* Soon after Victory in Europe Day in May 1945, Churchill praised the King for his weapons training and recalled that ‘if it had come to a last stand in London, a matter which had to be considered at one time, there is no doubt that His Majesty would have come very near departing from his usual constitutional rectitude by disregarding the advice of his Ministers’. In other words, the King would have wanted to fight the Germans himself rather than be taken to safety. (Hansard, 15 May 1945)
* The Coats Mission was commanded by Major James Coats (1894–1966), later third baronet. He married in 1917 Lady Amy Gordon-Lennox, a great friend of Queen Elizabeth all her life, and sister of Lady Doris Vyner. Another old friend of the Queen, Audrey Pleydell-Bouverie, née James, had been married to James’s brother Dudley.
* Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, newly arrived in Canada, where her husband had been appointed governor general, wrote to the Queen that it was ‘a bitter blow to the Monarchy … I am terribly grieved & it puts all of us Governors’ wives in a horrid position; we are supposed to stand for all that’s best in British home & social life, & now what’s the use – & how can we make any difference between people who place themselves outside the pale when one of the King’s representatives has a wife completely outside the pale.’ (11 July 1940, RA QEQM/PRIV/RF)
* One, Alfred Davies, died of his injuries later.
† Queen Elizabeth’s friend D’Arcy Osborne, then virtually imprisoned in Vatican City, was appalled when he heard on the BBC of the Palace bombing. Owen Chadwick, who recorded Osborne’s extraordinary wartime service in Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War, recounted, ‘When Buckingham Palace was bombed, Osborne went wild with rage (the only time in all these events, though not the only time he was angry) and persuaded the Pope to send the King and Queen a telegram of congratulation on their escape.’ (p. 137)
* In February 1941 Lord Woolton suggested to the Queen that a mobile canteen service to be dispatched to bombed areas of London should be named ‘The Queen’s Messengers’. She agreed, and in March formally accepted the first convoy of eighteen canteens sent to Buckingham Palace for her inspection. She later visited the Queen’s Messengers in operation at bomb sites. (Bodleian Library, MS Woolton 2)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
YEARS LIKE GREAT BLACK OXEN
1942–1945
‘My heart aches for our wonderful brave people’
THE SOMBRE, defensive and defiant mood of the war is caught in images of Windsor Castle. The Round Tower, Castle Hill and St George’s Gate stand darkly, dramatically brooding against an ever blacker sky. These were the wartime visions of the Castle painted by the artist John Piper at the request of the Queen. His watercolours were controversial at the time but they were immediately recognized as, and remain today, an extraordinary invocation of Britain at war – the age-old fortress of the monarch standing strong against the forces of darkness.1
It was the bombardment of London in 1940 and 1941 that inspired the Queen’s decision to have the Castle painted; she feared lest all or part of it be destroyed by the Germans. Her original idea, which she discussed with her friend Jasper Ridley, was to commission a series of watercolours ‘in the manner of Sandby’,2 who had painted 200 or so watercolours of the Castle during the reign of George III. Ridley consulted Kenneth Clark and together they introduced her to the work of John Piper at an exhibition at the National Gallery.* She liked what she saw and gave him the commission. Piper was honoured and excited. In all he produced twenty-six watercolours. They were not quite what the Queen had expected – indeed they were far removed from the meticulous topographical records of Paul Sandby. But they were a remarkable body of topographical draughtsmanship, which captured well the dark menace of the war. In the words of one art historian, ‘the towers of the Castle assume an eerie quality of animation, like sentinels beneath impending apocalyptic clouds’.3
The Queen herself seems to have been surprised. Nonetheless, she was pleased enough to ask Piper to do a second set of drawings and Clark wrote to her to say, ‘I have told Piper he must try a spring day & conquer his passion for putting grey architecture against black skies.’4 Such advice had little effect. When the second series was finally completed, Clark had to tell the Queen that ‘Black skies prevail, but the poor fellow has done his best to put in a little blue, & the general tone is less stormy.’5 Later, the King made a joke to the artist that became famous. As they looked at the pictures together, he said, ‘You seem to have had very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper.’6 This inspired the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster to paint a caricature of Piper sitting in the pouring rain as he drew, with the caption, ‘Mr Piper enjoying his usual luck with the weather.’7
Whatever the Queen’s original reservations may have been, she seems to have understood that she had commissioned a work of considerable importance – in the second half of her life she hung Piper’s paintings prominently in her London home and showed them to visitors with evident pleasure. Moreover she remained in friendly touch with Piper and in 1968 suggested that he should be invited to design the coloured-glass windows for the King George VI Memorial Chantry at St George’s Chapel.8
Piper’s work was only one of her artistic interests. The arts flourished during the war and the Queen was as involved as she could be. Her interest was not new. It had begun with her maternal grandmother, Mrs Scott, in whose Florentine home she had stayed as a child, and who took her to the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace. By the time the war began, the Queen had been a keen collector and patron of the arts for several years. Her tastes were not avant garde but they were progressive. In 1938 she had purchased Augustus John’s portrait of George Bernard Shaw; Kenneth Clark wrote to express his pleasure that she was buying the work of a living painter. ‘Under Your Majesty’s patronage British painters will have a new confidence, because you will make them feel that they are not working for a small clique but for the centre of the national life.’9 In an editorial The Times echoed Clark’s approval: ‘The Queen has decided that contemporary British painting matters … and it will be against all experience if, according to their means, the decision is not followed by many of her subjects – to the raising of the general level of taste, and to the practical advantage of good artists.’10
She relied heavily, as other royal patrons have done, on the advice of a few friends and experts, in particular Jasper Ridley and Clark, who was himself considered very modern at the time. During the war he gave great help to young British painters as chairman of the War Artists Advisory Committee. He devised a project called ‘Recording Britain’, financed by the Pilgrim Trust, to help landscape artists who might not otherwise find work. The Queen commended his efforts and he thanked her, saying that he thought that appreciation of art had actually increased during the war, partly as a result of the Queen’s own interest.11
In the middle of the war, she made one of her most important purchases – Landscape of the Vernal Equinox by Paul Nash. Ridley, who arranged the purchase, described Nash to her as the best ‘intellectual’ painter in England. It was a visionary painting of Wittenham Clumps, an ancient British camp in the Thames Valley, portrayed as in a dream, with the sun and moon together in the sky. Ridley commented that Nash put ‘brains and ideas’ into his paintings, and ‘when there is a gradually discovered meaning in a picture, it has the effect of MAGIC, as you say; and magic is an agreeable and domestic relic of the old old world, which is not the same thing as the grand new world’.12 Ridley’s remarks give an insight into the Queen’s own response to art – magic and a certain fey wistfulness had always been important to her. The picture kept its allure for her. ‘It’s a wonderful picture, imaginative and fascinating,’ she said to Eric Anderson many years later. Not all of her family were so sure – Princess Margaret recalled that ‘We said, poor Mummy’s gone mad. Look what she’s brought back. At the age of twelve we weren’t, I suppose, into that sort of thing.’13
*
THE ROYAL FAMILY spent the first three weeks of 1
942 at Appleton House near Sandringham. While they were there the Queen received her first ever food parcel. It was from J. P. Morgan, the American banker who had shot with them before the war. She wrote and thanked him, explaining that the cheese had caused the greatest stir and would always be most welcome as they never had any themselves, feeling it should be kept for the industrial workers. She feared that it would be a long time before they would meet again in the hills of Scotland. But ‘somehow the world seems to have balanced itself better with the United States in the fight against evil thinking and evil doing.’14
Similar confidence was expressed by Churchill when he saw the King on his return from his first visit to Roosevelt since America had entered the war. The King noted in his diary that Churchill told him ‘he was confident now of ultimate victory, as USA were longing to get to grips with the enemy & were starting on a full output of men & material. UK & USA were now “married” after many months of “walking out”.’15
But it would be a long time before the marriage bore obvious fruit. The first half of 1942 was terrible for the Allies. German U-boats sank more and more American and British ships in the North Atlantic, and in February 1942 the German naval command was able to run three heavy warships, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen, out of Brest and right up the Channel home into German waters, despite sustained British air assault upon them. As Churchill had predicted, worse was to come. With Malaya overrun by the Japanese, Singapore, the Far Eastern jewel in the imperial crown, surrendered to the enemy on 15 February. Eighty thousand British soldiers there were taken prisoner. The King and Queen were already feeling the effects of so much bad news. ‘Bertie & I have been very tired & troubled of late,’ the Queen acknowledged to her mother-in-law. But she still insisted on keeping faith: ‘one must have confidence in the good sense & wonderful fighting spirit of this wonderful people of ours.’16
Even at the darkest moments of the war, humour remained important to her, as it did to most of the British people. Writing to Elizabeth Elphinstone, now working as a nurse in Edinburgh, about her making a trip south, she said,
I rang up old Hitler, & quite politely asked him to make up his mind for once and all about his beastly old invasion. If he wasn’t going to risk it, well & good, but if he was going to come, well, for goodness sake he must decide – now. I told him, that apart from the trouble of having to mine the beaches, and the perpetual sharpening of the Home Guards’ pikes, that my niece Miss E was having her plans held up, and she really must be considered a little.
After a good deal of havering and evasions, I pinned him down to saying that the end of March was O.K., so that you will be able to come South with a clear conscience and no risk of being cut off from your hospital & kin and kith … I shall look forward to seeing you so VERY much. I am afraid that London is rather gloomy, with nobody to ring up or to go & see. Sometimes one feels quite lonely, it is so rare to see a friend, but how very exciting when one dear old face turns up!17
There was one happy family moment that spring. Princess Elizabeth, who was nearly sixteen, was to be confirmed. Her parents asked Cosmo Lang, about to retire as Archbishop of Canterbury, to carry out the service. Lang had been publicly much criticized for his alleged ‘cant’ at the time of the abdication, but the Royal Family relied upon him. Queen Mary described him as ‘our friend in weal & woe’.18 The service, on 28 March in the Private Chapel at Windsor Castle, was simple and touching. The family were all moved by the young Princess taking her solemn vows before the old Archbishop. The Queen thought Lang was ‘wonderful, so straightforward and so inspiring’, and was sad that this would be his last appearance at a family festival.19
On Easter Sunday the Princess took her First Communion. She walked with her parents, on ‘a deliciously clear early morning’, from Royal Lodge to the Royal Chapel, the little church just beyond the garden. Then they came home to breakfast. ‘It was so nice to be together & quiet after these years of war & turmoil & perpetual anxiety, for even a few moments of true peace,’ the Queen wrote to Queen Mary. She said that she had learned that ‘peace is only of the mind really. If only we can bring a true peace to this poor suffering world after this War is over, well, all the anguish & sorrow will have been worth while.’20
Much as the Queen regretted the departure of Cosmo Lang, so long both friend and spiritual adviser, it was at this time that she began to find a kindred spirit in Edward Woods, the Bishop of Lichfield. He was to become, in the words of a member of her family, ‘her personal Bishop’ for many years, and he helped both her and the King with speeches. In early May 1942 he came to preach at Windsor and stayed with the King and Queen for the weekend. ‘We talked on many subjects & he has got the right ideas,’ the King recorded in his diary;21 afterwards Bishop Woods wrote to the Queen saying he had been impressed by her interest in prayer and healing, and would send her some of his writings on the subject. He agreed with her about ‘the need of an occasional “retreat” or quiet day, in which to recover one’s soul & spiritual balance’.22
The place of God in this war was, of course, a matter of anxious debate, at least among committed Christians like the Queen. Later in the year Woods recommended that she read Romans 8,* ‘that never failing fount of comfort & strength’. He thought that all the suffering of the war would be utterly unbearable ‘unless one cd be sure – and every Christian can be sure – that God is down in the midst of it all, & that out of all this raw material of evil He is creating something good’.23 The Queen agreed with this. She believed, like many, that the war between Britain and Germany was between a nation that was still fundamentally Christian and one which had abandoned faith for godless ‘materialism’. The horrors of fascism showed what could happen when a great nation forsook the teachings of Christ. She had always found both strength and comfort in prayer; the suffering and the fears of war made her, and the King, more devout. It was not unusual. Churches were much fuller during the war than they had been in the late 1930s.
The Queen worried about the divine purpose constantly and she prayed every day. She continued to correspond with the Bishop of Lichfield on private spiritual matters as well as on the broader subject that preoccupied them both – how to renew the influence of Christianity in the life of the nation, and particularly through education.† He sent her many books. In one of his letters to her Woods wrote, ‘I think many people are needlessly fearful about the Church “interfering in politics”, hardly perhaps realising that, if Christianity is true, then it must affect – and redeem – a man’s environment, the whole framework of his life, as well as his “soul”.’24 It was a view which she shared.
Disasters continued. The Japanese swept the Allies out of the Philippines and the South Pacific, they captured Burma and they positioned themselves at the gates of India. At the end of April 1942 the Luftwaffe began a series of attacks on England’s heritage which became known as the Baedeker Raids. These bombing assaults were directed at such historic towns as Exeter, Bath, Norwich, York and Canterbury – ancient towns which had no war industries and which were targets only for cultural assault.
Over 1,500 people were killed in these raids; the King and Queen were outraged by the destruction.25 Visiting Exeter after two nights of bombing, they walked through the ruins of one of the oldest cities in England; it had been hit on two separate nights, the main street was smashed to pieces, three historic buildings, five churches, St Luke’s College and the old City Hospital (built in 1700) were demolished, and so were at least 2,000 houses.26
Their visit to Bath made a considerable impression upon a young schoolboy, Raymond Leppard, who later became an international conductor and a friend of Queen Elizabeth. They went all around Bath, he wrote, ‘climbing over rubble, talking to everyone, unguarded and caringly sympathetic’. Leppard was serving meals at an improvised soup kitchen for the homeless and saw the ‘magical and powerful’ effect they had. ‘At that moment they were the symbol of the spirit of England and people’s contact with it uplifted hearts and th
e triumph of good was assured.’27 With Queen Mary they watched a demonstration of a tank battle by the Guards Armoured Division; the Queen was impressed, but was reminded of the realities of warfare. ‘I cannot bear to think what they must be going through in Libya, fighting this terrible battle in the burning heat,’ she wrote.28
One of the Queen’s regiments, the Queen’s Bays, was deployed in North Africa. It had arrived in the desert in December 1941 and suffered considerable losses of men and tanks when trying to stem Rommel’s advance north of Jedabya at the end of January 1942. From there, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Draffen wrote to Arthur Penn with news for the Queen of their actions and casualties. Penn wrote back saying that the Queen shared their sorrow over the dead, and anxiety for the missing. She regularly wore the regimental brooch which the officers had given her and ‘She charges me to send you all every possible good wish and to assure you of her constant thoughts.’29
At the beginning of June 1942 they were in Scotland; the King inspected the fleet and the Queen went to the Palace of Holyrood-house which had had its windows broken, but no worse, by nearby bombing. They then spent two days on the royal train in Cambridgeshire visiting RAF stations.
They were able to relax at the Oaks and the Derby, being run at Newmarket, and the King was delighted that his filly Sun Chariot won the Oaks. But the Derby was a disappointment. His runner, Big Game, was described by the Queen as ‘such a beautiful & kindly disposed animal, as well as a good race horse!’ but he faded.30
That month there was another disaster in North Africa – the strategic Libyan port of Tobruk, which had been captured by British forces in January 1941, fell after a week’s siege. Rommel was then able to push eastwards to Egypt. The news reached Britain on a perfect summer’s day; the King was depressed and worried about what it would mean for all the British troops deployed there.31
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