The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  One of the lines along which the doodlebugs were directed seemed to pass directly over the Houses of Parliament and then Buckingham Palace. On the morning of 18 June, a V1 engine cut out just after it had crossed the Thames and it fell, between Parliament and Palace, straight on to the Guards Chapel while the Sunday-morning service was being conducted. The nave of the chapel was smashed to pieces. The chancel and the altar were unscathed and, astonishingly, the candles remained alight. But the carnage was terrible. Sixty-three servicemen and women and fifty-eight civilian worshippers were killed; over a hundred more were wounded. Many of those who died that morning were known to the King and Queen. Among them was Olive, the sister of Arthur Penn. The Queen immediately wrote to her friend, ‘I simply cannot tell you how much I feel for you over this ghastly tragedy this morning … I feel quite stunned by it all and what you must feel – I do pray that you may be helped and sustained. Oh Arthur, it all seems so terrible – we must be brave – I know you are and I shall try all I know in case I can help.’194

  In the first sixteen days of the V1 bombardment 1,935 civilians were killed, and by 6 July the toll had risen to 2,752.195 In the first month the doodlebugs destroyed 10,000 houses and damaged almost 200,000 more (compared with 63,000 homes destroyed during the whole 1940–1 Blitz).196 Hundreds of thousands of people fled the city. Buckingham Palace was under real threat – after the Guards Chapel was hit, another doodlebug fell on Constitution Hill, blowing out seventy-five yards of the garden wall.197 The King, the Prime Minister and the Queen took to holding their Tuesday meetings in the Palace air-raid shelter.

  After four exhausting years of war the Queen, like many others, thought the doodlebugs were an infernal new punishment – ‘there is something very inhuman & beastly about death dealing missiles being launched in such an indiscriminate manner.’198 Evidently fearing the worst, she wrote a letter to Princess Elizabeth ‘in case I get “done in” by the Germans!’, explaining that she had left her own things to be divided between her and Princess Margaret and offering advice on how her jewellery might be shared. ‘Let’s hope this won’t be needed, but I know that you will always do the right thing, & remember to keep your temper & your word & be loving – sweet – Mummy.’199 The King, presumably with the same dangers in mind, wrote a longer letter to Princess Elizabeth explaining the provisions of his will.200

  As well as worrying about her human charges, the Queen worried for those works of art still in the various palaces. Kenneth Clark told her he thought the thick walls of Windsor would protect the pictures there – he was more worried about the paintings at Hampton Court where flying glass was a greater danger. The National Gallery store was full and he suggested that, if the doodlebug campaign were likely to continue, perhaps some pictures should be taken to Balmoral.201

  Churchill was so appalled by the destruction and death wrought by the flying bombs that he considered using non-lethal poison gas on the launch sites and even on the cities of the Ruhr.202 When that option was rejected, the only other defence was to shoot the flying bombs down over Kent and Sussex before they reached London. The RAF rushed all the available anti-aircraft guns close to the coast. In mid-July 1944 the King and Queen visited gun sites in Sussex and Surrey. The Queen described the way in which both the battery and fighter planes tried to shoot down the doodlebugs. ‘An occasional fighter came hurtling past on the tail of one of the robots, and one flew straight into the bursting shells, & my heart nearly stopped, as he started to wobble about, and we thought he’d been hit. However, the bomb crashed a little further on, & the fighter seemed to recover. But really war is very exhausting!’203

  As usual, the poor areas of south and east London suffered most from the new bombardment. The King and Queen visited victims in Lambeth on 29 June. Later, however, the Queen was infuriated when she was refused permission to visit other areas hit by flying bombs. She complained to Tommy Lascelles that ‘the government does not want us to visit our own bombed out people.’204 This, he replied, was ‘not quite fair’ – and he told her that the government was trying to conceal from the Germans where exactly their bombs were falling. If she or the King visited bomb sites, the Germans would hear of it and would be able to adjust the trajectories in order to hit more built-up areas. Reluctantly the Queen had to accept this argument.205 She knew there were many other places where their presence was solicited. They visited airfields from which planes were scrambled at no notice to try and shoot down the flying bombs. Both of them were inspired by the bravery and the modesty of the young pilots.206

  The King was the next source of anxiety for the Queen. On 23 July he departed on a ten-day visit to his troops in Italy under the command of General Alexander. From 23 July until 3 August, he visited battlefields old and current, watching fighting and artillery bombardments. The night before his departure, the King wrote to his wife, ‘My darling Angel, As I am going away tonight on a journey by air I feel it is always wise to put one’s affairs in order. I am not thinking that something might happen to me while I am away from you, but there are some matters which might want clearing up.’ He stressed that she would ‘naturally go on living at Buck. Pal, in this Castle, Sandringham & Balmoral for the present until such time as Lilibet is on her own. I hope Royal Lodge, Appleton & Birkhall will always be your house on the private estates. The former is our home; the house we built & made for ourselves in Windsor Park.’207

  On the evening he left, the Queen and Princess Elizabeth drove with the King to Northolt aerodrome to see him off. The Queen looked around the converted Lancaster bomber and thought it was quite comfortable. But when she went up to the cockpit, an extraordinary thing happened: ‘the first thing I saw through the glass was a flying bomb caught in the searchlights, & coming straight for the plane! I really felt, well this is too much, & averted my eye in anger! Luckily it buzzed over & was going strong when I looked again! What emotions one goes through these days.’208 She was always nervous when the King was off on such trips, but she tried to hide it – ‘he feels so much not being more in the fighting line, and I know that it heartens the troops, & one swallows one’s anxieties!’209

  While the King was away, the Queen and, for the first time, Princess Elizabeth acted as Counsellors of State. The Queen kept herself busy, visiting the Girl Guide and Rangers camp at Frogmore, and ATS units at Bagshot, Aldershot and Windsor as well as the 2nd Battalion of the Home Guard under the command of her brother Mike. He had been left physically unfit by his experiences in the First World War and in 1939 he had been rejected by the army on medical grounds. The Queen had always been moved by these volunteers, and she said that as she looked at ‘these very English & some not-so-young men – it was something very difficult to put into words, such an unyielding spirit & yet so modest – I felt a lump in my throat and a great thankfulness & also a great humbleness too.’210 The effect was mutual, to judge by the letter of thanks her sister-in-law Betty Bowes Lyon wrote to her after the visit. The Queen, she said, had inspired a sense that ‘you were theirs – part of them & that they loved you so much they would happily die for you’.211

  From General Alexander’s headquarters in Italy the King wrote to tell her he was having ‘a very interesting time seeing a lot in lovely hot weather, a bit too hot for me but I’m dressed in shorts & a shirt … I have seen the Air Force, the US 5th Army & the Poles … Early starts in the morning, but I wake at 6.30 & bathe in the lake with Alex. He is a charming host & has told me a lot of his own thoughts … I have only been away a week & I feel it is 10 years. I hope you are not too lonely angel.’212 She had written to him hoping that ‘the tum tum tummy is behaving nicely, & not revolting at the climate, or the chianti, or the macaroni or spaghetti!’213 She was cheered by his letter – ‘I can tell everything is going alright,’ she told Tommy Lascelles.214

  In Naples the King saw the Queen’s friend D’Arcy Osborne, who was still His Majesty’s envoy to the Holy See. He had not enjoyed the nine months of German occupation, he told the Queen. It was �
��terribly oppressive, never knowing if the Gestapo would not come at any moment’. He said that Yeats summed up his feelings about the war:

  The years like great black oxen tread the world

  And God the herdsman goads them on behind

  And I am broken by their passing feet.215

  The King returned the day before the Queen’s birthday on 4 August; Queen Mary and other members of the family contributed to a Fabergé cornflower for her – she loved it and thought it ‘so beautifully unwarlike!’216 Queen Mary decided not to come over from Badminton to celebrate – she was concerned that if she met a robot plane the shock would give her an allergic reaction.217 The Queen thought she was probably wise – there were constant warnings and explosions on the afternoon of her birthday; she was longing to get the children away from Windsor ‘because life is rather un-normal, & though they are so good & composed, there is always the listening, & occasionally a leap behind the door, and it does become a strain’.218

  Once more Balmoral beckoned. There they could relax after two such violent months and she could watch her daughters with ‘very bright eyes & pink cheeks again’. The liberation of Paris had begun but it was an end to the bombardment of London that she wanted. ‘I don’t think that anybody has any conception of the strain & horrible-ness of the whole thing, and people are so wonderful about it all. Up here, away from it, I find that I think all the time of those little rows of houses, & everyone carrying on so splendidly amongst all the ruin & death – one feels almost conscience stricken to be so peaceful & quiet. It is marvellous too!’219

  After Paris was freed in August 1944 and Churchill had had a joyous reception there, the Queen asked the Prime Minister, ‘Do you think that there is any chance of London being “Liberated” in the coming months? My heart aches for our wonderful brave people, they have been tried so high, & of course can go on, but it really is rather a bore to feel that one might be blown to pieces at any moment. There is no limit to their courage & cheerfulness and I long for them to have a lightening of their burden.’220

  At the beginning of November 1944 the Queen learned that her father, who had been suffering from an attack of flu, was gravely ill. She immediately made plans to take the night train to Glamis, and telegraphed her younger brother David at the British Embassy in Washington: ‘FEAR NOT MUCH HOPE BUT HE IS VERY PEACEFUL BEST LOVE DARLING ELIZABETH’.221 David arranged to come at once, but Lord Strathmore died peacefully in his sleep on 7 November. His youngest son felt that in wartime circumstances he could not justify flying home ‘when all is over’.222 The Queen understood, but missed David greatly during the three sad days she spent at Glamis for the simple funeral.223 Lord Strathmore’s coffin, covered with a Union flag, was drawn to the burial ground on a farm cart by two horses while pipers from the Black Watch played ‘Flowers of the Forest’.224 The King walked behind the coffin with other men of the family; the Queen followed in a car with her sisters.

  She had many letters, she told David, which stressed their father’s ‘kindness to one and all’.225 She thanked Churchill for his sympathetic letter, saying, ‘It is a very sad moment for us all, my father loved us, and we loved him, and it was so comforting for me to go home, and feel even now, with old age coming on, that I was a loved child – that has gone, but I am very grateful to have had it so long.’226

  With the end of the war for the first time really in sight, the Queen was distressed by the decision to disband one of her favourite wartime institutions, the Home Guard. She saw it as emblematic of the ‘good brave self sacrificing British people’,227 working together in their amateur but committed manner to defeat the evils of fascism. After a visit to one battalion in July 1944, she wrote to the commanding officer, ‘As I went down the ranks I thought with pride & gratitude of the splendid spirit of loyalty and determination which brought the Home Guard into being during those critical days of 1940.’228 The King broadcast thanks to the Home Guard for their ‘steadfast devotion’ which had ‘helped much to ward off the danger of invasion’.229

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  AT THE END of 1944 the Queen began an association which gave her and others pleasure for the rest of her life – she became a bencher of the Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court, the professional associations to which every English barrister must belong. Since the foundation of the Inns in the Middle Ages, no monarch or consort had ever joined any of them, and no woman had ever before been a member of the parliament of an Inn.

  Like many of the historic buildings in London, the Middle Temple had been badly damaged by bombing. The Queen’s installation took place on 12 December 1944, in the New Parliament Chamber, whose windows had been blown out. One light was suspended from the ceiling by its flex. But good cheer was had nonetheless. The tables were set in the form of an E and were laid with the Middle Temple silver which, like the contents of the wine cellar, had survived.230 The simple menu – Clear Soup, Roast Turkey, Apple Tart and Cheese and Biscuits – was made more memorable by Pol Roger 1928, Château Margaux 1924, Taylor’s Port 1912 and 1878 brandy. In her speech the Queen displayed a sense of history:

  Though I am, I understand, the first of my sex to become a Bencher of this Inn, I like to feel that I am continuing a tradition rather than creating a precedent, for it is, after all, but a few paces from here that another Queen Elizabeth visited this Society in the Hall which was built with her permission, and indeed was so intimately associated with her that it was referred to by the Treasurer as ‘The Queen’s House’ … I feel this sense of the past to be very heartening at present when we see all about us so much overlaid by those hazards through which, please God, we can today see a light beginning to shine.

  Our walls may crumble, she continued, but more precious were the unshaken and unshakeable virtues and graces of the Inn. In particular ‘the honourable administration of the Law and the unswerving impartiality between rich and poor’.231 In response, the Master Treasurer rose and toasted ‘Our new Bencher the Queen’. For the rest of her life she rarely missed the annual dinner of the Inn.

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  THE PANTOMIME season at Windsor was upon them again and, the Queen wrote, ‘Windsor is ringing with words like lights, cut it, grease paint, Mother Hubbard, finale, opening chorus etc.’232 They called this pantomime Old Mother Red Riding Boots and performed it in the Waterloo Chamber just before Christmas. The King thought the 1944 pantomime was ‘better than ever & [the Princesses] both did their parts very well & enjoyed them’. This year, as he prepared his Christmas broadcast, he noted, ‘I did not have Logue with me. I knew I did not need his help.’233

  As the German armies retreated there were increasing anxieties about the wreckage that would be left behind, and about the march of Soviet communism westwards. Churchill was especially worried about Poland, on whose behalf Britain had originally gone to war, and Greece. In Athens, after the flight of the Nazi occupiers, growing violence between communists and royalists filled the streets. The Queen believed that such violence was perhaps inevitable given what had happened – ‘one feels that occupation of a country by the Germans leaves a terrible legacy of anarchy & cruelty & a weakening of moral forces – Indeed the Nazis are the forces of Evil. May the coming year see the end of this ghastly struggle & a return to law & order in Europe is my fervent prayer.’234

  She was dismayed by the way in which the press and the BBC appeared to support the communist side in Greece. ‘One could hardly believe’, she wrote to Queen Mary, ‘that the Press and intellectuals of the socialist party could be so blind as to back up a gang of bandits who wanted to seize power by force. We have suffered so much in the fight for what is called Freedom, it was very sad that at this moment people could be so misled as to what freedom means. It certainly doesn’t mean government by tommy gun.’235

  The Queen was able, by early 1945, to spend more time writing to and seeing her friends, though she found letters difficult. ‘There is so little to write about except war,’ she said.236 Among the friends of whom she had not s
een enough was Dick Molyneux, co-founder of the Windsor Wets. He wrote to her in the middle of March and she replied immediately:

  It is curious that your letter arrived today, because last night the King & I were saying that we had not seen you for AGES, and I said that I would write & ask you to come and spend a weekend at our little weekend cottage. And, lo and behold! on my table this morning what do I see? That well-known writing – is it? Can it be? Yes! No – Yes; it is! I suppose that my thoughts whizzed out of the window here, turned sharp right, cut across the Green Park, past the Ritz, down Berkeley Street, and entering your flat, elbowed their way through the guests thronging your hall, & crashed into your mind …

  Down with Hitler! Your friend E.R.237

  On 12 April 1945 the King and Queen were appalled to hear of the death of President Roosevelt from a cerebral haemorrhage. Queen Mary called it ‘a positive catastrophe’,238 and the King replied that the news had been ‘a great shock to me & we shall feel his loss very much.’239 Roosevelt was succeeded by the then little-known Vice-President, Harry Truman.

  By now, the war was nearly won. London was ‘liberated’ as the Queen had asked: all the doodlebug launch sites across the Channel had been captured or destroyed from the air; the mobile launchers of the V2 rocket bombs, whose trajectory could not be intercepted and whose death toll had been even higher, were also rendered ineffective. Mussolini was seized by Italian partisans on 27 April and executed the next day; two days later Hitler committed suicide in the squalor of his Berlin bunker. Victory was finally announced on 8 May 1945. In his diary the King wrote, ‘The day we have been longing for has arrived at last, & we can look back with thankfulness to God that our tribulation is over.’240

  The 8th was a Tuesday and after Churchill’s weekly lunch with the King the Prime Minister returned to 10 Downing Street to put the finishing touches to his victory speech, to be broadcast by the BBC and relayed by loudspeakers around Whitehall that evening. It was short and resolute, and he ended with the words: ‘the evil doers lie prostrate before us.’ The crowds in the streets gasped at this phrase. ‘Advance Britannia!’ the Prime Minister shouted.