The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  Among Elizabeth’s abiding childhood memories were her trips to Italy with her mother, to stay with her grandmother Mrs Scott in her various villas in Florence, San Remo and Bordighera. These visits are not well documented, but the first was probably to San Remo in February 1907, when she was six years old. On 14 February, Claude wrote to his mother at the Strathmores’ villa in Bordighera: ‘Cecilia and my darling Elizabeth are starting from Charing X tomorrow morning and you will see her soon I hope.’72 Eight days later Elizabeth wrote to her father, with some assistance, for the spelling is faultless: ‘This is a most lovely place and there is an orange tree in the garden and lots of flowers I pick them before breakfast.’73

  There were several more trips over the next few years and they made a deep impression on the young girl. Later she spoke to her first biographer of ‘the thrill of night travel and restaurant-car meals, and at the end of the journey the glamour of being “abroad”, the gabble and gesticulations of foreigners, and all the colour and beauty of this Italian home’. Mrs Scott’s Villa Capponi in Florence had a wonderful garden, ‘with magnificent cypresses standing out against the blue distant mountains behind Fiesole’ and views over the city of Florence; the house itself was filled with beautiful furniture, pictures and flowers.74 On another trip, this time to Bordighera, Elizabeth reported back to her father that she had been playing on the rocks on the sea shore. ‘There is a dear little donky here called Marguarita and we put it in a little carriage and I drive it is so quiet have got nothing more to say exept it is a lovly garden my best love to yourself good by from your very loving Elizabeth.’75

  In November 1908 Elizabeth’s eldest brother Patrick, Lord Glamis, married Lady Dorothy Osborne, daughter of the Duke of Leeds. ‘Me and Dorothy’s little brother are going to be bridesmaids,’ she wrote.76 It was to prove a problematic marriage for the family: none of them found Dorothy Glamis easy.77 In early 1910, the birth of John, the eldest son of Patrick and Dorothy, made Elizabeth an aunt for the first time, at the age of nine. She proudly recorded the event in the first of her surviving diaries, which she began on the first day of 1910.

  The diary is a red morocco leather book about the size of a large postcard, perhaps given to her as a Christmas present in 1909. Her handwriting is strong and even, in black ink. On the flyleaf she wrote: ‘Written by Elizabeth Lyon, begun Jan 1 1910, at St Paul’s Walden.’

  Jan 1 1910. I had my first nevew great excitement. Same day went to Lady Litten’s Fancy dress party and had great fun. Jan 2 Sunday – did nothing went to church. Jan 3 lessons in the morning – in the afternoon I went to a party at King’s Walden there was a Xmas tree. Jan 4 had lessons in the morning. At 7 in the evening May, Rosie, David and I went to Lady Verhner in fancy dress it was great fun, there were proggrams too and supper at half past nine. We went away at ten. It was from 7 to 12.78

  The diary was kept well for January 1910 but, in the way of diaries, tailed off thereafter. It recounted her lessons, a ‘not very nice’ fancy-dress party, enjoying Aladdin in London, lessons, rain, more lessons, tobogganing and church, and on the 21st she went for a long walk and ‘met people going to vote. David and I wore the right color. Vote for Hillier.’79 Alfred Hillier was the Conservative candidate for Hitchin, and his victory gave Elizabeth some happy news to send to her French governess: ‘Le conservatives a allee dedans ici n’est e pas ces gentil.’80

  It was a time of political change. In 1906 the Conservatives had been swept away at Westminster by a landslide Liberal victory, and twenty-nine of the new Members represented the Labour Party. The January 1910 election was called after the unprecedented rejection by the House of Lords of a Finance Bill – Lloyd George’s controversial ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909. He had proposed to raise income tax and other taxes. Land taxes, in particular, aroused the fury of the Conservative majority in the Lords.

  The election resulted in a hung Parliament. The Liberals lost their large majority and were returned with a majority of just two. They now had to rely on the support of Labour and Irish MPs. King Edward VII was not pleased. He complained to his son that ‘our great Empire’ was now being ruled by Irish nationalists, ‘aided and abetted by Messrs Asquith, L. George and W. Churchill’.81 And indeed the new government was compelled to bring in an Irish Home Rule bill in return for Irish nationalist support for Lloyd George’s budget. But the Conservative majority in the House of Lords rejected the proposals of the Liberal government to reduce the powers of the Lords and this brought about a constitutional crisis which eventually did lead to a reduction in those powers.

  The crisis was unresolved when, on 6 May 1910, Edward VII died. His son, King George V, wrote in his diary, ‘At 11.45 [p.m.], beloved Papa passed peacefully away & I have lost my best friend and the best of fathers.’82 Lady Strathmore noted that all the shops were ‘crammed’ when she went out to buy mourning clothes. On 20 May, a beautiful day, she and her two elder daughters watched the funeral procession from Apsley House at Hyde Park Corner.83 Nine European monarchs came to bury the King, including his nephew Kaiser William II of Germany; none could foresee that four years later their nations would all be engulfed in war.

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  IN JULY 1910 Elizabeth’s eldest sister May married Sidney Herbert, sixteenth Baron Elphinstone, at St Margaret’s, Westminster. He had an exciting personality: formerly a big-game hunter and an explorer, in 1900 he had travelled to the Ta Hingan Shan mountains on the Sino-Russian border. Elizabeth loved being a bridesmaid at the wedding.84 She was by now well into her lifetime habit of writing chatty letters and wrote several to May as soon as her sister had departed on her honeymoon.

  Darling May-di-kin,

  This letter will reach you just after the one I wrote last night, perhaps you will think it funny me writing so soon, but I have got such a lot more to ask and tell you that I am writing before I forget it. (Please tell me if I am to call Sidney Darling or Dear).… wasen’t it funny when they showered Sidney and you with rice, how far did you go with the shoes fastened on the motor, the boys told Charles May to stand in front of them so you would not see.85

  May replied to her promptly from her honeymoon, for three days later Elizabeth wrote again, apologizing that ‘I cant help writing so often because I have got such a lot to tell you, so please don’t answer all my letters unless you like.’86

  For her birthday on 4 August, she told May, her father had given her ten shillings ‘because I was ten’, her mother gave her a ring, her grandmother a tennis racket and some cut coral. Her brother Michael teased her by refusing to go and buy her a present, then handed her a penny which he increased to four shillings – ‘so I am very rich’. May and Sidney sent her a present too. ‘I absolutely don’t know how to thank you and Sidney for the lovely beautiful [underlined often] clock it will be so usefull, I thank you and Sidney a thousand times.’87

  When Cecilia Strathmore had to go to London or to Streatlam without her, Elizabeth wrote a stream of affectionate letters to her ‘Darling Sweetie Lovie Mother’, telling her that they had been to look for wild hyacinth bulbs in the wood, or that one of the dogs was lame, or that she was doing her lessons – ‘essays, music, Geografy and sums’.88 After Christmas 1910 she wrote, ‘I am [underlined seven times] so longing to see you lovie. Rosie said that perhaps you are going to let us go to Jack and the Beanstalk. Do write or telephone and tell us if we are going to any parties.’89

  The telephone was part of the exhilarating technological revolution of the time. It was still a marvel but, like the motor car, was becoming more and more widely used. In 1900 there were 36,000 horses pulling trams in Britain. Over the next fourteen years, the internal combustion engine caused their number to fall to fewer than a thousand.90 Even more astonishing were adventures in the air. The ten-year-old Elizabeth wrote an essay entitled ‘A recent invention, Aeroplanes’: ‘An aeroplane, to look at, is like a big, great bird. They are very clever inventions. An aeroplane is usualy shaped like a cigar, and has a propeller at one end, and on each si
de the great white wings, which makes it look so like a bird. An aeroplane can fly very high and it makes a great noise. They are not quite safe, yet, and many, many axidents have happened.’91

  Next year more domestic interests dominated a letter in which she recounted a typical day at St Paul’s Walden:

  Dear Miss Ela Collins,

  I hope you are feeling quite well. We are at St Paul’s Walden, and it is a lovely day. This morning David and I got up at 6 o’clock. We first went and let out – Peter, Agiratem, Bumble bee, Lion-mouse, Beauty and Delicate, our six silver blue Persian kitten cats. After that we went to see the ponies, then we fed the chickens, there are over three hundred. Then we went to get Judy, Juno, her four puppies, and Major. Then we went to look for eggs for our breakfast, then went for a ride. After that lessons till lunchtime. Then lessons till half past four, then we took our tea into the wood and when we came home I begun to write this letter. Goodbye Miss Ela & with

  Love from

  Elizabeth A M B Lyon92

  Much later she recalled that her early years were spent in ‘a quiet world’ of horses. In St James’s Square ‘the footman would whistle once for a hansom and four times for a Growler’,* and Hyde Park on Saturdays was filled with ponies and carriages. At St Paul’s Walden the family had dog carts to take them through the lanes to and from the railway station. And at Glamis she remembered all her life a frightening incident when, the coachman by her side, she was driving a pair of horses and they started to run away with her. ‘We were hanging on, making straight for the gates which were shut and I said to our coachman, “What are we going to do?” and he took his bowler hat off and he said, “Trust in the Lord,” with which we hung on and, do you know, as we got nearer the gates, they opened. We flew through them at great speed. Trust in the Lord.’93

  The quiet horse-world began to end when her father acquired the first family car – ‘Huge. It made such a noise you really couldn’t hear what the other person was saying.’ It could go uphill only backwards. ‘I remember my father sitting on the back seat tapping on the window with his stick saying to the chauffeur “Take a run at it.” ’ Those early cars were both hazardous and exciting, she said – and grooms did not always make good drivers.94

  Life took on a more boisterous note when Elizabeth and David were joined by their elder siblings and parties of friends for weekends at St Paul’s Walden Bury and for the summer holidays in Scotland. Lord Gorell recalled that nothing was as friendly as the pre-war summer house parties at Glamis, when, ‘under the gracious guidance’ of Cecilia Strathmore, ‘the old castle re-echoed with fun and laughter’. The boys played cricket constantly. The games were fun – ‘serious-non-serious’ rather than in deadly earnest. One match at Arbroath depended on the ability of Fergus, ‘a great wag as well as a dear and gallant fellow, but no cricketer, to achieve the unusual and make a run, and amidst cheers for once he managed a fluke shot’.95

  Shooting was at the heart of life at Glamis. There were two high points in the year – August-September for grouse and September-October for partridges. Horses and carts took the guns (the shooting party) up to the moor; the keepers would walk. The party would spend most of the day on drives such as Ingliston Bogs, West Dunoon, Tarbrax, Hayston Hill, The Warren. Every male member of the family had his own gamebook; these were meticulously kept and reveal that an average of five guns, sometimes only two and rarely more than seven, went out at a time. Often it was just members of the family who shot, along with the factor and occasionally friends and neighbours. The gamebook of Elizabeth’s brother Fergus shows a good grouse day on 15 August 1913. The guns that day were all family – Pat, Jock, Mike, Fergus and their father. They shot 133 grouse, two woodcock, six hares, twelve rabbits and one ‘various’. On another occasion, when Fergus shot at Glen of Ogilvie by himself, he recorded: ‘ripping day. Most enjoyable I ever had.’96

  The evenings were also lively. The Castle was lit by hundreds of candles; there were immense fires; there was dinner in the great dining room, which the twelfth Earl had renovated in ‘Jacobean’ style and which boasted an enormous carved sideboard, family portraits and wooden armorial shields illustrating family alliances. After dinner the family and their guests adjourned to the drawing room, where logs burned constantly in the fireplace to banish the chills as summer died into autumn. The focus of the room was often the piano at which Lady Strathmore or one of her daughters would play in the evenings while the rest of the party gathered around to sing traditional Scottish ballads or popular songs of the day such as ‘Would You Like Me for a Father, Mary Ann?’, ‘The Little Nipper’ by Albert Chevalier or ‘The Vamp’ from Bran Pie.97 If one of the children had a birthday, the older siblings made comic toasts which aroused general laughter. Gorell commented that there was:

  no stiffness, no aloofness anywhere, no formality except the beautiful old custom of having the two pipers marching around the table at the close of dinner, followed by a momentary silence as the sound of their bagpipes died away gradually in the distance of the castle. It was all so friendly and so kind … No wonder little Elizabeth came up to me once as my visit was nearing its end and demanded ‘But why don’t you beg to stay?’98

  A friend and admirer of Elizabeth’s sister Rose, a young naval officer named Frederick Dalrymple Hamilton,* came for the first time in the summer of 1911; his diaries over the next three years contain vivid glimpses of life in the Strathmore family, and of the young Elizabeth. ‘Very pleased to see Lady Rose again,’ he wrote on arriving at Glamis. ‘Made the acquaintance of her younger sister Elizabeth for 1st time who is a little angel!! After tea Rosie took me up to the gardens & we fed on gooseberries. Played a new gambling game after dinner.’ The next days were filled with cricket matches, shooting, tennis, raids on the fruit garden and picnics. After one ‘enormous lunch’ on the moor, ‘the more energetic ones set out to climb a hill about 3 miles off. Mike & Elizabeth & I thought this quite beyond our strength & so we coiled ourselves down & went to sleep on the top of the first hill!’ In the evening they ‘sang ribald songs in the Billiard room and later on danced in the drawing room’. The next day they all dressed up for dinner, and Rose pinned her friend into a velvet costume with a sword and wig. ‘Rose as Joan of Arc was topping also Elizabeth in an early Georgian kind of rig … After dinner we danced reels in the middle of which my trousers fell off & I had to make a quick exit!!!’99

  Sitting next to Mike in the Castle chapel at the first of two services he attended on Sunday, Freddy ‘had much ado not to laugh’ but was deterred by the presence of Lord Strathmore behind them; in the afternoon he went with the two sisters for ‘a trout tickling expedition & had great fun though the number of trout tickled was exactly nil!’ In the garden later, he recorded, ‘E. nearly killed herself eating green apples!’ He hated leaving next day – ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had such a good time,’ he wrote. He said goodbye sadly at the station to a large party including Elizabeth and that evening he sent her a box of chocolates.100 His later visits both to Glamis and to St Paul’s Walden were equally filled with fun and carefree games – in Freddy’s pre-war diaries there is a sense of eternal play.

  But there was grief in the Strathmore family also. Alec, Elizabeth’s third brother, had been badly injured at Eton when a cricket ball hit his head. This seems to have caused a tumour. In July 1911 his brother Jock, who was a year older, wrote to their mother from Boston, Massachusetts, where he was working in a bank, ‘I am so sorry to hear you don’t think Alec is so strong. I wonder why it is? What do the doctors say about the condition of his head? Poor Alec, what an awful long time it has been for him.’101 Alec’s gamebook records that towards the end of his life he often had to stop shooting early because of headaches. In October 1911 Jock wrote to a friend, ‘I am very much afraid that he is not getting any better.’102 Jock took a boat home, but he was too late to see his brother. Alec died in his sleep in the early hours of 19 October 1911, aged twenty-four. Cecilia was devastated. Her mother wrote to
her from Bordighera: ‘I am so thankful to feel that you have Jock with you but so grieved for him not getting home in time to see his Companion Brother. With his deep feeling heart it must be hard to bear.’103

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  IN EARLY 1912 Elizabeth took up her diary again with a brief entry for the weekend of 17–18 February. She was at St Paul’s Walden Bury with Rose, her father and David; her mother was at Glamis. On Saturday she and Rose went riding from 11 to 3. ‘Great fun. Lovely day.’104 On Sunday they all went to the parish church of All Saints, which lay at the end of a grassy ride cutting through the woods below the house.

  At the beginning of March Freddy Dalrymple Hamilton found both Elizabeth and David ‘down with measles or up rather’ when he lunched with the family at St James’s Square; he was there again the next day to take Mike and Rose to a show at the Coliseum, and noted in his diary that suffragettes, whose campaign to win the vote for women was at its height, were ‘busy smashing windows all day’.105 In April he spent a weekend at St Paul’s Walden, where he joined a young house party: there was tennis and other games, and after church on Sunday ‘we were beautifully idle all the rest of the day lying in various attitudes of repose on the lawn.’ The next morning ‘Mike, Lady Rosie, Elizabeth & David & I went down to the Grotto & had certain adventures with an old Boat which Mike & I succeeded in sinking.’ On the drive back to London that night, he saw billboards announcing ‘the awful news about the Titanic’.106 The great liner, supposedly unsinkable, had sunk on her maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg; more than 1,500 people died.