An Audience with an Elephant

by Byron Rogers

  In the 1970s, you must remember, royalty was the most secret and mysterious force in society. Biographers kept their distance then, and opponents such as the MP Willie Hamilton regarded it as a regressive but horribly efficient piece of machinery at the centre of things. Yet nobody really knew how royalty operated: it was like an unexplored galaxy, and here I was among its outer rings, my journey just beginning. What would I find at the end? Would I be Buckingham to the Prince’s Charles I?

  Barnetson arranged a lunch at the Savoy Grill. Checketts was late. Barnetson sat wreathed in pipe smoke and nodding to famous men. ‘Hello, Harry,’ he said, and then to me, ‘That was Chapman Pincher.’ Then Checketts came. ‘Big boy, aren’t you,’ he said as I stood to shake hands. I remembered him from Aberystwyth during that bizarre term when the Prince was given a crash course there in the Welsh language. Checketts had seemed then like one of nature’s gym masters, forceful, tough, not over troubled by humour.

  Over lunch he and Barnetson talked about their country houses while I ate everything on the table, feeling like the Dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. But when the coffee came Checketts turned abruptly to me and began to talk about what he called ‘a possible role’. No mention of shoulders now. If things worked out I would be a machine, just as he was a machine, for when he outlived his uses even he would be gone. There were no pension rights in his job, volunteered Checketts. He would like to say a few words about what the Prince actually did. A few months before, he said solemnly, he had lent his name to a campaign to have bicycle theft stamped out in Cornwall, and was also passionately interested in having old canals re-dug. Barnetson’s vision of great events was crashing about my ears as Checketts got to his feet. The next step, he said briskly, was to meet the Boss, ‘to see whether the chemistry worked’.

  That was August. A month went by. I dropped a note to Checketts saying the chemistry practical seemed to be taking an awfully long time to arrange. The letter from Checketts contained no jokes; the earliest possible time was in October, he wrote, and somehow contrived to give the impression that it was I who was seeking the interview.

  I cycled to the Palace on an autumn morning. There were still a few tourists at the gates. They looked at me curiously as the policeman on duty scanned a list of names and pointed me towards the Privy Purse door, the right wing of the façade. I was finally inside. A sentry’s boots crashed into the gravel as he turned a few yards from where I crouched, chaining up my bike, for old habits died hard and bicycle theft figured large in my mind.

  A man in a tailcoat was expecting me and I sat under Frith’s Derby Day (there are no prints in the Palace) as he phoned through. There was no sign of a living soul as I was directed across the inner courtyard to the Prince’s offices. I was nearing the centre of the galaxy. Which, incredibly, was a line of luggage as far as the eye could see, enough to equip a battalion for embarkation, except that each case, each hat box, bore the three feathers. That was the first shock, for the Jubilee was just over and I had read many articles on the Monarchy as a force in the modern world, yet here was the sort of kit an eighteenth-century aristocrat would take on a Grand Tour.

  That was all. This time there was nobody waiting for me. In the end I knocked at a door and the young man who appeared seemed pleased at the interruption, any interruption. He was an army officer, the Prince’s military equerry, and took me to Checketts, who occupied a large office opposite. This looked like an Oxford don’s sitting room except that there was a large black Labrador asleep on the floor. Checketts rang through and we walked to an old lift which took us to the second floor. He raised one finger, knocked on a door and disappeared as suddenly as the White Rabbit.

  I was left among the red and gold, red carpets, gold framed oil paintings almost touching, and a decor which could have been by the man responsible for Gaumont cinema foyers. The sheer amount of stuff on display was remarkable; come the revolution, someone could go out of his mind trying to produce an inventory of Buckingham Palace. My journey was ending. Like Pompey, I was about to enter the Holy of Holies.

  The door opened and I went in. More oil paintings, more reds, more gold, a leather-topped desk and the Prince of Wales coming round from behind it. He was wearing a double-breasted blazer with bright brass buttons. He looked startlingly like his photographs, only smaller. A high colour and good features, which nevertheless looked as though they had been assembled in a hurry, from memory. What I remember most is the hand I shook which was completely at odds with the rest of him; it was massive and strong, and my own hand disappeared into it.

  It was a very peculiar job interview. My prospective employer seemed ill at ease, licked his lips a lot, played with a signet ring, and kept giving those eerie social smiles where the eyes wrinkle a fraction of a second before the mouth moves. It was I who asked the questions. Did he see it as a full-time job? No, part-time. Was he looking for a researcher or, I searched for the word, a phrase-maker? A researcher, said the Prince: he would write his own final drafts. But the curious thing was that Checketts introduced me to other members of the staff as the new phrase-maker. Phrase-maker. Rain-maker.

  But little of this registered at the time for the Prince kept saying the strangest things. He said he was not an ambitious man. All people seemed to want, he said gloomily, was to see him; as far as speeches went, it was of no matter what the content was. There was a marked melancholy in everything he said. He found it hard to remember faces, and people became so annoyed at this for they forgot how many faces he saw. Asked whether he was looking forward to America, he said no, not really; that he made it a practice not to look forward to anything, so that anything, if it happened, could surprise him. And then he said the strangest thing of all.

  The bands were playing outside the window when the Heir to the Throne informed a man he had only just met that, up until the year before, he had not believed in the Monarchy. I looked across at Checketts but he was examining the backs of his hands. It was the public response to the Jubilee which had changed his mind for him, the Prince went on, and the way crowds of people had greeted him and the Queen. He now felt the Monarchy had a function.

  Checketts got to his feet. Downstairs he introduced me to Michael Colborne, the Secretary as he called him. I had expected to find an office run by tall public school men and here was a man who was a dead ringer for the Cockney comedy actor Alfie Bass. Colborne had been a petty officer on the Prince’s first ship when, to his own bewilderment, he had been whisked out of the navy overnight. I liked Colborne. He seemed to have trouble with reality as well. After Checketts had gone, he told me mischievously that, contrary to appearance, he, Colborne, ran this place, then roared with laughter. He had even written some speeches, and when the Prince opened a sewage farm had contributed the fact that the average British family produced 30 pounds of the stuff a week. He had felt proud, he told me, when he heard the Prince actually say this.

  I cycled thoughtfully back along the Mall, my mind full of the story of Pompey who, when he finally penetrated the Holy of Holies, had found nothing there at all. Everyone to do with the job, except the man at the centre of it, seemed so happy I felt I was about to become part of a pleasant situation comedy. No one had mentioned any of the problems associated with what a constitutional monarch-in-waiting could, or could not, say in public. As I went under Admiralty Arch, I remembered that not one of them had mentioned money either.

  The story broke in the Londoner’s Diary of the Evening Standard. ‘Charles Takes On the Son of a Carpenter.’ My wife, finding the cutting the other day, said this made it sound as though the Second Coming had been at hand in England in November 1977.

  ‘Prince Charles has taken on an aide to help him with his speeches. Until now everything he had said in public has been all his own work, but in future he will be able to call on the services of Byron Rogers. Rogers is a freelance journalist from humble Welsh origins — his father was a carpenter — and his engagement by Prince Charles indicates the change in attitude
at Buckingham Palace. There is now, I understand, a determination that some appointments should be made among those of lowlier stock.’

  I read on, entranced. The writer, whom I knew, would clearly have had no trouble in describing the Virgin Mary as upwardly mobile. I had in fact pleaded with her on the phone not to use this particular story, but even the pleading, I noted, had been incorporated into it. Odd lot, the English: the snobbery, like damp, always shows somewhere.

  The Times speculated about the nature of the job (‘part-time rhetorical consultant and teller of shaggy-dog stories’), while the Evening News burbled about ‘an unprecedented honour’ (I was writing for the News at the time). The Telegraph gave it the full treatment it reserves for truly mysterious events like the death of the Glastonbury Thorn: one paragraph. ‘The Prince of Wales has appointed as speech writer Mr Byron Rogers, a colourful Welshman’, as though a colourful Welshman was a job, like a bus driver.

  ‘I don’t think it is generally known that Britain is self sufficient in blackcurrants.’ It was a month later, and I sat up in the bath, startled by the familiarity of those words. The voice was even more familiar. I had switched on the radio, forgetting that until 7.00 on a Saturday morning at that time Radio 4 had a farming programme.

  ‘In fact we lead the world in the production of blackcurrants. No imports disturb our trade figures, no foreign price rises threaten our economy . . . Every year the wind blows through 10,000 acres of British blackcurrants. . .’. The Prince’s timing, I noted, was very good.

  The speech to the Farmers’ Club was the first I had worked on, and it set the pattern. The Palace, usually Michael Colborne, would ring to tell me where the speech would be made, to whom and under what circumstances. This was to be an after-dinner speech at a Club Dinner; but the themes and the character of the speech were left entirely to me. At one point I wrote to the Prince, complaining that I felt like a duck-gun being pointed in an approximate direction in the hope that the scatter pattern might hit something, anything. He wrote back and said the duck-gun appeared to be working.

  It meant I had to rely on my wits even more than I did as a journalist. For the Farmers’ Club meeting in St James, what was I to write about, the Common Agricultural Policy? I went to see the Club’s officers, read through a Club history (from which I extracted the little gem that the last Prince of Wales to address them had done so in 1923 ‘to an unceasing chorus of cheers and applause, saying, it is sad to relate . . . nothing whatever of substance or importance.’). This appealed to my employer’s sense of melancholy and the little quote turned up in other speeches.

  But then I remembered that odd fact about the blackcurrants, tucked away somewhere at the back of my mind, and I was up and running. The rest followed, with the irony of an agricultural club in the middle of London, which in the past had been addressed on such subjects like ‘Slurry’.

  From the start I was aware of the comedy involved in writing speeches to be delivered in places I had never been, to men I would never meet, about matters of which I knew absolutely nothing. It was worse for my employer who had to go to those places and meet those men, but I had been hired, a member of his staff told me, to stop him starting speeches along the lines of ‘Ladies and gentleman, what on earth am I doing here?’, for the ladies and gentleman knew exactly what he was doing there.

  So time passed. The Anglo-Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce at Caracas. The Burma Star Association. And, the ultimate unreality, something that had me walking round the room touching the furniture, an address to a gathering of engineers at Zurich University. I stole a column about engineers from my colleague Peter Simple, in whose fantasies I by then believed I had taken up residence.

  I fell back on my own experiences, which then of course became the Prince’s, and he would come out with anecdotes like this: ‘A friend of mine was doing market research on the brewers.’ Could the Prince of Wales have ever had a friend doing market research on brewers? The man had had to find the lowest social category of all so he went into a municipal garden and met a tramp. He got him into a pub, bought him a pint and the tramp opened like a rose. What did he think of Charrington’s? Oh, very good. Marston’s? Wonderful. But surely, my friend asked, there was some brewer he objected to? The tramp got to his feet. ‘You see in front of you someone who once had a family, a job, a future. You see in front of you a man brought down by Bass.’

  If the Prince’s speeches ever get published, scholars may ponder over a period in his life when Welsh headmasters confided in him about the relaxed entrance requirements of the new polytechnics (‘If you’ve anybody there who’s not yet fixed up, just send him along’), and when he could describe eighteenth-century Highland society as ‘the Masai, grown white and articulate, at the end of the Great North Road’.

  This last remark was dropped, without preamble, into a speech, for it was the Prince’s method to use a paragraph here and there (he still liked his ‘What on earth am I doing here?’ openings). There were of course things the Prince felt he could not say. He presided at a Press awards ceremony and I wanted him to end the speech by looking quizzically around him. ‘But I see only a section of the British press in front of me, and the more poorly paid section at that. Ladies and gentlemen, where is the Linotype Operator of the Year?’ His father, he said later, had raised no objection to this but the event’s organisers had. I also wanted him to poke fun at his future biographer, Anthony Holden, by saying that his own job was bad enough, ‘without my Boswell padding behind me in the Economy Section’, but he chose instead to be nice to Holden; his attitude changed dramatically when the book appeared. He later showed me a second book written by Holden at the time of the royal marriage. Inside there was a fulsome handwritten inscription in, I think, green biro, at which he pulled a face. But the Press speech he enjoyed, especially an elaborate conceit I had worked out in which he compared his presence at such an event to a pheasant handing out prizes after a shoot.

  Only once did the shit hit the fan, and that ironically was the one occasion on which I had really done some research. It was on British industry and I used the comments of American and Japanese businessmen I had interviewed on the stultifying social divide they had seen here between the executive restaurant and the works canteen. The Prince made the speech, and that night on the television news I listened to something extraordinary, a CBI spokesman denouncing a member of the Royal Family. Even more extraordinary, I met that weekend in the pubs of Carmarthen working men who remembered the comments of Edward VIII in the Rhondda and felt that they might again have a prince who understood.

  The question of payment took months to work out, and required a meeting with Checketts, who in a memo had said, ‘I rather thought he [Rogers] was going to do this work for nothing.’ They were not quite of the modern world, these men, and I remembered the remarks of one member of staff when the Prince, attempting to intervene in the social problems of south London, called a conference of police officers and black teenagers at the Palace. ‘They all came but at a certain time HRH got up and said, “Well, I’m afraid I have to go now.” Which left all these policemen and teenagers staring at each other round a table in Buckingham Palace.’

  Checketts asked what was the going rate in journalism, and I, plucking a figure out of the air, suggested £125 per thousand words. That worked for a while except that if something interested me I wrote on. And on. Oliver Everett, newly transferred from the Foreign Office, then came up with an impeccable Civil Service compromise: the grading of speeches according to their public importance, fees to range from £65 for a post-prandial jolly to £125 for Sermons on the Mount. I could of course have stealthily trebled this, as Mr James Whittaker suggested one night at a reception; it only required a phone call, said Mr Whittaker, scribbling a number on a piece of paper. I never did, not only out of loyalty — the reality of life beyond those gates was just too bizarre.

  A remarkable young man, more camp than Julian Clary, minced into Michael Colborne’s office. When he had gone
I asked who he was, for Colborne, I noticed, had not introduced us. ‘That,’ he said heavily, ‘is the best reason for getting the Prince of Wales married as soon as possible.’ It had been the Prince’s valet. On another occasion I walked in to find Colborne’s desk covered in knitted woollen socks; someone had called, hoping to get a Royal Warrant.

  The Palace itself, like everything else, was not what it seemed. Entered from the Mall it was a Palace, but entered from the side, the Buckingham Gate entrance, it was a DoE storehouse, with men wheeling trolleys and a notice-board on which the footmen tried to sell each other second-hand cars (the Chaplain’s Rover was at one point up for sale). But then you went through a door, the carpet started, and you were in the Palace again.

  There were so many corridors on so many different levels that occasionally I lost my way, and once, below ground, came on a door marked ‘Royal Clockmaker’, which I could never find afterwards. Below ground I saw people going about their jobs, but above not a soul, so if you kept your nerve you could wander at will. Once I surfaced in the Throne Room.

  There was the odd social event, like the Ball before the Wedding at which I saw the bride-to-be run across the room like a hunted thing. The guests were remarkable — the Cabinet talking warily to each other, foreign royalty in strange uniforms, two of the Goons, and Mrs Nancy Reagan. Nobody, I noted, awaited her at the door, so the Empress of the West entered very small and alone.

  Some guests got extremely plastered, for there was a bar serving the strongest cocktails I have ever drunk. I caught one tiny dowager as she fell down the main stairs and she weighed no more than a piece of cardboard; her make-up, close to, was pale green, like that of one of Dracula’s Brides. At the cocktail bar a huge bull in scarlet turned to me. ‘No finer sight in the world than a good Catholic girl with hair under her arms, dontcha think?’ Up to a point, I said.