by Tom Quinn
By the late 1950s and into the 1960s things had definitely begun to shift and even the grandest families were beginning to be less formal with their staff. Billy sensed this shift and it added to his confidence. Even as a relatively junior footman he was able to make odd little jokes and amusing asides that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier.
‘He was brilliant at these little theatrical asides,’ recalled Roger Booth. ‘And he had a wonderful drawl which always made the Queen Mother smile. He would say “But my dear, they were simply made for each other”, and the word “made” would slowly drip off his tongue.’
This kind of theatricality delighted Billy’s friends and his employers because it affected almost everything he did. Whether carrying flowers along the corridors or serving at table, whether leading the corgis or just opening doors, he did everything with a kind of exaggerated flourish. There is a famous photograph of Billy with armfuls of flowers smiling at the camera where he looks almost as if he is himself part of a floral display; the centrepiece of a bright and colourful collection.
Of course, when he made the short trip along the Mall from Buckingham Palace to his new home at Clarence House he would have been acutely aware of how the hierarchy worked both for servants – chambermaids at the bottom and butlers at the top – and for equerries and other well-born advisers. William was a political animal who knew who he had to impress and who he could ignore; who to flatter and who to avoid.
Robert Fisher, who worked at Buckingham Palace in the mid-1950s, remembered meeting Billy for the first time.
He was very self-assured and though he was still a relatively lowly footman – which was admittedly the start if you wanted to climb the ladder – he always behaved as if he had a far superior role. The Queen Mother noticed him from the start, I think. She began to ask for him more often than she asked for other servants but it was all very odd because it happened gradually without anyone really noticing how or why it was happening. Billy had a way of dealing with her which she liked and which he knew she liked.
Roger Booth is certain that the Queen Mother knew Billy was gay and didn’t mind in the least.
I would say she positively welcomed the fact, as there had been a long tradition of homosexual servants at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House. Some commentators have said this was partly because the royals felt that their female children would be safer if the male servants were homosexual, but it almost certainly had far more to do with the fact that homosexual servants were perceived – rightly or wrongly – as having less need for a life outside the palace.
And even though homosexuality was illegal until the mid-1960s, the royals took a very lordly view of that kind of illegality. They had always known homosexual men – in service and in their families – and couldn’t really understand what all the fuss was about. It’s also nonsense, I think, to say that Queen Elizabeth didn’t mind so long as her gay servants were discreet in their affairs. I’d say the opposite was true and she liked the fact that her gay servants were often very indiscreet indeed, but just so long as they didn’t go too far. It provided a bit of excitement for her and at no risk to herself or her reputation. She famously said that without gay servants the royal family would be reduced to ‘self-service’.
If a footman were caught soliciting in Hyde Park and the story ended up in the papers, he could simply be sacked and the royal household would never be mentioned in the newspapers as the person’s employer. There was an automatic instinct almost everywhere to avoid any scandal attaching to the royals, which is a very different picture from the picture we have today where I think often people are keen to embarrass the royals wherever and whenever they possibly can. If a servant happened to get caught in the 1950s or early 1960s, the police might also sometimes discreetly contact the palace and there would be a quiet word in the right ear and the servant would be let off with a warning.
But if Billy was sexually indiscreet, he had an uncanny survival instinct and would only ever go so far. He would never allow a sexual conquest to threaten his position. And there were many liaisons both before and after he started his relationship with his lifelong partner, Reg Wilcox.
THERE WAS TO be an unwelcome break in Billy’s royal service before he was able to consolidate his position with the Queen Mother. Billy’s life as a junior assistant and footman in the stewards’ room at Buckingham Palace was interrupted dramatically after little more than a year when he was called up to do his National Service. He had expressed a desire to continue working for the Queen Mother but everything had to be put on hold. Billy spent two years in the RAF and, remarkably, those years mirrored in many ways his life at the palace. As soon as his commanding officer discovered what Billy had been doing before call up, he asked him ‘on the spot, there and then’, as Billy himself later recalled, if he would like to do something similar in the air force. Billy felt it would be no bad thing and found himself assigned as batman to a ‘rather delicate but aristocratic senior officer’.
It is interesting that, even in the RAF, a very different environment in many ways from the palace, Billy found his natural role as servant to someone from a socially superior background. ‘He was a very nice man,’ Billy said. ‘Very grand, but kind, and I learned a huge amount from him about how to behave.’
Billy was always slightly reluctant to talk about his time in the RAF. To some extent he felt it was two wasted years; years he could and should have spent working for the royals. ‘We did have some fun,’ he once said, ‘but thank heavens I didn’t have to play at soldiers for too long!’
It was towards the end of Billy’s National Service – two years was then compulsory – that the widowed queen, knowing that Billy had expressed a desire to work for her, arranged for a letter to be sent to him offering him a job at her new home, Clarence House. That’s one story. A more likely account is given by Reg Wilcox, who said Billy wrote several letters to the Queen Mother after the King died to ask if he could come back and work for her. Reg claimed she remembered him, liked him and said yes. That’s all there was to it. If the later story is true it was a repeat of Billy’s strategy of always writing directly to the man or woman at the top. After a short stay in Coventry to see his family after he was demobbed, Billy was back in London.
LIFE AT CLARENCE House was very similar to life at Buckingham Palace: the long days, the hours spent waiting for instructions and endless door opening and serving at table. For years after he started work there Billy lived in a small room at the top of the house, just as he had lived in a small room at the top of Buckingham Palace.
The interior of Clarence House had been largely neglected for more than fifty years. It was threadbare and almost shabby in places. ‘It may have been shabby,’ recalled one servant, ‘but it was definitely shabby genteel. You would find the most expensive objects lying in corners or covered in dust on a forgotten window-sill somewhere.’ One of Billy’s visitors later recalled the ‘rickety old wooden lift’, the cold in winter and the general air of decline. But Billy’s room was always a little sanctuary of brightness.
It was only when Billy’s parents died in the 1970s and he no longer had a home outside the palace that the Queen Mother gave him the use of Gate Lodge, a small cottage just by the entrance to Clarence House from the Mall. Even today the lodge looks like nothing more than a tiny one-storey guardroom, but it was to become Billy’s pride and joy and his home for the last thirty years of his time in service.
But for now it was life in a small bed-sitting room.
There is no doubt that from the time he returned to work at Clarence House in 1953 his aim was clear, as he explained in a brief – and slightly drunken – conversation many years later:
There was something about Elizabeth the Queen Mother that drew people to her. It wasn’t just that she had once been queen. It was her personality as much as her status. She inspired respect, even awe, I think. But apart from wanting to work for her I also wanted to get to the top in service. People might have look
ed down on servants – they certainly still did in the 1950s – but not on the senior servants and certainly not on royal servants. As time passed, of course, and fewer people had servants at all, royal servants came to have an aura of real glamour.
Billy’s time as an officer’s batman had taught him a great deal about looking after the personal needs of an individual and he made good use of this knowledge. Where other junior footmen would open doors and collect letters to be taken to the post, Billy always went a step further by asking if anything more was required, or he would suggest serving drinks in a certain way, as fellow servant John Hodges remembered:
Billy had a knack of seeming to anticipate the Queen Mother’s needs and in the royal household the family members can tell immediately – or at least they think they can – if someone is prepared to go the extra mile for them. They recognised loyalty and in their own way they reciprocated where they found it. That’s why Billy eventually got his cottage in the Mall. It also explains why, when Billy got into rows with the equerries and advisers, the Queen Mother almost always backed him.
Of course Billy loved praise; he positively bathed in it, but especially when it came from his beloved Queen Mum. But her fondness for him and his habit of constantly suggesting things to her, often in what looked like an over-familiar way, made the equerries and advisers dislike him.
The Queen Mother was a stickler for rules and for doing things properly, but she was quite arbitrary in terms of which rules were to be imposed rigidly and which were to be ignored. Thus, she never forgave her husband’s brother for abdicating, yet after she was told that Sir Anthony Blunt, the art historian, had spied for the Russians, she continued to see him, even inviting him regularly to share her box at the opera. She liked Blunt; he was distantly related to her family and had taken tea with her in Bruton Street early in the century. She didn’t really care that he had been a traitor. When first told of Blunt’s treachery she is reported to have said it was all a long time ago – which it was – and that it was easy to make too much fuss about these things.
But while Billy was opening doors, pouring drinks and helping lay tables, he was also travelling up to Sandringham in Norfolk regularly, as well as to Birkhall on the Balmoral estate in Scotland. He was cementing carefully his relationship with Elizabeth. He was also developing a taste for a very different kind of life from the one he had known as a young man in Coventry.
John Hobsom, who was one of Billy’s lovers at about this time, remembered a man driven purely by sex rather than concern for others.
Well, Billy didn’t really have lovers, if by that you mean people he might have felt any loyalty to over any period of time. He was loyal to Reg Wilcox in his own way but that didn’t include sexual fidelity. Neither of them minded about that sort of thing and in a bizarre way that made them rather like the royals. People at the top of the social tree seem to think it is very suburban and provincial to get all worked up just because one’s wife or husband is sleeping with other people.
Billy used to say that worrying about that sort of thing was pointless; he even used the word ‘suburban’ once, which I thought was a bit rich given that he really did come from the suburbs of Coventry. But I think Billy was right, about sex and the royals, I mean. He was always saying that when he went up to Balmoral or Sandringham the aristocrats and well-born friends of the royals were always bed-hopping. I’m pretty sure he was making this up because it was the sort of frivolous, slightly mischievous thing he enjoyed saying, but it didn’t mean it was true. He just wanted to amuse and be slightly outrageous; sometimes it was almost as if he just wanted to make a little noise. He didn’t like gaps in the conversation! He used to joke that it would be fun to sprinkle flour along the corridors where people slept and then see where the footsteps led in the morning.
And also I think because he was wary of so many of the rather grand advisers he didn’t mind saying they got up to all sorts of mischief, but that doesn’t mean it was all untrue. He even told me once that he knew a very upper-class drug dealer who used to visit Kensington Palace regularly when Diana, Princess of Wales was alive. But you never knew with Billy where truth ended and a good story began!
One of the Balmoral gillies whose main job was to take the Queen Mother fishing remembered Billy and the Queen Mother and their unique relationship.
The Queen Mother and William were always waving and smiling at each other even if they were parting company for only a few minutes – in fact William’s mannerisms and whole demeanour become uncannily like the Queen Mother. One of the footmen used to say ‘Billy’s the Queen Mother in bloody drag!’
The Queen Mother herself would smile at the servants but rarely talk much to them, with the exception of William and her team of gillies, who she knew were much better at fishing than she was and, in the inevitable informality of the river bank, you could end up saying things to her that you’d later regret.
I once said rather irritably ‘No, no, no, not like that,’ when for the third time she had cast her line to the wrong place. She looked at me and laughed and said, ‘Who is the queen? Is it you or me? Oh yes, let me see – it’s me, isn’t it.’ But she was smiling all the while so I didn’t think I would be sacked quite yet.
But I don’t think the Queen Mother or any other member of the royal family worried in the least about being thought dotty or eccentric. In fact they enjoyed talking about their own mad relatives. And I think they rather liked Billy, or at least the Queen Mother did, because he was himself rather eccentric.
She used to say, ‘Well, of course we’re bound to be mad, aren’t we, because we spent so many centuries marrying our own relatives.’
Billy loved stories like this but he was careful to re-tell them only to a small group he felt he could trust. He also felt that every intimate story further strengthened his relationship with the Queen Mother. Towards the end of his life, Billy recounted one of his favourites:
The Queen Mother was lunching with other members of the family when she happened to mention Prince Philip’s mother, Alice of Battenberg.
Another member of the family responded by saying that Alice was a wonderful person, but was also rather obsessive and that her biggest failing was her insistence that she was having a sexual relationship with both Jesus Christ and the Buddha.
The Queen Mother, to Billy’s delight, responded instantly: ‘But then Alice always was very spiritual.’
The Queen Mother could also be rather dotty herself, although she was never in the least out of control. In later life this occasionally became more pronounced, particularly when she was in Scotland where she tended to lower her guard. According to one servant she once spent half an hour wandering around the corridors at Balmoral with a long trail of loo paper dangling out of the back of her dress and the servants were all too terrified to say anything. The crisis ended only when one of the footmen ran up behind her and stood on the loose end of the paper.
Billy disliked stories that made the Queen Mother seem ill-tempered or impatient but he didn’t mind in the least if they created an image of a woman who was a little eccentric so long as they also suggested her humour, her intelligence or her concern for others. But best of all he liked it when the Queen Mother said something slightly cutting, so long as it was funny. This was true even if the story was at his expense.
A famous story involved Billy and his partner Reg Wilcox arguing over some trivial matter and the Queen Mother, fed up with waiting for Billy, shouting from the top of the stairs, ‘When you two old queens have finished, this old queen would like a gin and tonic.’
The story may be apocryphal, but it fits perfectly into what we know of the Queen Mother’s ready wit. The part of it that is suspicious is perhaps the reference to ‘gin and tonic’ because though Billy himself sometimes absentmindedly referred to the Queen Mother’s liking for gin mixed with tonic, he knew that she actually only drank gin mixed with Dubonnet, which she often mixed herself.
Billy’s trips to Scotland were mo
re or less an annual affair but he never really enjoyed them. ‘I only have the corgis for company,’ he once said. And he was not always too keen on the corgis. ‘I’m going to throw one of them down the aeroplane steps one of these days,’ he would sometimes grumble.
Several servants of the time also remember Billy dancing with the Queen Mother at various balls in Scotland. She was particularly fond of Scottish country dancing, as is the Queen, and Billy was frequently invited to join in. On one occasion at Balmoral he was so exhausted from dancing that he went and hid in a corridor. A young Prince Charles hunted him down and said, ‘You must come, William; Granny needs you.’
He returned and swept the Queen Mother out across the dance floor before being relieved, ten minutes later, by an equerry who continued to dance with a woman who seemed never to tire. Everyone recalled that she had enormous energy and a great capacity for enjoyment. But she could be cutting if she felt other dancers were not up to her standard. She said to Billy on one occasion, ‘Whenever I dance with David [one of the gillies] I have to remind myself to visit my chiropodist.’
Part of the reason for Billy’s dislike of Balmoral was that other, local servants tended to overshadow him and partly – and far more importantly from Billy’s point of view – Balmoral meant he was trapped in the middle of nowhere. Beyond the gates were miles of open countryside. Compared to the attractions of life outside Clarence House, it was a desert.
Chapter Eight
Life partners
EVERYONE SEEMS TO agree that in his youth and well into his middle years Billy was pursued, as one friend put it, ‘by sexual demons’. Billy admitted to the same friend that he knew from the day he arrived at Buckingham Palace in 1951 that this was an environment in which he could enjoy himself, because he could tell straight away – using what today would be called his instinctive ‘gaydar’ – that below stairs the palace was filled with young homosexual men.