The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  At the end of June the King and Queen made an official visit to Ulster where they stayed with their friends, the Duke and Duchess of Abercorn. At Harland and Wolff’s shipyard they were mobbed by a boisterous, happy crowd.32 The next day came a visit to a new and vital installation – the United States army camp near Ballykinler. There they saw some of the troops who had been shipped across the ocean since the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were impressed by the charm and intelligence of the officers and by their excellent equipment, especially ‘a remarkable little portable wireless sending and receiving set, which they call a “walkie talkie” ’.33

  Back in England the Queen made more visits to war-related organizations, including the Red Cross, the ATS units in South-East Command (where she was pleased by the improvement in morale since the year before),34 the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, the Clothing Branch of the Officers’ Families Fund at the Royal School of Needlework (an organization in which she had a lifelong interest). In North Wales she and the King visited aircraft factories and steelworks and saw the oak tree in which King Charles had hidden at Boscobel. In Lichfield they visited the Cathedral and had tea with the Queen’s new mentor, the Bishop Edward Woods. She was pleased to discover that he had three sons in the Church.35

  That summer, her goddaughter Elizabeth, Doris and Clare Vyner’s daughter, who had just joined the Wrens, died after a harrowing two-week struggle with meningitis. Both the King and Queen wrote the Vyners heartfelt letters of condolence.36 Then on 25 August 1942 came a family tragedy.

  The King and Queen were at Balmoral. That day the weather was appalling and in the evening while they were dining with their guests the King was called to the telephone. He came back to the table in clear distress and passed a card to the Queen on which he had written in pencil, ‘Darling, what shall we do about ending dinner? I am afraid George has been killed flying to Iceland. He left Invergordon at 1.30 pm & hit a mountain near Wick.’37 The Queen caught the eye of the Duchess of Gloucester, who was sitting next to the King, and signalled her to rise with the other ladies and leave the room. ‘In the drawing room,’ the Duchess said later, ‘we all assumed the news must be of Queen Mary’s death … Then the Queen left us and came back with the King who told us that it was the Duke of Kent who had been killed.’38

  The war had brought out the best in the Duke. He had asked to be given military duties, and was created an air commodore in the Royal Air Force. His task was to oversee and inspect RAF facilities both at home and abroad. In 1941 he had visited the Canadian flying schools which were training pilots for the defence of Britain, and had journeyed also to the United States where President and Mrs Roosevelt were charmed by him. On the day he died he was aboard a Sunderland flying boat bound from Invergordon to an RAF base in Iceland. The plane should not have taken off in such poor conditions. Flying too low in thick fog it hit the top of a hill on the Duke of Portland’s Langwell estate. All sorts of conspiracy theories have since been attached to the Duke’s death but it seems to have been a simple case of pilot error.

  The King and Queen were both distraught. The King confided to his diary that, at the funeral four days later in St George’s Chapel, he had great difficulty in preventing himself from breaking down. No other family funeral had affected him so much.39 The Queen knew that she too would miss the Duke greatly. She thought of him more as a brother than a brother-in-law – ‘I could talk to him about many family affairs for he had a quick & sensitive mind & a very good & useful social sense, & we had a great many jokes too.’40 To her brother David in Washington, she wrote that the Duke’s death was ‘such a dreadful waste, and he was doing such very good work, and becoming so helpful to Bertie. We shall miss him very much.’41

  A real question now was how best to help the Duke’s widow, Princess Marina. The King, trying to assuage her grief, arranged for her sister, Princess Olga of Yugoslavia, then in exile in South Africa with her husband Prince Paul, to come and stay with Princess Marina at her home, Coppins, in Buckinghamshire. This was far from simple because Prince Paul was now regarded as a man who had collaborated with the Germans. Both women were grateful.42

  Queen Mary was especially affected – George was her favourite son. She was moved to receive a ‘most dear telegram’ from her eldest son, the Duke of Windsor, asking for details of what had happened.43 She replied in an eight-page letter, the first lines of which illustrated her deep sorrow: ‘Most darling David, In this terrible hour of grief at the passing of our darling precious Georgie, my thoughts go out to you, who are so far away from us all, knowing how devoted you were to him.’ At the end of this letter she wrote, ‘I send a kind message to your wife who will help you to bear your sorrow.’44

  The Duke replied by hand, and when his mother saw his writing after so many years, she ‘gave a gasp of pleasure’, she told him.45 He thanked her for her sweet letter and said that but for Wallis’s love and comfort he would have felt very lost. Apparently still unable to comprehend the evil against which Britain was fighting, he said he thought George’s death had brought home ‘the utter useless cruelty of this ghastly war’. He still had the ‘deep-rooted conviction’ that it could have been avoided, but he realized that it could not now end until German plans for world domination had been frustrated. He was greatly pained by the six-year split with his mother and he still hoped that it could be mended and that he could bring Wallis to see her. ‘I can never begin to tell you how intensified has become our great love for each other in the five years we have been married.’46

  To his brother the King, the Duke wrote more harshly about the King’s ‘attitude’ towards him. He added of their mother, ‘She is certainly a most courageous and noble person and it is hard that in her later years, she should have yet another great and bitter blow to bear. Her fortitude is indeed an example to us all.’47 The King sent this letter to their mother; Queen Mary copied out these words and added, ‘I think this was very touching & nice of David.’48

  Queen Mary, happy that ‘the ice has at last been broken’, was optimistic that the family crisis was finally past and that relations with the Duke could be more amiable in future.49 However, within a few weeks, the Duke had written to the Prime Minister to ask once more that the title of HRH be ‘restored’ to his wife.50 Churchill consulted the King, who wrote to his mother that he thought it was impossible ‘to reverse a decision taken with much thought only 6 years ago. Elizabeth agrees with this too. Time is a great healer we know but this is not the moment I feel to rake up the past. This worry coming on top of all one’s other work is too bad.’51 Queen Mary agreed with the King and Queen that ‘this tiresome question’ of the Duchess’s title should not be raised again.52

  The strain of these weeks told upon the Queen. After the Duke of Kent’s funeral she returned to Balmoral and took to her bed with a bad cold which developed into bronchitis; she had to cancel all her engagements for several weeks. The Queen was broad minded in her choice of medical treatment. Since her marriage she had, under the influence of Dr John Weir, come to share the Royal Family’s faith in homeopathy. Throughout her life she would hand out arnica tablets to anyone with a bruise or worse. She described the homeopathic philosophy thus to Osbert Sitwell: ‘the approach to illness is intelligent and each individual is treated as a person & not only as an interesting case of so and so. If it comes off, the treatment seems very successful, but of course it can be rather slow.’53 Not everyone at Court was persuaded about the success of Dr Weir’s methods. Tommy Lascelles wrote of him, ‘I’ve known him now for over twenty years, and at one time allowed him to dose me with some of his curious little powders. I like him as a man; as a healer of the sick, how much of him is Aesculapius and how much Quack, I have never been able to determine.’54

  The Queen was not dogmatic about homeopathy; she also accepted the advances of modern medicine. In one of her wartime bouts of tonsillitis, Dr Miles of Forfar, in whom she had confidence, gave her a new drug, M&B, which, she said, ‘eats up the bad germs like ligh
tning’.55*

  In September 1942 Mrs Ronnie Greville died. She had good qualities and remarkable energy, but her snobbery, her anti-Semitism and her partiality for Hitler in the 1930s had made her many enemies. She had been a generous friend to the King and Queen for almost twenty years and the Queen admired her tenacity. She told Osbert Sitwell: ‘I shall miss her very much indeed, (as I know you will, for she was truly devoted to you), she was so shrewd, so kind, so amusingly unkind, so sharp, such fun, so naughty … and altogether a real person, a character, utterly Mrs Ronald Greville and no tinge of anything alien.’56 Sitwell wrote to the Queen to describe Mrs Greville’s funeral at Polesden Lacey – he found it a sad occasion, because she had no near relations. The Queen, touched by Sitwell’s letter, remembered all the long-ago, carefree weekends at the house – ‘they seem so far off and delectable.’57

  A few days later the Queen learned to her surprise that, while leaving Polesden Lacey to the National Trust, Mrs Greville had left her jewellery to her – including a magnificent diamond necklace that was said to have belonged to Marie Antoinette. She had also left £20,000 to Princess Margaret.58 The Queen was very touched by her bequest from ‘the dear old thing’, she told Queen Mary, admitting that she admired beautiful stones – ‘I can’t help thinking that most women do!’59 Her mother-in-law was not above a tease, and responded that no one had ever left her such jewellery, ‘but I am not really jealous, I just mention this as it came into my mind!’60*

  Resting in bed at Balmoral was in a way welcome – ‘the first time that I have been laid aside in peace & quiet since the war. I needed it very badly, & it was heaven seeing nobody at all except a nice tactful nurse & a Scottish doctor or two.’61 At the end of September, Dr Weir recommended another fortnight convalescing. She clearly needed it – and wrote to Arthur Penn that she had ‘narrowly escaped death from the antidote to pneumonia’.62

  While she was unwell, she read widely. Alongside her abiding love of P. G. Wodehouse, who always cheered her up, she was now also much taken with Damon Runyon – indeed she and Arthur Penn appreciated Runyonesque repartee. In one letter to him she showed that she was on the road to recovery; thanking him for a book, she wrote, ‘The author definitely knows his potatoes, and I think the whole story is absolutely the berries. The way that dame Pearl gets a ripple on, there was a baby for you – oh boy.’63

  Books were always companions, and others that she enjoyed during the war included some by Robert Louis Stevenson, William Beckford’s Travels and ‘heavenly stories’ by F. Marion Crawford, a nineteenth-century American author of adventure novels. She was not impressed by a few unidentified ‘horrid modern books by horrid journalists’.64 She exchanged books with Tommy Lascelles – he sent her one of Eric Ambler’s thrillers, Epitaph for a Spy, and she lent him Sir Richard Burton’s Wife by the explorer’s great-niece, Jean Burton.65 Osbert Sitwell sent her the typescript of the first volume of his autobiography. The Queen told him she loved it and it had done her the world of good – ‘I immediately felt better after the first chapter, & called for a steak half way through the second, and have never looked back since.’66

  Following the daily news of the war, she wrote to the King, ‘It is really terrible what the Germans are doing now in Europe, they seem to have lost every vestige of decent behaviour … their true nature is coming out. Beasts.’ She thought the German treatment of Allied prisoners at Dieppe was ‘pure barbarism’ but it was a great mistake for the British to indulge in any tit-for-tat behaviour.* ‘Because they murder & rob, is no reason why we should follow their bad example. I was very distressed when I read it in the paper.’67

  *

  LIKE WINSTON CHURCHILL, the King and Queen both knew that nothing was more vital to Britain than the United States. General de Gaulle claimed that Churchill had once told him that he woke up every morning wondering how that day he could please President Roosevelt.68 At the end of their American visit in summer 1939, the King and Queen had invited the Roosevelts to visit Britain. But the impetus for a trip came from the President himself. Sumner Welles, the Under Secretary of State, told Lord Halifax that the President would like his wife to go to Britain to see as much as possible of the work of the Women’s Voluntary Service. They asked for an invitation to be extended by the Queen. She quickly sent a formal message to Mrs Roosevelt saying, ‘The King and I would be so pleased if you would care to pay a visit to England in the near future to see something of the varied war activities in which the women of Great Britain are now engaged.’69

  The visit was fixed for the middle of October 1942, but to the Queen’s embarrassment it had to be delayed because of her illness.70 She finally returned from the peaceful beauty of the Highlands to the grime of wartime London on the night of 19 October. Writing to Queen Mary to tell her of Mrs Roosevelt’s imminent arrival, she said, ‘The whole affair is such a deadly secret owing to the flying risk’; she hoped the President’s wife could spend a night with Queen Mary at Badminton. ‘It is so dreary at Buckingham Palace, so dirty & dark and draughty,’ and she felt very sorry for the housekeeper and the maids who had to keep a half-ruined house halfway presentable.71 She decided to lend Mrs Roosevelt her own bedroom; she had had some small sheets of isinglass put into the window frames whose larger panes had been blown out. The preparations showed her that it was quite difficult putting up even a single guest in the Palace at this time. Fortunately Mrs Roosevelt travelled very simply, with just one secretary.72

  The President’s wife was delayed by bad weather, and finally arrived in London on 23 October; the King and Queen met her at Paddington station and took her to tea at the Palace with the Princesses. Eleanor Roosevelt found Princess Elizabeth ‘very attractive, quite serious, with a good deal of character. She asked a great deal of questions about life’ in the United States.73 Mrs Roosevelt was far from demanding, but she was shocked by the conditions in which Britons had to live, even in the Palace. The Queen showed her to her rooms and Mrs Roosevelt observed the draughts, the lack of window panes and the black line painted around the bath showing just how little water was allowed to be drawn. In her diary she wrote that the Palace was ‘an enormous place and without heat. I do not see how they keep the dampness out.’74

  That night the King and the Queen gave a dinner for her – the Churchills, Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food, General Smuts and the Mountbattens were among the guests. Woolton told her that the indifferent food – fishcakes, cold chicken and ham with salad and two vegetables – was much the same as would be found in any house in England, and would have shocked the King’s grandfather. Mrs Roosevelt did note, however, that it was served on gold and silver plate.75

  The food may not have been memorable but there was a great air of excitement at the Palace that evening. General Montgomery had that day launched at El Alamein the offensive that would eventually destroy German power in North Africa. The Prime Minister was understandably distracted. Even the showing of the new Noël Coward film, In Which We Serve, a hymn to the courage of the navy based on Louis Mountbatten’s command of HMS Kelly, did not divert him. He was, according to Tommy Lascelles, ‘like a cat on hot bricks’ waiting for news from the desert battlefield;76 he finally telephoned 10 Downing Street himself and, on hearing that the initial reports were favourable, came back to the party singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ with great enthusiasm and rather less sense of tune.77 Britain’s first victory in three years of warfare was close at hand.

  Next day the King and Queen took their American visitor to a lunch attended by heads of British women’s services and organizations. Conscription of women under thirty had been introduced at the end of 1941 – they were allowed to choose between the auxiliary services and industrial jobs. The mobilization had been remarkable: according to figures sent to the Queen subsequently by Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour and National Service, fully 90 per cent of single women between the ages of eighteen and forty were now employed in industry, civil defence or the forces and the corresponding figure for
married women with children under fourteen was no less than 76 per cent.78

  That afternoon the King and Queen took their guest by car to see St Paul’s Cathedral and many of the bomb-damaged areas in the City and East End of London. Eleanor Roosevelt was stunned. London, she said, ‘is flat for blocks’. She realized that parts of the world’s common heritage had been destroyed, but most shocking of all to her were the countless homes which had been razed.

  The following day Mrs Roosevelt left the Palace to embark on an arduous tour of Britain, both to visit American camps and airfields and to see how the British were facing the hardship of war in factories and bombed towns all over the country, talking to hundreds of people. She had a sense of the cold, of the shortages, of the blackout and, particularly extraordinary to an American, of the terrifying nearness of the enemy. It was ‘a curious feeling’, she said, to stand at Dover and see the enemy lines just a few miles across the Channel. She was struck by English stoicism and enthusiasm and by how everyone contributed to one goal – victory. She found enormous gratitude for American help and everyone, she said, was welcoming to American soldiers.79

  Mrs Roosevelt travelled extensively, and visited Queen Mary at Badminton. ‘I liked her, she is so nice & very intelligent, has a wonderful grasp of things & is evidently impressed at what our women are doing – what a good thing she came over to see things for herself,’ wrote Queen Mary.80 Lascelles commented of the President’s wife, ‘she looks like a she-camel, and is tough; but I like her, and see dignity, even greatness in her.’81 The Queen thought her guest charming, understanding of and sympathetic to ‘our ideals & difficulties’.82