by Tom Quinn
John Reynolds worked in the kitchen in the mid-1950s. He recalled his early days with Billy and other servants of the time:
You felt almost instantly that this was a sort of family – horribly dysfunctional in many ways, but still a family. Most of the men I worked with were delightful and we did have flings with each other now and then and relationships were established.
Two male servants I remember left the palace to live together and do other things – they set up a guest house in the countryside. But Billy was never going to leave – he loved the work in general and the Queen Mother in particular, which is partly why I think he was attracted to Reg Wilcox. Reg was just the same and would rather have died than go and work somewhere else. They were a good example of how gay couples in service could get together – and stay together.
Those who knew both men insist that Reg was very much the passive partner, something that greatly reduced any chance of serious friction between them. But he and Billy also got on well because they had similar backgrounds and because being in service had been central to their lives before they met.
Other similarities between the two men were striking: like Billy, Reg had grown up in the provinces and his parents ran a fish-and-chip shop. Both men had gone into service because they wanted to escape their humdrum lives and be surrounded by glamour and fine things. Both Billy and Reg loved a life that was, by its very nature, camp.
Several of Billy’s former colleagues emphasise this camp nature of royal service.
‘I don’t think you can over-estimate it,’ said one.
You have to remember that the royal palaces and royal life in general, both for the royals themselves and for their servants, are the essence of camp – it is the highest of high camp. All those golden carriages and absurdly pink twin sets, all those rooms full of Russian china and Fabergé eggs. All that theatrical behaviour based on the grand country lifestyle of the Victorian era having survived into the twentieth century in this one little spot in central London. One of Billy’s earliest jobs, which he adored, was actually cleaning the Fabergé eggs. How camp is that?!
REG WILCOX WAS born on 4 May 1934 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire where his father ran a fish-and-chip shop in which Reg helped out as a young man. He was called up for National Service in 1951 and served as a private with the King’s Royal Hussars. Two years later he applied for a job with the royal family. After a brief interview at Buckingham Palace he became a junior footman in 1954. He was immediately popular and within months everyone – including the equerries and advisers – knew that Reg was someone rather special. He was seen as uncomplaining, extremely efficient, courteous, good humoured and loyal.
By 1957, he was working for the Duke of Windsor, formerly Edward VIII, in Paris – by all accounts the Duke had asked specially for Reg. In 1959 the Duke’s circumstances changed – it is impossible now to find out exactly what happened – and Reg was back in London and working at Clarence House. Some have said that Reg, who was openly gay, had committed an indiscretion in Paris, but it is far more likely the Queen Mother needed someone of Reg’s standing and reputation. The Queen Mother’s needs would always trump those of the Duke of Windsor.
However, the Duke did pay the young footman a great compliment at the end of their period together, apparently saying that he had never been more beautifully looked after.
There was a short period after Reg returned from Paris when he went back to his father’s chip shop in Yorkshire to help out when his mother was ill, but by the late 1950s he was back in London again and firmly ensconced in Clarence House, where he was to remain until his death.
Reg and Billy hit it off almost from day one and they quickly became lovers – though as we have seen it was not for either of them an exclusive sexual relationship. They took holidays together and spent a great deal of their free time drinking and organising dinner parties, especially when the Queen Mother was away and they had not been obliged to go with her.
Even when they went away together for work there was time for relaxing. Photographs of the two men show them at the seaside on a number of occasions and there were also indiscreet evenings of drunken revelry at Clarence House when the Queen Mother was away. A photograph uncovered after Billy’s death shows a decidedly drunken-looking Reg wearing one of the Queen Mother’s tiaras.
It is ironic that a job that put both men potentially in the public eye also protected them from scrutiny. Once inside Clarence House they could do what they liked, safe in the knowledge that little information about what went on would leak out. Servants gossiping to outsiders were almost always sacked if their indiscretions were uncovered, but both Reg and Billy had grown up at a time when homosexuality was illegal so caution was ingrained. They let themselves go only among friends and with a trusted few at Clarence House.
There were exceptions to this when Billy went ‘cottaging’ – although so far as anyone can tell they never went looking for men together. Occasionally Reg or Billy – and it was usually Billy – would return from a nocturnal foray looking bruised and battered after a rough encounter with someone who did not appreciate his advances, but he would be patched up and carry on working the next day as if nothing had happened.
The one time Billy needed a more significant amount of time off was after he was stabbed in the leg by a furious young man who he had propositioned when drunk. The wound took more than a week to heal and Billy had to make his excuses and stay in bed. If the Queen Mother suspected anything she did not say and Billy was sent a get-well card and waited on by the lower servants until he had recovered.
After another slightly less damaging encounter, Billy had to pretend that the large plaster on his cheek was the result of a shaving accident – in fact he had been badly scratched by a young man he’d picked up in Soho. When she saw Billy that morning the Queen Mother said, ‘I do hope you have not fallen out with one of your young friends. We must ask Reg to keep an eye on you!’
By 1975, Reg had been promoted to Senior Queen’s Footman. Then, in 1978, he was promoted to Deputy Steward and Page of the Presence, working directly under Billy. It was a position he retained until his death. Like Billy, he relished his ancient title, however absurd it might sound to outsiders. He was rewarded with the Royal Victorian Medal in 1979 and then a bar to the medal in 1997. The medal had been established by Queen Victoria in 1896 as a reward for personal services to the monarch. Reg was also awarded the Queen’s Long and Faithful Service Medal.
Other servants with lives outside royal service were always baffled that Billy and Reg should have suffered decades of low pay without complaint, concentrating instead on these meaningless awards. But, for Billy and Reg, they were not meaningless at all – they gave them the status and sense of self-worth they had always craved.
Chapter Nine
An outsider on the inside
MANY PUBLISHED MEMOIRS of servant life in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century mention aristocratic employers’ almost obsessive concern that working-class servants could not be trusted with valuable items. Not only were the working classes seen as congenitally dim, but they were also seen as clumsy, rough and unable to appreciate anything beyond fighting and fish and chips.
Billy and Reg would have been aware of this, but they were famously skilled at looking after the more valuable items at Clarence House. They were taught by the indomitable Walter Taylor and other older servants of the time and, in fact, Billy quickly became something of a connoisseur in his own right.
Former maid Sally Dexter recalled a life that must have been rather similar to Billy’s when he first started work. She remembered that ‘the mistress had an idea that it would be almost impossible for me not to break everything I touched, so for the first week or so she followed me round the sitting room watching me clean her ornaments. And you know it was ridiculous really because the ornaments were not that delicate, nor were they particularly valuable. She quickly realised I was not a complete clot and after those initial worries she lef
t me alone.’
Billy understood this world but somehow an in-built fastidiousness – a fastidiousness that had shown itself years earlier in his carefully pressed schoolboy trousers and general avoidance of anything dirty or chaotic – made him unusually sensitive to the values of those for whom he worked. An early report by the Comptroller of the Royal Household mentions that William Tallon is ‘intelligent, quick to learn and can be trusted with more delicate tasks’.
FROM 1955 TO 1957 Billy’s life, to an outsider, might have seemed fairly routine. When the Queen Mother went up to Scotland, to Birkhall, her house on the estate at Balmoral, he accompanied her. His main responsibility – in addition to his customary skill with the gin bottle – was the corgis. And it was Billy who amused Elizabeth by introducing at Birkhall a novel system of getting people to come down for lunch in which he would walk the halls and corridors ringing a bell and swinging a censer like a Catholic priest. He also threw himself into the dances that were a regular feature of life at Balmoral. ‘The Queen Mother loved the fact that Billy knew how to enjoy himself. At Balmoral dances the social barriers vanished temporarily and the Queen Mother would frequently ask specifically for Billy if she wanted a partner,’ remembered one Balmoral servant. On one occasion Billy excused himself from a dance and found a quiet corner to catch his breath. He had already danced a number of times with the Queen Mother and simply needed a rest.
‘Then I heard a high-pitched cry,’ he later recalled. ‘It was the Queen Mother shouting, “William, William, where on earth are you hiding?”’
When Billy re-appeared looking slightly shame-faced, the Queen Mother would tease him by saying, ‘William, I hope you haven’t been neglecting me in favour of the young men in the kitchen.’
Occasionally fuelled by excitement and drink Billy would suddenly execute his own version of a Highland sword dance. ‘It was very camp, very extravagant and very funny,’ recalled a Balmoral gillie. ‘It was the sort of thing only Billy could carry off but even so people were worried. I saw people glancing nervously towards the Queen Mother but she smiled and clapped her hands in delight.’
It was at these parties that the royal family could completely relax. One servant recalled HM the Queen, the Queen Mother and Prince Philip at lunch giggling uncontrollably after five minutes of throwing napkins at each other ended when Prince Philip almost fell off his chair.
They would also do impersonations or silly voices until they were all laughing. Or they would discuss things in the media that had annoyed them. They would always complain in a light-hearted way, but Prince Philip made everyone laugh on one occasion when he said about a journalist who had written about him that he was a ‘complete shit’.
At lunch Billy would stand behind the Queen Mother’s chair or close by, always ready to fill her glass and those of her guests. Indeed, Billy became famous for making these parties go with a swing both in Scotland and, more importantly, in London. It was famously said of him that if you tried to stop him filling your glass by putting your hand over it he would simply pour the wine through your fingers.
Billy gradually went from opening doors for pretty much anyone senior to him to having doors opened for him by the junior staff once it was realised that the Queen Mother had a special affection for him. All this was entirely unofficial. It was simply that the Queen Mother was gradually coming to rely more and more on this curiously talented young man. She liked him in the early days because he was very funny when he wanted to be, as John Hobsom remembered.
It is a great pity no one made a tape recording of Billy in full flow – I mean in full conversational flow. He could be very funny just in telling a story that might not in itself be funny at all, by which I mean there was no punch line. It was all to do with his delivery, the way he drawled out certain key words, and nothing to do with telling jokes. There was something wonderfully theatrical about his tone, his timing and the gestures he made. I can quite see why the Queen Mother loved having him around. He had an ability to sing for his supper, as it were, that hardly anyone else has ever had.
But he also had a tremendous ability to flounce out in a rage when the need arose. Sometimes he was genuinely cross; at others it was all a pretence. He would do it and the Queen Mother was always amused – so long as he hadn’t really lost his temper. She just found him good company and company was what the Queen Mother craved throughout her long life.
Billy could sense when the Queen Mother’s luncheon guests had left the room which of them it was safe to ridicule or at least gently mock. He very rarely misjudged it. And her life was usually so serious that she found his attitude delightfully entertaining.
‘William, you must tell me what you thought of so and so,’ she would say.
Billy would reply by raising his eyebrows, tossing his head a little to one side and saying, ‘Well, I’m afraid words simply fail me. Pearls before swine.’
The Queen Mother would throw her head back and laugh out loud.
By contrast, one or two of the advisers and equerries were seen as terrific bores, as one of Billy’s closest friends recalled:
They were loyal, certainly, but often no fun at all. They’d got their jobs in the royal palaces because, despite the advantages of birth and education, they were otherwise completely unsuited to any kind of work in the modern world. Well, that was what William rather bitchily used to say. And they were just too serious.
John Hobsom explained that though the Queen Mother had many duties to fulfil – official duties that is – she also had a tremendous amount of time that could have hung very heavily indeed without people like Billy.
She broke up her long, occasionally dreary days by inviting old friends for regular lunches and dinner parties. If she did not have an official public engagement she would always invite old friends to Clarence House – less so to Birkhall or the Castle of Mey – but above all things she detested lunching alone. She avoided it at all costs and in truth she didn’t much like dining with the other royals either because they were not likely to be as amusing as her friends. Films about the royals have sometimes shown the family having breakfast or lunch together, but this is entirely wrong. It really did not happen that often.
Favoured luncheon guests included many of Elizabeth’s contemporaries – from the days when she first came out, as aristocratic girls still did in the 1920s. Several of these aristocratic friends from her youth had become her ladies in waiting. Very few have ever spoken of their experiences at Clarence House – no doubt with the lesson of Nanny Crawford always before their eyes – but Lady Frances Campbell-Preston, who was a lady in waiting to the Queen Mother from 1965 to 2002, remembered these lunches, and more especially Billy.
She recalled a man who was attentive but occasionally temperamental. He was also very good with the corgis, but it is doubtful he really liked them. He knew he had to be good to them because the Queen Mother and Her Majesty the Queen – but certainly not the younger royals – were devoted to them. Any sign of dislike would not have been welcomed at all. This is why in so many royal photographs Billy can be seen serious-faced and usually rather dashing in the background leading one or two of the little dogs. In one photograph he can be seen carrying a corgi wrapped in a blanket up the stairs of an aeroplane. The Queen Mother never considered flying the corgis to Scotland an extravagance, as Billy himself recalled:
Well, I did get cross with her sometimes because she had no idea how the rest of the world lived. She would have hired an aeroplane just for the dogs if it had been necessary. She would leave me a letter asking me to arrange for a helicopter to arrive twenty minutes later than planned as she wanted a slightly longer luncheon or something similar. It never occurred to her that it might have been very expensive to keep a helicopter waiting, but on the other hand she was a queen and she had spent her life behaving in a certain way and wasn’t going to change for anyone. That was part of her charm. I don’t think she was in the least bit self-conscious in the sense that she never questioned her own be
haviour or thought she was either extravagant or privileged. That was her great strength. But it could be bloody irritating. You got a strong sense of her being entirely cut off from the real world in her constant complaints that Clarence House was a dreary, poky little house – she really said that often. She wanted something far bigger. But then she’d grown up in Glamis Castle and had spent her youth travelling between other castles. She was the genuine article if you see what I mean.
Among the royals the Queen Mother was always the least bothered by protocol. Many of the rules that surrounded her were perfectly understandable – guests at her luncheons completely understood why she would be served before anyone else and that lunch would only be over when she decided it was over. But other traditions were positively rejected by the Queen Mother.
There had long been a rule, for example, that when the royal host (or guest) at the head of the table stopped eating everyone else had to stop. The Queen Mother said about this, ‘We can’t possibly stick to it. I eat so little that my guests would starve if we did.’
And it is certainly true that as she grew older she ate less and less. She amused Billy on one occasion when her food arrived by saying, ‘William, I asked for fish and they appear to have cooked a whale for me.’
She had a wonderfully restrained, dry aristocratic wit that revealed that she was in essence a Victorian. She had a Victorian sense of the need for restraint and economy of expression; a sense that it was unseemly to get worked up about anything and that dry wit would always win the day. When student protesters threw loo rolls at her she famously picked one up and handed it back, saying, ‘I think this is yours.’