The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  On 6 August the first atom bomb was dropped on Japan with the second following three days later. Unconditional surrender followed swiftly and on 15 August the Pacific war was finally also over.

  That same day the King and Queen proceeded, in an open landau drawn by four greys, to open the first peacetime Parliament since 1938. The crowds gave them a tumultuous welcome. Inside Parliament, Chips Channon noted that ‘the many new socialists looked dazed and dazzled.’ When the royal procession entered he thought the Queen, in aquamarine blue, was ‘dignified and gracious’. The King announced the end of the war, and then mentioned the first radical measures of his new socialist government – the nationalization of the mines and of the Bank of England.15

  The King made a radio broadcast that night in which he said, ‘The war is over. You know, I think, that those four words have for the Queen and myself the same significance, simple yet immense, that they have for you. Our hearts are full to overflowing, as are your own. Yet there is not one of us who has experienced this terrible war who does not realise that we shall feel its inevitable consequences long after we have all forgotten our rejoicings of today.’16 But rejoice they did; that night the crowds gathered again outside Buckingham Palace and shouted for the King and Queen to come on to the balcony. James Lees-Milne, the diarist, was in the crowd and recorded, ‘They were tiny. I could barely distinguish her little figure swathed in a fur, and something sparkling in her hair. The gold buttons of his Admiral’s uniform glistened. Both waved in a slightly self-conscious fashion and stood for three minutes. Then they retreated. The crowd waved with great applause, and all walked quietly home.’17

  At the end of August they went to Balmoral, exhausted. It was a happy family time. The Queen’s friend and lady in waiting Cynthia Spencer described days in the hills and on the rivers, with them all singing ‘descants and ditties’ as they were driven from one place to another ‘in a super-shining motor bus’.18 A month at Balmoral was followed by a busy week in Edinburgh; with the Princesses they stayed at Holyroodhouse and attended Scotland’s Victory Parade. After dinner on 27 September they listened to the massed bands and pipes and community singing. As the Queen put it, ‘All the good staid citizens of Edinburgh let themselves go in an orgy of yelling & dancing, feeling decently disguised by the covering of the dark. It was the first time they had ever done such a thing, & it did them a lot of good.’19

  The family remained in Scotland for the autumn, a vital break for the King, but he still felt drained. He even rather envied Churchill in defeat. The hero of victory had gone on holiday after the electorate rejected him in July 1945. Later he visited the King, who observed to Tommy Lascelles, ‘When Winston was last here he was a tired man. Now he’s back from two months’ complete holiday in the Italian Lakes; brisk, chubby, pink as a baby, at the top of his form once more. That’s where these people score. I can’t ever get a holiday like that. I never get a chance to recuperate like they do.’20

  Lascelles thought there was a good deal of truth in this. So did the Queen, who worried constantly about her husband’s health. Duty pursued the King to Royal Lodge, Sandringham or Balmoral. Every day he had to read state papers, Cabinet minutes, and other documents that required his signature. He would stay up too late and smoke too much.21 At Balmoral he had to spend as much time every day with his secretaries as in London – the only relief that Scotland afforded him was from the endless audiences that he had to hold every day in the capital. These were exhausting for him because he took considerable trouble with each person. By the end of the afternoon he would be ‘dead beat’.22 The King told the Duke of Gloucester, ‘I feel burned out … I have been suffering from an awful reaction from the strain of the war I suppose.’23

  He found that no medicine, not even Dr Weir’s homeopathic powders, did him much good. The only cure was being out in the open air. The Queen told Queen Mary, ‘to my joy Bertie has taken to stalking again, which means he has more energy, & it is doing him good. He was very tired when we got up here at the end of August, for the summer had been very exhausting.’24

  *

  THE DUKE OF Windsor was a continuing concern. He had announced his resignation as governor of the Bahamas at the end of 1944 and had left for the United States in May 1945. The question was where he and the Duchess would now live. His family hoped they would not wish to settle in England. Churchill informed him in no uncertain terms that, although the King would always see him, Queen Mary was ‘inflexibly opposed’ to meeting the Duchess. ‘I imagine that this view is shared by the Queen,’ he added.25 That autumn the Duke wrote an affectionate letter to his mother and said that he would like to come and stay with her in October.26 Queen Mary was delighted – she had not seen her eldest son since his abdication. The Queen was glad for Queen Mary’s sake, knowing that ‘it is very hard for a mother to be parted from her son.’ But the Duke then immediately upset members of the family by giving press conferences en route to London. The Queen’s view was that he should have said that his visit was private and have refused to see the press.27

  When the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, came to Balmoral for the Prime Minister’s traditional autumn weekend, the Duke was a central topic of discussion. The King was pleased with Attlee’s attitude; he told Queen Mary that the Prime Minister ‘agrees with me that he cannot live here permanently owing to his wife & he is not prepared to offer D. any job here or anywhere.’ The King thought the family should remain firm, particularly about ‘her’ – ‘She does not like either us or this country, & the life she has been accustomed to live no longer exists here.’ He thought his brother still did not realize ‘the irrevocable step he took nine years ago & the ghastly shock he gave this country’.28

  The Duke came, alone, and Queen Mary was happy to have her ‘dear eldest son’ with her for a week. ‘Very nice he was,’ she told Owen Morshead later, ‘quite like old times; very well informed, knew everything that was going on. But still persisting about my receiving his wife, when he promised he’d never mention the subject to me again. His last words when he was going away – “Well goodbye – and don’t forget: I’m a married man now.” Don’t forget, indeed: as if one ever could!’29

  When the King came down from Balmoral to see the Duke, the Queen stayed in Scotland. The brothers spent two hours together at Buckingham Palace on 6 October 1945. It was, said the King in a letter written immediately afterwards to his mother, an ‘amicable & quiet’ conversation. Indeed it went better than the King and Queen had feared. The Duke said he was anxious to help improve Anglo-American relations when he returned to the United States. The King explained that as an ex-king the Duke could neither live in Britain nor work abroad for the Crown. His post in the Bahamas had been a wartime expedient. On the subject of the Duchess, the Duke said that he should take all the blame for what had happened in 1936, and if only the Duchess were recognized by the family all would be well. The King seems to have been touched by his brother and did not repeat how badly the family felt he had behaved. ‘I could tell that he is very happily married & that he wants to do his best for her in their future life together. But we cannot help him in this & I don’t see how we ever can.’30

  Queen Mary agreed entirely with the King.31 Tommy Lascelles noted in his diary that when the Duke left on 11 October he felt ‘rather as one did on hearing the all clear after a prolonged air-raid’.32 The Duke considered living in the United States, but in the end he and the Duchess made their principal home in France for the rest of their lives.

  *

  THE KING AND the Queen both understood that fundamental shifts were occurring in Britain and that these might affect the Crown’s relationship with the people. They were both determined to protect that relationship. Labour’s July 1945 victory showed that the electorate did not want to relive the misery of the mass unemployment of the 1930s. They had chosen a government committed to radical change and a huge extension of public ownership and nationalization of the means of production.

  It was no
t an implicit attack upon the monarchy. Indeed, the Labour Party had long ago made its peace with the Crown. In 1923 the Party Conference had defeated overwhelmingly a motion that republicanism should be the policy of the Labour Party. That decision was in good part a tribute to the success of Edward VII and George V in increasing royal involvement with social and charitable causes. As the historian Frank Prochaska put it, ‘Just as the crown intended, the slum visits, the dispensaries and the cottage hospitals, the youth clubs and playing fields, the training schemes and workshops, the consoling words at the pit heads and in the canteens, had taken the republican edge off socialism.’33

  After the abdication the new Queen had immediately seen that service to social causes would be her main responsibility. Charities and voluntary effort were at the forefront of her interest. And although she was happy to take on national institutions, she was determined also to keep up her local patronages and associations. Indeed throughout her life she retained this affection for the small, the local and the particular.

  But at the same time the intellectual leaders of the Labour Party were convinced that centralized planning was more important to meeting modern needs than traditional associations based on family and civil society.34 Individualism fell from fashion; state action, or collectivism, came to be seen as more ‘noble’ than charity work. The war had disrupted social norms; more and more women went to work, tens of thousands of children were separated from their parents, people had to move from areas in which their families had lived for centuries. Order gave way to change, voluntarism to compulsion, stability to destruction. Total war demanded total commitment and made charitable remedies seem inadequate. The state sector grew inexorably.

  During the war, nothing had shown the popular march of the state more clearly than the Beveridge report published a few days after the victory at El Alamein at the end of 1942. It had called, in effect, for a comprehensive ‘social service state’ based on a free health service, child allowances and full employment. The report seemed to chime in with the mood of optimism and patriotism of the time; well written, almost populist, it became a bestseller at once, with a cheap edition for the armed forces. The Queen at first had had her doubts about promising social security before world security was achieved. ‘It is much better not to promise things that may be impossible to bring to pass.’35 But the ideas were quickly embraced by all parties. In March 1943 Churchill had made his first broadcast in a year; in it he drew on Beveridge’s ideas and talked of the need for a national health service, universal national insurance and far wider educational opportunities.

  The new Labour government’s belief in ‘common ownership of the means of production’ would affect if not weaken traditional friends of the monarchy in the financial and commercial sectors and would tend also to ‘subdue and dispirit those civil institutions from which the monarchy drew so much of its strength’.36 In recent decades the Royal Family had developed their relations with the charitable and voluntary sections of society. After the 1945 election, a real question for them was this: as the government nationalized more and more of the economic structures and social services, what space would be left for civil society?

  The King and the Queen understood that the Labour government had a clear mandate for its changes. They may not have agreed with all the government’s policies but they grew to appreciate almost all members of the Cabinet, especially Ernest Bevin, who had distinguished himself as a member of the wartime coalition and was now a clear-sighted foreign secretary. He was the sort of traditional Labour patriot whom the Queen had always admired.

  Labour’s Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was the opposite of Winston Churchill. He was a slim, short man of few emotions and fewer words, but he was precise and determined, and both the King and Queen liked him. With perception, the Queen said later of him, ‘He wouldn’t strike one as a star, but he was a practical little man. I think at first he was quite cagey, you know, difficult to get on with, but then he soon melted. But I think he was very practical. Seemed to get a grip of things.’37

  But both the King and Queen came to fear that at home the government was being too radical too soon. In November 1945 the King noted in his diary that he had told Herbert Morrison, Attlee’s deputy, that the legislative programme was too crowded. Morrison responded that the government had to carry out its proposals as soon as possible.38 To the Duke of Gloucester, the King wrote, ‘My new Government is not too easy & the people are rather difficult to talk to.’39 But he always gave his government his support.

  The Queen was well aware of the additional strain that her husband’s anxieties about the governance of Britain placed upon him. She had a romantic view of the country, one in which perhaps Britain’s glorious history was more important than her present straitened circumstances. It was a challenge for the Queen to come to terms with the austerity imposed by the Labour government. Her contradictory feelings were later carefully described by her biographer, Dorothy Laird. ‘Her physical courage in the face of danger had been flawless; now another, and possibly more difficult kind of courage was required.’40 The King had to give his constitutional support to a socialist government which was determined to create a social revolution in a badly battered country, and the Queen had to support him in this. Both had misgivings.

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  THEIR FIRST Christmas of peace was spent at Sandringham House, which had been closed since 1940. She wrote to her old friend Dick Molyneux, in jocular mood: ‘Bowling through Berkeley Square today, it suddenly struck me to ask whether you were planning to spend Xmas anywhere particular, or whether you would care to come & spend it with us at hideous ugly germ ridden old Sandringham?’ She hoped he could come for at least a few days. ‘If you are already too engaged, a merry Xmas! if not you just wait. E R.’41

  Molyneux accepted happily. There was a small party staying in Norfolk. It included Arthur Penn, Michael Adeane, the King’s Deputy Private Secretary, Delia Peel, the Queen’s friend and lady in waiting, Owen Morshead and Anthony Blunt, the new Surveyor of the King’s Pictures.* No one was in better form than Queen Mary – she seemed to be the life of the party, ‘youthful, skittish and generally rejuvenated … really full of fun and giggles. She dances given any chance at all, coming out shooting (with stick and umbrella) & generally contributes to any jolly fun.’42 Queen Mary herself said she loved resuming ‘the old life’ and trying to forget the ‘six horrible war years’.43

  The new year was made sad for the Queen and the Princesses by the death at Sandringham of Alah Knight, who had looked after them all as children and was integral to the family. The Queen’s sorrow was eased by the presence of her brother David. ‘It really was a great shock, & a great sadness, & you were such a wonderful help. One still feels that she is quietly upstairs. It’s curious,’ she wrote to him shortly afterwards.44

  Another recent death had been that of the Queen’s longest-serving lady in waiting, Lady Helen Graham. She had been with the Queen since 1926 and served her with diligence, humour and affection. ‘I loved & admired dear Nellie – she helped me through so much when I was young & silly,’ said the Queen. ‘She was such fun too.’ The Queen took comfort in the continuing friendship and service of Delia Peel.45

  In early 1946 Arthur Penn resigned his temporary wartime post as her Private Secretary, to be replaced by Major Thomas Harvey. But she did not want to lose Penn and, in writing to thank him for his long service, asked him to become her Treasurer – ‘it would be nice to have a treasure as a Treasurer.’46 He was touched by her words and replied, ‘it is I who should be thanking you.’ He was eager to take on the new job – ‘If you had asked me to be your bootboy I should have leapt at it, & to be your Treasurer, that honourable post, would be a joy indeed. I shall certainly muddle, and probably embezzle, but it will be with the best possible intentions, I do promise, & perhaps I shan’t embezzle much.’47

  The King and Queen had to decide how best to rebuild the formal life of the Court now that peace had come – and now that B
ritish society was altering so profoundly. There was much advice. Jasper Ridley argued in a letter to the Queen that Britain had a unique history of orderly change, largely because of the influence of the Crown. ‘We have, after all, had a 30-year beastly upheaval in the world, and I reckon that at the end of it the Crown is more universally acknowledged as right and necessary than ever before. Surely a grand feather in your caps.’48

  In early 1946, they revived the pre-war practice of inviting people to ‘dine and sleep’ at Windsor Castle. Dick Molyneux reminded the Queen that during George V’s reign the Castle had become ‘almost like a vast empty museum, with Their Majesties living in a corner; such a waste of that splendid place & establishment’. He thought this must never happen again. If they asked up to sixty people a week, and their friends at weekends, they could make their court ‘the envy of the world, the centre of what is left of good society, a wonderful example to the young and an inspiration to everybody to be worthy of it’.49

  At the end of April 1946 they had the Churchills to stay at Windsor. Churchill had recently been in Fulton, Missouri where he had made a deeply considered speech about the communist ‘Iron Curtain’ descending across Europe from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic. This speech became one of the defining texts of the post-war world; the King recognized its importance at once and told him ‘how much good it had done in the world’.50 After the weekend Clementine Churchill wrote to thank the Queen, saying how honoured and ‘warmed’ they had been by the King and Queen’s ‘grace and kindness’.51

  On 8 June 1946, ten months after Victory in Japan Day, the official victory parade was at last held. Twenty-one thousand troops and civilians took part. But the growing split with the Soviet Union, and the bloc of countries it now controlled, meant that no Russian, Polish or Yugoslav troops were present. The King took the salute in the Mall, with the Queen standing beside him. On the dais with them were the Princesses and, among others, Crown Prince Olav of Norway, Princess Juliana and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and Prince Felix of Luxembourg. The King had commanded that the tattered Royal Standard flown on the cruiser Arethusa in which he had crossed the Channel to visit his troops after D-Day should fly from the dais.52 The next day there was a service at Westminster Abbey to give thanks for victory.