Hardinge told her that he knew that Lord Lloyd, like most others, shared her views, but thought the appointment was a lesser evil than the only alternative – the Windsors’ return to Britain. ‘I think that she will do harm wherever she is – but there is less scope for it in a place like the Bahamas than elsewhere – and the native population probably will not understand what it is all about!’125
The Duke had new demands. He insisted that his former servants be released from active service to accompany him to the Bahamas and that he and the Duchess be allowed to visit New York en route. Churchill absolutely refused to allow the second request but eventually and reluctantly agreed that one valet be discharged in order to return to him. Even then the Windsors’ departure was still not certain. The Germans made sure that the Duke was told that the British Secret Service were planning to assassinate him on the voyage and that he would be far safer under the German wing in Spain. It took another visit from the redoubtable Walter Monckton to convince him to leave; he and the Duchess finally set sail on 1 August.126
The extent to which the Duke would ever have co-operated with the Nazis cannot be known. On one occasion, the King wrote, ‘Winston told me that D.’s ideas and his pro-Nazi leanings would have been impossible during the crisis of the last three years.’127 That was undoubtedly true, but does not in itself imply treasonable intent. The considered view of the Duke’s biographer, Philip Ziegler, is that ‘there seems little doubt that he did think Britain was likely to lose the war and that, in such a case, he believed he might have a role to play.’ Despite all this, Ziegler concluded that in the awful event of a German victory the Duke’s belief in the British meant that ‘he could not have allowed himself to rule by favour of the Germans over a sullen and resentful people.’128
*
AS THE DUKE and Duchess sailed west, the next stage of Hitler’s assault began with the unprecedented, indeed revolutionary use of air power to break Britain’s will and ability to resist a seaborne invasion. The campaign had begun in early July with bombing raids on south-coast ports, and gathered in intensity, spreading through the south-east and on to London. Having given up hope of forcing Britain to the conference table, Hitler knew that no invasion could take place until the Germans controlled the air over Britain and the English Channel. He flung the mass of the Luftwaffe against London itself. For ten days the bright and sunny skies over south-eastern England were filled with the roar of warfare as wave after wave of German bombers growled across the coast towards London and young men in their Spitfires and Hurricanes rose up to shoot them down.
This new phase of the Battle of Britain was deadly. On 8 August the Luftwaffe began a systematic attack on airfields and aircraft factories, and managed to bomb many of them out of action. In the last week of August and the first week of September 1940 there were 600 enemy aircraft attacking Britain every day. In those two weeks, the RAF lost 290 aircraft. On the night of 7 September, 200 German bombers broke through the RAF defences and hit London, killing 300 people and injuring over 1,300 more in the next few hours. The docks in the East End were set alight and hundreds of fires attracted swarm after swarm of enemy aircraft. That night, to add to the horror, the Chiefs of Staff issued the code word ‘CROMWELL’. An invasion was thought to be imminent.
And so it went on every night – by the middle of the month more than 2,000 civilians had been killed and 8,000 wounded, most in London itself. The courage of ‘the few’ in the RAF was extraordinary and gave Britain an essential victory – their resistance to the Luftwaffe until the equinox gales arrived in the fourth week of September meant that Hitler had had to postpone Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain. Nonetheless, the bombing continued week after week and London was raided again and again and again.
On Sunday 8 September, Buckingham Palace itself received its first direct hit. A delayed-action bomb was dropped; it did not explode and next morning the King worked in his office above where it lay. In the middle of Monday night it went off, blowing out all the windows of his office and many others, and damaging the indoor swimming pool. Some of the Palace ceilings came down, but the main structure was not seriously affected.
During the week which followed, the King and Queen made their first visits to the devastated East End. They were given emotional welcomes by people picking through the rubble of their streets with extraordinary cheerfulness; they had lost everything but were still determined to try to rebuild their homes and their lives. The sight of their King and Queen walking among them and talking to many of them with obvious interest and concern was immensely reassuring. The King wrote to his mother, ‘we have seen some of the awful havoc which has been done in East London, & have talked to the people who are quite marvellous in the face of adversity. So cheerful about it all, & some have had very narrow escapes.’129
On the morning of 13 September the King and Queen themselves were nearly killed. In a deliberate attack, a German bomber emerged from low cloud, flew straight up the Mall and dropped a stick of bombs on the Palace. The Queen described what happened in a long letter to Queen Mary:
My darling Mama
I hardly know how to begin to tell you of the horrible attack on Buckingham Palace this morning Bertie & I arrived there at about ¼ to 11, and he & I went up to our poor windowless rooms to collect a few odds and ends.
There was an air raid in progress and she went to find the King to see if he was coming down to the shelter.
He asked me to take an eyelash out of his eye, and while I was battling with this task, Alec came into the room with a batch of papers in his hand. At this moment we heard the unmistakable whirr-whirr of a German plane. We said, ‘ah a German’, and before anything else could be said, there was the noise of aircraft diving at great speed, and then the scream of a bomb. It all happened so quickly, that we had only time to look foolishly at each other, when the scream hurtled past us, and exploded with a tremendous crash in the quadrangle.
I saw a great column of smoke & earth thrown up into the air, and then we all ducked like lightning into the corridor. There was another tremendous explosion, and we & our 2 pages who were outside the door, remained for a moment or two in the corridor away from the staircase, in case of flying glass. It is curious how one’s instinct works at these moments of great danger, as quite without thinking, the urge was to get away from the windows. Everybody remained wonderfully calm, and we went down to the shelter. I went along to see if the housemaids were alright, and found them busy in their various shelters.
Then came a cry for ‘bandages’, and the first aid party, who had been training for over a year, rose magnificently to the occasion, and treated the 3 poor casualties calmly and correctly. They, poor men, were working below the Chapel, and how they survived I don’t know.* Their whole workshop was a shambles, for the bomb had gone bang through the floor above them. My knees trembled a little bit for a minute or two after the explosions! But we both feel quite well today, tho’ just a bit tired.
I was so pleased with the behaviour of our servants. They were really magnificent. I went along to the kitchen which, as you will remember, has a glass roof. I found the chef bustling about, and when I asked him if he was alright, he replied cheerfully that there had been un petit quelque chose dans le coin, un petit bruit, with a broad smile. The petit quelque chose was the bomb on the Chapel just next door! He was perfectly unmoved, and took the opportunity to tell me of his unshakeable conviction that France will rise again!130
The King and Queen decided to conceal how nearly they had died, even from Churchill. In the second volume of his memoirs, Their Finest Hour, Churchill wrote, ‘Had the windows been closed instead of open, the whole of the glass would have splintered into the faces of the King and Queen, causing terrible injuries. So little did they make of it that even I … never realised until long afterwards … what had actually happened.’ Their near-escape was not made public until after the end of the war.†
On the day of the bombing, after lunch in their shelt
er, they drove again to the East End of London. The Queen was horrified and moved. ‘The damage there is ghastly,’ she told Queen Mary.
I really felt as if I was walking in a dead city, when we walked down a little empty street. All the houses evacuated and yet through the broken windows one saw all the poor little possessions, photographs, beds, just as they were left. At the end of the street is a school which was hit, and collapsed on the top of 500 people waiting to be evacuated – about 200 are still under the ruins. It does affect me seeing this terrible and senseless destruction – I think that really I mind it much more than being bombed myself. The people are marvellous, and full of fight. One could not imagine that life could become so terrible. We must win in the end.
Darling Mama, I do hope that you will let me come & stay a day or two later. It is so sad being parted, as this War has parted families.
With my love, and prayers for your safety, ever darling Mama, your loving daughter in law Elizabeth
PS Dear old BP is still standing and that is the main thing.131
But in one way the bombing of the Palace was helpful to the King and Queen – and to the country. Some Members of Parliament had worried in the first days of the Blitz that, if the bombing was concentrated on working-class areas, resentment would grow. The Queen said, famously and more than once, that she was glad that the Palace had been bombed because it meant that she could ‘now look the East End in the face’.132 And it was true that it did help create a closer bond. The King told Queen Mary that he thought their visits to the bombed areas helped people ‘who have lost their relations & homes, & we have both found a new bond with them as Buckingham Palace has been bombed as well as their homes, and nobody is immune.’133
The Queen now found that people would ask her how she felt about being attacked. A voluntary worker in one stricken area related that ‘the first thing all the women say to her, as they try to salvage their own pathetic bundles of belongings from their ruined homes, is “Did the Queen lose all her pretty things too?” ’134 On one such visit to south-east London, Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food, was with them.
The Queen asked me about the morale of the people who had been bombed: when we were coming through a very slummy district a crowd gathered around the carriage and called out, ‘Good Luck’ and ‘God Bless You’ and ‘Thank YMs for coming to see us’. I knew the district and had been there only a week before. I said, ‘You asked me about morale. All these people have lost their homes.’ The Queen was so touched she couldn’t speak for a moment, I saw the tears come into her eyes and then she said, ‘I think they’re wonderful.’135
At one communal feeding centre, there was a moment, noted Woolton, at which ‘a very dirty child’ in its mother’s arms grabbed at the Queen’s pearls. A photographer ran around trying to get a picture but she had just moved away. Woolton, standing behind the Queen, murmured to her, ‘Your Majesty, you’ve broken a press man’s heart.’ ‘Without showing the slightest sign that she had heard,’ Woolton recorded, ‘she moved back into position for the baby again to play with her pearls, and so that the pressman could take his photograph. The incident was, in fact, the only thing recorded in the press!’136 Woolton appreciated the simplicity of both the King and Queen. ‘They were so easy to talk to and to take round, and fell so readily into conversation with the people whom they were seeing, without any hesitation or affectation, or side. They were, in fact, very nice people, doing a very human job.’137*
That certainly was the impression they gave. After their trip to Bermondsey, the Chairman of the National Council of Girls’ Clubs, Mrs Walter Elliot, wrote to the Queen’s lady in waiting, ‘Everyone in Bermondsey believed that Her Majesty came to see them because she had heard that there had been a direct hit on a shelter, and had wanted to help them. It is impossible to over-estimate what this visit has meant … The people felt as if an angel had passed through their midst. This must have been said often before, but it was the literal truth.’138
From Chicago the Queen received a poem which began:
Be it said to your renown
That you wore your gayest gown
Your bravest smile, and stayed in Town
When London Bridge was burning down,
My fair lady.139
In fact her gowns in wartime were a constant worry. The King looked elegant in uniform throughout the war; the Queen had more difficulty deciding what she should wear. She knew that press photographs tended to reveal her plumpness rather than her clear skin, let alone her charm. Her dressmaker, Norman Hartnell, advised that she must stand out in the crowd and that since most of the people she mingled with would be darkly if not drably dressed, she should wear light colours. In his autobiography he recalled the problem of how she should appear when visiting the victims of the bombing. ‘In black? Black does not appear in the rainbow of hope. Conscious of tradition, the Queen made a wise decision in adhering to the gentle colours, and even though they became muted into what one might call dusty pink, dusty blue and dusty lilac, she never wore green and she never wore black. She wished to convey the most comforting, encouraging and sympathetic note possible.’140 In such clothes, and often in high heels, she certainly stood out in the bombed streets. Her gentle ostentation was deliberate and it seems to have been effective. It was encouraging for people who had lost almost everything to see that the Queen still had her style.141
She was careful to abide by the rules for ‘austerity’ clothes – the amount of material, the number of seams, the amount of adornment and width of collar and belt. For receptions at the Palace or the Castle more elegant dresses were needed, but restrictions still applied. Embroidery was forbidden, so Hartnell ‘re-tinted and re-arranged’ dresses from pre-war years. Many of them were the clothes he had created for the Canadian tour. In one case he painted by hand garlands of lilac and green leaves on a voluminous white satin gown. The Queen also encouraged him to accept a Board of Trade request to design utility clothes for the public.142
*
THROUGHOUT THE Battle of Britain the King and Queen drove to London almost every day and slept at Windsor Castle with their daughters. A large dugout had been constructed for the Royal Family under the Brunswick Tower, at the northern corner of the East Terrace. The King and Queen did not like this hole in the ground (which was also quite far from their rooms) and from early September 1940 they usually slept on the ground floor of the Victoria Tower (now Queen’s Tower) which had been protected outside by huge concrete frames filled with sand, while more extensive reinforcing works took place. The whole tower was clothed in scaffolding and a ten-inch raft of concrete, steel and asbestos was built across the roof, while the four rooms in the cellar were given added protection by constructing a four-feet-thick roof of concrete and girders across the ground floor. ‘At least there we can sleep undisturbed, unless we are attacked by dive bombers,’ the King wrote to Queen Mary. ‘We still have the deep underground shelter to go to as a last resort, which is safe.’143
In the early days of the war, the inhabitants of the Castle were alerted to air raids not only by outside sirens but also by loud electric bells which clanged through the corridors. In one early air raid everyone made their way to their shelters – everyone, that is, except the nine-year-old Princess Margaret. Then, according to Owen Morshead, ‘After a little time Miss Crawford was sent like the dove out of the ark to retrieve her, and after threading her way along endless deserted passages, she found the child still in her bedroom. She was on her knees before her chest of drawers, the room in disarray, hurriedly searching for a pair of knickers to go with her skirt.’144
Reminiscing later, Queen Elizabeth recalled that one of the Princesses’ nannies always wore a nightcap to the shelter – ‘I think she thought it was to be decent in the war.’ She herself wore a gown which Hartnell had made especially for air-raid nights, and he also made her a black-velvet case for her gas mask.145
Windsor was attacked on two consecutive nights in October 1940, although the Ca
stle was not hit. This, the Queen wrote to her sister May, was ‘the first time that the children had actually heard the whistle & scream of bombs. They were wonderful, & when I went to say good-night to Margaret in her bed, I said that I hoped she wasn’t frightened etc, & she said “Mummy, it was just like when you take a photograph that doesn’t come out – all grey & blurred, & you see several hands & arms instead of one”, & it is so true, really very much what one feels like.’146 After the raid, the Queen visited bombed areas of Windsor and followed up by sending blankets to some whose houses had been destroyed.
The Castle was never warm in winter – the high rooms were hard to heat, the wind whistled through the tall windows. The King would sometimes sit in his room with a travelling rug wrapped around his feet, having failed in every other way to cope with the draught along the floor. In an attempt to ease the cold, electric radiators were installed in the window bays.147
Now the western end of St George’s Hall boasted a temporary stage on which the two Princesses and their friends from time to time gave entertainments. They played the piano and tap-danced, and put on a performance of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party from Alice in Wonderland – Princess Margaret distinguished herself as the Dormouse. Among their constant audience was a company of Grenadier Guards, stationed in the Castle mews to protect the Royal Family. They were welcomed – otherwise the Princesses were often alone with their governesses, a Castle official and perhaps Gerald Kelly the portraitist.
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