The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  It was during this period that she met the Prince of Wales, widely spoken of as the most glamorous man in London. She danced with him twice at the Cokes’ dance,* where she also danced with Lord Cranborne,† who was to become another lifelong friend. At the Harcourts’ a few nights later she sat between the Prince of Wales and Count Michael Torby.‡ She found it both terrifying and enjoyable. ‘As usual I danced the first dance with P.W., I don’t know why, but I usually do!’ In fact she danced three times with the Prince that night and several times with Victor Cochrane Baillie,§ a round young man with a large moustache whom she described as a faithful friend, ‘very nice, but extremely ugly, poor thing’.198 Cochrane Baillie was smitten with her and wrote to ask her if she would ‘deign’ to write to him sometimes.199

  The gaiety of her social life could not shut out the painful realities of the war, as her letters to Beryl Poignand in the spring of 1918 show. ‘It was the last dance for some time, so tho’ I enjoyed it very much, I felt slightly depressed at moments. Such a lot of these boys are going out quite soon – in fact nearly everybody I know. I suppose they expect fearful casualties. They are so young, a great many only nineteen.’200 She worried about Ernest Pearce, now in the field near Arras. She heard that Lord Settrington was missing. (He had been taken prisoner.) ‘I wonder if Peace will ever come. I feel as if I never want to go to a dance again, one only makes friends and then they are killed.’201 A few days later she wrote, ‘Doesn’t it make you curse & swear inside you when one thinks that if we’d had a decent Government the War might be over?’202

  George Thirkell,* an Australian officer who had stayed at Glamis, wrote to her from ‘In the Field, France’: ‘Just a note to let you know that I am still all OK though we have had a fairly strenuous time the last 6 weeks.’ He had just escaped a German gas barrage and he now enclosed some ‘souvenirs’ for her, namely pieces of fabric from three ‘Bosche’ planes.† The red piece came from the wing of Baron von Richthofen’s plane, which had been shot down ‘almost on top of my dug-out’. The Baron had brought down eighty Allied planes, Thirkell wrote. ‘He was chasing a British plane when he was brought down by an Australian Lewis Gunner on the ground.’203

  At the end of May Elizabeth went to Harwich to visit her brother-in-law Wisp on his destroyer, HMS Scott. She described the trip to the ship on board a launch, climbing the ‘wavy ladder’ up the side, saluting the sailors at the top; ‘then one falls heavily down the hatch (is it?) into the waiting arms of a Sub or (preferably) a Lieut!’

  The commanding officer, Admiral Tyrwhitt, came to dinner: everyone was frightened of him – everyone except Elizabeth, and he invited her to lunch on his flagship. She went and was shown around by a very nice flag lieutenant – ‘it was unfortunate that when the time came to go, I was found eating chocolates in his cabin!! … I do like sailors, they are such darlings. Soldiers, or the most beautiful officers, never awaken such thrills as a darling Lieut – don’t you agree? Pip pip.’204‡

  In June 1918 she had ‘a very riotous’ lunch with Freddy Dalrymple Hamilton, who always made her laugh. At a dinner dance with Lord and Lady Powis she danced with both ‘a funny little American with nice eyes, from the Embassy’ and Lord Erskine, who walked her home. Each was furious when she danced with the other. ‘I have suddenly taken to blushing again, I do hope it will go soon, it’s such a bore.’205

  The eager young American was called Sam Dickson, Third Secretary at the US Embassy; he began to telephone her and invited her to dinner. She had to explain to him ‘that young ladies did NOT dine alone with young men at well known restaurants!!!’ So her mother chaperoned them to dinner at the Berkeley and they then invited him back to the house where he and Elizabeth ate strawberries and talked till 11 p.m. He seemed lonely and told her all about his family life in the States. ‘It sounds exactly what we imagine cowboys to be!’206

  On 22 June her maternal grandmother, Mrs Scott, died at her home in Dawlish. Cecilia Strathmore went straight to Devon to organize the funeral, leaving Elizabeth to run the household in London. ‘Oh dear! I do miss her so dreadfully,’ Elizabeth wrote to Beryl. ‘I never knew before how much I depended on her – and more things seem to crop up for me to decide than I’ve ever known. It’s always the way.’207

  When she returned to Glamis in early August 1918 she found sixteen new soldiers; she did her best to get to know them all. She was also kept busy with duties in the local community: a bazaar at Glamis in aid of prisoners of war, at which they raised £300 despite a violent storm which blew down the marquee and ruined the lavender bags and trimmed hats which Elizabeth had made for her stall; a Baby Show at Arbroath; a charity sale at Forfar which, to her terror, she had to open with a speech. Meanwhile she made friends with an amusing Canadian, Lieutenant J. S. Reynolds, who had ‘grasped me by the arrrm, & hurrrled me into safety!’ in the storm at Glamis.208

  By now the might of America was at last turning the war. The Allies had managed, at enormous cost, to halt the last great German offensive. In August 1918 many of the positions lost during the Battle of the Somme two years before were regained. The Allies attacked the length of the Western Front in a final mood of exhilaration. But the casualties mounted.

  Elizabeth was worried for Lieutenant Reynolds, but in September he wrote to tell her that he and his unit were now advancing through northern France. They had collected ‘tons of souvenirs from the Huns’ and ‘if I get out of this mess alive will send you an Iron Cross if you think it will be OK.’209 She copied a part of this letter to Beryl saying, ‘Rather a nice letter don’t you think? I think he thought he might get killed don’t you?’210 A little later, he did indeed send her an Iron Cross, and she was delighted.211

  At Holy Communion on Sunday 29 September four soldiers came to worship with Sister. Elizabeth was touched to see them all kneeling in their hospital blues before the altar. ‘It really was a beautiful sight, tho’ it gave me a lump in my throat. I keep on thinking of it. Poor dear boys.’

  That month Austria began to sue for peace and German forces started to withdraw from the Western Front. As the warriors wound wearily towards peace, a new killer, influenza, began to rage. Twenty thousand American soldiers died of the disease in two months. Anarchy spread through Germany. On 9 November 1918 the Kaiser fled Berlin and, having finally agreed to abdicate, drove into exile in Holland. By now three of the dynastic empires of Europe had fallen, the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs. Tsar Nicholas II and his family, King George V’s cousins, had been brutally murdered in July 1918 by the Bolsheviks, who had seized power in Russia following the October Revolution in 1917.

  At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the Armistice effectively ended the war. Elizabeth was at Glamis and ever after she remembered the patients from the Castle, all dressed in their hospital blues, marching happily together up the long avenue to the pub. ‘They went straight to the village to celebrate and I think they drank too much. Seats got broken up to make a bonfire and all that sort of thing. I can see them now, all going to enjoy this wonderful moment.’212

  In London thousands of people rushed into the street and danced around bonfires all over town, even at the foot of Nelson’s Column. King George V and Queen Mary appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace before the exultant crowds. In the next week they drove five times through London in an open carriage and everywhere they were cheered by ecstatic people. In a speech to the assembled Lords and Commons in the Palace of Westminster, the King said, ‘May goodwill and concord at home strengthen our influence for concord abroad. May the morning star of peace, which is now rising over a war-worn world, be here and everywhere the herald of a better day, in which the storms of strife shall have died down and the rays of an enduring peace be shed upon all nations.’

  Three-quarters of a million people from the United Kingdom had been killed. Another 200,000 from the Empire also died. France lost many more, both actually and proportionately. No one knows just how many people
died around the world. Some say about ten million; others more. Russia alone is thought to have lost between 1,700,000 and 3,000,000 dead and another five million wounded. Typhus killed another million in the Balkans. Millions more were wounded, families were carved into pieces. Europeans were shocked by what they had done to themselves. Perhaps it is not quite true to say that an entire generation was lost, but it was scarred for ever.

  Winston Churchill described well the nature of the war that had just ended.

  No truce or parley mitigated the strife between the armies. The wounded died between the lines: the dead mouldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered, often slowly, in the dark recesses of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood of their countries. Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battle field on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran.213

  The economic heart of the continent had been ravaged too. Millions were starving. Economic output in 1919 was a quarter below what it had been in 1914. And at the centre of the destruction lay shattered the country which had been the power of Europe before the war, Germany herself. ‘We are at the dead season of our fortunes,’ wrote John Maynard Keynes, a young economist. ‘Never in the lifetime of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly.’214

  A letter that Elizabeth wrote to Beryl at the end of the month reflected the uncertain mood in the country after the initial euphoria of victory. Two Australian officers who had convalesced at Glamis had been to see her. They had had a nice and silly time, ‘& we yelled songs round the piano after tea’. Perhaps because of the long-drawn-out suspense of the war, she was now feeling depressed. ‘Can’t think why. No reason on earth. Everything is wonderful. So long waiting for Mike perhaps.’215

  Mike finally came home. In the first week of 1919, Elizabeth and her mother were at St Paul’s Walden when they received a telephone call to say that he was on a train. They rushed up to London. At the station they had to wait as five trains unloaded wounded, sick and disoriented soldiers whose appearance shocked Elizabeth. Finally Mike’s train came in and they were able at last to embrace him. He seemed fairly well and cheerful, but he brought with him a friend called Lathom who looked very ill and was completely dazed. ‘He merely sat & looked at the fire,’ she told Beryl. ‘Poor boys, they must have had a beastly time, they hate talking about it.’216

  *

  IN EARLY APRIL 1919 Elizabeth gave a play party. She and her sister-in-law, Jock’s wife Neva, Emma Thynne, Mike, Captain Keenan and Charlie Settrington dined at the Ritz and then went to see George Robey perform in Joybells – she thought he was ‘too priceless’.217 Then she did something rather daring. Decades later she recalled ‘creeping out of the house in St James’s Square, round the corner into Duke Street and going off to lunch with a very nice young gentleman in one of those horrible little low cars’. They ‘whizzed off’ down the Portsmouth Road to a pub.218

  The young gentleman was Charlie Settrington. It appears that they motored to Walton for lunch and then took a long walk on Box Hill. They had tea ‘at an extraordinary place, where the waiter winked, & said he also came from London!’ Writing to Beryl about it, Elizabeth maintained firmly that Charles was a dear, but just a friend. ‘One’s family always thinks that a man must be violently in love with one, which is so annoying if one is friends.’219

  Although there was now a spate of engagements and weddings among her circle of friends, she seems to have had no desire to follow suit, and was sorry when Lavinia married Luke White in April.* ‘It’s rather a sad thing a wedding, don’t you think?’ she wrote to Beryl before setting off for Althorp with Katie Hamilton for the ceremony. ‘Poor old Lavinia! Her last two days of spinsterhood.’ ‘I do hate weddings!’ she commented afterwards.220

  Later in the month she and David took her Canadian friend Lieutenant Reynolds to see a revue, Buzz-Buzz.† She was amused by the officer’s wildness and his fondness for alcohol; he was perhaps an early example of the appeal that raffish but entertaining characters had for her throughout her life. Towards the end of May the Lieutenant left England; he came to say goodbye one morning, bearing roses; she was still in bed. ‘I was so sad at not seeing him … he is so nice and wild!!!’221

  On 28 June 1919 the Versailles Peace Treaty was signed. The King appeared again and again before ecstatic crowds on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. ‘Please God,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘please God the dear old Country will now settle down and work in unity.’222 It later became conventional to decry the peace that was reached at Versailles. In truth it deserves a certain respect. The task facing its authors was almost impossible – it was to reconcile ideals and expectations with recalcitrant realities. This was the first great European peace treaty which had to be drawn up with the views of democratic electorates in mind. France needed to believe herself protected from a third dose of German aggression, the British and the Americans had to deal with the overriding problem of central European security. Poland was resurrected. Serbia was enlarged into Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia was created out of the ruins of Austria-Hungary.* All these countries survived for most of the rest of the century and Poland thrives still today.

  The peace agreement had to be a world settlement – of the twenty-seven countries which signed the principal treaty, seventeen were outside Europe. The harshest parts of the treaty were the economic reparations which were imposed on Germany. The main intent was to recompense France and Belgium for the devastation they had suffered and to give both as much guarantee as possible that Germany could never rise to threaten them again.

  When the treaty was signed at Versailles, smaller wars were still being fought. British troops were fighting alongside Generals Koltchak and Denikin and the White Russian forces still holding out against the new Soviet Union. They were there partly to secure British investments in Russia and partly to identify the British army with an antirevolutionary cause. Their presence gave Elizabeth one of her greatest heartbreaks of those years.

  August 1919 found her, as always, at Glamis. It was a parched summer – they had had no rain for three months. Plans to make a new tennis court had had to be postponed because the ground was so hard. There were still Canadian and Australian officers around for tea and she and her mother went to a sale of Friesian cattle, where her mother bought two bulls. Elizabeth had taken driving lessons and was now driving the family Wolseley all over the Glamis estate – which she found ‘great fun’.223

  But then came awful news – Charlie Settrington, fighting in the White Russian cause, had been badly wounded.224 He died on 24 August. Elizabeth was inconsolable. ‘He is my only real friend, & one feels one can never have another like him. He was a real friend, I wasn’t shy of him, and he was so delightful. It’s a dreadful thing, and his family simply adored him … I think I must have been fonder of him than I realised, because now there seems a kind of blank – if you understand what I mean?’ He had been the only male friend she had to whom she could talk naturally. ‘I liked him specially because he never tried to flirt, or make love or anything like that – which always spoils friendships. Even that day spent down at Box Hill.’225

  Elizabeth had entered the war in 1914 as a carefree girl; she emerged from it as a young woman mature for her years. She was joyous, vivacious, and delightful company. But as a result of the war she had moved among, and learned about, a wider circle of people than she would otherwise ever have met. She had also acquired, through her experience of the suffering of family, friends and soldiers from all over the world, an understanding o
f pain, and of the difficulties of others, which served her and her country well in the years to come.

  * Lady Christian Dawson-Damer (1890–1959), daughter of fifth Earl of Portarlington. A daughter, Rosemary (1915–89; m. 1945 Edward Joicey-Cecil), was born of this marriage. Lady Christian married again in 1919 (Captain William Martin, d. 1947).

  † The Hon. Fenella Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis (1889–1966), known in the Strathmore family as Neva, younger daughter of twenty-first Baron Clinton. She and Jock had five daughters.

  * Dorothy Irene Beryl Poignand (1887–1965), daughter of Colonel George Poignand and his wife Catherine Maud. Governess to Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon 1914–17. Under the pseudonym Anne Ring, she wrote two books about Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret in the 1930s and several magazine articles about the Royal Family in the 1940s. During the Second World War she was temporarily employed by the Royal Household in the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood, and stayed on until 1949. In 1947 she helped organize the exhibition of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding presents and compiled the catalogue. Until her death in 1965 she remained in touch with Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, whose letters to Beryl were subsequently returned by her cousin, Mrs Leone Poignand Hall. These letters, together with Beryl’s letters to her mother, to which access has been generously given by Mrs Hall’s son Mr Richard Hall, have not been available to previous biographers.