The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  The travels of the King and Queen around the country and their visits to factories, barracks and schools continued. Tommy Lascelles constantly advised where their presence would be most beneficial to the war effort. In October 1943 he wrote to the Queen, ‘At the moment, the two obvious activities of vital importance are Bombing and Coal. Perhaps the troops that are being kept waiting, not too patiently, for some future continental adventure, come next.’ He also suggested visits at Christmas to clubs and hospitals used by troops from overseas.159

  After a visit to Queen Mary in November 1943, the King and Queen returned to London and gave lunch to two Saudi Arabian princes; the Queen reported to her mother-in-law that ‘the two brothers were most beautiful; true Arabs with marvellous dignity & lovely manners. It was rather a strain having to talk through an interpreter, but it all seemed to go smoothly. They brought Bertie a diamond studded sword from King Ibn Saud, & they were very pleased when Bertie drew out its curved blade, & said that it would do to cut Hitler’s head off!’160

  *

  IT WAS NOT easy for the Queen to combine her wartime duties with her responsibilities to, and love for, her daughters. She was unable to spend much time with them except at weekends. There was, perhaps, another factor. She had always dedicated herself to supporting her husband; since the abdication this had become an even stronger priority for her, and both as wife and as queen she felt that her place was at his side. She was nevertheless aware of how difficult it was to grow up in a nation at war and she did all she could to preserve the normal pleasures of childhood for them. She ended one letter to Arthur Penn, ‘I must scram as the children have already eased off their ponies.’161

  The Queen realized that there were similarities between her own life among the soldiers at Glamis in the First World War and that of her daughters, particularly Princess Elizabeth, at Windsor now: ‘what a beastly time it is for people growing up. Lilibet meets young Grenadiers at Windsor and then they get killed, & it is horrid for someone so young.’162 Among such young men was Francis Wigram, son of Lord Wigram, King George V’s Private Secretary and now Governor of Windsor Castle. The Queen had liked him very much and was nervous about what to say when Lord Wigram came to meet them at the station soon after his son’s death. She thought this was ‘a very brave thing to do. Of course I could hardly say anything for the lump in my throat, but so like the wonderful old thing, he started off at once saying, “Isn’t it sad about Francis”, and helping us out as he always does.’163

  The success of the nativity play in 1940 had led to a series of pantomimes written, as usual, by Hubert Tannar, in which the Princesses acted with children from his school. At Christmas 1943 the Princesses were heavily involved in Aladdin. Costumes were conjured up from old curtains and blackout material. ‘The oldest jokes are being resurrected & used boldly once more,’ said the Queen, but ‘some dreadfully Japanese touches are creeping in, such atrocities as “Nip off to Nippon” & such things!’164 The characters of the two Princesses were by now well developed. Princess Margaret, now thirteen, was still constantly mischievous and provocative. Tommy Lascelles told the Queen that one of her dancing partners had enjoyed her company greatly but had been embarrassed by her freewheeling gossip. The Queen thanked him, saying he should not hesitate to tell her such things, ‘and even if it is something I don’t like, if it is said kindly & tactfully I shall never mind’.165

  Princess Elizabeth was growing into a poised, serious but open young woman. In early 1942 the King had appointed her colonel of the Grenadier Guards,* who were protecting the family at Windsor; she immediately took a great interest in the regiment, her father recorded, and on her sixteenth birthday she had inspected a regimental parade in the Quadrangle at the Castle.166 General Smuts met her at the end of 1943 – ‘He seems pleased with Lilibet, which is nice, as I think he is a good judge,’ said the Queen.167 The Princess made a great impression on a young Grenadier and friend of the family, Mark Bonham Carter, who went to see her as colonel of his regiment. According to Arthur Penn, he arrived nervous but ‘when he came out he was in a state which I can best describe as exaltation … I have seen this effect, in another generation, so often that it is almost what the lawyers call “common form”, but it gave me such pleasure to see it reproduced that I felt I must tell Your Majesty.’168

  The Princess was also showing signs of an interest in Prince Philip of Greece; this was a friendship about which her parents had some concerns, if only on account of her age. Prince Philip was the nephew of King Constantine of Greece, but he was closely related to the British Royal Family – his maternal grandmother, Victoria Marchioness of Milford Haven, was Queen Victoria’s granddaughter and lived in Kensington Palace. Both she and his mother, Princess Alice, were born in Windsor Castle. His father, Prince Andrew of Greece, was King George V’s first cousin. Prince Philip himself was born in the family home on Corfu but when he was eighteen months old his parents had to flee with him and his four elder sisters on a British warship after a Greek revolutionary court sentenced his father to death.

  The family then lived in somewhat reduced circumstances outside Paris. By the early 1930s the Prince’s parents had drifted apart; his mother developed psychiatric problems and then sought solace in religion, while his father based himself in Monte Carlo. The young Prince Philip continued to see each of his parents and spent a good deal of time in Germany with his sisters, who had all married German princes. He went first to preparatory school at Cheam in Surrey, then to Salem in Germany, which was run by the progressive educationalist Kurt Hahn.

  When Hahn was driven out of Germany by the Nazis in 1933, he founded a new school, Gordonstoun, in north-eastern Scotland, and Prince Philip became a pupil. An adventurous, good-looking and athletic boy with precocious curiosity, the Prince flourished there. ‘Often naughty, never nasty,’ Hahn wrote of him. Even as a boy the Prince set high standards – for himself and for others. In his final report, Hahn summarized his character: ‘Prince Philip is a born leader, but will need the exacting demands of a great service to do justice to himself. His best is outstanding – his second best is not good enough.’

  In January 1940, after passing out of the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, having been awarded the King’s Dirk as the best all-round cadet of his term, Prince Philip began a distinguished career in the Royal Navy. He had a good war and was mentioned in dispatches after the Battle of Matapan in 1941; in charge of searchlights on HMS Valiant, he had enabled the sinking of two Italian cruisers.

  In December 1943 the King and Queen held a small dance for their daughters at Windsor Castle. The Queen was much impressed by the good behaviour of the young men; they seemed to appreciate the beauties of Windsor – ‘I fear that they are all starved of colour and beautiful things to look at, in these days.’169 To Princess Elizabeth’s disappointment Prince Philip was struck by flu and confined to bed in Claridge’s (‘of all gloomy places’, said the Queen).170 But in the end he was well enough to come to the pantomime; he stayed the weekend after it and they all laughed a great deal. He then spent Christmas with them and, according to Princess Elizabeth, ‘we had a very gay time, with a film, dinner parties and dancing to the gramophone’.171 According to Tommy Lascelles, they ‘frisked and capered away till near 1 a.m.’.172

  As well as being good looking, Prince Philip was a strong character, full of opinions. He seems to have been aware early on that the Queen, another such character, might not always appreciate his exuberance. In his thank-you letter to her after Christmas 1943, he wrote that he hoped that ‘my behaviour did not get out of hand’. He said that he also hoped it would not be too presumptuous if he now added Windsor to Broadlands (the Mountbattens’ home) and Coppins (the Kents’ home) as his favourite places; ‘that may give you some small idea of how much I appreciated the few days you were kind enough to let me spend with you.’ The young Prince and the Queen had evidently been talking about what he should do next. ‘In thinking it over I have come to the conclusion that you were
right and that if I had the freedom to choose I would stay in this country and not go to America.’173 After a subsequent visit to Windsor, Prince Philip told the Queen how much he loved being with them – ‘It is the simple enjoyment of family pleasures and amusements and the feeling that I am welcome to share them. I am afraid I am not capable of putting all this into the right words and I am certainly incapable of showing you the gratitude I feel.’174

  Early in 1944 Queen Mary heard a rumour that the King of Greece was planning to suggest his cousin Prince Philip as a possible suitor for Princess Elizabeth. Queen Mary thought Prince Philip was in some ways very suitable. The King liked him too but, according to Queen Mary, wondered if an Englishman, through and through, might not be more popular with the people of Britain.175 (Hugh Euston, son and heir to the Duke of Grafton, and now a young Grenadier who had been stationed at the Castle, was high on the King’s list of suitable young men.) Queen Mary wrote to the King hoping that he would not think her interfering, ‘But as you know well I adore Lilibet, & her future means much to me, tho’ I am too old to be able to expect to see much of it!’176

  The King confirmed the rumour about Prince Philip and said that he liked him – ‘he is intelligent, has a good sense of humour and thinks about things in the right way.’ But he and the Queen both thought that their daughter was ‘too young for that now, as she has never met any young men of her own age’.177 Queen Mary was relieved, ‘as L is much too young, & after all the country will have to have a say in the matter. P. sounds extremely nice.’178

  Despite their concerns about age, neither the King nor the Queen did anything to discourage the growing friendship between their daughter and the Prince. Meanwhile, Princess Elizabeth took on more public duties, particularly after her eighteenth birthday in April 1944. To her mother’s and grandmother’s delight, she now became a Counsellor of State.* She often accompanied her parents on official appointments and began to carry out engagements on her own.

  *

  BY THE SPRING of 1944 the Queen believed that, although the Allies were finally marching towards victory, an immense struggle still lay ahead. Longing for peace vied with anger. Writing to her mother-in-law she said, ‘One feels quite exhausted by the immensity of the huge battlefields, stretching right across the world, and by the great amount of misery caused by the Germans. What people – words fail one … if only we could crush the Germans, and bring a true peace to this poor suffering world.’179

  Weariness reigned. For the King’s birthday, Queen Mary had sent him greetings and sympathy over ‘this terrible war which never seems to come to an end & which gives you such endless work in so many different ways’. She thought it was ‘far, far worse’ than the previous war.180 The King replied that he hoped very much that the war would end in 1944 ‘as really everybody is getting worn out with work & anxiety’.181

  The Queen’s public life in 1944, the last full year of the war, did not much change. While she was still at Sandringham in January she chaired the AGM of the local Women’s Institute, and gave out prizes at the Sunday School Treat. After returning to London, she visited the headquarters of Bomber Command (whose aircrews won her lifelong admiration for their exemplary courage), the Yorkshire coalfields and air force stations, the New Zealand Forces Club and the American Red Cross Club. On a very cold day she, the King and Princess Elizabeth attended the England vs Scotland football match at Wembley (England won 6–2), and she inspected the 5th, 1st and 7th Battalions of the Black Watch. She toured bombed-out areas in south and west London and watched the beating of the retreat by pipes and drums of the 51st Highland Division. On 7 March she attended the ‘Back to Work’ Exhibition for Disabled Men at Burlington House, and later in the month reviewed troops in Yorkshire and then, together with Princess Elizabeth, toured South Wales.

  In April the family had a happy spring break at Sandringham. ‘The beauty of the countryside was amazing,’ the Queen wrote to Osbert Sitwell. ‘It was so lovely that one could hardly bear it … One could watch the leaves unfolding and the lilac coming out, & the double cherry trees blazing. How lovely it was. I noticed that some of the young soldiers minded the beauty very much – it is true that the war does make anything as glorious as England in April very agonising.’ And then, in elegiac vein, she quoted Turgenev:

  Years of gladness,

  Days of joy,

  Like the torrents of spring,

  They hurried away.

  ‘It’s all very sad,’ she added.182

  Spirits had to be sustained nonetheless. There were enjoyable interludes during family weekends at Windsor. In early May the King and Queen gave a small dance with Ambrose’s band. It was a cheerful affair, Owen Morshead reported to Queen Mary, in large part because the King was in wonderful form, dancing every dance until four in the morning; ‘and so did the Queen, who characteristically chose the shyest boys from the Sandhurst contingent and put them completely at their ease’. It was not just the Queen who enjoyed herself. ‘Both Princesses too danced till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their shoes.’183

  The Allies were in the last weeks of preparing for the invasion of Europe. The Queen found the preparations for D-Day a time of enormous tension. The thought of all the deaths to come lay, she said, ‘heavy on the heart & mind’.184 Churchill felt the same. On the night of 5 June 1944, the day before D-Day, he said to his wife Clementine, ‘Do you realise that by the time you wake up in the morning twenty thousand men may have been killed?’185 The immediate casualties were in the event less terrible than expected, but still, as the Queen put it, ‘so many precious people’ lost their lives.186 By the end of the month almost 8,000 Allied soldiers had been killed since D-Day, more than half of them American.187

  Both the King and Churchill had wished to accompany the invading troops, and the Queen had encouraged the King to go. But Lascelles was appalled, and had dissuaded the King, who then had a fierce argument with Churchill, one of the worst he had ever had, when he insisted that the Prime Minister must not go either. Churchill gave way – but with bad grace.188

  On the night of D-Day the King made a broadcast to the country. The Queen had insisted that it should be he, not the Prime Minister, who did this. She had discussed the matter with Queen Mary during a stay at Badminton with her daughters. ‘One suggestion of yours which I think is admirable’, Queen Mary wrote to her afterwards, ‘is that Bertie shd talk to the Country when invasion starts, & not leave it to the P.M. or the Archbishop to do so, Bertie’s message will be far more popular. Do persuade him to do so.’189

  The King took a great deal of trouble – the Bishop of Lichfield helped craft the words and Lionel Logue once again helped him deliver them. He reminded the British people of what they had suffered and achieved so far: ‘Four years ago, our Nation and Empire stood alone against an overwhelming enemy with our backs to the wall. Tested as never before in history, in God’s providence we survived the test … Now once more a supreme test has to be faced.’ He asked everyone throughout the land to take part in a worldwide vigil of prayer ‘as the great crusade sets forth’.190

  Ten days later, on 16 June, the invasion had proceeded well; the fighting was now far enough inland for the King to be able to cross the Channel to the Normandy beaches where he spent the day with General Montgomery. The Queen was overwhelmed by emotion. In church on Sunday 18 June, as the Allies were pushing further into France, she told Osbert Sitwell, ‘I weakly let a tear leave my eye, thinking of the sorrows of so many good, brave people & feeling unhappy for them.’ As she did so, ‘I felt a small hand in mine, & the anxious blue eyes of Margaret Rose wondering what was the matter.’ Holding her daughter’s hand, the Queen remembered ‘with a pang’ that she had been in exactly the same situation with her own mother, Lady Strathmore, during the First World War. ‘I remembered so vividly looking up at my mother in church, & seeing tears on her cheeks, & wondering how to comfort her. She then had 4 sons in the army, & was so brave. I could not bear to think that my daughter shou
ld have to go through all this in another 25 years. It must not be.’191

  That same morning, as the Queen and Princess Margaret were praying together, death came to another church in which they worshipped, the Guards Chapel in Birdcage Walk. Hitler had just launched his latest weapon against Britain – the pilotless V1 bomber. These robotic machines were described as flying bombs and came to be known as doodlebugs. They were in some ways more horrifying than almost anything that had come before. They made a sinister growling noise, rather like an ill-tuned motorcycle, and they flew at 400 mph in a straight line from launch sites across the Channel until their engines cut out. Then they fell to earth causing massive explosions and, in built-up areas, terrible damage. When people heard the engine of a doodlebug stop, they knew that it was falling and was about to explode somewhere near by and so would throw themselves under tables, into doorways, down cellar steps.

  These random killers came in swarms of thousands. ‘It was as impersonal as the plague,’ wrote Evelyn Waugh, ‘as though the city were infested with enormous, venomous insects.’192 On one occasion, while dictating a telegram to Roosevelt, Churchill broke off his argument to inform the President, ‘At the moment a flying bomb is approaching this dwelling.’ He continued his dictation regardless and then added, ‘Bomb has fallen some way off but others are reported.’193