The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  For South African society, the garden party at the Governor General’s country house, Westbrook, was a high spot. Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, who wore short afternoon frocks, were surprised that all the ladies of Cape Town were in long dresses.77 The Queen, however, met their highest standards: ostrich feathers decorated not only the sleeves of her long gown and her hat, but also her parasol. The radio carried enthusiastic reports of their progress throughout the country. Enid Bagnold, the author of National Velvet, who had come to South Africa in part to see the tour, wrote, ‘The King and Queen’s every breath and movement is blown through Africa at all hours on the wireless, so that I myself am worked up and await with excitement to know what they are wearing. There was a woman commentator in Cape Town who completely lost her head and kept shouting on the first day “But she’s lovely. Oh, she’s lovely, lovely.” And the Princesses, “Oh, they’re lovely, lovely.” ’78

  All of them, but particularly the Princesses, were amazed by the warmth of the sunshine as well as of the welcome. They could hardly believe the vast blue skies, the vibrant colours, the cornucopias of food. The Princesses were no less astonished by the shops and gazed in the windows as they drove by. They had never seen anything like it in England, the Queen later recalled. ‘Rolls of silk, garden chairs, all the things you hadn’t seen at all. A young person growing up in the war was totally cut off from those sort of things.’79 A visit to the races at Kenilworth for the Cape of Good Hope Derby was made more enjoyable when the Queen and the Princesses backed the winner. That night at a ball for the non-European community, the Queen was visibly delighted by a cheerful interpretation of an old-fashioned quadrille. Entranced, the family stayed on long after they should have departed. Ted Grove wrote that the 5,000 dancers, in their evening dress, ‘made a glorious pageant of colour’.80

  But the reality of segregation could not be disguised. The King had asked that the third morning be given to the children of the Cape Peninsula. Schoolchildren lined the royal route to Simonstown: whites on one side of the road and Coloureds and blacks on the other, all from separate schools. The Queen and the Princesses each received baskets of flowers from three little girls: one of English extraction, one of Dutch and the third Bantu.

  Nor could the political divisions be ignored. They spent a day in the rural Cape, visiting the wine-growing region, in valleys shadowed by the gaunt ridges of the Drakenstein mountains. Intensely Nationalist, country people had lived simply there for three centuries, following old Dutch traditions. In Stellenbosch no Union flag flew and many of the Boers had refused to fight for the British Crown during the war. ‘I think that the visit is going well,’ the Queen reported to Queen Mary, adding, ‘There are so many serious racial problems, but so far all sections of the community have been most welcoming. Yesterday we went out to Paarl & Stellenbosch, two very Nationalist & Afrikaans speaking towns, and had the most delightful reception – very nice country people, and they had prepared a picnic on the top of a mountain with a staggering amount of home made food! Lovely old Dutch recipes and French Hugenot dishes – Bertie & I were stunned by so much, & then we descended the mountain & had luncheon under the trees, again a mass of food & we nearly burst!’81 In fact the workload and the stress were so great that the King lost weight in the course of the tour.

  The climax of their days in the Cape was the state opening of Parliament by the King. The Queen had already put her tutoring in Afrikaans to use in informal conversations; the King’s challenge was more daunting – to make a speech in Afrikaans to Parliament. For the ceremony the Queen was dressed formally in white silk crêpe, with the blue ribbon of the Garter. She wore Queen Mary’s enormous, heavy tiara made for the Delhi Durbar in 1911 from diamonds originally given by De Beers to Queen Mary and George V when they visited South Africa as Duke and Duchess of York in 1901.82

  With the success of Cape Town behind them, the royal party set off into the other provinces of South Africa. Their ‘White Train’ or ‘Wittrein’, with its smartly dressed engine drivers and stewards, was painted ivory and gold. The fourteen coaches were fully air-conditioned and insulated against heat and cold. Internally the suites were wood panelled and the corridors were lined with walnut veneer. Wireless and telephonic communication was built in. There was a carriage for the Household staff, where the clerks of the Private Secretary’s office could continue working on matters relating to home as well as to the tour. Mail was delivered and collected daily. Day after day the train passed through beautiful countryside, farmland, vineyards and ravines and across rivers; years later the Queen remembered ‘the dim blue hills everywhere’ in the distance.83

  The train was a place of escape, but it was also a trap in that it compelled endless impromptu encounters at station after tiny station and village after village. At every stage of its long progress through the Union, the family were pressed with opportunities to greet the enormous crowds of country people waiting by the line for them to pass by. Sometimes the train simply slowed through little halts to give time for waving; on occasion at night the Princesses were already in their dressing gowns when they were needed to appear at the doors to wave. The Queen advised them to put on their jewellery – this would make their dressing gowns look like long dresses. The Queen told Queen Mary that the constant stopping was rather exhausting but they liked to do it because the people ‘are so nice, & some come a very long way, carrying babies, & standing patiently for hours, & one meets the ordinary citizens this way.’84

  At an ostrich farm at Le Roux, outside Oudtshoorn, the Queen and the Princesses cut tail feathers from an ostrich. The owner of the farm, Basie Meyer, said he hoped that changing fashions in the USA and Britain would return their pre-war prosperity to the ostrich farmers of South Africa. To help do just that, the Princesses, as well as the Queen, had made a point of incorporating ostrich feathers in many of their tour clothes. That night in the dusk they heard for the first time a crowd of Bantu children singing, in slow haunting rhythm, as the train drew into a siding happily called Konigsrust – King’s Rest.

  Rest was always the problem. Prime Minister Smuts saw the tour as political rather than recreational and he worked his guests very hard. When they were by the Indian Ocean, they could sometimes bathe and have picnics or braaivleis on the shore and the Princesses tried to ride as often as they could, on mounts lent to them locally. But most days were gruelling. The rule for royal tours was to keep Sunday as a day of rest and simple worship. This tour offered some unusual services, the first of which was at George. By the estuary of the Touws river an arbour had been created, a table with a white cloth had been laid, and a lectern was cut from the branch of a tree. Here the Bishop of George held a service, which was a more sympathetic affair than those in the Dutch Reformed churches which the family had to attend, where they could understand little or nothing.

  In place after place, crowds of Bantu men and women lined the track; as the train passed by they would break into the Bantu anthem, ‘Nkosi Sikelel’i Afrika’ (Lord, bless Africa). The Queen loved the singing. She had few solo engagements on the tour, but her spontaneity, her sense of fun and her instinct for what would do people good infected the whole tour. Enid Bagnold described her uncanny ability to relate to both scores of individuals and massive crowds. Writing to her friend Lady Diana Cooper, she observed,

  She is like Irving* after a First Night and oneself at the stage door. I watched her closely … when she was inspecting ex-servicemen right under my nose … She has an extraordinary control of every facial muscle, a very delicate control, so that she makes valuable every look and half smile in a very experienced way. We others, and the Princesses, just smile or don’t smile, but the Queen has a bigger range and a delicacy of holding or tilting her head or casting a small look for an instant that gives a rain of pleasure here and there and on whoever gets one of the fragments. It’s the sort of thing one sometimes sees Edith Evans do on the stage when she is half listening, half smiling at someone.85

  T
he historical rift with Britain was strongest of all in the Orange Free State. In one town the nervous tension on the arrival of the royal party was eased by the Mayor, a Mr Hart. When he took off his hat it was evident that his hair was full of bees, and that he did not appear to be bothered. This gave rise to some hilarity.86 During the visit to the Orange Free State they entered Basutoland, a British protectorate. At Umtata, on the border, the King and Queen stood up in their car as it drove slowly past the crowds. All were aware of the historic nature of the visit – Basutoland had never been conquered by either the British or the Dutch; now people came in their thousands to pay homage.

  It was a magnificent spectacle. ‘For days the Basuto had been riding in from the mountains and it was estimated that 60–70,000 had assembled for the great Pitso [the gathering of tribes under their chiefs] … The steep hillside was covered with Bantus including prisoners of both sexes and the inmates of the leper hospital.’87 About 40,000 of the assembly were on horseback. As the King and Queen approached the dais the crowds shouted ‘Pula!’ – rain. In some districts the drought had been unbroken for three years. The day after the royal party arrived the rains came, and the King was seen as a rain-maker.

  In Natal the Royal Family enjoyed a break in the Natal National Park Hostel. The flowers there, as elsewhere, were a dazzling sight; the Queen wrote to her sister May that ‘the profusion & terrific colours just took my breath away! … hibiscus, & frangipani and morning glory (which at once made me think of Mother) not to mention roses & lilies and delphiniums and chrysanthemums & dahlias all mixed up together!’88 When they flew into Eshowe they were greeted at the aerodrome by what appeared to be a chaotic crowd of Zulus. Then the mêlée resolved itself into a highly organized but wild war-dance. ‘It was an impressive sight,’ Princess Elizabeth wrote, ‘with 5,000 warriors singing and stamping their feet, ending up with a terrific charge to the edge of the dais where we were. This they were allowed to do only because Mummy begged them to be allowed to come nearer.’89

  In Benomi in the East Rand there was an unfortunate incident. The King and Queen were particularly tired that day and everyone was tense, according to Peter Townsend. Suddenly, to the Queen’s great consternation, they saw a policeman rushing forward as another man sprinted up and grabbed hold of their car. The Queen misunderstood what was happening and was terrified that it was an assault; she beat the man off with her parasol, breaking it. In fact he was an ex-serviceman, named Kayser Sitholi, who was desperate to show the King his loyalty by giving him a sum of money, as was the custom of native tribesmen greeting their chief. Sitholi, who meant no harm to anyone, was dragged off. The King and Queen were both aghast; the King asked Townsend to find out if the man was all right. ‘I hope he was not too badly hurt.’90

  The Queen liked Durban. ‘They are very English & Scottish there, & cling to the old links with Great Britain,’ she wrote to Elizabeth Elphinstone. The churches were full of young people, a nice change from home. And even the old Boer farmers who were ‘brought up Republicans & to look upon England as an enemy have come to greet us’.91 Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa, was the official climax of the tour. The Queen established a rapport with the Mayor of Pretoria, despite his communist background. ‘He confided to Mummy that he had been shut up without evidence, and that he had never even cut a telephone wire or blown up a railway line!’ wrote Princess Elizabeth.92

  The excitement of the crowds in both Pretoria and Johannesburg was palpable. But the demands were relentless and the Queen was concerned about the strain on the King. However warm the welcome, he was constantly worrying about conditions in Britain. She told Queen Mary: ‘This tour is being very strenuous as I feared it would be, & doubly hard for Bertie who feels he should be at home … We think of home all the time.’93 Sometimes his frustration got the better of the King and he lost his temper. He found the officiousness of the Afrikaner police irksome, as did the rest of his family. The Cape Times apparently reported that on one country walk he remarked that they had shaken off the Gestapo at last. On other occasions he could become exhausted and irritated by the constant pressure of the crowds. The Queen would stroke his arm or his hand to calm him. The royal biographer Elizabeth Longford was told that he was infuriated by the Nationalists’ hostility to Smuts and burst out to the Queen, ‘I’d like to shoot them all!’ To which she replied soothingly, ‘But Bertie, you can’t shoot them all.’94 Ted Grove commented that he did not think the King ‘could have got through it all without the love and devotion of the Queen. We admired the way she cared and watched over him during the tour when sometimes the continual heat and travel in the confined space of the Royal Train did nothing to improve his occasional bouts of temper.’95

  In his public speeches the King tried to remind his audiences of all that Britain had endured in the previous eight years; he told Queen Mary that he felt the South Africans, whose lives were much more comfortable, should be reminded of ‘the trials going on at home’. He and the Queen and Princesses were often embarrassed by the amount of food that was always spread before them.96

  One evening, the King ordered that the train be stopped beside a fairly distant beach. The British journalist James Cameron, who was covering the trip, recorded that the police roped off a pathway from the train and down it walked ‘a solitary figure in a blue bathrobe, carrying a towel. The sea was a long way off, but he went. And all alone, on the great empty beach, between the surging banks of the people who might not approach, the King of England stepped into the Indian Ocean and jumped up and down – the loneliest man, at that moment, in the world.’97

  It was tiring for the Queen as well. She may have been a brilliant actress who could be relied on to give a wonderful performance, but her feelings were genuine and the constant need to display them was exhausting. Enid Bagnold stood by the track to watch the White Train pass by. ‘Suddenly there was the Queen in her garden dress, sitting in the window. I waved and she gave one more sickly wave like a dying duck, a sketch of her other waves. She looked as though she would die if she saw just one more woman to wave to.’98 Bagnold was sympathetic and correct. The Queen confessed to Elizabeth Elphinstone that ‘I am rather gaga & tired’ and ‘It is a curious thing how driving through crowded streets full of eager people seems to draw life out of one.’99 Later she repeated: ‘One feels quite sucked dry sometimes – I am sure that crowds of people take something out of one – I can almost feel it going sometimes, and it takes a little time to put it back!’100

  It was a daunting programme for everyone. They spent thirty-five nights on board the train. Many more miles were covered in a fleet of Daimlers and in aircraft. ‘Mouse’ Fielden, Captain of the King’s Flight, who became a long-term friend of the Queen, remarked later that ‘it was not until the South African Tour in 1947 that the King really began to enjoy flying’. Both King and Queen understood the freedom, speed and excitement offered by air travel. They particularly enjoyed communicating with one another on the intercom system when flying in separate planes.101

  They flew up to the British colonies of Northern and Southern Rhodesia, where there was much less tension than in South Africa. The Queen relaxed in Government House in Salisbury, happy that, unlike many of the South African houses in which they stayed, it was a real home. She liked the Governor, Major General Sir John Kennedy, and his wife. Sir John later recalled that on the day they arrived at Salisbury he took the King out for a walk in the grounds of Government House, where there was a tree planted by King Edward VIII as Prince of Wales. ‘The King stopped and looked at it reflectively, and then he said, “My brother never had the good fortune I had when I married my wife.” ’102 They made a visit to the grave of Cecil Rhodes in Matabeleland; on the stony hillside, the heel of one of the Queen’s high-heeled shoes broke. The press party made quite a show of the fact that Princess Elizabeth gave her shoes to her mother and completed the day in her stockinged feet. ‘So like Mummy’, said the Princess, ‘to set out in those shoes.’103


  In Salisbury, the Queen could indulge in a little shopping; she bought nylon stockings, crystallized fruit and chocolates for friends and family back home starved of such delicacies. She had a few solo engagements: visits to the Queen Elizabeth’s Welfare Clinic in Salisbury, to a gathering of representatives of women’s organizations at Government House, for the presentation of Red Cross certificates. Wearing her Black Watch regimental badge, she spoke to a contingent of Rhodesian members of the Black Watch in Bulawayo. Altogether she found Rhodesia ‘most attractive, a very agreeable mixture of British & good colonial, and a nice feeling of freedom everywhere’.104 She maintained a close affection for the country for many years to come.

  Back in Johannesburg, Smuts arranged a private meeting with the exiled Prince and Princess Paul of Yugoslavia. The Queen was now pleased to have a reunion with them. She wrote at once to Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, to tell her how her sister Olga was. The Duchess was deeply grateful. ‘It is sweet of you to write the way you do, so full of heart,’ she replied to the Queen.105