The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  Another Veuve Clicquot to christen

  The great bows that slide away!14

  Harvey remained a friend of Queen Elizabeth until he died. In reorganizing her life after the death of the King, Queen Elizabeth depended on family, friends and courtiers like him. Her most constant support and protector throughout these difficult years remained Arthur Penn, her friend since childhood and her Treasurer since 1946.

  Penn was humorous and cultivated; an ardent monarchist, he was devoted to Queen Elizabeth. She relied not only upon his benevolent supervision of her Household, but on his good taste, scouring sale rooms and antique shops on her behalf to find mirrors, tables or pictures at reasonable prices with which to complete the furnishing of her homes. He did his best to impose some order on her finances, both public and private, and to discourage her from unlimited expansion of her overdraft at Coutts, a private bank whose management was understanding of royal debt.

  Such indulgence was helpful. Queen Elizabeth did not spend conspicuously on her homes, but bouts of cautious parsimony alternated with a certain insouciance. Arthur Penn began one of his letters to her: ‘This is a boring letter, being about money, and if there is an odious subject that is it’15 – which matched her attitude perfectly. She found it difficult to control her outgoings, and her horses and the Castle of Mey, for which she paid out of her private funds, were a heavy burden.16 ‘She certainly had a hazy idea of costs,’ wrote one of her ladies in waiting later, ‘but greedy she was not and her extravagances as measured by those of modern celebrities could be reckoned almost modest.’17

  She was aware that royal expenses were under more and more Parliamentary scrutiny and at Sandringham over Christmas and New Year 1953–4, when the Queen and Prince Philip were on their Commonwealth tour, she made a point of telling the Queen that she had tried to keep costs down by having as few staff as possible.18 Nonetheless she felt then (and always) that she had to maintain ‘a certain standard, such as large motor cars & special trains, and all the things that are expected of the mother of the sovereign’.19

  The letters between Queen Elizabeth and Arthur Penn are a poignant testimony to the affection between a queen and her friend and servant. By 1956, however, Penn was seventy and he told her he thought he should now bow out. Hating to lose someone so vital to her, she begged him to ‘continue the drudgery of battling with my horrid finances’ for some time yet. But, she added, when he really did find the job too burdensome he must tell her, so he could resign as her Treasurer ‘& become Keeper of my Conscience & prod it when I am preparing to buy two Chippendale mirrors, instead of paying off the overdraft at Coutts’.20 On another occasion she sent him a teasing note saying, ‘I have lost all your money at Ascot – I do hope you don’t mind.’21

  He stayed. But he felt weaker still and, two years later, he wrote another letter of charm and courtesy, reminding her that when he had last suggested retirement ‘you most generously asked me to tarry’. He was almost seventy-three and ‘my best service to you now is to slip unobtrusively away’.22 Still she would not have it. She told him she was ‘deeply distressed’ by his letter. ‘You do more for me than anyone else, so there.’ She repeated that she could never have continued her public work after the death of the King without his help, pointing out that ‘trying to start a completely new life by oneself is quite the most difficult and horrible thing that one could imagine, and I am deeply, deeply grateful for all you did then, & after’.23

  Penn’s burden was lightened after Martin Gilliat became her Private Secretary in 1955. Like Penn and many others whom the Queen Mother favoured, Gilliat was a military man who had been schooled at Eton. During the war he was mentioned in dispatches before being captured at Dunkirk; after escaping from two other German prisoner-of-war camps, he was imprisoned at Colditz, whence he attempted constantly to escape. After the war he had served with Lord Mountbatten in India and most recently he had been military secretary to Field Marshal Slim as governor general of Australia.24

  A tall, convivial and clubbable man who dabbled in financing theatre productions, he was an excellent planner and quickly mastered the range of the Queen Mother’s interests, concerns, duties and friendships. He shared her enthusiasm for the turf and played a large part in her racing life. She became both dependent on and fond of him. But it was characteristic of the informal way in which she oversaw Clarence House that he came to her on trial and thirty years later, according to Kenneth Rose, he joked that he was still waiting to hear if his appointment would be made permanent.25

  *

  ONE OF Martin Gilliat’s first duties for the Queen Mother was to accompany her on a visit to Paris in March 1956. She had been invited to open the Franco-Scottish exhibition at the French National Archives in the Hôtel de Rohan. She flew to Le Bourget on 13 March. Sir Gladwyn Jebb, the British Ambassador, had not doubted that happy memories of her last visit, in 1938 with the King, would ensure the success of this one. But he was astonished at the warmth of her reception. ‘Although the visit was completely unofficial and had not received any very great advanced publicity in the press,’ he reported, ‘the streets from Le Bourget to the Embassy were completely lined, in places 10 or 20 deep.’26

  Queen Elizabeth opened the exhibition that afternoon with an expertly delivered speech in French and, after dinner at the British Embassy, returned to the Hôtel de Rohan for a French government reception. Next day she lunched with the President, René Coty, at the Elysée Palace, and then drove out to Versailles. There she was entertained to tea by all the Commonwealth ambassadors at the Grand Trianon, which had been placed at their disposal by the French government ‘as an exceptional mark of friendship to Her Majesty’.27 In the evening the Jebbs held a reception for her at the Embassy at which, according to a report reaching Lady Salisbury, she was ‘dazzling’.28

  There were more memories of the past. Queen Elizabeth’s first French governess, Madame Guérin, came to see her with her daughter Georgina, who had taught the Princesses before the war. This episode gave rise to critical comment by Lady Jebb about her royal guest: she noted in her diary that Queen Elizabeth delighted in mimicry, and mimicked the governess. ‘I find her a puzzling person,’ she wrote. ‘So sweet, so smiling, so soft, so charming, so winning, so easy and pleasant. And yet there is another side, which sometimes reveals itself, rather mocking, not very kind, not very loyal, almost unwise.’29 Nonetheless, the Ambassadress wrote to Queen Elizabeth afterwards complimenting her on the pleasure her visit had given. ‘The people of Paris, and indeed of France, have always held the late King and Your Majesty in a very special place in their hearts, and they were truly glad to welcome you again.’ She thought that the visit had helped convince the French that they still had British support.30

  Sir Gladwyn Jebb went even further, writing to the Foreign Secretary: ‘There is no doubt at all to my mind that this kind of visit has a very profound and salutary political effect. Just when the French were feeling low about things in general, and more particularly about Algeria … it was heartening for them to have physical proof of sympathy from their closest ally in the person of so charming and intelligent a member of the Royal Family.’31

  Despite public successes, however, private loneliness was always with her. To recapture the sense of family life, her regular visits to Windsor for Easter and Sandringham for Christmas were vital. After her return to England and the disappointment of Devon Loch at the Grand National, Queen Elizabeth was grateful for her week at Windsor. Writing to the Queen afterwards she thanked her daughter for ‘so much sweetness & thought and care for your venerable parent’. Above all, she treasured the companionship of family. ‘You can’t imagine how deadly everything is when one is alone – When one is young one feels that life goes on for ever, & I was utterly happy with Papa & you & Margaret.’ She hoped that the Queen would have more children. ‘I longed for more children, but somehow everything seemed against us.’32

  The family spent Christmas together at Sandringham. Through February
and March 1957 the Queen Mother undertook official engagements almost every weekday. In April she went to the Castle of Mey, where she ‘got hold of’ a television and watched ‘some excellent tho’ rather foggy pictures’ of the Queen and Prince Philip on an official visit to Paris – she told the Queen that she thought her clothes looked ‘perfect’.33 On the anniversary of her Coronation, 12 May, the Worshipful Company of Gardeners presented her with a replica of her Coronation bouquet; this became a tradition which continued for the rest of her life. On 29 June she made a brief visit to France to unveil the Dunkirk Memorial commemorating the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force in 1940.

  Then came the major event of the Queen Mother’s year. At the beginning of July 1957 she left for another official visit to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Her principal task was to open the new University College at Salisbury, the foundation stone of which she had laid in 1953, and to be installed as its president. Her role was especially significant because she was also Chancellor of the University of London, with which the new University College was linked. She was to tour all three countries of the Federation.

  Prince Charles, together with Princess Margaret and Princess Anne, came to see her off at London Airport, and climbed aboard the Britannia aircraft to inspect the ingenious layout of the cabins for the Queen Mother and her ladies in waiting, with couches, tables and chairs which converted into beds. Also on board was Queen Elizabeth’s wardrobe for the tour – some sixty items including twenty-nine outfits with matching hats, eleven extra day dresses and four extra evening dresses.

  After a twenty-one-hour flight, they landed in Salisbury and over the next few days Queen Elizabeth went to a tobacco auction, visited a nursery school for African children and received several deputations. On 5 July, she was installed as president of the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Her speech emphasized the high academic standards and the multi-racial status of the new University.

  They travelled on to Bulawayo for more engagements, and Queen Elizabeth attended an indaba, or tribal gathering, in the Matopos Hills. It was a ‘moving and memorable occasion’ as tribal sentinels stood with their spears and shields on the tops of surrounding hills. She was elaborately dressed for the occasion, in a white lace dress with her Garter ribbon and star and Family Orders, and wearing a white hat adorned with white feathers touched with Garter blue. There were ritual dances of welcome, gifts and acts of homage to Queen Elizabeth; her speech of thanks was translated into two languages and she invested four chiefs with the Queen’s medal.34

  Afterwards the party flew to Northern Rhodesia, first to Lusaka and then to Ndola in the copper belt, where in fierce heat at Luanshya Queen Elizabeth, now dressed in miner’s kit of white protective coat, overshoes, helmet and lamp, was taken 1,500 feet down a copper mine. Conditions were said to be ideal – ‘a high, light, airy mine, where it is apparently quite safe to smoke. The press in full force!’ At another mine at Kitwe she was shown molten copper ore being poured from the furnace. ‘Unfortunately the wind changed at the crucial moment, and the whole party were nearly asphyxiated by sulphur fumes.’ She then drove through the African township and spent the night in the mining company’s guest house. Her lady in waiting, Olivia Mulholland, commented that it was an exhausting ‘but absorbingly interesting’ day.35

  On 10 July she took a ‘bumpy flight in a small and not very comfortable plane’, a Heron, to the town of Broken Hill where there was a reception and a lunch and she then decided to do a spontaneous ‘walkabout’ – such as she and her husband had first done in New Zealand in 1927. ‘This produced immense enthusiasm and she was given an ecstatic welcome.’ Back in Lusaka she received a deputation from Queen Elizabeth’s Colonial Nursing Service,* and then unveiled a plaque at the High Courts of Justice. She laid the foundation stone for the new Anglican cathedral, attended a garden party at Government House and presented Silver Drums to the 1st Battalion The Northern Rhodesia Regiment and watched the Beating Retreat – ‘a ceremony quite beautifully carried out, and the bugle calls most moving and romantic as the African light began to fail’.36

  Next morning, 12 July, she was on another flight, this time to Chileke, where she was met by the Governor of Nyasaland and Lady Armitage; she visited and named the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, had lunch with the Chief Justice, attended a garden party at the Limbe Country Club and then had a pleasant evening drive to Government House in Zomba, pronounced by Olivia Mulholland the most beautiful place they had yet visited, with glorious views of the surrounding mountains.

  At a state baraza (an open public meeting) for African chiefs from the whole territory, she delighted the crowd by appearing in a blue and white evening dress with a sparkling tiara, a mass of diamond jewellery and the Garter ribbon over her shoulder. More than a hundred chiefs took part in a colourful and impressive ceremony and the Queen Mother shook hands with each of them. In the evening she decided to drive up the hair-raising road to the top of the Zomba Mountain to see the view and the profusion of wild flowers; the whole party repeated the experience the next day in convoy, raising clouds of red dust, for a picnic tea. ‘There were unanimous regrets at leaving such a lovely spot,’ Olivia Mulholland recorded. They would have enjoyed a rest, but they had to return to Salisbury next morning.37

  The last day, 16 July, was particularly exhausting with several public engagements, a hot and dusty race meeting and a state banquet. After that the party was driven straight to the airport with the Queen Mother still in evening dress and tiara. ‘A most romantic departure as HM boarded the plane with the floodlights on, the whole thing looking like a scene from a musical comedy.’38 They landed at London Airport in the pouring rain and were met by Princess Margaret. The Queen and Prince Philip came to Clarence House and they all dined together before dispersing, exhausted and somewhat dazed but confident that the trip had been a great success.

  The acting British High Commissioner reported home that Queen Elizabeth’s tour had had a positive effect on race relations in the Federation. Her engagements had been very much multi-racial, sometimes in spite of opposition. ‘For her part, Her Majesty emphasised again and again the pleasure with which she saw the representatives of all races, and this gracious influence in favour of racial tolerance cannot fail to be of effect throughout the country … now that these barriers of race prejudice have once been lowered other people will be less fearful of trying to behave in a liberal way in future.’39

  *

  QUEEN ELIZABETH undertook her longest tour at the beginning of 1958. It gave her considerable pleasure that as a result she would fly right around the world before her very modern son-in-law Prince Philip had done so. She left feeling unwell, after she and other members of the family had contracted a rather vicious form of flu at Sandringham.

  She had been invited by the government of Australia to open the British Empire Service League biennial conference in Canberra on 17 February, and preceded this with a ten-day visit to New Zealand. She flew out of London on a BOAC DC-7 on the morning of 28 January. Her first brief stop was Montreal where the plane landed to refuel in a blinding snowstorm. Her flight continued across the Prairies and the Rockies to Vancouver, where she arrived at 11.30 p.m. local time. The snow had been replaced by drenching rain. Almost twenty-four hours after leaving London, she was tired, but when she landed she said she was ‘so glad to be here’.

  Travelling via Honolulu and crossing the international dateline, she touched down in Fiji on the afternoon of Friday 31 January. There was no question of rest – instead she was accorded a formal reception first by the Governor and then by the Mayor of Lautoka, and was asked to watch a display of Fijian song and dance. After a short night’s sleep, she took off for the last leg of the journey out to New Zealand, arriving in the afternoon of 1 February. There, after a journey of 12,700 miles, she was greeted by the Governor General and Lady Cobham.

  Throughout February and the first week of March she conducted an extensive and relentlessly busy tour
of New Zealand and Australia. It included all the usual paraphernalia of royal tours – civic receptions, garden parties, inspections of schools and universities, farms and showgrounds; the presentation of colours to military units, luncheons and dinners with local and national politicians, church services, drives from airport to hotel, hotel to airport in long convoys of cars. Sir James Scholtens, the assistant director of the Australian tour, later recalled that her programme was indeed very heavy and was ‘saturated with’ events.40

  Still exhausted by the journey out, she had a nasty recurrence of her flu symptoms in the Cathedral Church of St Paul at Wellington. As she described it to the Queen, ‘My head started to go round just like it did in London before I left, & my knees trembled so much that the service paper rattled & rustled! It was really an agony, & the first time in my life that such a thing has happened to me.’ She found that the worst thing was being alone without anyone in the family. ‘When one has someone either to help, or be helped by, nothing seems quite so devastating – Luckily, I shall be far too old soon for any more Australasian tours!’41

  When she finally shook off her illness, the Queen Mother enjoyed herself much more and wrote home saying how touching her welcome had been. The Australian papers were gossipy, but ‘so far they are quite polite, & go on the old stories of how tired I am, & how much my feet hurt, & how tired the staff is, & how I must dye my hair otherwise how could it still be dark etc etc!! Quite harmless, & quite funny sometimes.’42

  Later she described herself as ‘just hanging on’; the tour was so packed that there was hardly time for breathing. But luckily the weather was lovely ‘and one feels revived’.43 She found the loyalty to the Crown and to Britain ‘burning’.44 She was annoyed to think that the English newspapers were not covering her efforts, but in fact the British press followed her tour quite extensively and both her daughters told her so. Princess Margaret wrote, ‘We see nothing but delicious hot sunny photographs of you with millions & millions of people waving. I can almost hear that exhausting noise!’45 There were compensations. Queen Elizabeth wrote to her unmarried daughter that on a sheep station she had met the owners’ ‘very beautiful nephews, all called Bill. The real country Australian is really a knock out. Very tall, with long legs encased in tight trousers, blue eyes, a drawl and a Stetson – they are too charming for words and the American cowboy is a mere nothing compared.’46