The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  Together with Gilliat and Anstruther worked her assistant Private Secretary Alastair Aird, another ex-army officer. He had joined her Household as equerry in 1960, took on the role of comptroller in 1974, and became the lynchpin of her Household, in charge of her homes and their contents, her staff and her entertaining. In close support from 1959 was her press secretary John Griffin, a former officer of the 24th Lancers and then of the Queen’s Bays, who fitted well into the easygoing Household. With the press he was laconic, taking the view that the fewer words he uttered, the better he was doing his job. Like others, he stayed and stayed in Queen Elizabeth’s service – until he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1990, after which she used to invite him and his wife Henrietta to come as guests to Scotland.

  Her senior Household were all devoted to Queen Elizabeth but they were aware that her style of living, as ‘the last great Edwardian’, could excite criticism in the more egalitarian times at the end of the twentieth century. Ralph Anstruther, in particular, had to be concerned about the size of her entourage, as well as the cost of her clothes, her horses and her entertaining at home – no easy matter when she liked everything to be of the best.

  Her parties tended to go with a swing. She described to Princess Margaret one ecclesiastical reception she gave. ‘I gave a cocktail party for 200 Bishops from overseas – by the time that 8 o’clock came, they were in cracking form!’ They tucked into all the canapés ‘& tossed down martini after martini, especially the Americans who I am sure had been entertained on warm sherry for weeks before!’46

  She frequently gave lunch and dinner parties, usually for about twelve people. Guests always loved these invitations: the food was good, the cocktails were mixed and the wine was poured with generous aplomb by her uniformed stewards, and the atmosphere was merry. On fine summer days lunch was often served at a table under the trees in the garden. Harold Macmillan, the former Conservative Prime Minister, thanked her for one such ‘picnic’, saying that it had ‘all the pleasures of informality and none of its disadvantages. A rustic bank is all very well in its way, but it is apt to be uncomfortable and there is always the danger of earwigs.’47 Roy Strong noted, ‘The Clarence House ritual is that of an Edwardian great house and the sight of eighteen people sitting at a dining-room table laid overall alfresco with three menservants ministering to their needs was pure 1890s.’48

  Among the jovial and frequent guests were Woodrow Wyatt, a slightly rakish former Labour politician and prolific journalist who became a devotee of Margaret Thatcher and was also chairman of the Horserace Totalisator Board. She enjoyed his gossipy wit as well as his love of racing and often dined with him. Equally, if differently, entertaining was Bruno Heim, who became in 1982 the Vatican’s first apostolic nuncio to Great Britain and Northern Ireland, marking the establishment for the first time of full diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and the Holy See. (This was of significance to Queen Elizabeth because of her long friendship with D’Arcy Osborne.) Heim was a cultivated man, an authority on ecclesiastical heraldry, and a generous host at his own home where he entertained Queen Elizabeth and many others with his own excellent cooking, generous martinis and champagne enhanced with a twist of sorrel.

  Lady Gladwyn, wife of the former Ambassador in Paris,* recounted a night at the Opera. She and other guests gathered to wait rather formally at Clarence House for their hostess. ‘Suddenly there seemed a movement in the air, a widening of our circle, a rustle of skirts, and in came, with the greatest of informality and the highest of spirits, the Queen Mother. Sparkling with diamonds, in a pink tulle crinoline, and breaking any ice there might have been, she exuded an excited joy that was almost unqueenly.’ Lady Gladwyn was fascinated: ‘such is her power to charm and dazzle, that it does not seem to matter one whit that her inherent stoutness is now completely out of control.’ Other people worried about weight for reasons of health or vanity. ‘Not her. Obviously she relishes her food, her sweets and her champagne, and is not going to spoil her enjoyment of life by bothering about diet and exercise.’ Cynthia Gladwyn was not sure how much the Queen Mother enjoyed Figaro. ‘She sat straight as a ramrod and completely still … I thought from where I sat that I could detect a little weariness, a little sadness in her profile.’ (In fact ramrod straight was how Queen Elizabeth always sat: she had been brought up to believe that a lady’s back should never touch the back of her chair.) Lady Gladwyn said that as soon as there was a chance to applaud and comment, Queen Elizabeth’s gaiety returned and she encouraged everyone to clap as loudly as they could and to shout encore.49

  Not for nothing did Frances Campbell-Preston later recall that when she started to work as one of the women of the bedchamber – ladies in waiting in daily attendance – for Queen Elizabeth in the 1960s, ‘I stepped back into a world which had died for me in 1939 – a world of butlers, chefs, housekeepers, housemaids, pages and footmen in smart uniforms, kitchen maids, chauffeurs and gardeners.’50 She carried out her duties with wit and brio and became one of Queen Elizabeth’s longest-serving ladies in waiting. Another was Lady Grimthorpe, who was appointed in 1973 and later became the senior lady in the Household. In 1990 she took over the duties of the Mistress of the Robes – attending Queen Elizabeth at important engagements and arranging the rota of ladies in waiting – after the death of the Duchess of Abercorn, who had held the post since 1964. Elizabeth (‘Skip’) Grimthorpe was the daughter of Queen Elizabeth’s girlhood friend Katharine McEwen, who had become countess of Scarbrough.

  The ladies lived with Queen Elizabeth for two weeks at a time. One of their principal tasks, as we have seen, was to deal with the thousands of letters, often requests for help, which she received every year. There were social as well as secretarial duties. Dame Frances Campbell-Preston (as she later became) commented, ‘The job was very nebulous. There were no rules. You did have to answer letters, help plan her engagements, chat up her guests, but no one told you what to do. You did as you liked. She didn’t want stereotypes. She wanted to gossip with you. She was huge fun, but you never got very intimate with her. There was always a line.’ This was perhaps because of her nervousness about the danger of being quoted, or misquoted in the press. ‘She hated being asked questions,’ said Dame Frances. ‘If you asked her how she had liked Churchill, it would be a blank wall. She was very guarded and didn’t want to be caught out.’51 Many other members of the Royal Family share that concern.

  The engine room at Clarence House was the equerry’s room. The equerry, typically seconded from one of the Queen Mother’s regiments for a two-year tour of duty at Clarence House, sat behind a large partner’s desk with a telephone and an internal communications box to various parts of the house and to the Mews at Marlborough House. His principal tasks were to help organize the Queen Mother’s private and official travel arrangements while in London and to act as host in her other homes. It was not an especially challenging role and the Queen Mother was a forgiving employer. On one occasion in the early 1970s an equerry overslept and missed an important engagement at which he was supposed to be in attendance. He was forgiven – and received an alarm clock the next day for his pains.

  The equerry’s office boasted a large drinks cupboard behind a door disguised by a selection of regimental histories and the like. The office acted as a general meeting place for the Household, and outside guests could be invited there. The equerry’s working day would usually be interrupted at about noon when his male colleagues gathered in the room. Many of Sir Martin Gilliat’s friends, who included a number of former Colditz comrades, would come to see him before lunch.

  The staff whom the Queen Mother saw most often were her maid, her dresser and her two pages. One of the longest serving of her pages, Bill Baker, had worked for her since 1927 and retired in 1975. Walter Taylor, steward at Clarence House, served for almost as long, from 1936 until his death in 1978. These two were succeeded, respectively, by Reginald Wilcock and his friend William Tallon. Queen Elizabeth relied greatly upon them both in later
life. Tallon was a cultivated but flamboyant man who became the great character on her staff. His off-duty behaviour as a boulevardier raised eyebrows; with his bouffant hair, his gift for bold repartee and his fondness for a drink, he had various escapades in his private life which might have embarrassed other employers – but if senior members of her Household ever complained about his conduct, she would suggest to them that, although their jobs were always under review, Tallon’s was not.52 After Queen Elizabeth’s death Tallon was offered large sums of money by newspapers to tell her secrets. He refused.

  From 1970 onwards there was also her chef Michael Sealey, who described himself as ‘a loquacious West Country yeoman’. Sealey had been third assistant chef at Buckingham Palace since Coronation year and the offer to work for Queen Elizabeth came, he said, out of the blue. Her taste in food was simple and, he thought, derived from early life at Glamis. He said later that choosing the menus was a two-way street. She loved goujons of sole (which she had been served on her triumphant 1938 visit to Paris), and haddock – ‘She would have had that every night. I once tried monkfish and she sent a message “Tell Chef we won’t have that again.” ’53 She insisted on fresh food in season; the only frozen food that Sealey ever served her were peas in Russian salads. She thought Spanish strawberries tasted like turnips. Among other dislikes were smoked salmon (which other people gave her too often), oysters, coconut and capers. She loved omelettes. One of her favourite dishes, which Sealey made time and time again, was Oeufs Drumkilbo. Named after the Elphinstone family home in Perthshire, the dish had been created by their Baltic cook; it consisted of diced hard-boiled eggs, lobster, shrimps, tomato, cream and mayonnaise, served cold in aspic.54

  Most of the staff at Clarence House saw Queen Elizabeth only rarely. Indeed for some it was only when she gave out Christmas presents. ‘We used to call it school prize giving,’ recalled Lucy Murphy, who started working at Clarence House as lady clerk to the Private Secretary in 1967, and was still there in 2002. Everyone was allowed to choose his or her own gift, which was then presented, unwrapped, by the Queen Mother at individual audiences where only William Tallon and the housekeeper were present.

  *

  WHEN SHE WAS based in London, Queen Elizabeth spent as many weekends as possible at Royal Lodge, the pale-pink-washed house in Windsor Great Park on which she and the Duke of York had lavished so much time and affection. She continued to love the house along with new generations of the family. In the 1950s Prince Charles and Princess Anne spent long weekends and parts of the school holidays playing in the Welsh Cottage which had been given to Princess Elizabeth in 1932. In the upstairs nursery at Royal Lodge there were still the rocking horses and many of the toys – a Noah’s Ark and a host of animals – with which both Princesses had played, and from the mid-1960s onwards it was the turn of Princess Margaret’s children, David and Sarah, to enjoy them.

  Royal Lodge was a comfortable, easy house, whose focal point was still the magnificent saloon which the Duke and Duchess of York had restored in the 1930s, and which was depicted in the National Portrait Gallery’s well-known conversation piece by James Gunn, showing the King and Queen and the two Princesses in 1950. The room was dominated by the five tall and elegant French windows which gave on to the terrace. Over the fireplace hung, appropriately, a portrait of the Lodge’s original denizen King George IV by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Facing each other on either side of the fireplace were two sofas, one covered in pink damask and the other in green. Other groups of chairs were gathered close to the windows. Tables were piled with books and big pots of flowers. On one end wall hung a fine verdure tapestry from Brussels. A large red and blue Persian carpet covered most of the floor.

  Next door was the Octagon Room where visitors might wait before seeing Queen Elizabeth in the saloon. There was a green-marble fireplace with an old-fashioned three-bar electric fire in the hearth, a hexagonal table piled with books, panelled walls, bookcases filled with worn-looking leatherbound sets, family photographs on the piano. On the wall were the John Singer Sargent pendant portraits of the Duke and Duchess of York at the time of their marriage. The curtains were pink and the armchairs and sofas covered in flowered chintz. The carpet, with a twelve-sided central panel, became very worn over the years, by people and also by dogs. The desk, by the French window, was filled to overflowing with family photographs and large cache-pots of flowers.

  Upstairs the bedrooms and bathrooms remained as the Duke and Duchess of York had designed them, simple and somewhat tired. Queen Elizabeth was always reluctant to change familiar, much-loved furnishings and, as the years went by, Royal Lodge showed its age. Doors could get stuck, light switches tended to flash, the central heating and the plumbing were unpredictable. All this, together with the clutter of Wellington boots and gardening clothes just inside the front door, enhanced the feeling of old-fashioned country-house living at Royal Lodge, and the sense of continuity was reflected in the garden tombstones of the corgis who had barked before.

  Here, as at her other homes, Queen Elizabeth developed annual rituals. She would have two pheasant-shooting weekends. Every spring she welcomed a lawn meet for the Eton College Hunt (Beagles). In March she had what was called the Musical Weekend (sometimes also called the Geriatric Weekend within her Household) at which she entertained those of her friends who were less interested in shooting or fishing. In the last two decades of her life, the guests often included Archbishop Runcie and his wife Lindy, Peter Carrington and his wife Iona, Fitzroy and Veronica Maclean, Sir John (later Lord) Sainsbury, merchant and philanthropist, and his wife Anya, a former principal ballerina with the Royal Ballet. She admired the Sainsbury family for both its business success and its record of philanthropy. In 1985, John Sainsbury, the chairman of the company, invited her to make her one and only visit to the modern phenomenon of a supermarket, the big Sainsbury store in Cromwell Road. There she spoke to surprised and delighted customers and staff and told the French manager of the wine department (in French) of her fondness for claret. She appreciated the Sainsburys’ generous interest in ballet and much approved of their donation of the new wing of the National Gallery at the end of the 1980s. The original, modernist design was fiercely criticized, including by the Prince of Wales who described it as ‘a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend’. Many architects never forgave the Prince but, after a long controversy, the modernist plans were scrapped, a more harmonious design by the firm of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown was approved instead, and the new Sainsbury wing opened to acclaim in 1991.55

  Other frequent guests at Royal Lodge included Lord David Cecil, the Duke and Duchess of Grafton, and Lord Gowrie, Conservative politician and poet, and his wife Nitie, whose father, Count Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, had been executed for his part in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. There was always fine poetry and music at these weekends, provided by such poets as Stephen Spender and John Betjeman, actors like Sir John Gielgud, and young musicians, sometimes from the Royal College of Music. Like other guests, Spender found these weekends ‘magical’ and told her, ‘I think you float on the pleasure that you give to all those around you.’56

  One Royal Lodge house party was amusingly evoked by another guest, the diplomat Sir Charles Johnston, who described the fun and games after dinner, with Lord Ballantrae playing the piano while the guests danced in and out of the room led by the ‘dynamic little figure’ of the Queen Mother, ‘arms up in Highland attitudes’, until ‘we all got noisy and over-excited and the ex-bish of New York began to lose his collar.’57

  She had met the ‘ex-bish’, Horace Donegan,* on her trip to the United States in 1954, when she had heard him preach on the importance of family life. Thereafter, as Hugo Vickers expressed it in his biography of her: ‘The Queen Mother warmed to him, and, once he had found her, he never let her go.’58 Bishop Donegan appreciated the martinis that flowed at Royal Lodge. One year he had so many, Lord Carrington recalled, that he was unable to remember Grace when Quee
n Elizabeth asked him to say it. ‘After dinner she said to Martin [Gilliat] “You really must not give him so many martinis next year.” The next year I heard Martin saying to him, “Have another martini Bish – it will steady your nerves for Grace.” ’59

  Royal Lodge was also the base for many of her expeditions to see her racehorses and attend race meetings. Horses enlivened the whole of the second half of her life. She read Sporting Life every day and she had installed in Clarence House a rather primitive loudspeaker system, such as usually exists only in betting shops, to relay minute-by-minute news from racetracks around the country.

  Her racing colours, derived from those of the ‘racing’ twelfth Earl of Strathmore, were blue with buff stripes, blue sleeves and a black cap with a gold tassel. She brought a new excitement and glamour to steeplechasing and she was welcomed warmly at every racecourse. An early annual meeting that she always wished to attend was the Royal Artillery Meeting at Sandown Park in February. To coincide with the Grand Military meeting in early March, she held a house party and gave a reception for owners, trainers, jockeys and race officials every year. Then came the National Hunt Festival at Cheltenham. For some years she stayed with Lady Avice Spicer at Spye Park for Cheltenham, but later she drove down daily from Royal Lodge, where she always had a house party for the meeting.

  At the end of April there was the Whitbread Gold Cup at Sandown Park. Billy Whitbread, who had started this sponsorship, was one of those flamboyant characters she enjoyed. After attending the Derby, with the Queen, the Queen Mother always went to Royal Ascot, and the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at the end of July. She had house parties at Royal Lodge for the latter.

  Her first important race meeting of the winter was the Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury for which she would have a different group of friends to stay at Royal Lodge. At the Ascot Christmas meeting on the Saturday before Christmas, she would have a children’s lunch party in the royal box for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of friends. It was often a riotous affair, for Martin Gilliat was adept at making children roar with laughter. Father Christmas drove down the racecourse, and crowds of children would gather round the entrance to the Royal Box, where the Queen and Queen Elizabeth gave out the presents – sweets and chocolates – from his sack. When Christmases were at Windsor, Queen Elizabeth always went to the King George VI steeplechase at Kempton Park on Boxing Day.