The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  In addition to all these regular meetings, she tried to go wherever she had a horse running. She and Michael Oswald, her Racing Manager, once went to Warwick by train; the steward brought her tea in his own earthenware teapot instead of the standard British Rail metal one, which he didn’t think good enough. ‘How nice,’ she said, whereupon he gave it to her. She used it often thereafter at Royal Lodge, Birkhall and Sandringham.60

  Of her trainers, Peter Cazalet probably gave her the most fun, both with the horses he trained and at his beautiful house, Fairlawne in Kent. Cazalet’s grandfather, Edward, who had made a fortune through trade with Russia, had become the squire of the neighbouring village of Shipbourne and had acquired Fairlawne in the 1870s. He had added to the house and built the Queen Anne-style stables which his grandson used to create his racing establishment in the late 1940s. Cazalet’s first wife, Leonora, was the stepdaughter of P. G. Wodehouse. She had died during the war and in 1949 Cazalet married Zara Strutt, a bubbly and attractive woman who immediately began to enhance Fairlawne and became a lifelong friend of Queen Elizabeth. The Cazalets appreciated fine living and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as Cazalet built up the racing successes of Fairlawne, his wife entertained generously. Every December, they would throw a big house party to coincide with the races at nearby Lingfield, a small Surrey racecourse. Weekends at Fairlawne were glamorous and fun and the Queen Mother enjoyed them. All in all she stayed with the Cazalets about twenty times.

  On one occasion Peter Cazalet’s son Anthony, aged about nine, invited Queen Elizabeth for a drive in the ancient car he drove about the grounds. To Zara Cazalet’s consternation Queen Elizabeth replied, ‘Oh yes, I would love to,’ and sat on the floor of the banger, which disappeared into Fairlawne’s Home Woods, while Mrs Cazalet uttered anxious cries of ‘Where are they?’ Eventually they returned, both smiling happily, and Queen Elizabeth remarked on what a wonderful time she had had.

  Among her fellow guests at Fairlawne were the film star Elizabeth Taylor, Noël Coward and the historian Elizabeth Longford and her husband Frank, the Labour peer, who lived near by. Once when Coward was at Fairlawne the Cazalets invited to lunch a couple they had met in Tahiti; the wife’s father had written about the mutiny on the Bounty. They presented the Queen Mother with a Cartier box. Its contents were unexpected: a nail from the Bounty. Never at a loss at such moments, she received it with her usual charm. Afterwards, Noël Coward teased her for the way she had exclaimed in tones of wonderment, ‘Oh, a nail!’, ‘as if it was a Crown Jewel!’61

  At Noël Coward’s weekends there would always be at least one singsong around the piano. Queen Elizabeth, like everyone else, loved Coward’s affectionate parodies of British manners. Particular favourites were ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Midday Sun’, ‘The Stately Homes of England’ and ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’.62

  Peter Cazalet always ensured that the Queen Mother had horses running at Lingfield during these weekends. These included Double Star, The Rip, Laffy, Makaldar and Escalus. Double Star had been found in Ireland by Cazalet; he had cost £4,000, a considerable sum in 1956, but he justified this, winning the Ashdown Handicap Chase at Lingfield three times; overall he won seventeen out of the fifty races in which he was entered between 1956 and 1963.

  Perhaps her best racing weekend there was in December 1961 when she had three winners – Laffy, Double Star and The Rip. The Rip was by Queen Elizabeth’s own early favourite, Manicou, out of a mare called Easy Virtue, which was owned by Jack Irwin, the son of the landlord of the Red Cat pub at Wootton Marshes near Sandringham. The Queen Mother acquired him for 400 guineas, which turned out to be a bargain.

  He was sent to be broken in by Major Eldred Wilson DSO, the senior tenant farmer on the Sandringham estate, who had been a prisoner of war and on his return became a successful farmer and horseman. He brought on Queen Elizabeth’s young horses and became a friend to her; she liked to compliment him by saying that he had ‘a touch of Irish in him’. Wilson had been a brave point-to-point rider and, after he retired, he continued to live on the estate. She visited him at home every July and each year the same conversation was repeated, the same jokes rehearsed, the same laughter enjoyed. She made similar visits to other retired members of her staff and Household every year until the end of her life.

  Wilson did a fine job with The Rip, who won four races in a row in 1962; in the 1964 Hennessy Gold Cup he was placed third behind the illustrious Arkle and Ferry Boat. Altogether The Rip won thirteen races under the Queen Mother’s colours. Among her other more successful horses, Double Star and Chaou II each won seventeen races. In 1964 she had her one-hundredth win with a rather temperamental horse, Gay Record, in the Sevenoaks Chase at Folkestone. To celebrate, she held a dance to which she invited all her friends from the racing world and many from the acting world as well and, according to Dick Francis, danced with all the jockeys.63

  During the Cazalet years Queen Elizabeth had up to sixteen jumpers in training with him and with other trainers. After his death in 1973 she cut back somewhat – the expenses were not sustainable – and usually had fewer than ten, many of them with Fulke Walwyn at his stables at Lambourn in Berkshire. Walwyn had his own distinguished racing history and, when he was a jockey, had actually won the Grand National on Reynoldstown in 1936. He had fewer winners for the Queen Mother than Cazalet, but his winners won bigger races. The first race he won for her was, appropriately, the Fairlawne Chase at Windsor, with Game Spirit, and the next the Reynoldstown Pattern Hurdle at Wolverhampton, with Sunnyboy. In 1975 he won her the popular Schweppes Hurdle at Newbury with Tammuz, ridden by Bill Smith. It carried a purse of over £9,000 – her most valuable win up to that time. For her 200th and 300th winners, her rumbustious friend Dick Wilkins, a stockjobber in the City of London and a man of generous instincts and proportions, gave her parties at the Savoy.

  Racing and horses afforded her not just seasonal but daily pleasure. Like her daughter, she was a good judge of horseflesh and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of racing form. She and the Queen were both patrons of the Jockey Club, and when the National Hunt Committee, of which she was patron, merged with the Jockey Club, she became joint patron.

  Sir Michael Oswald recalled that, unlike many owners, she took an interest in everyone from stable boys and girls upwards. ‘Very few people looking at a horse pay any attention to the person holding the horse. She always spoke to them and shook hands before looking at the horse.’ Oswald thought that the Queen Mother understood well what people wanted from her. If she found herself surrounded by people with cameras at an event, she would smile and wave to each side of the road. She invariably stopped to talk to people in wheelchairs. ‘She always wanted to make sure that people who wanted to see her went away happy.’ She would often repeat the maxim she had learned from her mother – ‘There is no one who is really boring – if you find someone so, it must be because of you.’ She had wonderful manners and to the end of her life she would try to get out of her chair to shake people’s hands. She managed to remember people year after year.64

  She was loyal to horses as well as trainers. She would never sell a horse; instead homes would be found for them with her regiments, or with local farmers who could use them for hacking, and she would send them off on permanent loan. None of this came cheap and, throughout, her racing had to be subsidized by the Queen. After one particularly disappointing year, the Queen offered to pay her mother’s bill from Peter Cazalet. The Queen Mother accepted gratefully, signed the bill and wrote underneath the total, ‘Oh dear’.65

  After Devon Loch’s disastrous collapse in the 1956 Grand National, probably the most thrilling race in which she was involved was the 1984 Whitbread Gold Cup in which she ran Special Cargo. That year’s race was in a class of its own, as the Sunday Times correspondent, Brough Scott, related. In the final uphill stretch, after twenty-four fences had been jumped, four horses – Special Cargo, Lettoch, Diamond Edge and Plundering – strained towards the post. In
the Royal Box, the Queen Mother was visibly excited. Plundering then fell away and, with only a hundred yards to go, Diamond Edge was gaining on the leader, Lettoch. But Special Cargo was now within two lengths and flying fast. ‘All three were together as the post flashed by. First thoughts were that none could be a loser.’ There were long minutes of suspense as the judges considered the photographs. Queen Elizabeth was unable to move until she knew the result.66 Special Cargo had won by a fraction; overjoyed she rushed down to the winner’s enclosure, where her pale-blue coat matched her jockey’s silks.67

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  THE MOST REMOTE of her houses, the Castle of Mey, was the most personal – in good part, no doubt, because it was the only one that actually belonged to her. She was able to invest Mey, and her stays there, with her own individual spirit and tastes. Her principal visit every year from 1956 onwards was made in August, immediately after her birthday, and she used to say that it was ‘the beginning of the holidays’ and the end of the ‘term’ in London. She loved the fresh air and the open space that the Castle offered, with the ever changing view of clouds and sea and the shadows on Orkney beyond. Another great advantage was that ‘at the furthest tip of these islands, one feels so beautifully far away and the newspapers come too late to be readable’.68

  Her visits to Mey started privately and modestly, but developed into what her neighbour Lord Thurso called ‘a mini season’ in Caithness. Local landowners made sure they were in residence when she came, and many threw parties in the hope of attracting her; she gave a cocktail party every summer which was a major event. There was no question but that her ownership of Mey put Caithness on the map.

  The Castle itself required constant maintenance even after she had completed the basic structural repairs in the 1950s. Because it was built of porous sandstone, it was very hard to keep the damp out. In addition, as the years went by, water seeped through the roof, and lead work was found to be missing; the initial repairs had been inadequate.

  The furnishings developed and moved over time. Many of the original pieces she and the Vyners had bought locally, in Miss Miller Calder’s shop in Thurso. A huge clam-shell jardinière stood in the front hall, packed with flowers while the Queen Mother was in residence. In the hall there was a chronometer from King George V’s racing yacht Britannia, which struck the bells of the watch instead of the hours. The London firm of Lenygon and Morant, which worked for the Queen Mother in her other homes, was responsible for much of the internal design and decoration, and supplied curtains and other furnishings. She and those around her were pleased with the results. In 1959 Arthur Penn wrote to her to say, ‘What a very rewarding & memorable visit your Castle gave us all this spring. It was bristling with triumphs.’69

  Today the house is preserved as it was in her lifetime. The main room on the raised ground floor is the drawing room, whose windows face both inland and north towards the sea and the Orkney Islands. A large sixteenth-century Flemish wool tapestry hangs on the north wall. When she was in residence a peat fire burned continuously in the grate. Next door to the drawing room is the equerry’s room. On the desk the red leatherbound hymnal and prayer book which the equerry carried for her to church every Sunday can still be seen. In this and other rooms are paintings and miniature model casts of some of her most successful cattle.

  Beyond the equerry’s room is the Library where, in later life, Queen Elizabeth dealt with her correspondence every day – ‘my Hunka-Munka room’, she called it. On her desk are three of her favourite photographs, slightly faded by time – the King in uniform in 1943, the King in South Africa, the King with her and Princess Elizabeth – and various objects, including a little corgi from the Buckingham Palace gift shop. On a small Formica table by the wall sits an elderly television, on top of which are photographs of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, dressed for a wartime pantomime. Against one wall stands a handsome upright piano in a walnut case, which the Queen Mother bought in Inverness and which she encouraged Ruth Fermoy and others to play after dinner.

  The most striking room in the house is the dining room, at the western end. This was added in 1819 by the twelfth Earl of Caithness as an extension to the original Castle. On the east wall Queen Elizabeth hung a spectacularly vivid tapestry of her coat of arms, which she had commissioned from the Dovecote Studio in Edinburgh in 1950.70 It was designed by Stephen Gooden RA, a distinguished book illustrator and line engraver, and was woven on an ancient loom using Cheviot wool specially spun and dyed in Scotland. In the fireplace at the opposite end of the room is a beautiful cast-iron fire-back created by Martin Charteris, the Queen’s long-serving Private Secretary and a friend of the Queen Mother. The piece depicts the Queen Mother’s ER cipher and the royal yacht Britannia among local flora and fauna. Above the fireplace is a naive painting of the Castle from the sea painted by R. I. Gray in 1884. It is an oddly prophetic picture. In the field in front of the Castle there is a herd of black cattle; offshore a yacht lies at anchor. Just over a century later Britannia could have been seen sailing past Queen Elizabeth’s herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle. On either side of the fireplace is an oil painting by Prince Philip, an accomplished amateur painter.

  Next door to the dining room is the butler’s pantry, which by the end of the century had become almost a museum piece of 1950s domestic design, with white metal doors and drawers, a wheezing, ancient gas-fired refrigerator and an old electric oven in which plates were warmed. Connecting the pantry with the much more modern kitchen below is a steep and narrow staircase and a small dumb-waiter food lift. But the dumb-waiter was hand operated and made a great deal of noise – the footmen and pages preferred to run up and down stairs balancing heavy trays rather than disturb the guests with its wailing mechanism.

  At the opposite end of the house, Queen Elizabeth’s bedroom is reached up the stone stairs in the turret, which she managed to navigate until the end of her life. (In the 1950s she restored the lift that the Imbert-Terrys had installed, but she rarely used it except for regular Sunday-morning descents to talk to the chef and his staff in the kitchen, after which she would insist on walking up the narrow stairs before leaving for church.) Her bedroom has north-, east- and south-facing windows which enabled her to keep an eye not only on her cattle and sheep but also on the comings and goings of guests in the driveway. Ceilings and walls are all painted light blue; her bed covers and the headboard are also blue and have faded gently with the years. The room is modestly furnished with a simple blue-painted wardrobe and mahogany chest of drawers.

  Near her room is a bedroom with a small four-poster bed with pale-blue hangings. This is called Princess Margaret’s Bedroom, although the Princess never spent a night there. She did not much like ‘Mummy’s draughty castle’. At the western end of the corridor is Lady Doris Vyner’s Bedroom; this looks out on the Castle’s walled garden, which Queen Elizabeth cherished. The garden is surrounded by the fifteen-foot high Great Wall of Mey, as it became known, to shield the flowers, shrubs and vegetables from the worst of the elements. Everything grown there had to be chosen for its resistance to wind and sea spray. Queen Elizabeth was pleased to be able to grow even her favourite old rose, Albertine, on the south-facing wall between the garden and the Castle; within the garden a complicated network of seven-foot-high hedges of privet, currant and elder protected flowerbeds of marigolds, pansies, dahlias, primulas, nasturtiums and sweet peas. A wide variety of fruits and vegetables was grown for the dining table.71

  Near the Castle is Longoe Farm, where she insisted, despite the expense, on raising her livestock. Whenever she was at Mey she would walk down through the gardens and policies (fields) between the Castle and the sea to visit her animals and talk to those who cared for them, especially the McCarthy family who farmed the land. She took great pleasure in showing off the cattle and sheep to knowledgeable farmers and stockmen who occasionally came on organized visits, and in getting their views – ‘the more forthright and frank the better!’ said Martin Leslie, her factor. At such visits
tea, chocolate cake and drams of whisky were served in the dining room. ‘Afterwards a Page reported on the whisky consumption and the hostess got much satisfaction, and amusement, judging how well her hospitality had been received while marvelling at her guests’ capacity.’ She would show her cattle and sheep at both local and national shows. When Leslie went up to Mey in her absence, she would ask him to telephone her every day to tell her ‘how the people are, how the stock are looking, what Caithness is looking like and if the weather is fine and the skies are beautiful’.72

  The Mey Visitors’ Book is a large brown-leather volume. Its first page is inscribed ‘Arrival at Wick Airport 1952’ and a photograph shows Queen Elizabeth at the bottom of the steps of a plane, being greeted by the Vyners. She is all in black, wearing a string of pearls and a long fur stole. This is followed by photographs of her and the Vyners on a trawler and taking a picnic on the cliffs. The first signatures of guests appear in October 1959 – they include Queen Elizabeth’s niece Elizabeth Elphinstone, Martin Gilliat and E. H. ‘Mouse’ Fielden, an RAF veteran who had been appointed the first captain of the King’s Flight by King Edward VIII in 1936 and was reappointed in the next two reigns.

  Fielden was a courageous man; during the war he had won the Distinguished Flying Cross for flying British agents in and out of occupied France in tiny Lysander planes. In 1941 he brought back a bottle of that year’s wine and presented it to the King. According to the historian Kenneth Rose, the King served the bottle to Winston Churchill, at one of their weekly lunches, ‘teasing his guest by refusing to say how he had come by it’.73 Fielden worked hard within the postwar Whitehall bureaucracy to ensure the best and safest planes for his royal charges; he was an exuberant and delightful man and became a long-standing friend of Queen Elizabeth.