The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  Unseen that same day was an accident which befell the Queen Mother – as she was leaving Horse Guards Parade, she slipped and hurt her leg. It took a very long time to heal. Despite her injury, she insisted on going ahead with a planned visit to Canada in early July – Canada was a leitmotif of her eighties. She made four trips there during the decade. But she was hobbling badly throughout the trip and when she returned she was in such pain that she had to cancel a number of engagements. She was nevertheless determined to recover in time for the wedding of her grandson on 29 July.

  On 28 July, the eve of the wedding, there was much coming and going at Clarence House. Bridesmaids dresses and pages uniforms arrived. That night a huge firework display was to be staged in Hyde Park, attended by the Royal Family and their principal guests. Half a million people were expected to line the streets and fill the park to see the Prince of Wales light the first in a chain of beacons to blaze across the country, and to hear Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks played in front of a specially constructed pyrotechnic Palace in the Park.

  Queen Elizabeth had invited the bride, together with her sister Lady Jane, the wife of Robert Fellowes, Assistant Private Secretary to the Queen, to stay at Clarence House that night. It was a low-key evening with no dinner party. In fact the generations separated early. The two young women had supper alone together in their upstairs sitting room, while the two grandmothers, Queen Elizabeth and Lady Fermoy, had theirs in front of the television in the main drawing room on the first floor. Frances Campbell-Preston, who was in waiting, joined them and, in her private record of the evening, noted that the Queen Mother was in excellent spirits. They watched Dad’s Army and then the news which was followed by an interview with Prince Charles and Lady Diana. ‘Diana is awfully good,’86 said Queen Elizabeth. Then came the fireworks and Queen Elizabeth provided good-natured commentary on all the important guests appearing on the screen. All in all, Frances Campbell-Preston concluded, it was a joyful evening – ‘the Queen Mother in the most marvellous form’.87

  Next day, vast crowds – perhaps over half a million people – gathered along the route between Buckingham Palace and St Paul’s Cathedral. Queen Elizabeth drove to the Palace with the Dowager Duchess of Abercorn, her Mistress of the Robes, in attendance on her, to join the Queen’s procession. She took her place with other members of the Royal Family under the dome of Wren’s magnificent Cathedral and greatly enjoyed the service. Back at the Palace, the family appeared on the balcony and the Prince kissed his bride to roars of approval from the crowds in the Mall. Then they set off, as his father and mother had done almost thirty-three years before, to start their honeymoon at the Mountbatten home, Broadlands, in Hampshire, and completed it in the royal yacht Britannia.

  Both bride and groom wrote Queen Elizabeth thank-you letters. The new Princess of Wales expressed herself with charm – ‘Dearest Ma’am, I cannot explain just how much it meant to me to spend my last night in your home. Everyone was so kind & I ended up a thoroughly spoilt bride to be.’ She thanked Queen Elizabeth ‘from the bottom of my heart’. And as a postscript she added, ‘I will try my hardest to make your grandson happy & give him all the love & support he needs & deserves. I still can’t get over how lucky I am & it will take me the rest of my life to recover!’88

  * This was the serialization of Wallis and Edward: Letters 1931–1937, edited by Michael Bloch, published in 1986.

  * Anthony Gurney and George Dawnay were, along with Harry Birkbeck, farmers and neighbours to Sandringham in Norfolk whom Queen Elizabeth enjoyed visiting. Eldred Wilson was the senior tenant farmer on the Sandringham Estate, a skilled horseman who broke in Queen Elizabeth’s horses. Len Bradley was the retired stud groom at Wolferton.

  * Bummarees were porters at Smithfield Meat Market; Queen Elizabeth was an honorary freeman of the Butchers’ Company. Queen Elizabeth always enjoyed her Smithfield lunches. Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire described one of them with her customary eloquence: ‘Smithfield looms, Cake to lunch there, much raising of glasses & toasts to Tom, Dick and Harry, any excuse really. I love going in her wake through the crowds, she has an extraordinary effect on the populace, the faces when she’s passed unexpectedly are v revealing, giggles, amazement, cameras too late, only getting backs of people like me. Worth seeing.’ (In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, ed. Charlotte Mosley, John Murray, 2008, p. 211)

  * The guests included Lord and Lady Abergavenny, Lord and Lady Dalhousie, Lord and Lady Strathmore and their son Michael, Lord Glamis, Martin and Catriona Leslie, Brian and Carey Basset, Sir Martin Gilliat and many more.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  POETRY AND PAIN

  1981–1999

  ‘It’s no good sitting back. Your devoir, your duty’

  IF THE LOG CABIN at Polveir, happily placed between river and trees, had been a perfect eightieth-birthday present, a gift which Queen Elizabeth valued highly ten years later was a poem by Ted Hughes, the Poet Laureate. He wrote her an epic of the century, hers, his and everyman’s. He called it A Masque for Three Voices’ and considered it ‘a drama of the modern age’.1 He used a variety of tones to bring different moments from the Queen Mother’s life into focus ‘against a procession of simple historical tableaux’.

  Hughes was a passionate man and a patriot. He thought that any country needing to defend itself must call upon its ‘dormant genetic resource’, its ‘sacred myth’, and in Britain’s case that was the Crown. In 1939 ‘the mantle of this palladium settled on the Queen Mother, who was then Queen.’ He believed that ‘She rose to the occasion in such a way that she became the incarnation of it.’

  His poem began with a statement of the importance of monarchy:

  A royalty mints the sovereign soul

  Of wise man and of clown

  What substitute’s debased those souls

  Whose country lacks a crown

  Because it lies in some Swiss bank

  Or has been melted down …

  The century, he wrote, ‘dawned at your first smile/Lit with another wonder’. Hughes took the reader through both the innovations and the horrors of the twentieth century, the Great War, Einstein, the Ford motor car, Mickey Mouse, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini. But in the 1930s, he wrote, tyranny ‘alchemised its antidote, the true’ – and by ‘the true’ he meant the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

  He ended in the present day with new generations who had never known what the First and Second World Wars meant, nor ‘how the Queen Mother comes to be at the centre of Britain’s experience of the drama by which the 20th century will be remembered’.2

  Much like the heart that carries us about,

  The fearless hope beneath the fearful doubt,

  You have worn the Nazi and Soviet Empires out …

  Your birthday shares this present with the world.

  Simply yourself, like the first smile you smiled,

  A small blue figure, bending to a child.

  Queen Elizabeth took the poem with her to the Castle of Mey in August 1990. It was a good place, she told him, to concentrate: ‘There is only the sea and an immense sky, and the images that you create in your great poem seem to float in one’s mind, in fact every time I read it a new one appears.’ Thanking him, she said that she was full of admiration for its beauty and was amazed that he had been able to put into glorious words the whole history of the previous ninety years. ‘And slipping from horror words like Stalin and Hitler suddenly into lovely things like a salmon lying under a white stone. There is a white stone in my favourite pool on the Dee, Polveir, and there is nearly always a fish under it, just moving in a languid way against the stream. And you even remembered when Mickey Mouse came upon the scene!’ She felt she did not have words enough to tell him ‘what immense joy your poem has given me, it is so beautiful and so moving, there are several passages that make me cry, and this happens every time I read it.’3

  *

  TED HUGHES’S tribute came
at the end of a happy decade for Queen Elizabeth. She loved her eighties and thrived throughout them. When Dame Frances Campbell-Preston later reached what she considered the ripe old age of eighty and thought she ought to retire, Queen Elizabeth would have none of it. ‘Congratulations. You will feel marvellous,’ she said.4 Dame Frances stayed en poste.

  It is often said that people rarely make new friends late in life. With Queen Elizabeth this was not so. She remained particularly good at forging new friendships among younger people, often much younger than her. During her eighties and nineties many new friendships were begun, many older ones ripened and matured. Lady Diana Cooper, socialite, writer and wit, widow of Duff, gave bohemian lunch parties for Queen Elizabeth which she loved. After one typically convivial occasion at the Cooper home in Little Venice, west London, she remarked that it was ‘great fun to watch the famous HOUSE POISON doing its work, voices rising, conversation becoming more & more sparkling, & even the dear faces of the clergy becoming a tiny bit roseate’.5

  Another private fixture she much enjoyed was lunch with her friends Charles and Lady Katharine Farrell (niece of Lady Diana Cooper) at their house in Oxfordshire. As with letters to other friends, her thank-you letters to the Farrells, stretching over more than twenty years, have their own refrain. She often referred to the brilliance of the ‘Palais de Glace’ – the conservatory which they built on to their house and in which they often ate – and the ‘ANNUAL INSPECTION’ of the hedge they had planted in the garden. The lunches were merry, bucolic occasions. She enjoyed the neighbours and friends whom they invited and was especially intrigued by Paul Getty, the philanthropist whose love of English traditions in general and cricket in particular had a Wodehousian quality.

  Her own invitations were cherished. Her guests – whether they were shooting friends or bibliophiles or music lovers or fishermen and women or walkers or racegoers – loved her stylish, generous entertainment at Clarence House and Royal Lodge, Birkhall, the Castle of Mey and, in July, at Sandringham.

  Outside her intimate circle, she had her critics. James Lees-Milne, the diarist, commented ungallantly on her appearance. ‘Her teeth, which are her own, are bad. She has little finger nails upturned at the ends – not pretty. Her hair straight, wispy, stringy. Nevertheless, she has dignity and charm – how often has that been said? – however evanescent; and stamina. For 1½ hours she stood – never once sat – talking to total strangers and making herself agreeable.’6

  Lees-Milne criticized her for ‘sugary insincerity’, which he found quite unlike the bright, direct dignity and humour of the Queen. He recorded a story told him by Johnny Lucinge, the impresario of her French visits, who had stayed with her at Sandringham for the Flower Show in 1983. There, local women were displaying their pet rabbits.

  One old lady, very eccentric and untidy, had an awful exhibit, an ancient, bald rabbit like a melon which she adorned with ribbons and furbelows. The other old ladies did their best to shield the spectacle from the Queen. But the Q. made straight for her, talked to her only and stroked the animal. When urged by Fortune Grafton to walk on to some other stall she lingered, turning her head towards the proud owner as though most loath to leave. All the other respectable old lady competitors furious, of course. This is an example of her compelling charm, he says.

  Lees-Milne himself sounds unconvinced.7

  But even he was wary when the novelist Penelope Mortimer came to interview him for ‘yet another biography of the Queen Mother’. She had brought a tape recorder which alarmed him and ‘so long as the machine was whizzing I remained discreet.’8 Mortimer’s biography was probably the most unsympathetic ever written about the Queen Mother.*

  Writing of Queen Elizabeth’s many charitable appearances, Mortimer said:

  The Queen Mother Image is dressed, coiffeured, transported, deposited. When the performance is over it is fetched, deposited, fed, cleaned and put carefully away for the night. If the Queen Mother beckons, someone notices; if she calls, someone comes. All she has to do when she drops fresh as a daisy from the sky is to generate love, delight and enthusiasm … It may be increasingly difficult for an octogenarian to climb into the helicopter, but once air-borne the flight is effortless, skimming over the dull, pedestrian world, skimming over empty spaces and uneasy silences, over neglect and indifference, landing only where the lights shine and the climate is entirely dependable. One day she will simply spin out of sight, emerging God knows where to carry on with the angels.9

  But there were other authors whom she helped with their books – she assisted Kenneth Rose with his well-received biography of George V. Rose, diarist extraordinaire of the Daily Telegraph, was one of the few journalists whom she trusted. He sent her flowers with kind notes on her wedding anniversary every year. She also talked to her friend the Cambridge historian Professor Owen Chadwick, in preparation for his book Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War. This paid what she thought was overdue tribute to D’Arcy Osborne’s wartime achievements as British ambassador to the Vatican. Chadwick, like Queen Elizabeth herself, admired Osborne for both his courage and his delightful personality and she enjoyed talking with him. On another occasion, ever true to her love for P. G. Wodehouse, she advised him to read Gussie Fink-Nottle’s prize-giving speech in Right Ho, Jeeves. Chadwick did so, with great pleasure, and wrote to tell her that his laughter had caused consternation in the silent college library.10

  One of the great new friends of her eighties was Ted Hughes. They met when he spoke at the King’s Lynn Festival and Queen Elizabeth invited him and his wife Carol to dinner at Sandringham. The following year she invited them to Royal Lodge for her Musical Weekend. She asked him to read some of his poems, which he did ‘with some trepidation’. He need not have worried; he was captivated by her and she by him.11

  Hughes was a dedicated countryman and fisherman. Queen Elizabeth liked that sort of person and she also found his looks – tall, craggy and well built – ‘very striking’.12 Writing to his brother after one visit to Birkhall, Hughes said, ‘the morale and general spirits in her group is always incredibly high. And she never alters in the slightest way. Interested in everything, amused by everything. Her secret is – one of her secrets – to be positive about everything. Another must be – to be pretty strong. She climbs about the steep gardens. Stands & walks for hours at a time. There’s something about her that’s kept very young – like a young woman. But everybody is so fond of her that she escapes the psychological isolation – for most old people inescapable.’13

  *

  ISOLATED SHE never was. Through this decade she watched with pleasure (and sometimes concern) her grandchildren growing older and her great-grandchildren’s infancy. She continued with her private trips to France and with her official visits abroad, particularly to Canada. The pattern of her years remained much the same as it had always been, with the regular commitments to her charities, her regiments, her ships – and of course her horses. Not all of these engagements need to be rehearsed; at the risk of showing favouritism (which she always tried to eschew) a few landmarks should be recorded.

  Spring 1982 saw her carrying out her military obligations, presenting shamrock to the Irish Guards at Pirbright on 17 March and visiting her regiment, 1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards, in Northern Ireland at the end of April. Earlier that month an unexpected war had broken out when Argentina seized the Falkland Islands, a British colony in the South Atlantic. The British government immediately declared its intention of regaining the islands; a task force was prepared and dispatched. Prince Andrew went out with the force as a naval helicopter pilot in HMS Invincible. With her habitual horror of war, Queen Elizabeth wrote to the Queen, One feels such a dark cloud in one’s mind over the Falklands’; she longed for a solution to be found.14

  In early June she lunched privately with Mrs Thatcher at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official country residence, and shortly afterwards President and Mrs Reagan arrived in England on an official visit, during which the Ameri
can leader made clear his support for British determination to recapture the Falklands. Queen Elizabeth attended the banquet for the Reagans at Windsor Castle. The war ended with British victory on 14 June.

  Queen Elizabeth was to have flown by helicopter from Royal Lodge to Margate for the start of her Cinque Ports visit on 8 June. But one engine failed just after takeoff and the helicopter had to make an emergency landing. She seemed not in the least alarmed; after lunch at home she took a plane of the Queen’s Flight from Heathrow to Marston in Kent instead.

  She had a busy summer which included a visit to Barnard Castle in County Durham to open three galleries at the Bowes Museum, in which her family connection gave her a personal interest.* She travelled to Glasgow for the Centenary Service of the St Andrew’s Ambulance Association and a visit to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama; and she paid a two-day visit to Germany to see her regiments – the 9th/12th Royal Lancers and the 1st Battalion The Black Watch. On 16 July she returned to Scotland to celebrate the centenary of the University of Dundee, and on 26 July she attended the Falklands thanksgiving service at St Paul’s Cathedral before driving to Sandringham for the King’s Lynn Festival and her usual July house party. Her birthday that year had a special resonance; Prince William, the first son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, was christened by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Buckingham Palace. After the ceremony the family celebrated both events at a lunch at the Palace.

  Towards the end of her customary Scottish holidays she paid her annual visit to the Lord Roberts Workshops for disabled soldiers in Dundee, named a British Railways locomotive The Queen Mother at Aberdeen and attended the Perth Bull Sales where she was delighted that her Aberdeen Angus bull won Reserve Junior Champion. Back in London she and Princess Margaret acted as Counsellors of State while the Queen was in Australia. She wrote to her daughter: ‘Thinking of you in great heat & chiffon, I write, as usual, in a downpour of rain and thick wool!’ and sent her horse news – mostly bad at this point. She had been following the tour on television and thought of how hard the Queen worked, compared with how little she was doing.15