They walked around the golf course, the Duke with a club, they went to church in the rain on Sunday, they listened to gramophone records, they ‘Talked very hard’.11 And they enjoyed the unaccustomed privacy and solitude. They allowed one photographer to come and take pictures of them in order to deter all the others. On Thursday 3 May 1923, a hot day, reality intruded with a slightly unwelcome visit to London. They drove up to Bruton Street, where the Duchess ‘talked hard’ to her brothers David and Mike and to her mother. After lunch she and the Duke went to the Palace where she ‘argued in vain’ with Commander Greig. The cause of this particular disagreement is not known, but she was apparently becoming impatient with her husband’s principal aide.12
In the afternoon, to their relief, they were able to drive back to Polesden Lacey and went for a warm evening stroll in Mrs Greville’s garden, before writing more letters. On Monday 7 May they left the house and motored up to London, lunching with the Strathmores at Bruton Street. That evening the Duchess had a cocktail with Mike and then changed into her blue travelling suit. The Prince of Wales arrived and ‘We had a very gay dinner – & sang at the piano afterwards.’ Then they drove to Euston to take the 11 o’clock sleeper to Scotland.13 The train pulled into Glamis station at 10 a.m. and the platform was thronged with well-wishers. The Duchess’s troop of Girl Guides, as well as the Boy Scouts and the local schoolchildren, were among those who had come to welcome them. ‘Very nice of them,’ she remarked.14
Her parents had prepared a suite of rooms in the oldest part of the Castle for them, and these they used from now on. On the first floor, the sitting room had latticed windows on either side of the blue and white Dutch-tiled fireplace. There were eighteenth-century tapestries on the walls and Chippendale chairs for which Lady Strathmore had worked tapestry seats. In the main bedroom, the fringe around the top of the four-poster bed was embroidered with the names and birth dates of all Lady Strathmore’s children (and the dates on which Violet and Alec had died); the bed was covered with a quilt she had made. The dressing room had been converted into a bathroom for them, with another dressing room next door.
It was ‘delicious’ to be back at Glamis, as the Duchess wrote to Beryl; but the weather was dreadful – icy cold, with hail, sleet and snow showers.15 Nevertheless they went out for walks, shot rabbits, visited friends in the neighbourhood or read, relaxed and wrote more letters. By the middle of the next week the Duchess had developed a ‘rather troublesome’ cough. Despite this, on Thursday 17 May they drove over to Cortachy Castle to lunch with the Airlie family and that evening, after playing bezique before dinner, they took the sleeper to London. The Duchess was touched by the crowd who gathered at the station to cheer them off.16
Next morning her cough was worse; they went straight to Bruton Street for breakfast, and the doctor came and gave her cough mixture. In the evening they drove down to Frogmore House in the Home Park at Windsor, which the King had lent them, as White Lodge was not yet ready. The cough was by now ‘very uncomfortable’. They spent the weekend resting at Frogmore, but were not constantly prudent. On Tuesday the Prince of Wales came to dine and then suggested they went dancing at the Embassy Club, ‘so we dashed up to London in his car, & joined Paul’s party there’. Among Prince Paul’s guests were the Prince of Wales’s friend Freda Dudley Ward, Sheila Loughborough,* Alice Astor, Prince Serge Obolensky† and Lord Cranborne. ‘Danced hard till 2.30. David sent us back in his car. Very tired & enjoyed it awfully. Coughed a good deal.’17
The following morning, she recorded, ‘Woke up very tired. We are not used to dancing!’ On Friday 25 May she was diagnosed with whooping cough. ‘Most annoying, but glad to know what it is.’18 It was in the papers the following day. ‘I hope Her Royal Highness likes Bananas,’ wrote the dowager Lady Bradford solicitously to Queen Mary, ‘for they are so good in whooping cough.’19 The Duke told his mother that they could not come to her birthday party next day. ‘You can imagine how very disappointed we both are about it, as it is so unromantic to catch whooping cough on your honeymoon!’20
Meanwhile Queen Mary was still busying herself with the refurbishment of White Lodge. She acted from the best of motives – her own first married home had been furnished in advance by Maples on the orders of her future husband, in the mistaken belief that he was doing her a kindness.‡ No doubt she wanted to ensure not only that her old home retained its character but also that it would be suitably elegant. It cannot have been easy, however, for the Duchess to feel at home in a house so dominated by her mother-in-law’s taste.
The young couple finally moved into White Lodge on 6 June. Together they arranged their possessions, old and new, fitting in as well as they could with the furniture that Queen Mary had chosen. The Duchess’s diary records a two-hour visit of inspection by her mother-in-law a month later. ‘We went all over the house till 5.15. Felt quite exhausted about the legs!’21 She later confided to her mother that her bedroom was ‘HIDEOUS’, and asked if she could have two of her pictures from Glamis, one of them a Madonna, to hang on the walls.22 It was a small but very natural rebellion.
It quickly became clear that White Lodge was not ideal for a young couple in the public eye whose lives were centred in London. The house was big and expensive to run. Richmond Park was no longer the sylvan fastness that George II had enjoyed 200 years before, but a weekend attraction for thousands of people. Many of them wanted nothing so much as a glimpse of the new Duchess and her husband. So when they were at home, privacy was a problem. When they left it, distance was the difficulty.
The road to London was nothing like as crowded as it was to become, but it was busy nonetheless. After an afternoon or early-evening engagement, the Duke and Duchess often had to drive to Richmond to change into evening wear and then drive back to town. In the winter, fog often descended upon the Park and it was sometimes hard to find the house at all. Although they had rooms at Buckingham Palace which Queen Mary urged them to use whenever they wanted – ‘I have done my best to make them as nice as possible for Elizabeth,’ she wrote23 – they quickly began to wish they could move to London. But that was not easy, partly because of the need to avoid offending the King, let alone the Queen, and partly because delicate negotiations with the Crown Estate Commissioners and the Ministry of Works were involved. Royal expenditure may not then have been scrutinized as carefully as in later years, but it was an issue.
Three years were to pass before a suitable house in London could be found for them and the hurdles to moving were overcome. In the meantime the Duchess made the best of it. She invited D’Arcy Osborne, busy at the Foreign Office, to visit her – ‘So some time you must throw the Eastern question firmly aside, turn your most magic stone three times from East to West, & start for Richmond.’24 (She and Osborne had a long-running whimsical dialogue about how magic stones could ward off trouble. As one historian wrote of Osborne, ‘he would have liked to believe in witches and the god Pan … with only a half-sceptical smile he wore a charm against cosmic rays.’)25
Despite its drawbacks, White Lodge gave the Duke and Duchess a degree of independence and freedom: they were able to entertain family and friends informally, to play tennis and to go out riding (which the Duchess enjoyed, remarking in her diary that she had not ridden for years).26 Nor did the distance prevent them from driving frequently to London to dine and dance with friends.
All this helped counterbalance the new restraints in the Duchess’s life. Entry into the Royal Family, with its rituals and its orderliness, really was a sort of golden incarceration. The young Duchess could no longer go shopping alone; she could not travel on trains alone, or on buses at all. She was no longer able to see her friends as spontaneously as she loved to do, and when she met them at Court or at official functions there was a certain distance imposed by the formality required of the Royal Family. Helen Hardinge commented in her memoirs that older members of Queen Mary’s entourage disapproved of the Duchess seeing ‘too much’ of her old friends, for fear that they would
be too familiar towards her. As a result, Helen herself made a point of being ‘very formal and decorous – so that it took the Duchess of York some time after her marriage to come to terms with all our conventional efforts to treat her correctly’.27 Although later the Duchess was able to appoint friends to her entourage, her first lady in waiting was a stranger, a generation older and no doubt chosen by Queen Mary as someone whose experience would be helpful. She was Lady Katharine Meade,* formerly lady in waiting to the Duchess of Albany. She received the lukewarm description ‘quite nice’ on her first appearance in the Duchess of York’s diary in June 1923; Helen Hardinge described her as a ‘well-meaning old cup of tea’,28 but she never became close to the Duchess and resigned in 1926.
All in all, the Duchess was isolated and restricted in a way she had never been before. Her own family life had been so relaxed that the rules of the Palace, the Court and the King himself cannot have been easy to assimilate. The King’s life, as the Duke of Windsor later wrote, was a ‘masterpiece in the art of well-ordered, unostentatious, elegant living’. The King and male members of the Household wore frock coats every day. Ladies of the Household dressed in formal clothes and wore, or at least carried, gloves at all times. In the evenings, dinners were sumptuous and formal. The King wore white tie and tails and the Queen wore full evening dress with tiara, even when they were dining alone. At Windsor, men wore the Windsor Coat, a dark-blue evening dress coat with scarlet collar and cuffs, gilt buttons and knee breeches. In Ascot Week, before dinner, guests gathered in the Green Drawing Room. Ladies would mingle on one side of the room, men on the other.
Members of the family would wait in the Grand Corridor until the King and Queen arrived. In the State Dining Room the dinner table was laden with the Grand Service of silver gilt, originally made for George IV. When the Queen led the ladies out at the end of the meal, they each dropped the King a deep curtsy. In the drawing room, the Queen had her own settee to which one or two women were brought to talk to her, while the others talked rather formally in small groups. The King and the men then came out of the dining room, paused for a moment with the ladies and went on into another room where they smoked cigars and talked.29
The Duchess, whose family dinner parties were far less formal and considerably more fun, did what she felt she could to enliven Court life. She found that she was able to put nervous guests at ease in ways which the King and Queen could never have done. When possible, she would sit down at the piano after dinner, play and sing and encourage other guests to join her.30
The King and Queen were perhaps surprised by how much they enjoyed this breath of informality. They quickly became fond of their new daughter-in-law and were openly affectionate towards her. They asked her to call them Papa and Mama, their own children’s names for them; fortunately she had always called her own parents Mother and Father. The King made concessions to the Duchess that other members of the family would have thought quite impossible. Of them, he demanded perfection in every detail, and precision was essential to perfection. Sir Frederick Ponsonby, Keeper of the Privy Purse, wrote subsequently that there was no greater crime than being late. ‘When I say late, the ordinary meaning of the word hardly conveyed the wonderful punctuality of the King and Queen. One was late if the clock sounded when one was on the stairs, even in a small house like York Cottage.’31
Punctuality was not known to be a passion of the Duchess. Remarkably, that did not seem to matter. It was soon part of Court lore that on one occasion early in her marriage she and the Duke arrived two minutes late for lunch and she apologized. To the delighted amazement of others at table, the King replied, ‘You are not late, my dear, I think we must have sat down two minutes too early.’ On another occasion when someone mentioned to the King her tendency to tardiness, he replied, ‘Ah, but if she weren’t late, she would be perfect, and how horrible that would be.’32
Adding to the King and Queen’s affection for her was the fact that Prince Albert was clearly so happy. He had rarely appeared to be a very confident young man; his stammer compounded his general nervousness and his nervousness exaggerated his stammer. He was hard to get to know, but those who did know him valued him highly. It is a cliché but nonetheless true that he blossomed on marriage. He revelled in having achieved both freedom (at least some) and love (of an abiding sort). He found life in a new home with the Duchess to be an enchanting adventure, which not even the problems of White Lodge could diminish. Whenever he was upset – whether by a chance remark or request from his parents, or a failure on the tennis court or in the butts, or a problem with making a speech – she gently calmed and reassured him. ‘I shall never forget the Duchess’s wonderful gentleness with him in the car afterwards,’ said one of her ladies in waiting after he was trounced at tennis at Wimbledon.33
At the end of June she had to prepare for a stressful moment – entertaining her parents-in-law to a meal at White Lodge for the first time. The Duchess may well have been concerned – the Duke wrote to his mother in advance, ‘I had better warn you that our cook is not very good, but she can do the plain dishes well, & I know you like that sort.’ The lunch went well, and Queen Mary thought that they had made the house ‘very nice’.34
*
PUBLIC LIFE began to demand the Duchess’s attention. The politics of the time was dominated by the problems of the economy and, in particular, by the decline of Britain’s principal export industries – coal, steel and shipbuilding. The brief post-war boom had ended by 1921, and unemployment remained above one million until the Second World War. Hopes that the sacrifices of 1914–18 would bring about a better world were shrinking, and by 1922 the idealism of the immediate post-war years had almost entirely disappeared. For, instead of prosperity, peace had brought deflation, higher unemployment, lower wages and lower profits.
Economic gloom was accompanied by cultural questioning, a reaction against what were thought to be the stuffy and traditional values of the Victorian era. Writers began to question these values. In Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, Lytton Strachey had satirized celebrated Victorians such as Dr Arnold, General Gordon and Florence Nightingale, treating them as plaster saints. Where Strachey led, lesser talents followed. By the end of the 1920s, many people were coming to believe that Britain had blundered through the Great War under the leadership of incompetent politicians and bloodthirsty generals. The new atmosphere of cynicism and questioning posed difficulties for the Royal Family, who were forced to redefine their role in a society greatly changed from that which they had known before 1914.
In politics new men were coming to power. The Lloyd George era ended with the fall of his Coalition government in October 1922. The Coalition had been widely condemned for its policy of repression in Ireland, for its aggressive attitude towards organized labour, and for corruption in the sale of honours. In the general election which followed in November 1922, two-party politics was restored, but with the Labour Party replacing the Liberals as the main party of the left. The Conservatives, however, under their new leader Bonar Law, won the election, although Law was forced to resign on grounds of ill health in 1923, and died shortly afterwards. The new Conservative leader, who, with Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald, was to dominate the inter-war years, was Stanley Baldwin. Both of these men believed in moderation. MacDonald sought to wean the Labour Party away from doctrines of class war and direct action. Baldwin, a former West Midlands ironmaster, tried to persuade the Conservatives and the leaders of industry to adopt a more conciliatory attitude towards organized labour. In a speech to the House of Commons in 1923, shortly after becoming prime minister, he declared: ‘Four words of one syllable each are words which contain salvation for this country and for the whole world. They are “Faith”, “Hope”, “Love” and “Work”. No Government in this country today which has not faith in the people, hope in the future, love for its fellow-men, and which will not work and work and work, will ever bring this country through into better days and better times.’35
Baldwin�
��s conciliatory sentiments naturally endeared him to George V and the Royal Family. In modern times, the constitutional monarchy has become a unifying institution, and so successive monarchs have been temperamentally inclined to conciliation and moderation. Between the wars, George V, Edward VIII and George VI all saw themselves as having a role to play in helping to mitigate class feeling.
The Duchess’s first public engagement as a member of the Royal Family came on 30 June 1923 when she and the Duke attended the Royal Air Force Pageant at Hendon. Aeroplanes, still an awe-inspiring novelty, provided an increasingly popular spectacle. Attempts to fly the Atlantic had excited huge publicity since 1919 when two RAF pilots, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Brown, had managed to cross from Newfoundland to Ireland, some eight years before Charles Lindbergh made his epic solo flight. An airmail service between London and Paris had been opened in 1919 and in 1923 a regular passenger service was just gaining popularity; aircraft became a little more comfortable – made of metal rather than wood and wire – and safer, as radio communications were developed. In the summer of 1923, some 80,000 people came to the Hendon show to see the de Havillands which had been formed into a special new squadron to defend London and had a top speed of 150 mph.36
In early July the Duke and Duchess visited Edinburgh, where they drove through the city with the King and Queen, cheered by large crowds. For the next five days they stayed at the Palace of Holyroodhouse – which the Duchess loved, as she wrote to D Arcy Osborne. She was pleased to find herself back among her Scottish countrymen. ‘They are so romantic, & sentimental, & generous & proud that they have to hide it all under a mask of reserve and hardness, & they seem to take people in very successfully!!’37 She and the Duke accompanied the King and Queen on engagements in and around Edinburgh, they toured the Border country together by motor, and on 13 July they went to Dunfermline. Although the press photographs of these visits show the Duchess in an obviously secondary role, a girlish figure in pretty summery clothes, often just in the background, a sharp-eyed reporter at Dunfermline noticed her particular talent with crowds, which was to endear her to the public in the future. At the Carnegie Orthopaedic Clinic, she ‘suddenly recognised among the ex-Service men one whom she had met in a war hospital’ – presumably Glamis. ‘She at once went across to the patient, shook hands with him, and chatted with him for some minutes.’38
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