The Crown

by Robert Lacey

  So far, so reasonable … But then the Prince went on to venture a few jokes. ‘The family,’ he speculated, ‘may have to move into smaller premises, who knows?’ They had already had to sell a ‘small yacht’, and at this rate, he was wondering, he ‘may have to give up polo’.432

  Few laughed, or even chuckled. ‘My heart bleeds,’ responded the Labour MP Willie Hamilton, who spearheaded the Labour Party’s republican movement.433 The underwriting of ‘the wealthy royal family – not only the Queen but her husband, mother, sister, daughter, and other assorted relatives’ was not a popular cause in left-wing circles. The councillors of the London Borough of Lambeth took down their portrait of Elizabeth II, and hid it away under a sofa434 – although a group of Bermondsey dockers did organise a collection to buy Prince Philip a new polo pony. ‘When we were kids,’ they said – with all seriousness, on the face of it – ‘he did a lot for us with the playing fields and the boys’ clubs …’435

  Enter breezy PR man Bill Heseltine with his plan for a large-scale television documentary that would follow the Queen and her family through a full year of activity to show how jolly hard they worked and how they were worth every penny that they consumed of taxpayers’ money. As Philip put it privately, ‘We are fighting an election every day of the week.’436

  The forthcoming investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales offered a peg for the proposed film, along with some camouflage. The storyline would follow the young Prince as he prepared for this landmark event in his life, and would then branch out to survey the sort of activities to which Charles might look forward as his career developed.437 ITV and the BBC agreed to sink their differences to collaborate on this unprecedented venture for which, in the event, they generated over 43 hours of filmed material438 – at a cost, in 1969, of £150,000 (about £2.5 million today).439 It was to be a high-security enterprise, all sides agreed, with the raw footage being stored in special vaults in cans labelled ‘Religious Programming’.

  Starting in the summer of 1968, the BBC/ITV film crew headed to Scotland to capture some Balmoral sequences that would live in the memory of all who saw the film – and which have been recreated in Episode 304 by the current cast of The Crown. Elizabeth and Prince Charles were shown chopping and preparing a salad, while Philip and Anne went to work barbecuing sausages and steak.

  ‘Well,’ the Queen reported, strolling over to her husband, ‘the salad is finished!’

  ‘Well done,’ replied her husband sardonically, turning over a sausage on the griddle. ‘This, as you will observe, is not.’440

  Other ‘private’ glimpses of the family showed the Queen and the four-year-old Prince Edward visiting the Balmoral village shop in search of an ice cream. ‘Cinema vérité!’ exulted Richard Cawston, the film’s director and producer. Scarcely less pompous was President Richard Nixon’s on-screen greeting to Prince Charles in the US-related sequences: ‘I’ve seen you on television!’

  ‘I’ve seen you, too!’ was the Prince’s snappy rejoinder.441

  With regard to Prince Philip’s startling use of nicknames for Elizabeth and Anne in this episode, there are reliable reports of him being heard to call the Queen ‘Cabbage’ (possibly an English variation of the French endearment ‘mon petit chou’), but there is no solid evidence as to whether he ever called his daughter ‘Sweetie’.

  Royal Family proved a massive success, shown first in black and white on the BBC on 21 June 1969, then repeated the following week on ITV in colour. Over the years it would be seen in more than 125 countries and has been transmitted nearly a dozen times in Britain alone. ‘There was no question of the Queen’s censoring the film,’ said Richard Cawston. ‘I suppose I was much more stringent in my own cutting than they would ever have been.’442

  The critics cheered. The film was praised by Stuart Hood, The Spectator’s TV critic, as the ‘apotheosis of home movies’443 – he predicted a British move towards a bicycle-riding, Scandinavian-style monarchy. Even the left-wing New Statesman felt compelled to suggest that Cawston and his co-producer Antony Jay should be given knighthoods: ‘They’ll certainly have added a decade or two to the life of the British Monarchy.’444 In the event, Jay did receive a knighthood in 1988, though that was primarily for his work on the political satire Yes Minister.445

  What the real Royal Family documentary did not include was the participation of Prince Philip’s eccentric mother, Princess Alice of Greece, who was living in Buckingham Palace in these years, but was kept carefully away from the production. This, as Peter Morgan suggests in Episode 304, was a pity, since the Princess’s life and character offered exactly the unsentimental element of reality that the programme makers were seeking. Though born royal, Alice of Battenberg, the elder sister of ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, was congenitally deaf446 and was diagnosed with schizophrenia while her son Philip was still a boy.447

  The sources are not clear on the exact nature of the Princess’s intonation and accent – despite her deafness she was able to lipread and also to speak fluently. According to her grand-niece Lady Pamela Hicks, she could hear enough to converse on the phone from Greece. Born in England, raised in Germany and living most of her adult life in Greece, Alice could speak and understand all three national languages – though it is unclear whether her accent was more English, German or Greek.

  Alice’s deafness and other problems led to the breakdown of her already shaky marriage with Philip’s father, Prince Andrew of Greece, and was followed by her confinement to a private sanitorium.448 There the Princess found solace in religious mania, lying on the ground for hours on end in a trance-like state, seeking to develop what she described as ‘the power conveyed to her from above’. Alice came to believe that she was literally the bride of Christ, and that she was physically involved not only with Jesus, but with other great spiritual figures like the Buddha.

  The Princess’s sexual fantasies attracted the attention of Sigmund Freud, who diagnosed Alice as suffering from a ‘neurotic-pre-psychotic libidinous condition’ – for which he prescribed radiation of her ovaries ‘in order to accelerate the menopause’.449 This brutal treatment was carried out on the great man’s orders, with the Princess remaining locked up against her will in the sanitorium and seeing next to nothing of her son Philip for years. (Chapter Seventeen, ‘Moondust’ – Episode 307 – relates more of this traumatic episode in the young Philip’s life.)

  For 23 episodes of The Crown we have been observing Prince Philip’s often unconventional behaviour. Now we have some clue to one major source of it – the psychosis of the mother who called him ‘Bubbikins’, but was separated from him for such long periods during his childhood. ‘He just never had the love,’ explained Michael Parker, his naval chum and later private secretary. ‘There was no one really close – that day-today parental contact you need to smooth off the rough edges. That’s where his apparent rudeness comes from – not enough slap-down when it mattered.’450

  We have little idea, however, about how Prince Philip really felt about his mother’s lengthy absences – which were hardly her fault. Indeed, the Prince had every reason to be proud of his unconventional parent, who made a comeback from her mental illness, moving to live in German-occupied Athens throughout the war, working for the Red Cross and helping to organise soup kitchens for the starving populace. She set up a sisterhood that operated as a convalescent home – part infirmary and part training school for nuns. She had neither an office nor a bedroom at the sisterhood, as depicted. But she certainly sold some of her family possessions in order to keep her sisterhood alive – the role of the pawnbroker and the subsequent police raid at the convent have been invented in order to dramatise this.

  Sometime around 1943 the Princess secretly gave refuge to a Jewish friend, Rachel Cohen,451 and two of her children, who were being sought by the Gestapo and would certainly have been deported to the death camps if Alice had not protected them – at considerable personal risk. To recognise this act of bravery, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusa
lem, honoured Princess Alice as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ in a ceremony on the Mount of Olives, which Prince Philip attended in October 1994.

  ‘I suspect that it never occurred to her,’ remarked Philip, ‘that her action was in any way special. She was a person with a deep religious faith, and she would have considered it to be a perfectly natural human reaction to fellow beings in distress.’ In 2010 Princess Alice was posthumously named a ‘Hero of the Holocaust’ by the British government.452

  1960: Princess Alice of Greece and Denmark – and son

  Of all the royal grandchildren, Princess Anne was the closest to their remarkable Danish-Greek grandmother – hence the imagined sequence in this episode in the Palace gardens, where we see Anne pushing Alice into the path of the ITV/BBC cameras for an interview. This is surely the ‘Stag Scene’ of Season 3! Anne called Alice ‘Yaya’, the Greek word for grandmother,453 and she enjoyed hearing the stories that her most unusual grandmother had to tell about Queen Victoria – who had actually been present at Alice’s birth.

  For both Charles and Anne, the connection with their grandmother went back to 1956, when ‘Yaya’ had joined the royal family on a cruise around the Outer Hebrides on Britannia, during which Anne’s sixth birthday had been celebrated.454 Revelling in her religious background, Alice had regaled her grandchildren with her favourite Bible stories – along with her ‘little tales’ of poor children in Greece whom she had fed bread and cabbages during the war while she was looking after orphans in Nazi-occupied Athens.

  As a pupil at Benenden School, Anne was known for her frugality – fellow pupils noted how she always seemed to have something left over from her £2-a-term pocket money, and how she frequently attended practical lectures on subjects like nursing and social work. It seems reasonable to speculate that these traits reflected the influence of Anne’s unique ‘Yaya’ – the remarkable princess-nun who tried to found an order of religious nurses in Greece.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘COUP’

  MAY 1967–MAY 1968

  ONE OF THE MOST REGULAR VISITORS TO PRINCESS Alice of Greece and Denmark when she moved into Buckingham Palace in the late 1960s was her ever-busy younger brother ‘Dickie’, Earl Mountbatten of Burma. ‘Dickie’ loved dropping in on ‘Alice-at-the-Palace’, as he came to dub his sister – though Alice did develop some suspicions about the frequency of his visits: following her brother’s departure, she could not help noticing how the stack of Buckingham Palace notepaper on her desk always seemed a little lower.455

  There was no doubting that Lord Louis Mountbatten had a high opinion of himself – he had unquenchable ambition. That is the theme and question at the heart of Episode 305, ‘Coup’ – how far did Dickie’s conceit and ambition extend? – since it is a matter of surprising but solid historical fact that on 8 May 1968, four eminent conspirators gathered in Lord Mountbatten’s home in Kinnerton Street, a former mews in Knightsbridge near the back of Buckingham Palace, to discuss the possibility of replacing Harold Wilson, the elected Prime Minister of the moment, with an unelected ‘Government of National Unity’. They did not get very far with planning out the details of their deposition, but two of them, and maybe three, were quite clear on their main objective – that Prime Minister Wilson should be replaced by Lord Louis Mountbatten.

  ‘Dickie,’ noted one of the participants in his diary, ‘is really intrigued by [the] suggestion that he should be the boss man of a “government”’.456

  The moving spirit of this subversive gathering was Cecil Harmsworth King, the tall and bulky (6 foot 4 inches and 18 stone) press magnate who was chairman of the International Publishing Corporation (IPC), at that date the biggest publishing empire in the world, controlling the Daily Mirror, The Sun, the Sunday Pictorial, the Daily Record in Scotland, and some 200 other newspapers and magazines. In the run-up to the 1964 general election – which had proved surprisingly close – the Daily Mirror had conducted a brilliant campaign among its working-class readership to help deliver victory to Harold Wilson. King even drove around London with a red flag reading ‘Vote Labour’ fluttering from the bonnet of his Rolls-Royce.457

  King had had high hopes for Wilson, rating him a canny improvement on his predecessor as leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, and hoping to play the role of Wilson’s éminence grise. Wilson responded by offering King one of the recently invented life peerages, which King declined on the grounds that he wanted an hereditary peerage – ideally an earldom that would outrank his press baron uncles, Northcliffe and Rothermere. When Wilson explained his feeling that a socialist government had no business handing out hereditary privileges, King took offence and the two men’s relationship never quite recovered.458

  King’s right-hand man – and another of the May 1968 players in Kinnerton Street – was Hubert ‘Hugh’ Cudlipp, the snappy, hands-on Welsh editor whose formula of gimmicks, stunts and punchy headlines was generally credited with the huge success of IPC and of the Mirror newspapers, in particular. Cudlipp had a fair claim to being the father of the modern tabloid ‘rag’. He had deployed his graphic techniques during the Second World War in the creation of Union Jack, the morale-boosting British Forces, newspaper – and prior to that, as a 1942 participant in the first battle of El Alamein, he had developed his own stock of wartime anecdotes he could swap with ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten.459

  1965 – Earl Mountbatten of Burma KG GCB OM GCSI GCIE GCVO…

  The fourth member of the Kinnerton quartet, the Russian-Jewish scientist Sir Solomon ‘Solly’ Zuckerman, also had a distinguished war record as designer of the lightweight steel ‘Zuckerman’ helmet used by civil defence organisations, and as a bombing consultant during the Normandy landings.460 Zuckerman had been invited to the gathering as Mountbatten’s friend and adviser, and, by his own subsequent account, it was just as well that he showed up.

  All the participants left their own varying accounts of the meeting – after the event, these four powerful men became very well aware that they had been playing with fire in Kinnerton Street – and we know that Cecil King opened the agenda by recounting the catalogue of Wilsonian shortcomings that he would publish two days later in an editorial on the front of the Daily Mirror of 10 May. ‘Enough is Enough’ blared the headline above the name and photograph of Cecil H. King, chairman of the International Publishing Corporation, along with the list of the principal newspapers King controlled: ‘Mr Wilson and his Government have lost all credibility: all authority,’ complained King, his voice the more powerful for coming, apparently officially, from Britain’s largest Labour-supporting newspaper group. ‘The Government that was voted into office with so much good will only three and a half years ago has revealed itself as lacking in foresight, in administrative ability, in political sensitivity, and integrity. Mr Wilson is seen to be a brilliant Parliamentary tactician and nothing more.’461

  King illustrated his complaint against Labour’s parliamentary manoeuvring with photographs of the four ministers of education that Wilson had appointed in the last four years (‘which means that effectively Mr Wilson has had no Minister of Education’) – with education being just one by-product, in King’s opinion, of a catalogue of disasters since 1964: the devastating strikes by the dockers and the National Union of Seamen, the doubling of unemployment within a year, the devaluation of the pound in November 1967 and the consequent loss of sterling reserves, rounded off by General de Gaulle’s contemptuous refusal to let Britain join the Common Market – for a second time.

  ‘We are now threatened with the greatest financial crisis in our history,’ concluded King to his readers, and this was the message that he delivered verbally on 8 May to Cudlipp, Mountbatten and Zuckerman in Kinnerton Street. Britain’s knife-edge national emergency, he would write two days later, ‘is not to be removed by lies about our reserves, but only by a fresh start under a fresh leader’. And to make this fresh start, King made clear to his Kinnerton Street listeners that Lord ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, the great war hero of th
e Burma campaign, was, in his opinion, the ‘fresh leader’ that Britain required at this perilous moment in its history.462

  Episode 305 leaps off from this extraordinary proposal by setting the crucial meeting between King and Mountbatten in a boardroom at the Bank of England – which was not where it actually happened, but was certainly where King had developed the ideas that he presented that afternoon at Kinnerton Street. As the Queen Mother explains to ‘Dickie’ in this episode, while the two elder royals pore together over the Mirror’s angry ‘Enough is Enough’ editorial, Wilson had tried to pacify Cecil King by making him a director of the Bank of England. But that had only served to lock him in a room ‘with Wilson’s biggest enemies – financiers and bankers – who explained to King in graphic terms what a mess Wilson is making of the economy’.463

  The Bank of England’s ‘big guns’ were particularly angry about ‘Operation Brutus’, a Labour government plan to impose tighter regulations upon both the Bank and the City of London, and they had won King round to their view that ‘Brutus’ was an unconstitutional attack upon their traditional financial freedoms. As the Queen Mother puts it to ‘Dickie’, Wilson’s too-ready endorsement of this left-wing project had ‘scored something of an own goal’.464

  We then see Mountbatten doing some research at Broadlands, his grand Hampshire home, into the practicalities of a coup with a large map on the wall. This scene is based on a subsequent allegation by Wilson’s close ally and confidante Marcia Williams, who has to be viewed, of course, as a biased witness. Then the entire fantastic enterprise is brought to an end by the Queen herself, who rebukes ‘Dickie’ and defends Wilson’s legitimacy in a confrontation in which, scripted by Peter Morgan, Her Majesty sets out the classic view of Britain’s unwritten constitution. This is an ‘invented’ scene, but similar words could well have been uttered in May 1968, a few days after the Kinnerton Street gathering, when Elizabeth went to stay at Broadlands. That is when Uncle ‘Dickie’ is thought to have disclosed to her the details of his meeting with King, Cudlipp and Zuckerman:465