The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

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  AT THE HEIGHT of the economic crisis in 1931 the King offered the Yorks the use of Royal Lodge, a charming and unpretentious house in Windsor Great Park. It was a welcome offer because, now that the Duke had given up his horses, they no longer rented houses in hunt country. Royal Lodge changed their lives and became one of the places the Duchess loved and lived in most for decades to come. Indeed, she died there seventy-one years later.

  Royal Lodge had been the country home of the Prince Regent, later King George IV. He chose not to live in Windsor Castle where his father, George III, was confined for his last years of sickness and delusion and where Queen Charlotte and her daughters also lived. The cottage, as it was called, became a favourite residence, and even after he became king in 1820 he continued to use it.

  George IV enjoyed grandiose schemes and he asked the architects John Nash and Sir Jeffry Wyatville to expand and improve the house. When the King died in 1830 Wyatville was in the process of building a large banqueting saloon. This room and the small octagonal room adjoining it were the principal features to be retained when most of the house was demolished after the King’s death. Thereafter the Lodge was little used until the late 1860s, when it became a grace-and-favour residence, lived in mostly by members of the Royal Household, until the arrival of the Yorks. Alterations and additions had been haphazardly made. The front door was reached only through a long conservatory. Wyatville’s splendid saloon with its five bays of tall Gothic windows had been divided into three rather poky rooms and additional rooms built above it. The rest was cramped and poorly maintained.

  Queen Mary, ever practical, was at first opposed to her son and daughter-in-law taking on the property. She urged the Duke to turn it down on the grounds that the house was very small, the garden was expensive to keep up, they would be expected to contribute to all the Windsor charities, and they would need a caretaker. In a word, she was concerned that they could not afford it. ‘I tender my advice for what it is worth but I believe you will agree with me, both of you.’129 They did not. They saw past the dilapidation and, like George IV – always a favourite of the Duchess, who called him ‘Old Naughty’ – they both loved the house at once.

  The Duchess wrote to Queen Mary saying that they thought it was ‘the most delightful place & the garden quite enchanting, also the little wood’. There were not quite enough bedrooms for the four of them, but they could manage if her husband took one of the small downstairs rooms as his dressing room. ‘It would be wonderful for the children, and I am sure that they would be very happy there.’130 She understood the financial constraints – they had already had to make economies – but she thought they could manage. Thriftily, she told the Queen that to save on carpets they would ‘fill up with linoleum’.131 (Much of that linoleum was still there when she died.) Queen Mary was not displeased that her initial advice had been ignored; once it was clear that they had set their hearts upon it, she entered into the project with enthusiasm.132

  Inevitably, the more they considered it all, the more work needed to be done. The first thing was to take out the partitions in the big saloon and restore it to Wyatville’s intended glory. The floor there turned out to be in bad condition and so they put down parquet. They changed the old kitchen into a dining room, and moved the kitchen towards the back of the house – the Duchess thought that would cut down on the smell of cooking around the house and would allow the staff to be more self-contained.133

  Having then decided that they should demolish the enormous conservatory and build a new family wing, they found a firm of builders who would do the whole job – largely to the Duke’s own designs – including all new bathroom and other fittings for a little over £5,000. As he observed in the history of the house which he later compiled, economic conditions in 1931 were ‘not propitious for approaching the Treasury for a grant’.134 Instead, the Duke proposed to his father that they should go ahead and pay for the work themselves. He hoped his father would approve the scheme.135 The King did. Dust and debris reigned, but by the end of 1932 the rather gloomy, run-down house had been successfully transformed into a charming and comfortable home.

  Their hopes for Royal Lodge, in the words of the Duke’s biographer, were that it should be ‘their real home’, where they could relax, where ‘the keynote was to be gaiety and love and laughter; above all a home where their children might grow up with the boon and the blessing of a family life replete with affection and understanding, such as the Duchess had enjoyed, and the Duke had never known’.136 He might have added that it was to be another St Paul’s Walden.

  The garden was just as important to them as the house. It offered the Duchess her first chance to indulge the love of gardening she had absorbed from her mother, and it gave the Duke scope to develop his talent for landscaping. He liked being out in all weathers, and would sally forth ‘clad in a blue overall and armed with a double edged javelin chopper, clippers and saw’ and followed by ‘a small army of household servants’, supplemented during Ascot week by any available visitors, to help clear the grounds.137 With the advice of Eric Savill, the Deputy Surveyor of Windsor Parks and Woods, he and the Duchess created what was later described as ‘one of the most beautiful smaller gardens in the country’.138 They replanted and extended the existing garden, bringing in a waterfall and a series of pools to enlarge the rock garden. A woodland area containing many fine old trees was also added, and in this they took special interest and pleasure. Within it they made glades of flowering shrubs and trees and grassy walks interspersed with statues, including one, Charity, copied from the original at St Paul’s Walden. The Duke loved rhododendrons, about which he became knowledgeable, and planted many new varieties; the Duchess had a special affection for magnolias.

  In addition to its echoes of her childhood home, the garden acquired another link with the Duchess’s youth: her convalescent soldier friend Ernest Pearce, who in 1935 was unemployed. She offered him a job as gardener at Royal Lodge, where he remained until his death in 1969.* There was also a miniature garden for the little thatched and fully furnished house called Y Bwthyn Bach, which the people of Wales presented to Princess Elizabeth on her sixth birthday in 1932, and which still stands there today. The two Princesses were given the task of looking after its garden.

  In 1936 the Duke and Duchess called in the architect and landscape designer Geoffrey Jellicoe, who designed new terraces to link the house more harmoniously with its setting.139 The garden remained a great source of pleasure to the Duchess throughout her life.

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  PREOCCUPIED AS they were by their new home, their public duties continued. In early March 1932 the Duke made an informal industrial tour of Lancashire and later in the month they both went to Cardiff. They were touched by the courage of the unemployed miners and their families and lent their support to fundraising efforts for the Blaina and District Hospital which was perilously short of money. Afterwards the Duchess received a letter from a voluntary social worker in Blaina, thanking her for ‘all the immense joy you gave to that sad, disgruntled people. They felt they were forgotten by all the world, & then you came – & a new force of life thrilled thro’ them.’140

  Her involvement in the arts was developing and she was showing an interest in contemporary work. She gave her support, for instance, to the Camargo Society for the Production of Ballet,* and the matinée she attended on 29 February was devised and performed by some of the most exciting artists of the time: she met their Vice-President, Madame Tamara Karsavina, and Lydia Lopokova (wife of the economist John Maynard Keynes), Ninette de Valois and Frederick Ashton.† William Walton’s Façade and Darius Milhaud’s La Création du monde were performed. Constant Lambert and Alicia Markova were also present. The Duchess was developing her own style, and although her relationship with the King and Queen was never confrontational, her tastes were quite distinct, and in the case of the ballet and art could be considered relatively avant garde. She became an enthusiastic balletomane over the years ahead, and it
was a passion that she passed on to Princess Margaret.

  Other organizations she supported that spring and early summer included the Royal General Theatrical Fund, the Royal Cancer Hospital, the Child Haven children’s home near Brentford, the National Council of Girls’ Clubs in Liverpool, and the Forty-Five Churches Fund, through which she was involved in welfare work in east London – a particular interest to her. She paid a visit to Plymouth which had had to be cancelled the year before. In June she and the Duke visited the Ex-Services Welfare Society in Leatherhead, which provided a home and workshops for those suffering severe mental breakdown as a result of the war. Ex-servicemen and their work always appealed to her and at the end of June she received purses in aid of the Duke of Richmond’s Convalescent Home for Discharged Soldiers.

  For her birthday that August the King and Queen gave her a shared present with the Duke – it was a Chinese screen for Royal Lodge.141 She was delighted and thanked the King ‘a thousand times for your great kindness’. The bad news, however, was that with her birthday ‘I am beginning to feel pretty aged, & today I found TWO GREY HAIRS!! I suppose one must expect this at 32, or shall I pay a visit to my hairdresser, & come out a platinum blonde!’142 The King had been, as usual, racing his yacht at Cowes and she hoped that sailing had given him ‘a rest from the cares of these troubled times’. In a touching and significant statement of her feelings, she thanked him for all that he and the Queen had done for her. ‘I was very young & ignorant of the world when I married & had no idea at all of what I would be plunged into – the pitfalls were many; but Bertie was so good, and you & Mama so kind & forgiving of my mistakes that I shall always feel very grateful to you for your understanding & affection. It means so much to me, & it has helped me tremendously. I do hope that you don’t mind me saying this – it somehow just came as I wrote.’143

  This summer they had once more asked the King to lend them Birkhall, rather than have them to stay at Balmoral. The Queen was not happy as she relied on the Yorks to be the most attentive of her children; she professed to be surprised.144 In the end she and the King did allow them to base themselves at Birkhall – on one condition, that the little Princesses came to stay at Balmoral for a week as well.145

  Once again Birkhall seduced them and they put off their return to London as long as they could. The Duchess loved the feeling of isolation in the wild, the beauty of the trees and the tumbling river outside her window. ‘I am so happy here,’ she wrote. ‘In fact I am certain that I am a most simple creature and am most ill suited to my present calling. I inherit a hermit complex from my Lyon family side, & the older I get, the more exclusive I feel.’146 (She probably meant ‘reclusive’.)

  During their summer in Scotland the Duke and Duchess had visited Glasgow. The horror of unemployment was very clear in all the villages they drove through and she told Queen Mary, ‘It was very sad to see the sad & lean faces of the men. I am afraid there is a great deal of misery.’ The Depression was indeed causing more and more misery and on 1 November hunger marchers reached London. Both the Duchess and Queen Mary were frustrated that they could not do more to help. The Duchess had her own solution: ‘It is the men who need work so much – women do not need employment in the same way – they can be happy when idle, but a man ought to work. I would like to make all the women who have jobs that men could do, give them up. I know that this is impossible, but I wish that it was not.’147

  Writing to D’Arcy Osborne, she said, ‘I am feeling very thwarted at this moment. There is so much to be done in this country, things that I could easily do, but a combination of Press & Precedent make it impossible. And I am quite sure that it is not only useless, but almost dangerous to flout convention. Curse it!’ Making the same point as she had to Queen Mary, but in stronger terms, she wrote:

  I cannot see how the older men can ever work again. It is a tragedy, & unless the land can absorb some work & unless some women will give up their jobs, I fear that a lot of men will be workless all their lives. Women can be idle quite happily – they can spend hours trying their hair in new ways, & making last year’s black coat into this year’s jumper, & all this on 3 cups of tea and some buns. But a man must be seriously busy, & eat meat. Therefore, I think it a crime for women to take jobs that men can do as well.

  She added, ‘I am writing very wildly I am afraid.’148

  Her belief that women were automatically less fitted for most jobs than men was outdated, as D’Arcy Osborne pointed out to her in response, even as he sympathized with her ‘frustration complex over unemployment & other national affairs’. He suggested ironically, ‘perhaps one day you will be able to take things in hand and order the women of the country from the plough and the counting house to their proper place, the home’.149 In the event, when her day did come she was to praise young women who put their hand to the plough during the Second World War and to give her whole-hearted support to organizations, both civilian and military, which provided work for women. She called herself ‘anti-feminist’ in 1934,150 and would still have done so a lifetime later; but her position made her a valuable catch for working women’s organizations needing publicity or funds, and she gave patronage and active help to many of these, avoiding only those of ‘a political complexion’.151

  On Christmas Day 1932, for the first time, the King broadcast a message to the Empire, speaking into a microphone installed at Sandringham. The message was relayed widely, including to the congregation in Canterbury Cathedral. Cosmo Lang wrote to the Duchess to say that the worshippers had been deeply moved. ‘I suppose hardly any of them had ever heard his voice before.’ Dr Lang also congratulated the Yorks on the way they carried out their duties.152 The Duchess appreciated his ‘nice and cheering letter’ and told him how much she enjoyed her ‘(alas) rare’ talks with him. She hoped to be able to see him soon. ‘Life becomes more complicated daily. I am lucky in having a very happy family life, which, of course, gives one great strength, and I am indeed grateful, as without it, the hurry & rush would be too much to bear.’153

  Early in the new year of 1933 she left the children with their grandparents at Sandringham. The Queen was, as always, delighted and reported that Princess Margaret ‘is a great pickle & does all kinds of things to annoy Papa, tho’ she seems to be very fond of him, she thinks it is funny & looks up at him with wicked eyes after she has done it, she is very attractive’.154

  The Duke and Duchess continued to work on Royal Lodge; she had bought chairs for her bedroom, ‘a rather battered but good clock’, some china, and other furniture, pictures and chintzes. There were still pungent smells of new paint and fusty carpets which she hoped time and fresh air would banish. They had to put up a shed for garden furniture and build a meat larder. There was time also to relax; they went skating on the lake near by in the Great Park.155 The next need was for a dog and in summer 1933 the family took delivery of Dookie, the first of a long line of Welsh corgis, supplied by Miss Thelma Evans, of Rozavel Kennels in Reigate.156* From now on generations of corgis grew up with the Duchess and her daughters.

  The demands of their public life in the early 1930s, as well as those of home and family, were slowly changing their priorities. Days, and sometimes evenings too, were filled with public engagements, and their social life shrank in consequence. Often they dined with a few friends and went to see a film or a play afterwards; sometimes they went to the cinema by themselves, but they did not go as often to dances and balls as in earlier years.

  There was increasing pressure year by year to involve their children, or at least Princess Elizabeth, in public events. This was a pressure that the Duchess tried to resist, determined to give her children the kind of happy and unfettered life she herself had enjoyed. In 1933 she took on a young Scottish teacher, Marion Crawford, as governess to Princess Elizabeth. Since finishing her two-year teacher-training course at the Moray House Training College in Edinburgh in 1930 Miss Crawford had been governess to the daughter of the Duchess’s sister Rose. It is evident from the lett
er she wrote to the Duchess setting out her qualifications that she had received a good theoretical and practical grounding, and her teacher’s certificate, she said, described her as ‘Very Promising’.157 Dermot Morrah, who talked to Marion Crawford for his authorized book on Princess Elizabeth in 1949, described her as attractive and very human, kindly but with ‘the high sense of intellectual discipline which is an honourable tradition of Scotland’.158

  Miss Crawford was invited for a trial visit to the family at Easter, and began teaching Princess Elizabeth in the autumn of 1933; Princess Margaret joined the class in due course. A schoolroom was set up at 145 Piccadilly and lessons were from 9.15 to 12.30 with half an hour’s break. The Princesses then lunched with their parents, if they were at home. In the early years at least, there were no more lessons after that; the children spent the afternoons out of doors whenever possible, and at 5.30 they went to their mother in her sitting room for an hour before supper and bedtime.

  To judge from Marion Crawford’s letters and timetables preserved in the Royal Archives, she was a serious-minded young woman who did her best to give her pupils the kind of solid education, self-discipline and wide-ranging instruction that would enable them to participate intelligently in conversation and make sense of the world around them, rather than to excel academically. That Crawfie, as they called her, remained with the Princesses for the next fifteen years is evidence that she got on well with them and that her efforts satisfied their parents.