The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  When the Duke arrived at Sandringham he found Queen Mary presiding over tea while a large company, including his children, played a game of Happy Families. He realized now how ill his father was and how remarkably calmly and bravely his mother was facing the end. The Duchess was still not well enough to travel to Sandringham, and she wrote to the Queen, ‘I must send you one little line to tell you that I am thinking & praying for you & Papa all the time. I cannot think of anything else, my life has been so bound up with yours the last twelve years, and I cannot bear to think of your anxiety.’232

  On Saturday the guests left – the little Princesses were taken back to their mother at Royal Lodge. The first bulletin about the King’s ill health was issued. Sandringham was at once besieged by reporters and photographers. ‘Too heartless,’ commented the Queen.233 Emotion ran through the house with the Prince of Wales seeming particularly distraught, though he was less close to his father than the other siblings. On Monday 20 January the King held in his bedroom a last meeting of his Privy Counsellors to set up a Council of State to act on his behalf. With great difficulty he spoke his assent and signed what looked something like GR on the document. As the Counsellors left he smiled at them – many were in tears. That night another bulletin was read on the BBC: ‘The King’s life is moving peacefully to its close.’

  Just before the end, according to Lord Wigram, the Prince of Wales ‘became hysterical, cried loudly and kept on embracing the Queen’.234 ‘His emotion was frantic and unreasonable’, according to Helen Hardinge.235 At the moment her husband died, Queen Mary turned to her eldest son and kissed the hand of her new king, Edward VIII. In her diary she wrote of King George V: ‘The sunset of his death tinged the whole world’s sky.’236

  She was not wrong. King George had been widely and greatly loved. The next day’s newspapers appeared with heavy black borders; all broadcasting was cancelled, theatres and cinemas were closed. Millions of people across the land went to church to pray.

  The following day, Wednesday 22 January, the Duchess was at last well enough to travel to Sandringham. The whole family was now there. On Thursday the 23rd the coffin was taken by train from Wolferton station to London; all the way, people stood bareheaded by the track and on the hills above it, watching the King on his last journey. From King’s Cross, King Edward and his brothers followed their father’s coffin on foot to Westminster Hall. The coffin was enfolded in the Royal Standard and on top of it was fixed the Imperial Crown. As the procession turned into the Palace of Westminster, the jewelled Maltese cross on the top of the crown was shaken loose and tumbled into the gutter. The officer in charge of the bearer party picked it up. ‘A most terrible omen,’ Harold Nicolson thought.237

  As relations and other dignitaries arrived for the funeral, almost a million men and women passed silently by the coffin in the dim and misty Westminster Hall. At midnight on 27 January, the eve of the funeral, the King and his three brothers stood guard over the coffin for twenty minutes in dim candlelight – ‘a very touching thought’, their mother recorded.238

  The next day the Queen described as ‘a terrible day of sadness for us’. The coffin was drawn on its gun carriage to Paddington station ‘through wonderful crowds of sorrowing people mourning their dear King’. It was then carried by train to Windsor, past thousands upon thousands of people lining the track, and then taken through more throngs of mourners into the Castle and St George’s Chapel. After the funeral service, attended by many kings and heads of state from a Europe teetering again on the edge of horror, King George was laid to rest. Queen Mary wrote, ‘We left him sadly, lying with his ancestors in the vault. We returned to London by train & got home by 3.30.’239

  Over the next few weeks the Duke and Duchess and other members of the family were constantly with the Queen, whose dignity and strength throughout moved everyone. Like other members of the family, the Duchess received and replied to many letters of sympathy. Arthur Penn was sure she felt the loss, ‘but if anything can cheer you, I think it may well be the knowledge that nothing can have added so much to the happiness of the King’s later years [as] his first daughter in law’.240

  Schoolchildren all over the world wrote to Queen Mary and other members of the family. Messages from African chiefs and Tibetan lamas were widely and, it should be said, gratefully read. The poets did their best. Edmund Blunden penned an elegy in The Times. The Poet Laureate, John Masefield, cabled his tribute to the King from Los Angeles, praising ‘His courage and his kindness and his grace’. More evocative of the past and perhaps more prescient of the uncertain future was the young John Betjeman:

  Spirits of well-shot woodcock, partridge, snipe

  Flutter and bear him up the Norfolk sky:

  In that red house in a red mahogany book-case

  The stamp collection waits with mounts long dry.

  The big blue eyes are shut that saw wrong clothing

  And favourite fields and coverts from a horse;

  Old men in country houses hear clocks ticking

  Over thick carpets with a deadened force;

  Old men who never cheated, never doubted,

  Communicated monthly, sit and stare

  At a red suburb ruled by Mrs Simpson,

  Where a young man lands hatless from the air.241

  * The Long Weekend was the title of a 1940 book by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge drawn upon here.

  * Lady Cynthia Mary Evelyn Asquith (1887–1960), diarist, novelist and biographer. Daughter of eleventh Earl of Wemyss. She married Herbert Asquith (son of the Prime Minister) in 1910.

  * Painted Fabrics grew out of painting classes run by students from the Sheffield School of Art for severely injured servicemen during the First World War. Its founder, Annie Carter, set up a business employing the men to produce fabrics for a well-off clientele, and its workshops were taken over to make aircraft parts during the Second World War. Fabric production continued afterwards, but business declined and the firm was wound up in 1958.

  * Crown Prince Olav was the only son of King Haakon VII of Norway and his wife Queen Maud, King George V’s sister. He was also related to the Duke through his father, who was Queen Alexandra’s nephew.

  * Sir Samuel Hoare, second Baronet (1880–1959), Conservative politician, and his wife Lady Maud, née Lygon, daughter of sixth Earl Beauchamp. Hoare was created Viscount Temple-wood in 1944.

  * These were prints of famous people by the Victorian satirical cartoonists Spy (Leslie Ward) and Ape (Carlo Pellegrini) collected by Sir Dighton Probyn VC (1833–1924), who had lived in the house. He had won the Victoria Cross in the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and was the founder of Probyn’s Horse. He was Keeper of the Privy Purse to King Edward VII and Comptroller to Queen Alexandra in her widowhood.

  * A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes was published to great acclaim in 1929; it did away with Victorian sentimental visions of childhood. Set against a tropical landscape and the ever present sea, it told the story of a family of English children who, on the voyage home from Jamaica, fell into the hands of pirates. The Man Within was Graham Greene’s first novel, published in 1929. The title was taken from a line by Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), ‘There’s another man within me that’s angry with me.’

  † King George II of Greece (1890–1947), Queen Alexandra’s great-nephew, succeeded his father Constantine I as King of the Hellenes in 1922, was deposed 1924 and lived in exile at Claridge’s Hotel in London until restored to his throne by plebiscite in 1935. During the Second World War he again lived in exile in England from 1940 before returning to Greece in 1946, not long before his death.

  * Their first child, Patricia, born in 1916, had died at eleven months. The second, Anne (1917–80), married, first, Viscount Anson in 1938 and, second, Prince George of Denmark in 1950. Diana, the fourth (1923 -86), married Peter Somervell in 1960. Their other two daughters, Nerissa (1919–86) and Katherine, born in 1926, inherited a mental condition from which three of their cousins, children of Fenella’s sister, also
suffered. Their grandfather Lord Clinton paid for the five children to be looked after at a home not far from St Paul’s Walden Bury. They later moved to a hospital in Surrey. Their cousin Lady Mary Clayton, daughter of the Duchess of York’s sister Rose, described them as ‘lovely children … like easily frightened does’. She added, ‘Though none of these children recognised their mothers they knew each other and used to walk together in the park which interested the doctors very much.’ Their aunt Elizabeth sent Nerissa and Katherine presents each year.

  * ‘Twilight sleep’ was a form of anaesthetic consisting of injections of morphine and scopolamine, used especially to relieve the pain of childbirth. It fell out of favour because it provided inadequate relief and could be dangerous for the baby.

  * Clive Wigram, the King’s Assistant Private Secretary, recorded that when the idea was broached after dinner at Balmoral, he, the King’s Private Secretary Lord Stamfordham and Dr Stirton, the Minister at Crathie Church, ‘raised a cry of horror. Firstly the Church of Scotland is recognised in Scotland as the C of E is in England … There might be something in the proposal of her baptism in the C of Scotland … At the same time we said that there would be an awful outcry in England if the possible heir to the throne was baptized in the C of S. – Should this Princess ever succeed there would be a shout for her Coronation in St Giles.’ (Sir Clive Wigram to Lady Wigram, 27 August 1930, copy, RA AEC/GG/6)

  * The future Queen of Denmark, she was the daughter of King George V’s cousin Princess Margaret of Connaught, Crown Princess of Sweden. She married Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark in 1935.

  * Sir John Weir (1879–1971), homeopathic doctor who was physician to many members of the Royal Family.

  † Louise, Princess Royal, Duchess of Fife (1867–1931). She married in 1889 Alexander Duff, sixth Earl of Fife, who was created duke of Fife by Queen Victoria. He died in 1912.

  * Captain Sir Harold Campbell (1888–1969), Assistant Private Secretary and equerry to Duke of York 1929–33, Private Secretary 1933–6, Groom of the Robes and equerry to King George VI 1937–52, Groom of the Robes and equerry to Queen Elizabeth II 1952–4.

  † Lady Helen Graham (1879–1945), daughter of fifth Duke of Montrose.

  ‡ The Hon. Mrs Geoffrey Bowlby (1885–1988), née Annesley, daughter of eleventh Viscount Valentia. Her husband Captain Geoffrey Bowlby was killed in the First World War.

  * The Duchess was patron of the St Marylebone Housing Association; after she had laid the foundation stone of the Association’s first block of flats in 1928 the Honorary Secretary commented on the effect on ‘what is supposed to be a “Red” neighbourhood. Anything less “Red” than the demonstration on June 9th it would be hard to imagine – yet the Police had asked me if it would be wise to allow Her Royal Highness to visit one of the cottages.’ (Letter to Lady Helen Graham, 17 July 1928, RA QEQMH/PS/PS/St Marylebone Housing Association)

  * Rhododendrons were not Ernest Pearce’s favourite plant, however, to judge by the letter he wrote asking for a boiler suit to wear while doing the ‘long dirty sticky job’ of picking the blooms. ‘I have to get right inside some of them … and I get in a very dirty mess – much to the annoyance of Mrs P. when it comes to washing day.’ (Letter from Ernest Pearce to the Privy Purse, 3 June 1956, RA QEQMH/HH/INDIV/PEARCE)

  * The Camargo Society, named after Marie Camargo, a renowned eighteenth-century ballerina, was created by ballet lovers in 1930 with the intention of stimulating the idea of a national ballet. It gave a platform to Frederick Ashton, Ninette de Valois and other choreographers. The society staged the first British productions of Giselle and Swan Lake, Act II. In 1933 its repertoire was incorporated into the Vic-Wells (later the Royal) Ballet.

  † Sir Frederick Ashton (1904–88), leading ballet dancer and choreographer. Director of the Royal Ballet 1963–70, he was a friend of Queen Elizabeth till the end of his life.

  * Dookie’s kennel name was Rozavel Golden Eagle; when he was sent for training, servants in the house, knowing he was destined to live with the Duke of York, called him Dookie – he learned to respond to that name and so it remained with him.

  * Mlle Guérin came several times in 1935–9; her letters home give a glimpse of life at Birkhall and Balmoral, and reveal that she detested Crawfie. She was succeeded in 1939 by Madame Montaudon Smith, ‘Monty’, who taught the Princesses in term-time as well, and to whom they were devoted. They also had a German governess, Hanni Davey.

  * A Girl Guide company was formed at Buckingham Palace, into which friends of the Princesses and daughters of Royal Household staff were enrolled.

  * In 1935 the enterprise’s fundraising campaign in London, essential to give its disabled employees a summer holiday, had been a complete flop owing to the illness of its royal patron, the Princess Royal. They turned to the Duchess for help, asking her to come to a special sale at Claridge’s. She hesitated, not wishing to encroach on her sister-in-law’s territory. But as her lady in waiting wrote, ‘the Duchess of York, having seen the men at work and met their families, is deeply interested and intensely anxious that they should not have to forgo their holidays this year.’ She went; the sale raised enough to guarantee the men their holiday, and there was great jubilation, the administrator reported. (Captain Scott to Lettice Bowlby, 19 June 1935, and to Lady Helen Graham, 18 July 1935, RA QEQMH/PS/ENGT/1935/17 July)

  * The roll-call of members, eventually, was the Duke of York, the ninth Earl of Airlie, Sir Reginald Seymour, the ninth Duke of Devonshire, the tenth Duke of Beaufort, the ninth Duke of Rutland, the fifth Earl of Erne, the Hon. Sir Richard Molyneux, the fourth Earl of Eldon, the nineteenth Duke of Norfolk and the third Viscount Halifax (later first Earl); apart from the Duchess there were only two lady members, the Duchess of Beaufort and the Countess of Eldon.

  * Britannia was King George V’s racing yacht, built on the Clyde in 1893 for his father the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII). She was a 121.5-foot steel-framed, cutter-rigged yacht and won many races in the 1890s. King George V inherited Britannia and his father’s love of racing, and the yacht continued to compete successfully at Cowes in the inter-war years. She was scuttled after the King’s death in 1936, in accordance with his wishes.

  † Victoria and Albert was the third of three royal yachts of this name built for Queen Victoria, launched in 1901. She was used for cruises around Britain and to the Mediterranean by King Edward VII and King George V; she was replaced in 1953 by the new royal yacht Britannia, named in honour of King George V’s racing yacht.

  * After the abdication Käthe Kübler wrote to the Duchess, now Queen, saying she would like to come to see her, and asking permission to dedicate her memoirs to her. She did come, and took tea with the Queen on 13 October 1937. Her book, Meine Schülerin, die Königin von England, was published that year.

  * Phipps recounted also how Mrs Greville, the Yorks’ friend and benefactor, had sought an appointment with Hitler while a guest of the German government in Nuremberg. A short meeting had been arranged with some difficulty. ‘Mrs Greville was, it seems, delighted.’

  † This attack by Italian forces on the Ethiopian Empire – also known as Abyssinia – began the Second Italo-Abyssinian War (October 1935-May 1936). Abyssinia never surrendered but it was annexed into the newly created colony of Italian East Africa. The crisis demonstrated the ineffectiveness of the League. Both Italy and Abyssinia were member nations and yet the League was unable to control Italy or to protect Abyssinia. Italy’s invasion was accepted by Britain and France because they sought to retain Italy as an ally in case of war with Germany.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ABDICATION

  1936–1937

  ‘We are not afraid’

  NINETEEN-THIRTY-SIX was one of the unhappiest years of the Duchess’s life. She began it in bed with pneumonia and ended it ill again, with the virulent influenza that attacked her so frequently. She began it as the daughter-in-law of King George V and she ended it, to her astonishment and dismay, as Queen Consort t
o King George VI. The abdication of King Edward VIII was the most serious constitutional crisis affecting the British monarchy since the seventeenth century. There were many, and they included the Duchess of York and her husband, who feared that the institution might not survive it.

  King Edward VIII came to the throne on a wave of public enthusiasm. He was a hugely popular figure of whom much was expected, and he was widely seen as a talented, exuberant and sympathetic young man who could bridge the gap between generations. People thought that as an ex-serviceman he would be able to relate to the needs of former soldiers. His travels, much wider than those of any previous Prince of Wales, would give him a special understanding of the lands of the Empire and those beyond. He would be as steadfast as his father but more up to date, more flexible.

  At first he enjoyed extra sympathy because it was clear to everyone that, as an unmarried and childless man, his difficult job would also be a very lonely one. During the interment of King George V in St George’s Chapel, Lady Helen Graham, the Duchess of York’s lady in waiting, looked at the new King and said to the member of the Royal Household beside her, ‘I feel so sorry for him. He is not going home to a wife behind the tea pot and a warm fire, with his children making toast for him.’1 A similar fear was expressed by Chips Channon, who wrote that his heart went out to King Edward ‘as he will mind so terribly being King. His loneliness, his seclusion, his isolation will be almost more than his highly strung and unimaginative nature can bear.’2

  *

  AS HEIR TO the throne, the Prince of Wales had had a long and not always easy apprenticeship. But he had perhaps suffered less than his younger brother Prince Albert from their father’s hypercritical attitude, being more obviously attuned to the demands of public life and not having to endure the terror of a crippling stammer.

  The Prince of Wales joined the Grenadier Guards just before the outbreak of war in 1914; he had a ‘good war’, insisting that he be allowed to serve on the Western Front, but was chagrined that he was not allowed to fight in the trenches. The war over, he embarked on what was perhaps the finest public period of his life – a series of overseas tours in which his youth, his looks and his charm captivated hearts and strengthened links across the Empire. He was particularly gifted at reaching out to veterans. Lloyd George called him ‘our greatest ambassador’ and even his father wrote a rare letter of unqualified praise.3 However, the Prince made clear from early on that he found many of his official duties irksome. Lloyd George warned the Prince that if he was to be a constitutional monarch he must first be a constitutional Prince of Wales. The King was more severe and saw in his son’s insouciance a lack of respect for manners and morals which he believed would damage if not destroy the monarchy.