as they had been shown, pushing up their frocks with the same movement and showing bare legs above socks’.
During the three-hour ceremony, Elizabeth watched intently as the Archbishop of Canterbury performed the complex rites, and her father, with the utmost difficulty, repeated the words ‘All this – I promise to do’.
For any child to view the Coronation at close quarters was a memorable experience: only a handful had the opportunity. For the Heiress Presumptive to see her own parents crowned, and to take part in the procession, must have been awesome. What did she think and feel? The Royal Library contains her own answer – an essay, both vivid and prosaic, written in pencil on lined paper just after the event, and carefully tied with pink ribbon. On the cover is inscribed, in neat red crayon, the words:
The Coronation
12th May; 1937
To Mummy and Papa
In Memory of Their Coronation
From Lilibet
By Herself
An Account of the Coronation
It describes how she was woken at five in the morning by the band of the Royal Marines outside her window (much as her great-great grandmother had been woken by the guns in the Park), and how, draped in an eiderdown and accompanied by her nurse-maid Bobo MacDonald, ‘we crouched in the window looking onto a cold, misty morning’. After breakfast (‘we did not eat very much as we were too excited’) they got dressed and
showed ourselves to the visitors and housemaids. Now I shall try and give you a description of our dresses. They were white silk with old cream lace and had little gold bows all the way down the middle. They had puffed sleeves with one little bow in the centre. Then there were the robes of purple velvet with gold on the edge.
We went along to Mummy’s bedroom and we found her putting on her dress. Papa was dressed in a white shirt, breeches and stockings, and over this he wore a crimson satin coat. Then a page came and said it was time to go down, so we kissed Mummy, and wished her good luck and went down. There we said Goodmorning to Aunt Alice, Aunt Marina and Aunt Mary with whom we were to drive to the Abbey. We were then told to get into the carriage . . . At first it was very jolty but we soon got used to it.
Princess Elizabeth describes the procession down the Mall, along Whitehall, to Westminster Abbey, and the walk up the aisle with her family, before she went up into the royal box with Queen Mary:
Then the service began.
I thought it all very, very wonderful and I expect the Abbey did, too. The arches and beams at the top were covered with a sort of haze of wonder as Papa was crowned, at least I thought so.
When Mummy was crowned and all the peeresses put on their coronets it looked wonderful to see arms and coronets hovering in the air and then the arms disappear as if by magic. Also the music was lovely and the band, the orchestra and the new organ all played beautifully.
What struck me as being rather odd was that Grannie did not remember much of her own Coronation. I should have thought that it would have stayed in her mind for ever.
At the end the service got rather boring as it was all prayers. Grannie and I were looking to see how many more pages to the end, and we turned one more and then I pointed to the word at the bottom of the page and it said “Finis”. We both smiled at each other and turned back to the service.
. . . When we got back to our dressing-room we had some sandwiches, stuffed rolls, orangeade and lemonade. Then we left for our long drive.
On leaving the Abbey we went along the Embankment, Northumberland Avenue, through Trafalgar Square, St. James’s St. Piccadilly, Regent St. Oxford St. with Selfridge’s lovely figures, through Marble Arch, through Hyde Park, Hyde Park Corner, Constitution Hill, round the Memorial and into the courtyard.
Then we went up to the corridor to see the Coach coming in. Then Mummy and Papa came up and said “Goodmorning” and were congratulated. Then we all went on to the Balcony where millions of people were waiting below. After that we all went to be photographed in front of those awful lights.
When we sat down to tea it was nearly six o’clock! When I got into bed my legs ached terribly. As my head touched the pillow I was asleep and I did not wake up till nearly eight o’clock the next morning.
PRINCESS ELIZABETH was eleven at the time of the Coronation, and it was an initiation for her, as well as for her parents. The day was not far off, as one writer put it in the royalty idiom of the time, when she would move out of childhood ‘into a swifter current of life.’
Pretty and pubescent, she attracted nearly as much attention as the King and Queen during the two months of state drives, official tours and youth displays that followed. Although she continued to be dressed as a little girl, there was an increase in the number of grand occasions in which she was involved. There was also a sudden seriousness about equipping her for future duties.
One new initiative was the establishment of a Girl Guide company at the Palace, to which a Brownie pack was attached, with the specific purpose of providing the two princesses with a training ground. Based on a romantic myth of imperial kinship, the Scouts and Guides were at their zenith, and several members of the Royal Family had honorific titles within the movement. The Buckingham Palace Company met on Wednesday afternoons and gathered together about twenty children of friends and vetted acquaintances – some, like the royal princesses, taught at home by governesses, others attending London day schools. The Guides were grouped in three patrols. Princess Elizabeth was second-in-command to Patricia Mountbatten, who was a few years older, in the Kingfisher patrol. In winter they met in one of the vast rooms in Buckingham Palace, in the summer in the gardens. There were also trips to Windsor, involving the normal activities of Girl Guides everywhere, though in an abnormal setting: tracking, bird watching, trekking with a hand-cart, cooking sausages and ‘dampers’ (flour balls on sticks) over a campfire. At the Palace, the long corridors were used for signalling practice.
Princess Elizabeth received no special treatment, and mixed in well with the other girls. According to Lady Mountbatten, she was ‘a very efficient and capable deputy,’ already with an air of authority, and popular in the Company, ‘nice, easy to deal with, you’d want her as your best friend’.
Another member of the Company, Elizabeth Cavendish, confirms the impression of the Heiress Presumptive as a highly competent Girl Guide, who took the various activities and rituals seriously, and did well at them.
When a Scottish dancer came to give them special instruction, Princess Elizabeth showed a particular proficiency at dancing Highland reels.
The picture is of a conventional, unquestioning child, making the most of what was presented to her. Yet if Princess Elizabeth was not singled out, there was something different about her. ‘She was very aware that how she behaved in public was very important,’ says Lady Mountbatten. ‘For instance, she couldn’t burst into tears. If she hurt her knee she knew she must try not to cry.’
The Company Captain was a Miss Synge, held in awe by the girls, with Miss Crawford assisting. Some of the Guides, Patricia Mountbatten and Camilla Wallop (later Lady Rupert Nevill), for instance, became lifelong friends.
Punch, 28th April 1937
It was not just cut knees. Incidents in the Kingfisher patrol were not, in general, leaked or reported. However, other events in Princess Elizabeth’s life now were – as the press, less intrusive than later but no less curious, sought to cater for a huge public appetite for details about the royal children’s lives. The princesses might not be able to cry over a minor mishap, but grazes and slight colds often got into the papers just the same. Even before their teens, public appearances had become performances. If the royal children were taken to the theatre, the newspapers automatically treated them as the main attraction – reporting every movement or gesture next day. Sometimes the theatre management, delighted by the privilege of entertaining royalty, would shower honours on them, and the spotlight would be turned in their direction. When the Heiress Presumptive attended the 1937 Christmas production of ‘Where the Rainbow Ends’ at the Holborn Empire, along with fifteen hundred other children, everybody was asked to stand and sing a specially composed children’s verse of the National Anthem.
‘Normal’ expeditions and natural behaviour were difficult.
The birthday of Princess Elizabeth, meanwhile, became a national event. Birthday presents were listed even in the serious newspapers, together with details of the guests and of how the anniversary was being celebrated. Stimulated by these public announcements, well-wishers would gather wherever the Princess happened to be, to cheer her and convey greetings, and she would be required to appear, and politely acknowledge them.
She also became the recipient of a flow of unsolicited mail, often from children in disaster areas, like Chinese orphans fleeing from the Japanese.
Some aspects of the princesses’ lives did not greatly alter. The family continued to come together for weekends at Royal Lodge, where their existence remained much as it had been before. The press made much of the ‘simplicity’ of life at the Lodge, although actually the Royal Family enjoyed every luxury, opportunity for recreation, and service that anybody could wish for. Still, it was possible to enjoy a degree of informality. Here they could enjoy, if not simple living, then the kind of rustic domesticity which had been the greatest pleasure of the Duke and Duchess of York before the upheaval, in the company of horses and dogs unconscious of rank, with grooms, stable boys and kennel hands to look after, handle and talk about them. Princess Elizabeth’s ponies had names like Peggy and Comet; the dogs included corgis, labradors and a Tibetan lion dog, and had names like Dookie, Spark, Flash, Scruffy, Mimsey and Stiffy. The public took a keen interest in these animals. ‘Dookie is unquestionably the “character” of the princesses’ delightful canine family,’ declared one authority in 1942.
On Sundays, the girls and their parents attended services at St George’s Chapel or the Chapel Royal in the grounds of Royal Lodge; on Saturdays, and other days during holidays, the princesses went riding in the morning. Sometimes they walked in Windsor Forest, cycled in the royal gardens at Frogmore or swam in an outdoor pool at the Lodge. All that was lacking was the company of other children of whom they saw as little, or less, than at Buckingham Palace.
Juvenile guests were rare. However, the King and Queen had to entertain official, and especially foreign, visitors who were invited to stay with increasing frequency as fears about the international crisis grew. According to Crawfie, Princess Elizabeth began to take an interest in politics at about this time, ‘and knew quite a bit of what was going on in the world outside’.
She certainly had a unique vantage point compared with most other children of her age. In one month in 1938, four kings, a regent and a crown prince called on her parents, mainly on trips to London to rally support in defence of their countries. Visitors to Windsor early in the reign included the newly appointed American Ambassador, Joe Kennedy, and his wife Rose, who stayed for a weekend in April 1938. Rose Kennedy was moved by her brief contact with British royalty, especially its younger members. She recorded in her diary that she ‘found it a great conversational convenience’ that her own large brood included two children, Teddy and Jean, who were about the same ages as the princesses. During her stay, she watched out for the royal daughters, much as one might look out for rare and exotic birds when visiting their habitat, and she was not disappointed. While walking in the park surrounding the Castle, she and Joe ‘ran into Princess Elizabeth hiding behind the shrubs. She had on a pink coat and was hatless and she smiled at us’. The Kennedys saw her again over luncheon, when Elizabeth and Margaret appeared together, clad identically in rose dresses with checked blouses, red shoes with silver-coloured buckles, white socks and necklaces of coral and pearl. Elizabeth, not quite twelve, was placed next to the wicked old envoy, to his saturnine delight. After the meal, the princesses were required to accompany their parents and the ambassadorial couple as they walked ‘very informally’ over to Frogmore.
Learning how to handle distinguished guests was one important part of an Heiress’s education, and was soon extended. Shortly after the Kennedy visit, Princess Elizabeth was promoted from white socks to silk stockings, receiving a box from her mother as a birthday present.
She started to attend the huge, thousands-strong, garden parties held annually at Buckingham Palace. She also began occasionally to take a leading role at small-scale semi-public events, presenting rosettes at children’s pony shows, and cups and shields to children at the Bath Club. When she was thirteen, she was allowed to accept the presidency of the Children’s League of the Princess Elizabeth of York Hospital, which had been named after her.
There remained the question, both practical and philosophical, of what an Heiress Presumptive and future Queen should be educated to be like – a conundrum that had not faced the Court or Government since the 1830s, when Princess Victoria’s education had been entrusted to the remarkable Baroness Lehzen. Marion Crawford had been employed to help the princesses become lady-like, not monarchical. After George VI’s accession, there was a hesitant appreciation that being lady-like was not enough, but there remained a tension between the training felt suitable for a Head of State, and the needs of an idealized princess. The result was an incongruous mix. If the notion, as an authorized account claimed, that the Princess was subjected to ‘a strenuous tutelage increasing in measure with the passing years’,
was simply a pious invention, there was at least some expansion of the curriculum. Princess Elizabeth began to take twice weekly lessons in constitutional history at Eton College, close to Windsor Castle and Royal Lodge, given by the Vice-Provost, Henry (later Sir Henry) Marten. Later this tuition was supplemented by that of the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue, who taught both princesses French, French literature and European history.
Yet there was also a deep concern to avoid the taint of an ‘intellectual’ as opposed to ‘practical’ princess. It was therefore announced that she was taking cooking lessons in the Royal Lodge kitchens, that she sometimes baked cakes in her little Welsh cottage which were sent to children in hospitals or to unemployed areas, that she had learnt to sweep and scrub and to polish furniture, and that Queen Mary, ‘a keen housewife,’ had admired her efforts.
Marten did his best. The theme of his tutelage combined the traditional and the modern, reminding the Princess of where she came from, but also of the changes wrought by modern conditions. Later, he recalled teaching her that the British Monarchy was exceeded in antiquity only by the papacy, that it went back more than a millennium to King Egbert, ‘the first to unite all England,’ and that the secret of its survival was its ability to adapt. He also taught her what he considered the two great events affecting the Monarchy in their own time, the 1931 Statute of Westminster and the advent of broadcasting. The Statute, he explained, had founded the modern British Commonwealth by making a common allegiance to the Crown the sole surviving link between Great Britain and the Dominions; while broadcasting enabled the Royal Family, by talking personally on the air, to sustain that link.
How much his pupil retained is hard to say, though he may have fired her interest in the past a little. When Princess Marie Louise apologized over dinner at Windsor during the Second World War for indulging in an old lady’s reminiscences, the teenage Princess replied: ‘But Cousin Louise, it’s history, and therefore so thrilling.’
But perhaps she was just being polite.
Yet if the Princess began to build up an academic knowledge from her tutor, as well as an extraordinary acquaintanceship with some of the major players on the world stage, if she was known to millions of young people all over the world and occasionally seen by a few thousand of them – she nevertheless remained separate from all but a handful of carefully selected contemporaries, with few of whom she could ever be close. There is always a sense of the goldfish bowl, and the lack of any direct contact through the glass.
In some ways, she was very mature for her age. Physically, she developed early, with ‘big bosoms just like her mother’, as a member of a courtier family, who played kick-the-tin with her at Balmoral in the late 1930s, fondly recalls.
In other ways, silk stockings notwithstanding, she was held back in childhood. Marten remembered teaching ‘a somewhat shy girl of thirteen who when asked a question would look for confidence and support to her beloved governess, Miss Crawford.’
Crawfie herself suggests a lonely, yet self-sufficient, child, and one with her own private world of perplexity. She recalled seeing her stand for hours at the window at Buckingham Palace, looking down the Mall towards Admiralty Arch, and that she would ask her questions ‘about the world outside’.
The picture of a young princess who lacked nothing except social intercourse with people who did not think of her, first and always, as a princess, is confirmed by Elizabeth’s own recollections. When she was having her portrait painted in the Yellow Drawing-Room by Pietro Annigoni shortly after her own Accession, she told the artist that she had spent hours as a child in the same huge, magnificent room, looking out of the windows. ‘I loved watching the people and the cars there in the Mall,’ she said. ‘They all seemed so busy. I used to wonder what they were doing and where they were all going, and what they thought about outside the Palace.’
WAR, AND THE threat of war, ups the value of Monarchy. As the danger from Hitler grew, and the rearmament programme gathered pace, the King and Queen became increasingly busy as hosts, ambassadors and patriotic symbols. Two days before the signing of the Munich agreement in the autumn of 1938, the twelve-year-old Princess Elizabeth travelled with her mother to Clydebank for the launch of the giant Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth, destined to be used both for civilian passengers and as a troop ship. Usually, however, the royal couple did their visiting and travelling unaccompanied by their children who, it was felt, were better off at home. In the case of the foreign trips which the King and Queen were now required to make, there was no sense that, quite apart from the advantages of keeping the family together, seeing other countries would be educational.
The most important royal visit of the decade took place in 1939. Following a brief and apparently successful trip to France in July 1938 to strengthen the Entente Cordiale, it was decided to send the royal couple to North America, to strengthen the special relationship. Before the journey, President Roosevelt invited ‘either or both’ the princesses, genially observing in his letter that ‘I shall try to have one or two Roosevelts of approximately the same age to play with them!’ It was an exciting offer, but the King declined it, on the grounds that they were too young for the rigours of the Canadian part of the tour.
By the time of embarkation in May 1939, Franco had taken Madrid, Hitler had marched into Prague, and a full-scale European conflict seemed imminent. Interest in the tour on both sides of the Atlantic was intense. Perhaps the wild excitement that greeted the King and Queen from the moment they landed in Canada on 17 May would have been even greater if their daughters had been with them. As it was, the visitors had to content themselves with the first-ever royal transatlantic telephone call, taken by the princesses at the Bowes-Lyon house at St. Paul’s Walden Bury.
The King and Queen spoke through hand microphones; the children finished their end of the conversation by holding the Queen’s corgi and making him bark by pinching him.
After three weeks in Canada, the King and Queen were fêted in the United States by the President (‘He is so easy to get to know,’ wrote a grateful Monarch, ‘& never makes one feel shy’), before reembarking from Canada on 15 June. Deeply moved by his reception, and relieved that it was over, the King ‘nearly cried’ – as he later confessed – at the end of his final speech before departing. It was, wrote his biographer, ‘a climacture in the King’s life,’ while at the same time ‘an undeniable wrench to leave homeland and family under such uncertain conditions’.
Presumably it was also a wrench for his children, despite the telephone call. In the press, the six-week parting was widely discussed as an example of the high level of sacrifice the royal couple were prepared to make for the public good. Some interest was also taken in the feelings of their daughters, and the leave-taking at Portsmouth at the beginning of the trip became a moment of sentimental drama.
Keen attention was paid to the princesses as they were taken aboard their parents’ ship before she sailed. Elizabeth at thirteen, it was observed, was nearly as tall as her mother. There was a change in the way she dressed – no longer in ‘babyish, bonnet-shaped hats,’ wearing instead a tilted cap, with the hem-line of her coat and dress lowered to below her knees.
The faces of both girls were scrutinized for signs of emotion. According to one witness, ‘they looked somewhat forlorn when, at length, amid tremendous cheering, the hooting of sirens, and the God-speed of thousands of onlookers, the mighty liner, bearing their Majesties, slowly glided out of the harbour.’
According to another, when the princesses returned to the jetty, ‘Margaret’s face puckered up, Elizabeth looked tearful . . . ,’ while the King and Queen could be seen gazing after them, ‘until the two little figures merged into the blue of thronged quays’.
During the tour, Elizabeth sent her mother photographs, and made a film of Margaret and the pets with a cine-camera. Various diversions of an educational sort were arranged by Queen Mary. One was a visit to the Bank of England to see the gold in the vaults. Naturally, the Governor, Montagu Norman, accompanied them. The old Queen was sincere in her didactic aims. However, in the prevailing mood such excursions almost inevitably became public events as well as private ones, despite strenuous efforts by Buckingham Palace to prevent, or at any rate contain, publicity. ‘I think that the question of the press and press photographers in connection with the outings of T.R.H.s Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret will have to be seriously considered,’ Sir Eric Miéville, the courtier responsible for press relations, wrote to the King’s private secretary following a trip to London Zoo which was widely covered in the picture papers. ‘What happens now is that by some extraordinary means, unknown to me, whenever they are due to visit an institution, news always leaks out ahead to certain members of the press . . . One has to remember that in these days such information given to the newspapers is worth money.’
The homecoming of the King and Queen was almost as dramatic as the departure. The princesses prepared for it by spring-cleaning the ‘Little House’.
The press did so by sending every available reporter to Southampton, where a destroyer, the Kempenfelt, had been ordered to carry the children to the liner Empress of Britain for a family reunion. ‘Blue eyes sparkling, hair blowing,’ the girls were piped on board the Kempenfelt.
Solemnly, they shook hands with each of the ship’s officers, before sailing out to meet their parents in the Solent. After they had been brought together and returned to shore, the whole royal party proceeded by train to Waterloo, whence they rode in state to Buckingham Palace, the two princesses beside the King and Queen in the leading carriage.
Chapter 4
‘WE NEVER SEEMED to get really settled again after the Canada-America visit of 1939,’ recalled Crawfie.
The trip marked the end of the tight family life that had survived the move out of 145 Piccadilly, and the start of intermittent separations and comings-together that lasted until 1945. The Royal Family had a good war – by the standards of almost every other royal house a stupendous one, emerging with its reputation enhanced, and much of the damage done by the Abdication repaired. Yet the psychology of the achievement was complicated. Much depended on the passivity of the Symbol King, and the serenity of his family life. Loyalty to the Monarchy waxed as the nation’s fear grew, and acquired a character of hope and yearning – different from the sentimentalities and social conservatism of peacetime – which, as the end approached, turned to gratitude toward a King who had no way of affecting the outcome. Meanwhile, his children became representatives of what the fighting was about, their pre-war immaturity and innocence frozen in aspic. ‘One felt,’ in the words of a writer of the period, ‘that these engaging little people would never grow up’.
The symbolism was heightened by a mystery. For security reasons, the whereabouts of the girls were kept secret, and the images of them that appeared in the press were set against an unknown, unidentifiable background, adding to a sense of them as magical princesses whose fate was linked to the national destiny.
The Royal Family was at Balmoral until just before the declaration of war on September 3rd. The King returned to London on August 23rd, his wife five days later. The children were despatched to Birkhall, the first of their mysterious locations, where they were cared for and guarded by a retinue headed by an equerry, and including a chauffeur, a police sergeant and several constables.
Lessons of a sort continued, Crawfie reading newspapers out loud, ‘trying as far as possible to give them some idea of what was happening without too many horrible details.’
Marten posted history papers, and Princess Elizabeth sent him essays for correction. Girl Guide meetings took place in the village hall. So did ‘war-work’, which consisted of a large sewing party mainly made up of women from the royal estate. At Christmas they went to Sandringham, and then to Royal Lodge until May, with the Queen in residence for much of the time. Here there was more Girl Guiding, with the unusual ingredient of evacuees from the East End, bringing the girls into fleeting contact with urban working-class children.
‘Thank you so very much for the books you and Mr Chamberlain sent me for my birthday,’ Princess Elizabeth wrote to the Prime Minister’s wife on 23 April 1940. ‘It was so kind of you and I have always wanted to read them. I hope you are both well and that Mr Chamberlain is not too tired. Thanking you again so much.’
Mr Chamberlain was, however, shortly to be relieved of his responsibilities. On 8 May , following the debate on the Norway campaign, he was forced to resign. Two days later, Winston Churchill drove to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands as his successor. On 12 May, as Hitler invaded the Low Countries, the princesses were moved into the great fortress of Windsor Castle, where they were to live for most of the war. ‘We went there for a weekend,’ as Princess Margaret recalls, ‘and we stayed for five years.’
For a while, they slept in the dungeons. Princess Margaret remembers having to run to get to the shelter under Brunswick Tower. Yet she thought of it as a happy time.
Her sister felt much the same. She later told Harold Nicolson that she would like to make Windsor her home, rather than Buckingham Palace or Sandringham, since all the happiest memories of her childhood were associated with the Castle and the Park.
The girls lived in pampered seclusion, in conditions, as Morrah put it after the war, ‘favourable to the quiet business of the schoolroom, though perhaps less for the enlargement of human contacts.’
There was a shifting band of soldiers, often Grenadier Guards, for company. With an informality hard to imagine in peacetime, they ate with their governesses and one or two officers in the State Dining Room, where a single light bulb hung from the ceiling in place of a chandelier.
At first, the King and Queen stayed at Windsor, commuting to Buckingham Palace. Later, after the worst of the bombing, they returned to London, visiting the Castle only at weekends.
How should the royal children be used in wartime? Some of the best minds in the Ministry of Information addressed the problem with, as usual, contradictory results. On the one hand, it was decided to make much of the princesses’ privations at a ‘place in the country,’ where they bore their loneliness stoically, for the national good. On the other, government propaganda used them as the centre-piece to a tableau of the perfect family hearth, confidently and comfortably immune to the threats of vulgar dictators. To project such an image, they would be shown, in pictures or prose, relaxing on sofas and rugs, surrounded by proud parents and placid pets. These two, separate, ways of imagining the King’s daughters were sometimes combined. Later in the war, when victory was in sight, the second tended to predominate. Initially, when the need for sacrifice was greatest, the emphasis was on the first.
The presentation of the girls as victims of the family-rending impact of war provided the theme of Princess Elizabeth’s first broadcast, delivered in October 1940 when she was fourteen-and-a-half, and directed at British children evacuated to North America, though actually intended to influence adult opinion in the United States, and the US Government, as well.
That the broadcast took place at all was a retreat by Buckingham Palace and a sign of how dire the emergency had become. Pre-war requests for Princess Elizabeth to speak on the air had been met by curt refusals. In 1938, the influential owner of the New York Herald Tribune, Helen Reid, was brusquely rebuffed when she asked if the Princess might make a five-minute broadcast to open National Children’s Week in the United States. Mrs Reid had used the powerful argument that such a gesture would be in keeping with the British Government’s policy of doing everything possible to bring America and Great Britain together. She had added, a little less tactfully, that it would also assuage American bitterness over the treatment of the Duke of Windsor at the time of his marriage.
Referring the matter to Buckingham Palace, the British ambassador wrote dismissively of such ‘attempts to enlist the princesses for stunts’.
The Palace strongly agreed, and confirmed ‘that there is, of course, no question of the princesses broadcasting, nor is it likely to be considered for many years to come’.
The autumn of 1940, however, was no time to be fastidious, where a chance of influencing American public opinion was concerned. When the Director-General of the BBC, Frederick Ogilvie, approached the King’s private secretary, he immediately received a favourable answer.
The plan was to get Princess Elizabeth to introduce a series of ‘Children in Wartime’ programmes, intended to bring out the part children could play in the nation’s defence. The Princess’s brief statement would go out live in the short-wave service to the United States and Canada, and later be heard in recorded form all over the world. The unofficial aim of pulling adult heartstrings was made clear to the King and Queen. ‘As Her Royal Highness’s first broadcast, delivered at an historic moment,’ Ogilvie explained to the Palace, ‘it would reach the minds of the millions who heard it with a singular poignancy.’
The broadcast went out on 13 October. The Princess read a carefully scripted text which linked her own recent life and that of her sister to the lives of displaced British children overseas. ‘Thousands of you in this country have had to leave your homes and be separated from your father and mother,’ she told her listeners, in a high-pitched, precise voice which The Times likened to that of her mother.
‘My sister Margaret Rose and I feel so much for you, as we know from experience what it means to be away from those we love most of all.’ There was an expression of optimism (‘We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well.’) A final exchange with the ten-year-old Princess Margaret was also in the prepared text: ‘My sister is by my side, and we are both going to say good night to you. Come on, Margaret.’ ‘Good night,’ said a smaller voice. ‘Good night and good luck to you all.’
Jock Colville, private secretary to the Prime Minister and later to Princess Elizabeth, wrote in his diary that he and Diana Sandys, Winston Churchill’s daughter, who listened to the broadcast with him, ‘were embarrassed by the sloppy sentiment she was made to express, but her voice was most impressive and, if the Monarchy survives, Queen Elizabeth II should be a most successful radio Queen’.
Sloppiness was what the occasion seemed to require: the broadcast was hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as a propaganda triumph, at a time when triumphs of any kind were sparse. It attracted particularly wide attention in the United States and made the front pages, with a picture in all the New York papers. ‘Princess yesterday huge success here,’ the local BBC representative cabled to Ogilvie. ‘Some stations report telephone exchanges jammed with requests for repeat.’
Such was the quantity and enthusiasm of fan mail that the BBC turned the broadcast into a gramophone record for sale in America and throughout the Empire.
The guise of the princesses as typically lonely displaced children reinforced another part of the Ministry of Information’s offensive: a projection of the King and Queen as typical Londoners carrying on regardless in spite of the Blitz. It helped to give the broadcast impact, indeed it might almost have been part of the plot, that Buckingham Palace had received a direct hit a few weeks earlier. Pictures of brave little girls in the country and their brave parents among the rubble mixed together in the public imagination. Mass Observation, the precursor of in-depth polling, recorded a mood of indignation and defiance, in which royalty played a part. ‘If they hurt the King and Queen or the princesses we’d be so mad we’d blast every German out of existence,’ declared a supposedly typical female clerk.
Sometimes the children were shown on a pony cart with a corgi beside them, without adults, alone in a park. According to one early wartime account, walkers near their home would ‘meet the two girls jogging along hatless, laughing, and talking merrily, taking it in turns to hold the reins, which they do gracefully with ribbons threaded in orthodox fashion over the first finger and under the thumb of the left hand’.
The impression was of free spirits, self-sufficient and unharmed in their own secret world. The contrast between this fairy land and bombed-out cities was stark. But there was also the other guise: children in the perfect family, whose domestic happiness was to be protected by the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Empire as if it were their own. In this version, the children were never alone. Indeed, the presence of the King and Queen was a key ingredient.
It was important, as Simon Schama has observed, that a monarchy should appear as ‘the family of families, at once dynastic and domestic, remote and accessible, magical and mundane’.
In a total war, the importance of the Windsors’ as the ‘family of families’ increased because conditions on the home front, in addition to the foreign danger, were shaking non-royal family life to its foundations. The same had been true in the First World War. However, there had been a significant shift since 1914–18, partly because of the milder temperament of George VI, compared to his father, and the circumstances of his accession; and partly because his Royal Family, unlike the one he was born into, was conveniently young, nuclear and comprehensible. In the First War, George V had been portrayed as patriarchal, even god-like, a warrior monarch to whom duty was owed. In the Second World War, the whole ‘family of families’ was given prominence as a unit, with the King and Queen frequently shown in the company of their children, underscoring the domestic affections and virtues that the war was about.
Here it is particularly difficult to separate image from reality, because witnesses to royal domesticity were subject to the same media messages as everybody else, and the dutiful Windsors themselves, hounded by the pressures of what was expected of them, were on their best behaviour when being observed. In the context of such necessary and powerful myths, the royal actors had little choice but to play their allotted parts.
Would Edward VIII, had he lasted, have been selfish and truculent in wartime, or would he have risen to the occasion? It is an interesting speculation. As it was, the stammering King whom some had believed could not survive the ordeal of being crowned, seemed able to adapt in war, as in peace, to the requirements of his job. These consisted mainly of being photographed, taking part in public ceremonies, and personally bestowing honours – sometimes, because of the fighting, decorating several hundred servicemen in a single session. It also involved, and this was an especially vital role, making important visitors feel pleased to have had the opportunity of meeting him and his family. Surprisingly, this became something that George VI was particularly good at. The strange combination of his own social ineptitude, the Queen’s ability to make whoever she addressed feel that they were the one person to whom she wished to speak, and their daughters’ lack of affectation, provided a recipe for putting people at their ease.
Were they as genuinely pleased to see an endless flow of visitors as they seemed, or was it all act? Noël Coward asked himself this question after experiencing what he called ‘an exhibition of unqualified “niceness” from all concerned’ during a meeting with the Royal Family in 1942. He concluded that it did not matter. Putting oneself out was part of the job of royalty. ‘I’ll settle for anyone who does their job well, anyhow.’
Few others, however, came away feeling that it was just for show. For most who encountered the Family informally, the wonder of being in the presence of Monarchy in an Empire at war was combined with an uplifting sense of inclusion, as if they themselves were family members. The result was a miasma of shared affection, of which the grateful visitor felt both spectator and part. When Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia (herself a refugee) met them in 1944, she immediately decided that ‘this was the sort of home life I wanted, with children and dogs playing at my feet.’
General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who spent a shooting weekend with them in Norfolk in the same year, came away with a similar feeling – recording his impression of ‘one of the very best examples of family life. A thoroughly close-knit and happy family all wrapped up in each other.’
Nobody referred, in their descriptions of the King, to his intellectual capacities, his political judgement, or his knowledge of the war. Yet so far from being a handicap, George VI’s limitations – and his awareness of them – were turned into a precious source of strength. One Gentleman Usher fondly described him as ‘a plodder’ – a man of simple ideas, with a strong sense of what he ought to do. Much was made of such decent ordinariness, which meant confronting what others had to face without complaint – and included such self-denials as not seeking to escape the Blitz, or trying to give his daughters a privileged immunity from danger by sending them with other rich children to Canada. It also meant frugality, and strict obedience to government rules – a topic which played a major part in the use of royalty for propaganda. Thus, in April 1940, the public was informed that at the celebration of Princess Elizabeth’s fourteenth birthday, the Queen had decreed that the three-tier anniversary cake should be limited to plain sponge, as an economy.
There were many tales of economy with clothing coupons, and of how the Queen cut down and altered her own dresses for Elizabeth, adapting these in turn for Margaret, so that ‘with the three of us, we manage in relays’.
This was not just for public consumption. When Eleanor Roosevelt visited Buckingham Palace late in 1942, she found an adherence to heat, water and food restrictions that was almost a fetish. Broken window panes in her bedroom had been replaced with wood, and her bath had a painted black line above which she was not supposed to run the water.
Nevertheless, there remained a wide gulf between the life lived by the Royal Family, with their houses, parks and horses, and retinue of servants, and the conditions of their subjects. After a bomb struck the Palace, the Queen was supposed to have said: ‘Now we can look the East End in the face’. The East End, however, was not able to retreat to Windsor to catch up on sleep, or to spend recuperative holidays in Norfolk and Scotland. Nor was the East End able to supplement its diet with pheasants and venison shot on the royal estates.
Indeed some aspects of royal life went on remarkably undisturbed. There was little interruption to the riding lessons given to the princesses by Horace Smith, which continued throughout the war. Training with Smith involved pony carts, which (as he later observed) had the particular advantage in wartime that journeys in them did not require petrol. With future troop-reviewing in mind, Smith also taught Princess Elizabeth to ride side-saddle. Occasions for demonstrating equestrian prowess did not cease, either. In 1943, Smith personally awarded Princess Elizabeth first prize in the Royal Windsor Horse Show for her driving of a ‘utility vehicle,’ harnessed to her own black Fell pony – a trophy she won again the following year, both times in the presence of the King and Queen.
Watching was a developing interest, as well as riding or driving. In the spring of 1942, the Princess was taken by her parents to the Beckhampton stables on the Wiltshire Downs, where horses bred at the royal studs were trained, to see two royal horses, Big Game and Sun Chariot, which were highly fancied for the Derby and the Oaks. The jockey Sir Gordon Richards later recalled his meeting with the sixteen-year-old girl ‘who took them all in’, and was quizzed about them by her father as they worked, causing the royal trainer Fred Darling to remark loyally ‘that Princess Elizabeth must have a natural eye for a horse’. Visits to see the mares and foals at the royal stud at Hampton Court, and to see the royal horses in training at Newmarket followed.
Other pursuits also involved opportunities not available to most compatriots. In October 1942, Princess Elizabeth made her contribution to the royal larder by shooting her first stag in the hills at Balmoral – using a rifle she had been taught to handle the previous year.
In the autumn of 1943, she hunted with the Garth Foxhounds, and later with the Duke of Beaufort’s Hounds in Gloucestershire.
The decision to allow her to go hunting was taken, according to a report, ‘in accord with the general policy of making her life as “normal” as possible’ in the light of her position as Heiress Presumptive.
There were also private entertainments. The King, despite his shyness, was a good dancer, and especially enjoyed dancing in the company of his children. He did not allow the war to curtail this particular pastime. A number of royal balls were held. Princess Elizabeth attended her first at Windsor in July 1941, when she was fifteen. A West End dance band played foxtrots, waltzes and rumbas to the Royal Family and their guests, who included Guards officers, until two in the morning, and Elizabeth danced several times with her father.
Later in the war, before the start of flying bombs in 1944, dances were held fortnightly in the Bow Room on the ground floor at Buckingham Palace. On one occasion the King, oblivious to cares of state, his stammer forgotten, led his family and other guests in a conga line through the corridors and state rooms.
FOR MAXIMUM BENEFIT to the war effort, the privacy of the Royal Family needed to be less than complete. If life at Windsor and Buckingham Palace had been simply private, its exemplary virtues could scarcely have been known to loyal subjects. For this reason, as The Times observed just after the end of the war, ‘many glimpses’ of the Royal Family’s home life had ‘reached a wide public, through illustrated journals and the cinema’.
One avid supplier to the illustrated journals, and propagator of royal mythology, was the photographer Lisa Sheridan who, by her own testimony, never failed to come away from a professional visit to the Royal Family without feeling a better person. Her recollections of the princesses in wartime are interesting not only because her pictures of wagging puppy tails, happy children and proud parents became fixed in the Empire’s imagination, but also because she provides a distillation of the ‘family of families’ miasma in its purest form.
In her memoirs, Mrs Sheridan described several wartime trips to see the princesses. Her account of the first, to Royal Lodge in early 1940, reflected the official line of the phoney war period, that the enemy had done little to change the traditional British way of life. The windows ‘showed no signs of criss-cross sticky tape or nasty black-out’. The princesses were intent on their normal recreations. When she arrived, they were dressed for riding and carried crops; they changed into ‘sensible’ tweed skirts and pullovers, in order to be photographed in the garden, suitably equipped with rakes and barrows, digging for victory. The overriding impression, however, was of the Windsors as a household anyone would like to be part of. Apart from the King and Queen and a policeman at the gate, nobody else was visible. ‘I never felt the presence of anyone at all other than the family,’ she recalled. It was clear ‘that home was to the Royal Family the source of life itself and that there was a determination on the part of the King and Queen to maintain a simple, united family life, whatever calls there might be to duty’. Later visits reinforced this picture of self-containment, though the background shifted from the unchanging domesticity of Royal Lodge to the warlike ramparts of the Castle. Here there were parables of life and death: the demise of a pet chameleon, for example (‘Princess Elizabeth could not bring herself to speak of her tiny pet for quite a long time after his death’) and, even more painfully, the death of a favourite corgi. The Queen, however, as always comforting and wise, told her elder daughter to keep things in proportion. It was, after all, the height of a world war.
Sheridan’s photographs, disseminated among dusty desert rats, weary Bevin boys, homesick land girls and traumatized evacuees, show a precious, sheltered intactness. In Sheridan’s world, the princesses were happily free from the requirement to do anything except obligingly change their outfits, and display an exquisite politeness. Yet they were also shown to be greatly concerned about the worrying state of a world mercifully beyond their comprehension – a concern that helpfully linked the ‘perfect hearth’ portrayal of the photographic image to a view of the girls which provided the regular diet of Ministry of Information handouts: as dutiful models for every other daughter of the Empire too young to serve in the women’s services.
A series of newspaper reports involving Princess Elizabeth, in particular, were designed, not so much to idealize the Heiress Presumptive, as to indicate royal approval for Government-sponsored schemes. Thus, the princesses did not only dig for victory, they knitted for it – the product of their labours being divided, with judicious impartiality, between the men of the army, navy and air force.
When they ran out of materials, there was a solution: in July 1941 it was announced that the two girls, aged fifteen and eleven, had personally arranged, and performed in, a concert in front of their parents and members of the armed services, from which between £70 and £80 had been raised, ‘to buy wool for knitting for the Forces’. If a Ministry wished to exhort the population to greater efforts, or advertise an achievement, it turned to the Palace for help, and where appropriate, royal children were provided. On one occasion the princesses (to the envy of every school child) were shown over a Fortress bomber, and allowed to play with the controls. On another, orchestrated publicity was given to the Queen’s decision to have both of them immunized against diphtheria. On yet another, the Heiress Presumptive was designated by the Ministry of Works as the donor of a prize open to Welsh schoolchildren ‘for the best essay in English and Welsh on metal salvage.’
Meanwhile, there was a press story in 1941 about how the fifteen-year-old Princess (despite a Civil List income of £6,000 a year) was only allowed five shillings a week pocket money; and that more than half even of this small sum was generously donated to war-supporting good causes.
The same spring, royal dolls owned by the children were exhibited to raise money for the British War Relief Society,
and a special ‘Princess Elizabeth’s Day’ was announced, for collecting for children’s charities.
How could any teenager cope? One answer is that royalty lived its life in compartments: the public sectioned off from the private and, in the case of a young princess, often barely touching her personally at all. Another is that teenagers had not yet been invented – or at any rate, young people in their teens in the early 1940s had very different expectations from those either before or after the war. The Second World War was a time when adolescence was held in suspension. Children who went straight from school into war work or the armed services, enjoyed no intervening period of irresponsibility. In this, Princess Elizabeth was not unusual. The acceptance of a variety of honorific titles or the performance of symbolic acts was not necessarily more stressful than the tasks and ways of life of many contemporaries. Nevertheless, at a stage in life when it is hard enough to keep everyday private events in perspective, such a cacophony of public roles provided a strange accompaniment to growing up.
She was like other girls of her age, yet not like them. Winston Churchill was supposed to have remarked in an unflattering reference to Clement Attlee, that if you feed a grub on royal jelly, it becomes a queen. In the case of a human Heiress Presumptive, the equivalent of royal jelly is the world’s perceptions: the drip feed of curtseys, deference, public recognition, combined with a knowledge of lack of choice, and of inevitability. The strongest instinct of many adolescents is to conform: it was an instinct with which Princess Elizabeth was well equipped. She seems to have dealt with the peculiarity of her position by becoming as unremarkable as possible in everything she could not change, while accepting absolutely what was expected of her. Her actual experience was unique: there was nobody with whom she could compare herself, no peer group to set a standard. Yet few young people could have been more conformist, more amenable, than George VI’s elder daughter.
There remains the difficulty for the rest of humanity – grubs without a destiny – in understanding the mentality of somebody with such extraordinary expectations. A distinctive character, however, was beginning to emerge. Authentic portraits are rare – vignettes by passing visitors are generally coloured by excitement at meeting royalty, and tell more about the witness than the subject. But there are enough thoughtful descriptions to confirm the part-flattering, part-disconcerting impressions provided by Crawfie, of a reserved, strong-willed, narrow-visioned, slightly priggish child, without intellectual or aesthetic interests, taking what she is given as part of the natural order, but with greater mental capacities than any close member of the family cared to appreciate. When she was still thirteen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, noted after ‘a full talk with the little lady alone’ before he conducted her confirmation service, that ‘though naturally not very communicative, she showed real intelligence and understanding’.
More than two years later, Eleanor Roosevelt formed a view of her that was strikingly similar. The wife of one Head of State assessed the daughter of another as ‘quite serious and a child with a great deal of character and personality . . . She asked me a number of questions about life in the United States and they were serious questions.’
The experience of her as an able, but above all single-minded, young person was shared by Horace Smith, who had more contact with her during the war than any of her other teachers apart from Crawfie, and who taught her in the subject that interested her most. The Princess was not, he considered, ‘a person who takes up interests lightly, only to drop them just as easily a short time later. If and when her interest is aroused, she goes into whatever subject it is with thoroughness and application, nor does her interest wane with the passing of time or the claim of other new matters upon her attention.’ In addition, he noted, she had ‘a keen and retentive mind’.
Such perceptions were combined, however, with a sense that she was young for her age, and remained in appearance and manner still a child until well into her teens. Perhaps there was an element of wishful thinking: the princesses’ childhood was part of the status quo ante bellum which it was hoped to restore. Such a feeling may have been strongest of all in the King and Queen, who liked her to wear the clothes of a child after she had ceased to be one. Nevertheless an uncertainty about whether Princess Elizabeth was precocious or immature, or both, is a recurrent feature of the accounts. Chips Channon observed the princesses in procession at a service at St. Paul’s in May 1943, ‘dressed alike in blue, which made them seem like little girls’.
Peter Townsend, an RAF officer who joined the Royal Family as an equerry to the King nine months later, found that they were not too old to lead him in a ‘hair-raising bicycle race,’ and recalled Princess Elizabeth as ‘charming and totally unsophisticated’.
Alexandra of Yugoslavia’s recollection of meeting her British cousins at Windsor, describes a childish ritual involving the princesses and their dogs. When tea was brought in, they insisted on feeding (with the aid of a footman) their four corgis first.
Preparation for her osmosis from child-princess, locked in a tower with her schoolbooks or playing in the park with her sister, to constitutionally responsible Heiress, was scratchy, like much else in wartime. For some time, the Crawfie and Marten regime had been supplemented with French lessons from the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue. According to one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, Lady Helen Graham, Elizabeth had been encouraged to attend closely to the news bulletins of the BBC.
‘Already the Princess has a first-rate knowledge of State and current affairs,’ a courtier declared in 1943.
Various accounts were given of the level of her knowledge, some of them doubtless exaggerated, in order to demonstrate her fitness for the tasks ahead. It was said that, in addition to French, she was fluent in German. When she was eighteen, The Times claimed she was highly musical and although ‘like some others of her sex, she is no mathematician,’ she was familiar with ‘many classics’ in English and French.
When a magazine editor wrote to the Palace to check a list, supplied by ‘a friend near the Court,’ of books and authors the Princess had allegedly read, a courtier replied firmly that the list could be published as correct. It consisted of ‘many of Shakespeare’s plays,’ Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Coleridge, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Scott, Dickens, Austen, Trollope, Stevenson, Trevelyan’s History of England, Conan Doyle, Buchan and Peter Cheyney.
To this remarkably large collection might be added the Brontës: at the end of the war, Lisa Sheridan found the Princess reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and expressing a preference for historical novels and stories about the Highlands.
Was it true? If such accounts were even half accurate, the Princess would have been a strong candidate for a place at university, where she might have extended her intellectual range. Neither university nor even finishing school, however, was considered as a possibility. Instead, like a butcher or a joiner, she apprenticed for the job she would be undertaking for the rest of her life by doing it.
Her first practical experience of the grown-up world of royalty was to head a regiment. In January 1942, following the death of the Duke of Connaught, she was asked to take his place as honorary Colonel of the Grenadier Guards – a natural choice, some felt, in view of her contact with the Grenadiers at Windsor. The offer was accepted, and on her sixteenth birthday she carried out her first engagement as Colonel at Windsor Castle, inspecting the Grenadiers in the company of her father. Thirty reporters and ten photographers were granted press passes to cover the event.
Cecil Beaton marked it with one of his most famous pictures, which shows the Heiress Presumptive in uniform, fresh-faced and half-smiling, with her jacket unbuttoned and her hat at a coquettish angle. Afterwards, she was hostess to more than six hundred officers and men, entertained by the comedian Tommy Handley.
The Grenadier Guards were delighted by their acquisition, and those who dined with her in the officers’ mess recall her as ‘charming, and very sincere’.
Yet despite this dramatic début, Buckingham Palace kept up the fiction that the Princess was still a child, and American press requests for help with a story about her were met with the incomprehensible denial that she was entering public life.
Adulthood could not be postponed for ever. Princess Elizabeth’s coming-of-age, when she was entitled to succeed to the throne without need for a Regent, took place when she was eighteen, in April 1944. There was no débutante ball to celebrate the occasion. Instead, it was accompanied by the Princess’s graduation from a nursery bedroom to a suite. Here she was pictured by Lisa Sheridan, as if she were part of the interior design. ‘The upholstery is pale pink brocade patterned in cream,’ it was revealed. ‘The walls are cream, hung with peaceful pictures of pastoral scenes. The Princess’s flowered frock harmonized admirably with her room.’
There were other changes, to mark her rise in status. She was assigned her own armorial bearings, and her own standard which flew in whatever residence she happened to be occupying. She also acquired a ‘Household’ of her own, including, in July 1944, a lady-in-waiting. Meanwhile, she had unwittingly stimulated a minor constitutional controversy which engaged the best legal brains for several months.
The 1937 Regency Act, which had been passed following George VI’s accession, had provided for two forms of delegation of royal powers: to a Regent, in the event of a child under eighteen succeeding, or of the total incapacitation of a monarch; and to five Counsellors of State, composed of the Consort and the four next in line of succession, in the event of the Sovereign’s illness or absence abroad. However, the provision disqualified anybody not ‘a British subject of full age,’ which effectively meant that Elizabeth could succeed her father as Monarch with full powers at eighteen, but not deputise for him as a Counsellor until she was twenty-one.
Nobody noticed this anomaly until an eagle-eyed lawyer pointed it out to the King’s private secretary, Sir Alexander Hardinge, in the autumn of 1942. Hardinge at first dismissed it. It was ‘common sense,’ he replied to the lawyer tartly, to regard the Princess as fully of age if she could succeed without a Regent.
The Lord Chancellor, Lord Simon, however, disagreed: due to bad drafting, the law and common sense did not coincide.
There the matter might have rested, had not the King himself indicated his desire to have his daughter as a Counsellor of State. The Lord Chancellor was once again consulted, and recommended to the Prime Minister that the law be changed in order to permit the Heiress Presumptive to become a Counsellor, bearing in mind ‘the qualities of the young lady and the wish of her parents’.
As Allied troops invaded Sicily in July 1943, George VI spoke to Winston Churchill on the matter, and secured a promise that it should be brought up at War Cabinet, with a view to a quick Bill. ‘He quite agrees this should be done,’ wrote the King.
Cabinet assented, and in October, the Labour Home Secretary in the wartime Coalition, Herbert Morrison, introduced legislation, arguing that the responsibility would give the Heiress valuable experience.
The new Act received the Royal Assent in time for the eighteen-year-old Princess to become a Counsellor, along with her mother and three others, during her father’s visit to Italy in July 1944. In his absence she performed her first constitutional functions, which included signifying the Royal Assent to Acts which had been passed by Parliament. Yet she was still not ‘a British subject of full age’, or legally old enough to vote in an election.
A further question also arose in connection with the Princess’s eighteenth birthday: the possibility of a change of title. During 1943, letters and articles appeared in the press suggesting that, in view of her unchallenged position as Heiress, it would be appropriate to designate her ‘Princess of Wales,’ an idea first mooted in 1936. In August, Pwllheli Town Council petitioned the Prime Minister on the subject,
recommending the Princess’s birthday as a suitable moment. At the end of the year, the Carmarthen Journal reported that no project in recent years had been more popular,
and early in 1944, the Welsh Parliamentary Party, composed of Conservative, Liberal and Labour MPs, joined the campaign. It was pointed out, on all sides, that such a gesture would be greeted with enthusiasm in the Principality, with great benefits to Anglo-Welsh relations.
The Palace, however, demurred. While appreciating the sentiment behind such a proposal, it was unwilling to be swept along by a wave of populist fervour. The key issue, it decided, was the precedent for such a bestowal of title, and the lack of one. The title ‘Prince of Wales’ had only ever been given to the Heir Apparent. Princess Elizabeth was merely Heir or Heiress Presumptive. Could the Princess perhaps be promoted from Presumptive to Apparent? The Home Office was asked to investigate. ‘I have looked into your question about HRH Princess Elizabeth’, J. A. R. Pimlott, a Home Office official, wrote to Sir Eric Miéville. ‘Where the heir to the throne is a woman her right of succession is defeasible at any time by the birth of a son to the reigning Sovereign. HRH Princess Elizabeth therefore remains Heir Presumptive till she in fact succeeds.’ This had been true, he pointed out, of Victoria in 1837. Though Queen Adelaide, widow of William IV, had no child for seventeen years, it was thought constitutionally advisable in proclaiming the accession of Queen Victoria to guard against the possibility of a posthumous birth. The new Sovereign was therefore proclaimed Queen ‘saving the rights of any issue of his Late Majesty King William IV which may be born of His Late Majesty’s Consort’.
This, however, was not the end of the matter. Though it dealt with the Presumptive-Apparent problem – by definition, no female could be Apparent – it did not dispose of the issue of whether there was any precedent for calling a female Heir, even though only Presumptive, by the Welsh title. Indeed, an inquiry seemed to show, on the basis of records kept by a sixteenth-century German ambassador, that Henry VIII had considered that whichever of his daughters was Heir to the throne should be known as Princess of Wales.
For a short time, there was consternation, and uncertainty. However, the evidence to support such a claim was shadowy, and when it was put to Sir Gerald Wollaston, Garter Principal King of Arms, he was dismissive. He also pointed out the danger of setting a new precedent, opening the doors to the alarming future possibility, if George VI had a son who then married, of there being two Princesses of Wales.
The Palace view hardened. There remained, of course, the political complication of public opinion, which would be disappointed, especially in Wales, by a negative decision. But the King’s new private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, regarded this as a minor factor. ‘I have no doubt that the matter will be raised in Parliament before long, and of course the Commons have a right to do so,’ he wrote to the King in January 1944, shortly before the Allied forces landed in Anzio. ‘As long ago as 1376, they petitioned Edward III to make his grandson, Richard of Bordeaux, Prince of Wales.’
Not everybody, however, agreed that the views of parliamentarians should be as readily ignored in the twentieth century as in the fourteenth. One objector was Herbert Morrison, who suggested that to make the King’s elder daughter Princess of Wales would deal neatly with any suggestion that the Government was anti-Welsh. It did not matter, Morrison reasonably suggested, if there was no precedent. Moreover, in the unlikely event of a male heir being born, the title could simply lapse.
The Home Secretary’s minute on the subject of 28th January 1944 was sent to the Palace, but Lascelles, no mean politician on issues he regarded as important, deliberately withheld it from the King.
Probably it made no difference. A few days earlier, Jock Colville recorded in his diary that, while the Cabinet approved of the idea of making Elizabeth Princess of Wales, her father did not.
The royal will prevailed. At his weekly audience, Churchill promised the King that he would tell the Minister of Information to ‘damp down all discussion of this question in the Press,’ in order to avoid a row. In February, it was officially announced from Buckingham Palace that there would be no change in the Princess’s title on her eighteenth birthday. ‘This will check the spate of press comment and general chatter,’ Lascelles recorded on 13 February. As a result, the principality was without a Prince or Princess until 1958. The oft-repeated explanation for this vacancy was ‘the very real distinction between heirs apparent and presumptive’.
TO CONSOLE the Welsh, the King and Queen took Princess Elizabeth with them on a tour of mining and industrial areas in South Wales early in 1944. The crowds were welcoming and forgiving, and came from all classes and occupations. At Cardiff docks, according to one report, the Queen and Princess ‘mingled with a crowd of coloured Merchant Navy seamen,’ and stood beside ‘an ebony giant from British Honduras’. People from the villages walked for several miles just to see the King’s daughter, who smiled and bowed her head in acknowledgement of greetings.
It was not just in Wales, however, that there was an upsurge of feeling in favour of Elizabeth. As the war entered its final phase, she found herself an emblematic heroine everywhere. All over the Empire, the health, beauty and emerging womanhood of the Princess were linked to the eagerly anticipated future, in which families would be brought together, sweethearts rejoined, babies born, bellies filled and freedom enjoyed. Encouraged by broadcasters and newsreels, young people took a special interest in her. On the Welsh tour, she caused particular excitement among children. In Valletta, on the island of Malta, a thousand school children assembled a few weeks before the Normandy landings to see and cheer a special film depicting scenes from her life.
Requests for public appearances by the Princess now became frequent. For the time being the Palace was adamant: there could be no question of ‘independent engagements,’ though she might occasionally accompany her parents, as to South Wales.
Soon, however, this rule was relaxed. On 23 May 1944, Princess Elizabeth spoke publicly for the first time at the annual meeting of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in Hackney. In the autumn, she accepted an invitation to launch HMS Vanguard, the largest battleship ever built in the British Isles. The ceremony, in Clyde shipyards, was followed by a luncheon at which she read a short speech. The First Lord of the Admiralty, A. V. Alexander, wrote to Lascelles afterwards describing ‘the clear and decisive way’ in which she carried out both duties.
There remained the question of whether she would enter one of the women’s services, and if so, which. Early in 1945, it was decided that she would join the Auxiliary Territorial Service. It was not the obvious choice. In view of her family’s naval traditions, the WRNS would have been more natural. The King and Queen were apparently reluctant: there is no reason to doubt Crawfie’s account of an eager and determined young woman wearing down the resistance of her parents.
At the end of February she was registered as No. 230873 Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor. The rank was an honorary one, but the training in driving and vehicle-maintenance she underwent at No. 1 Mechanical Transport Training Centre at Aldershot, was genuine. She enjoyed this sole, brief experience of communal education. Several decades later, she told the Labour politician Barbara Castle that it was the only time in her life when she had been able seriously to test her own capabilities against those of others of her age.
After six weeks she qualified as a driver, and at the end of July, a few days before the final end to the war, she was promoted to Junior Commander.
‘The Princess is to be treated in exactly the same way as any other officer learning at the driving training centre,’ maintained the official report at the outset.
To back this up, the Queen requested that photographers should not be given any facilities.
This, however, did not deter the press, and during her short stay at the Centre she was photographed more intensively than at any time since the Coronation. As a result, she was scarcely just one of the girls. If it was not quite true, as a 1957 assessment put it, that ‘the rule of seclusion was maintained and she did not mix with her fellows on the course,’
the extent of mucking in, on equal terms, was limited. She kept to the routine of the ATS mess, took her share of duties, and acquired the basics of driving, car mechanics and maintenance. But she returned to Windsor every night to sleep. She also became an unwitting mannequin for the uniform of the service – pictures of her with a spanner, at the wheel of a lorry, leaning on a bonnet, or peering purposefully and fetchingly under one, appeared in the newspapers and magazines of every Allied nation.
In such matters, it was always impossible to disentangle a private motive from the public effort. Since the enrolment of a royal princess could not be kept secret, her participation in the ATS inevitably became part of the morale-boosting display of the Monarchy. It was a similar story with other initiatives that started spontaneously. A particularly striking and, in its way, sad example of the way Royal Family behaviour spilled over from the personal to the public, so that domestic events were turned into courtly contrivance, was provided by a series of Christmas shows put on during the war by Windsor children, with the aid of adult mentors, and performed in front of parents and other members of the Castle community.
These began modestly in 1940 with a simple play, ‘The Christmas Child,’ in St. George’s Hall, with Elizabeth playing one of the three kings, flanked by two boy evacuees. The occasion was enjoyed by everybody, and the princesses, who had been on stage since birth without knowing it, discovered an interest in, and even a talent for, amateur theatricals. The following Christmas, the stakes were raised slightly, and a pantomime, ‘Cinderella,’ was written for them by a local schoolmaster. Again it was a success, and once again there was a good deal of democratic sharing of tasks and banter in the preparations and rehearsals. The next year, they put on ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ and Lisa Sheridan described how Princess Elizabeth ‘took the arms of the two “sailors” and sang “Mind Your Sisters”’ and brought the house down.
The tradition continued, giving pleasure to both performers and audience, which always included the princesses’ parents. Horace Smith, who attended the pantomimes of 1942–4, recalled seeing the elder princess ‘full of confidence and vigour,’ and reducing the King to hearty laughter.
The humour depended a lot on puns. ‘There are three acres in one rood,’ Widow Twankey, an office boy from the Castle, was required to say in the 1943 production of ‘Aladdin’. ‘We don’t want anything improper,’ replied Margaret. ‘There’s a large copper in the kitchen,’ said the Widow. ‘We’ll soon get rid of him,’ declared Elizabeth – and so on.
Year by year, the performances became more polished, with increasingly elaborate costumes and sets. It was also established, as Court etiquette apparently required, that if the King and Queen were to attend, their daughters should have leading parts, regardless of the acting ability of the evacuees and village children who were also involved. Consequently, attention focused on the royal children and their skills, even more than would have been true in any case. Meanwhile audiences grew, bringing in large numbers of locally-based guardsmen and ATS girls. In 1943, there were three performances, including one specifically for soldiers. The show also became publicly known. Weeks before the 1943 pantomime, advance publicity produced a flood of inquiries, and more than a thousand would-be ticket holders sent in applications containing blank cheques. All were politely refused.
However, those denied entry could still learn about the show second-hand, for reports appeared in the press. Particular interest was aroused by ‘Aladdin’ in 1943, in which the Heiress Presumptive, cast in the title role, and wearing utility shorts and top, performed a tap dance, and in one scene appeared as a charlady, in an apron of sackcloth. ‘From the moment Princess Elizabeth popped out of a laundry basket,’ enthused the Sunday Graphic, ‘the King and Queen and the audience of 400 laughed and thoroughly enjoyed the show.’
After seeing the last of the three performances, Lascelles wrote in his diary that the principals and chorus alike would not have disgraced Drury Lane. ‘P’cess Eliz. was a charming Aladdin’, he noted, ‘and P’cess M. a charming and competent Princess Roxana’.
Altogether the pantomime netted £200.
The final pantomime, at Christmas 1944, starred the Heiress Presumptive as a Victorian seaside belle. It also included a carefully choreographed ‘ballet interlude,’ arranged by the dancing mistress at Buckingham Palace.
By this time, however, it had been transformed into an ambitious, semi-professional extravaganza, widely discussed as an established rite, and, in effect, part of the public relations of royalty.
Chapter 5
BEING ON STAGE was, of course, an inescapable part of a royal childhood. Indeed, the last of the Windsor shows was followed by a royal performance as theatrical as anything the princesses had yet experienced. In contrast to the run-up to the 1918 Armistice which was brought about by a sudden German collapse, the early months of 1945 provided a crescendo of victories and liberations. At home, faith in the cause, pride at survival, and the justice of the outcome, created a patriotic mood quite different from the nationalist frenzy of twenty-seven years before. As a result the celebrations marking the defeat first of Germany and then of Japan contained a communal spirit which expressed itself in the festival nature of the rejoicing, and also in an inclusive and grateful attitude to the Royal Family. On both VE and VJ-Days it was the crowds, as much as the Government, that placed the King, Queen and two princesses centre-stage.
Officially, Victory-in-Europe Day was 8 May. In practice, the celebrations lasted at least three days, with attention directed at Buckingham Palace, and with the Royal Family in starring roles throughout. By mid-afternoon on VE-Day itself, the number of people gathered in the hot sunshine round the Queen Victoria Memorial in front of the Palace exceeded that at the Coronation. It was, according to The Times, ‘a red, white and blue crowd,’ with every other woman wearing a multi-coloured ribbon or rosette in her hair. Winston Churchill arrived in an open car and spoke briefly, before disappearing for lunch with the King and Queen. A lull followed. Then the call ‘We want the King’ rose from the crowd. Responding to it, the royal couple and the two princesses came out onto the balcony, the King in naval, and Princess Elizabeth in ATS uniform, to be met by prolonged cheering and singing of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. Only later did the Prime Minister appear with them, giving the ‘V for Victory’ sign. In the evening after Churchill had left, the Royal Family appeared for yet another encore, producing fresh waves of applause and community singing.
That night, they were joined for dinner by a group of Guards officers who were friends of the princesses. After the meal, as the noise continued beyond the railings, Princess Margaret suggested that the younger members of the party should go outside, so that she and her sister could become, for an evening, part of the chorus. It was a frivolous idea which would have been dismissed as absurd on any other day. However, the exhilaration was such that the King and Queen agreed. Accompanied by a police sergeant, a small party left the Palace and went into the street.
They wandered among the chanting, cheering merry-makers. According to Lascelles, ‘the Princesses, under escort, went out and walked unrecognized about St. James’s Street and Piccadilly’.
One member of the group remembers a much more extensive itinerary – from Buckingham Palace to Parliament Square, then to Piccadilly, St. James’s Street, Bennet Street, Berkeley Square, Park Lane, and into the Ritz and Dorchester Hotels, before crossing Green Park, and ending up, once again, outside the Palace. ‘It was such a happy atmosphere,’ he recalls. ‘Such a tremendous feeling of being alive.’
Apart from Margaret, all were in uniform, making them barely distinguishable from thousands of others also moving almost aimlessly in the no-longer blacked-out city centre.
To be invisible in a crowd! For an instant, the fantasy of being ordinary and unknown became real. After five years of incarceration at Windsor, and a life sentence of the public spotlight, the nation’s liberation gave them an exceptional moment of personal freedom. Many years later, Elizabeth recalled that they were terrified of being recognized, ‘so I pulled my uniform cap well down over my eyes’. She remembered ‘lines of people linking arms and walking down Whitehall, and all of us were swept along by tides of happiness and relief’.
One of the party snatched a Dutch sailor’s cap as a joke, and the sailor kept chasing after them, not knowing and probably not caring who they had in their midst. In the atmosphere of carefree hysteria, they did the Lambeth Walk and the hokey-cokey. When they got back to the Palace, they stood close to the railings, and helped to orchestrate a new wave of ‘We want the King’ cries. Unlike most people, however, they were able to supply the King. One of them was sent inside, and shortly afterwards, the King and Queen reappeared on the balcony.
Next day, the holiday continued with street parties and bonfires. During the afternoon, the princesses went with their parents on a tour of bombed-out districts in East London, including a council estate in Stepney, where two blocks of flats, and one hundred and thirty people, had been wiped out by a V2 rocket two months before. The King and Queen and their daughters appeared again on the Palace balcony in the evening, as a military band entertained the crowds from the forecourt.
Similar celebrations followed the Japanese surrender in August, with the important difference that, though the royal participants were the same, a Labour Government was in office, and a Labour Prime Minister now acknowledged the cheers and addressed the crowd. In place of the romantic Churchillian rhetoric, there was a clipped Attleean homily. ‘We are right to rejoice at the victory of the people,’ declared the new premier, from the balcony of the Ministry of Health, ‘and it is right for a short time that we should relax. But I want to remind you that we have a great deal of work to do to win the peace as we won the war.’ A speech read by the King, loyally described in the press as ‘firm, resonant and strong,’ was broadcast through loudspeakers. The Royal Family spent the rest of the day taking curtain calls on the balcony, waving to the multitude, and acknowledging the roars of approval.
That night, the princesses repeated the escapade of 8 May. This time, however, the attempt to behave like anonymous citizens – masked princesses at the ball – did not quite succeed. Perhaps the mood was less euphoric than on VE-Day; perhaps because Princess Elizabeth was not in uniform, she was easier to identify. At any rate, they were spotted. ‘Big Crowds at the Palace,’ headlined The Times. ‘Royal Family on the Balcony. Princesses Join the Throng.’ The paper revealed that the King’s daughters had left the Palace shortly before eleven o’clock, and that they ‘were here and there recognised and quickly surrounded by cheering men and women’. But police had told the crowds that ‘the princesses wished to be treated as private individuals, and they were allowed to go on their way’.
IN ITSELF, the coming of peace in August did not greatly affect the everyday lives of the Royal Family, who had been re-united at Buckingham Palace earlier in the year. There had already been various symptoms of the post VE-Day phoney peace. Early in August, Elizabeth was taken to Ascot. It was a doubly memorable day. Gordon Richards won five races, carrying the royal colours to victory in the Burghclere Stakes for the first time; and, during lunch at Windsor, the King received the news from President Truman that an atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima.
Despite such excursions, and weekend trips to Windsor, it took time to re-adjust to the cratered capital and bomb-damaged royal mansion. ‘It was a nasty shock to live in a town again,’ says Princess Margaret.
The King found himself as busy as at the height of the war: the exhortatory use made of the Monarchy, if anything, increased. Peacetime austerity had its own moralising. So did the newly elected Labour Government.
In 1940 the King had favoured Lord Halifax for the premiership. During the war, however, he had grown to like and depend on Churchill, who behaved towards him with extravagant courtesy, and he was distressed by the outcome of the general election in July 1945. Apart from his familiarity with the war leader, and his dislike of change per se, he was alarmed about the implications for his family, and his kind. ‘Thank God for the Civil Service,’ he is supposed to have remarked on hearing of the huge majority for a party committed to a programme of nationalization, redistribution and social reform. In private, he was unapologetically right-wing (his wife even more so), and was often moved to explosions of anger at the latest socialist outrage, especially if he felt he had not been consulted.
He need not have worried. Though he remained much more uneasy about the Attlee governments of 1945 and 1950 than his father had been about the MacDonald ones of 1924 and 1929, there was little in reality that the Labour Cabinet wished or dared to do to discomfort him. Indeed, the new Prime Minister went out of his way to provide reassurance. At Attlee’s first audience, George VI expressed disquiet at the news that Hugh Dalton, the renegade son of George V’s old tutor Canon Dalton, might be made Foreign Secretary. The Labour premier immediately bowed to the King’s wishes, or at least allowed the Palace to think he was doing so. Ernest Bevin became Foreign Secretary, and Dalton was sent to the Treasury instead. Thereafter, Attlee treated the Sovereign with perfect correctness, and there turned out to be as little republicanism in the Labour Party after the Second World War as there had been before it. Soon, what some saw as the incongruity of a King-Emperor presiding over a social revolution – and over the granting of self-rule to the Indian sub-continent, jewel in the imperial crown – became accepted as natural and even valuable. Whereas, in the reign of George V, Buckingham Palace had stood at the pinnacle of a confident Establishment unshaken by the arrival of a Labour Government, in the late 1940s the Royal Family managed to avoid any outward appearance of discomfiture, as the Establishment took some knocks.
Indeed, George VI’s passivity arguably became even more of an asset after the war than during it. On the one hand the Royal Family could be seen as a typically British piece of camouflage, disguising and making acceptable the Government’s radicalism; on the other, its existence stood as a guarantee that pragmatic caution would prevail, and radicalism kept within bounds. Thus, when Labour took major industries into public ownership (but compensated owners generously) or made adjustments to the powers of the House of Lords (but only modest ones), both left and right thanked God for the Monarchy.
For Elizabeth, peace brought to an end her brief, token excursion into ATS ‘normality’. It also produced an increase in the number of her solo engagements. She was nineteen, Honorary Colonel, occasional Counsellor of State, and a performer of royal duties: cast, it was increasingly clear, in the mould of her father and grandfather, though more self-assured than George VI, and cleverer than both of them. Was there ever a moment, in her early adulthood, when she questioned what she did, or wondered, in the prevailing atmosphere of equality, and fashion for the abandoning of pomp and circumstance, whether it was worth it? If she ever indulged in such a dissident speculation, she kept her thoughts to herself. There was no visible hint of rebellion, or suggestion that her own values and those of her parents and mentors ever clashed. She was now the almost certain future Queen, who, if she did succeed, would become the third monarch of the century who had not been born to such a fate but had had it thrust upon them. As the position became clearer with the passage of time, she accepted it, knowing that the possibility of an alternative did not exist.
She did as she was told in an enclosed world where loyal and experienced advice could be taken for granted. She became used to the ritual of the royal speech, consisting of a few platitudes crafted by courtiers skilled at the job. Her itineraries just after the war reflected the priorities of Buckingham Palace, and also of the Government. Thus, in the summer of 1945, she opened a new library of the Royal College of Nursing, presented prizes and certificates to students of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine for Women, inspected the Fifth Battalion and Training Battalion of the Grenadier Guards, and addressed (in her recently acquired capacity of Sea Ranger Commodore) three thousand Welsh Girl Guides. She also accompanied her parents on a visit to Ulster, travelling by air for the first time, in a flight from Northolt to Long Kesh.
Some apparently promising requests, however, were refused. Lascelles turned down, on her behalf, an invitation to become the first woman ever to be awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge University – despite pressure from the Chancellor, Lord Baldwin.
Occasionally, the proposals of Labour politicians were considered excessive. In 1947, Lascelles rejected a request from Hugh Gaitskell, the Minister of Fuel and Power, for her to attend ‘The Miner Comes to Town’ exhibition at Marble Arch which had recently been opened by the Prime Minister, on the grounds that she was too busy.
Generally, her visits expressed support for an officially approved, but non-controversial, good cause – though sometimes what the Palace saw as non-controversial turned out to be political dynamite. This was true of a tour of Northern Ireland without her parents in March 1946, for what was described as ‘the most ambitious mission undertaken by the young Heir Presumptive’. The tour gave the Princess her first experience of being used, not as a symbol above domestic politics, but as a blatant political tool by one faction.
It was a mission to underline the Union, something which a visit from British royalty, personifying United Kingdom ties, achieved more eloquently than anything. The result was a welcome both vehement and purposeful. This was a Protestant tour and the groups and institutions she met and addressed reflected it. Sometimes the message remained implicit. At Dungannon High School 1,200 girls sang ‘Come back to Ulster, dear Princess’ to the tune of ‘Come back to Erin’. On other occasions, it was crudely and disagreeably partisan. At Enniskillen, the Royal Ulster Constabulary put on a display that included an illegal still, camouflaged with peat and foliage. The producers of illicit ‘poteen’ were acted by local workers, heavily made up with rouge, and wearing paddy-hats and green three-cornered scarves. An almost hysterical atmosphere of loyalism lasted until the Princess’s departure from Belfast on 21 March, when a mob of schoolchildren broke flag-bedecked stands and ran to the edge of the quay. As her cruiser left the harbour, the whole crowd sang ‘Will ye no’ come back again?’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
In Northern Ireland, enthusiasm was a symptom of sectarian anxiety. Elsewhere and on other occasions, the excitement the Heiress caused is less easily explicable, especially so soon after the election of a Government committed to dispossessing the better off. At the beginning of 1946, support for socialism was at its zenith: Gallup put Labour twenty per cent ahead in the polls, as the Cabinet prepared to introduce its most radical measures.
Yet, such popularity – and apparent popular support for levelling down – was not accompanied by any decline in pro-royal sentiment. In April, a gigantic crowd came to watch the bands of the Royal Horse and Grenadier Guards playing on the East Terrace of Windsor Castle, to mark Princess Elizabeth’s twentieth birthday. The Times estimated it at 40,000, a figure three times as large as for any such event in the 1930s.
Perhaps the austerity and restrictions, as great after the war as during it, sparked a reaction. Such gatherings, and the carnival mood that infused them, may have been a form of escape, a release from drabness. But there was also a deep personal interest in the Princess: in her beauty, her clothes, her shy smile, and, increasingly, her prospects.
When and whom would she marry? The assumption was that she would do so soon; this, after all, had been the point of her education. ‘That the Heiress to the Throne would stay unmarried’, as Crawfie archly but accurately put it, ‘was unthinkable’.
The matter had been discussed in the popular papers since the 1930s. The difficulty lay in finding a suitable consort, at a time when suitability still entailed reasons of state. No heir to the throne had ever contracted a marriage for reasons that did not take dynastic considerations into account. However, conventions were changing. Although Edward VIII had been refused permission to marry the woman of his choice, the marriage of George VI had been a non-arranged, romantic and successful one. It was now accepted that a husband could not be forced upon the Princess. It was also accepted, however, that she could not be allowed unrestricted freedom, and that the range of possible suitors was limited to the diaspora of European royalty, few of whom were now in reigning families, and to the upper ranks of the British aristocracy. Though the Princess was well known, she did not know many people. Moreover, her small circle of friends, acquaintances and sufficiently distant relatives included hardly any young men who would be acceptable as a consort, or who would presume to such a role. That she was desirable, there was no question: but to pay court to the Heiress to the world’s premier Monarchy required an exceptional degree of passion, confidence or gall.
Perhaps she sensed these difficulties, for in practice they never arose. There were minor flirtations, and stories of heirs to great titles who took liberties and were frozen out for ever. But there was never a phase of boyfriends, of falling in and out of love, of trial and error. From early in her adolescence she took a friendly and romantic interest in one man, and there is no evidence that she ever seriously considered anybody else. ‘She fell in love with him,’ says one former courtier.
According to another, it was a matter of coming contentedly to terms with what had to be. ‘There really was no one else she could possibly marry but Prince Philip.’
Yet if Philip was, in a sense, hand-picked, it was not the Princess’s parents, or the Court, who did the picking.
Prince Philip of Greece, nearly five years older than the Princess, had several commanding advantages: he was royal, on first acquaintance extremely personable and, though not British, he gave an excellent impression of being so. The British Royal Family had known him since he was a small child, when he had taken tea at Buckingham Palace with Queen Mary, who reported him ‘a nice little boy with very blue eyes’.
He had been in the company of Princess Elizabeth at several pre-war family gatherings, including the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Kent in 1934, and the Coronation three years later. Even before the Coronation, Philip’s name had been linked in the press with that of the Princess, as one of a tiny list of hypothetical bridegrooms.
The first significant encounter, however, took place on 22 July 1939, during the short interlude between the Canada-America trip and the outbreak of war, in the course of a Royal Family visit to the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. According to Crawfie, the introduction took place in the nursery of the house of the Captain of the College. Philip, who had recently been admitted as a cadet, was taken in to see the princesses, who were playing with a clockwork train. Allegedly, the new friendship was sealed with ginger crackers and lemonade, and by a game of tennis.
As far as the adult, non-nursery world was concerned, however, the first important meeting took place at a tea party on board the royal yacht Victoria and Albert. This had been arranged – engineered might conceivably be a better word – by Lord Mountbatten, the King’s cousin and Philip’s uncle. ‘Philip came back aboard V & A for tea and was a great success with the children,’ Mountbatten wrote in his diary.
There are also filmic and photographic records of the day. One amateur snap shows the Greek cadet and the much smaller princess together alone, apart from the watching photographer, playing croquet in the Captain’s garden. A still picture from a contemporary newsreal encapsulates the whole drama, as if it were a tableau: the child-like, solemn Princess Elizabeth, looking much younger than thirteen in a sea of adult faces, her parents and sister, Philip, laughing at some private joke, Mountbatten, also smiling, at his shoulder.
‘It is hard to believe,’ suggests Mountbatten’s official biographer, discussing his subject’s attitude towards the 1939 Dartmouth meeting, that ‘no thought crossed his mind that an admirable husband for the future Queen Elizabeth might be readily available’.
In view of Mountbatten’s character, his personal and dynastic ambition, his taste for intrigue, it is more than hard. We may take it for granted that one did. It is possible that such a thought had also occurred to the King and Queen. They were aware, after all, of the need to find a son-in-law before very long, and a foreign prince training for the British Navy was an obvious possibility. In Philip’s case, however, there were some worrying features.
Indeed, the Prince’s origins and early life raised the question of what ‘royal’ meant, if it was to be treated as a qualification. Should it be defined in terms of bloodlines, or did it relate to real-world wealth, reputation, and constitutional significance? By the first criterion, Philip was unquestionably royal, in one sense more so than Princess Elizabeth, for he had royalty on both sides of his family, instead of just one. He also happened to be related to the Princess several times over. His most important relationship was through his mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, who was sister to Lord Mountbatten, mentor and cousin to George VI. But there were also other strands. He was even a fourth cousin once removed through collateral descendants of George III.
Moreover, he was not just descended from royalty, he had been born into a reigning Royal Family, the grandson and nephew of Greek kings.
On the other hand, by the second criterion, the current standing of his dynasty, Philip scored badly, or not at all. His birth took place at the Greek royal residence of Mon Repos on the Ionian island of Corfu in June 1921. This did not remain his home for long. Within eighteen months, following the passing of a death sentence by a Greek revolutionary court on his father, Prince Andrew, he and all his family became refugees. A few years later, Philip’s mother recorded her thanks to George V for his personal intervention, ‘realizing the deadly peril’ her husband was in, to ensure that a warship got him ‘out of the clutches of the military dictators and brought him and his family away from Greece’ on the day after the trial.
The exile of Andrew, his wife, four daughters and baby son, turned out effectively to be permanent. Dispossessed, impoverished and in the case of Prince Andrew embittered, they settled in a house provided by Philip’s aunt, Marie Bonaparte, at St. Cloud, on the outskirts of Paris.
It was to be a shambolic, meagre existence, built on fading dreams and painful memories. Philip’s birthplace in Corfu had been lacking in amenities: in the early 1920s, there was no electricity, gas, running hot water or proper heating.
But it had been grand in style, and magnificent in location. By contrast, the villa in St. Cloud was humiliatingly unpretentious, ‘a very simple country house,’ according to one of Philip’s sisters.
Cut off from the friendships and rivalries that mattered to him, Prince Andrew, the former commander of armies, immersed himself in the writing of a book appropriately called Towards Disaster, about the military endeavours, and their failure, for which he had stood trial. His wife, with five children to care for, suffered a nervous breakdown, and turned to religion. The couple separated in 1930, Andrew eventually moving to Monte Carlo, where he died in December 1944.
Against this troubled background, Philip began a cultural shift. Later, there was the question of whether ‘Philip the Greek’ was ever Greek at all; although born a Greek citizen, the son of a Greek prince, there were no ‘ethnic’ Greeks in his recent ancestry. In some ways this helped, but it also laid him open to a more damning charge. The description of him as a ‘blond Viking’, partly on the basis of his Danish ancestry, became a way of avoiding the fact, embarrassing in the 1940s, that his strongest family links were with Germany. All his four sisters married Germans and reverted to a German identity.
Until Philip was adult, he really belonged to no nation, except the freemasonry of Romanov, Habsburg and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha descendants, which conferred an entry ticket to the great houses and palaces of Europe. It was the benign interest of his mother’s relatives, and perhaps a family appreciation that England was the most hopeful place for an uprooted royal to seek his fortune, that pushed him in a British direction. From early childhood, there were frequent English trips, especially to see Philip’s Battenberg grandmother, the Marchioness of Milford Haven, herself the eldest grandchild of Queen Victoria and sister of the last Tsarina. Sophie (‘Tiny’), youngest of Philip’s sisters, recalls annual visits by the children to the Marchioness in the 1920s. She remembers sunbathing on the roof at Kensington Palace, where the old lady had an apartment, meetings with members of the British Royal Family, and most influential of all, being regaled with stories of their Europe-wide connections, which contrasted so dramatically with the life they lived in St. Cloud. These expeditions served as a reminder, and a tonic: if the children had any doubt about their social standing, the Marchioness removed them.
At about the time of his parents’ separation, Philip left the American school in St. Cloud at which he had been a pupil, and was sent to Cheam, an English preparatory establishment in Surrey; and from there to Salem, in Baden, a school owned by one of his German brothers-in-law and run by the legendary Kurt Hahn. But for Hitler, the rest of his education might have been German. In 1934, however, Hahn moved to Scotland to escape the Nazis, setting up a new school, Gordonstoun. Philip became a pupil and, as a result, in the words of the Countess of Airlie, was ‘brought up to all intents and purposes an Englishman,’
except that few Englishmen ever had to suffer the rigours and eccentricities of the Hahn–Gordonstoun form of educational progressiveness.
‘I don’t think anybody thinks I had a father,’ Philip allegedly once complained. ‘Most people think that Dickie’s my father anyway.’
Philip had been much affected by the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, and retained a great sympathy for Prince Andrew. ‘He really loved his father,’ says one close associate. ‘He had a big image of him which persisted, and his death was a great shock to him.’
After 1930, however, he saw much more of his mother, Princess Alice, and was closer to her, despite all her difficulties – which were extreme. In addition to the psychological problems which developed during Philip’s childhood, she was congenitally deaf. Later, she used to say that she could not communicate with her children until they were old enough to speak, when she became able to read their lips.
But the presentation of her as a demented recluse was false. Friends recall her, except when ill, as forceful, intelligent and amusing. Despite her marital and other difficulties, she was responsible for translating her husband’s book from Greek into English. Conceivably, as one friend of Philip puts it, her eventual decision to found a Greek Orthodox monastic order, and become a nun in it, ‘was a very clever solution to the problem of how she fitted into the world,’ as an elderly royal widow without money, but with an interest in good causes.
Nevertheless, Philip’s early life, with an absent father and often psychologically absent mother, was by any standards disturbed and unstable. Much of it, especially when his mother had to go into a sanatorium, was spent migrating between schools and foster-homes provided by relatives. There was a confusion: uncertainty, neglect, and the feeling of being special mixed together. The only son, as well as the youngest child, Philip was a particular focus of family attention, especially to his four sisters who adored, petted and mothered him. However, within the space of a few months in 1931–2 all of them solved the problem of a disintegrating home by marrying German princes, scattering what was left of his family across Europe.
There were fixed points: Salem, for summer holidays, was one. When Philip was at school in Britain, his Uncle George, Marquess of Milford Haven and son of the dowager Marchioness, provided another, becoming his guardian in school vacations, and helping with fees. Although George was his main benefactor, Philip was also a frequent visitor at the house of his other uncle, Lord Mountbatten. ‘He was around with us a lot from about 1934,’ says Patricia.
Another refuge was Gordonstoun where Philip became a model pupil – athletic, outgoing, enterprising, effortlessly displaying precisely those attributes which it had been Hahn’s vision to produce.
Yet the standard portrayal of Philip in his teens as a kind of Boys’ Own Paper hero misses something out. There was a picaresque quality, the sense of the adventurer who lives by his wits, and for whom what one early writer called ‘the lean upbringing of expatriate royalty,’
had provided as keen a training as any continental theory. Philip’s cousin Alexandra, Queen of Yugoslavia (and a fellow expatriate), recalled him on holiday with her family in Venice, a year before the Dartmouth meeting, as a genial sponger, living in a style not uncommon among displaced princelings, and giving the impression of ‘a huge hungry dog, perhaps a friendly collie who had never had a basket of his own’.
The summer of 1938 was an especially waif-like moment. George Milford Haven had died the previous April, leaving Prince Philip, as Philip Ziegler puts it, ‘stateless, nameless and not far from penniless’
and particularly in need of open-handed friends. Luckily, more substantial help was available. The death of one benefactor cleared the way for another, of incomparably greater influence. Observing Philip’s predicament, George’s younger brother Louis – ‘Uncle Dickie’ – stepped in, and took over what remained of the job of bringing his nephew up. It was a generous undertaking, but also, in view of the young man’s obvious talents, a well judged one. Lord Mountbatten was a prominent naval officer and it had, in any case, already been planned that the best place for a déraciné young prince with a taste for travel, and no home base, was the British Navy. Hence, on 1 May 1939, Philip joined Dartmouth College as a Special Entry Cadet.
When Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth met in July, he was an unknown young man barely two months into training. What did he make of his world-famous distant cousin, with her home in Buckingham Palace? Did he distinguish between the celebrity and the child-like person? It would be surprising if she did not have an impact, because of who she was: but it would also be surprising if, at this stage, Philip’s interest was romantic. Handsome and confident eighteen-year-old young men are not often greatly attracted by thirteen-year-old little girls scarcely out of short socks. According to Queen Alexandra, the previous summer the Greek prince had shown himself a girl-crazy party-goer on the Venetian social scene. ‘Blondes, brunettes and red head charmers,’ she recalled, ‘Philip gallantly and I think quite impartially squired them all.’
Hélène Cordet, a cabaret singer who had been a childhood friend (and who was later dubbed by the French press as ‘the mystery blonde’ and ‘the one who will not be invited to the wedding’) had a similar view of him.
Other accounts also show him as a happy-go-lucky enjoyer of female company, and player of the field. Yet Princess Elizabeth was pretty, royal, and obviously a catch. The thoughts that must have passed through his uncle’s mind, may also have passed through his own. At the time, however, there were other pressing things to consider. War was imminent, with everything that such a prospect offered to a prize-winning naval cadet, with excellent connections.
If the British Royal Family had a good war, Philip in a more conventional sense, had a highly distinguished one. After a period of escorting contingents of troops from Australia to the Middle East, he was involved in several engagements in the Mediterranean. During the battle of Matapan against the Italian fleet, he controlled the searchlights of his ship, and was mentioned in dispatches. ‘Thanks to his alertness and appreciation of the situation,’ reported his Captain, ‘we were able to sink in five minutes two eight-inch-gun Italian cruisers.’
Philip spent much of 1941 with the British Fleet in the East Mediterranean. In the spring, Greek resistance to the Germans crumbled, and on 23 April, King George of Greece and his Government were evacuated to Crete. The same day, Princess Elizabeth wrote to Winston Churchill thanking him for a bunch of roses he and his wife had sent her for her fifteenth birthday two days earlier. In her letter, she offered her sympathy, in view of the ‘very worrying time’ he had lately been having.
Perhaps she had Philip’s recent dangers and exploits, and those of his royal house, partly in mind.
Such an officer was likely to be rapidly promoted in wartime, especially if he had ambition. In Philip’s case, the energy and drive he had shown at Gordonstoun and Dartmouth, together with a view of his own long-term future which received ample encouragement from his Uncle Dickie, helped to push him forward. Mike Parker, a fellow officer who had also been a fellow cadet and later became his equerry, recalls thinking of the Prince as a dedicated professional and as a man heading for the very top: somebody who already ‘had mapped out a course to which he was going to stick . . . a plan already in his mind that had probably been set before he left’.
In October 1942, Philip was made First Lieutenant and second-in-command of a destroyer, at twenty-one one of the youngest officers to hold such a post.
His adventures continued. The following July, while courtiers in Buckingham Palace exchanged learned memoranda about the date of Princess Elizabeth’s coming-of-age and its constitutional significance, Prince Philip was aboard HMS Wallace off the coast of Sicily, helping to provide cover for the Allied attack and possibly bombarding one of his brothers-in-law, on the German side, in the process. In July 1944, his ship was sent to the Pacific, where he remained until after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and until the final surrender of Japan.
Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth ’scapes, i’ the imminent deadly breach . . .
My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs.
It is hard to think of an experience of war further removed than that of the Heiress Presumptive, in her castellated schoolroom.
At first, Philip’s busy war provided little scope for contact with the British Royal Family. Shore leaves were brief, makeshift and hectic. Parker felt that it was a bond between him and Prince Philip that both of them were ‘orphans’ (Parker was Australian), with a problem about where to stay.
In London, Philip was often put up by the Mountbattens, who had been bombed out of previous homes and were living in a house in Chester Street. Mountbatten’s younger daughter Pamela recalls that she and a camp bed would move from room to room to provide space for her cousin, who would ‘come and go and added glamour and sparkle to every occasion’.
His favours were distributed widely. Queen Alexandra, herself in London at the time, maintained that ‘the fascination of Philip had spread like influenza, I knew, through a whole string of girls’.
But there was no special girlfriend. According to Parker, ‘never once did I ever find him involved with any particular one. It was very much in a crowd formation’.
Other stories about Philip in wartime confirm the impression of a hedonistic, though also cashless, socialite whose uniform, looks, charm and connections opened every door – a character out of Evelyn Waugh or Olivia Manning, who popped up wherever in the world there were enough members of the pre-war upper class to hold a party.
Princess Elizabeth was sometimes in his thoughts. Alexandra met up with him in 1941 in Cape Town, where he was on leave from a troop ship. When she came across him writing a letter, he told her it was to ‘Lilibet’. Alexandra assumed – such were the mental processes of displaced royalty – that he was fishing for invitations.
Perhaps she was right. It was not, however, until the end of 1943 that he was able to accept one of importance. This was to spend Christmas with the Royal Family at Windsor Castle, and to attend the annual Windsor family pantomime.
Philip accepted, with pleasure.
It was a private invitation. However, both the show, and the Prince’s attendance at it, were reported in the press. In November, it was announced that a stage had been erected in a large hall in the ‘country mansion’ where the princesses were staying; that a cast of forty was rehearsing under the joint direction of Princess Elizabeth and a local schoolmaster, who had together written the script; and that twenty-five village school children would provide the chorus, accompanied by a Guards band.
A few days before Christmas, The Times reported that ‘Prince Philip of Greece’ had attended the third of three performances, sitting in the front row. Others in the audience included the King and Queen, various courtiers, royal relatives, and villagers.
According to Lisa Sheridan, Prince Philip was more than just a passive spectator of the seventeen-year-old Elizabeth as she acted, joked, tap-danced and sang a few songs just in front of him. ‘Both in the audience and in the wings he thoroughly entered into the fun, and was welcomed by the princesses as a delightful boy cousin.’
The pantomime was followed by Christmas festivities. On Boxing Day, there was a family meal at the Castle including retainers, Prince Philip and the young Marquess of Milford Haven. ‘After dinner, and some charades,’ Sir Alan Lascelles recorded in his diary, ‘they rolled back the carpet in the crimson drawing-room, turned on the gramophone, and frisked and capered away till near 1 a.m.’
Crawfie maintained it was a turning point: thereafter, Elizabeth took a growing interest in Philip’s activities and whereabouts, and exchanged letters with him. The Heiress to the throne enjoyed the idea of being like other girls, she suggested, with a young man in the services to write to.
IF ELIZABETH only began to think seriously about Philip in December 1943, she was way behind the drifting circuit of European royalty and its hangers on, which had been talking about the supposed relationship, almost as if a marriage was a fait accompli, for two or three years. Of course, Philip’s eligibility as a bachelor prince, together with his semi-Britishness, was likely to make him the subject of conjecture in any case. However, before the end of 1943, the couple had little opportunity to get to know each other. What is curious, therefore, is the firmness of the predictions, and the confidence of the rumours, from quite early in the war.
One of the first to pick up and record the story of an intended marriage, in its definite form, was Chips Channon, befriender of Balkan princelings. He heard it at the beginning of 1941 during a visit to Athens, where the tale seemed to be current among the Greek Royal Family, whose interest had been sharpened by the presence of Prince Philip in their midst, on leave from his ship. After meeting Philip at a cocktail party, Channon noted in his diary, ‘He is to be our Prince Consort, and that is why he is serving in our Navy.’ The alliance between the British and Greek royal houses had supposedly been arranged by the finessing hand of Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten. Philip was handsome and charming, noted Channon, ‘but I deplore such a marriage. He and Princess Elizabeth are too interrelated.’
Such an item was, of course, no more than gossip, a symptom of the decadence and anxieties of the Greek court. Princess Elizabeth was fourteen at the time, and the notion of the British Government or Royal Family fixing a future marriage alliance with the Greek one is preposterous. According to Mountbatten a few years later, it was at about this time that Philip ‘made up his mind and asked me to apply for [British] naturalisation for him’.
Perhaps it was news of this plan, combined with Philip’s evident closeness to his British uncle, that inspired the tale. Nevertheless, the existence of such a lively and, as it turned out accurate, rumour nearly three years before a serious friendship is supposed to have started, puts the Prince’s visit to witness the Princess performing into perspective. Had Mountbatten been involved behind the scenes? It is possible. ‘He was a shrewd operator and intriguer, always going round corners, never straight at it,’ says one former courtier from the 1940s, ‘he was ruthless in his approach to the royals.’
Another suggests: ‘Dickie seems to have planned it in his own mind, but it was not an arranged marriage.’
It would certainly have been in character for him to have followed up on the 1939 introduction. That, however, is a matter for speculation. What is clear is that in the course of 1944, despite the huge pressures on him, Lord Mountbatten took it upon himself to follow through his match-making initiative with operational resolve.
One effect of the Christmas 1943 get-together, and of its publication in the press, was to fuel the rumours. Prince Philip himself was reticent. Parker knew that Philip had begun to visit the Royal Family when he was in England, but he did not find out the significance of the visits until after the war.
Others had more sensitive antennae. In February 1944, Channon again got the story, this time from a source very close to the throne – his own parents-in-law, Lord and Lady Iveagh, who had just taken tea with the King and Queen. The Windsor party had evidently been a success. ‘I do believe,’ Channon reaffirmed, ‘that a marriage may well be arranged one day between Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip of Greece.’
Meanwhile, in Egypt, where the Greek royal family presided over the Government-in-exile, interest had deepened, and with good reason. Within months, or possibly a few weeks, of the Windsor meeting, Philip had declared his intentions to the Greek king. The diary of Sir Alan Lascelles contains a significant entry for 2 April 1944 in which he records that George VI had told him that Prince Philip of Greece had recently asked his uncle, George of Greece, whether he thought he could be considered as a suitor for the hand of Princess Elizabeth. The proposition had been rejected.
However, it was early days.
In August 1944, the British ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, recorded meeting Prince Philip, once again on leave, at a ball in Alexandria, in the company of the Greek crown prince and princess. Lampson found him ‘a most attractive youth’. In the course of the evening, the crown princess let slip ‘that Philip would do very well for Princess Elizabeth!’ an idea now of long-standing, and one on which the beleaguered Greek royal family was evidently pinning high hopes.
Philip’s presence in Egypt, however, inspired more than a minor indiscretion from a relative. On 23 August, according to Lampson, Lord Mountbatten, now Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia, arrived in Cairo by air and proceeded to unfold a most extraordinary cloak-and-dagger tale. The purpose of his mission, Mountbatten explained as they drove to the embassy from the aerodrome, was to arrange for Prince Philip, ‘being a very promising officer in the British Navy,’ to apply for British nationality. Gravely, Mountbatten explained that King George VI had become concerned about the depleted numbers of his close relatives, and believed that, if Philip became properly British, ‘he should be an additional asset to the British Royal Family and a great help to them in carrying out their royal functions’. It was therefore his intention, he continued, to sound out Philip, and then the king of Greece, about his proposition. In the course of the same day, both were sounded, together with the crown prince, and all three agreed. Early that afternoon, a satisfied Mountbatten left by aeroplane for Karachi to resume his Command.
What should we make of this very curious account? Mountbatten’s explanation for his ‘soundings’ is obviously unconvincing – the one thing the British Monarchy did not need was functional help from a young foreign royal, let alone a Greek one, just because he happened to be on the market. The only way that Philip could be ‘an additional asset’ to the Windsors was by marrying into them, and this, as Lascelles’s note the previous April shows, he by now wished to do. It seems much more likely that Mountbatten’s mission was part of a considered plan, aimed at remoulding Philip for the requirements of the position both uncle and nephew wished him to hold. To make such an objective obtainable, Philip needed to be, not so much British, but non-Greek, in view of the unsavoury connections of his own dynasty. In short, the Egyptian whistle-stop visit was an opening move. Such an explanation is consistent with the behaviour of Lord Mountbatten over the next two or three years, as he bent ears and pulled strings in Buckingham Palace, Westminster and Whitehall, at every opportunity. So great, indeed, was Mountbatten’s determination on his nephew’s behalf, that at one point Prince Philip was moved to chide him gently for almost forcing him ‘to do the wooing by proxy’.
The wooing proceeded apace. There were meetings between Philip and Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, and also at Coppins, the home of the Kents, as the ubiquitous Channon discovered when he inspected the visitors’ book there in October 1944.
The problem from the start was not the Prince’s courtship, but the British Government, concerned about its wartime Balkan diplomacy, and the hesitation of the Princess’s parents. Despite Mountbatten’s bold claim to Lampson in August that the British King was behind the naturalization initiative, nearly six months elapsed before Buckingham Palace made even tentative inquiries at the Home Office on Philip’s behalf. ‘The King asked me recently what steps would have to be taken to enable Prince Philip of Greece (Louis Mountbatten’s nephew) to become a British subject,’ Sir Alan Lascelles wrote to the relevant official in March 1945. The King, he explained, did not want the matter dealt with officially yet: he only wished to know ‘how it could be most easily and expeditiously handled’ at an appropriate time.
In August, Lascelles went to see the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, at the King’s behest, observing crustily, ‘I suspect there may be a matrimonial nigger in the woodpile.’
The question of Philip’s naturalization, however, only became a matter for political discussion at the highest level in October 1945, by which time Greek politics, and the Greek royal family’s embroilment, had become even more tangled. The Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary now considered the proposal put to them by the Palace but, faced with the prospect of stirring a hornet’s nest, postponed a decision. The danger, it was explained to the King, was that such a step would be interpreted in Greece as support for the Greek royalists. Alternatively, given the feverish nature of politics in the Balkan peninsula, it might be taken ‘as a sign that the future prospects of the Greek Monarchy are admitted to be dark,’ and that Greek royals were scurrying for safety abroad. In view of these competing risks, Attlee suggested that the question should be left until after elections and a plebiscite had been held in Greece the following year.
When Prince Philip returned from the Far East early in 1946, the problem acquired a new urgency. Philip’s undemanding peacetime job, as a member of staff of a naval training establishment in North Wales, provided ample opportunity for frequent visits to Buckingham Palace, where his charm worked, not only on Princess Elizabeth, but on Crawfie, who found him a breath of fresh air in the stuffy Court, ‘a forthright and completely natural young man, given to say what he thought’. Above all, he could talk to Elizabeth as no outsider had ever dared to do before. Soon, she was taking more trouble over her appearance, and began to play the hit record ‘People Will Say We’re in Love,’ from the musical Oklahoma! incessantly on the gramophone.
In May, in an atmosphere of continuing uncertainty, Philip went to Salem for the second marriage of his sister Tiny, whom he had not seen for nine years, and whose first husband had been killed in the war. He told her about his relationship with Princess Elizabeth. ‘He was thinking about getting engaged,’ Tiny recalls. ‘Uncle Dickie was being helpful.’
There was as yet no engagement, official or unofficial. The real reason for Philip’s request for naturalization was coyly avoided in official memoranda – though the involvement of senior members of the Government indicated that it was known or suspected. Publicly, a pretence had to be kept up. If the Prince and Princess were present at the same party, they did not dance together, as a precaution.
However, there were clues which led to leaks. The addition of Philip’s name to the guest list for Balmoral in 1946, when it had not been included on the advance list, aroused much below-stairs interest at the Palace.
A pattern developed which became the norm with royal betrothals: stories in the foreign press, picked up by British popular newspapers, followed by Palace denials whose cautious nature fuelled speculation. In September 1946, after a year of mounting gossip, Sir Alan Lascelles took the novel step of repudiating reports of an engagement, but without commenting on the future possibility of one. The story finally broke, not in words but – and it was another significant precedent – on celluloid: a newsreel shot of an exchange of tender glances at the wedding of Lord Mountbatten’s daughter Patricia to Lord Brabourne, as Philip, an usher, helped Elizabeth, a bridesmaid, with her fur wrap.
A Greek plebiscite took place on 1 September 1946, restoring the Greek Monarchy: the restoration of George II, however, so far from reducing the political embarrassment of an alliance with the Greek dynasty, increased it, by highlighting King George’s legacy of authoritarian rule.
In the meantime, the issue of Philip’s national status, even his eligibility, as a foreigner, for a peacetime commission in the Royal Navy, remained unresolved. At first, he was told he could stay in the Navy;
then the Admiralty had second thoughts, and ruled that his retention depended on his naturalization.
Matters ground to a virtual halt. The obstacle continued to be the attitude of the Government but also, it had become clear, the coolness of the Court. Faced with a Kafka-like civil service, a hesitant British King, and his dubious set of advisers, Uncle Dickie decided to harass the Palace.
It did the trick. The Palace’s patience snapped. Following one particularly vigorous piece of Mountbatten lobbying, Lascelles informed the King somewhat testily that Dickie had telephoned him yet again on the subject of Prince Philip’s naturalization, and that he had suggested that, as Prince Philip’s uncle and guardian, there was no reason why he should not take up the matter himself, without reference to the Monarch.
Mountbatten took this as a carte blanche. Replying that ‘nothing would suit him better,’ he asked to see the King. Then he moved, striking hard and fast, making good use of his standing with the Labour Government. On 14 November, he saw the Home Secretary, and then the Prime Minister, and secured the agreement of both to the naturalization, and also that Philip would be known, in his new British persona, as ‘HRH Prince Philip’ – an extra bit of varnish to his nation-swapping nephew’s image. Next day he wrote triumphantly to the Prince, sending him a form to fill, instructing him on what to put in it, and promising path-smoothing letters.
The politics remained delicate. Backbench Labour MPs, many of whom took a keen interest both in foreign affairs and immigration policy, were liable to object not just that Philip was linked to an unpleasant dynasty but also that his naturalization, at a time when many aliens were clamouring for it, constituted favourable treatment. Mountbatten anticipated this danger by showering the press with detailed information designed to show that, in everything that mattered, Philip was already British.
In August, the Labour MP and journalist Tom Driberg, who was friendly with Mountbatten, took Philip on an educational trip round Parliament. Afterwards, he offered to help with newspaper articles. Mountbatten had replied with an urgent request that Driberg should not allow ‘any form of pre-publicity to break, which I feel would be fatal’ – while also sending the MP a biographical information pack for use later, which would show that his nephew ‘really is more English than any other nationality.’
Now he asked Driberg to use this material, which recounted that Philip was the son of ‘the late General Prince Andrew of Greece and of Denmark, GCVO,’ that he had spent no more than three months in Greece since the age of one, and that he spoke no Greek. Mountbatten also asked Driberg to persuade his ‘Left Wing friends’ – that is, Labour MPs who might ask awkward questions – that Philip had ‘nothing whatever to do with the political set-up in Greece, or any of our reactionaries.’ Finally, he briefed the Press Association that ‘the Prince’s desire to be British dated back several years before the rumours about the engagement,’ and somewhat disingenuously, had ‘no possible connection with such rumours’.
To his great relief – as, no doubt, to that of Philip and Elizabeth – the press rose to the occasion. Most newspapers printed the Mountbatten memorandum almost verbatim, but without attribution, and as if it were news. The Times even obligingly suggested that, but for the war, Philip might have become a British subject on passing out from Dartmouth in 1939.
Philip turned down the offer of ‘HRH,’ which was anomalous once he stopped being Greek, preferring to stick to his naval rank. There remained the question of his surname. On this, Dickie received his reward. Philip’s Danish-derived dynastic name, Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, did little to assist the desired transformation. The ex-prince therefore turned to his mother’s and uncle’s family, adopting the appellation ‘Mountbatten’, itself the anglicized version of a foreign name changed during an earlier bout of xenophobia. Lord Mountbatten took the name change back to the King and Home Secretary, and fixed that too,
and on 18th March 1947 the change of nationality of Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten of 16 Chester Street appeared in the London Gazette.
There was a sequel to the saga of Philip’s rushed naturalization. In November 1972 Lord Dilhorne, the former Lord Chancellor, replied to an inquiry from Lord Mountbatten with a remarkable piece of information. It was undeniably the case, he wrote, that under a 1705 Act of Parliament all descendants of the Electress Sophie of Hanover were British subjects. The point had, indeed, been tested in a 1956 case involving Prince Ernst August of Hanover, which concluded with a decision in the House of Lords that the Prince was a British subject by virtue of the same Act. Philip was, of course, a descendant of the Electress, through Queen Victoria. ‘. . . [S]o it appears,’ wrote Dilhorne, ‘that the naturalization of Prince Philip was quite unnecessary and of no effect for you cannot naturalize someone who is already a British subject . . .’ The law was quite clear: the Queen’s consort had had British nationality since the date of his birth.
Chapter 6
IF UNCLE DICKIE and his nephew believed that Buckingham Palace was dragging its feet over procedures which, when complete, would remove the major political objection to a marriage, they were probably right. Buffeted by his daughter, the King made enquiries. A few days before the Japanese surrender, Sir Alan Lascelles even wrote that George VI was ‘interesting himself keenly’ in the question of Philip’s naturalization.
But the King did not press his advisers to speed things along, and his advisers did not press ministers. It took the energetic intervention of Lord Mountbatten to bring the matter to a conclusion. Indeed, a profound ambivalence seems to have characterized the attitude of the entire Court, almost until the engagement was announced.
The Windsors were a harmonious family, and Elizabeth’s views were usually respected. It is interesting, therefore, that on something so important there should have been a difference of opinion. The explanation, common enough in royal romances through the centuries, seems to have been that the qualities that made the suitor lovable to the Heiress, did not have the same effect on those who guarded over the inheritance.
There were good grounds for approving of Prince Philip. In looks, public manner, war record, even in his choice of the Royal Navy, he fitted the part of ‘crown consort’ to perfection. The reasons for objecting to him were more complex. Some were obvious – in particular, the fact that, as Crawfie unerringly put it, he was a ‘prince without a home or kingdom,’ and hence, in seeking the hand of a British princess who had both, was aiming too high.
But there were other factors. In particular, ambivalence towards Philip reflected ambivalence towards his uncle. Though Mountbatten was close to the King, he was also known for his politicking and intrigue, and for his intimacy with the Labour Government. There seems to have been a dislike of conceding yet another round to Uncle Dickie’s apparently ungovernable ambitions, and a fear that in doing so a fifth columnist might be introduced who would give Mountbatten the chance to exert a reforming influence on the style and traditions of Buckingham Palace.
As far as the King and Queen themselves were concerned, there were personal reasons for not being rushed into a precipitate match. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had been twenty-two when she accepted the proposal of the Duke of York in 1923. Her daughter was a mere seventeen at the time of Prince Philip’s first formal request to be considered as a suitor. Queen Mary’s belief, as related to Lady Airlie, that Elizabeth’s parents simply considered her too young for marriage, may well be right. So too may Lady Airlie’s own theory that the King was miserable about the prospect of letting her go, that his elder daughter ‘was his constant companion in shooting, walking, riding – in fact in everything,’ and he dreaded losing her.
Both views are also compatible with Wheeler-Bennett’s suggestion that the King regarded Elizabeth as not only too young but too inexperienced, and found it hard to believe that she had fallen in love with the first young man she had ever met.
In addition, there was the Prince himself – and here there was a contradiction that has continued to dog him all his life. Philip had a capacity to attract admiration and to cause irritation in equal measure. At the time, he was a man with enthusiastic supporters, but also with angry detractors. On the one hand, friends extolled his energy, directness, and ability to lead, attributes that brought him success at school and Dartmouth and in the Navy, and helped to win the hearts of many an English débutante and émigré countess. On the other, his forthright manner made some older people suspicious. What worked with naval ratings and princesses – abruptness, a democratic style, intolerance of humbug – grated at Court, and in the grander houses of the aristocracy. A courtier once told Harold Nicolson that both the King and the Queen ‘felt he was rough, ill-tempered, uneducated and would probably not be faithful.’
According to a former adviser to the King: ‘Some of the people who were guests at Balmoral thought him rather unpolished’.
There was also something else, alluded to in the last chapter: Philip’s supposed (and actual) connections with the nation which, at the time of his first overtures, Britain was engaged in fighting. For all his acquired Englishness, there was something in Philip’s character, in his tendency to put backs up, and in his mixture of rootlessness and dubious roots, that stirred in the previous generation of high aristocrats a mixture of snobbery and xenophobia. ‘The kind of people who didn’t like Prince Philip were the kind who didn’t like Mountbatten,’ suggests an ex-courtier. ‘It was all bound up in the single word: “German”.’
In view of the Germanic links of the British Royal Family over the preceding two centuries, this was scarcely a rational prejudice, but it was undoubtedly there. The strongest evidence of its existence is provided by unpublished sections of the diary of Jock (later Sir John) Colville, who had been a private secretary to Neville Chamberlain and then to Winston Churchill, and became Princess Elizabeth’s private secretary in the summer of 1947. During his first stay at Balmoral in the same year, Colville noted with fascination the prevailing atmosphere of bitterness towards the ex-Greek prince. ‘Lords Salisbury, Eldon and Stanley think him no gentleman,’ he recorded; ‘and in a sense they are right. They also profess to see in him a Teutonic strain.’
‘People in the generation which had fought in the First World War were not very much in favour of what they called “the Hun”,’ says a former adviser to George VI.
An aristocrat linked to the Conservative Party used privately to refer to Philip as ‘Charlie Kraut’.
One of the fiercest of Philip’s opponents was the Queen’s brother, David Bowes-Lyon, who did his best to influence his sister against the match.
What exactly did being ‘no gentleman’ mean? There were several, generally unspoken elements. ‘He wasn’t part of the aristocracy’, suggests a former courtier meaning that he did not share British aristocratic assumptions.
This point was linked to the unfortunate matter of his schooling. The problem was not its extent – if high scholastic attainment had been a requirement for joining the Windsor family, few twentiethcentury consorts (let alone the royals they married) would have passed muster – but its location. It was a significant disadvantage that he was not a member of the freemasonry of old Etonians to which virtually everybody in the inner circle who was not actually a Royal Highness, almost by definition, belonged.
Philip’s unusual academy, regarded by the world at large as an interesting variation, contributed to the sense of him as an outsider – even possibly, like his uncle, as a kind of socialist. ‘He had been at Gordonstoun,’ points out a former royal aide. ‘So he had very few friends. Eton engenders friendships. The more severe ethos at Gordonstoun leaves you without friends.’ (Being ‘without friends’ should not, of course, be taken literally: what it meant was friends of an appropriate type. The same source acknowledges that, though Philip did have friends, they tended to be ‘Falstaffian’ ones.
) In addition, Gordonstoun’s ‘progressive’ ethos could give rise to disturbing ideas. Thus, one member of the Royal Family apparently complained that the would-be consort ‘had been to a crank school with theories of complete social equality where the boys were taught to mix with all and sundry.’
There was no single, or over-riding, objection: just the raised eyebrow, the closing of ranks at which royalty and the landed classes were peculiarly adept. If there was a unifying theme, it was a kind of jealous, chauvinistic protectiveness – based on a belief that so precious an asset should not be lightly handed over, least of all to the penniless scion of a disreputable house who, in the nostrils of his critics, had about him the whiff of a fortune-hunter. Contemplating the presence of ‘Philip of Greece’ and his cousin the Marquess of Milford Haven at the Boxing Day party at Windsor Castle in 1943, Sir Alan Lascelles laconically observed: ‘I prefer the latter’.
Whatever the full reason, a courtly and aristocratic distaste for the young suitor, and suspicion about his motives, hindered his full acceptance into courtly and aristocratic circles for years to come.
ONE PERSON had no doubts: Princess Elizabeth herself. ‘She was a stunning girl’, a close friend fondly remembers, ‘longing to be a young wife without too many problems.’
In this ambition she was supported by most public opinion, apart from a sliver of the Labour Party on the pro-Communist left, which continued to associate Philip not with the Hun, but with the Greek right. In general, however, press and public took what they saw: a handsome, eligible naval officer, who happened to be a prince. So far from objecting, most early commentators found his combination of royal status, a British naval commission, and lack of celebrity, entirely appropriate for the back-seat but decorative role that would be required. Yet for the time being, Philip remained a shadowy figure.
Elizabeth, by contrast, was ever more visible in the popular magazines – with interest enhanced by speculation about the developing but unannounced romance. The American press, always ahead of the British, anticipated an engagement early in 1947 by turning her into a cover girl, a newsreel star, and – highest compliment – the ultimately desirable girl-next-door. In January 1947, the International Artists’ Committee in New York voted her one of the most glamorous women in the world. In March, Time declared her ‘the Woman of the Week’, and praised her for her ‘Pin-Up Charm’. Devoting four pages to her life story, it revealed her as a princess the magazine’s readers could take to their hearts. She was practical, down-to-earth, human – the essence of suburban middle America. As well as being an excellent horsewoman she was, the article declared, a tireless dancer and an enthusiastic lover of swing music, night clubs, and ‘having her own way’. She enjoyed reading best-sellers, knitting and gossipy teas with her sister and a few girlfriends in front of the fire at Buckingham Palace.
According to Crawfie, she was an indifferent knitter.
However, the picture was not entirely false. Whatever she may have read in her teens, her adult tastes in literature and drama were, as a British observer put it delicately in the 1950s, ‘those of the many rather than the few’.
In this respect, as in others, efforts to nip any blue-stocking tendency in the bud had succeeded.
It was also true that she enjoyed music, especially if it was not too demanding. She took a keen interest in the ‘musicals’ currently in vogue on the London stage. She liked the satirical entertainment 1066 and All That so much that she obtained a copy of the song ‘Going Home to Rome’ from the management.
Jean Woodroffe (then Gibbs), who became her lady-in-waiting early in 1945, remembers that the two of them would while away the time on long car journeys to and from official engagements by singing popular songs.
After the war ended, weekly madrigal sessions were held at the Palace – either Margaret or a professional musician played the piano and both girls sang, together with some officers in the Palace guard.
One madrigal singer was Lord Porchester (now the seventh Earl of Carnarvon) who had known Princess Elizabeth when he was in the Royal Horse Guards at the end of the war, and had taken part in the Buckingham Palace VE-Night escapade. Porchester (‘Porchey’)* also shared the Princess’s interest in riding, breeding and racing horses. During the war, they had seen each other at the Beckhampton stables on the Wiltshire Downs, where horses bred at the royal studs were trained. Porchester was the grandson of the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, who, as well as being the joint discoverer of the tomb of Tutenkhamun, had been the leading racehorse owner-breeder at the beginning of the century, and had set up the Highclere Stud at his Hampshire home. His father, the sixth Earl, had bred the 1930 Derby winner Blenheim. ‘The King thought I was a suitable racing companion of her age group,’ says Lord Carnarvon. ‘There were not many people then who could accompany her to the races.’ Since the 1940s, he says, ‘We have developed our interest together, and it has got sharper.’
He was beside her at Newmarket in October 1945, and at almost every Derby since.
Before the war, horses had been Elizabeth’s childhood fantasy. During it, her confidence as a rider had been built up with the help of Horace Smith. After 1945, the horse world became her chief relaxation and escape. She read widely on the subject, extending her knowledge of horse management, welfare and veterinary needs, and she developed a sixth sense as a trainer. ‘She has an ability to get horses psychologically attuned to what she wants,’ says Sir John Miller, for many years Crown Equerry and responsible for all the Queen’s non-race horses, ‘and then to persuade them to enjoy it.’
What started as a hobby later became a serious enterprise, and an area for her own independent professionalism. ‘Prince Philip shrewdly kept out of it all,’ says a former royal employee. ‘Otherwise he would have dominated the discussion.’
For Elizabeth, horse breeding was a family interest. The royal studs had been founded at Hampton Court in the sixteenth century, later moving to Windsor. In the late nineteenth century, the then Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, had re-confirmed the royal hobby by establishing the Sandringham stud. Royal interest seemed curiously, though perhaps not surprisingly, to mirror the royal fascination with dynastic genealogy. The result had been an exclusive attitude to bloodlines. ‘Royal managers had avoided sending to some of the best stallions, often because they did not like the owner,’ Carnarvon recalls. On one occasion, an otherwise ideal candidate for covering a royal mare was rejected by Captain Charles Moore, George VI’s (and later his daughter’s) Manager of the Royal Studs, on the grounds that it belonged to a bookmaker. In much the same way, the King – who took a mild interest in racing – had a patriotic approach to the sport. Not only did he prefer to send to British-based stallions, it upset him if French horses too often won British races.
Lord Porchester, who had studied at Cirencester Agricultural College and had acquired a knowledge of the principles of ‘hybrid vigour,’ tried to advance royal practice by encouraging the family to be less fussy about equestrian social backgrounds. As Porchey and Elizabeth became more expert together, a quiet revolution came eventually to overtake royal breeding methods. After Elizabeth became Queen, her interest increased, and in 1962 she leased Polhampton Lodge Stud, near Overton in Hampshire, for breeding race horses – adding to the studs (Sandringham and Wolverton) at Sandringham. In 1970, Lord Porchester took over as the Queen’s racing manager. Over the years their shared passion for horses became the basis for a close friendship. ‘With Henry Porchester, racing and horses bring them continually together,’ says a former royal adviser. ‘Henry tells her a lot of gossip. She’s very fond of him and he’s devoted to her.’
Princess Elizabeth’s other recreations were also uncompromisingly those of royalty and the landed aristocracy. Like her grandfather, father and mother, she was relentless in her pursuit of the fauna on the Sandringham and Balmoral estates. She did not use a shotgun, but she became skilled with a rifle, and in stalking deer during Scottish holidays. One report described how, while staying on the Invernesshire estate of Lord Elphinstone, the Queen’s brother-in-law, in October 1946, the twenty-year-old Princess followed a stag through the forest, ‘aimed with steadiness and brought down the animal,’ which turned out to be a twelve-pointer.
It was a sport for which she was well-equipped. After visiting Balmoral during the war, King Peter of Yugoslavia, Alexandra’s husband, expressed admiration at the quality of the rifle she lent him.
Later, Porchey gave her a .22 rifle as a present.
The pace quickened at the end of the war, in shooting as in everything else. Aubrey (now Lord) Buxton, a Norfolk neighbour who became a close friend of the royal couple – and who later helped to inspire Philip’s interest in wildlife and conservation – described one extraordinary day’s shooting at Balmoral, a fortnight after the Japanese surrender. A royal house party, headed by the Monarch, set itself the task of killing as wide a range of different birds and animals as possible. The King set out in search of ptarmigan, somebody else had to catch a salmon and a trout, and so on. After a hard day, the final bag in the game book was 1 pheasant, 12 partridges, 1 mountain hare, 1 brown hare, 3 rabbits, 1 woodcock, 1 snipe, 1 wild duck, 1 stag, 1 roe deer, 2 pigeons, 2 black game, 17 grouse, 2 capercailzie, 6 ptarmigan, 2 salmon, 1 trout, 1 heron and a sparrow hawk. Princess Elizabeth was the proud dispatcher of the stag.
Margaret did not share Elizabeth’s sporting enthusiasms – one of the factors which led to the growth of different and contrasting circles of friends. To some extent, despite the age gap, their circles overlapped. Weekend parties in the mid-1940s included the heirs to great titles, who were regarded as potential husbands for either of them. Names like Blandford, Dalkeith, Rutland, Euston, Westmorland tended to crop up. ‘There was a good deal of speculation,’ an ex-courtier remembers, ‘about whether any of them would do.’ When Philip became a fixture, the circles diverged. Margaret began to attract a smarter set: her friends thought of themselves as gaier, wilder, wittier, and regarded Elizabeth’s as grand, conventional and dull.
As well as the gap in interests, the distinction reflected a difference in temperament. ‘Princess Margaret loved being amused,’ suggests one of her friends, ‘in a way that her sister didn’t.’ It was also a product of the princesses’ contrasting relationship with the King. Elizabeth, the introvert, had been brought up to be responsible; Margaret, the extrovert, to be pretty, entertaining and fun. ‘George VI had a strong concern for Princess Elizabeth,’ says the same source, ‘but he had a more fatherly attitude towards her sister. I remember him leaning on a piano when she was singing light-hearted songs, with an adoring look, thinking it was frightfully funny.’ While Margaret reached out to people, Elizabeth seemed never to give much away. A lady-in-waiting recalls her, in the mid–1940s, as ‘very charming, but very quiet and shy – much more shy than later.’
Colville formed a similar impression. ‘Princess Elizabeth has the sweetest of characters,’ he recorded, shortly after joining her, ‘but she is not easy to talk to, except when one sits next to her at dinner, and her worth, which I take to be very real, is not on the surface.’
The impression of Princess Elizabeth is of a strangely poised young person used to going her own way, which tended to be the way of her class rather than of her age group, and making few concessions to fashion. Yet the sense of her as highly conventional – in contrast to her sister – depends partly on the vantage-point and the generation of the observer. Simon Phipps, friendly with Margaret when he was a theological student and young clergyman, and who later became Bishop of Lincoln, remembers the stiffness of royal protocol, including having to change twice in the evening (once for tea, and again for dinner), and turning at table when the Monarch turned. But he also recalls happy games of charades, including an anarchic one in which he was cast as a bishop, and the King as his chaplain.
When Lady Airlie, Queen Mary’s friend and lady-in-waiting, visited Sandringham in January 1946, what shocked her was the extent of change since before the war. She found youth in control, with jig-saw puzzles set out on a baize-covered table in the entrance hall. ‘The younger members of the party – the princesses, Lady Mary Cambridge, Mrs Gibbs and several young guardsmen congregated round them from morning to night,’ she noted. ‘The radio, worked by Princess Elizabeth, blared incessantly.’ No orders or medals were worn at dinner, as they had been in the old days, and the girls related to their parents with – to Lady Airlie – startling informality. Modernity was also visible ‘in the way both sisters teased, and were teased by, the young Guardsmen.’
Teasing and teased Guards Officers were, however, only one aspect of their lives. The chasm that divided the King’s daughters from the young men and women they were able to meet socially, widened early in 1947 when they accompanied their parents on a major tour of southern Africa which attracted world attention, and set the stage for Princess Elizabeth’s début as a fully-fledged royal performer.
The end of the war had given a brief, almost paradoxical, boost to the imperial ideal. Partly, it was an effect of sheer survival – defending the Empire had been one of the causes for which the war had been fought. Britain’s near-bankruptcy had made the vision of a shared, transoceanic loyalty all the more necessary to national self-esteem: a necessity which the granting of self-government to India seemed, if anything, to increase. At the same time, the British Government was aware that the bonds that tied together the Commonwealth were in need of repair. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the case of Pretoria, capital of a Union still bitterly divided between English-speakers and Afrikaners.
Officially, the tour – which involved a total of four months’ travel – was supposed to be a chance for the King and Queen to rest after the ordeal of war. In practice, the schedule prepared for the Royal Family was strenuous, and the objectives highly political. Wheeler-Bennett later called it a ‘great imperial mission’
. That was one way of describing it. From the South African point of view, the visit was (in the words of another historian) ‘essentially a mission to save Smuts and the Crown of South Africa’.
English-speakers were enthusiastic about it, Afrikaners on the other hand, were cynical – seeing George VI (according to the High Commissioner, in a telegram to the Palace) ‘as the symbol of the “Empire-bond” which they had pledged themselves to break.’ General Smuts was accused of having arranged the trip in order to rally the English section round him for the coming general election.
But there was also something else, which in one sense made nationalist Boers right to be suspicious: the royal trip had an ‘imperial’ aspect that went beyond the attempt to improve relations with the Union. South Africa was important in a new ‘multi-cultural’ definition of the Commonwealth – in the light of Indian independence – because it was the only ‘white’ dominion that was in reality predominantly black. The royal visit was to be a way of showing Windsor and Westminster interest in what one (pro-British) Natal paper described as ‘the complex problems of race relationships – problems which are certain to assume an increasing importance in the years ahead,’ in the many countries which owed allegiance to the Crown.
These factors, however, were not the ones that got the most publicity. In the eyes of the world, the tour also had a personal and dynastic interest: Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip would be apart for four months. Since the invitation was accepted by the King on behalf of the whole Royal Family in the first half of 1946, the trip could hardly be seen as an attempt to break up the friendship. Yet the visit took place as speculation was at its height; and the irony did not escape the gossip-writers that the first major tour on which the King and Queen proposed to take their elder daughter was also one on which she had reason to be reluctant to accompany them.
Why was there no engagement announcement before they set out? A belief that all was not going smoothly added to the press excitement. One former courtier suggests that – whatever the original intention – the King and Queen saw the visit as an opportunity for reflection. ‘Undoubtedly there was hesitation on the part of her parents,’ he says. ‘They weren’t saying “You must or mustn’t marry Prince Philip,” but rather, “Do you think you should marry him?” It wasn’t forced. The King and Queen basically said: “Come with us to South Africa and then decide”.’
With Philip’s naturalization due to be gazetted in a few weeks, however, any pretence that the relationship did not exist was abandoned. A couple of nights before the departure of the Royal Family, Elizabeth accompanied both her parents to dinner with the Mountbattens, including the about-to-be Philip Mountbatten, at 16 Chester Street – serenaded by Noël Coward. ‘The royal engagement was clearly in the air that night,’ recalled John Dean, Mountbatten’s butler and later valet to Philip.
It was a farewell meal in two senses. While the King prepared to inspect one of his domains, Uncle Dickie was about to negotiate the transfer of power, as George VI’s Viceroy of India, in another.
MUCH OF THE journey to Cape Town, aboard the battleship HMS Vanguard, was uncomfortably rough, confining the Royal Family to their cabins. When she returned to South Africa as Queen several decades later, Elizabeth recounted how sea-sick they had been. However, as they travelled south they left Europe’s worst winter weather of the century behind them. ‘Our party seems to be enjoying themselves, especially the princesses,’ Lascelles wrote to his wife, describing ‘crossing the line’ festivities, and a treasure hunt involving the King’s daughters and the midshipmen. ‘Peter T[ownsend],’ he added, referring to an equerry who was a member of the party, ‘tries hard and is doing well.’
For the two young women, the experience was breathtaking – not least because it was the first time either of them had been abroad. In the 1930s, they had been considered too young to accompany their parents on foreign visits, and during the war it had been too dangerous, or impracticable, to do so. Thus, Princess Elizabeth had reached the age of twenty before setting foot outside the United Kingdom. The impact of the voyage and then of the journey around a very different kind of country was therefore all the greater. South Africa – with its varieties of terrain, race, wealth and culture – was a powerful reminder to Elizabeth of the Commonwealth duties that lay ahead. Both girls were struck by the open spaces: Princess Margaret recalls her sense of the vastness of the country and the contrasts with austerity Britain. ‘There was an amazing opulence, and a great deal to eat,’ she says. She remembers the change from a country still restricted by food rationing, and her delight at the endless series of meals with their abundance of delicacies, including an enticing array of complicated Dutch pastries. Huge fir cones seemed to symbolize the outsize scale of everything they encountered. The South Africans lent them horses, and they rode on the beaches, wearing double felt hats.
The royal party arrived in Cape Town on 17 February to a tumultuous welcome that banished fears of republican hostility. There was a glittering state banquet the same night. Next day, Lascelles wrote home that while he had never attended a more dreary and miserable dinner in thirty years of attending public functions, the Royal Family seemed to enjoy it, especially the princesses. ‘Princess E[lizabeth] is delightfully enthusiastic and interested,’ he noted; ‘she has her grandmother’s passion for punctuality, and, to my delight, goes bounding furiously up the stairs to bolt her parents, when they are more than usually late.’
The plan was to bring the British Monarchy into direct contact with every part of the Union – in the words of the tour’s official souvenir – from the seaboard of the Cape and Natal ‘to areas where African tribes live in peace and security under conditions which still suggest the Africa of history.’
The royal party slept in a special ‘White Train’ for a total of thirty-five nights, travelling to the Orange Free State, Basutoland, Natal and the Transvaal, and then to Northern Rhodesia and Bechuanaland. South Africa was a society rigidly divided on racial grounds: but it did not yet have strict apartheid laws, and the royal party met people from different communities, even attending a ‘Coloured Ball’. The King’s daughter attracted particular attention. Africans shouted from the crowds ‘Stay with us!’ and ‘Leave the Princess behind!’
The presence of British royalty also aroused keen interest in the small, enclosed white South African world, dominating popular entertainment. At a huge civic ball held in Cape Town the night following their arrival, five thousand guests danced to a fox-trot composed in honour of Elizabeth, called ‘Princess’. The tune accompanied a song which became the catch of the season. ‘Princess, in our opinion,’ went its loyal refrain, ‘You’ll find in our Dominion/Greetings that surely take your breath,/For you have a corner in every heart,/Princess Elizabeth’.
Elsewhere, there were other musical tributes. At Eshowe, Zulu warriors pounded out the ‘Ngoma Umkosi,’ the Royal Dance before the King. One verse was omitted at the last minute: ‘We hear, O King, your eldest daughter, Princess Elizabeth, is about to give her heart in marriage, and we would like to hear from you who is the man, and when this will be.’
On 1st April, close to the end of the tour, the not unwelcome or unhelpful news came through of the death of King George of Greece. Lascelles reported home that while there would be a week’s court mourning in London, no notice at all would be taken ‘by anybody out here because we haven’t any becoming mourning with us – a typical Royal Family compromise!’
At East London, the second city of Cape Province, Elizabeth had to open a graving dock – it was a windy day, and she had to struggle to keep her hat on, her dress down, and her speech from blowing away.
For much of the trip, however, the princesses’ most demanding duty was to walk behind their parents at ceremonies or sit beside them at displays. It was a long time to be away, on holiday yet constantly on show – and out of touch with ice-bound Britain, where Philip, at his naval base, lectured his students in his naval greatcoat and by candlelight, because of the fuel crisis. According to below-stairs gossip, spread by Bobo MacDonald, who had graduated from children’s nursemaid to become the Princess’s maid and dresser, ‘Elizabeth was very eager for mail throughout the tour, and so was Philip.’
She also wrote to other friends. Lord Porchester, for instance, received letters from her wherever she went. She wrote vividly, about the tour and meeting Smuts, but also about home. In one letter she asked about her horse, Maple Leaf.
The passivity, however, did not last until the end of the tour. The Royal Family’s departure date was fixed for 24 April. Princess Elizabeth’s twenty-first birthday fell three days earlier – a happy coincidence of timing which enabled the South African government to make it the climax of the visit. It could scarcely have been celebrated on a more elaborate, and extravagant, scale. As a token of the importance Smuts attached to the royal tour, 21 April was declared a public holiday throughout the Union. In addition, the royal birthday was marked by a ceremony, attended by the entire Cabinet, at which the Princess reviewed a large contingent of soldiers, sailors, women’s services, cadets and veterans; by a speech given by the Princess to a ‘youth rally of all races’; by a reception at City Hall in Cape Town; and by yet another ball in the Princess’s honour at which General Smuts presented her with a twenty-one-stone gemstone necklace and a gold key to the city.
The Royal Family made its own most dramatic contribution to the day’s events in the form of a broadcast to the Empire and Commonwealth by Princess Elizabeth, which became the most celebrated of her life. The author was not the Princess, but Sir Alan Lascelles, a straight-backed, hard-bitten courtier, not given to emotionalism – though with a sense of occasion and (as his memoranda and diaries reveal) a lucid, if somewhat old-fashioned, literary style. The speech was both a culmination to the tour, and a prologue for the Princess.
When Princess Elizabeth was consulted in the White Train near Bloemfontein during the preparation of a draft, according to one account, she told her father’s private secretary, ‘It has made me cry’. The effect on many listeners and cinema-goers was much the same as they heard or later watched the solemn young woman making her commitment, like a confirmation or a marriage vow. That her message came from a problematic dominion added to the impact of words which already sounded archaic, and a few years later might have seemed kitsch, yet which seemed strangely to capture the moment. The effect was the more surprising because Lascelles had made no concessions to populism, and had not attempted to write the kind of speech a young woman might have delivered, if the thoughts had been her own.
Punch, 23rd April 1947
‘Although there is none of my father’s subjects, from the oldest to the youngest, whom I do not wish to greet,’ the Princess read from her script, ‘I am thinking especially today of all the young men and women who were born about the same time as myself and have grown up like me in the terrible and glorious years of the Second World War. Will you, the youth of the British family of nations, let me speak on my birthday as your representative?’ She quoted Rupert Brooke. She spoke of the British Empire which had saved the world, and ‘has now to save itself,’ and of making the Commonwealth more full, prosperous and happy. Thus far, her speech belonged alongside other truistic utterances forgettably spoken by royalty when required to address the public. It was the next part that took listeners by surprise. Unexpectedly, she changed tack, launching into what amounted to a personal manifesto, that combined two themes of Sir Henry Marten in his tutorials – the Commonwealth, and the importance of broadcasting:
There is a motto which has been borne by many of my ancestors – a noble motto, “I serve”. Those words were an inspiration to many bygone heirs to the throne when they made their knightly dedication as they came to manhood. I cannot do quite as they did, but through the inventions of science I can do what was not possible for any of them. I can make my solemn act of dedication with a whole Empire listening. I should like to make that dedication now. It is very simple.
I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Imperial family to which we all belong, but I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in with me, as I now invite you to do. I know that your support will be unfailingly given. God help me to make good my vow and God bless all of you who are willing to share in it.
What was it in this nun-like promise – about a crumbling Empire that in a few years would cease to exist – that captured the imagination of those who heard it? It was partly the youth of the speaker, the cadences of the delivery, and the confidence of the performance; partly the knowledge that a royal betrothal was imminent; partly the earnestness of the sentiment in an earnest decade.
In fact, though the Princess may not have known it, the message was highly political – directed at several distinct audiences. One of its aims was to help Smuts and the cause of English-speakers in South Africa. It was designed to help Uncle Dickie, as Viceroy, in his task of seeking to retain Indian friendship within a Commonwealth that would no longer be able to differentiate between self-governing white dominions, and imperially ruled black colonies. At the same time, the speech was for domestic consumption in Britain – it offered a population that was exasperated by restrictions, and worn out after the added hardships of a terrible winter, the bromide of Commonwealth and imperial ideals. Finally, it was a royal speech, written by a courtier for a royal anniversary: it reaffirmed the British Monarchy as the one reliable link in an association of nations and territories whose ties had become tenuous, because of war, British economic weakness, and nascent nationalism.
But it was the Princess herself, and the feeling she conveyed as an individual, which, as it was said, brought ‘a lump into millions of throats’.
For a moment, the Empire seemed as one. In South Africa, the English-speakers could not have felt prouder, and even the Afrikaners acknowledged the effect. ‘I feel . . . a bit exhausted by the tremendous success of the whole thing,’ Lascelles wrote to his wife, as he packed his bags in Cape Town, ‘and for Princess Elizabeth’s speech, on which I had lavished much care.’
A few days later, as the Vanguard sailed for home, the King’s private secretary was able to reflect a little more on his handiwork. The tour, he concluded, had amply achieved its most important objective, as far as the Court was concerned, of demonstrating the value to South Africa of the British Monarchy. The biggest revelation had been the blossoming of the King’s elder daughter:
From the inside, the most satisfactory feature of the whole business is the remarkable development of P’cess E. She has got all P’cess Marg’s solid and endearing qualities plus a perfectly natural power of enjoying herself . . . Not a great sense of humour, but a healthy sense of fun. Moreover, when necessary, she can take on the old bores with much of her mother’s skill, and never spares herself in that exhausting part of royal duty. For a child of her years, she has got an astonishing solicitude for other people’s comfort; such unselfishness is not a normal characteristic of that family.
In addition, he noted with approval, the Princess had become extremely business-like: she had developed the ‘admirable technique,’ if they were running late, ‘of going up behind her mother and prodding her in the Achilles tendon with the point of her umbrella when time is being wasted in unnecessary conversation’. When circumstances required, she also ‘tells her father off . . .’ Both princesses must have found moments in the tour very dull, Lascelles concluded. But, on the whole, both had been ‘as good as gold’.
Lascelles’s optimism about the impact of the tour turned out to be misplaced. Indeed, if the aim had been to save both Smuts and the Crown in South Africa, it was a double failure. The following year, Smuts was ousted by Malan and the isolationists, and a new government adopted a programme of racial laws that weakened still further the Commonwealth links of the Union, and led eventually to South Africa’s withdrawal from the association thirteen years later. Yet it would be wrong to dismiss the trip as politically negligible. In a way it was a marker: remembered, with nostalgia and also hope, for the affirmation it had provided of more elevated values than those later imposed. The memory was still there when, nearly half a century later, Nelson Mandela’s democratic republic re-applied for Commonwealth membership. There was also a directly personal effect. Elizabeth’s first tour, which was also one of her longest, profoundly affected her outlook, helping to establish a Commonwealth interest and loyalty that became a consistent theme of her reign.
AT HOME, every paper carried a birthday profile of the Heiress Presumptive, in each case seeking to meet a public desire for as happy and as rosy a picture of the Princess as the meagre details available about her short life permitted. Descriptions highlighted the qualities an idealized princess ought to have, alongside those she actually did. Since it was an egalitarian, democratic era, much ingenuity was exercised in presenting her as a people’s princess.
The Prime Minister set the tone. The simple dignity and wise understanding of the King’s elder daughter, he declared, had endeared her to all classes.
The sentiment was echoed, universally. The News Chronicle helpfully noted that, unlike a male heir, who would have been created Prince of Wales and a member of the House of Lords, she was technically a commoner, and had appropriately simple tastes in personal adornment.
The Times saw the point as more than technical. Elizabeth belonged to a Monarchy that had become ‘social and unpretentious,’ it declared, acting as ‘the mirror in which the people may see their own ideals of life’. From this firm base, the Princess would provide the rising generation with a model that was progressive in the widest sense, ‘standing for the aspirations of the men and women of her own age, for everything that is forward-looking, for all the effort that seeks to build afresh.’
Such a ‘representative’ view of royalty, of course, begged a few questions: did being ‘representative’ mean representing the interests and ideals of ordinary young people in a symbolic sense, or actually being like them? Dermot Morrah, always ready with a loyal argument, claimed that the Princess was as representative in the second sense as in the first – and that her representative status came from the happy chance of her intellectual and cultural limitations. Like her father and grandfather, he pointed out, she was ‘normal’ – that is, average – in capacity, taste and training. The result was an Heiress Presumptive with normal, average values. That she was ‘simple, warm-hearted, hard-working, painstaking, cultivated, humorous and above all friendly’ helped to make her ‘a typical daughter of the Britain of her time’.
Like the trumpeted ‘simplicity’ of the Princess’s pre-war upbringing, however, the reality was somewhat different. Most of the ‘normality’ of her early adulthood was a product of the ambition of observers to present her as somebody with whom genuinely simple and normal people could identify. The only hard, publicly available evidence was that she was untypical – in particular that she was rich and about to become richer, with a Civil List income rising from £6,000 per annum to £15,000 on her majority, a sum over which she would have full control. She was also untypically, even uniquely, famous: one newspaper suggested that the twenty-one-year-old Princess was ‘unquestionably the most publicized young woman in the world,’ easily out-distancing Shirley Temple, her nearest rival.
Privately, the Princess felt no particular need to pretend to be what she was not. Indeed, her reluctance to step outside her own class in her social relations caused her royal grandmother, who continued to watch her progress carefully, some disquiet. At the beginning of July, Jock Colville recorded a conversation with Queen Mary in the garden at Marlborough House, in the course of which the elderly lady, nearing eighty, ‘said many wise things’ about her grand-daughter, ‘including the necessity of travel, of mixing with all the classes (H.R.H. is inclined to associate with young Guards officers to the exclusion of more representative strata of the community) and of learning to know young members of the Labour Party.’
Yet there was also, perhaps, a quality that did not entirely belong to the categories of cliché or necessary myth. Unremarkable in capacity, abnormal in experience, wealth and friends, the Princess nevertheless possessed an attribute which radio listeners and filmgoers believed they could hear and see for themselves. This could best be described as ‘wholesomeness’ and stood in unremarked contrast to the decadence associated with the former Heir Apparent to George V. The Princess’s involvement in the Guides and ATS, her outdoor interests and pursuits, and her supposedly happy upbringing, had already been the stuff of wartime propaganda. After 1945, a belief in the Princess’s decency, straightforwardness, honesty, rather than in any visible talent, did much to elevate the idea of Monarchy during anxious years when – against ideological trends, or pre-war expectations – its psychic power seemed to soar. When Lord Templewood, who as Sir Samuel Hoare had been a Cabinet minister at the time of the Abdication, wrote of the ‘growing influence of the Crown,’ and of its ‘moral power,’ which was now ‘so firmly established that we can look forward with undoubted confidence to the reign of Queen Elizabeth the Second,’
he expressed a common feeling, for which the Cape Town broadcast had provided confirmation, that the institution would remain in clean hands.
The future of the Monarchy, however, was also linked to the question of who the Princess would marry. By now, an engagement to Prince Philip was assumed. During the South African tour, the BBC – planning ahead – began to consider a talk on the Princess ‘by someone who had known her since childhood’ to follow a betrothal announcement, and a similar one on the Prince.
But no announcement was made, either on Princess Elizabeth’s birthday, or on the Royal Family’s return. To damp down speculation, the couple tried to be seen less together – thereby sparking rumours that the relationship had been broken off.
One royal adviser recorded that, during a meeting with the Princess’s grandmother, Princess Elizabeth’s coming engagement had been discussed and that Queen Mary evidently had grave doubts about it.
Perhaps there was a last minute rearguard action by opponents of the match. If so, it swiftly collapsed. Prince Philip’s small sports car began to reappear at the side entrance to Buckingham Palace,
and on July 8th, the Palace declared its hand. ‘It had long been rumoured,’ noted Colville.
A few weeks after the official announcement, the Princess’s private secretary wrote of the lobbying that had taken place against the Prince by his critics. Whether they had been unable to block the engagement, he wrote, ‘because, as they think, the Queen’s usually good judgement has failed her, or because Princess Elizabeth was so much in love as to overcome her parents’ antipathy to the match, I do not know’.
* This is the Queen’s own spelling. Others have ‘Porchie’.
Chapter 7
UNCLE DICKIE had prepared the ground well. The press reaction to the betrothal, at a time when the Princess’s popularity had never been greater, was one of unqualified enthusiasm. Newspapers vied with each other to point out, not only that ‘this was clearly a marriage of choice not arrangement,’ but also that it was an extremely suitable match, made all the more so by Philip’s British bearing and attachments.
‘An effort had obviously been made,’ as Colville drily observed, ‘to build him up as the nephew of Lord Louis Mountbatten rather than a Greek Prince.’
The effort came primarily from Dickie, and it worked. Glucksburg antecedents took a backseat. Profiles focused on Philip’s British relatives, education and service record, which made a neat package. As one account put it, the Prince was ‘thoroughly English by upbringing, has that intense love of England and the British way of life, that deep devotion to the ideals of peace and liberty for which Britain stands, that are characteristic of so many naval men’.
Others tactfully suggested that, although technically a member of the Greek Orthodox Church into which he had been born, Princess Elizabeth’s fiancé had ‘regarded himself’ as a member of the Church of England since entering Dartmouth;
that he did not look Greek; and that his royal rank was a bonus – even though the naturalization had set aside any significance it ever had. Meanwhile, in Athens, the continuing Greek royal family – which had leaked the news of the engagement the day before its official release – had no doubt about its own reaction. Philip had hit the jackpot.
Philip himself acquired a valet and a detective, who accompanied him wherever he went. He also received a degree of public attention which he had never been subjected to before, and which he would now have to put up with for the rest of his life. His face, shown on all the newsreels, became recognizable everywhere. So did his car – suddenly everybody in Britain seemed to know that he drove a black, green-upholstered sports car with the registration HDK 99, and they looked out for it. For the time being, however, he continued to live on a lieutenant’s pay. According to his valet, his wardrobe was ‘scantier than that of many a bank clerk,’ and often didn’t include a clean shirt.
His naval wardrobe wasn’t much better. Appraising the King’s future son-in-law at a royal garden party a few days after the announcement, Lady Airlie noted, not entirely disapprovingly, that his uniform was shabby, with ‘the usual after-the-war look’.
For a short time, the image of the Prince as a genteelly poor, male Cinderella became a newspaper staple. Crawfie – who had been won over by the Prince from the beginning – took secret delight in the raffish style he introduced into the Palace, and in the pursed lips of servants and courtiers when he arrived hatless, with flannel trousers, and in an open-necked shirt with rolled-up sleeves.
In August, after the King and Privy Council, including the Prime Minister, Archbishop of Canterbury and Leader of the Opposition, had formally approved the match (as they were required to do under the 1772 Royal Marriages Act), Lieutenant Mountbatten joined the Royal Family at Balmoral. Here the Court was able to assess, soberly, the new recruit. According to one below-stairs tale, Philip annoyed the King when they were in Scotland by bobbing a mock curtsey at him while wearing a kilt.
Whether or not the story is true, it fits in with a picture of the Prince’s uneasy first summer in possession of the prize, regarded with caution by the King’s aristocratic friends, and potentially as dynamite by his courtiers. Jock Colville – in mellow mood, after his own first Balmoral working holiday – recorded his impressions of the royal life north of the border. He was struck by the contrasts with austerity London, even as experienced in Buckingham Palace. ‘There was luxury, sunshine and gaiety,’ he wrote, with ‘picnics on the moors every day; pleasant siestas in a garden ablaze with roses, stocks and antirrhinums; songs and games; and a most agreeable company with which to disport oneself.’ The company included Lord and Lady Eldon, the Salisburys, the Duke of Kent, David Bowes-Lyon, and Lady Violet Bonham Carter’s son Mark – several of them avowed disapprovers of the Prince.
Colville and Philip overlapped for a week, long enough for the Princess’s private secretary to form a provisionally favourable opinion, though also a cautious one. He liked the young naval officer, appreciated his difficulty in fitting into ‘the very English atmosphere that surrounds the Royal Family,’ especially when people like the Eldons and the Salisburys were around, and felt that he was intelligent and progressive, especially on the Commonwealth. But he was puzzled by the Philip–Elizabeth relationship. He recorded that the Princess was certainly in love with her fiancé. But he wondered about the apparently ‘dutiful’ appearance of the Prince.
Perhaps Philip did not show his deeper feelings, perhaps Colville’s attitude was tinged with a little jealousy: he, after all, was the person who saw more of the Heiress than almost anybody – including, probably, her fiancé. Other impressions varied. One royal adviser remembers games of ‘murder’ at Balmoral, and bumping into the couple in the dark. ‘Somehow’, he recalls, ‘they always seemed to find each other when the lights went out.’
Another, however, confirms Colville’s impression of a mysterious imbalance. ‘She was in love with him, you know’, he says. ‘Whether he was with her, I couldn’t say’.
The marriage was fixed for November 20th. In the meantime, Princess Elizabeth took over from the Duke of Gloucester the function of the King’s ceremonial understudy. In October, she accompanied her father at the State Opening of Parliament for the first time, riding to the ceremony in the glass coach, with a lady-in-waiting. Royal Wedding fever – which was to reach epidemic proportions a few weeks later – had already gripped the capital: people began to line the procession route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster in the early hours of the morning, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the Princess as she passed.
However, the idea that the marriage of the Heiress Presumptive should be treated as a major national and imperial event was a novel one – in Eric Hobsbawm’s terminology, an invented tradition. Walter Bagehot had written a famous passage in The English Constitution, in which he declared that the women of Britain cared more about the marriage of a Prince of Wales than a ministry. Yet nineteenth and early twentieth century royal weddings had been comparatively modest occasions, and the marriages of the children of recent monarchs were essentially family events. Although the wedding of George VI as Duke of York had taken place in the Abbey, this was a departure from earlier practice. Edward VII, as Prince of Wales, had married in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor and George V, as Duke of York, had married in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace. The wedding of Victoria, which took place after she had become Queen, was also at St. James’s Palace.
The choice of Westminster Abbey as the venue – made in consultation with the Prime Minister and Cabinet – was a decision to turn the day into a popular celebration of a kind, and on a scale, that had not taken place since before the war. It was to be a jamboree fit for a people’s princess, which would show that the Labour Government knew how to give everybody a good time, even in the depths of economic adversity. There were also – as at the time of George VI’s Coronation – diplomatic points to be made. In place of the restrained show of imperial might of 1937, the wedding of a decade later would be a peace-loving Empire parade, reminding people – as the South African tour had also sought to do – of the continuing strength of Commonwealth and imperial ties in the wake of Indian independence. Finally, Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to an undivorced, unforeign, relative provided both Monarchy and public with the Heir-to-the-Throne marriage of which they had been deprived in the 1930s, and which – it was fervently hoped – would blot out the memory of an unsuitable match with a suitable one, while perpetuating the new Windsor line.
Yet the arguments did not wash with everybody. Hugh Dalton, the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, described 1947 – in a phrase echoed by Elizabeth in a different context many years later – as his own, and the nation’s, ‘annus horrendus’. Not only was it an exceptionally uncomfortable year because of the protracted freeze-up in the first part of it. It was also economically a catastrophic one, with a fuel crisis which stopped factories, put millions out of work, and helped to precipitate a financial collapse that stalled the Government’s reform programme. In August – a few days after the Abbey announcement – the large North American dollar loan which had helped to pay for early post-war reconstruction ran out, and the free exchange of dollars and sterling was abruptly ended. In a restructuring of the Government in September, Sir Stafford Cripps, the President of the Board of Trade, was given the powerful new post of Minister of Economic Affairs, in order to strengthen the export drive. An Emergency Budget was scheduled for November, and Dalton was expected to announce the most restrictive package of measures since Labour came to office.
Against such a background there was some feeling, especially on the left, that a major state occasion was out of keeping with the rigour of the times. The Communist MP, William Gallagher, attacked the marriage both on the grounds of Philip’s ancestry (‘I am quite certain that he has not forsaken the family politics,’ he told the Commons), at a time of Greek repression, and because of the ‘lavish expenditure’ involved.
A group of Labour MPs added their own voice, sending a letter to the Chief Whip in protest at the likely cost.
On October 28th, Dalton responded to the attacks by declaring that only the decorations in Whitehall and outside the Palace would be funded by the taxpayer – everything else would be financed by the King’s Civil List.
On the eve of the Wedding, Chips Channon reckoned that Labour had got the worst of both worlds, laying itself open to criticism for spending too much, while actually appearing mean. Somebody in the Government he noted, ‘apparently advised simplicity, misjudging the English people’s love of pageantry and a show’.
There was certainly fierce pressure on the Palace not only to limit expenditure but, above all – at a time of foreign-exchange shortage – to buy British. Indeed, such were the jitters of the Government on the subject, that it became the cause for behind-the-scenes friction. In October, Lascelles responded with extreme testiness to a request for information from the Prime Minister, who was facing a hostile question, about a suggestion that ‘Lyons silk’ was being used for the bride’s dress. ‘The wedding dress contains silk from Chinese silk worms but woven in Scotland and Kent’, replied the courtier. ‘The wedding train contains silk produced by Kentish silk worms and woven in London. The going-away dress contains 4 or 5 yards of Lyons silk which was not specially imported but was part of the stock held by the dress maker (Hartnell) under permit.’ (Norman Hartnell had his own say. Faced with the accusation that, in troubled times, the silk might be ideologically suspect, he made a firm answer: ‘Our worms are Chinese worms’, he coldly informed his accusers, ‘– from Nationalist China, of course!’
) As for the suggestion that the Palace was insufficiently careful on such matters, Lascelles tartly reminded the Prime Minister that, only recently, the Privy Purse had found it necessary to tick off the Board of Trade for recommending an Austrian ornament-maker for the wedding dress’s trimmings, a recommendation which had threatened the Palace ‘with an appreciable amount of embarrassing publicity’.
A bigger problem, however, than the cost of the Wedding was the cost of the Princess. The marriage of an Heir to the Throne automatically involved a review of the Heir’s Civil List – and the month in which this was taking place could scarcely have been less propitious. Buckingham Palace asked for a total of £50,000 per annum for the couple – a net increase of £35,000. The Government – conscious of left-wing backbenchers whose working-class constituents had been told to tighten their belts – replied that this was politically impossible. It did not ease discussions on such a delicate matter that the Chancellor, responsible both for the Budget and for finding the cash for the King’s daughter, happened to be the son of a former tutor to George V, and – for complex domestic reasons – was heartily disliked by the Royal Family, which regarded him as a turncoat. Dalton, antiroyal since his youth, was not particularly good at concealing the wry pleasure he derived from the twist of fate that had made him royal paymaster.
The Cabinet had a single objective: to avoid a parliamentary row at a difficult time on what they regarded as a minor matter. On October 22nd, less than a month before the Wedding, Attlee and Dalton saw Lascelles and Sir Ulick Alexander, Keeper of the Privy Purse, in order, as Dalton recorded, to discuss ‘a new Civil List Bill and much more money for Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip’.
It was a sticky meeting. In reply to the courtiers’ request on behalf of the royal couple, the premier and Chancellor threatened a full-scale Select Committee, which might open a pandora’s box, and bring every item of royal expenditure under review. In particular, Attlee pointed out, ‘it might even be impossible to prevent questions being asked as to the extent of any private fortunes belonging to the King and to other members of the Royal Family’.
Dalton added that if the annuities were too high, ‘It would raise discord, and many awkward questions, and would impair the popularity of the Royal Family.’
Why, asked the Chancellor, should the King not solve the problem himself, by increasing the Princess’s present allowance out of the Household Balances which were in credit, and were likely to continue so? When Alexander insisted that the surplus was only temporary, Dalton drew attention to £200,000 which had been lent by the King, out of these balances, to the Government – and which might be used to pay for Elizabeth and Philip. At this point Lascelles suggested that Dalton should have a personal audience with the King, to discuss the matter
– and laid the ground for such a meeting by proposing to the Prime Minister a compromise. Parliament, he suggested, should make provision for the Princess – thereby avoiding the setting of a dangerous precedent by not doing so – but on the understanding that, while the difficult times lasted, the money would not be spent.
Dalton’s audience took place on October 27th. It appeared to go well. Lascelles wrote afterwards that the Chancellor was ‘greatly pleased by his talk with HM,’
and Dalton told the Prime Minister that he found the King ‘in a very happy mood’. The meeting seemed to resolve one of the royal difficulties – how to preserve the principle of provision by Parliament, without a Select Committee – by agreeing a formula that established a Select Committee in name, but not in reality. A royal message would announce that no burden should be placed on public funds while economic difficulties lasted. Then the Chancellor would propose the setting up of a Select Committee that would merely note that it was normal for provision to be made for an Heir on marriage, but that this would be delayed for the time being.
The affair, ‘so delicate from so many different points of view,’ Dalton wrote to Attlee, ‘has moved forward with an unexpected smoothness.’
But had it? One thing it had not disposed of was the problem of how much the Princess and Prince would get, and how they would be paid. ‘The essential point,’ Dalton reminded the King, ‘was to prevent the development of an embarrassing debate.’ That, however, was more the Government’s problem than George VI’s. The royal concern, the King told the Chancellor, was ‘that he could not go on indefinitely making the additional provision from his own resources . . .’
The gap between these two positions remained a wide one, and in the fortnight before the Budget it became the cause of a heated argument, which turned on the status of the royal wartime loan. The Government saw this as a fund of public money to be tapped; the Palace, on the other hand, regarded it as the product of royal frugality, and an essential part of the King’s accounts. It did not help Government-Palace relations that at the end of October it was decided, for technical constitutional reasons, that a proper Select Committee would be necessary after all.
On November 7th, Dalton returned to the attack, sending the Palace a detailed proposal: the King should surrender the £200,000 saved during the War, and out of this sum a £10,000 annuity should be paid to Elizabeth (over and above the £15,000 Civil List income she was already getting), and £5,000 to Philip, making a joint total of £30,000, part of which should be taxable. If he imagined that this would do the trick, he was mistaken. The Palace was incensed at an amount which it considered derisory, and a poor return on its £200,000 wartime saving. Lascelles recorded the next day that the King considered the offer to be unacceptable.
The prospect of a negotiated peace having thus faded, both sides now dug trenches. As Dalton approached the day on which he would have to give the most difficult Budget speech of his career, his attitude became even less tractable, and more infuriating to the Court. On November 10th, he returned to the Palace for another discussion with Lascelles and Alexander, and explained that his earlier offer had just been a bargaining position. The admission confirmed everything the Palace believed about him already. ‘He began by saying that he was not at all surprised that the King had rejected the offer,’ noted an exasperated Lascelles, who added that this was particularly remarkable in view of the fact that he had been told that Dalton had Cabinet backing.
There, for the next few days, the matter rested. In his Budget speech on November 12th, Dalton – as expected – announced a series of tax increases and other deflationary measures. Next day, in Cabinet, his sole recorded contribution to the morning’s discussion concerned the forthcoming marriage of HRH Princess Elizabeth for which, he said, Parliament should be asked to make further financial provisions.
A Draft Message from the King, in which His Majesty expressed willingness to ‘place at the disposal of the faithful Commons a sum derived from savings on the Civil List made during the war years’ was passed without a dissentient voice. Even the left seemed happy. The Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevin – who might have been expected to make a critical or at least quizzical comment – merely remarked that so long as Britain had one, ‘we ought never to lower the standards of the Monarchy’, and that he hoped the Select Committee would do its work quickly, and settle the whole matter while the Wedding was fresh in people’s minds. No figures were mentioned. ‘That is quite satisfactory’, Lascelles wrote to the King cautiously, ‘as far as it goes.’
The same night, however, an unexpected development altered the picture in a fundamental way. Released from Budget concerns, Dalton might now have turned his attention fully to the Civil List problem. Instead, the discovery that he was the inadvertent source of a Budget leak, which appeared in an evening paper while he was still giving his speech, forced him to offer his resignation as Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was accepted. His friends were shocked, while the Opposition congratulated itself on an unexpected scalp.
Buckingham Palace could be forgiven if it secretly rejoiced as well. At any rate, it is unlikely that the King remonstrated with Attlee about the departure. Indeed, he now had a double reason for gratitude towards his Prime Minister on the subject of Mr Dalton. In 1945, Attlee had obliged by not appointing the renegade Etonian as Foreign Secretary; two and a half years later, he obliged once again by accepting Dalton’s resignation as Chancellor, at a moment of maximum convenience to the Palace.
In the negotiations, Dalton had appeared both resistant and devious, even – most maddeningly of all – gleeful. His successor, Sir Stafford Cripps, was none of these things. Despite his reputation for austerity (perhaps partly because of it), he was not only straightforward in his dealing with the Palace on the Civil List issue, he was also accommodating. As a result, a much more generous provision than Dalton had ever envisaged went through without a hitch.
In December, the new Chancellor recommended to his colleagues a total provision of £50,000 – including a £25,000 increase for Elizabeth, with £10,000 for Philip – £20,000 more than Dalton’s offer. He also suggested that the King should make available only £100,000 of accumulated savings, for a period of four years.
He was, however, taking a risk. The provision required Parliamentary approval which, in view of the need for a Select Committee, could not be taken for granted. Moreover, if they did not accept it, serious damage would be done to the prestige of the Monarchy, as well as to relations between Palace and Parliament.
The Committee began hearing evidence on December 3rd. A key witness was the King’s private secretary, who impressed MPs with a dire warning that the Civil List ‘may have to face a crisis of insolvency,’ if it did not receive adequate provision. Should this happen, three major economies would become necessary: the abolition of horse-drawn carriages, the disbandment of the Gentleman at Arms and Yeoman of the Guard, and the closing of Windsor Castle as a royal residence. ‘I don’t think any member of this Committee,’ he declared – repeating Bevan’s remark in Cabinet – ‘will disagree with me when I say that, so long as we have a Monarchy, the Monarchy’s work has got to be done well’.
It was a close-run thing. Under only slightly different circumstances – with a less persuasive Chancellor, or one who commanded less authority among MPs – the decision might have gone the other way. As it was, five out of the twelve Labour MPs on the Committee, including the Chairman of the Parliamentary Party, were in favour of substantially lower annuities for the royal couple, backing figures of £35,000 for Elizabeth and £5,000 for Philip. In the final vote, Labour MPs, split evenly, and the higher figures proposed by the Chancellor required Tory and Liberal support to carry them.
THE DEBATE over annuities for the Heiress and her husband had many echoes over the next half century, as inflation bit into the Civil List, while rising asset values simultaneously added to royal wealth. The question of what Parliament should provide, and what it was fair to ask the Monarch to pay out of private or accumulated resources, remained one of the central issues surrounding the institution.
In 1947, however, few matters were of smaller interest to the public. Despite the Government’s misgivings, ‘Royal Wedding Week’ in mid-November provided the national carnival of the decade: a spectacular display of conspicuous consumption, for royalty and subjects alike, which revealed – to those who cared to note it – the public longing for a relaxation of controls after eight years of tight regulation. If there was popular criticism or resentment, little of it ever became public. Mass Observation discovered discontent, here and there, about the extravagance. People questioned about the 300 clothing coupons and £1,200 spent on the wedding dress split evenly on whether it was reasonable or not. The journalist Jill Craigie described the decision to design a calf-length trousseau for the Princess as ‘a major victory for the vested interests of the fashion houses.’
However, opinion polls showed a mellowing of opinion as the day approached, with a rise between July and November from 40 to 60 per cent of people actively approving of the arrangements.
During the autumn, pre-nuptial excitement focused fetishistically on the physical details of the preparations, including the wedding presents which arrived by the crate-load from all over the world. A souvenir book was published listing all 2,428 of them, and the gifts themselves were put on show, tickets a shilling each, at St James’s Palace. ‘After the scarcity, the make-do of the war years,’ wrote Crawfie, who beat Princess Elizabeth to the altar by getting married, more modestly, in September, ‘this sudden lavishness was unnerving.’
Presents ranged from a gold tiara from the Emperor of Ethiopia to a large number of nylon stockings, home-knitted jumpers and hand-made tea cosies.
There were political gifts, like a 175-piece porcelain dinner service from Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife; well-chosen ones, like a chestnut filly (Astrakhan) from the Aga Khan; and puzzling ones, like the item given by the Mahatma Gandhi, which the catalogue described as a ‘fringed lacework cloth made out of yarn spun by the donor on his own spinning wheel.’
Queen Mary thought it was the Indian leader’s famous loincloth, and took a dim view. ‘Such an indelicate gift,’ she told Lady Airlie.
Not included in the exhibition were hundreds of tons of tinned food from British communities abroad, which were distributed to needy widows and pensioners, with a message from the bride.
All exhibited gifts were carefully and democratically itemised in the catalogue, regardless of splendour. The pot pourri of the exhibition, appropriate for the times, was reflected in a preview party for donors, attended by rich and poor, ‘peers and factory workers, statesmen and schoolgirls, old age pensioners and housewives, visitors from the provinces, the Continent and the United States.’
Such social mixing, however, was not to everybody’s taste; nor were many of the gifts. Chips Channon, caught in the crush, noted with admiration a wreath of diamond roses given by the Nizam of Hyderabad, but ‘was struck by how ghastly some of the presents were, though the crowd made it difficult to see.’
He owed his own invitation to gift No. 797, listed as a ‘silver cigarette case, sunray pattern set with a cabochon sapphire in a gold thumb piece.’
The Princess herself spent much of her time before the Wedding thanking the more important corporate donors in person. For such occasions, she had a set speech, which was like a cutdown version of her Cape Town broadcast and a wedding rehearsal combined. ‘As long as we live’, she recited in her thank-you to the City of London, ‘it will be the constant purpose of Lieutenant Mountbatten and myself to serve a people who are so dear to me and to show ourselves deserving of their esteem’.
Of almost as great interest as ‘the presents’ was ‘the cake’ – a topic of special fascination because younger members of the population, reared on sugar rationing, found it difficult even to imagine a culinary creation of such opulence. The problem of having the wedding cake made was solved by a neat and characteristic royal exploitation of professional snobbery, vanity and loyalty. Royal-connected cake manufacturers were graciously permitted to present an example of their work, in return for an invitation to the viewing party in the mirror-lined State dining-room, in the presence of the King and Queen, who wandered around, asking polite questions about the ingredients. The winners had the satisfaction of knowing that their cakes had been consumed by royal guests.
There were twelve cakes in all, the biggest of which stood four feet high, and took four months to make.
Finally, there was ‘The Dress’. Of all the totemic artefacts associated with the royal wedding none drove the press and public to greater frenzy than this garment – partly, again, because of the shortages, which had made fine materials hard or impossible even for well-off people to obtain. Accounts of the wedding dress were caressing: according to Norman Hartnell’s own description, it was made of ‘clinging ivory silk’, trailed with jasmine, smilax, seringa and rose-like blossoms, and included a large number of small pearls. Others were even more lyrical. James Laver, fashion expert at the Victoria and Albert, spoke of Hartnell’s creation of Botticelli curves, and of the raised pearls arranged as York roses, entwined with ears of corn. By the device of reversed embroidery, the design had ‘alternated star flowers and orange blossom, now tulle on satin, and now satin on tulle, the whole encrusted with pearls and crystals.’
A mythology surrounded the production. Hartnell himself liked to recount that his manager, returning from America after a component-hunting expedition, had replied to the question at the customs about whether he had anything to declare, ‘Yes, ten thousand pearls, for the wedding dress of Princess Elizabeth.’
Like the presents, the dress was put on display, and at times the queue of people waiting to see it stretched the length of the Mall.
After the build-up, the Wedding became, in the words of an American monarchophile, ‘a movie premiere, an election, a World Series and Guy Fawkes Night all rolled into one’.
It was also, at its core, a gathering of the remnants of European royalty – a vast, rivalrous, beleaguered, mutually suspicious and mutually loyal, and frequently impoverished, extended family. In this respect, the Wedding was different from a Coronation, which was a state more than a personal event. Because of the background of the groom, special attention was directed at the least significant members of this inter-related, uniformed, bemedalled and be-jewelled galère, who included the flotsam of two world wars and many revolutions – and for whom Lieutenant Mountbatten was both an object of envy, and a morale-boosting proof that they still had a place in the world.
Since 1918 – if not before – the British Royal Family had been the premier dynasty; and now, with fewer surviving monarchies than ever, its pre-eminence was even more apparent. ‘You are the big potato,’ Smuts was overheard saying to the King’s mother at the wedding-eve party; ‘all the other queens are small potatoes.’
Nobody doubted it or that this was an occasion for big potatoes to show cousinly solicitude to small ones, whatever their circumstances. Lady Airlie cast her mind back to 1939 or even 1914. Old friends were reunited, she wrote, old jealousies swept away.
‘It was a tremendous meeting place,’ recalls Princess Margaret. ‘People who had been starving in little garrets all over Europe, suddenly reappeared.’
Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia likened the atmosphere to that of a boarding school, in which all the royal families belonged to the same house: the Wedding reminded her of a reunion of school friends, all ‘shedding their grown-up facade, and romping together in an abandon of gossip, leg-pulling and long-remembered family jokes’. Many of the visiting royals – especially the mendicant ones, who had their travel expenses discreetly paid by the Windsors – crowded round a communal table in the dining room at Claridges, where they were put up, adding to the illusion of an unruly and cacophonous academy.
However, simple accounts of happy high jinks, and of bygones being bygones, did not give the whole picture. Delicate decisions had to be made. Though Philip’s mother was invited, his three surviving, German-married sisters were not. Nor was the Duke of Windsor, who spent the day morosely in New York in his Waldorf Towers suite. A few who came might have done better to have stayed away. ‘When I am back behind the Iron Curtain,’ Queen Helen of Romania remarked during her brief stay, ‘I shall wonder whether this is all a dream.’
Her words acquired a special poignancy because the Government in Bucharest used the opportunity afforded by King Michael’s absence to declare a republic.
On the eve of the main event there was a dinner for foreign royalty, and a grand party at the Palace, attended by crowned heads, presidents and premiers. Much was made of the down-at-heel condition of royal adornments, of tiaras taken out of storage and dusted down: as though the ostentation was easier to justify if it was seen as a fancy dress parade, rather than the display of real luxury. Crown jewels were worn as if they were paste, almost apologetically – leading some of the kings and queens who still had thrones to feel superior. ‘Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was frightfully scathing about everybody’s jewellery,’ recalls Pamela Hicks, a bridesmaid. ‘“It’s so dirty,” she kept saying.’
Lady Airlie wrote that ‘anyone fortunate enough to have a new dress drew all eyes’. However, all the famous diamonds were visible, ‘even though most of them had not been cleaned since 1939’.
ONE TICKLISH question, which exercised the finest and most antiquarian minds at Buckingham Palace almost until the Wedding itself, was what Philip Mountbatten should be called and how he should be styled. Since he was no longer Greek, his royal title was meaningless, and anyway he had abandoned it; yet it was taken for granted that the Heiress’s consort could not remain a commoner. The problem was finding a suitable English title, and an appropriate rank. In choosing one, future children – including the future Heir or Heiress – had to be taken into account. Would they be named after their father or their mother? Consulted on this point, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Jowett, replied that the 1917 Proclamation which changed the Royal Family’s name to Windsor, did not include under the general rubric George V’s married female descendants. Elizabeth, and her issue, were excluded, and would take their names from her husband.
At the end of July, Dermot Morrah – who had covered the tour of South Africa for The Times and felt a passionate concern about the minutiae of royal etiquette – sent a memorandum to his editor, who passed it on to the Palace, listing some twenty alternative labels for Lieutenant Mountbatten, with comments on each. He gave ‘Edinburgh’ a high ranking. Though it had the drawback of lacking antiquity, ‘having been first conferred only in 1726,’ the adoption of it, he suggested, would be seen as a compliment to Scotland. Lascelles added his own notes, and passed on the list to the King.
In view of Philip’s naval background, either the Earl or Duke of Greenwich was considered a possibility.
Finally, Baron Greenwich, Earl of Merioneth, Duke of Edinburgh was agreed. However, the question of a ‘Royal’ Dukedom – whether Philip should be called ‘His Royal Highness’, following his marriage – still had to be sorted out. The King became greatly exercised on this issue. ‘Can you find out how Prince Henry of Battenberg who was Serene Highness was created Royal Highness by Q. Victoria on his marriage to Princess Beatrice?’, the King pencilled to Lascelles in August. ‘This will give me a Precedent in this case.’ In September, after consultations with the Home Secretary, it was decided to bestow the ‘HRH’ title which Philip had turned down before the engagement, but which his marriage to the Princess would justify. The King’s attention now turned to the complex question of his future son-in-law’s coat-of-arms. Rough sketches were commissioned, and the Monarch spent many productive hours poring over them, noting down his comments.
At the end of September, Philip’s transmogrification into an Englishman was completed with his formal reception into the Anglican Church by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the chapel at Lambeth Palace – at roughly the same time as his mother, Princess Alice, was making arrangements for the founding of her own Greek Orthodox order of working nuns. There was one more detail: in November, the King bestowed the Garter on both the Princess and Philip – though too late for the wedding service sheets, which described him as ‘Philip Mountbatten, RN’. Popularly, however, he had always been known as ‘Prince Philip’ – a title to which his wife, as Queen, finally gave regal sanction ten years later.
Courtiers continued to weigh him up. In late October, Philip accompanied Elizabeth on her last pre-marriage engagement, to launch the Cunard liner the Caronia from the Clydebank shipyard of John Brown and Co. On the way back, the royal train was delayed in a siding, and Jock Colville walked down the line with his employer’s fiancé, climbing with him into the signal box. ‘I watched P. narrowly,’ he recorded. ‘He is a strong believer in the hail-fellow-well-met as opposed to the semi-divine interpretation of Monarchy.’ However, during a conversation with some of the railwaymen, there was one ‘appalling gaffe’. When the signalman said jokingly that he was waiting for promotion until somebody died, noted Colville, ‘Philip replied, “Like me!” No doubt he meant in the Navy, but another interpretation was obvious.’ Colville wrote that he expected the future consort to be popular with the crowd, but that he could also be vulgar, and that his manner towards Princess Elizabeth at times was quite off-hand.
However, even the Princess’s acidic private secretary was not immune from the rising tide of sentiment towards the young couple, and the sense of a storybook romance. Close contact with both of them also caused him to revise his opinions. ‘As the day drew nearer’, Colville acknowledged immediately after the Wedding, ‘I began to think, as I now sincerely do, that the Princess and Philip really are in love.’
He also wrote that Elizabeth ‘bore the pre-wedding strain with great good nature and cheerfulness’.
Sometimes, it must have been hard. To the worries of any young bride were added an uncertainty about what to expect as the first married Heiress to the Throne of modern times, and the almost suffocating attentions of the world. Crawfie, seeing her former pupil’s nervousness, tried to help – by offering some advice. This took the form of a homily on the condition of matrimony, which reveals much about British attitudes (or at any rate Scottish lower-middle-class ones) in the 1940s. It was unwise, the governess explained, even in a royal union, to be too jealous or possessive a wife. ‘When you marry, you must not expect the honeymoon to last for ever,’ she told the young woman she had helped to bring up. ‘Sooner or later you will meet the stresses and strains of everyday life. You must not expect your husband to be constantly at your side or always to receive from him the extravagant affection of the first few months. A man has his own men friends, hobbies and interests in which you cannot and will not want to share.’
Princess Elizabeth started her wedding day much as she had begun the morning of her father’s Coronation ten years before – looking out of the window of Buckingham Palace in her dressing-gown.
Despite the cold November weather, crowds had gathered in the Mall the night before, in preparation for an all-night vigil. ‘There was a tremendous crowd reaction’, says Pamela Hicks. ‘Suddenly to see the state coach was marvellous, with Princess Elizabeth with her wonderful complexion and Prince Philip so devastatingly handsome – they were a dream couple.’
The theme was popular monarchy. The day’s events, including the service, were broadcast to forty-two countries. The address by the Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, stressed the universality of the occasion. Never, he said, had a wedding been followed with such interest by so many people, yet the ceremony was ‘in all essentials exactly the same as it would have been for any cottager who might be married this afternoon in some small country church in a remote village in the Dales’.
One of the essentials – despite a few protests from ‘extreme advocates for sexual equality’ – was the promise by the Heiress Presumptive ‘to love, cherish and obey’ her husband.
Non-essentials included the attendants, the list of whom made no concessions to social equality. All were either royal or aristocratic. Philip’s cousin, the Marquess of Milford Haven, was best man.
The congregation of two thousand included, as Wheeler-Bennett put it, ‘one of the largest gatherings of royalty, regnant and exiled, of the century’.
There were so many kings and queens and their off-spring, together with foreign heads of state, that other categories were squeezed – British MPs, for instance, had to ballot for places, much to their irritation. Many of the guests were unknown to either the bride or the groom. Others were known to the entire Abbey. When the Leader of the Opposition, Winston Churchill, arrived a little late, ‘everyone stood up’, as Channon observed, ‘all the Kings and Queens’.
There were also eccentrics. Lady Munnings, wife of Sir Alfred, President of the Royal Academy, sat through the whole service with her Pekinese dog, Black Knight, concealed in her muff.
To be invited was bliss: to be left off the list, when you thought you should be on it, was torture. ‘Miserable royal wedding day’, wrote Lord Reith, former Director-General of the BBC, in his diary. ‘Didn’t get up till 10.30. Completely out of phase with everything and everybody through not being asked to the Abbey.’
The lucky ones felt the kind of excitement people feel when they attend events everybody else wishes they were at: they found beauty and wonder everywhere, in the building, the words, the music, the congregation, the Royal Family, the royal couple and especially the bride. There were many accounts from people eager to display their privileged access, and inside knowledge. Faces were studied for expressions, clothes critically examined for the minutest detail. Mrs Fisher, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, thought the Princess looked ‘very calm, absolutely lovely’ coming up the aisle. The effect of her outfit, she wrote, ‘was a diaphanous one with her lovely train of silk tulle and her veil’.
Channon ‘thought Princess Elizabeth looked well, shy and attractive, and Prince Philip as if he was thoroughly enjoying himself’.
Others were impressed by the theatricality of the event. ‘The King looked unbelievably beautiful’, Sir Michael Duff wrote to Cecil Beaton, ‘like an early French King and HRH the Bride a dream.’
After the signing of the register in the Chapel of St Edward the Confessor, the couple returned, the Prince bowing to the King and Queen, the Princess dropping a low curtsey, her train billowing out behind her. Then they returned together in the Glass Coach to Buckingham Palace, for an ‘austerity’ wedding breakfast for 150 guests. At the end of it, the King made no speech. He simply raised his glass to ‘the bride’.
The going-away involved an additional ritual. As Philip in naval uniform and the Princess in a coat of ‘love-in-a-mist blue’
left the Palace forecourt for Waterloo Station, they were chased by bridesmaids and relations, including the King and Queen, pelting them with rose petals. Queen Alexandra recalled that the Monarch and his wife were hand in hand,
Crawfie that the Queen lifted her skirts to join the farewell party by the railings, as the couple disappeared into the crowds that lined the route.
According to The Times, ‘Roll upon roll of cheers followed the carriage’, on its journey.
Press coverage was even greater than for the Coronation – the start of an inflation in the news value of the Monarchy which eventually took its toll. In 1947, it helped to inflame a public interest in the display of royalty which had lain dormant since before the war. Radio was the dominant medium – used by the BBC to create images in the minds of listeners that were reverential, awe-inspiring and atmospheric. ‘Into London’s gathering dusk this afternoon’, the six o’clock newsreader intoned, ‘Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh – man and wife – drove away in an open landau from Buckingham Palace for their honeymoon . . . It’s been a day which London will long remember.’ The written script was broken up, with strokes between words and phrases, to indicate pauses for solemn effect.
Afterwards, radio and its world-wide audience became part of wedding lore, with tales of huddles of avid listeners in unlikely places – for example, it was reported that the skipper of the New Zealand ship Pamir hove to in the middle of the South Atlantic so that all his crew could listen properly to the broadcast.
Mass Observation noted that in a typical provincial office, the radio was switched on all day. ‘We couldn’t get into the room’, reported an informant, ‘and just joined the crowd clustered outside.’
As well as listening to the radio, a small number of people in Britain were able to watch some of the day’s events on an apparatus described by the press as ‘television’s magic crystal’ which had recently resumed broadcasting. A TV camera placed over the Palace forecourt was able to follow Princess Elizabeth’s coach as it came out of the gates, and another took over outside the Abbey. The service itself was filmed, and shown on television the same evening, while the film and other press and broadcasting materials were flown for distribution next day in the United States. So great was the international interest that the Wedding film was even screened in Allied-occupied Berlin. The 4,000 seat cinema in which it was shown in the still devastated city was fully booked, seven days a week.
For British children, the most potent symbol of the Wedding was probably ‘the cake’. Many schools celebrated with feasts of ices and buns, often (so it was reported) ‘without recourse to special supplementary permits from the Ministry of Food’, and in spite of a request from the Ministry of Education to head teachers to be as modest as possible in their spending. Universities treated it as an unofficial rag. Oxford had ‘its gayest celebration since the war,’ with community singing and fireworks in the streets, and undergraduates dancing eightsome reels.
What was it really about? People were as puzzled then as they are now. Apart from the chance to escape austerity, if only for a day, there was what a woman in Leatherhead described to a Mass Observer as ‘a delighted sort of family feeling. I always get it when watching any sort of royal do.’
The Archbishop of York had alluded to such a feeling in his marriage service address, and John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, displayed it in a mawkish but revealing Prayer for the Royal Marriage. ‘To those dear lands, still calling Britain “Home”,’ he versified, ‘The Crown is still the link with Britain’s past, The consecrated thing that must outlast / Folly and hate and other human foam.’ A less embarrassing version of the same sentiment was provided by the historian G. M. Trevelyan who wrote in the official souvenir of a King above politics, and a symbol of national unity, yet one ‘who appeals below the surface of politics to the simple, dutiful, human instincts which he and his own family circle represent,’ and ‘who holds the Commonwealth together by the common bond of his royal authority’.
In short, the Wedding was to be regarded – in the Establishment, but also in the Labour Government version – as a reminder of the direct link that supposedly existed between royal familial virtue and the constitutional and political functions of the Monarchy; and the public rejoicing as a celebration of a democratic system which worked. The whole occasion could be seen as a kind of victory parade for liberty, for a constitution, ‘still the most sea-worthy of all political craft,’ which had ‘weathered the storms of two world wars’, and for a family which provided a vital human ingredient. Trevelyan’s argument was pragmatic, yet also romantic. ‘In Great Britain the Crown is the least criticised of our domestic institutions’, he claimed; ‘throughout the Dominions and Colonies it is the point on which the eyes of loyalty are turned from across every ocean. Affection for a King’s person and family adds warmth and drama to every man’s rational awareness of his country’s political unity and historic tradition. It is a kind of popular poetry in these prosaic times.’
What Trevelyan did not say – something which provided an important element in the Empire-wide celebration of an essentially personal event – was that ‘family’ had come in the dozen years since George V’s death to encroach still further on the other aspects of Monarchy. As the author of an internal Cabinet Office paper on the functions of the Prime Minister put it in June 1947, not only was it absolute doctrine that the King did nothing political except on ministerial advice, ‘the tendency has been to regard more and more matters as having political significance’.
The Second World War, the election of a highly political Labour Government, and the personality of George VI, had all contributed to this tendency, which had rendered the areas of royal activity that were controversial, or open to normal criticism, nugatory, and narrowed the range of public interest in royal figures and royal lives, without removing its intensity.
Thus, the reduction of the Royal Family to picture book iconography did not diminish public enthusiasm: indeed, by removing all remaining partisan elements, it enhanced it. Appreciation of the virtues of the British system turned into an appreciation of personages from whom all hint of blame had been removed for anything that went wrong – yet who could be thanked for the things that had gone right. The biggest of these was survival. In the late 1940s, apart from the United States, British democracy had no major-state rival, and this was a point, not just for patriotic pride, but also for sober contemplation on the constitutional reasons why it should be so. The point was contemporary and urgent: amongst other things, the Wedding – the ‘splash of colour’ as Churchill called it – was a propaganda blast against totalitarianism at the start of the Cold War. ‘To every foreigner present,’ Wheeler-Bennett was able to write a few years later, the ceremonies, processions and public enthusiasm were ‘an object lesson, doubly expressive in the existing distressed state of Europe, of the stability of Britain’s political institutions, and of the unity of the nation in its respect for tradition and its loyalty to the throne’.
Chapter 8
ANY HOPE THAT, by leaving London for a supposedly private honeymoon in the country, Elizabeth and Philip could escape national attention or at any rate pretend it did not exist, was quickly disappointed. The public hunger, raised to such a level, could not simply be switched off at the moment when it became convenient to do so. The couple were due to spend the first part of their honeymoon at Uncle Dickie’s house Broadlands, near Romsey in the New Forest. When they got off the train at Winchester, the Princess was observed to have a corgi with her – symbol of the domesticity she longed for. But the crowds would not allow it. Having learnt of the whereabouts of the Princess and the Duke, sightseers lay in wait. On the first Sunday after the Wedding, in a foretaste of what was to come, a mass of them surged into Romsey Abbey, where the couple were due to attend Matins. Some – unable to get seats in the church – carried ladders, chairs, and even a sideboard into the churchyard to stand on, in order to get a better look. After the service, less voracious royal enthusiasts queued (it was an age of queuing) outside the Abbey, in order to take their turn at sitting in the seats that royalty had sat in.
After a week under siege at Broadlands the royal couple at last evaded their pursuers by travelling north to Birkhall.
They returned to the Palace in time for the King’s fifty-second birthday on December 14th. ‘The Edinburghs are back from Scotland,’ Colville wrote the following day. ‘She was looking very happy, and, as a result of three weeks of matrimony, suddenly a woman instead of a girl. He also seemed happy, but a shade querulous, which is, I think, in his character.’
One reason for querulousness was that, among all the prewedding preparations, one aspect of their future had been neglected: where they planned to live. Following their engagement they had chosen Sunninghill Park, near Ascot, as their future country home. In August, however, Sunninghill was gutted by fire. Chips Channon recorded that he had been asked if he would let or lend his house to the couple for several months while they found somewhere else, but had turned down the request on the grounds that it would mean too much upheaval.
Instead, they obtained a lease on Windlesham Moor, near Sunningdale in Surrey. This was not immediately available, and in any case was only for weekend use. Their London residence was to be Clarence House in Stable Yard, at the south angle of St James’s Palace. This imposing four-storey mansion had been built for William IV when Duke of Clarence in 1824. Its most recent occupant had been the Duke of Connaught, who had died in 1942, since when it had been unoccupied. In addition to the neglect of an elderly royal duke, there had been serious damage from bombing. Renovations took more than eighteen months, and the couple were unable to move in until July 1949.
In the meantime, they lived in Buckingham Palace. Crawfie believed that this was a mistake, that the Princess needed to get away from her parents.
Philip – beginning to experience the brutal consequences to his own life of such a marriage – may have felt the same. However, as the popular papers eagerly pointed out, the Palace was convenient for the office: Philip had been given a desk job working for the Director of Operations at the Admiralty, and was able to walk there every morning along the Mall, despite the stares of passers-by.
It was an odd period for both of them: Elizabeth at first living a life which on the surface had altered remarkably little since before her engagement, Philip undergoing the profound change of outlook, circumstance and expectation that accompanied his choice of mate. Both worked, though neither of them very strenuously. They took a keen interest in the Clarence House renovations, often visiting the initially gloomy building. Sometimes they joined in – Elizabeth amusing herself by mixing the paints for the walls of the Adam-style dining-room, which was hung with Hanoverian portraits, and by furnishing the house with wedding presents. When eventually they moved in, the Princess and her husband had separate but communicating bedrooms, with the dressing-tables only a few feet from the joint door, so that they could talk through it when they were getting ready for dinner. According to the Duke’s valet, John Dean, when Bobo MacDonald was helping Elizabeth and he was helping Philip, the couple ‘would joke happily through the left-open door.’
Getting settled into suitable accommodation took some time to sort out. Money was quicker – though by no means automatic. The Select Committee report on the Civil List was delivered promptly on December 11th, and discussed on the floor of the House six days later. The debate – as the Manchester Guardian put it – was of ‘peculiar interest’.
Against the background of the Wedding on the one hand, and the split vote in the Committee on the other, it provided the first opportunity since the Abdication for a proper public exploration of the role and function of the Monarchy. It was also an exercise in temperature taking: for the vote was a free one, and the House, with its large Labour majority, was as far tilted away from automatic monarchism as at any time since 1918.
Conservatives and Liberals supported the report proposals. The difficulty was on the Government side. Sir Stafford Cripps, moving the acceptance of the report, spoke of the importance of the functions the Princess and Duke had to perform, and of the proof of that importance provided by ‘the intense interest and enthusiasm displayed by all sections of the population at the time of their marriage’. For the Conservatives, Anthony Eden reminded the House that the British ambassador in Washington spent £20,000 a year just on entertaining. Labour left-wingers responded with arguments that were to become staple fare on such occasions. There was talk of the excessive cost of the ‘servants and hangers-on of the Court,’ and of ‘spivs and drones and butterflies’ around the royal couple. A Scottish MP compared the Duke’s £10,000 (‘in addition to a cushy job at the Admiralty’) with the forty shillings a week paid to men blinded in the war. Others suggested that the ‘Scandinavian type’ of monarchy was cheaper and better.
In addition, there was a ‘moderate’ opposition to the CrippsLascelles package – not republicanism, but a belief that (in the words of Maurice Webb, a Select Committee member) the country both wished to retain the Monarchy ‘and desired it to be simple, austere and democratic’. From the Palace’s point of view, such an argument was much more dangerous than that of the Monarchy denigrators, because it struck a genuine chord among the loyal but luxury-denied public; and because it sought, in reasonable tones, to reassert parliamentary control of royal expenditure. The decisive group, however, was the powerful body of Labour MPs who both believed in the Monarchy as a useful device, and felt – with Nye Bevan – that if it was to be done at all, it had to be done in style: in the words of Arthur Greenwood in the debate, ‘with proper dignity’.
It was to this group that the Prime Minister appealed when he spoke in support of a ‘ceremonial’ monarchy – whose value, he implied, derived both from its ability to meet a need for public theatre, and from the exemplary behaviour of the principal actors. In what amounted to a Labour theory of Monarchy, Attlee spoke of the need for ‘simple lives and approachable people’ at the heart of a democracy, and of royal ceremonials as an alternative to the sinister rituals of totalitarianism. The financial details before the House, he suggested, were intended to make such ceremonials and necessary symbolism possible, by giving ‘these young people the facilities for doing the kind of work the general public wanted them to do, of visiting and getting into contact with people in the United Kingdom’ and outside, especially in the Dominions.
Attlee’s advocacy worked, but it failed to supply the all-party support for the Select Committee recommendations which the Palace would have liked. Although no more than thirty-three MPs voted for a left-wing amendment to give no increase in the Civil List at all, an amendment proposed by Webb to limit the couple’s total to £40,000 was defeated only by 291 to 165 – indicating a large dissentient vote among Labour backbenchers, and a significant rate of abstention among ministers. A mere 122 Labour MPs opposed Webb’s amendment, while 106, including eleven ministers, were unaccounted for. In short, if Labour had voted on its own, the Webb reduction to the List payments would have been carried. As it was, the Princess and Duke got their increases in spite of, not because of, the votes of the governing party.
‘There was much criticism of the sums proposed but none of the Monarchy as such,’ noted Colville who, with other courtiers, keenly watched the proceedings from the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery. ‘There was, however, a large school on the Labour backbenches which said the country wanted a “Scandinavian monarchy” with less pageantry and pomp rather than a “ceremonial monarchy”. Cripps spoke admirably and was most effective in debate and Eden was also telling.’
Chips Channon blamed the Palace for the tactical error, as he saw it, of failing to invite enough ordinary MPs to the Wedding, which had resulted in a lengthy and embarrassing debate. He concluded that ‘the Royal Family had, I think, a deserved jolt.’
THE FIRST DUTY and ambition of an Heir to the Throne was swiftly accomplished: early in the New Year, Princess Elizabeth became pregnant. The announcement was not made until the summer. In the meantime, the publicity created by the Wedding, combined with the Princess’s new status, helped to increase her list of engagements.
With the marriage, as Ziegler has written, ‘the monarchy gained a new and incomparably brighter focus of attention. The King was in no sense forgotten . . . but in a curious way he was written off. Elizabeth was the future.’
The young Princess who signed no documents, made no decisions and uttered few words in public that were her own, continued to have a hypnotic effect wherever she went. As time passed, however, there was a shift in the tone and quality of the adulation. By chance, the marriage had coincided, not just with a crisis, but with the nadir of the nation’s peacetime fortunes. Thereafter, both the economy and living conditions began to improve. It was as if the Wedding had been a good omen; and the Princess – a healthy, composed, pretty, wifely symbol of post-war youth and possibility, with her exquisitely designed couture that made imaginative use of clothing coupons, and her picture-book war-hero husband – stood for a new alternative to drabness.
It was an enjoyable life, and less demanding than the frequency of her newsreel appearances made it appear. Yet it was also – as Colville perceived – a remarkably aimless one, devoid of any content apart from pleasing and being seen. The Princess’s private secretary, an ambitious and high-flying diplomat on secondment, had had a more exciting life than this, and he determined to inject some element of purpose, or at least of understanding, into the repetitive royal round. Once the Wedding was out of the way, he set himself the task of extending his employer’s political education.
He found the Princess easier to instruct than her husband. After going through some paperwork with both of them, he noted that Philip became impatient if his interest was not immediately aroused; and that Elizabeth concentrated better on details.
In order to advance the Princess’s knowledge, though possibly also to increase his own, he hit on the idea of getting her included in the distribution of Foreign Office telegrams. The less technical ones, he wrote to Lascelles, ‘would give HRH an idea of world affairs which she cannot possibly get from the newspapers.’
The Foreign Office consented, as did the King, and the first box of telegrams arrived on January 16th. In addition, rather like Crawfie and Queen Mary before the war, Colville decided to take the Princess on educational trips. Shortly after the arrival of the first FO box, they sat and watched a Foreign Affairs debate in the House of Commons. As the Princess entered, ‘all eyes there turned in her direction,’ according to the press.
The Princess sat demurely, while the Duke, who accompanied them, made lively comments.
Compensating for the deficiencies of a royal education was an uphill struggle. Though she appeared to read the telegrams, Colville was disappointed to find Princess Elizabeth at first uninterested in politics. However, his attempt to widen her experience continued. In February, he took her to a juvenile court for a day, in the not very optimistic hope of persuading her to improve her knowledge of the social services.
In this, he achieved more success than he perhaps realized. At any rate, the Princess picked up enough to assist her in one of the most necessary of royal skills, that of talking brightly to distinguished guests about areas that concerned them. When Eleanor Roosevelt stayed at Windsor Castle the same spring during a visit to England for the unveiling of a statue of her husband, she was greatly flattered that the King’s daughter sought her out with a question about homes for young women offenders. She found the Heiress ‘very serious-minded’ and she was impressed ‘that this young Princess was so interested in social problems and how they were being handled’.
There were also other horizon-expanding excursions in addition to the formal round. In May 1948, Tom Driberg complained to Lord Mountbatten that the Princess and Duke had made the wrong kind of visit to the Commons at the wrong time. Before the war, he pointed out, members of the Royal Family had dined informally in private rooms at the House with MPs of the then ruling party. He suggested taking the Princess to the House at Question Time. ‘To get the ethos, the feel, of Parliament’, he wrote, ‘she really ought to watch Bevan, Gaitskell, Harold Wilson, Morrison etc. parrying the everyday cuts, often pretty effectively and wittily.’
If this particular suggestion reached Clarence House, it was ignored. However, Driberg’s belief that the Princess had no contact with leading Labour figures was not quite correct. In fact, a meeting with a couple of the Labour politicians on his list had occurred only the month before.
This took the form of a small dinner party held by the Prime Minister and his wife for the royal couple, to which a few of the younger members of the Government, including the President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, and the Minister of Fuel and Power, Hugh Gaitskell, and their wives were invited. The gathering was indeed a strange one. The politicians could not decide whether it was appropriate to admit to the kind of feelings their constituents would have had at such an intimate meeting with royalty, or to put on a show of jacobin disdain. While they waited to greet the royal guests in the drawing room at No 10, they made nervous schoolboy jokes. ‘We had been talking about capital punishment,’ Gaitskell recorded. ‘Harold reminded us that it was still a capital offence to rape a Royal Princess!’ When the Princess and Duke arrived, the ministers and their wives were faced with the problem which often seems to beset prominent socialists in the presence of royalty: whether it was sillier to bow and curtsey, or not to. Dora Gaitskell could hardly bring herself to curtsey, but Mrs Attlee, entering into the spirit of things, ‘suddenly swung round and curtsied low to the Duke.’
After dinner, each minister was summoned to the sofa, to spend a quarter of an hour in conversation with the twenty-two-year-old guest of honour, who must have found the experience as taxing as they did. Gaitskell formed the same opinion as Colville. ‘She had a very pretty voice and quite an easy manner but is not, I think, very interested in politics or affairs generally’, he concluded. She tried hard, but evidently found it more difficult to think of things to say about the fuel economy than about homes for bad girls. Gamely, she remarked that her grandmother’s house was the coldest she knew. Why? inquired the minister. The Princess replied that ‘it was because of her national duty’.
Colville’s ambitions to extend his employer’s range (and also to extend his own) did not cease. In February, he proposed that the Princess and the Duke should visit Paris to help strengthen ties with an ally that was beginning to recover its economy and self-confidence after the war. The proposal was accepted by the Foreign Secretary and the King, but at first it encountered difficulties with the royal couple. Elizabeth was enthusiastic about the prospect of a trip that would take her to a city and country she had never visited, and which would be a good deal more exciting than speaking to women’s organizations in the provinces, or sitting on sofas with middle-aged politicians. Philip, on the other hand, who had spent most of his childhood in or around Paris, was less thrilled. He also resented the way Colville did things that affected him without getting his opinion first. There was a row, but eventually he agreed.
The notional purpose of the visit was the opening of the Exhibition of Eight Centuries of British Life at the Musée Galliera in Paris, in a ceremony to take place in the presence of President Auriol on May 14th. The real aim, however, was to give the Anglophile section of the French public a chance to show its sympathies, after a decade of confusion. It was the first official visit by British royalty since the King and Queen had been sent on a similar mission of bridge-building in 1939. The precedent was not entirely propitious: though British royalty had been welcomed on that occasion, the visit had failed in its purpose of helping to create an unbreakable bond between the two peoples. Since 1940, French attitudes towards Britain had contained a complex mixture of emotions, including those of comradeship and suspicion in equal measure.
So it was a gamble – but it worked. The French government did everything in its power to build up the diplomatic importance of the visit, and the French public – mystified and fascinated by the royal wedding – seemed delighted at the opportunity to see and cheer a newly married Princess. The royal party was escorted to Versailles and given lunch at the Grand Trianon, where the tablecloths and napkins had been embroidered with ‘E’s and ‘P’s in their honour. A triumphal progress down the Seine was followed by a dinner and reception at the British embassy, where the Princess glistened with the Nizam of Hyderabad’s jewels; and there were visits, through thick crowds, to Fontainebleau, Barbizon, Vaux-le-Vicomte. It was, said the papers, the Norman Conquest in reverse: Elizabeth had conquered Paris. It helped that the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue had done her work well, and that the Princess spoke almost faultless French. Even the Communist press abandoned its normal silence on such occasions, and paid the Princess the indirect compliment of complaining that the police arrangements for her security made it impossible for ordinary Parisians to get a close enough look.
The British Foreign Office privately expressed its satisfaction. ‘The latent enthusiasm of the French people for the pomp and pageantry of monarchy was clearly revealed,’ the British ambassador, Sir Oliver Harvey, wrote to Ernest Bevin. ‘It was an unusual experience to see the townsfolk of Paris cheer an English Princess from the Place de la Bastille.’ Yet the visit caused offence to some. General de Gaulle – opposed both to the current French government and to the Fourth Republic Constitution – was left off the Embassy invitation list, for fear of offending the President, and they had to do make do with the General’s brother, who was President of the Municipal Council of Paris, instead.
At home, some Scottish church organizations criticized the couple for visiting a racecourse and a Paris nightclub on a Sunday, and hence setting a most regrettable example to the Empire’s youth, ‘who look to their Royal Highnesses for guidance and inspiration’.
The Princess used the trip as an opportunity to stock up with goods not available in Britain. When she got the HM Customs bill, she startled her private secretary by asking him crossly why he had made a full declaration.
The appeal of the Princess to the French lay partly in her international celebrity following the Wedding; partly in her appearance, especially what Colville, a keen connoisseur, described as her ‘beautiful blue eyes and superb natural complexion’;
and partly in a feeling that she stood for those who had grown up in the war, and could look hopefully ahead. In Britain too, the vision of the Princess as the ambassador, not just of her country, but of her generation, seemed to justify hopes for a freer, more fulfilling future for the war’s young inheritors. Invitations to speak to, and on behalf of, younger people proliferated. At the end of May, she attended a parade of youth organizations in Coventry; later she delighted dons and undergraduates in Oxford with a speech in the Sheldonian in which she declared that the universities were ‘a powerful fortress against the tide of sloth, ignorance and materialism.’
Meanwhile, the idea of the Princess as standing for the future was enhanced on June 4th, Derby Day, by the announcement of her pregnancy. The Princess broke precedent by appearing the same afternoon, ‘smiling and unabashed,’ at the Epsom Downs racecourse.
No child in utero arouses more interest than a royal one in the direct line. As Crawfie later pointed out, the only truly private period in the existence of a member of the Royal Family is between conception and the moment when the coming event is publicly known.
For Prince Charles, that period was now over. The world’s most famous foetus became the hapless recipient of baby clothes from all over the world, together with matinée coats, bootees and pictures of storks.
PRECEDENT was about to be broken in another way: the custom that had got ‘Jix’ Joynson-Hicks out of bed in the middle of the night in 1926 was discontinued. Royal propaganda presented the decision as an independent initiative by the King and Queen, and further evidence of their modernity. In fact, it only came about after a fight, and the forces of reaction nearly won the day.
Lascelles later claimed to have been the instigator of change. ‘I had long thought that the practice of summoning the Home Secretary to attend, like a sort of supernumerary midwife, at the birth of a royal baby was out-of-date and ridiculous’, he wrote in 1969, after his retirement. ‘The Home Office made exhaustive researches and assured me that it had no constitutional significance whatever, and was merely a survival of the practice of ministers and courtiers, who would flock to the sick-bed, whenever any member of the Royal Family was ill.’
The Home Office assurance was indeed categorical. ‘The custom is only a custom,’ Chuter Ede, the Home Secretary, wrote in June. ‘It has no statutory authority behind it and there is no legal requirement for its continuance.’
It was an opportunity to do away with a time-wasting and embarrassing distraction. The matter was one for the King, but the King demurred. According to Lascelles’s later account, when he put the proposition to him in the autumn of 1948, George VI agreed at once, ‘but the Queen thought differently, seeing in this innovation a threat to the dignity of the Throne. So I was told to hold my hand.’
However, Lascelles’s memory of what happened was not exact. Contemporary records suggest that a period of indecision preceded the royal negative. Correspondence in the Royal Archives includes a letter from Lascelles himself to the Home Secretary, written at the end of July, putting off an answer. In it he explained that the King had been particularly busy lately, ‘but hopes to give his full consideration to the question of your attendance at Princess Elizabeth’s accouchement when he gets to Balmoral next week.’ It was another month before the period of full consideration was complete, and the verdict communicated. ‘It is His Majesty’s wish’, wrote Lascelles on August 21st, ‘that you, as Home Secretary, should be in attendance when Princess Elizabeth’s baby is born.’
There the matter rested until November when, a few weeks before the birth, the King changed his mind. The clinching factor was not a sudden progressive impulse, or a newly acquired desire to dispense with a meaningless ritual – but a shocked discovery of the constitutional implications of hanging on to it.
What turned the tables was a visit to the Palace, on other business, by the Canadian High Commissioner. In the course of the conversation with the King’s private secretary, the envoy happened to speak of the Princess’s condition. Since the Dominion governments had as much stake in the birth of a future heir as the British one, he remarked, he supposed that when the baby arrived, he and the representatives of the other Dominions would be asked to attend, along with the British Home Secretary. It was a eureka moment. The point had never occurred to Lascelles, to the Home Office, to the Dominion Governments or – apparently – to anybody at all in 1926, at the time of the Princess’s birth. However, constitutionally it was indisputable – and, at a time of Commonwealth transition, politically it was unavoidable.
When Lascelles spoke to the King later that day, he was able, quite casually, to mention that ‘as he had no doubt realized, if the old ritual was observed, there would be no less than seven Ministers sitting in the passage.’
The perpetuation of a custom popularly believed to involve the Home Secretary attending ‘as a sort of super-inspector to guarantee that the Royal baby is not a suppostitious child!’ could scarcely be seen as an act of homage
– least of all, if there were seven super-inspectors. According to Lascelles, the King was horrified at such a prospect, and his resistance immediately crumbled.
On November 5th, Buckingham Palace announced the ending of ‘an archaic custom’.
Perhaps a more personal factor also affected the Monarch’s judgement. The King had been unwell for some time, and in the autumn of 1948 his health took a sharp turn for the worse. On October 30th, a medical examination showed that he was seriously ill. Thirteen days later, his doctors firmly diagnosed early arteriosclerosis – with such a severe danger of gangrene to his right leg that they considered amputating it.
How much did the Princess know? The full significance of the diagnosis may have been kept from her, as it was from the King. However, the physical discomfort of her father, and the acute anxiety of her mother, must have communicated themselves to her during the last few days before her first confinement.
The burdens of being a monarch were not easily shed. Despite his illness, and the concern for his survival, the King was required to perform a constitutional function which the courtiers regarded as urgent. ‘As things stand at present,’ Lascelles wrote to the King on November 9th, while the doctors were considering their provisional diagnosis, ‘Princess Elizabeth’s son would be “Earl of Merioneth”, her daughter “Lady X Mountbatten”.’ To ensure that the child would be known, instead, as HRH Prince X or Princess Y, Letters Patent had to be prepared ‘before the baby is born,’ Lascelles stressed, ‘so that the official announcements may refer to him, or her, as a Prince or Princess.’
The King did as he was advised, and Letters Patent were rushed through and issued the same day. The move had an incidental consequence: it finally resolved, for the benefit of constitutional purists, an issue first raised after the birth of Princess Margaret, when it had been argued that the two princesses might have equal claims to the succession. By placing Princess Elizabeth in the same position as if she were the King’s son and heir, any theoretical doubt on this point was finally eliminated.
With Clarence House not ready and Windlesham Moor unsuitable, arrangements were made for the Princess’s confinement to take place at Buckingham Palace, just below her second floor bedroom, looking out towards the Mall. The American press reported ‘medical reasons’ for expecting the baby to be a girl
and a Ceylonese astrologer sent a horoscope – which Lascelles passed to the King for his amusement – promising a boy.
The astrologer was right. The Princess went into labour early in the evening of November 14th, and – attended by four doctors – gave birth to a baby boy shortly after 9 o’clock. Her husband, who played a game of squash during her contractions, was summoned from the Palace court immediately after the delivery to hear the news.
According to the official statement, the Duke ‘went into the Princess’s room to see her’ and then ‘went to see his son, who had been taken to the nursery.’
Meanwhile, the crowd outside the Palace, far greater than the little gathering in Bruton Street twenty-three years before, became so large that the police had to cordon off the road. Despite appeals for quiet, the cheering continued until after midnight. ‘The bells rang, and a man going down the street outside our flat called “It’s a boy,”’ recorded Hugh Dalton. Pondering the future for such a child, and the future of the British Monarchy, he added: ‘If this boy ever comes to the throne . . . it will be a very different country and Commonwealth he’ll rule over’.
Few others looked so far ahead. Most newspaper commentary combined anodyne leading articles about the value and virtues of royalty with sentimental descriptions of the baby’s appearance. Crawfie thought he looked like George V,
John Dean described him as ‘a tiny red-faced bundle, either hairless or so fair as to appear so’.
A few days after the birth, Cecil Beaton was called to the Palace to take the first official pictures of mother and baby. ‘Prince Charles, as he is to be named, is an obedient sitter,’ he noted. ‘He interrupted a long, contented sleep to do my bidding and open his blue eyes to stare long and wonderingly into the camera lens, the beginning of a lifetime in the glare of publicity.’
As a royal gesture, the Princess instructed that food parcels made up from gifts received at the Palace should be distributed to mothers of all children born on November 14th.
The baby Prince was placed in a gilt crib, with lace frills around it, and the entire Palace staff was invited to visit the nursery to take a peek. A royal pram was brought out of storage, along with a royal rattle once used by the Princess.
According to Crawfie, in order ‘to give him as good a foundation as possible,’ for the first few months the Princess breastfed him.
Before the Prince had reached the age of two months, however, there was an unfortunate hiatus. In January, it was announced from the Palace that Princess Elizabeth had contracted measles. There were no complications. Nevertheless, it was feared that the baby might catch the infection. It was therefore decided that mother and baby should be separated, until the disease had run its course.
IF THE PERIOD following the Wedding was a happy one for the Princess, the immediate aftermath of her first confinement was tense and anxious, as the full gravity of her father’s illness – with its terrible implications, not just for him, but for her as well – was brought home to her. Two days after the birth, the King yielded to the advice of his doctors that a long-projected tour of Australia and New Zealand, similar to the one he and the Queen had undertaken as Duke and Duchess of York in 1927, should be postponed. The decision was a bitter disappointment, but he had no choice – he had been told that such a journey might delay his recovery, and even endanger his leg.
The moment was a turning point. From this time on, the Heiress Presumptive and her young, healthy family became the present, as well as the future – her energy and composure linked in the public mind to the visible fatigue of the ailing King. Though still in his early fifties, the King looked and behaved like a man much older, and had become increasingly difficult for his family and advisers to handle. He remained a loving and deeply devoted father, who enjoyed nothing so much as a private family occasion. In matters of state, he was punctilious, honest, and stoical to a fault. But his ability to deal with complicated matters, never great, diminished still further under the impact of his illness. Although, ultimately always willing to take advice, he became increasingly obstinate.
There was also an intensifying of some long-established traits: and in particular his bad temper. ‘He had his explosions,’ says one of his former advisers. ‘He would explode if he read something in the paper that the Prime Minister hadn’t told him about. We used to call them his “gnashes”. When they occurred Princess Margaret was very good at defusing them.’
One friend of the princesses, who used to stay at Sandringham and Balmoral, recalls the King’s ‘prep-school sense of humour,’ and rollicking enjoyment of practical jokes. He also remembers his ‘Hanoverian bark’ if something annoyed him. The subject of his displeasure was often politics. However, everyday incidents could also provoke an outburst. Once, when they were shooting at Sandringham, a man walked past and the King said, ‘He didn’t take his bloody hat off.’
According to another ex-courtier, the Monarch ‘used to lose his temper with anyone around.’
Some people wondered whether he had a touch of the petit mal. Others put it down to the frustration caused by his own intellectual limitations, and the need to cover up. Alec Vidler, a canon at Windsor who often dined with the Royal Family, found him ‘really very simple,’ and also ‘difficult to get on with because he talked in an excitable manner’.
Another aide, meeting the King for the first time in 1947, was taken aback by his irascibility and apparent inferiority complex. It was as if, he recorded, the Monarch’s displays of wrath and emphatic manner were devices to hide his ignorance and weakness.
In March 1949, the King underwent major spinal surgery to restore circulation to his leg, carried out in a surgical theatre constructed at Buckingham Palace. He was well enough by June to be driven in an open carriage to watch the Ceremony of Trooping the Colour, while his elder daughter rode confidently at the head of the parade. Pictures of him, however, show a drawn, tired old man. He was now a semi-invalid, and the rest of his life was to be a series of alarms, remissions and new alarms, with alternating episodes of relief and anxiety, against the background of an unspoken foreboding. His wife and two daughters admired, adored, and felt protective towards him – as they always had. But as his health deteriorated and his ability to cope diminished, his dogmatism grew, and so did the pressure on those around him. It was heightened by a desperate resistance to the truth. ‘The Queen never allowed you to contemplate the fact of the King’s illness,’ recalls a former aide.
The result was a collective self-deceit at Court, which made a realistic look into the future impossible to discuss. The King’s ill-health also had the effect of increasing his elder daughter’s sense of independent responsibility, as she assumed more and more of his functions. Outwardly, the Princess showed no sign of strain. Indeed, she and the Duke – with a male heir promptly provided, and efficiently nurtured by a retinue of helpers – embarked on a brief episode of social gaiety. As pre-war Society began to re-emerge from hibernation, the royal couple were to be seen at the houses and events frequented by others of their kind, or in the company of show business personalities, for whom both princesses had a particular penchant. Ordinary citizens bought photos of their favourite film stars. The King’s daughters invited them to dinner, or to stay. When Princess Elizabeth celebrated her twenty-third birthday in April 1949 at the Café de Paris, a fashionable restaurant in Coventry Street, following a visit to The School for Scandal at the New Theatre, the royal party was joined by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, the leading actor and actress of the show. Together, the royal and theatrical party ‘tangoed and sambaed, waltzed and quick-stepped’ the night away, before going on to a nightclub for more of the same.
For a time, both princesses took up with Danny Kaye, then at the height of his fame. John Dean recalled seeing the American comedian ‘capering round Princess Elizabeth’ on the lawn at Windlesham Moor.
At grand social occasions, the Princess and the Duke were inevitably the main attraction, and they learned to play their parts. In June 1949, Chips Channon recorded his impression of the couple at a ball at Windsor Castle, mainly attended by the clever, artistic, smart members of the emerging ‘Princess Margaret set’. Elizabeth was wearing a very high tiara and the Garter, and Philip, also with the Garter, was in his naval uniform. ‘They looked like characters out of a fairy tale’, wrote Channon, ‘and quite eclipsed Princess Margaret, who was simply dressed.’
This was one kind of fancy dress. There was also another. At a ball given by the American ambassador in July – in a curiously snobbish piece of royal whimsy – the Duke appeared as a waiter, wearing a white apron, and his wife as a maid.
That summer they moved into Clarence House, away from the direct surveillance of the King and Queen. For a few months, they were able to lead the semblance of a normal family life – husband, wife and infant son, a single, separate unit under the same roof. The arrangement, however, was soon upset by the resumption of Philip’s active naval career. In October 1949 – following a period at the Royal Naval Staff College at Greenwich – he was appointed First Lieutenant and second-in-command of HMS Chequers, leader of the First Destroyer Flotilla of the Mediterranean Fleet, based in Malta. During the next two years, the Princess’s existence became, in one respect, the most ‘normal’ of her entire life. Crawfie wrote later that when Elizabeth was in Malta with her husband, she ‘saw and experienced for the first time the life of an ordinary girl.’
Mike Parker, who had become a private secretary to the Princess and the Duke jointly, agrees. ‘This was a fabulous period,’ he says, ‘when it was thought a good idea for her to become a naval officer’s wife. It seemed it was the King’s wish that she should do so.’
The negative side of such normality, however, was that she saw her husband only on those occasions that his location and leaves made possible.
Philip flew out to Malta on October 16th. The Princess was due to join him a few weeks later. Meanwhile, her emblematic role as young mother continued to develop. It was an age of exhortation, and the Princess’s demeanour and speaking style equipped her well for the task of delivering homilies to others – especially women – whose experience seemed to relate to her own. A couple of days after her husband left, she returned to the theme of ‘materialism’ – already denounced in her Oxford University speech – when she addressed a Mothers’ Union rally of young wives at Central Hall, Westminster. ‘Materialism’ in 1949 meant wasteful and unnecessary consumption – and therefore was subject to Government as well as moral disapproval. At the same time, she was required to lend her own moral authority – as a royal newly-wed and home-maker – to the Mothers’ Union condemnation of divorce.
In her speech, she spoke scathingly of the ‘current age of growing self-indulgence, of hardening materialism, of falling moral standards’. She also praised her audience’s emphasis on the sanctity of marriage.
The young wives applauded warmly when she declared that broken homes caused havoc among children, and that ‘we can have no doubt that divorce and separation are responsible for some of the darkest evils in our society today’. Children, she said, learnt by example, and would not be expected to do what parents were too lazy to do themselves. ‘I believe there is a great fear in our generation of being labelled priggish’, she added – indicating that the fear should not prevent responsible people from doing or saying what they believed to be right.
The speech plunged her into unexpected controversy. Advocates of changing the divorce laws reacted strongly. The Mothers’ Union, they claimed, was notorious for its conservatism on the subject, and they complained that royal sanction should not have been given for a standpoint that was increasingly contested. ‘The harm to children can be greater in a home where both parents are at loggerheads than if divorce ensues’, protested the chairman of the Marriage Law Reform Committee. Of course, the Princess had not written the words she had spoken, but – having allowed her personal image and reputation to be used in order to bolster a contentious point of view – she could not entirely escape responsibility for the sentiment. However, according to one member of the Royal Household, writing a few years later, there was no reason for the Princess to distance herself from her script. ‘King George and Queen Elizabeth were completely satisfied that their daughter had been right, for their views on marriage and family life were the same.’
Princess Elizabeth flew to Malta to join her husband on November 20th, accompanied by a party that included a lady-in-waiting, Lady Alice Egerton, Mike Parker, her maid Bobo, and Philip’s valet John Dean.
Prince Charles was left in the charge of nursery staff, much as Princess Elizabeth herself had been left in 1927, when her own parents, as Duke and Duchess of York, had embarked on their antipodean tour.
According to Dean, the Princess’s life in Malta was not markedly different from that of anybody else similarly placed. However, normality and ordinariness were only relative. Most service wives did not have a retinue of devoted helpers. There was also something else that singled her out: the presence and hospitality of Uncle Dickie. It added greatly to the convenience and comfort of the Princess that the ever-solicitous Lord Mountbatten happened to be based at Malta in his current role in command of the 1st Cruiser Squadron of the Mediterranean Fleet, and that he was more than happy to make his house, Villa Guardamangia, available to the royal couple.
The Princess’s party stayed till the end of December, when Chequers was sent with six other warships to patrol the Red Sea, following disorders in Eritrea. Dean recalled later that Princess Elizabeth had been very excited about her first Malta trip, ‘although she was probably a little sad at leaving Prince Charles behind’.
She did not, however, display any obvious consternation or – as some mothers might, after five weeks’ separation – find it necessary to rush back to him as soon as she returned to England. Instead, she spent four days at Clarence House attending to engagements and dealing (according to the press) with ‘a backlog of correspondence,’ before attending Hurst Park races, where she saw Monaveen, a horse she owned jointly with her mother, win at 10–1. Only then was she reunited with her son, who had been staying with her parents at Sandringham.
Yet the Princess could be forgiven for enjoying the novelty of her visits to Malta – a haven of comparative privacy, and freedom from official duties. ‘They were so relaxed and free, coming and going as they pleased . . .’ recalled Dean. ‘I think it was their happiest time.’
Philip was delighted to have returned to the life he knew and loved, and which depended on his abilities, not on his marriage. What for him, however, was a restoration of the status quo ante was a revelation for her. Though she lived in greater luxury than others, she did many of the same things as them, and in a similar way. Parker recalls that she would go down to the ship at the bottom of the road which led from the villa and ‘generally mucked in with the other wives’. There was a lot of social visiting, having tea and dining with other couples. ‘She spent only ten per cent of the time being a Princess,’ he says. The ten per cent was mainly accounted for by Uncle Dickie who ‘tried to get her into the admirals’ strata’.
There were some necessary courtesy calls. She was required to visit Archbishop Bonzi, and admire the views from his hilltop residence. Otherwise, to a degree that was barely imaginable in Britain, she was left alone. When Philip was busy, she drove her own Daimler, either solo or with a female companion, around the island. When he was free, she accompanied him on swimming expeditions with the Mountbattens, who would take a launch to the creeks and bays around Malta and Gozo, and they would sometimes sleep on board. She would watch her husband at some sporting event, or dine and dance with him at the local hotel – protected by the management and unharassed by the press. If she missed Charles, helping with a party given by Lady Mountbatten for a hundred children on board ship may have provided some consolation.
In April, Princess Elizabeth’s second pregnancy was announced. She spent her twenty-fourth birthday on Malta, watching her husband and uncle playing polo. Then she returned to England. The baby was due to be born in August, this time at Clarence House. As her time approached, thousands of people gathered outside, many of them hoping for a glimpse of the heavily pregnant Princess.
Bobo MacDonald responded to the tension by whipping herself up into a frenzy of work.
On August 15th, her mistress gave birth to a baby girl. Afterwards, Prince Charles, aged twenty-one months, was held up to the window to wave back at the onlookers.
The Princess took some time fully to recover. She had been expected to resume her public duties in October, but – on doctor’s orders – had to postpone or cancel all engagements for another month. There were further cancellations in November because of a ‘severe cold’. Later the same month – shortly after Charles’s second birthday – she flew to Malta to spend Christmas with her husband, while the children were taken to Sandringham to stay with their grandparents. Meanwhile, Philip had been promoted to Lieutenant-Commander, and at the beginning of September 1950 he was given command of the frigate HMS Magpie. The Magpie had been ordered to provide an escort for the Commander-in-Chief’s despatch vessel, HMS Surprise, for a visit to Philip’s relatives King Paul and Queen Frederika of Greece, in Athens. Princess Elizabeth accompanied her husband on the trip – and together they were warmly welcomed in the Greek capital.
Not everybody shared the devotion of a Bobo MacDonald. In January, the whole Royal Family’s education was dramatically advanced by the unexpected treachery – as they saw it – of Crawfie, now Mrs Buthlay, who had decided to cash in on her royal experiences. A letter from Princess Margaret to her former governess in March 1949 indicated concern at the Palace at the preparation of a revelatory book.
There may have been an element of misunderstanding. After the book was written, the Queen was approached for permission, and even saw proofs.
However, there was no doubt about the royal displeasure when the book was serialized, against the Royal Family’s express wishes, in the American Ladies’ Home Journal.
In March – spurred by the excitement caused in the United States – Woman’s Own ran it in Britain, advertising extracts as ‘The Loving, Human, Authentic Story of The Little Princesses’. The Palace tried to throw doubt on the accuracy of the account at every opportunity. ‘The Princess is not a bad sailor’ insisted the Comptroller of the Household in reply to a well-wisher who, on reading that the Heiress suffered from sea-sickness, had helpfully donated a patent remedy, ‘and to show how facts can be distorted, the voyage to the Channel Islands – on which occasion Miss Crawford reports that Her Royal Highness was prostrate – was in fact so calm that it was impossible to tell one was at sea, except for the subdued hum of the engines’.
Undeterred, Mrs Buthlay wrote a stream of additional books and articles over the next few years, drawing on the same store of knowledge, though ever thinner and more repetitive as the store ran out.
Eventually, to the great satisfaction of Buckingham Palace, she over-reached herself by writing in imaginative detail about a royal event as if she had witnessed it, before it had taken place, and then finding herself unable to prevent publication of the article after the event had been cancelled. Her literary career ended forthwith. Mrs Buthlay died in 1986, unmourned at Buckingham Palace. According to a royal aide who went to the Palace a few years after the rumpus, ‘the only thing I was told was that letters signed Bongo or Biffo should not be put in the bin because they were probably from cousins. Letters from Marion Crawford should be handled with a very long pair of forceps.’
Her name is still taboo: mention Crawfie to older royalty, and they stiffen. Yet there remains a little tragedy about the lack of a reconciliation. For the princesses, and especially Princess Elizabeth, were closer to Crawfie than almost anybody during their most formative years, and the bonds of understanding and affection had been strong.
Today it is difficult to appreciate an age of innocence in which Crawfie’s recollections caused such a sense of outrage. As A. N. Wilson puts it in his introduction to the 1993 reprint of Marion Crawford’s The Little Princesses, ‘though few books were written so mawkishly, few can have been written with such obvious love’.
Kenneth Rose suggests that the Royal Family was angry because ‘their privacy had been purloined and sold for gain’.
Yet there had been earlier accounts of the princesses’ childhood, almost as mawkish, and also for gain. Perhaps it was the disobedience that caused most fury, rather than either the content or the motive.
The Little Princesses marked a watershed. For the former governess had stumbled on a discovery that was to blight the Royal Family for the rest of the century: the market in intimate details of royal lives was a rising one. The financial value of revelations was already known, and had been remarked upon within the Palace before the war. What had changed, and would henceforth grow with increasing rapidity, was the voracity of the public appetite, and the profits-led crumbling of inhibitions about feeding it.
There was an irony: Crawfie’s writings caused a frisson because of the tightness with which royal privacy had been guarded, and the refusal to treat even the most modest press request for personal information as legitimate. The instrument of this policy was the King’s press secretary, Commander Richard Colville – an unbending ex-naval officer with no knowledge of the press, which he treated with a combination of distrust and lordly contempt. There was also a grundyish aspect: former colleagues fondly recall his countenance when, confronted by the latest newspaper lèse-majesté, the corners of his mouth would turn down in horror.
Journalists called him ‘the Abominable No Man’, fellow courtiers dubbed him ‘Sunshine’. At the time of Crawfie’s offence, he had been in post for three years. The affair seemed to have a traumatic effect on him. So far from encouraging him to liberalize, it produced secrecy, greater hauteur, and greater prudery.
Commander Colville stayed at the Palace until 1968, a source of continuing aggravation to those on the press side who had to deal with him. His legacy – a belief that any titbit of above or below-stairs royal gossip was inherently interesting, because of the irritation its publication would cause to the Palace – still has its baleful effect. The Commander, however, was not alone in his attitude to the media. While George VI lived, his views received active support from Sir Alan Lascelles, who to some extent shared – even helped to inspire – the view that the Palace owed the press nothing, and that it would be better if the newspapers confined themselves to publishing official handouts.
Though author of the Princess’s Cape Town BBC speech, Lascelles regarded the technology of radio with a special wariness. Over-exposure, he believed, through such a direct medium as broadcasting, was one of the biggest potential dangers to the Royal Family – and a temptation to be resisted strongly.
At the height of the Crawfie furore, it was proposed that Princess Elizabeth should accept an invitation to broadcast to the Youth of the Empire on Empire Day. She herself was keen. Lascelles’s reaction, however, was unhesitatingly negative. ‘The world, as a whole,’ the courtier wrote in an internal Palace minute, ‘is pretty surfeited with broadcasts, and the last thing we want is for the world to feel that way about royal broadcasts.’ Christmas broadcasts, together with the occasional VE-Day or Silver Wedding, were quite enough. He therefore strongly advised against the Princess undertaking ‘an “out of the blue” broadcast this summer – or indeed at any time’.
No Empire Day broadcast took place; and Princess Elizabeth remained – Crawfie outpourings apart – tantalizingly visible yet inaccessible, until many years after her accession as Queen.
Chapter 9
PHILIP RETURNED FROM MALTA in the summer of 1951 and bowed to the inevitable: that it was impossible to combine an active naval career with the role of active partner to the Heiress Presumptive – especially one who, because of the King’s illness, was expected to take on an increasing share of royal duties. It was a major sacrifice. He was barely thirty and, but for his marriage, his prospects of promotion to a high rank within the Navy of his adopted country were reckoned to be good. But he could not simultaneously accompany his wife, and command ships; his wife could not adapt her royal functions to suit his career; and he could not repeatedly take sabbaticals. When he left Malta, it was announced that he would not take up any further active naval appointments until after the return of the King and Queen from a Commonwealth tour now scheduled for the autumn. In fact, the break was a permanent one.
The result was a painful period of transition, which expressed itself in bursts of undirected energy and dismissive intolerance. According to his manservant, ‘he loved the sea and adored the Navy, and some of my gayest times with him were when he was serving’. After his return from the sea, he was ‘inclined to be moody and impatient’, and it was some time before he settled down to public engagements.
One of the butts of his impatience was the royal establishment, which he regarded as stuffy and old-fashioned. ‘Prince Philip was very hostile to Buckingham Palace – he didn’t like it, and he wanted his own show’, recalls a former courtier. ‘The gap between the Palace and Clarence House was very big.’
It was some compensation that, by 1951, the much smaller households of the Princess and Duke at Clarence House did constitute a quite distinct show – and one that worked with a degree of efficiency and harmony that would have been impossible if they had stayed longer in the same building as the King and the Queen. It may have helped that at the beginning of 1950 the suavely intelligent Jock Colville returned to the Foreign Office. In some ways, Colville had been a progressive influence, with an ambition to make the Heiress and her husband more socially aware. On one occasion he even made the suggestion to the Duke that he should work as a coal miner for a month – a proposal which was rejected on the grounds that ‘it would be playing to the gallery’.
Colville’s frequently possessive devotion to the Princess, however, had not made him the easiest of advisers for her husband to work with, and the atmosphere at Clarence House was more relaxed without him. His place was taken by Major Martin (later Lord) Charteris, a professional soldier who had spent much of the war in the Middle East, eventually running Military Intelligence in Palestine. Charteris worked for Elizabeth at Clarence House and then at Buckingham Palace for the next twenty-seven years. With the exception of her later Deputy Master of the Household, Lord Plunket, he came to know her as well as any courtier. His particular blend of wisdom, dry humour, friendliness, conservatism and selfless loyalty fitted her needs well.
Those who worked at Clarence House in the short period of its occupancy by the royal couple recall a happy, close-knit group of helpers, over which the influence of the busy and contented Princess, enjoying her duties and her pleasures, shone benignly. ‘Martin and I both loved to bask in her light’, says Mike Parker. ‘She was very good at making you feel part of her team and family.’
The mornings would be filled with letters and other business, the afternoons with visits. She and her husband would often lunch with the staff in the dining-room, in conditions that were less formal and much more intimate than anything possible at the Palace.
‘When we were planning daytime journeys, she was very good at making suggestions’, Parker recalls. ‘She showed an early maturity in discussing things and making decisions.’
Her responsibilities were widening. As yet, however, she had little knowledge of the conduct of Government business. Jock Colville had made his own contribution, by persuading the Foreign Secretary to let her see Foreign Office telegrams. In the summer of 1950, Charteris took a leaf out of Colville’s book, and raised with the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook, the possibility of letting her see Cabinet papers as well. Brook consulted the Prime Minister, suggesting that the Princess should see minutes as well as memoranda, apart from any Confidential Annexes, as ‘a temporary experiment forming part of the general plan for giving Her Royal Highness a wider experience of public affairs’.
Attlee spoke to the King. Then he scribbled a note to Brook: ‘I think it should be permanent’, and it became so.
The Princess’s experience of public affairs extended in other, more traditional ways over the next eighteen months. In 1951 – year of the Festival of Britain – the Royal Family was in exceptional demand for ceremonial duties, and Elizabeth had to deputize for her father, because of his illness, on many occasions. In June, she hosted a dinner for her uncle, King Haakon of Norway. This time her father was too ill to attend the King’s Birthday Parade of the Brigade of Guards, with the ceremony of Trooping the Colour, on Horse Guards Parade. It was a vivid début. The tiny, compact figure, riding side-saddle in the scarlet tunic of Colonel of the Grenadiers – ‘a woman alone’, as The Times put it, at the centre of an all-male military event – was a telling reminder of her significance, not just as under-study, but as successor to the sick Monarch.
In the summer, the medical suspicion that George VI had cancer became stronger. In September, exploratory surgery confirmed it, and the King underwent the removal of his left lung. Once the severity of the illness was established, a variety of arrangements had to be made. To ensure that the constitutional functions of the Monarchy should continue without interruption, Lascelles took the necessary steps to have the Queen, the two princesses, the Duke of Gloucester and the Princess Royal designated Counsellors of State. Princess Elizabeth wrote to her father’s private secretary agreeing that this was the best thing to do, ‘for it will relieve the King of so much of the ordinary routine things’.
One routine thing was the general election. Before the operation, the King had asked the Prime Minister to make a decision about a poll before the start of his Commonwealth tour, planned for January. After it, Lascelles wrote to Attlee explaining that when this request had been made, the King had had no inkling that the trip would have to be put off.
The decision was now taken to hold an election on October 15th. On October 4th, Princess Elizabeth presided over the Privy Council preceding the Dissolution. Meanwhile she had been making her own preparations. ‘In view of the unfortunate turn in the King’s health,’ she wrote to her young dress designer Hardy Amies on September 24th, and ‘in the strictest confidence . . . I have strong reason to believe that he will be unable to undertake the tour of Australia and New Zealand. I would very much like you to prepare some sketches for me to see . . . as a precaution against any sudden decision for us to go in the King’s place.’
On October 9th, the King’s already postponed South Sea tour was cancelled.
It was to be a busy winter – the busiest, indeed, of the Princess’s life so far. Despite anxiety about the King, she and her husband decided to go ahead with a long-projected tour of Canada. This particular venture had first been mooted three years earlier. Elizabeth had been keen, but – as over the French trip – Philip had initially been opposed, saying that he wanted to settle down and start a family.
Their family was now well started and they had, at Clarence House, a settled home. With the other obstacle – Philip’s naval duties – also removed, the trip was scheduled for October 1951. Meanwhile, the proposed tour had expanded in ambition. The visit had at first been envisaged as a purely Commonwealth undertaking. However, in July, Lord Halifax – a former ambassador in Washington – had suggested that it would be impolite for the royal couple not to include in their itinerary a brief detour south of the border. So what Lascelles called a ‘pop-over’ holiday visit to the United States was tacked on, as an extra.
The royal party flew out to Newfoundland on October 7th, for a tour that was overshadowed by fears for the King’s health. To guard against the possibility of his death, Charteris kept papers about the holding of an Accession Council under his bed throughout the trip.
They had a mixed reception. A few days after their arrival, the Canadian Governor-General wrote soothingly to the King that the Quebecois had been impressed by the Princess’s French, and that the crowds in Ottawa were bigger than those during the state visits of either President Truman or President Auriol of France.
However the press – unaware of the seriousness of the King’s illness and looking for an angle – quickly decided that the Princess looked distracted, and even bored. ‘At the end of some of the long trying days,’ declared one Canadian broadcaster, ‘you’d hear people worrying about how tired the Princess is.’
The royal party had an uncomfortable feeling of the trip having got off to a poor start. ‘There was a lot of comment about Princess Elizabeth not smiling,’ according to Lord Charteris. It was to become a common complaint. ‘My face is aching with smiling,’ he recalled her saying in exasperation.
Yet there was no lack of interest. Such was the crush of photographers wanting to get a picture of her face, smiling or blank, that splinters of glass from exploding flash bulbs were found on her coat.
As in South Africa in 1947, much of the tour was spent cooped up in a special train. The mood in the royal car varied. To relieve the monotony as they travelled into every province of the dominion, Philip developed a line in practical jokes. On one occasion he left a booby-trapped tin of nuts for his wife to open, on another he chased her down the corridor wearing a set of joke false teeth.
At other times, tempers frayed. One member of the party remembers the Duke loudly denouncing the Heiress Presumptive as a ‘bloody fool’ in the breakfast room.
Meanwhile, as they chugged across the vast open spaces, from the industrial lowlands of St Lawrence to the west coast, the nation’s enthusiasm – dormant at first – grew into an extraordinary excitement, focusing on the Governor-General’s train. People travelled colossal distances to gather at each stop. There were vivid incidents. Dean particularly remembered the arrival of the royal train at a small settlement deep in the Rockies, late at night in falling snow. As the couple dismounted, they were greeted by the town band and the entire population singing ‘The Loveliest Night of the Year’.
The high point was the hastily-added pop-over. On October 31st, they flew to Washington, where – to ensure a fitting welcome – President Truman had ordered that all Federal employees should be given time off.
What guaranteed the success of the visit was partly the Canadian preamble, which gave the American press time to get used to the idea; partly the brevity of the trip, which gave no time for boredom; and partly that Truman decided to make it the climactic celebration of his own presidency. ‘He fell in love with her’, according to Charteris.
The British ambassador, Sir Oliver Franks, wrote to the King that when the President appeared with Princess Elizabeth in public he conveyed ‘the impression of a very proud uncle presenting his favourite niece to his friends’.
As Federal workers lined the streets to cheer, the President behaved as if the Princess and her husband had been responsible for some magnificent achievement. ‘We have many distinguished visitors here in this city,’ he declared in a speech in the Rose Garden, ‘but never before have we had such a wonderful couple, that so completely captured the hearts of all of us.’
The Washington papers wrote of ‘little Lilibet’ – recently made familiar to the American public through the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal – who had ‘suddenly matured into the lovely young mother who one day is to be the ruling Queen of England’.
At a big British embassy reception, the Princess and the Duke had to shake the hands of 1,500 guests.
There were matters of protocol. One, which caused a flurry of diplomatic telegrams, was the question of where the Princess should return the President’s hospitality. As the pop-over took place during a tour of Canada, she came to the United States not as future Queen of England but as future Queen of Canada, and consequently was required to entertain President Truman at the Canadian, not the British, embassy.
Afterwards, there was the question of thank-you letters. When the royal couple had returned to Canada, Philip wrote to Mrs Truman – as one consort to another – thanking her for her kindness, and describing his ‘rather blurred memory of our rush round Washington’. It was the job of the Princess to write to the President. She did so after talking to her father on the telephone. ‘He sounded much better,’ she wrote, hopefully.
Across the Atlantic, the King was shown glowing extracts from the Washington Evening Star, and read the famous remark of Harry Truman: ‘When I was little boy, I read about a fairy princess, and there she is.’
IN MID-NOVEMBER, the Princess and Duke returned to England, and to a new political landscape. A few years earlier, Labour had seemed so firmly entrenched that many people believed it would retain office for a generation. The 1950 election, however, had cut its majority to a handful. In the general election of October 1951, a tired Labour Government – depleted by retirements and resignations – faced a re-invigorated Conservative Party campaigning for a bigger conflagration of controls. The result was tight. Labour polled more votes, but the Tories obtained a small working majority. At seventy-seven, Winston Churchill was called to the Palace and asked by the convalescing King to form the first purely Conservative Government since Baldwin left office in 1929. The Monarch was not sorry. Although Attlee had treated him with civility and respect, the King and Queen made little secret – in private – of their High Tory opinions.
During the war the King had come to depend personally on Churchill, whose exaggerated shows of deference he found reassuring and flattering, and he welcomed the return of a Prime Minister who took an almost child-like pleasure in the pageantry and show of Monarchy.
Elizabeth and Philip did not have long, however, to adjust to the change. Following the cancellation of the tour of the King and Queen, arrangements had been put in train for the Princess and her husband to undertake it instead – including, in their itinerary, a few days in East Africa en route. There were two reasons for such an excursion. The Kenyan colonial government, which had given the Princess and Duke a farm, Sagana Lodge, as a wedding present, had been keenly asking for a royal visit. Furthermore, such a pause in the journey gave an excuse for not stopping in Egypt, currently in the throes of a political crisis. ‘Going to Kenya is a good way of skipping the Mediterranean,’ the King pencilled in a tremulous note to his private secretary.
The intention was to make the Kenya leg of the journey largely a holiday, before they went on from Mombasa, aboard HMS Gothic, to Ceylon.
The Kenyan settler community was delighted at the news. The East African Standard spoke for the colony when it welcomed the visit of two young people whose charm, devotion to duty and ‘personal example of homemaking family life’ had endeared them to the Commonwealth: it hoped that they would enjoy what Kenya had to offer in terms of fishing, riding, shooting and travelling on safari. As with the South African tour, the fiction was preserved that the royal visit – intended to provide symbolic reassurance to the white settlers in increasingly uncertain times – was purely recreational.
The couple’s example of homemaking did not include bringing their children with them. Though they expected to be away for six months, longer even than the Yorks’ 1927 trip, the question did not arise. ‘It was absolutely taken for granted that they would be left behind,’ says an ex-courtier. ‘It was simply what one did in those days.’
As soon as he knew they were coming, the Governor of Kenya, Sir Philip Mitchell, made an imaginative suggestion. ‘. . . [P]lease try to get them here so that their visit includes the period of three days on either side of the full moon,’ he wrote to the Colonial Office on October 13th. ‘In that case I would reserve Treetops for them for a night, that is the hotel in the branches of a giant fig tree overlooking a salt lick about ten miles from their Lodge in the Aberdares . . . I am sure that H.R.H. would enjoy it enormously; it really is something not to be missed and it does require, for its full enjoyment, as much moonlight as possible.’ The moonlight was for viewing the big game that came to the water-hole under the tree.
In his Christmas broadcast, the King expressed his pleasure that ‘our daughter, Princess Elizabeth’ and her husband would be taking his and the Queen’s place on the tour. It was the first and last time that he ever referred to his heir on such an occasion by name.
After recording the programme – piece by piece, as his strength allowed – the King spent Christmas with his family in Norfolk. ‘I am progressing well since my operation, I am glad to say’, he wrote to General Eisenhower from Sandringham on January 7th.
On January 30th, he returned to London for a visit to the American musical South Pacific in Drury Lane. The following day he accompanied his elder daughter and his son-in-law to London airport and said good-bye to them on the tarmac as they boarded their plane for Nairobi.
The royal couple were greeted on arrival next morning by Sir Philip Mitchell, in plumed hat, and whisked off for a series of engagements. Then the royal party set out for Sagana Lodge in Nyeri, a hundred miles north of the capital, where they spent a couple of days elephant-watching, fishing and filming – before driving to Treetops. The hotel, as Mitchell had indicated, was an outpost only for the sturdiest of tourists. Getting to it was regarded as hazardous, because of wild animals at the foot of the tree. There may also have been another hazard, because it was in the heart of Mau Mau territory – during the rebellion which erupted shortly afterwards, it was burnt down. At the time, however, the Princess and the Duke were able to spend a safe and peaceful evening watching Kenya’s most imposing fauna from the hotel’s observation balcony.
On February 4th, Lascelles wrote to Mitchell from England thanking him, on behalf of the King and Queen, for helping to make the visit a success.
Next day, in Downing Street, the Cabinet discussed a Labour motion complaining about a planned royal visit to South Africa, in the course of which the King was due to stay in Dr Malan’s official residence as his guest. Ministers agreed that the matter was one for the Union Government to decide, and that it would be ‘constitutionally inappropriate’ to offer advice.
In Sandringham, the King went out shooting, and returned for dinner with his wife and younger daughter. ‘There were jolly jokes,’ Princess Margaret recalls, ‘and he went to bed early because he was convalescing. Then he wasn’t there any more.’
That night, he died in his sleep.
When did Elizabeth succeed? ‘She became Queen,’ wrote Harold Nicolson, ‘while perched in a tree in Africa watching the rhinoceros come down to the pool to drink.’
This became the legend, and it was not far from the truth. When the King’s fatal heart attack occurred in the early hours of the morning, the Princess was either asleep or eating breakfast (watching, not rhinoceros, but baboons) or taking pictures of the sunrise. Mike Parker, a member of the royal party, believes he was with her at the precise moment when her reign began. He had invited her to climb up to a look-out point at the top of the tree to watch the dawn coming up over the jungle. While they looked at the iridescent light that preceded the sunrise, they saw an eagle hovering just above their heads. For a moment, he was frightened that it would dive onto them. ‘I never thought about it until later’, he recalled, ‘but that was roughly the time when the King died.’
Although for several months his death had been a medical inevitability, the news of it came as a surprise both to the public and to the Royal Family. ‘He died as he was getting better,’ says Princess Margaret.
Remarkably, the ground had not been prepared and the arrangements for telling key people had rapidly to be improvised. The Queen had been the first to know, after the King’s valet had discovered his body, at 7.30 a.m. An hour or more elapsed before Edward Ford, the assistant private secretary, was sent by Sir Alan Lascelles to tell the Prime Minister and the King’s mother. Ford drove to Downing Street, and was shown up to Churchill’s bedroom. The premier was propped up in bed writing, surrounded by paperwork and a candle for his cigar. ‘I’ve got bad news,’ Ford recalls saying, ‘– the King died this morning.’ Churchill seemed shaken. ‘Bad news?’ he exclaimed. ‘The worst!’ He flung aside the papers. ‘How unimportant these matters seem. Get me Anthony Eden.’ Then, according to Ford, ‘he got onto the phone and said, in an absurd attempt at security, “Anthony, can we scramble?” But they couldn’t scramble. He went on in a kind of code, “Our big chief has gone – we must have a Cabinet.”’
The Prime Minister’s distress was more than momentary. Jock Colville – who, with the change of Government, had been brought back into No 10 as Churchill’s joint private secretary – found him in tears. When he tried to cheer the premier by saying how well he would get on with the new Queen, ‘all he could say was that he did not know her and that she was only a child’.
Getting hold of the Prime Minister was a great deal easier than finding the new Monarch, who had returned from Treetops to Sagana Lodge. It was more than four hours before the Queen knew that she had succeeded. ‘Because of where we were,’ says Pamela Hicks, who was in the party as a lady-in-waiting, ‘we were almost the last people in the world to know.’ Another lady-in-waiting – aboard the Gothic at Mombasa in anticipation of the royal party – only learnt of the King’s death when she asked why people were taking down the decorations.
Eventually the story was picked up from the radio by Martin Charteris, a few miles away at the Outspan Hotel. He telephoned Sagana Lodge and spoke to Parker. There was no way to check officially. It was confirmed, however, when Mike Parker switched on his own radio, and heard the announcement on the overseas wavelength of the BBC.
Parker told Philip who – at about 2.45 p.m., 11.45 a.m. London time – told his wife.
‘He took her up to the garden,’ according to Parker, ‘and they walked slowly up and down the lawn while he talked and talked and talked to her.’
THE DEATH of a British monarch changes little in practical terms. It does not shift a Prime Minister, alter the party of Government, reverse its policies, or influence the economy. Yet – in a way that is hard to define – it affects the mood. This is because the British public relates to its kings and queens, who it regards with a variety of emotions, but always with interest. It even imagines that the relationship works both ways: the question in A. A. Milne’s rhyme about changing the guard at Buckingham Palace – ‘Do you think the King knows about me?’ – is an adult fancy, as well as a childhood one. Hence such an event is often experienced with genuine grief, as a family loss. But there is also a wider, social relationship, which makes a change of reign more than a nominal transition. It is not just for convenience that the culture, mores, architecture, style of dress of a period have often been identified by the name of the monarch – ‘Victorian’, ‘Edwardian’ and so on. A link is made between the supposed character of the titular ruler, and some facet of the age. Even in the mid-twentieth century, after the abandonment of this kind of epochal labelling, monarchs still give a flavour to the attitudes and outlook of the episode over which they formally preside.
Politically, there was little to bind the reign of George VI together. Spanning a turbulent fifteen and a half years from the Depression and the rise of fascism, through a world war, to post-war austerity, the building of the welfare state, Indian independence, the Cold War, and the beginnings of consumer affluence, it had no single theme. Yet its very instability gave the King’s nervous courage and mule-like conservatism an historical role. Indeed, his lack of imagination was seen by many as an advantage, placing him below statesmen and closer to the bewildered common man. In private, prime ministers found him almost intolerably slow, yet they respected his honesty and decency, and his desire to do his best, and they felt protective towards him. There was also relief, and gratitude, that he should have provided the most domestically admirable ‘Royal Family’ since the days of Prince Albert.
The press became filled with images of black drapery, coffins, tombs and catafalques. Even the New Statesman – whose editor, Kingsley Martin, was a rare critic of Monarchy – became convulsed by an argument about whether the front page should have a black band around it. However, the mourning was not just a media indulgence. Affection for George VI was felt everywhere. A few days after the death, Richard Crossman, a left-wing MP and iconoclast, recorded his impression of a ‘hard-boiled’ attitude in Parliament, but ‘directly you got outside, you certainly realised that the newspapers were not sentimentalizing when they described the nation’s feeling of personal loss’.
The feeling was intensified by the King’s relatively young age, and by sympathy for his widow; and by a mixture of concern and excited, expectant curiosity towards his elder daughter, who had been so closely watched since childhood, who had recently become an almost mythic being, but about whom very little was yet known. It was around this small and mysterious person that the national sentiment rapidly became – in the unironic phrase of the Annual Register for 1952 – ‘a religion of royalism’.
A variety of procedures automatically followed the King’s death, even before Elizabeth – now the Queen – knew of it. An emergency Cabinet met at 11 a.m., and decided to hold an Accession Council the same afternoon. There was a discussion of the wording of the Proclamation, which had important long-term effects. It was also decided to extend the Council’s composition. ‘Representatives of other members of the Commonwealth’ were now to join the ‘Lords Spiritual and Temporal, members of the Privy Council, and other Principal Gentlemen of Quality, with the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens of London’.
At the Council later in the day, the Lord President, Lord Woolton, read the draft declaration proclaiming the new Monarch as Queen Elizabeth the Second – the first to have been proclaimed in absentia since the accession of George I.
Proclamations echoed around the world, as never before – and never again, for the phenomenon of one individual as hereditary Head of State in so many different colonies and self-governing states is unlikely to be repeated. There was a plethora of invented traditions. In Australia, for example, the proclamation of George VI in 1936 had been read by a secretary in the Prime Minister’s department to a handful of people assembled in the King’s Hall at Parliament House. His daughter’s proclamation was read by the Governor-General from the steps of Parliament House, and similar ceremonies were conducted before large crowds in state capitals around the country.
In some places, the implications of what was proclaimed caused local difficulties. A particular complaint was made in Scotland, where the National Committee of the Scottish Covenant Association pointed out that, north of the border, she was Elizabeth I. There was a fierce legal argument. On February 20th the Edinburgh Court of Sessions resolved the matter by announcing that, as far as official documents and declarations were concerned, she would be styled ‘the Second’. The result was a grievance against the British Monarchy that was not forgotten.
In Kenya, it was difficult for ‘the lady we must now call the Queen’ – as Charteris began to refer to her – to come to terms, simultaneously, with the loss of a father and becoming Head of State for the rest of her life. It was also hard for her husband. After they got the news, the royal party rapidly prepared for the return journey to London. ‘I have this picture in my mind,’ according to Lord Charteris, ‘of going into the Lodge on 6th February 1952 and the Queen sitting at her desk, pencil in hand, and Prince Philip lying back on a sofa and holding open The Times over his face. And I felt then that something had changed, and it had.’ He recalls her ‘sitting erect, no tears, colour up a little, fully accepting her destiny’. He asked what she wanted to be called as Queen. ‘My own name, Elizabeth, of course,’ she said.
When Pamela Hicks expressed her sympathy, the Queen’s reaction was ‘I’m so sorry, we’ve got to go back. I’ve ruined everybody’s trip’.
Parker felt that ‘her feelings were deep, deep inside her’.
They left Sagana – the Queen still wearing blue jeans – before five. ‘When all the luggage had been packed,’ a servant wrote in Swahili a few days later, ‘Their Royal Highnesses came to us and said, “Goodbye, and thank you, we shall meet again”. They got into their car and went away.’
Charteris asked the press not to take any pictures. ‘As the motor cars left the Lodge, the world’s press lined the road’, he recalled. ‘Yet not a single photograph was taken.’
At seven o’clock, the royal party flew from Nanyuki to Entebbe, where they had to wait for two hours in the airport lounge, because of a thunderstorm. Then they began the twenty-four-hour flight home – monitored stage by stage by the world’s news agencies as the plane made refuelling stops. There was little talk on the journey. Dean recalled that once or twice the Queen left her seat, and when she returned she looked as if she had been crying.
‘She was looking out of the window on her own,’ says Lord Charteris. ‘At one point she called me over. She said: “What’s going to happen when we get home?” I realized that she didn’t know.’
The first thing to happen was a solemn greeting on the tarmac from the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, and other prominent political figures. At Clarence House, she was met by Queen Mary, veteran of five reigns, who curtseyed and kissed her granddaughter’s hand. It was Churchill, however, who set the scene for what he called a new Elizabethan Age. ‘Famous have been the reigns of our Queens,’ he declaimed in a broadcast that night. ‘Some of the greatest periods in our history have unfolded under their sceptre.’ He also spoke of the Monarchy, ‘the magic link which unites our loosely bound, but strongly interwoven Commonwealth.’
The Queen’s first public presentation took place at a full meeting of the Accession Council at St James’s Palace on February 8th. It was attended by an assortment of Privy Councillors – ‘people one didn’t remember were still alive,’ Dalton noted, ‘and some looking quite perky and self-important.’ The Queen, he thought, looked ‘very small – high pitched, rather reedy voice. She does her part well, facing hundreds of old men in black clothes with long faces. She will take up this task “which has come to me so early in life”.’
The contrast with her stumbling father on such occasions was stark. Harold Macmillan noted ‘her firm yet charming voice’ as she said her lines.
Harold Wilson found the Council ‘the most moving ceremonial I can recall’.
Deep emotions stirred. There were uncomfortable features. It was one of the ironies – or hypocrisies – of the hereditary system that death and renewal were combined: grief at the loss of one monarch was supposed to be accompanied by joy at the arrival of another. Churchill spoke of the thrill in once more invoking the prayer and the anthem ‘God Save the Queen’.
Yet the thrill at placing a young woman on a pedestal normally reserved for men was a complex one. If there was something grotesque – a distortion of past glories – about the protracted rituals and obeisances associated with the public mourning, there was also a peculiarity about the prostration of old gentlemen before a twenty-five-year-old Queen who had no choice but to accept the part she was asked to play.
Some spoke or wrote about her with barely concealed sexuality. Cecil Beaton described her, after a brief encounter at the theatre in July, as if she were Garbo. ‘The purity of her expression,’ he wrote, ‘the unspoilt childishness of the smile, the pristine quality of her pink and white complexion, are all part of an appearance that is individual and gives the effect of a total entity.’
Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, found ‘something breathtaking’ in her swift changes of costume and role. He recalled how moved he felt watching her out of the window at the Palace, as she knelt on the grass in a yellow shirt and jodhpurs, calling a dog to come to her – and knowing that, within a quarter of an hour, she would have changed and become a sovereign receiving her subjects.
Churchill himself soon became besotted. ‘All the film people in the world,’ the premier rhapsodized to Lord Moran, ‘if they had scoured the globe, could not have found anyone so suited to the part.’
It did not take long for the popular newspapers, mixing the lugubrious and the prurient, to see the opportunities. For if the Queen at her Accession had been, in the press imagery, ‘a girl in unrelieved black whom [the King’s] death had brought back from Kenya’s tropic sunshine to the searching chill of Norfolk in mid-winter,’
she was also a pretty face to brighten the front page. Some of the finest pre-Coronation pictures show her in mourning. There was an erotic splendour to the line of queens and princesses, Elizabeth II at their head, that attended the lying in state in Westminster Hall, ‘like Moslem women,’ as Crossman put it, ‘clothed in dead black, swathed and double swathed with veils so thick that they couldn’t read the Order of Service through them’.
THE QUESTION of how the Queen should be described in the Proclamation – discussed in Cabinet within hours of the King’s death – was of more than ritual significance. The words chosen, and amended, helped to determine the relationship of the Queen to her realms – and those that would cease to be realms – for many years to come. There was agreement that account needed to be taken of changes. Ministers felt that the traditional formula ‘was not wholly in accord with present constitutional conditions in the Commonwealth.’ The old wording contained anomalous references to ‘Ireland’ – no longer a member state – and to the ‘British Dominions’ which some of the countries so described might not like. It was therefore decided to drop ‘Imperial Crown,’ and include a reference to the Sovereign’s position as ‘Head of the Commonwealth’.
The problem reflected the growing diversity of the dominions since the Second World War; and it helped to determine the future nature of their relationship with the United Kingdom. Much was to flow from the designation of the Queen as ‘Head of the Commonwealth’ – a title formally acquired by George VI less than a year earlier, through the Royal Titles Bill, which had recognized the ‘divisibility’ of the Crown. Divisibility (the product of diversity) was officially adopted as a principle at the first Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference of the reign in December 1952, when it was agreed that each state should think up a title to express its own relationship with the Crown.
Apart from the United Kingdom, six self-governing nations – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon – retained the British Monarch as head of state. Three of them felt that ‘Defender of the Faith’ was inappropriate. In all of them ‘Queen of the British Dominions beyond the Seas’ was replaced by ‘Queen of her other Realms and Territories’. Finally, the words ‘Great Britain, Ireland’ in the full title were replaced by ‘the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. The changes accelerated a movement away from the notion of the British Monarch as sovereign over ‘dominions’ and towards a personally-based link, in which the Monarch enjoyed a separate identity in each country.
Advocates of ‘divisibility’ maintained that it was unavoidable and desirable. Not only were the dominions growing apart constitutionally in any case, a sober recognition of political and cultural realities would have the effect of promoting rather than diminishing Commonwealth unity.
Others argued both that the idea of a ‘personal union’ was absurd, and that the idea of a ‘Head of the Commonwealth,’ who would have any area of discretion distinct from the advice given to her by the ministers of her governments, and primarily the British Government, was a dangerous heresy.
The sharpest proponent of this view was Enoch Powell, a young Conservative MP who had spent much of the war in India, and who – from the start of the new reign – established himself as a lynx-eyed guardian of parliamentary rights vis-à-vis the Crown. Three weeks after the Accession, he wrote to the Prime Minister complaining about the attendance of the Duke of Edinburgh in the peers’ gallery of the House of Commons during a debate – something, he pointed out, a royal consort had not done since 1846 – in the course of which the Duke seemed to make his opinions of what was being discussed unconstitutionally obvious.
The Government Chief Whip backed the complaint, remarking that the consort had not been ‘exactly pokerfaced,’ and the Duke was privately ticked off.
Powell returned to the topic of royal interference on many occasions, as the Queen’s titular ‘divisibility’ – which many people in 1952 saw as just an exercise in linguistic tidying – grew in significance as the Commonwealth evolved.
As well as Commonwealth titles, there was also another problem of nomenclature – which touched the Sovereign herself, and more particularly her husband, personally. This was the question of what the Royal Family, and its descendants, should be called.
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