The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  She enjoyed the Italian trips but her greater love remained France. When Prince Jean-Louis asked her at the end of the Sicilian trip, ‘What about next year, Your Majesty?’ she replied, ‘ “Oh you know, I miss France a lot.” So that made me understand that she’d like to come back.’113 But the Prince, her second cicerone and only three years her junior, was beginning to tire. In 1989 he took Queen Elizabeth to the Languedoc, where her party stayed in a quiet, comfortable hotel, the Hotel de la Reserve, in Albi on the banks of the River Tarn. There they visited the Toulouse-Lautrec family house, which now belonged to a young friend of Johnny Lucinge, Bertrand du Vignaud de Villefort, and his sister, whose mother was a Toulouse-Lautrec. The Prince had in fact asked the young man to take over his role.

  The tour-director designate quickly discovered what he was up against. On the afternoon of the Queen Mother’s arrival, after the customary reception for local dignitaries, he had left a short interval for the eighty-eight-year-old traveller to rest. Instead, he found himself hurriedly improvising a visit to two local villages in response to a telephoned request for ‘something to do before dinner’.114

  Two days later the party visited Toulouse on the same day that the right-wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen was holding a rally there. The authorities were anxious to get Queen Elizabeth away before this began; she wanted to stay and said – mischievously – that she would love to meet Le Pen. In the event she left before the rally, having proved, according to Sir Ralph Anstruther’s account, a greater attraction than the politician. She questioned du Vignaud about Le Pen; although conservative in her own ideas, she was worried by the tendency he represented.115

  Nineteen-ninety saw her in Brittany; she took a French naval barge up the River Odet to Quimper and had an excellent picnic lunch on board. In Quimper itself, the enthusiastic crowds were too big for her to be able to carry out a planned tour of the Old Town. At lunch the next day the Naval Pipe Band from Lorient played for her. They had gone to great trouble to learn a Scots tune – they had chosen the dirge ‘Flowers of the Forest’.116 In 1991 she made what proved to be her last French trip. Appropriately, it was to Savoie, where Johnny Lucinge’s family had once ruled over Faucigny as an independent state. She stayed at the Hotel Royale in Evian and toured châteaux, gardens and churches on the edge of Lake Geneva and in the mountains near by, and laid a wreath on the memorial to Resistance fighters at the cemetery at Les Glières.117

  In early May 1992 she added Spain to her European list, when she was invited by the Duke and Duchess of Wellington to spend a private weekend at their house near Granada. The trip included a picnic lunch and a drive round one of the estates granted to the first Duke of Wellington by a grateful Spain after the Peninsular Wars. The next day the Wellingtons gave a lunch party to which the King and Queen of Spain came, and on the last evening Queen Elizabeth visited the Alhambra in Granada.

  The last of these happy private excursions was to Umbria that same month. The only sadness to the trip was that Johnny Lucinge was not well enough to accompany her. (He died later that year.) On her first evening in Perugia, Queen Elizabeth gave a reception at her hotel, the Brufani, at which the Abbot of St Peter’s Church invited her to come and see his church there and then – which she did.

  In Cortona she visited the Museo Diocesano, with its small but exquisite collection of paintings by Fra Angelico, Duccio and Signorelli. In the hot afternoon she walked up the steep cobbled street to the Church of San Nicolò and then drove to Santa Maria del Calcinaio, a beautiful, simple fifteenth-century church with a fine sixteenth-century stained-glass window. The next day the Marchese and Marchesa Antinori gave her an excellent lunch at their fortress-like home, Castello della Sala, with wine from the family vineyard, and she then drove to see the Cathedral in Orvieto – a large crowd in the piazza cheered her. On her final day she visited both basilicas in Assisi, saw the tomb of St Francis, and talked through a grille to members of a silent order of nuns.118

  In all the thirty years during which she made her twenty-two private tours in Europe, little changed from year to year. She moved in an exquisitely geared time machine, cocooned against the harsher realities of the modern world. Her travelling companions remained constant and vigilant; on each occasion she was generously and charmingly entertained by members of the local nobility or even royalty; and each year she saw beautiful churches, castles, palaces, houses, museums, monuments, gardens and landscapes, in two countries which she had loved since she was young. Her hosts went to immense trouble to ensure that she was received everywhere as a dowager queen should be – regally.

  * Brigadier Sir Bernard Fergusson (1911–80), created Lord Ballantrae in 1972. His father, Sir Charles Fergusson, was Governor General of New Zealand during the visit of the Duke and Duchess of York in 1927; Sir Bernard held the same appointment from 1962 to 1967 and was thus Queen Elizabeth’s host during her visit to New Zealand in 1966. His wife Laura was the sister of Queen Elizabeth’s long-serving lady in waiting, Dame Frances Campbell-Preston. Another link was the Black Watch, in which Fergusson served, becoming colonel of the regiment from 1969 to 1976.

  * Sir Ralph Marnham (Sergeant-Surgeon to the Queen 1967–8) carried out the operation; Dr D. E. F. Johnson was the anaesthetist.

  * Mstislav Rostropovich (1927–2007) was publicly disgraced in the USSR for his support of his friend Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974 and left Russia in 1978 to live permanently in the USA, where he became director and conductor of the US National Symphony Orchestra.

  * Sir Hans Heysen, born in Germany in 1877, had emigrated with his family to Australia as a child. He was particularly recognized for his watercolours of the Australian bush, and won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting nine times. He lived in the Adelaide Hills until his death in 1968. The people of Adelaide presented Queen Elizabeth with two Heysen watercolours, Brachina Gorge and Timber Haulers. The former was included in the exhibition of her watercolours and drawings in Edinburgh and London in 2005–6. (Susan Owens, Watercolours and Drawings from the Collection of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, pp. 150–1)

  * The WVS was awarded the honour of adding ‘Royal’ to its title in 1966.

  † The operation was carried out by the same team, Sir Ralph Marnham and Dr D. E. F. Johnson, as for the appendectomy in 1964.

  * The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, launched by the Duke in 1956, helped young people from all backgrounds to participate in challenging activities, have adventures and make new friends.

  * Sir Hugh Casson KCVO (1910–99), President of the Royal Academy 1976–84. Friends with several members of the Royal Family, he designed the interior of the royal yacht Britannia and helped teach Charles, Princes of Wales to paint in watercolours. Casson’s wife Margaret was also a distinguished architect.

  † Freya Stark DBE (1893–1993), British travel writer who became one of the first Western women to travel through the Arabian deserts and Persian wilderness.

  * Sir Harold Acton KBE (1904–94), British writer, scholar and aesthete who lived much of his life on his family estate Villa La Pietra near Florence. A generous and entertaining host, he had a remarkable circle of friends who loved to make pilgrimages to La Pietra. He left the villa to New York University.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  UNDER SCRUTINY

  1968–1981

  ‘Let’s go down to the old Bull and Bush’

  AS ONE DECADE succeeded another, Britain continued to alter with almost bewildering speed. In retrospect and perhaps in cliche, the 1960s were deemed the decade of change, but the social revolution that began there had no neat ten-year ending. Rather, its reverberations continued to work through society in all the years that followed. The 1970s, Queen Elizabeth’s eighth decade, were notable for economic failure, for weak government and for the abandonment of old social nostrums. Many time-honoured British institutions – the Church of England, the armed services, the law and the monarchy itself – faced unprecedented challenges and demands for reform. Patterns of authori
ty were discarded. Relativism, the belief that no point of view is superior to another, became the new creed. People of conservative bent became concerned that society was disintegrating, even that Britain was facing its twilight.

  The traditional family was in decline as the nucleus of society. More marriages ended in divorce, and the numbers of children born out of wedlock rose inexorably. More women went to work, more people lived alone. Minorities demanded more rights more vocally. University students became more rebellious. Football hooliganism and mugging on the streets became more common. Decimal coinage replaced pounds, shillings and pence in 1971, unsolicited credit cards were sent by banks to their customers, spending became more fashionable than saving, inflation soared, the first of many housing booms gathered pace, the price of oil shot up after the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War of 1973, supermarkets grew and so did the numbers of immigrants from disparate parts of the former empire.1

  The nature of secondary education changed as a result of decisions by the Labour government after 1964. For decades selective grammar schools had been a great help to clever working-class children, but Tony Crosland, Harold Wilson’s Education Secretary, declared that he was going to ‘destroy’ every grammar school in the country.2 Comprehensive schools, less exclusive and less academic, were promoted instead. The result was startling – in 1970 some 34 per cent of British secondary-school children were in comprehensive schools; by 1980 the numbers had swollen to 80 per cent. It would be fair to say that this change did not always seem to lead to a widespread improvement in standards.

  Numbers in higher education doubled in the 1960s with the opening of new universities – first, Sussex (at Brighton) in 1961, followed by York, Kent (at Canterbury) and Essex (at Colchester). Numbers of students continued to increase in the 1970s but cuts in government expenditure took some of the gloss off the new institutions. The hope that large numbers of children would take to science and engineering was not realized – sociology was preferred.

  In addition to social change, the United Kingdom was under brutal assault from the Irish Republican Army with its frequent murderous attacks in Ulster and in British cities, in pursuit of its demand for a united Ireland. Terrorist atrocities and the consequent deaths of both civilians and members of the armed forces (including some from regiments of which Queen Elizabeth was colonel-in-chief) became a dismal refrain throughout the next thirty years. Queen Elizabeth followed closely the fortunes of her own regiments which were involved in the defence of the United Kingdom. She said that she prayed for Northern Ireland every night.3

  Queen Elizabeth was aware of the magnitude of the changes that were taking place. ‘It is almost incredible to think of what has happened in the last 30 years, compared with, say 30 years in one’s grandfather’s time,’ she wrote to a friend at the time of her seventieth birthday.4 Much of it she may have disliked. But she was always careful not to give public voice to her anxieties. Moreover, she was usually both optimistic and philosophical – she did not see it as part of her duties to tilt at windmills.

  Such a battery of changes was bound to affect the monarchy and the Royal Family. As the Duke of Edinburgh had said, ‘The monarchy is part of the fabric of the country. And, as the fabric alters, so the monarchy and its people’s relations to it alters.’5 With society becoming so much more open, some Palace officials felt by the end of the 1960s that the Royal Family itself needed to be more accessible. Until now relations with the press had been deliberately kept formal and as distant as possible.

  When Lord Brabourne, Lord Mountbatten’s son-in-law, suggested making a film of the family at work and play, the Duke of Edinburgh took up the idea and the Queen agreed to it. Royal Family was broadcast by the BBC and then by ITV in June 1969, and the BBC estimated that 68 per cent of the British public had watched it. The film was sold to 140 countries. It was a remarkable documentary which gave people all over the world the opportunity to see for the first time the annual pattern of the monarch’s life, to hear her voice at home and to see her and her children interact (if somewhat stiltedly). Viewers saw the Queen on formal occasions and at ease; she was seen discussing her clothes with her dresser and Foreign Office telegrams with her Private Secretary, at Balmoral and on board Britannia. Prince Philip was shown boating with his young son, Prince Edward; at a picnic Prince Charles made salad dressing while Princess Anne tried to get the barbecue going. On the Berkshire downs the Queen and Princess Anne watched racehorses exercise in the morning mist. This first authorized glimpse into the Royal Family’s daily life was far more revealing than anything Crawfie or other royal servants had ever disclosed.

  The film was made in good faith as an attempt to portray the family in a more modern, open manner, and it was received in this spirit by many members of the public. It was a huge success at the time and showed the most attractive side of the family itself and of its individual members. Such openness was almost revolutionary. But it carried risks; those who hoped that this one act of collaboration would sate the appetites of the media had made a sad misjudgement. Perhaps inevitably many journalists saw it as a challenge: the Royal Family had breached the walls of privacy from the inside, so their private lives were now fair game.

  The theatre critic Milton Shulman maintained that with the film the Royal Family was replacing an old image with a new one. The old image, that of George V and George VI and, till now, of Queen Elizabeth II, had been of authority and remoteness – this had now given way to one of ‘homeliness, industry and relaxation’. He noted that ‘Every institution that has so far attempted to use TV to popularise or aggrandise itself has been trivialised by it.’6

  The Queen’s biographer Ben Pimlott later asked, ‘Was it right for a fourth estate worth its salt, to accept such a calculated piece of media manipulation as a given? If royal “privacy” was no longer sacrosanct, why should its exposure be strictly on royalty’s own terms?’7 In fact, real though the dangers were, the Royal Family had no alternative to becoming more open to the world. Had they refused to do so at the end of the 1960s, they would have been dismissed and denounced as utterly irrelevant to the modern age. They were damned if they did and damned if they did not.

  The film was immediately followed by another big media event which put the Royal Family at the centre of the national stage. This was the Investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales by the Queen at Caernarvon Castle, on 1 July 1969, in his twenty-first year. It was an effort to show the monarchy as both self-renewing and involved in all parts of the United Kingdom. It was a deliberately theatrical event; the Queen appointed the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshal, to co-ordinate the ceremony together with Lord Snowdon, who designed the setting and the costumes with the demands of powerful television cameras very much in mind.

  In retrospect it was easy to mock both Snowdon’s efforts and, indeed, the entire ceremony, as ‘mock-Arthurian’.8 The Queen and the Prince themselves saw the funny side of it all and the dress rehearsal threatened to reduce them both to giggles; but the actual ceremony was conducted faultlessly.9 The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince were enthroned in the courtyard of Caernarvon Castle under a perspex canopy. Four thousand guests seated on scarlet chairs watched as the Prince, clad in the Snowdon vision of medieval garb, kneeled before his mother who was dressed for 1969, and swore an oath of loyalty to the Queen. She in turn placed a gold coronet on his head. The Prince wrote in his diary that he was very moved by it all.10

  So was Queen Elizabeth; she congratulated Snowdon on his efforts, saying that the Investiture was all ‘so perfect and arranged with such marvellous taste that I feel I must send you one line of heartfelt congratulation on a really super result … It is so lovely to know that this day, so important to you, is also a sort of turning point for the people of our country. You’ve done so much to achieve this, well done. Your loving MOTHER IN LAW, ER’.11

  *

  ROYAL FAMILY and the Investiture came at a time of increased pressure upon the royal finances. Indeed the costs of th
e monarchy now became an issue for the first time since the Queen came to the throne. Six years of Labour government made this almost inevitable. The needs of the state seemed to grow inexorably. Government expenditure on health and social services, which consumed 16 per cent of Gross National Product in 1951, had risen to 29 per cent in 1975, or almost half of all public expenditure that year.12

  As a result, Labour politicians and others on the left began again to examine royal expenditure. Money for the monarch and the Royal Family has always been a contentious matter in the House of Commons. Parliament first took responsibility for the expenses of the Royal Household after the Revolution of 1688. Since 1760 every monarch has agreed to surrender the income from the Crown Estates to Parliament, and in return Parliament gives the monarch an annual provision known as the Civil List. The amount used to be fixed at the start of every reign and was supposed to remain fixed at that level thereafter.

  By 1969 inflation had eaten away at the Civil List, which had been fixed at £475,000 in 1952. Salaries at Buckingham Palace were famously low. That year Prince Philip surprised everyone when he gave a television interview in North America and warned that the Royal Family was about to go into the red and ‘we may have to move into smaller premises, who knows?’13

  Harold Wilson, a Labour Prime Minister who was devoted to both the Queen and the monarchy, did not want the issue of royal finances to become party political. He sought and obtained the agreement of Edward Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party, that there should be a new select committee on the Civil List, to be set up after the forthcoming election.

  In May 1970, when the polls looked favourable to Labour, Wilson called an election. To widespread surprise, the Conservatives won and the Queen called upon Edward Heath to form her new government. He went ahead and set up the Select Committee. It was chaired by the new Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, Anthony Barber, but included also such dedicated republican critics of the monarchy as William Hamilton, Labour MP for Fife. In May 1971 the Committee began its examination of royal finances. The hearings were tough. Indeed, Pimlott suggested that the Select Committee put the monarchy more seriously on the defensive than at any time since 1936.14