by Tom Quinn
Coventry contemporaries were to become proud of Billy’s royal connection and he did mix with them whenever he returned to see his parents. He also invited one or two close friends to visit him if they happened to be in London. In turn, Billy was justifiably proud that he was able to offer guided tours of Clarence House. But, when his mother Mabel finally died in the 1970s he cut his ties with Coventry and it seems he never again visited the city.
When the Tallons arrived in Coundon, the terraced house in which they settled in Norman Place Road was by no means the worst in the town. In fact, Coundon was considered one of the better districts. It had only recently lost its status as a village – Coventry’s house-building boom swamped the old village in the years leading up to Billy’s birth but it was still recognised by the older residents as having a distinct difference from Coventry. Some residents welcomed the fact that it would now be part of a bigger town; others lamented the loss of its independence.
Billy, a year old when the family moved, was to spend the rest of his childhood in Coundon, but he never really regarded it as home. He always felt on the edge of things, an outsider. This was undoubtedly partly due to the growing realisation that he was homosexual, but far more to attitudes he had clearly learned from his mother and during his long years in royal service he would always groan if anyone asked him about his childhood. In fact, it eventually became almost a no-go area for conversation and fellow servants were always careful to avoid the subject. Peter Livesey, who worked in the royal kitchens during the 1970s and 1980s, remembered that Billy made a point of behaving in an aloof manner until he got to know you, but even then his conversation was always rooted in the present.
However much he liked you, he hated it if you were ‘cheeky’, which meant asking any questions about his past – I mean before he joined the royals. He really wanted people to think that he was well born. It wasn’t exactly that he was ashamed of his origins or that he told lies about the past but he had a reluctance to talk about a life he had clearly been desperate to escape.
Billy vanishes for a while after the move from Birtley to Coventry apart from occasional glimpses of a lively child who ran about the streets but was curiously fastidious. Friends recall a boy who hated to get his clothes dirty and disliked football, which made him very much the odd man out. He had a reputation for being a bit of a sissy but this was combined with an inner toughness. He may not have been much good in a scrap but he was a sarcastic and quick-witted boy who was good at making the bullies feel foolish. One contemporary remembered that though Billy wasn’t sporty and hated to get into fights, he already had a ‘savage tongue’. It was something he had inherited from his mother, who was well known for her waspish put-downs and for the speed and fearlessness with which she delivered them. No one ever complained in the Tallons’ shop or was rude to her face because she could turn in a second. ‘One minute she was all smiles then next she’d torn your character to shreds with a pointed one-liner,’ recalled one of Billy’s early friends.
Once, when a boy said something rude about Billy’s mother he was livid and in a split second he turned to the boy – who had a reputation for fighting – and spat out, ‘I don’t know that your mother is any better – all fur coat and no knickers, I’ve heard!’
The next we hear of Billy is when he went, aged eleven, to the local school, Barker’s Butts.
The school had come into existence, in the form in which Billy knew it, following the Education Act of 1944. This set up a tripartite system, with grammar schools taking the top ten to fifteen per cent of each age group (these were the elite), technical schools taking those who were deemed intelligent but of a more practical bent, and finally secondary moderns, notoriously bad schools that were effectively dumping grounds for those deemed good for little more than factory work, driving buses or sweeping the streets.
Billy failed his eleven plus and had no choice but to attend a school that had low expectations for its pupils and could attract only those teachers who could not get jobs elsewhere. He was immensely intelligent, as his later career was to show, but, like so many boys condemned to a dreary future by the old tripartite system, he was rejected by a system that gave you one chance and one chance only at age eleven.
Billy began to think for himself in his mid-teens but by then it was too late – the end of his school days was already looming. He may have collected beautiful china and pictures later in life but he rarely read for pleasure and had no interest in books generally – both legacies of those early uninspiring years.
But even Billy was surprised that, unlike other aspiring Coventry parents, Mabel and William Sr had not tried harder to get him through the eleven plus and into grammar school.
‘I think they were just tired by then,’ he recalled. ‘And they themselves were not academic or ambitious for me in any particular way. I don’t think they really understood the system either; the implications, I mean, of failure at age eleven.’
But, whatever his parents’ level of interest, there is no doubt that Barker’s Butts was what today would be described as a ‘sink school’. Although many ex-pupils remember enjoying their time there, none made any claim for it as a place that taught you to have high aspirations. Peter McGrath attended in the 1950s. He recalled:
Well, when you are in your early teens you’re barely aware what sort of school you’re attending, especially if you come from a working-class background. You just go where you are sent and Barker’s Butts had some good teachers, or at least teachers who cared about us – and we had a great football team!
The problem was that Barker’s Butts worked on the principle that the children in its care needed only a very basic education – a smattering of geography and history and arithmetic, a bit of reading and English grammar, but no French or Latin, no physics or biology. Pupils were being made ready for lives as factory workers and bus drivers, shop workers and dustbin men. The only compensation was that daily life among one’s friends made up for some of what the school lacked. Billy later insisted that though the school offered little, he was not particularly unhappy.
With little academic ambition for its pupils, many of whom were sent out on projects to count the number of cars passing along the street or given other inane tasks just to keep them occupied, Barker’s Butts was a drab environment for a boy with ideas above his station.
The school that Billy knew was demolished in the 1960s as part of a local education authority re-organisation. Architecturally it was typical of early twentieth-century board schools – red brick with tall windows and a vaguely Queen Anne appearance. Unlike many board schools, which were and are rather elegant, Barker’s Butts was a long, low building. Other pupils remember the school with a mixture of resignation and downright hostility. Reg Cotter, who was two years ahead of Billy, recalled, ‘We knew we’d failed from the age of eleven.’
The lucky few who avoided Barker’s Butts went on to grammar school, which meant a professional job and maybe even university in Leeds or Birmingham. Barker’s Butts was what people called the factory kids’ school because without a miracle – and there were few enough of those at the time in Coventry – the factory was the chief employer of ex-pupils. A number of boys recalled that the only relief from the sense that you had failed was sport. The football club – rugby was for the grammar school boys – made life bearable for those who were good at sport. But this only left Billy on the side-lines both literally and metaphorically.
But if the school lacked the polish of the local grammar school, the city of Coventry wasn’t much better.
Coventry in the late 1930s was one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Europe, but when Billy was seven it was largely destroyed by the Luftwaffe in a series of night-time air raids that set light easily to the ancient dried timbers of the city’s houses.
Billy may well have just about remembered the city before the terrible bombing that laid waste to it.
It had been a beautiful, largely unspoiled and still recognisably medieval
city filled with narrow lanes and picturesque fifteenth- and sixteenth-century timber-framed buildings. But we took it for granted and, in fact, many people, especially on the council, actually hated it. They thought it was old and worn out, a load of rubbish, an embarrassment.
But if the city centre had survived the bombs it would have been destroyed anyway in the 1960s when much of what did survive the war was destroyed by the planning department of the council. Billy once said, ‘I might have gone back if Coventry hadn’t been turned into one of the ugliest places in Europe. After the 1960s it was ghastly for anyone who loved beautiful things. A real shock.’
This was another reason Billy hardly ever returned in later life to the city of his early years. ‘Coventry is a terrible place,’ he would say. ‘It was beautiful if boring when I lived there as a boy but the planners finished what the Luftwaffe began and now no sane person would spend any more time there than he or she absolutely had to.’
The so-called Gibson Plan to comprehensively re-construct the city in favour of cars, industry and concrete blocks of flats produced the soulless place we see today. Had the city survived it would have been as popular with tourists as York is today – something Billy himself said on a number of occasions – but when the bombs and, worse, the developers had finished their work, the once beautiful city was left as one of the ugliest urban centres in Europe.
The taste for the past had not yet arrived in England and, like youngsters everywhere, Billy and his friends were not interested in old buildings. They wanted parties and cinemas, bright lights and fun. Coundon could only offer a few old pubs along with acres of dereliction.
But, like all children Billy accepted life as he found it, although at some point in his childhood – and it was unusually early, perhaps around the age of ten – he seems to have become aware that war-damaged Coventry was not for him. He became desperate to get away.
A friend with whom he later fell out, and who did not want to be named, said:
I knew Billy when he was eleven and all he could talk about was going to London. He hated Coventry because it was so grimy and flat – by flat I mean deadly dull – which it was. There was no romance in the city and life sort of plodded along in a way he hated. We called him Gentleman Jim because now and then he seemed a bit showy – he had what we called ‘airs and graces’. His slightly aloof manner wasn’t too obvious and I don’t remember him being bullied for it, but he was definitely different. He worried about things such as breaking his nails and was worried about his appearance in a way that other kids definitely were not.
Other friends recalled a boy who developed a closed inner world; a boy who became secretive and a bit of a loner. It would be glib to put this down to his growing realisation of his homosexuality, but that no doubt played a part. Billy’s childhood friend Dick Smith lived just a few hundred yards from him in those early years and he stayed in touch after Billy moved to London. He saw him now and then during his first decade at Clarence House. He describes the teenage Billy as having a detached air, always seeming to be on his own, and by the age of fourteen he had certainly lost whatever interest he had once had in the rough and tumble of street games.
I remember the day we all left Barker’s Butts School. We were fifteen. At the end of the day we all sat on Billy’s wall just chatting about this and that. A few days later and without a word, he’d gone – to London, I mean.
Word quickly spread that Billy had managed to get himself a job in the kitchens at Buckingham Palace. Billy’s mother Mabel allegedly dropped it into the conversation whenever she could, but she was vague about what exactly he was doing. Billy’s friends thought she was proud of the fact that he’d got himself a job in London but was less pleased that people thought he was working in the kitchens, which she felt was beneath her Billy. And, besides, it was not true.
In the streets of Coundon the words ‘Buckingham Palace’ had a glamour that made people indifferent to the details.
Dick Smith said, ‘We were amazed and, in fact, we didn’t believe it at first, but then none of us at that time knew Billy had been writing to the palace for years. That only came out much later when he was well known.’
Chapter Four
Glamorous worlds
BILLY’S LONGING FOR a more glamorous life came to dominate his early teens; but where was this life to be found? Well, surprisingly, Billy found it initially all over the city in the form of newspaper stories and magazine features about the doings of the royal family. Likewise, the radio held a fascination for the young man because it regularly broadcast the voices of the royals, as well as news about their trips around the country and abroad.
The old Bakelite wireless at home where the family would sit and listen to the news became a vital means by which Billy, in his mind at least, could wander far away. And news about the royals was far more uncritical at that time than it later became. Journalists wrote in hugely deferential terms, as if their role were to pay homage to the royals, and that, of course, is in stark contrast to more recent times when journalists began actively to try to uncover damaging stories about them.
But in Billy’s early days, radio bulletins would solemnly report the mere fact that the family had travelled from Windsor to Sandringham, or from Buckingham Palace to Balmoral. The tone of reports in those innocent days was one that only hinted at the sort of glamour that so captivated Billy. Here was a world, he thought, that was filled with golden beings far removed from the grime of everyday life in Coventry; beings who travelled the country and the world staying in glamorous places and who were seemingly above criticism, their every move a source of wonder to the British public. Even the coats and dresses worn by the family were described at length in the newspapers and magazines of the time.
So, deeply moved by all that he saw and heard about this glamorous distant world, Billy began, aged about eight, to collect every possible scrap of information he could lay his hands on about the royal family. He filled notebooks with jottings about the family and beautifully kept scrapbooks bulged with cuttings from newspapers and magazines. The old photograph-filled Picture Post magazine was a special favourite and where some boys spent their pocket money on sweets and Hotspur magazine, Billy tracked down and bought every publication that included photographs of the latest royal visit.
For Billy it didn’t matter which royal it was – he collected them all, including pictures and stories about George VI, crowned in 1937, but also Mary of Teck, the late king George V’s consort who was to die in 1953. He even collected pictures of Belgian, Spanish and Swedish royalty.
The main focus of Billy’s attention was undoubtedly the King and Queen. He knew Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had married Albert Frederick Arthur George, the future George VI, in 1923, in Westminster Abbey. The wedding was one of the great events of that year with crowds filling Parliament Square, Whitehall and Victoria Street, but, as we have seen, no one at that time had ever imagined that Albert would become king.
Albert was famously shy and retiring; he was a man with an intense dislike of public speaking – he had an appalling stammer – and the various high-profile duties of a monarch filled him with dread. It was the scandal of his brother Edward’s relationship with Wallis Simpson and subsequent abdication in 1936 that led to an extraordinary change in the young royal couple’s life.
The young Billy was fascinated by this turbulent history, which was still relatively recent news when he was a young man. It was still the greatest scandal of the age.
Meanwhile, as his tiny bedroom walls filled up with grainy black and white photographs and news stories cut from every publication he could lay his hands on, Billy developed what amounted almost to an obsession with the royal family. He would go as far as to fish old magazines out of dustbins to check to see if he had missed a story. In the days when Picture Post dominated magazine sales at the newsagents he made sure he secured copies that remained unsold since at that time magazines were ordered on what was called firm sale (rather than sale or return) so
Billy knew that if they were not sold by the newsagent they were likely to be thrown away.
By the time he was fifteen Billy had amassed a detailed dossier – almost a miniature library according to one contemporary – of royal lives. The dossier eventually also included stories about distant relatives of the immediate royal family – including stories about the Russian royals – and it covered a period of more than five years.
Billy’s interest in the royals was in marked contrast to his interest in school lessons. But then he would have guessed that no amount of study at Barker’s Butts would rescue him from his fate. He needed another way out, and so he channelled his considerable intelligence into his royal collection and, by the age of eleven, he knew he wanted to work for the royal family.
WHEN THE COMPTROLLER of the Royal Household at Buckingham Palace received a carefully written, if slightly clumsily composed letter postmarked Coventry and addressed directly to George VI, he must have been tempted to throw it into the waste paper basket.
The letter would have arrived in 1947 or early 1948. It explained that the writer was a huge fan of the royal family, was intelligent and hardworking, loyal, conscientious and honest. The writer explained all his good qualities and then asked if he could have a job – any job – at the palace.
Having sent that letter the young Billy Tallon waited, desperately hoping for a positive reply. The King’s office almost certainly did reply, but it was inevitably a gentle brush off, as Billy was too young to leave school. Undaunted, Billy wrote every six months or so from then on, always politely suggesting that as soon as he was able to leave school he would like to work in the royal household.