The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  President Lebrun and his wife were charming. At one occasion the Queen noticed the President looking askance at her: she was wearing the Légion d’Honneur, which he had just conferred on her, on the wrong shoulder. She hurriedly changed it.109 She said later she was overwhelmed by the welcome they received everywhere, and she was struck that the French hardly talked to her about the English. ‘It was all Scottish and Scotland that they seemed to be interested in.’ She talked as much as she could in French, ‘but when I was stuck for a word I just put my hand upon my heart and they supplied me with one.’110

  The visit was a triumph for them both, but in particular for the Queen. One French newspaper exulted, ‘We have taken the Queen to our hearts. She rules over two nations.’111 Another paper, L’Oeuvre, published a humorous article, ‘Hors d’oeuvre’, with the subheading ‘Honni soit qui mal y pense’. The writer expressed regret that protocol meant that the King & Queen had separate bedrooms, for otherwise perhaps the good food and wine and hospitality of France might have led to the birth of a ‘dauphin’ on 20 April 1939, and the Princesses would have been told, ‘C’est un petit frère que papa et maman ont acheté à Paris et qui arrive aujourd’hui.’112

  There was much to rejoice about in the present because there was so much to fear in the future. The overarching theme of all the events and of the constant applause was of two democracies embattled but united against brutal threats. Every opportunity was taken by both the hosts and the visitors to emphasize their alliance and their commitment to peace. At the Elysée banquet in their honour, the King said, ‘It is the ardent desire of our Governments to find, by means of international agreements, a solution of those political problems which threaten the peace of the world and of those economic difficulties which restrict human well-being.’113

  On the final day of the visit they were entertained at Versailles. The Queen was wearing another floor-length spreading dress of white organdie, embroidered all over with open-work broderie anglaise. Her white leghorn hat was trimmed with a ribbon of black velvet.114 At Louis XIV’s magnificent Palace, they reviewed 50,000 French soldiers as they marched past the King. Churchill was much moved and spoke of the French troops as the bulwark of European freedom.115 Unfortunately, the fly-past by the French air force was delayed until the afternoon and took place during a concert in the chapel of the Palace. Suddenly the music was interrupted by the roars of wave after wave of military planes passing overhead. Rather than reassuring, the display was macabre and unsettling – certainly that was how the experience remained in the memories of the King and the Queen.116

  That last night, the royal couple enjoyed many curtain calls on the balcony of the Quai d’Orsay as thousands of people in the streets below demanded, by enthusiastic cheering, to see them. Lady Diana Cooper joined the throng and wrote, ‘I can never forget it. To the French the Royal Visit seemed a safeguard against the dreaded war. That at least is what they told me but I could see nothing to allay my fears.’117

  She was right. The uninvited guests, Hitler and Mussolini, loomed over all those enchanted evenings. On the last day of the visit, in a reminder of why another war seemed too terrible to contemplate, the King and Queen visited Villers-Bretonneux to unveil a memorial to the 11,000 members of the Australian Imperial Forces who fell in France during the 1914–18 war and had no known grave. After the King had laid his official wreath, the Queen spontaneously approached the memorial and laid on it a bunch of red poppies from the surrounding fields which had been given to her that morning by a schoolboy.118

  The French love affair with the Queen and her husband was intense. Neville Chamberlain wrote to the King, praising him and saying, ‘the Queen’s smile as usual took every place by storm’.119 Duff Cooper congratulated the Queen, quoting a friend in Paris who had said that the visit had had an extraordinary effect in increasing French confidence. ‘Never since Armistice night have I seen such vibration of happiness and relief from an unknown nightmare … Everyone says that the Queen has something magnetic about her which touches the masses as well as the lucky few who know her.’120 In his diary, Cooper wrote that the French enthusiasm for the King and more especially for the Queen surpassed description. ‘This at least is good, but I view the near future with great disquiet and if we are at peace when Parliament meets on November 1st I think we shall be fortunate.’121

  *

  BACK HOME THERE was a heat wave. The King and Queen and their daughters went first to the Solent where the King attended Cowes Week briefly – unlike his father, he was not a yachtsman. The Queen took her daughters picnicking in the New Forest and to visit Osborne, Queen Victoria’s home on the Isle of Wight. Then, more slowly than usual, they made their way to Scotland, in the Victoria and Albert. The sea was calm and they could all relax; the Queen thought the officers were charming; they ‘devised all kinds of amusing things to entertain us!’ They stopped off at Southwold in Suffolk for the King to make his annual visit to his Duke of York’s Camp. He was rowed to the shore and carried aloft by the boys for a happy meal around the campfire, before returning to the yacht. North they continued, arriving at Aberdeen on a perfect hot day; the Queen remarked how pretty the harbour looked with the gaily painted trawlers bobbing on the blue sea.122

  At Balmoral they did their best to have a holiday despite the deepening political darkness on the continent. Georgina Guérin was there again for the Princesses – they had lessons every morning and then rode their ponies; afterwards the women and children usually joined the men out on the hill for lunch. After tea back at the house, the Princesses sometimes played the radio-gramophone in the drawing room, or there was cricket on the lawn for anyone who wanted to join in, and at about seven o’clock the house party changed for dinner.123 Life was a little less formal than under King George V. Etiquette was nonetheless imposing and at dinner, white tie was still de rigueur. A typical evening meal that August was clear soup, fish, beef, grouse, chocolate pudding, iced pudding, cheese soufflé, peaches, plums and grapes, with several different wines. Seven pipers played around the table at dessert. Afterwards cigarettes were smoked, by women as well as men. Sometimes there was a film show.124

  The peaceful hills and heather could not conceal Europe’s march towards the war which everyone feared. Although many people regarded Hitler with horror, it was from their memories of 1914–18 that their anxiety derived. People tried to reassure themselves that Germany was too complex and had too rich a culture to be reduced to simple black and white, good and evil. They could agree that some of the decisions made about Germany at Versailles were unjust, or at least unworkable. The Sudeten Germans had indeed been incorporated without consultation into the new state of Czechoslovakia after the First World War. Their problems under the social democrat government in Prague were grossly exaggerated by the Nazi propaganda machine, but some problems did exist.

  Those who argued for compromise, or appeasement, in both France and Britain had a fundamental belief which was both decent and compelling. It was that even the enemies of reason must in some fashion be susceptible to logic and persuasion. It was hard for men and women of goodwill to believe that the Nazis were ‘a political movement whose animating principles were paranoid conspiracy theories, blood-curdling hatreds, medieval superstitions, and the lure of murder’.125 But that is what they were.

  By August 1938 Hitler was declaring that the condition of the Sudeten Germans under their Czech rulers was intolerable. German troops began conducting extensive manoeuvres around the Czech border. The danger that Germany would use force was growing every day. The French had made clear that they would abide by their treaty commitments to Czechoslovakia. If France went to war Britain would be dragged in. Neville Chamberlain took the train up to Balmoral to see the King at the end of August, still believing that peace could prevail. Back in London he wrote to the King that matters were developing only slowly and that he had a ‘hunch’ that the use of force might be avoided.126 But on 12 September Hitler made a vicious speech at Nuremberg,
laced with contempt for the Czechoslovak state and its ministers and demanding a revolt in the Sudetenland.

  Thousands of people began to flee London and Chamberlain decided on a dramatic move – he, who had never been in an aeroplane, would fly at once to see Hitler. The King decided that he should return to the capital and on 14 September he took the night train from Ballater. Queen Mary approved, writing to him that the public took confidence in seeing the Royal Standard flying over the Palace and thus knowing that the King was in residence. She, like almost everyone, had been shocked by Hitler’s speech. ‘I was horrified at his voice & shouting & at what he said, so theatrical & awful.’ But she thought it ‘a brilliant idea’ for the Prime Minister to fly to see the German dictator, ‘for even if nothing comes of it, he will have made, in England’s name, the beau geste for peace’. If war did come, she said, ‘it will be to prevent Germany from dominating most of Europe, not to back up the Czechs for their foolishness in treating the Sudetens so badly.’127

  Over the next ten days Chamberlain made not one but three visits to Germany – to Berchtesgaden, to Bad Godesberg and finally to Munich, in ever more desperate attempts to propitiate the dictator. In this he had the grateful support of the vast majority of the British people, and of their King and Queen. On 19 September, after Chamberlain’s first meeting with Hitler, the King wrote to the Queen in Balmoral. ‘My own darling Angel, I fear you must be feeling anxious as to how things are developing here.’ He did not like to use the telephone, so he was sending her a lot of papers to read. Knowing that she felt she should be with him, he wrote, ‘Please don’t think of coming down here yet, as it might make people feel nervous. We will keep you well informed as to the daily progress of the situation, & just carry on as usual.’

  Among the papers he sent were the minutes of Sunday’s Cabinet meeting in which Chamberlain gave his impressions of Hitler. ‘I wish he could have got more out of him,’ the King told the Queen; but perhaps that would happen when Chamberlain returned the following Wednesday. He added, ‘I don’t much care for our new guarantees of the new Czechoslovakian frontier against unprovoked aggression, as again how can we help them in this event. What we want is a guarantee from Hitler that he won’t walk into it in 3 or 4 months’ time. However, the French & ourselves are in agreement on this point.’ At the end of the letter, the King wrote, ‘All my love Angel & I miss you too terribly.’128

  The Queen missed him too; she felt miserable and thought she ought to be in London at such a time. On 21 September she did travel south, leaving the Princesses at Balmoral. She meant it to be only a short trip, but she found her husband under such strain that she stayed away longer than she had planned.129

  London was grim. Air-raid precautions were put into effect on 25 September, cellars and basements were commandeered, hospitals were cleared for war-wounded, schoolchildren crowded the railway stations for evacuation to the countryside. Trenches were dug in Hyde Park, to give some notional shelter from air raids, Londoners were registered for gas-mask distribution, anti-aircraft guns were mounted on bridges and close to Buckingham Palace.

  As the spectre of war approached, the greater grew the sense of urgency to avoid it. The King felt strongly the need to help in any way he could. His Private Secretary Alec Hardinge, although himself opposed to appeasement, suggested that the King send a personal appeal to Hitler, ‘as one ex-Serviceman to another’, urging him to spare the youth of Europe another terrible war. It might have no effect, but it would be ‘the only real contribution that Your Majesty could make to a peaceful solution by approaching the question from an entirely non-political angle’.130 The King put this idea first to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, on 15 September when Chamberlain was on his first trip to Germany. Halifax advised waiting for his return.131 On 26 September the King told the Prime Minister of his proposal. He had prepared a draft, with Hardinge’s assistance. But Chamberlain considered that such an advance would be unwise; he feared that Hitler might send an insulting reply.132

  On 27 September the King and Queen had a long-standing engagement to launch the world’s largest passenger liner, her namesake, the Queen Elizabeth, sister ship to the Queen Mary, on the Clyde. At the last minute the crisis prevented the King from leaving London. The Queen had to go on her own; worse still, she would have to make the speech at the launch ceremony. She left London by train on the evening of the 26th; all the stations were filled with children being sent out of the capital. Fears of an imminent German attack were very real. At Glasgow she was joined by her daughters, who had been brought down from Balmoral, and together they toured the Empire Exhibition. According to The Times, ‘A great multitude of people gave them a welcome which the tension of the moment seemed to charge with a deeper and more personal feeling than would have coloured enthusiasm at a less critical time.’133

  At John Brown’s shipyard the great new liner lay, over a thousand feet long, ready to run out to sea at the Queen’s command. Piled beside the vessel on each side were massive drag-chains, weighing more than 2,000 tons, to slow her impetus as she took to the water for the first time. The Queen’s speech was broadcast live by the BBC and heard by millions of people across the country. She told them of the King’s deep regret in having to cancel his journey to Clydeside and said that she had a message from him. ‘He bids the people of this country to be of good cheer, in spite of the dark clouds hanging over them and, indeed, over the whole world.’ She spoke confidently and clearly, describing the ships that plied across the Atlantic ‘like shuttles in a mighty loom, weaving a fabric of friendship and understanding between the people of Britain and the people of the United States’.134

  The last props holding the ship in place were removed. Very slowly she began to move to cries of ‘She’s off!’ The Queen quickly stepped forward to say, ‘I name this ship Queen Elizabeth and wish success to her and all who sail in her,’ and released the bottle of champagne to break against the bow. As the great ship’s stern hit the water, a riot of steam whistles mingled with the roar of the drag-chains as they rushed out into the sea after her.135 ‘I was so proud of Elizabeth taking on that ordeal of broadcasting the speech at a moment’s notice, when I could not do it myself,’ the King wrote to May Elphinstone afterwards.136

  To Neville Chamberlain, the only way to peace seemed to be to allow Hitler to occupy the Sudetenland. On the night of 27 September, exhausted, he made the broadcast for which he would ever be remembered – ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.’ Duff Cooper considered the speech ‘the most depressing utterance’, expressing more sympathy for Hitler than for Czechoslovakia.137 Churchill also was indignant. But millions of people agreed with Chamberlain. The King himself was moved and sent him a message of sympathy and praise.

  In both Paris and London there was a sense that the next day, 28 September, would be the final day of peace. The King held a Privy Council meeting to declare a state of emergency and to agree the mobilization of the fleet. That afternoon, as Chamberlain was recounting to the Commons the doleful events of recent days, he was handed a piece of paper containing an invitation from Hitler to an immediate four-power conference with Mussolini and the French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier in Munich. The House was ecstatic.

  In Munich the dictators received the two dark-suited parliamentary leaders of France and Britain. They offered scant improvement on the terms for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, but Hitler gave Chamberlain a solemn undertaking that these were his last territorial demands. The Prime Minister chose to accept this assurance. He persuaded Hitler also to sign a piece of paper stating that their agreement was ‘symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war again’. When Chamberlain landed at Heston aerodrome outside London he waved this paper to wild applause and read its words aloud; at Downing Street later he declared that it brought ‘peace and honour’ and ‘peace for ou
r time’.

  The King had sent him an invitation to come straight to Buckingham Palace, where his wife Anne had also been invited. The King and Queen then took the Chamberlains out on to the balcony overlooking the Mall. They were given an emotional ovation. Crowds sang ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ deep into the night. Queen Mary wrote to congratulate the King. ‘What an excellent photo of you two with Chamberlains in the papers … The paper the P.M. & Hitler signed is most interesting, let us hope that at last our 2 countries will come together.’138

  For her part, the Queen wrote to Anne Chamberlain saying that she had been thinking of her ‘during these last agonising weeks, knowing & understanding something of what you must be going through. It is so hard to wait, & when it is on the shoulders of your husband that such tremendous responsibilities rest, then it is doubly hard. But you must feel so proud & glad that through sheer courage & great wisdom he has been able to achieve so much for us & for the World.’139 Anne Chamberlain replied, thanking her for her letter ‘so full of understanding’.140

  Chamberlain’s Munich agreement was welcomed wholeheartedly not only in Britain but, as the historian Andrew Roberts has pointed out, by ‘the vast majority of the English-speaking peoples’. Chamberlain received telegrams of congratulation and relief from the Prime Ministers of Canada, South Africa and Australia along with tens of thousands of letters and other messages from around the world. ‘Appeasement was not simply a political phenomenon. The Church of England supported it on spiritual grounds, ex-servicemen’s organizations supported it as a way to avoid war, and the management of corporate Britain embraced it as the best way to avoid damaging Britain’s economic strength.’141 The stock market leaped. The press was almost united in praise.