by Craig Brown
The master of ceremonies took all the male guests outside and provided them with brass pokers, shovels, etc. After ten minutes’ practice they were then made to parade as a squad, with the shovels and pokers on their shoulders, in slow goose step down the long drawing room past the King, the Queen and the Princesses, who found it exquisite fun seeing Stafford Cripps, Lord Ismay and Anthony Eden doing ‘Eyes Right.’
Nicolson told Crossman that ‘he hadn’t seen anything like Stafford Cripps, who had been forced at two hours’ notice to spend a weekend at Windsor and who humbly obeyed the Royal command but suffered the full humiliation which Royalty seemed determined to extract from its Commoner guests’.
Small wonder, then, if Princess Margaret grew up with an imperious streak, a presumption that the rest of the world had a duty to perform at the flick of a finger, and an unforgiving view of politicians. ‘I hate them. They never listen to anything I say or answer my questions,’ she complained to a friend. ‘Even Sir Winston Churchill would just grunt.’
She relished making dismissive generalisations about those to whom she was obliged to engage in small talk during her Royal progress. ‘All the town clerks are exactly the same,’ she would say; and, of the university of which she was chancellor, ‘All the students at Keele have just discovered Marx.’ She was barely more approving of those in her own family, describing her grandmother, Queen Mary, as ‘absolutely terrifying’, and her grandfather, King George V, as ‘a most objectionable old man’ to a visiting biographer.
Though she affected a kind of monarchical indifference to party politics, her own opinions were deeply conservative. ‘I don’t mind who’s in government so long as they’re good at governing. What we must avoid at all costs is these windscreen wipers: left, right, left, right,’ she opines in Edward St Aubyn’s roman à clef, Some Hope. Giving money to the poor, she thought, somehow makes them less disciplined, and therefore less happy: ‘What it really shows is the emptiness of the socialist dream. They thought that every problem could be solved by throwing money at it, but it simply isn’t true. People may have been poor, but they were happy because they lived in real communities. My mother says that when she visited the East End during the Blitz she met more people there with real dignity than you could hope to find in the entire corps diplomatique.’
She offered a fuller view of her political outlook in a private letter to the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who had written to the Princess after she had been admitted to the London Clinic for an operation to remove a benign skin lesion. Mrs Thatcher’s letter had touched on her recent visit to New York (‘they are so easy to please and so delighted if you say what you really think’) and the steel strike (‘it is difficult to get across the message that more money has to be earned and not just demanded’). Princess Margaret’s handwritten reply is dated 7 February 1980:
My dear Prime Minister
I write belatedly to thank you for your kind letter. I just had to have some things dug out of my face but luckily everything went well and we’re not worrying.
I was so interested to hear about your visit to the United States. I expect you surprised them no end at answering their questions in a positive way, when they are used to waffling on for hours in figures of 8, not actually answering anything.
The steel strike is depressing. I well remember when Charles Villiers took it over. I congratulated him on his courage and he said, ‘I am taking on a moribund, old fashioned, out of date, uneconomical, out of date industry’ and I said ‘Is there any hope of improving it?’ and he said ‘Very little’.
I suppose if one is an ordinary working man and one’s union tells one not to vote for new machinery or technology because otherwise you will lose your job or your card – you just don’t dare.
I went to Cambridge for a debate (rather dull, all about the church, lots of clerics) and found them all rabid conservatives – not a Trotskyite to argue with!
They were passionately against the Olympic Games in Moscow. I tried the ‘isn’t it hard on the athletes’ bit but they were adamant. I suppose individuals must choose whether to go as it’s up to the Olympic Committee.
If that silly boxer* doesn’t make a hash of it he might get Africa to cock a snook at the Russians.
I find it quite impossible to find out what is happening in Afghanistan. Are they about to wheel into Iran and get all the oil? More power to your policy of nuclear power stations.
I wish they weren’t called ‘nuclear’ as people always think of the bomb. I’ve been advocating this since I was 20!
Many thanks for allocating £10,000 to the NSPCC. They are vital and I am President and support their free service.
With again many thanks for your letter.
Yours very sincerely,
Margaret
* Muhammad Ali, who had been sent to Tanzania, Nigeria and Senegal by the US government to campaign for a boycott of the Games.
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At the reopening of the Bath Assembly Rooms in 1979, James Lees-Milne cast his beady eye over Princess Margaret, who had recently fallen victim to severe criticism in the press.
Lees-Milne felt a twinge of pity for her. ‘She looked extremely nervous,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘On the platform her hand was shaking. Making strange grimaces with her mouth. I suppose she is frightened of insults.’ On a recent visit to Bristol, someone in the crowd had shouted, ‘Whore!’
‘I feel sorry for under-dogs,’ he added, but by the next sentence his sympathy had dispersed. ‘She is her own worst enemy of course, and if you are royal you must be immaculate, or expect the consequences. But she consorts with the raffish, and this the public does not like.’
The critic and connoisseur Brian Sewell was another exacting writer whose path crossed the Princess’s around this time. In 1980 he had been invited to stay the weekend at the country house of an elderly friend, ‘at the behest, she informed me, of Princess Margaret’. The Princess was to join them for dinner on the Saturday night.
It was not a success. ‘Not even Stephen Sondheim foresaw the miseries possible in such a purgatorial occasion,’ Sewell recalled. ‘The Princess arrived an hour before midnight for a ruined dinner scheduled for eight; by then the servants from the village had gone home to bed and the rest of us, some half-dozen, absolutely plastered, had to buckle-to, and carry and carve the baked meats of sacrifice; she then kept us up until four in the morning, kippering us with her cigarettes. Long after the crack of dawn, with not a sniff of coffee nor sign of a servant in the kitchen to clear the mess from the night, I wandered into the village, called a friend and arranged a late morning death-and-doomsday telephone message requiring my immediate return home.’
Even in her own home, the Princess was never safe. On Thursday, 6 November 1980, Roy Strong expressed his disappointment at the state of her apartment at Kensington Palace. It was, he said, ‘grubby and run-down’.
Before dinner, he had been obliged to guide twenty of her friends around his latest exhibition, ‘Princely Magnificence’, at the Victoria and Albert Museum. ‘It’s a curious set she attracts in some ways,’ he reflected in his diary. Among his fellow guests were Derek Hart, Roddy Llewellyn, Colin Tennant (‘looking very middle aged’), Luigi d’Orso, Ned Ryan (‘Who is this man?’),* Jane Stevens and ‘the usual top-up of members of the Household’. Strong and his wife Julia were given special leave to depart at 10.15 p.m., as they had to drive home to Hereford. ‘It was awful to hear HRH droning on about how wonderful Anthony Blunt was but I’ve endured worse evenings with her.’
As the years rolled on, Princess Margaret became increasingly picky. Over dinner with Lady Harlech on 2 February 1982, she filled Strong in on all the latest shows she had failed to enjoy. ‘No, she hadn’t enjoyed the Gonzaga exhibition, the musical The Mitford Girls or the Evening Standard Drama Awards.’
On Wednesday, 7 December 1983, Strong had lunch with David Hicks in Mayfair. They took advantage of Princess Margaret’s absence to exchange the latest gossip about her
. ‘Apparently no-one had told the British Consul in Miami that she was passing through, with the result that she was shunted through what we all endure. Bad temper resulted. Much funnier was when she had to walk through the arch which registers metal which she set off jangling like blazes. No one knew what to do because it had been set a-singing by the antiquated metal-supported corsetry she wore beneath!’
By the end of the 1980s, the Princess had grown too demanding even for diarists on the lookout for copy. In September 1988, Sir Edward Tomkins, the former ambassador to France, told the Strongs that Princess Margaret would be staying with him and his wife at the end of October. Would they come to lunch? ‘I’m afraid we dodged it,’ Strong confided to his diary. ‘She had rung up and altered the date. Each time there is the ghastly listing off of people invited and the arrangements to HRH on the telephone and then waiting for her reaction: “Oh, I like them,” “No, I don’t think I want to do that” and “Can’t stand them.” Gill [Tomkins] then gets stuck with ringing up and somehow eliminating those not in favour.’ By now her potential hosts, none of them getting any younger, were growing weary of the number of fresh amusements – new people, new places, new things – she expected to be laid on for her, and all the extra staff needed to cook and serve. ‘Gill is a saint,’ reflected Strong, ‘but I really wondered whether it was all worth it.’
* Ned Ryan (1933–2010), former bus conductor, dismissed after it was discovered he had never bothered to collect fares from the upper deck. He went on to achieve financial success in the property business, and social success as Princess Margaret’s walker. A genial figure, he was sometimes dubbed ‘The Sherpa’ by those wary and/or envious of his skills as a social climber.
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Servants tend to become proprietorial, but none more so than the ever-watchful David John Payne. He never felt that Tony was quite up to scratch. Margaret’s new romance had taken him and the rest of the staff by surprise: up to then, they had written off the society photographer as just a passing acquaintance. After all, ‘he was still a commoner, and no match, so we all thought, for the Princess’.
Payne first set eyes on Tony (as the staff called him behind his back) at a lunch thrown by the Queen Mother in honour of the high commissioner for Rhodesia and Nyasaland in July 1959. Tony was wearing a navy-blue suit with a white shirt and a plum-coloured tie. ‘His fairish hair was groomed in his characteristic manner, which I thought rather ridiculous then. But I didn’t know that one day it would set a new style for men’s hair fashions.’
Payne had no idea who the young gentleman might be, but noticed his eyes darting around the room at the other guests, taking them all in, ‘and he kept eyeing me and the other servants in our liveries with a sort of obvious wonder’.
Bending over to serve him, Payne glanced at his name card. ‘It said simply … Mr Antony Armstrong-Jones.’ An unspoken exchange then took place between guest and servant. ‘He glanced up as I spooned vegetables on his plate and smiled. I was quite shocked. I had come to expect only a stony stare from top people when I served them. Now here was this young man smiling at me in an obvious attempt to be friendly. I wanted to smile back then because I knew he felt out of his depth in that company but I dared not. It was just not done.’
Payne was intrigued, and his interest quickened still further when he spotted Princess Alexandra chatting to the newcomer like an old friend. Who was this dapper young man?
After lunch, Payne kept a sharp eye on Mr Armstrong-Jones. ‘I noticed something funny about Tony’s walk. He was stepping along with a strange spring-heeled action … His slim figure was emphasized by the tightness of his trousers which tapered away to about sixteen-inch bottoms.’
As the time came for the guests to leave, Armstrong-Jones buttonholed Payne near the front door. ‘He smiled and said, “I don’t think I’ve seen you before have I?”
‘“No sir,” I replied. “I don’t think you have.”
‘This was hardly surprising as it was the first time to my knowledge that he had been invited up to the house.’
Armstrong-Jones asked Payne what his name was.
‘“Oh, you are John, who is with her Royal Highness. She has mentioned your name to me. I must say I have always been impressed by the way in which she has spoken of you to me. She has often told me, ‘John did this for me today’ or ‘John did that.’ Now I know who she meant. I hope to be seeing a lot more of you in future, John.”
‘“I hope so too, sir.”
‘“I think you will John.”’
Despite this chummy exchange, or perhaps because of it, Payne entertained misgivings. Like most of the servants, he was more of a Townsend man. ‘I never really felt happy myself at the match. While Townsend seemed to project force and vigor, Tony was not that type of man. I felt my Princess was wasting herself on this friendly but unsuitable man. Often I think back to that first day I saw him and how I watched him briskly stepping out along the pavement with his head in the air and a spring in his step and I wish that he had walked away and never returned to claim Margaret’s hand in marriage.’
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Yet, for all Tony’s faults, she might have done worse. After all, many men, not all of them quite savoury, had once entertained the idea of walking her up the aisle.
Like many a schoolboy, Jeremy Thorpe enjoyed indulging in fantasies about his future. Aged sixteen, he entertained his fellow Etonians by delivering the balcony speech he would one day address to a tearful crowd upon standing down as prime minister. Another fantasy ran alongside it: one day in the not-too-distant future, he planned to marry Princess Margaret. A year older than the Princess, handsome, well-connected and amusing, he felt himself well placed to achieve this ambition.
Fifteen years later, Thorpe was the up-and-coming young Liberal MP for North Devon. One of his schoolboy fantasies was in with a fighting chance of becoming a reality. Small wonder, then, that he was taken aback by the announcement, in March 1960, that the Princess had just become engaged to his old chum Antony Armstrong-Jones.
Two friends recalled the strength of his reaction. One described him as ‘completely furious’. The other, a business associate, remembered seeing him on the day of the official announcement:
In March 1960, Thorpe dined with me one evening at the Dorchester. He arrived late and appeared to be upset. It was the evening of the announcement of the news of Princess Margaret’s engagement. I asked what was the matter and he utterly dumbfounded me by saying he was furious at ‘Maggie pulling the wool over his eyes and getting engaged’. He went on to say he had been after her for a long time and considered himself in with a top chance. I thought he was joking but very soon saw he was in earnest.
Around the same time, Thorpe posted a characteristically indiscreet House of Commons postcard to his friend Norman van der Vater* about the royal coupling. By now his anger had subsided into regret. ‘What a pity about HRH,’ the card read. ‘I rather hoped to marry the one and seduce the other.’
Following Jeremy Fry’s withdrawal from the role of best man at the forthcoming wedding ‘owing to a recurrence of jaundice’,* Armstrong-Jones put forward the name of Jeremy Thorpe. A discreet investigation on behalf of MI5, the Chief Constable of Devon, Colonel Ranulph ‘Streaky’ Bacon, revealed that while the friendship of Armstrong-Jones and Thorpe was ‘nothing more than two Old Etonians catching up with each other’, it was ‘fairly common knowledge in Devon’ that Thorpe was homosexual. It was felt that this was enough to disbar him from being best man, though not apparently from being an MP, or, a little later, leader of the Liberal Party.
Nineteen years after the royal wedding, Jeremy Thorpe was on trial for conspiracy to murder his former lover, Norman Scott. Scott had worked for Norman van der Vater as a stable-boy. On leaving his employ, he had purloined a number of cards and letters of an intimate nature from Thorpe to van der Vater. This is how the ‘marry the one and seduce the other’ postcard came to be in the possession of the police. It would almost certainly have been
produced at the trial had the judge not been determined to stop the Royal Family being dragged into the proceedings.
* Born Norman Vivian Vater, later to rejig his name to Brecht Van de Vater, before achieving a compromise with Norman van de Vater. The number of characters employing bogus names in the Thorpe saga is spectacular. Norman Scott was born Norman Josiffe, later upgrading to the Hon. Norman Lianche-Josiffe. Staying with Thorpe’s mother, he signed his name ‘Peter Johnson’ in her guest book. When staying in Los Angeles, Thorpe’s one-time partner in crime and fellow Liberal MP Peter Bessell called himself Dr Paul Hoffman ‘for security reasons’, while the mustachioed hitman Andrew ‘Gino’ Newton introduced himself to Scott as Peter Keene. By the 1990s, Newton had changed his name to Hann Redwin, which on close investigation turns out to be an anagram – inappropriate, given his circumstances – of Winner Hand.
* Fry had stepped down, in the words of the New Yorker’s Mollie Panter-Downes, ‘for the highly unusual reason, as reported in the press, that he expected to be ill between now and May’. In fact he had been fined £2 for homosexual importuning eight years previously, and the press had got wind of it.
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Lord Thorpe of Barnstaple and HRH The Princess Margaret, Lady Thorpe, Welcome Us Into Their Beautiful Home
From Hello magazine, 1999
Theirs was the fairy-tale wedding that captured the heart of a nation. As the beautiful Princess and the handsome young politician walked back down the aisle of Westminster Abbey on that beautiful summer’s day in 1962, the dreams of a nation seemed to have been fulfilled.