The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  On 23 May she and Princess Margaret had an adventure. Together with Lord and Lady Salisbury, they visited the de Havilland factory near Hatfield and were taken for a four-hour flight in the Comet, the revolutionary jet airliner, over Geneva and Mont Blanc. On board was Sir Miles Thomas, the Chairman of the national airline, the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), who later wrote an account of the flight in his autobiography, Out on a Wing. The Comet flew over Italy and the north of Corsica as well; they reached 500 mph and Queen Elizabeth asked how fast they could go. The pilot suggested she push the control column forward – they reached 525 mph, touching the red danger section on the airspeed indicator. The aeroplane began to ‘porpoise’, showing that it was at the limit of its aerodynamic stability. Comets later proved to have a structural weakness which led to fatal crashes until the fault was put right, and Thomas wrote that he shuddered whenever he remembered this flight.47 Queen Elizabeth, however, was quite unperturbed by the aircraft’s erratic movement. ‘The Viking will seem a little slow after this,’ she said, and sent a radio message to No. 600 Squadron of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force at Biggin Hill, of which she was Honorary Air Commodore. ‘I am delighted to tell you that today I took over as first pilot of the Comet aircraft. We exceeded a reading of Mach 0.8 at 40,000 feet. What the passengers thought I really would not like to say!’48

  In early June 1952 she went north to Scotland, first – and rather sadly – to Balmoral. Every part of it evoked memories of the King, she told Queen Mary. ‘He was always so full of plans & ideas for improving house & garden, & we spent so many happy hours here. Life seems incredibly meaningless without him – I miss him every moment of the day.’49 After a week, she flew on up to Wick to stay with Clare and Doris Vyner in Caithness, on the very northern tip of mainland Britain, close to John o’Groats.

  Caithness is a barren, surprisingly flat county, sometimes called ‘the Lowlands beyond the Highlands’. Windswept and austere, it forms the north-eastern corner of Britain. For much of the Victorian era, fishing for herring – ‘the silver darlings’ – provided most of the work and the income of Caithness, and when that fishing declined, so did the population. By the early 1950s Caithness was really the end of Britain, one of the poorest regions of the country, with many unmade roads and very few people.

  The Vyners had a home almost as far north as the land stretched, on Dunnet Head, a fist of rock which jabs out into the Pentland Firth just south of the Orkney Islands. Their large white house was romantically named The House of the Northern Gate. It was utterly alone and remote, and the wind used to lift the carpets. It was the first place Queen Elizabeth had been to since February that had no associations with the King and she gained relaxation and peace from it.50 To her great surprise, this visit to Caithness offered her a new interest, one which was to provide her enormous pleasure for the rest of her life.

  One day she drove with the Vyners east along the little coast road towards John o’Groats. Between the road and the waves, she said much later, they suddenly saw ‘this romantic looking castle down by the sea’. They drove down the track towards it and found it was quite empty. ‘And then the next day we discovered it was going to be pulled down and I thought this would be a terrible pity. One had seen so much destruction in one’s life.’51 The Castle, named Barrogill, had a superb position, right on the sea, overlooking Orkney, but it was in terrible condition. It had been commandeered during the war and used for troop accommodation. No maintenance had been carried out. The roof was in a disastrous state, and a violent storm in spring 1952 had caused serious damage. Now no one wanted it. The Queen Mother was immediately attracted to the Castle, and was determined to preserve it.

  The owner, Captain Imbert-Terry, was delighted by her interest. He offered to give the Castle to her for nothing. This she declined, but she accepted his suggestion of a nominal price of £100. She decided to change the name from Barrogill to its more romantic original name, the Castle of Mey. It was the only house that ever belonged to her.

  The Vyners were overjoyed that she was to become their neighbour in the wild. Doris Vyner wrote to her: ‘You’ve no idea what a wonderful thing it is for us all this – to be able to be of use – and to have such an enthralling thing to think about instead of the usual gloomy thoughts.’52 Clare Vyner arranged for the Queen Mother to buy some more land along the coast at a cost of some £300; the grazing would provide an income of about £30 a year and, when a small shoot was developed, it could bring in a rent of about £200 a year. ‘It would thus all work in quite economically for you & although not a good shoot would amuse Your Majesty’s guests & give food for the table.’53 Doris Vyner went around local antique shops and found old and inexpensive furniture for her to buy – one extensive list cost £124. She also arranged for electricity to be brought to the Castle.54 She wrote to Queen Elizabeth, ‘I do long for Castle Mey, because I know you’ll feel happy in a way there. I’m sure the King would love you to be by the sea looking at that such important part of his life – Scapa Flow etc etc, Oh dear – you are so brave.’55

  For the time being the Queen Mother kept her plan secret. It was not until early August that she told Arthur Penn, her Treasurer, of what she had in mind. She planned to ‘escape there occasionally when life became hideous’, she told him. ‘Do you think me mad?’56 The news of her purchase came out in the newspapers towards the end of August 1952, and she wrote to her friends and family explaining what she had done. Perhaps nervous of the likely reaction of her cautious mother-in-law, in her letter to Queen Mary she played down the task she had taken on. She had been told that the Castle was going to ‘crumble away’, she wrote, ‘and I felt that it was such a wrong thing to happen to an interesting old place’.57

  Queen Mary owned that she had been surprised to learn from the press the ‘exciting’ news that Queen Elizabeth had bought herself an isolated castle. She feared she would not see it ‘as my travelling days are over’.58 May Elphinstone wished that Mey were not so far away.59 To the Queen Mother that was part of the attraction – she loved being in Caithness because it was Scotland, to which she was devoted, and yet a part of Scotland which had no memories of happier days. She saw the Castle as emblematic of her own life. It gave her and many of her friends and courtiers great joy in the decades to come.

  *

  AS THE SUMMER of 1952 progressed, she started to undertake more official engagements. In the first ten days of July she received representatives of the Royal Society of Arts, attended a concert given by the Bar Musical Society at the Middle Temple, paid visits to the Home for Retired Congregational Ministers and their wives in Sussex and to the Royal College of Art, received several ambassadors and their wives, attended a garden party at Lambeth Palace, and made her annual visit to the London Garden Society.

  She had been dreading going alone to Sandringham that summer – as Queen Mary wrote in a sympathetic letter, being there for the first time alone ‘must have been a severe test to your shattered nerves’. She understood what her daughter-in-law was going through: ‘all the intimate things one was accustomed to discuss with one’s husband & how one misses the talks’, and felt deeply sorry for her.60

  Doris Vyner was more optimistic – she hoped that Queen Elizabeth would feel the King’s presence close to her at Sandringham.61 To her surprise and gratitude, that was indeed how Queen Elizabeth felt at Sandringham that summer. She attended the King’s Lynn Festival to hear a recital by her friend and future lady in waiting Ruth Fermoy, and visited the Sandringham Flower Show, another hardy perennial of hers through the decades to come. She went to a concert by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir John Barbirolli, in St Nicholas’s Church at Dersingham; Vaughan Williams was in the audience and his Fifth Symphony was performed.

  These were friendly, unpretentious local events and she loved them. Edward Seago, who came to stay, and Cynthia Spencer, who was in waiting on her, commented on the peacefulness that surrounded her at Sandringham.62 She was aware of it herself a
nd wrote to Queen Mary, ‘I have felt more at peace than any time since February. Being surrounded by people who loved Bertie, has made me feel very close to him.’63 To her daughter, the Queen, she wrote that ‘I felt an amazing feeling of relief & peace, which I have not felt since Papa died. It was just as if Sandringham opened its arms to me, & I sank into them thankfully.’ Although the house was utterly bound up with the King, ‘I love the people & all that happens here, & to be amongst them is a relief & a healing.’ She reminded her daughter that, when Queen Mary was widowed, the King had told her that she must still treat Sandringham as her home. ‘I would so love it if you would say that to me too.’ She would not come often but she would love to know she could come once in a while.64 The Queen replied at once to her mother that she was ‘very, very thankful’ that the visit had been so happy. ‘I had been in a fever in case it would prove too much agony for you.’ She said that ‘of course’ her mother must continue to treat Sandringham as her home and go there whenever she wanted.65

  After her birthday, the Queen Mother, as always in August, removed to Scotland. First she stayed with the Vyners, making more plans for Mey, and then she went back to the Highlands and Balmoral. She had to prepare for another daunting change: she was to move out of Balmoral and into Birkhall, where she would live without her family. She was concerned; the house had many memories of happy days at the beginning of her marriage but since then she had come to see Balmoral as her Scottish home and after so many years in the Castle, Birkhall seemed very cramped.66 To her sister May she wrote that it was ‘rather awful’ being there instead of at Balmoral and that she felt completely lost without her husband.67

  Even so, she had some friends to stay, among them D’Arcy Osborne, whom she taught to play canasta.68 She told him afterwards how glad she had been of his presence – ‘You were one of the very few friends I wanted to see – you were so kind & understanding, and I was so very grateful to you. Next year I hope to be more brave.’ For the moment she took comfort in her grandchildren, Charles and Anne. ‘Charles is a great love of mine,’ she said to Osborne. ‘He is such a darling & so like his mother when she was a small child.’69

  The peace and optimism she had felt at Sandringham did not last through that autumn. ‘I suppose that one will never feel the same again. I talk & laugh & listen, but one lives in a dream, & I expect that one’s real self dies when one’s husband dies, and only a ghost remains.’ What upset her, she said, were people who looked at her with a penetrating expression and asked, ‘are you feeling BETTER’, and those who said ‘ “but what a wonderful death for the King – how that must comfort you”. If only they knew!’70

  Gradually she came out of herself. Edith Sitwell sent her a copy of her new literary anthology, A Book of Flowers. This turned out to be an inspired gift. Queen Elizabeth wrote to her:

  I started to read it, sitting by the river, and it was a day when one felt engulfed by great black clouds of unhappiness and misery, and I found a sort of peace stealing round my heart as I read such lovely poems and heavenly words.

  I found a hope in George Herbert’s poem, ‘Who could have thought my shrivel’d heart, could have recovered greennesse. It was gone quite underground.’ And I thought how small and selfish is sorrow. But it bangs one about until one is senseless, and I can never thank you enough for giving me such a delicious book wherein I found so much beauty and hope.71

  She was still considering how exactly she should continue her official life. The uncertainty was difficult for her ladies in waiting too, as she postponed making any decision about which of them she wished to keep in her new Household. Arthur Penn wrote to Lady Spencer about their anxieties; as a lifelong friend, he understood Queen Elizabeth well. He was both sympathetic to the ladies and frank, if not tart, about a particular failing of their mistress: ‘The Queen, bless her heart, has cultivated procrastination to a degree which is really an art – when one is vexed, as I fear I often am, one should recall that the Bowes Lyons are the laziest family in the world. Against this reflection it becomes remarkable that she accomplishes so much.’72 Penn believed he understood why Queen Elizabeth had not yet informed her ladies of her intentions. ‘I think it possible that this omission may be the reflection of what has been apparent from the first, a sturdy repudiation of any idea that HM has any intention, because she is widowed, of relinquishing all to which she has become accustomed.’73 She did not give up any of her ladies.

  During the autumn of 1952, Queen Elizabeth had a long conversation with Winston Churchill. According to his daughter Mary Soames, Churchill took it upon himself to tell Queen Elizabeth that, despite the death of the King and the accession of the Queen, she still had an enormously important part to play in British public life.

  She had met Churchill at dinner with the Salisburys on 1 August, and she wrote afterwards to Betty Salisbury, ‘Winston was so angelic about the King – he has such tender understanding, & I was so touched & helped.’74 Then she saw him again in Scotland; he was staying at Balmoral for the Prime Minister’s annual autumn visit and asked if he could come to see her at Birkhall. Her lady in waiting, Jean Rankin, told him to arrive unannounced, and on 2 October he drove over. ‘He was absolutely charming & very interesting,’ Queen Elizabeth wrote to Lord Salisbury, ‘and I realised suddenly how very much I am now cut off from “inside” information. He is truly a remarkable man, & with great delicacy of feeling too.’75 This may have been the crucial conversation during which he persuaded her that she still had a vital national role. Jean Rankin saw that his visit made a difference to Queen Elizabeth. ‘I think he must have said things which made her realise how important it was for her to carry on, how much people wanted her to do things as she had before.’76

  Throughout that autumn she began to pick up the pace of her private interests and her official work. The journal of her activities maintained by her ladies in waiting from the 1950s until the end of her life shows how her interests were concentrated: church, army and charities dominated her public life; in private, music, ballet, art and – a relatively new interest – horses drew her attention, and spilled over into her choice of patronages and engagements. Many of her public duties she now carried out with Princess Margaret at her side. Among the official engagements she undertook in Scotland were a visit to the oil refinery at Grangemouth, and the unveiling of the War Memorial to the Commandos at Spean Bridge. As always, she visited the Lord Roberts’ Workshops in Dundee and the Black Watch Memorial Home at Dunalistair. (This became an annual visit until the 1990s.) In mid-October she went back to London but there was little let-up. In the weeks leading up to Christmas her diary was full. There were visits to her regiments, to almshouses, to prize givings, concerts and recitals, the theatre and the ballet, the unveiling of monuments and many official dinners.

  She had another important preoccupation: the search for a biographer for the King. It would not be an easy book to write, she thought. ‘There can be very few Kings of England whose reigns were so harried and harassed by troubles & worries & anxieties on such an immense scale,’ she wrote to Lascelles.

  First the abdication, & all the agony of mind. I doubt if people realise how horrible it all was to the King & me – to feel unwanted, & to undertake such a job for such a dreadful reason – & it was a terrible experience. Then the War with all its agony, & then ‘after the War’, which was a dreadful strain upon the King. I suppose that we have been through a revolution and, as usual, people hardly realised what was happening to them. All this crammed into 15 short years – it is a dizzy thought.77

  Lascelles proposed John Wheeler-Bennett, a distinguished military historian, as official biographer. He wrote vividly and accurately, Lascelles considered, and had a reputation as a trustworthy historian; coincidentally he had also been a pupil of Lionel Logue.78 (He had a stammer induced when a German bomb was dropped on his school during the First World War.) Moreover he had spent much time as a traveller and writer in Germany between the wars and was one of the first British
commentators to recognize the evil of Nazism.79 He was, in fact, well qualified to inspire Queen Elizabeth’s confidence, and to give her reason to believe that he would be sympathetic to the challenges faced by the King.

  She saw Wheeler-Bennett just before Christmas 1952, liked him, and agreed that he should be given the task. Early in 1953 she promised to send him, through Lascelles, the diaries the King had kept during the war – a decision which took much thought, for the King had intended them to be kept closed in the Royal Archives. ‘And yet I feel that it is very important for someone like Wheeler B to read this day to day account of these terrible days.’80

  Later in the year she invited the author to stay at Birkhall to gather atmosphere and information.81 He gained insights, but at a certain cost. Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart later recorded that Wheeler-Bennett:

  gave us an amusing account of his visit to Balmoral to see the Queen and to Birkhall to see the Queen Mother. At Balmoral the Queen kept off the book till the last morning when she took Jack for a long eight (?) mile walk. Jack, who was not dressed nor shod for such a walk and was more or less ‘beat’ when he got back to Balmoral, collected his suitcase and drove over to Birkhall. The Queen Mother promptly took him for an afternoon walk as long as his morning walk with the Queen. When they returned to the house, Jack wilted visibly. The Queen Mother said to him: ‘Did my daughter, by any chance, take you for one of her walks this morning?’ Jack admitted that she had. ‘Then’, said the Queen Mother, ‘champagne is the only remedy.’82