Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

  ‘Do you like Alice in Wonderland, Ma’am?’

  ‘No.’

  * Oddly enough, the answer is probably yes. As it happens, Ivan Moffat was a film producer and screenwriter (A Place in the Sun, The Great Escape, Giant). Born in Cuba in 1918, he was the son of the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the nephew of Sir Max Beerbohm, and the uncle of Oliver Reed. In Paris in the forties, Moffat was friends with Sartre and de Beauvoir, and he had affairs with two notable women who appear elsewhere in this book – Lady Caroline Blackwood and Elizabeth Taylor. Kate, his second wife, was a direct descendant of the founder of W.H. Smith, and a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother. So now you know.

  12

  In 1993, the sixty-two-year-old Princess Margaret stood by a dustbin piled with letters and documents, while her chauffeur put a match to them.

  David Griffin had been a professional driver for many years – double-decker buses, lorries, the 3 a.m. coach for Harrow Underground workers – before, one day in 1976, spotting a newspaper advertisement for a royal chauffeur. He leapt at it. ‘I wouldn’t say I was an absolute royalist. I just thought they were the ultimate people to work for, the pinnacle of the chauffeur world.’

  He was to spend most of the next twenty-six years driving Princess Margaret around. He once calculated that he spent more time with her than with his own mother, though he spoke to her very rarely. ‘She was part of the old school and she never changed from day one. She was very starchy, no jokey conversation. She called me Griffin and I called her Your Royal Highness.’ By the end of a typical trip to Sandringham, she would have uttered a total of two words: ‘Good’ and ‘morning’.

  ‘There was no need to say more, she knew I knew the way. I saw myself as part of the car, an extension of the steering wheel. A proper royal servant is never seen and never heard. We preferred to work in total silence, so we didn’t have to be friendly. We never used to try and chat. They used to say Princess Margaret could freeze a daisy at four feet by just looking at it.’

  During this time, the Princess owned a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith (fitted with a specially raised floor to make her look taller), a Mercedes Benz 320 for private use, a small Daihatsu runabout, and a Ford Transit minibus for ferrying friends around. As Griffin describes it, ‘Six or seven people would pile in and shout: “Orf we go on our outing.”’ The Princess herself had never taken a driving test. Why bother?

  Griffin’s day began at 8 a.m., when he gave the cars a thorough polish, inside and out. He then collected any letters to be delivered, a category that included anything of the slightest importance and quite a few of no importance at all. These would be handed to him by the Princess’s private secretary or a lady-in-waiting, or, every now and then, by Her Royal Highness in person. Occasionally he had to take a letter to her former husband, Lord Snowdon (‘very pleasant and nice with impeccable manners’), who would invariably ask him to wait while he composed a reply. But if Snowdon telephoned Kensington Palace to ask whether Griffin could collect a message for Princess Margaret, the Princess would usually reply, ‘No, he’s got other things to do.’

  As long as she had no official duties, her daily routine remained unvaried. Shortly after 11 a.m., Griffin would drive her to her hairdresser, latterly David and Joseph in South Audley Street. ‘Then she would go out for lunch at a nice restaurant. Then she’d come back to the palace and have a rest.’ Around 4.30 p.m. he would drive her to Buckingham Palace for a swim in the pool. ‘Then she’d go to the hairdresser’s for the second time in one day. Then I’d drive her to pre-theatre drinks, then to the theatre, then a post-theatre dinner. And I’d finish about 3 a.m. Sometimes this would happen every night. And I’d always be up at 8 a.m. At the weekend, I’d drive her to the country. If she travelled to Europe, I’d get there first and pick her up at the airport in Prague, for example, so she never thought anything was different.’

  On a number of occasions, the Princess asked Griffin to drive her to Clarence House. After a couple of hours she would emerge with a large binbag filled with letters, which she would hand to him. Back at Kensington Palace, she would put on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and help him bundle the letters, still in their bags, into a metal garden dustbin in the garage before ordering him to set light to them. ‘We did it several times over a period of years,’ says Griffin. ‘A lot of it was old, going back donkeys’ years, but I saw letters from Diana among them. We must have destroyed thousands of letters. I could see what it was we were burning. She made it very clear it was the highly confidential stuff that we burned. The rest was shredded in her office.’

  13

  Where memoirs of servants are concerned, it suits those upstairs to pooh-pooh them. Their authors are embittered, they say, and wrote them for money, or to settle a score. Biographers of the Royal Family tend to follow suit, turning up their noses at the reminiscences of a butler or footman, while devoting page upon page to the unreliable gush of a distant relative. But even William Shawcross, the Queen Mother’s treacly biographer, acknowledges that, when it came to her mother’s correspondence, Princess Margaret had a touch of the pyromaniac about her.

  In the preface to his 666*-page doorstopper Counting One’s Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Shawcross acknowledges that ‘Princess Margaret … made little secret of the fact that in the 1990s she “tidied” her mother’s papers and consigned many of them to black bin-bags for burning.’ In his companion biography, Shawcross states that, around the time of Lord Linley’s wedding in 1993, ‘Princess Margaret was now engaged on one of her periodic “sortings” of her mother’s papers, which were still filed haphazardly in various drawers and bags and pieces of furniture in her rooms at Clarence House and at Royal Lodge.* She wrote to her mother at Birkhall, “I am going back today to clear up some more of your room. Keeping the letters for you to sort later.” Next day, she wrote, “Darling Mummy, I am sitting in your sitting room ‘doing a bit of sorting’ … I’ve nearly cleared the chaise longue and made an attack on the fire stool.”’

  Naturally, Shawcross does his loyal best to make Margaret’s little fires appear perfectly respectable, even caring: ‘No doubt Princess Margaret felt that she was protecting her mother and other members of the family. It was understandable, although regrettable from a historical viewpoint.’

  Shawcross writes of ‘large black bags … taken away for destruction’. He acknowledges that no one will ever know what went up in flames, ‘but Princess Margaret later told Lady Penn that among the papers she had destroyed were letters from the Princess of Wales to Queen Elizabeth – because they were so private, she said’.

  It’s likely that quite a few letters incinerated by Margaret were those she herself had written. Her relationship with her mother was often stormy, particularly in the years 1952–1960, after the death of King George VI and the accession of Queen Elizabeth II, when she was in her twenties. The two of them were living in separate apartments in Clarence House, one above the other. As the Queen Mother’s authorised biographer, Shawcross is generally the smoothest of courtiers, tiptoeing around any unpleasantness with his forefinger pressed to his lips, yet he makes little attempt to conceal Margaret’s prickliness towards her mother. ‘Even her closest friends could not predict when her mood might change from gaiety to hauteur. Although she loved her mother, she was not always kind to her – indeed she could be rude,’ he writes. ‘On one occasion Lady Penn … said to Queen Elizabeth, “I can’t bear to see the way Princess Margaret treats you.” To which Queen Elizabeth replied, “Oh, you mustn’t worry about that. I’m quite used to it.”’

  The household staff at Clarence House were also struck by Margaret’s shirtiness towards her mother. ‘Why do you dress in those ridiculous clothes?’ she once asked in passing, as the Queen Mother stood chatting to a lady-in-waiting. If her mother was watching a television programme she didn’t like, Princess Margaret would offhandedly switch channels without asking.

  Their preferred method of com
munication during these years was by letter, even though, most of the time, there was only a ceiling between them. A footman doubled as a postman, taking letters upstairs and downstairs, from one to the other, on an almost daily basis. Yet in his voluminous collection, Shawcross includes just twelve letters from the Queen Mother to Margaret, as opposed to seventy to her elder daughter, Elizabeth. Judging by their tone and content, most of them were written in response to heated accusations,* perhaps after a telephone had been hung up, or flung down.

  ‘My Darling Margaret,’ the Queen Mother writes from Birkhall on 9 September 1955, at the height of the Townsend crisis:

  I sometimes wonder whether you quite realise how much I hate having to point out the more difficult and occasionally horrid problems which arise when discussing your future.

  It would be so much easier to gloss them over, but I feel such a deep sense of responsibility as your only living parent, and I seem to be the only person who can point them out, and you can imagine what anguish it causes.

  I suppose that every mother wants her child to be happy, and I know what a miserable & worrying time you are having, torn by so many difficult constitutional & moral problems.

  I think about it and you all the time, and because I have to talk over the horrid things does not mean that I don’t suffer with you, or that one’s love is any less.

  I have wanted to write this for a long time, as it is a thing which might sound embarrassing if said. Your very loving Mummy.

  Margaret’s response, contained in a footnote, seems to acknowledge her own explosive nature: ‘Please don’t think that because I have blown up at intervals when we’ve discussed the situation, that I didn’t know how you felt.’

  Their relationship remained tricky right to the end. In his less dewy-eyed biography of the Queen Mother, Hugo Vickers states that ‘There were those who were depressed by the way she [Margaret] could be openly rude to her mother when groups were about, though when alone with her, perhaps without an audience, she tended to be more sympathetic. But there was clearly some residual bitterness, and the Queen Mother did not always have an easy time with her younger daughter.’

  For his biography Princess Margaret: A Life of Contrasts, Christopher Warwick was helped by the Princess herself, and was duly grateful: ‘I am, of course, greatly indebted to Princess Margaret, to whom … I offer my warmest and best thanks; not only for her time and co-operation, but also for asking some of her closest friends … to see me.’ But even this most tactful of biographers says that ‘It had to be admitted … that the Queen Mother was closer to her first-born, whose character was more like her own … The relationship between Queen Elizabeth [the Queen Mother] and Princess Margaret was almost stereotypically mother-and-daughter: each guaranteed at times to bait and irritate the other.’

  Warwick points out that it took Princess Margaret thirty years to visit the castle her mother had bought in the early days of her widowhood. Following this one and only visit, Margaret concluded, ‘I can’t think why you have such a horrible place as the Castle of Mey.’

  ‘Well, darling,’ replied her mother, ‘you needn’t come again.’ And she did not.

  So we leave the Princess, for the moment, in her garage at Kensington Palace, resplendent – a word much-loved by royal biographers – in her yellow rubber gloves, her eyes aglow from the blaze of her mother’s letters. ‘The smoke was so thick it made her eyes water and she had to leave,’ recalls Griffin. ‘We went back to Clarence House several times over a period after that to collect more letters and papers, and burned them all. I saw Diana’s name on a few, and even her crest and handwriting, and there were lots of others addressed to the King and Queen, so they were quite old. The Princess never said why she was doing it, but she was very determined that they should all be destroyed, thousands of them. I remember thinking we were putting a match to history.’*

  * A coincidence.

  * Her house in Windsor Great Park.

  * Princess Margaret could be frosty with servants. Princess Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, claims that, on returning from an engagement, she would touch the television, testing it for warmth, just in case the servants had been watching when her back was turned.

  * Following Margaret’s death in 2002, Griffin was made redundant, and ordered out of his Kensington Palace tied cottage within forty-two days. Until that point he had been earning £1,500 a month. There had been no shift system, and he was never paid overtime. Furious at his forced redundancy, he refused a Royal Service Medal. He now lives in a flat on the Isle of Wight, decorated with a mixture of reclining semi-nudes, press cuttings about Princess Margaret’s cars and a large photograph of a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow he bought for himself from the royal fleet. He fitted it with the numberplate HRH 8N, which he bought from a dealer. He financed these purchases by selling a bundle of cards and notes from Princess Diana for £10,500, among them a cartoon of two sperm declaring that they were swimming down someone’s throat. ‘Di and I used to compete to send the sauciest cards to each other, you see.’

  14

  ‘We are born in a clear field, and we die in a dark forest,’ goes the Russian proverb. For fifteen years – from the age of two to seventeen – Princess Margaret was looked after by a governess, Marion Crawford; for both of them, this was their clear field.

  Marion Crawford – always known to the Royal Family as ‘Crawfie’ – was born in Ayrshire in 1909. She studied to be a teacher, with the aim of becoming a child psychologist. She wanted to help the poorest members of society, and ‘to do something about the misery and unhappiness I saw all around me’.

  But a chance meeting diverted her from this calling. The Countess of Elgin asked her to teach history to her seven-year-old son, Andrew. Crawfie became the victim of her own success: impressed by her teaching skills, the Countess persuaded her to stay on to teach her other three children, and then recommended her to Lady Rose Leveson-Gower, who was after a tutor for her daughter Mary. Mary later remembered Crawfie as ‘a lovely country girl, who was a very good teacher’.

  And so the ball was set rolling. In turn, Lady Rose recommended her to the then Duchess of York, who needed a governess for her little daughters Princess Elizabeth, aged five, and Princess Margaret Rose, aged two.

  The interview went swimmingly. Crawfie found the Duchess of York the homeliest of women. ‘There was nothing alarmingly fashionable about her,’ she recalled. ‘Her hair was done in a way that suited her admirably, with a little fringe over her forehead.’ Royal historians have credited, or discredited, Marion Crawford with obsequious, saccharine observations, but that initial view of her future employer surely has a sharp edge to it, with its needle-like suggestion of frumpiness.

  The Duchess sat plumply by the window at that first meeting: ‘The blue of her dress, I remember, exactly matched the sky behind her that morning and the blue of her eyes.’ It’s an eerie image, suggesting a disembodied royal, her dress merging into the sky, and with holes where her eyes should have been.

  So Crawfie was taken on as governess, and moved into 145 Piccadilly, the London residence of the Duke and Duchess of York and their two little Princesses. After a day or two, she was presented to His Majesty King George V. In a loud booming voice – ‘rather terrifying to children and young ladies’ – the King barked, ‘For goodness sake, teach Margaret and Lilibet to write a decent hand, that’s all I ask you. Not one of my children can write properly. They all do it exactly the same way. I like a hand with character in it.’

  (Bettmann/Getty Images)

  On her arrival, Crawfie had been aware of a widespread rumour that little Princess Margaret Rose was rarely seen in public because there was something wrong with her. ‘One school of thought had it that she was deaf and dumb, a notion not without its humour to those who knew her.’* The rumour was eventually dispelled by news of a bright remark the little Princess had made over tea at Glamis Castle with the playwright J.M. Barrie. Barrie had asked Margaret if a last biscuit was his or hers. ‘It
is yours and mine,’ replied Margaret. Barrie inserted the line into his play The Boy David, and rewarded Margaret with a penny for each time it was spoken onstage.

  From the start, Crawfie found her two charges very different. Elizabeth was organised, Margaret artistic; Elizabeth discreet, Margaret attention-seeking; Elizabeth dutiful, Margaret disobedient; Elizabeth disciplined, Margaret wild. ‘Margaret was a great joy and a diversion, but Lilibet had a natural grace of her own … Lilibet was the one with the temper, but it was under control. Margaret was often naughty, but she had a gay bouncing way with her which was hard to deal with. She would often defy me with a sidelong look, make a scene and kiss and be friends and all forgiven and forgotten. Lilibet took longer to recover, but she had always the more dignity of the two.’

  The relationship between the two little Princesses was already set. ‘Lilibet was very motherly with her younger sister. I used to think at one time she gave in to her rather more than was good for Margaret. Sometimes she would say to me, in her funny responsible manner, “I really don’t know what we are going to do with Margaret, Crawfie.”’

  Margaret’s Christmas present list for 1936 – their first Christmas in Buckingham Palace – shows how the elder sister took the younger in hand. Lilibet, aged ten, wrote it to remind Margaret, aged six, who would be expecting Thank You letters from her, and for what.

  See-saw – Mummie

  Dolls with dresses – Mummie

  Umbrella – Papa

  Teniquoit – Papa

  Brooch – Mummie

  Calendar – Grannie