The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  There was only one minor irritation provoked by Mrs Roosevelt’s visit: she tried – and failed – to persuade the Queen to grant an interview to a friend of hers who was also in London, Mrs Bruce Gould, of the American magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal. The Foreign Office supported the idea with vigour but the Queen had no such wish. Tommy Lascelles wrote succinctly in his diary that Americans failed to recognize the unique position of the King and Queen. It would be no more appropriate for them to give interviews than it would be for the Pope to go to a race meeting, or the President to a bawdy house. He thought the British public had no time for a ‘chatty’ monarch – indeed that was why Edward VIII could never have made a good king.83

  Back in the White House Mrs Roosevelt gave a press conference in which she said she had been greatly impressed by the fact that in Britain ‘there is only one thing in everyone’s mind, and that is “we are fighting the war”,’ whereas in America there was much less pressure. She also noted how standards of living had fallen for everyone; ‘for instance, in Buckingham Palace, they will not light a fire in the fireplace until December 1st. That’s the uniform rule.’84 The war, she thought, was changing Britain fundamentally and it would never be able to ‘go back to the old system. The change is in the whole old social scale. Certain types of living will never be possible again. The people are now working side by side, getting to know each other well, as they never did before, from all classes.’ She thought the length of the war still to come depended on how much Americans were prepared to sacrifice to help.85

  Lascelles sent a transcript of this press conference to the Queen, who thought that her guest had drawn ‘quite a good & sober picture of this incredibly gallant country’. Mrs Roosevelt, she thought, had wisely understated the hardships and sacrifices because she did not want to appear too pro-British.86

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  ON TUESDAY 3 NOVEMBER the Prime Minister was due at the Palace for his weekly lunchtime discussion with the King and Queen. Churchill endeavoured not to be late for his King, but this lunchtime he was delayed and, the Queen later told his daughter Mary, the King became irritated.87 Eventually the Prime Minister arrived at the Palace, carrying before him a red dispatch box. He strode towards the King, bowed and made an extraordinary announcement. ‘He said’, the King recorded in his diary, ‘ “I bring you victory.” ’88 The Queen was astonished. ‘I remember we looked at each other,’ said the Queen later, ‘and we thought, “Is he going mad?” ’ She added, ‘We had not heard that word since the war began.’89

  Churchill knew what he was saying. The King was overjoyed by the contents of the dispatch box. He wrote in his diary that night that it contained two top-secret intercepted ‘Boniface’ radio signals from Rommel to Hitler.* In these messages, wrote the King, ‘Rommel gave Hitler a very depressing account of the battle in Egypt from his point of view. He was greatly outnumbered by troops & tanks & armoured vehicles, & was short of petrol & ammunition in the forward areas & in the rear areas there was none … This is very good news … What rejoicing there will be.’90

  Whether or not the Queen was privy to the closely guarded and vital secrets about British decryption of German messages cannot be known. It may be doubted that they were revealed to her. But they were revealed to the King, and he took her into his confidence on almost every matter during the war. Indeed, given the closeness of their relationship it would have been strange if he had not done so. Long afterwards, when asked if she had shared the King’s wartime burdens and whether he had told her much, she replied, ‘Oh yes, he told me everything. Well one had to, you see, because you couldn’t not, in a way. There was only us there. So obviously he had to tell one things. But one was so dreadfully discreet, that even now I feel nervous sometimes, about talking about things. You know, you knew something and you couldn’t say a word about it, when you heard people talking absolute nonsense.’91

  Next day, 4 November 1942, the King received another welcome telegram. General Alexander, Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, cabled Churchill that after twelve days of heavy & violent fighting the Eighth Army had inflicted a heavy defeat on Rommel’s forces at El Alamein. Churchill sent Alexander’s telegram to the King, who pinned it into his diary, in which he wrote that day: ‘A Victory at last. How good it is for the nerves.’92 That night, when a BBC announcer interrupted programming to advise listeners that the best news for years would be broadcast at midnight, his voice was said to be trembling with excitement.93

  Alamein was a catharsis. But of course the thousands of personal tragedies continued. That same day the Queen had to send condolences to her friends the Halifaxes in Washington – their son Peter had been killed in the fighting in Egypt.94 Dorothy Halifax thanked her for her sympathy and, with the stoicism which so many people displayed during the war, replied, ‘We now rejoice with Your Majesties at the good news of the battle in Egypt in which Peter was allowed to play a small part.’95

  When the scale of the victory at El Alamein was confirmed and the success of American and British landings in Morocco and Algeria – Operation Torch – became clear, Churchill warned against euphoria. ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’96 Some rejoicing was called for and the government ordered that church bells, silenced since June 1940, be rung in celebration. Nothing symbolized better the renewal of hope than the bells pealing from towers and spires in every parish of the land.

  In 1943 Stalin began to inflict serious defeats upon the Germans in Russia. Britain and America made more and more progress in North Africa. On 4 February, General Alexander sent his celebrated telegram to the Prime Minister: ‘SIR, The orders you gave me on August 15, 1942 have been fulfilled. His Majesty’s enemies, together with their impedimenta, have been completely eliminated from Egypt, Cyrenaica, Libya and Tripolitana. I now await your further instructions.’97 The next instruction was to inflict total defeat on the Axis forces still in Africa. This was finally achieved with the surrender of the last-remaining enemy troops on 13 May 1943. ‘It is an overwhelming victory,’ wrote the King.98

  The Queen was both infected and a little concerned by the new optimism. ‘I am sure that this year is going to be a difficult one,’ she wrote to Osbert Sitwell, ‘because everyone is expecting so much. I am always a little alarmed when a sense of optimism sweeps the country, tho’ I have infinite trust in the level heads of the Britons who live in these Islands.’ She was more concerned about the perhaps inevitable disagreements between Britain and her allies. She had appreciated the ‘arm-stretching sensation of freedom and independence’ of the terrifying days when Britain was alone in 1940. Now she was ‘conscious of a closing in of too many countries with all their jealousies, bitternesses, & unintelligent criticisms, and yet this must be a wrong feeling, for it is so very important to keep together & work together to win the peace.’99

  Relationships among the Allies were certainly changing and not to Britain’s advantage. At the Casablanca meeting with Roosevelt in January 1943, Churchill persuaded the American President that the cross-Channel invasion of Europe would have to be postponed till 1944, and in the meantime the Mediterranean campaign should be emphasized, with an invasion of Sicily. From now on the overwhelming might of America and the increasing power of Russia combined to diminish British influence among the ‘Big Three’.100

  The Queen continued her visits to places, people and institutions involved in the war effort, often with the King, sometimes alone. At the end of January they visited aerodromes around Norwich. They found it an interesting day, much less formal than usual, the King noted in his diary. They listened as four pilots were briefed for a mission over Holland in low-flying Typhoons and then watched them take off. Fog forced them back. At Ludham they met No. 167 Squadron, ‘& while we were there one of the pilots returned having just shot down his first Junkers 88. We were all thrilled but he was quite calm.’101

  As the Allies made progress in different theatres on the ground, so the Luftwaff
e attacks on Britain were stepped up again. The Queen was appalled – ‘They are dropping bombs just anywhere.’ On 4 February 1943 she visited Lewisham Hospital to see the children who had survived an attack on a school; she took them some bananas that Lord Louis Mountbatten had brought from Casablanca for her daughters.* The sight of these children touched and horrified her. ‘It made me all the more determined to beat those unspeakable Huns, to see those little faces, so good and so hurt for the sake of Nazi propaganda. I grind my teeth with rage. But it happens every day – pure murder.’102 On another occasion, she recalled later, she met a woman in the East End ‘leaning on what was left of her little gate. The house in fact had gone behind her. And she said to me, “We’re not going to be done in by that there ’itler.” I remember it quite vividly.’103

  In recent months the Queen, like many others, had become more and more aware of the scale of Nazi evil. The German regime had, since January 1942, institutionalized and quickened their attempt to liquidate all the Jews in Europe. The precise plans were secret, but Hitler publicly made his intentions clear.† He had told a huge crowd of cheering supporters in Berlin that the result of the war would be ‘the complete annihilation of the Jews’.104

  News of these diabolical efforts had begun to emerge in the course of 1942. In early December the Queen received a telegram from several women’s organizations in Jerusalem, imploring her to use her influence to awaken the conscience of the world and help save the Jewish people from extinction by the ‘Nazi Moloch’. At the same time Harriet Cohen, CBE, a well-known concert pianist, wrote requesting the Queen’s intercession on behalf of ‘the (entire) European Jews – children old people & men & women; 5,000,000 of whom, by Xmas – i.e. in three weeks time will be exterminated in the Abattoirs, the slaughter-houses (literally) in Poland’. She pointed out that ‘If a whole race can be exterminated it means there can be no truth in what we are fighting for. Will Your Majesty use Your Loving Interest, that Maternal Kindness for which your Subjects literally adore Your Majesty, to intercede with the King’s Ministers – and the world’s Rulers (Allied & Neutral) for the Jews.’105 There is no record of what action the Queen took in response to this particular request. But she had become increasingly appalled by German conduct. In October 1942 she had written to Queen Mary, ‘Is it not terrible the way the Germans are behaving all over Europe. The mask is off at last, & the true savagery is emerging.’106

  In December 1942 the government published, with its American and Soviet counterparts, a Joint Declaration condemning ‘in the strongest possible terms’ what it described as ‘this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination’. In Parliament on 17 December the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden read out the Declaration himself, stating that he regretted having to inform the House that Jews in occupied Europe were being subjected to ‘barbarous and inhuman treatment’. The House then stood in a two-minute silent tribute.

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  RADIO WAS AN immensely important weapon of war. The BBC was used most effectively by Churchill, whose ringing invocations of the spirit of victory were vital to national morale. Broadcasts by the King and Queen were more rare but they too played a crucial role in sustaining the conviction that the nation was united around a just and essential cause. Neither of them did it lightly, the King because of his stammer, the Queen because she found the writing of any broadcast something of an ordeal. Tommy Lascelles commented that she had ‘a great dislike of being what she calls “turned on like a tap”; moreover, she demands a considerable time for preparation & reflection before making any sort of public utterance’.107 But in early 1943 she agreed to broadcast again to the women of the Empire and agonized over what to say.

  The Queen was socially conservative and did not want the war to revolutionize women or indeed to revolutionize anything. Thus she wrote to Alec Hardinge, ‘one would like to congratulate women on the way they are tackling men’s jobs, & yet they must be ready to stand down (& by) after the war’.108 To Cosmo Lang, the retired Archbishop of Canterbury, she said that she wanted both ‘to praise & urge on to war work, & yet remind that the home & preferably a Christian one is more important than anything else’.109

  She sought the help of her spiritual adviser the Bishop of Lichfield, but a week before the broadcast was due she was still not happy and showed it to Tommy Lascelles, asking that he do anything, ‘however drastic, to give it a little punch’.110* He agreed that the draft was poor and sat up till 2 a.m. writing another three pages which he then returned to the Queen.111 She adapted and adopted some of his ideas and then sent the new version to Churchill who made his own suggestions, which she liked.112

  In the final version, which was broadcast on 11 April 1943, she started by saying that she wanted this talk to be a meeting between herself and ‘my fellow-countrywomen all over the world’. She did not have a special message but there was something deep in her heart that she knew that they should be told – ‘and probably I am the best person to do it.’ Sometimes, after reading a book that inspired hope and courage, she continued, ‘we have wished that, though we are strangers to him, we could meet the author and tell him how much we admire his work, and how grateful we are for it.’ In the same way,

  I would like to meet you, this Sunday night. For you, though you may not realise it, have done work as great as any book that ever was written; you too, in these years of tragedy and glory, of crushing sorrow and splendid achievement, have earned the gratitude and admiration of all mankind; and I am sure that every man who is doing his man’s share in the grim task of winning this war, would agree that it is high time that someone told you so.

  Women might feel that she was exaggerating, and ask what they had done compared with what their men had endured ‘dodging submarines in the Atlantic or chasing Rommel across Africa’. But they had given all that was good in themselves to the same cause, ‘our cause, the cause of Right against Wrong’. Women’s work, she said, was:

  just as valuable, just as much ‘war-work’ as that which is done by the bravest soldier, sailor or airman who actually meets the enemy in battle.

  And have you not met that enemy too? You have endured his bombs; you have helped put out the fires he has kindled in our homes; you have tended those he has maimed; brought strength to those he has bereaved … in a hundred ways you have filled the places of the men who have gone away to fight; and, coping uncomplainingly with all the tedious difficulties of war-time – you … have kept their homes for them against the blessed day when they come back.

  In a paragraph added by Churchill, she said, ‘Many there are whose homes have been shattered by the fire of the enemy. The dwellings can be rebuilt, but nothing can restore the family circle if a dear one has gone for-ever from it. A firm faith in reunion beyond this world of space and time, and a fortitude born of the resolve to do one’s duty and carry on to the end, are true consolations. I pray they may not be denied to all who have suffered & mourn.’

  The Queen went on to say that all women loved their family life, homes and children and so did their men. ‘These men – both at home and abroad – are counting on us at all times to be steadfast and faithful.’ Women as home-makers had a great part to play in rebuilding family life as soon as the war ended, but it should be done on the strength of spiritual life. If ‘the years to come are to see some real spiritual recovery, the women of our Nation must be deeply concerned with Religion, and our homes the very place where it should start; it is the creative and dynamic power of Christianity which can help us to carry the moral responsibilities which history is placing upon our shoulders. If our homes can be truly Christian, then the influence of that spirit will assuredly spread like leaven through all the aspects of our common life, industrial, social and political.’ She thanked people for their prayers for her and the King and their family. ‘We need them and try to live up to them. And we also pray that God will bless and guide our people in this Country and in our great family throughout the Empire, and will lead us forward, united and strong, into
the paths of victory and peace.’113

  It was all in all a formidable statement of her beliefs in the Christian Church and in the role of women in both wartime and the family. After the broadcast she wrote to thank Lascelles for his help and commented, ‘What agony these things are! It’s funny, but when I talk into those dumb-looking little microphones, I think of the grey & narrow streets of places like South Shields or Sunderland. If one can help those gallant people, everything is worthwhile.’114

  Lascelles noted in his diary, ‘The Q delivered her broadcast, & did so very well. In its final form, it was the joint work of Winston Churchill, the Bp. of Lichfield, & myself – a curious trio of collaborationists, who are unlikely ever to be in literary partnership again.’115 Nevertheless its sentiments were the Queen’s own. Thanking Churchill for his assistance, she said, ‘I put it just as you wrote it, and I am certain that those words will comfort many an aching heart.’116 Churchill replied with his usual graciousness, ‘I am glad the few words I suggested were acceptable. The Broadcast was an outstanding success. Yr Majesty’s voice was clear & captivating & I heard from every side nothing but praise & expressions of pleasure & high sentiment.’117 That was true – the speech drew a flood of congratulatory letters from people who took comfort from her words.

  She tried to wear the praise lightly. Later in the year, when her brother David asked her to speak to a women’s Christian group, she replied, ‘honestly darling I don’t feel very holy at the moment, & couldn’t think of a word to say to them. Just because I said last spring that I believed in Christianity and home life, I am considered practically a mother superior and clergymen raise their hats to me with a sort of special gusto!’118

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  A FEW DAYS after the broadcast the Queen and the Princesses attended a poetry reading at the Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street, which Osbert Sitwell had organized to help ‘keep the arts alive’.119 He had persuaded her to attend and had been consulting her on the details for weeks.120 The reading was given in aid of the Free French Fund and it was, as can be imagined, quite an occasion – a gathering of some of the greatest talents, and greatest egos, in the world of letters at the time. Among the ladies and gentlemen of letters were Edmund Blunden, Vita Sackville-West, Walter de la Mare, who was dwarfed by the lectern, Osbert’s sister Edith, looking flamboyant as ever, and Lady Gerald ‘Dottie’ Wellesley, who was thought by many to be inebriated, although she denied it. The Queen and her daughters sat in the front row looking very serious. According to Sitwell’s biographer, Philip Ziegler, ‘the Princesses kept their eyes on the performers with decorous and disconcerting fervour, except when T. S. Eliot incanted from “The Waste Land”, at which point they had to try hard not to giggle. They enjoyed it even more when W. J. Turner exceeded by far his allotted span of six minutes and was loudly heckled by his fellow poets.’121 Decades later Queen Elizabeth recalled that ‘they all got so angry with each other because they all went on too long.’ She singled out Edith Sitwell for praise, remarking that she ‘read beautifully’. All in all, she thought it very kind of Osbert Sitwell to try and educate her daughters but the great company of poets was more humorous than anything else.122