The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  In 1977, a quarter-century since the death of the King, the Queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee. Given Britain’s economic malaise, there was concern both within government and at the Palace at how extensively this anniversary should be marked. Martin Charteris argued that twenty-five years on the throne was a significant achievement which people would wish to celebrate. Events proved him right. The Queen had a happy tour of Commonwealth countries and then millions of people across Britain came out to celebrate. In London alone 4,000 street parties were held. Altogether the popular enthusiasm provided an endorsement of all that the Queen, with support from other members of her family, particularly her husband and her mother, had achieved in the previous twenty-five years. ‘She had a love affair with the country,’ said Martin Charteris.41 She was genuinely touched by it all. ‘I am simply amazed, I had no idea,’ one courtier recalls her as saying over and over again.42

  Queen Elizabeth attended many of the celebrations with the Queen, including a dinner given by the Secretary of State for Scotland at Edinburgh Castle in May, the lighting of the bonfire on Snow Hill in Windsor Great Park, which was the signal for beacons to be lit around the country, on 6 June, and the thanksgiving service at St Paul’s Cathedral the next day. Her lady in waiting noted that ‘there were tremendous crowds out for the full length of the route & deafening cheers.’43

  During her visit to the Castle of Mey that summer she attended a Jubilee Ball in the somewhat utilitarian Assembly Rooms in Wick. The evening, arranged by Lord and Lady Thurso, was a great success. The Queen Mother was expected to stay for an hour or so but, resplendent in tiara and long evening dress, she arrived at 9 p.m. and danced till 1.30 a.m. Most of the dances were Scottish reels, which she had loved since childhood. She treasured the evening, reeling into the small hours, and thereafter she always referred to it as ‘the Great Ball’.44

  In a way, perhaps, the celebration and the enthusiasm for the Queen represented a nostalgic longing for what Britain had once been. At the beginning of the Queen’s reign Britain was still the strongest economic and military power in Europe, even though exhausted and depleted by the effort of war. By the end of the 1970s Britain seemed to be a country in free fall.

  This impression was supported by the realities. Inflation was still soaring, causing fear and distress, and the winter of 1978–9 brought a series of strikes by road transport workers, ambulance drivers, grave-diggers, dustmen and others. Not for nothing did the period become known as ‘the winter of discontent’. At the height of it, while the Queen undertook an official tour of the Middle East in February 1979, Queen Elizabeth acted as Counsellor of State, a task which as always she much enjoyed. She kept the Queen up to date. ‘Here, everything rumbles along in the same old way, strikes everywhere, and yesterday the Civil Service joined in, and … people arriving by air had a marvellous time smuggling at the airports, because the customs men were on strike!’45

  That spring the Labour government lost a vote of confidence and called a general election for 3 May. The Conservative Party, led now by Margaret Thatcher, campaigned against the ‘extremism’ of Labour and against the power of the unions. On election day there was a swing away from Labour of 5.2 per cent, the largest since 1945, and the Conservatives won power. This turned out to be one of the most significant elections since the end of the war. Mrs Thatcher was convinced that by the end of the 1970s Britain was not working. She was determined to confront the unions and change for ever the bipartisan tradition of government by consensus, which she thought weak, irresponsible and a major reason for British economic and industrial decline. Her prescriptions for change were to be painful and controversial, and they aroused fury at the time, but eventually they came to be more widely accepted.

  Queen Elizabeth was too discreet to make known her view on the election and the different parties. She hated the spectre of British decline. But James Callaghan, who had succeeded Harold Wilson as Labour prime minister in 1976, was one of the Labour politicians whom she had always liked. The respect was mutual; among other things, Callaghan appreciated that in conversation with him she often asked after the wellbeing of the miners in his Cardiff constituency.46

  Her attitude towards the unions was mixed. She did not like the harsh militancy of left-wing leaders who used industrial disputes for political purposes. But she liked traditional unionists (as had King George VI) and she often sympathized with their grievances. Some years later, after a visit to Smithfield Market, she was pleased when she was invited by Ron Todd, the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, to become an honorary member of the union, ‘in line with the precedent set by your late husband, HM King George VI, who became an honorary member of the Union in the time of the late Ernest Bevin’.47

  ‘Would you tell Ron Todd (splendid name!)’, she instructed Martin Gilliat, ‘that as an Hon. Bummaree* I would be delighted to become an honorary member of the Union, and especially to follow the King as an Hon. Member (I remember the occasion) & I greatly admired & respected Ernie Bevin – a proper Englishman.’48

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  AT THE END of June 1979 Queen Elizabeth made another official visit to Canada, the country which had come to symbolize best for her the old Commonwealth. The original invitation had been from the Province of Ontario to attend the 120th running of the Queen’s Plate at the Woodbine races and undertake engagements with her Canadian regiments.

  At first, Toronto was to be the only destination and Queen Elizabeth looked forward to a simple trip built around the regiments and the race. But then the province of Nova Scotia asked that she come there too. As often happened, her office’s requests that she be given no more than two engagements a day were ignored. Instead, Canadian officials inserted more and more engagements, grander parties and more speeches into the programme. On the afternoon she arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia (when it was already evening London time), she found she had to wave to assembled crowds from an uncomfortable closed car (the brakes on the open car had failed at the last moment), attend two receptions and then wait two hours for an official dinner. The party was able to retire to bed only at 4 a.m. London time.

  The main event of the Nova Scotian visit, the opening ceremony of the International Gathering of the Clans, took place the following day at the Halifax Metro Centre, a stadium filled with 9,000 people clad in kilts and tartan sashes. Queen Elizabeth, wearing her sash, made a speech, which was followed by a three-hour tattoo, sometimes very noisy indeed, with some 500 military and civilian performers. It was a long evening.

  After flying to Toronto the next morning she talked with a hundred recipients of Gold Medals of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme, and then attended a reception for officers of her three regiments, the Canadian Forces Medical Services, the Black Watch of Canada and the Toronto Scottish Regiment. That evening the Lieutenant Governor, the Hon. Pauline McGibbon, gave a dinner for 1,500 people. Queen Elizabeth endeared herself to the Black Watch pipers by talking to them at length before the dinner.49

  Saturday 30 June was the day of the big race. In the morning she drove to the Sunnybrook Medical Centre to meet veterans and spoke to more than a hundred of them, as her lady in waiting recorded. Lunch at Windfields, the private house in which she was again staying, was ‘nearly a rather fraught meal’ because her host, E. P. Taylor, had ‘locked up all the drink & gone to the races with the key’. Happily he returned ‘in the nick of time’ just before lunch.50 There had been much rain and the Woodbine racetrack was a sea of mud; horses and riders emerged looking filthy. Against his trainer’s advice one owner, Major Donald Willmot, insisted on running his horse, Steady Growth, a ‘flat-footer’ unsuited to muddy conditions, because the Queen Mother was there.51 To everyone’s surprise he won. Queen Elizabeth presented the trophy, and that evening enjoyed a dinner given by the Ontario Jockey Club, where she remained until after midnight.

  After one more day of engagements including a regimental garden party Queen Elizabeth flew home, arriving at Clarence House afte
r 1 a.m. on Tuesday 3 July. Over a scrambled-egg supper, she and her companions held a ‘post mortem’ with ‘a great deal of laughter … It was generally accepted that it had all been a great success,’ noted her lady in waiting; ‘she is undoubtedly greatly loved in Canada.’52

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  THAT SUMMER Queen Elizabeth took on another pleasant responsibility. She was installed as the 160th lord warden of the Cinque Ports at Dover, the first woman ever to hold the post. Her appointment had been proposed in 1978 by the Prime Minister, James Callaghan.

  The group of strategic ports, facing continental Europe at the Channel’s narrowest point, has existed since before the Norman Conquest; they were the Anglo-Saxon successors to the Roman system of coastal defence. The original five ports were Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich – Rye and Winchelsea were added later. After the Norman invasion King William I gave them special jurisdiction. They provided the core of the King’s fleet until the fourteenth century but then they lost their monopoly and declined. Nonetheless, they retained a symbolic importance. In recent years the most distinguished holder of the title had been Winston Churchill, who took it on at the height of the war in 1941 and kept it until his death in 1965. He had been followed by Queen Elizabeth’s friend and admirer Robert Menzies, the former Prime Minister of Australia, monarchist and anglophile.

  On the evening of Monday 30 July, together with Princess Margaret and Prince Edward, Queen Elizabeth embarked in the royal yacht at Greenwich to sail to Dover for her installation. Princess Margaret’s children, David and Sarah, joined her next day. Over the years to come she much enjoyed her summer visits to the Kent coast. She based herself at the lord warden’s apartments in Walmer Castle near Deal and every year her staff, led by the indomitable William Tallon and the housekeeper, would load a van with furniture, silver, cutlery, glass, kitchen equipment, wine and food so that Walmer Castle, which lay empty for most of the year, was transformed into a miniature royal palace for the two days that she was there. The kitchen was tiny but her chef Michael Sealey did the best he could and she enjoyed entertaining local dignitaries and friends from London in style. On several occasions she invited the biographer Kenneth Rose. In one letter of thanks he wrote that his heart glowed with pride to see the lord warden’s flag flying from the battlements of Walmer. ‘I shall never forget standing on the terrace with Your Majesty, gazing across to France: a magic moment, as if time had run back to fetch the age of King Henry V.’53

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  ON MONDAY 27 August 1979 Queen Elizabeth was lunching with friends and members of her Household at her favourite salmon pool, Polveir, on the River Dee, when a policeman came to speak to Alastair Aird, her Deputy Private Secretary. He brought terrible news. Lord Mountbatten had been killed in an explosion in his small boat just outside the harbour of Sligo in Ireland.

  Mountbatten and his family had been staying, as they did every August, at Classiebawn Castle, a large Gothic house which his wife Edwina had inherited and which Mountbatten adored. He had come here without problems for many years despite the increasing menace of the IRA throughout the 1970s. Security was lax. He and members of his family went out most days on a twenty-nine-foot fishing boat, Shadow V, which was left unprotected in the harbour for long periods. The IRA hid a bomb on board and it was detonated as Mountbatten steered the boat out to sea. He was killed instantly. So were his fourteen-year-old grandson, Nicholas Knatchbull, and the young Irish boatman, Paul Maxwell. Mountbatten’s daughter Patricia, her husband John Brabourne (who had made the film Royal Family), his mother and Nicholas’s twin brother Timothy were seriously injured. John Brabourne’s mother died next day.

  Queen Elizabeth was appalled by the news. Shortly afterwards the Queen, with Princess Margaret and her children, came to join her at Polveir. ‘Everyone horrified – deeply distressed,’ her lady in waiting recorded in the diary.54 Prince Charles was told the news in Iceland; he was overcome by the loss of the man he described that night in his journal as ‘a combination of grandfather, great-uncle, father, brother and friend’.55 He flew back to Scotland to grieve with his family.

  On 4 September the Queen Mother, together with the Queen, Princess Margaret and the Prince of Wales, took the train to London together for Lord Mountbatten’s funeral in Westminster Abbey next day. It was a grand and stirring event; Mountbatten had meticulously planned every moment himself.

  A few days later she gave tea at Birkhall to the new Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher had recently returned from the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference in Lusaka, which had threatened to end with a disastrous breakdown between Britain and black African states over the Rhodesian issue. In fact it ended in success – the Lusaka Accord set up a new constitutional conference in London to resolve the future of Rhodesia.

  The views of the two women on this occasion are not recorded, but both were believed to have sympathy for the white minority settlers. In a prompt thank-you letter, Mrs Thatcher wrote that it had been a great pleasure to talk to the Queen Mother about Rhodesia; she reported that the first day of the constitutional conference ‘went all right – thanks to our British calm and refusal to be put out by the posturing of the “Patriotic” Front’.56 But the views of the Front were largely accepted; in fairly short order, the conference agreed the end of white-settler rule, a new constitution, free elections and the creation of a new independent state, to be named Zimbabwe, under an elected black majority government.

  At their Birkhall tea Queen Elizabeth had given the Prime Minister a silver brooch, which Mrs Thatcher told her she would always treasure.57 The two women also shared a belief in the greatness of Britain and the important role that the monarchy played in the cohesion of British society. Margaret Thatcher was resolved to reduce the role of government in both the public and private sectors, and her government was the first since 1945 seriously to question state provision of services. This meant that the importance of voluntarism, which the monarchy had always championed, was now being recognized once more in government.58

  Queen Elizabeth had a habit, much enjoyed by her friends, of raising or lowering her glass in dinner-table toasts. For those of whom she disapproved, such as some socialist politicians, ‘The Dear Old Liberal Democrat Mixup Party’ (as she referred to the merged Liberal and Social Democrat Parties) and the Forestry Commission (which she blamed for planting too many ugly conifers on pristine Scottish moors), she would propose a toast of ‘Down with …’, while lowering her glass out of sight below the table. For those she favoured the toast was more traditional, with the glass held up. ‘Up with de Gaulle’ was one. For Mrs Thatcher, the glass was always high.

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  IN THE YEAR of Queen Elizabeth’s eightieth birthday an important new building and an important new relation came into her life.

  The year began badly, at least as far as her horses were concerned; in fact they had been a ‘disaster’ recently. The problem with jumpers, she used to say, was that one always had to wait a long time to discover how good they would really be ‘& one’s hopes are always high’.59 So disappointment would be all the greater. As she told the Queen in a thank-you letter after her usual New Year’s stay at Sandringham, Upton Grey had swollen hind legs, Rhyme Royal had a cough and was very stiff, Special Cargo (one of her best horses) was better but not ready to run, Cranbourne had run well, but got stuck in the mud, Queen’s College kept falling about – all in all she was despondent.60 Later she wrote to the retired trainer, Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, that she had had a bad season – ‘Nothing but legs and backs etc, so must hope that next season they will be more healthy! It is very difficult to find a decent horse at a decent price nowadays.’61

  Throughout this period her own legs were continuing to give her pain. Ischaemic damage, sometimes caused by the paws of affectionate corgis, was one of the principal and most painful ailments from which she suffered. In London she saw the royal physician, Sir Richard Bayliss, before going to Royal Lodge with Princess Margaret and Elizabeth E
lphinstone. She remained there until after the annual service in memory of the King, in the Royal Chapel on 6 February.

  One great sadness in the early part of 1980 was the death of Lady Doris Vyner. They had been intimate friends for more than sixty years and Lady Doris was the last real link to Queen Elizabeth’s youth. Queen Elizabeth arranged a memorial service for her in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace, after which she gave a lunch at Clarence House for the family.62

  In May she travelled north as usual for her fishing fortnight, although this year she stayed at Craigowan, in the grounds of Balmoral Castle, as the Queen was having a new kitchen built at Birkhall as her birthday present to her mother. The Queen and Princess Margaret were well aware that their mother’s homes all became a little tired as the decades passed, because she hated to spend money on furnishings, redecoration or even maintenance. From her sixties onwards she would say, ‘I won’t be around much longer. It’s not worth it. Guests enjoyed shabby lino in the bathrooms, frayed curtains and damaged lampshades in the bedrooms. Sometimes when she was away her daughters would have chairs re-covered in identical material so that she would not notice anything had changed. When the Queen gave her mother a new carpet for the drawing room at the Castle of Mey it had to be indistinguishable from the one it replaced.

  Queen Elizabeth’s house parties in Scotland were more prolonged and more spontaneous than the musical weekends at Royal Lodge. As time went by, Birkhall seemed increasingly like another world, totally separated from modern Britain. Some visitors found it quite magical, almost like walking through the wardrobe door into Narnia. The same guests returned year after year; as a rule only death ended their annual invitations. Among the early regulars were John and Magdalen Eldon, good friends over many decades, he a remarkable naturalist, she a great beauty and one of the few female members of Queen Elizabeth’s Windsor Wets club; the Sutherlands, the Linlithgows and Billy Fellowes, the retired agent from Sandringham, and his wife Jane; they were the parents of the Queen’s Private Secretary in the 1990s, Robert Fellowes. Dick Wilkins, her ebullient and witty stockjobber friend, was often invited though he was not a great sportsman. He would go fishing with a ghillie and tended to sit on the bank until the ghillie caught something, whereupon he would seize the rod and, if lucky, reel the creature in. His account of his triumph at dinner would be splendid.