The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  On the way home they stopped in Paris at the suggestion of Lady Jebb, whose husband was still British ambassador. She had proposed that the Queen Mother visit the International Floral Exhibition and the exhibition of British furniture, ‘The Century of Elegance in England’, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.78 Queen Elizabeth rarely needed encouragement to visit Paris, one of her favourite cities, and, while there, she was pleased to have lunch with General de Gaulle, now President of France.

  In her published diaries, Lady Jebb painted an unflattering portrait of Princess Margaret, whose ‘disagreeable’ behaviour she contrasted with her mother’s ‘sparkling and delightful’ manners. The Princess, she said, ‘wishes to convey that she is very much the Princess, but at the same time she is not prepared to stick to the rules if they bore or annoy her, such as being polite to people.’ She claimed that the Princess faked a cold to get out of engagements and that her only interests were to have her hair coiffed by the famous hairdresser Alexandre and to have a fitting for a Dior dress. Lady Jebb complained about the Princess to the Queen Mother’s lady in waiting, Patricia Hambleden, who, she claimed, was not surprised and observed that the Queen Mother would not be concerned in any way by her daughter’s behaviour: ‘Nothing will disturb her happiness.’ Lady Jebb asked if Queen Elizabeth had always been so philosophical and Lady Hambleden replied, ‘Yes, I think she always had this quality. And a sort of serenity, and of being unhurried.’79

  A year later, in May 1960, Queen Elizabeth made her second visit to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and spent nineteen days there. This was perhaps her favourite part of the British Empire in Africa. She listened to the growing concerns of the white minority in Southern Rhodesia but was told by people she trusted that relations between black and white were likely to get much worse. Major General Sir John Kennedy, the former Governor, thought the white settlers were ‘diehard’ and ‘unrealistic’.80

  Once again there were fears that, given what the Governor of Nyasaland called ‘the uneasy political atmosphere’, there might be boycotts or ‘unhappy incidents’.81 In the event there were none at all. The principal purpose of Queen Elizabeth’s visit was to open the Kariba Dam, intended to provide hydro-electric power for the copper belt. She made numerous other visits to schools, factories and farms; one child whose school she had visited wrote an essay about her saying ‘she had gloves studded with rubies … Her shoes were pink, studded with diamonds … The jewels on her dress and her tiara twinkled like stars … On her gloves were small emeralds.’82

  She travelled widely throughout the Federation, visiting small towns far from the usual beaten track. She went to Barotseland, which delighted her. ‘No roads, and a vast plain, which every year is inundated by the mighty Zambesi, too beautiful for words, because the water is just going down now, & the tall grass is growing through the water, & this endless vista of shimmer & light is really fascinating.’83 More schools, tea plantations, farms, tobacco estates and hospitals welcomed her. Near Blantyre, the capital of Nyasaland, she unveiled a war memorial to African and European servicemen who had fallen in the two world wars. She spoke movingly of the sacrifices that colonial soldiers had made for Britain and laid a wreath of poppies on the memorial, which bore the inscription ‘Lest we forget’.

  The Governor of Nyasaland noted that it was above all the Queen Mother’s ‘charm and dignity’ which ensured the great success of the visit at such a politically difficult time. ‘Tales of her friendliness and personal charm’ spread quickly and as a result what began as small crowds grew to throngs of thousands.84 She was pleased too. Martin Gilliat wrote to the Governor to say that her hopes had been ‘fulfilled beyond her keenest expectations’.85

  From this period on Queen Elizabeth followed the affairs of all of eastern and southern Africa with great attention. She admired what the white settlers had achieved while understanding that ‘the winds of change’ must indeed produce just that – and would lead to black majority rule. In the case of Southern Rhodesia she grew more and more concerned by the gulf between the whites and the blacks, by the white minority government’s later unilateral declaration of independence, and by the way in which subsequent British governments handled the crisis.

  *

  IT WAS NOT just the Empire that was having to change at the end of the 1950s. The imperial monarchy at home also began to come under scrutiny, along with many other British institutions. The years following the failure of British intervention in the Suez crisis of 1956 were a time of national reassessment. The Conservative Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, resigned and was replaced by Harold Macmillan. The country was still poor and battered, struggling to recover from the immense exertion of winning the war. There were still bomb sites all over London and other great cities. Added to the expense of rebuilding were the costs of nationalization and the welfare state embarked upon by the radical Labour governments of 1945–51 and accepted by the Conservative government that succeeded them.

  Britain was still an overwhelmingly white nation. The first immigrants from the British colonies, particularly the West Indies, had begun to arrive in 1947, but there were only 36,000 a decade later. Class divisions had been diminished but not ended by the war. Social rank was easily identified by accents and clothing, even by men’s hats. The monarchy was not just accepted but was enjoyed by the overwhelming majority of the population. But, even for the monarchy, change had begun.

  In 1953 the Royal Family had profited from a romantic sense of renewal and hope after the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. But public attitudes by the end of the decade were much more questioning. There was love still, but it was no longer unconditional. The period of scepticism was triggered (or was subsequently seen to be triggered) when a young peer, Lord Altrincham (John Grigg), criticized the Queen in National Review, a small magazine he owned. He called her speeches ‘prim little sermons’ and said that her background and training were too limited and her advisers too narrowly chosen. He thought she needed ‘a truly classless and Commonwealth Court’. His remarks were thoughtful and intended to be supportive of what he called ‘the genius of constitutional monarchy’. Privately, some of the Queen’s own advisers considered that such comments were helpful and that it was time for the Palace to shed its ‘tweedy’ image. But such criticism was unprecedented and raised a public storm.

  In these circumstances, the arrival of Antony Armstrong-Jones in the royal firmament was propitious – he was far from the tweedy set that Lord Altrincham had criticized. A young and attractive society photographer, his uncle was Oliver Messel, a well-known artist and theatrical designer. Armstrong-Jones had been at Eton and had then coxed the winning Cambridge boat in the 1950 boat race against Oxford.

  His friendship with Princess Margaret began to develop in 1958 after they were introduced by Elizabeth Cavendish, a sister of the Duke of Devonshire. His bohemian lifestyle was instantly attractive to the cloistered but somewhat rebellious Princess. He had a studio and flat in the Pimlico Road and also a hideaway south of the Thames in Rotherhithe, in those days a very unfashionable part of London that would have seemed exotic to someone nurtured in the greatest palaces and castles of the land.

  Armstrong-Jones sent Princess Margaret long-playing gramophone records of a popular musical, Irma la Douce, and then invited her to see it.86 She took her mother into her confidence and Queen Elizabeth asked Armstrong-Jones to lunch at Clarence House. The Princess warned him that if he came she would ‘bore you by forcing you to look at my photograph of Mama in the heather which has blown up very nicely. It’s interesting (to me) for its textures … Altogether it would be too sad if you cannot come!’87 The lunch went well; the Queen Mother liked this engaging young artist and encouraged her daughter to pursue the friendship. Armstrong-Jones liked the Queen Mother too – he enjoyed her coquettish familiarity touched with formality. Their friendship became close and was to survive to the end of her life.

  Armstrong-Jones took scores of photographs of the Princess, as he did of
all his friends. In April 1959 she asked him to photograph her ‘properly’ and suggested he come to Royal Lodge for the weekend of 1 May.88 That summer they fell in love and by August she was writing to him joyful letters from Balmoral. ‘You’ve made me happy. Are you pleased? I am … I left London tremendously NOT in turmoil. Are you aware how much that means to me – having travelled unhappily, bumping about.’ Now, by contrast, she had ‘golden dreams’ and found herself ‘smiling unconsciously. What a short time it is since April really. Three months, not counting the last blissful weeks … every time you came to stay it was nicer than the last … my sister is glorious, my b[rother] in l[aw] better now and the children are cockahoop, camping the night in a stalking house. Darling do write back and tell me everything that happens to you, every detail please.’89

  All that summer they wrote to each other, letters filled with endearment. On her birthday, 21 August, she waited in her room for his call and next day she wrote to tell him again how happy she now was. ‘Dare one say that word … I’m afraid of stating it.’ She had been unhappy for a long time but now she thought she really was happy – ‘because I feel peaceful and unworried and you are nice and gentle, very rare’. Later that evening the family, she told him, ‘sat for hours after dinner singing songs round the table, and then on and on in the drawing room’.90

  At the end of August President Eisenhower, near the end of his second term in office, took up a long-standing invitation to visit the family in Scotland. The Princess wrote a long and hilarious description of the occasion. ‘Excitement, arrangements, arrangements, nonsense talked, wrong information, confirmation of wrong information, diet sheets, screening by G men, last minute refutation of wrong information, that went on before his arrival put us all in a frenzy of nerves.’

  Prince Philip met Eisenhower’s flight and drove with him to Balmoral. The Queen and the Princess walked down the drive and waited just around a corner and out of sight of the horde of photographers outside the gate. Prince Philip had forgotten that they were planning to do this and his first reaction, he said afterwards, was ‘who are those two idiotic women?’91 They took Eisenhower into the hills and the Queen cooked him drop scones on a barbecue. Then it was ‘on for a drink with my glorious Mum at a party at Birkhall where everybody produced cameras so that instead of faces there were just a lot of old lenses on the lawn’.92

  In October Armstrong-Jones came to stay at Balmoral and he and the Princess enjoyed exploring together all the places the Princess loved the most. They visited the Queen Mother at Birkhall too. He showed the Princess how to take better photographs and took many himself. Afterwards, he sent her a parcel of hundreds of photographs – she handed them around with pride and was particularly pleased if someone said, ‘What a marvellous Armstrong-Jones portrait,’ and she could say ‘I took that one myself.’

  While the family was at Balmoral the general election called by Harold Macmillan took place on 8 October, and on election night, the Princess stayed up in ‘the nerve centre’ (the equerries’ room) watching the results; she was much cheered when Macmillan and his Conservative Party won another victory.93

  Later, after a visit to Glamis, the Princess wrote to tell Armstrong-Jones that it gave her such pleasure to be there ‘and it brings back hundreds of blissful memories of a sunny childhood and loving, fond grandparents’. She was about to take the train ‘back to London and you. I love you passionately and peacefully and I’ve thought of you every second which has resulted in long periods of day dreaming out of which I have to be literally shaken. I have missed you all the time darling and can’t wait to see you.’94

  On 27 February 1960, shortly after the birth of Queen Elizabeth’s third grandchild, Prince Andrew, the Court Circular announced: ‘It is with the greatest pleasure that Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother announces the betrothal of her beloved daughter The Princess Margaret to Mr Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones, son of Mr R. O. L. Armstrong-Jones, QC, and the Countess of Rosse to which engagement the Queen has gladly given her consent.’

  The news was greeted with astonishment – Armstrong-Jones had never been mentioned as a possible suitor – and great pleasure. Many people felt that Princess Margaret had been dealt a poor hand over Peter Townsend; the fact that she could now be happy was doubly pleasing. And the fact that the Queen’s sister was marrying neither prince nor duke nor even aristocrat found favour with many. He was widely described in the press as a ‘commoner’, though the Daily Mail reassured its readers that both his parents were from the landed gentry. By comparison with his new family, he was seen as somewhat raffish. His boyish good looks, his wide smile, the fact that he worked for a living and his obvious talent endeared him to many people, and to the spirit of the more populist age.

  Some of Armstrong-Jones’s friends were concerned that the love match might also in the end prove a mismatch. And some members of the family were not sure what to make of it all. The Duchess of Gloucester wrote to Queen Elizabeth to say that she and her husband had been ‘wondering how you feel about Margaret’s great venture’. She thought ‘her “Tony” ’ looked very nice in the photographs ‘& sounds an interesting & rather unusual sort of character’. The fact that they had never come across him ‘all makes it so much more difficult to know what to say or think about it. Anyway it is very exciting news.’95

  The Queen Mother was pleased. In a letter she wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury* she said, ‘I feel very happy about it, and feel sure too, that Margaret has found someone with whom she can be happy … they went to Holy Communion together on the first Sunday after they became engaged, which seems encouraging for the future.’96 She presented the beaming couple to the world at a gala evening at the Royal Opera House. They all waved from the royal box while the audience in the stalls and the circles cheered with evident pleasure.

  Preparations for the wedding went on alongside the Queen Mother’s normal official life. In early April there was a charming interlude. The President of France and Madame de Gaulle made a state visit to London. De Gaulle had always been one of the Queen Mother’s heroes. She stood on the balcony of Clarence House to watch his carriage drive up the Mall to Buckingham Palace. When the carriage was opposite Clarence House it stopped; the General stood up and saluted her.97 Later he and his wife came to tea at Clarence House, and the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret attended the state banquet in his honour at Buckingham Palace.

  The wedding took place at Westminster Abbey on 6 May 1960. It was the first great royal event since the Coronation. Now, seven years later, the country was bursting into the 1960s and what the Queen’s biographer Elizabeth Longford called ‘a period of brittle animation’.98 The Mall was decorated with arches of roses, the sun shone; the crowds, according to Noël Coward, ‘looked like endless, vivid, herbaceous borders’. ‘We want Margaret,’ they shouted. Three million more people watched the ceremony on television.

  Queen Elizabeth wrote to her daughter on her honeymoon in terms which many mothers would understand. ‘After the tremendous bustle and noise and beauty of your wedding day, you suddenly disappeared, and I feel that I haven’t seen you since you were about 9 years old!’ She thought the wedding was perfect – ‘I felt that it was a real wedding service, holy & beautiful, and you looked heavenly darling.’99 From Britannia Tony Armstrong-Jones, thanked his mother-in-law for ‘the wonderful feeling of warmth and welcome’ she had given him; he had never in his life been as contented as during the weekends at Royal Lodge.100

  Princess Margaret told her mother that every minute of her wedding ‘was a dream of happiness’ – and she thanked her ‘for being so absolutely heavenly all the time we were engaged, you were so encouraging and angelic and it is something that is difficult to express on paper because it is really thanking you for being you’.101

  * Dick Francis CBE (b. 1920), one of the most successful National Hunt jockeys of his time. He won over 350 races, and raced in Queen Elizabeth’s colours 1953–6. In 1957 he had to retire from the track af
ter a serious fall and subsequently became an equally successful author of racing thrillers.

  * Devon Loch recovered and later in 1956 he came second in the King George VI Chase at Kempton Park to Rose Park, another Cazalet-trained horse. He was then injured and retired. The Queen Mother gave him to Noël Murless, one of the Queen’s trainers, and his daughter Julie rode him constantly until he had to be put down, aged seventeen, in 1963. (Sean Smith, Royal Racing, p. 60)

  * Queen Elizabeth had become patron of the service in 1953; its name was later changed to Queen Elizabeth’s Overseas Nursing Service Association.

  * The letter was never sent, as she noted on it herself, and remained among her papers – probably, therefore, an oversight on her part.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE HEART OF THE MATTER

  ‘I would LOVE to be Patron’

  IN THE 1960s Britain embarked on an extensive social revolution, one which led to more questioning of ancient institutions than ever before. It was uncomfortable for members of the Royal Family. The social historian Asa Briggs suggested later that culturally and politically the year 1956 had seemed to mark the symbolic break with the past. That was the year of John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, of James Dean’s Rebel without a Cause, of Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, of Bill Haley and the Comets’ ‘Rock around the Clock’. It was also the year, as we have noted, of the failed British intervention at Suez, which showed the British more clearly than anything else that their country was no longer the Great Power that it had been.1