by Kitty Kelley
The King and Queen ordered their lawyers to institute loyalty oaths* for all future servants. Anyone who dared to “do a Crawfie” was sued by the Palace and stopped by the courts. Because of Crawfie, the subsequent see-and-sell memoirs of the royal servants had to find their markets outside the United Kingdom. No British publisher would dare dishonor the monarchy by venturing into print with unauthorized recollections. To do so would show flagrant disrespect and, not incidentally, prejudice his prospects for a knighthood. Over the years secrets seeped out of the House of Windsor, stripping the monarchy of its mystique and deflating the fantasy. By 1994 the chimera had been so exposed that all deference was gone. Not even the threat of litigation intimidated royal servants. The fairy tale thoroughly dissolved when Prince Charles, the future King of England, went on television and admitted adultery. His valet then revealed the future King’s romps outside his marriage bed.
“He was in the bushes with his mistress and there was mud and muck everywhere,” said the disgusted servant, who said he had to wash the royal pajamas. “They’d obviously been doing it in the open air.” The valet was forced to resign his $18,000-a-year job, but he said he did not care. By then it was no longer an honor to be a member of the royal household. The royal family had tumbled so far off its pedestal that even royal servants were dismayed. The power of royal displeasure no longer carried the punch it did in 1949.
At that time, King George VI had his hands full. While dealing with the international commotion over Crawfie’s book, and his own precarious health, he was being pestered by his son-in-law for permission to return to active duty. Prince Philip, who aspired to becoming an admiral, wanted to quit his office job at the Admiralty, where he said all he did was “shuffle ships around all day,” and resume his career in the navy. The King was resisting because he knew Elizabeth would want to accompany her husband during his two-year tour, and the King did not want her to go. Weeks of family negotiations ensured what Elizabeth should do; when she agreed to commute to London every few months, the King agreed to release Philip from his desk. The Duke of Edinburgh left in October 1949 for Malta, where his uncle Dickie Mountbatten, second in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, eventually gave him command of his own frigate, HMS Magpie. Respected, not loved, he was called “Dukey” by his crew.
As she promised, Elizabeth remained in England for a few weeks with her baby. Soon, though, she left the eleven-month-old infant with his nannies and grandparents. She skipped her baby’s first birthday to join her husband in Malta for their second wedding anniversary.
“[The] Princess had no very clear understanding of the way people lived outside Palace walls,” said her governess, Marion Crawford. “But… when she flew to visit Prince Philip in Malta, she saw and experienced for the first time the life of an ordinary girl not living in a palace.”
Lady Mountbatten agreed. In a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, she wrote: “It’s lovely seeing her so radiant, and leading a more or less human and normal existence for once.”
The Mountbattens turned over their hilltop quarters in Villa Guardamangia to Elizabeth and Philip during her visits, and the Princess so enjoyed herself that she extended her stay to spend Christmas with her husband. So little Prince Charles spent the holidays with his nanny, his grandparents, and his great-grandmother Queen Mary, whom he called “Gan Gan.”
“He is too sweet stomping around the room & we shall love having him at Sandringham,” the King wrote of his two-year-old grandson. “He is the fifth generation to live there & I hope will get to love the place.”
Elizabeth returned home only when her husband went to sea, and Lady Mountbatten accompanied her to the airport.
“Lilibet had left with a tear in her eyes and a lump in her throat,” Edwina Mountbatten wrote to a friend. “Putting her into the Viking when she left was I thought rather like putting a bird back into a very small cage and I felt sad and nearly tearful myself.”
Back home, Elizabeth discovered she was pregnant. So she returned to Malta in March 1950 to tell her husband the news and stayed with him for another month. She returned to London in May and did not see Philip again until he came home for the birth of their daughter, Anne, on August 15, 1950. He stayed for four weeks before returning to Malta.
Elizabeth rejoined him there in November for three months, again leaving her children with their nannies and grandparents. Accompanied by her maid, her footman, and her detective, she arrived on the island with her sports car, forty wardrobe trunks, and a new polo pony for her husband. She spent her days relaxing in the sun, shopping, lunching with officers’ wives, and getting her hair done in a beauty salon. Occasionally she toured military installations, cut ceremonial ribbons, and visited nursery schools. She filled her evenings with dinner parties, dances, and movies. On later trips she traveled with Philip to Italy and Greece. The Maltese press reported the personal cruise as professional business: “Like the wife of any naval officer, she is joining her husband on his station.” While she said she considered herself “just another naval wife,” she never discouraged curtsies or formal introductions as “Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh.”
The Maltese were enchanted with her, and the Times of Malta ran several stories reporting her visits to the Under-Five Club, for children whose fathers were stationed in Malta. But the paper did not raise the question of why she, unlike other military mothers, had left her own children, under the age of five, in England. Often, photographs appeared of her smiling and waving, attending Champagne parties, visiting churches, warships, and horse stables. She was hailed as “the best-loved, the most notable naval wife ever to visit these islands.”
Back home, her press coverage was not quite so gushy. One newspaper story wondered how she could abandon her children for weeks on end, especially when her son came down with tonsillitis. Other newspapers took her to task for looking like “an Edwardian vaudeville queen.” Carpings about her weight and wardrobe disturbed her more than criticism about her children, especially coming from her husband.
“You’re not going to wear that thing,” he said when Elizabeth walked into his room to show him a new dress. “Take it off at once.”
“It was all very upsetting,” wrote Geoffrey Bocca in an early biography. “The Empire had on its hands a Princess it adored passionately, but a Princess that was both overstuffed and overdressed…. As a non-smoker she did not have the assistance of nicotine to hold down the poundage… [so] she went off starchy food and she took appetite-reducing pills—a blue pill for breakfast, a green pill at lunch, and a chocolate pill at dinner.”
The amphetamines, like all other medications for the Princess, were bought by a servant to preserve her privacy. “When sleeping tablets were prescribed to help her get a good night’s rest, I got them in my own name,” said John Dean. “To avoid drawing attention to the purchase and to the fact that they were for Princess Elizabeth.”
During Elizabeth’s longest stay in Malta, her sister came to visit, and the prospect of the glamorous, pouty-lipped Princess with her long, ornate cigarette holder and strapless gowns excited the bachelor contingent stationed on the small island.
“Malta is only ninety square miles in size, and Princess Margaret’s arrival was big, big news for the men, who just about went crazy,” recalled Roland Flamini, a diplomatic correspondent for Time magazine. “I was a teenager then, and because my father was writing Malta’s constitution, I later got to meet Princess Elizabeth. I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to her, so I blurted out something about Princess Margaret’s visit, and said I hoped that she had had a good time.
“ ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ said Princess Elizabeth in her high-pitched voice. ‘The little bitch hasn’t written to me yet, or thanked me.’ ”*
“I knew then that there was more to the proper, prissy-looking Princess Elizabeth than met the eye.”
Because of her father’s failing health, Elizabeth returned to London, and Philip had to follow a f
ew months later after resigning from the navy. On July 16, 1951, he bade farewell to his crew. “The past eleven months have been the happiest of my sailor life,” he said. Five days later he flew to England, where he was greeted at the airport by his young son, Prince Charles, and one of his son’s nannies. But Elizabeth was not there. She was at the Ascot races.
Three months later, in October 1951, she and Philip were called upon to represent the royal family on a tour of Canada, which, after a diplomatic prod from the British to the Americans,* included a short visit to the United States. Once again Elizabeth and Philip left their children in the care of nannies and grandparents. They missed Princess Anne’s first steps and the third birthday of Prince Charles, but before leaving England, they selected gifts for him, which they left with the King and Queen to present. They embarked on their five-week journey with an entourage of four servants and 189 wardrobe trunks. One suitcase contained a sealed parchment envelope with the Accession Declaration in case the King died during the tour. They spent almost a month in the Dominion, where their purpose, as described by the British Foreign Office, was “to show the flag” to fourteen million people who were the King’s subjects. He had insisted on the royal tour after hearing Newfoundland’s Premier say, “The cords that bind us to the Mother Country are only silken cords of sentiment.” The King wanted those cords strengthened, so the royal couple crisscrossed Canada twice, traveling more than ten thousand miles through North America and visiting every province, including Newfoundland. All along their route, Elizabeth phoned her parents.
“Are you smiling enough, dear?” asked the Queen.
“Oh, Mother!” said her daughter. “I seem to be smiling all the time!”
Afterward she said Canada was “a country which has become a second home in every sense.” Philip pronounced the country “a good investment.”
When the royal couple arrived in Washington, D.C., for their two-day visit, President Harry S Truman greeted them at the airport. Such a gesture was unusual for the President of the United States, but Truman was grateful to the “fairy Princess,” as he called Elizabeth, for entertaining his daughter, Margaret, in London. His only child had been received by the royal family at Buckingham Palace, so he reciprocated by welcoming Elizabeth with open arms. When she came down the mobile stairway, he was waiting for her. Ignoring royal protocol, he addressed her affectionately as “my dear” and casually waylaid her at the foot of the airplane for ten minutes so photographers could take pictures. While she and her husband waited, Truman told jokes.
“Hundreds of police were milling about,” recalled John Dean. “They told me they were amazed that the Princess and the Duke traveled with so little protection. I shall never forget the ride [we] were given to Blair House… for on our high-speed drive we were escorted by motorcycle police, with sirens blaring all the time.”
Lines of uniformed police surrounded the President and guarded his armor-plated limousine. Jerking his thumb toward the security force, Truman said, “I suppose you haven’t got the tradition of nuts that we’ve got.” Knowing that Puerto Rican nationalists had tried to assassinate the President the year before, Elizabeth and Philip appreciated Truman’s humor. When he stood with them in a receiving line, he announced they were ready by telling his aide, “Bring in the customers.” The royal couple’s smiling faces appeared in the next day’s newspapers, and the President sent the photographs to the King. In his handwritten letter, Truman pronounced the trip a resounding success: “We’ve just had a visit from a lovely young lady and her personable husband,” wrote the President. “They went to the hearts of all the citizens of the United States…. As one father to another, we can be very proud of our daughters. You have the better of me—because you have two!”
The King responded to the expression of paternal love by sending a cable from Buckingham Palace: “The Queen and I would like you to know how touched we are to hear of the friendly welcome given to our daughter and son-in-law in Washington. Our thoughts go back to our own visit in 1939 of which we have such happy memories. We are so grateful to you, Mr. President, for your kindness and hospitality to our children.”
With the White House under renovation, Bess Truman tried to spruce up Blair House across the street. She had removed all the air conditioners, as the royal couple had requested, and although surprised by their desire for separate bedrooms, she prepared a suite for Princess Elizabeth and moved in the blue damask four-poster canopy bed that the Trumans shared. The First Lady also hung flowered curtains from the presidential bedroom in the Princess’s guest room and prepared an adjoining green suite for Prince Philip. “We brought in a small Oriental rug, with a table and a few books, to make it more cozy,” recalled White House usher J. B. West. “But the Princess still had to use the concrete bathtub.”
The Princess’s maid and dresser, BoBo MacDonald, inspected everything before Her Royal Highness arrived and declared the accommodations satisfactory. “Why, it’s just like her bedroom at Windsor Castle,” she said.
Elizabeth never complained about her accommodations on foreign visits. She left that to her husband. On a subsequent visit to Washington, the royal couple again stayed in Blair House and were awakened throughout the night by the comings and goings of Secret Service agents. The next morning, Philip objected to U.S. Chief of Protocol Henry Catto. “I say, Catto. Do you employ professional door slammers in this house?” Duly chastised, Catto immediately ordered all the doorjambs to be lined in felt.
The President’s elderly mother, who was bedridden on the top floor of Blair House, was looking forward to meeting the royal couple. “She’ll kill me if she doesn’t get to say hello to you,” Truman told the Princess. So Elizabeth and Philip followed the President up six flights of stairs.
“Mother,” bellowed Truman, “I’ve brought Princess Elizabeth to see you!”
Infirm and almost deaf at the age of ninety-eight, Martha Truman had learned that Winston Churchill had been returned as Prime Minister on October 25, 1951. So she was primed for the royal introduction.
The little old woman beamed. “I’m so glad your father’s been reelected,” she said.
Elizabeth smiled and Philip chuckled as Harry Truman threw back his head and roared.
The folksy President had won the affection of the royal couple, and Elizabeth wrote him a three-page letter of thanks: “The memory of our visit to Washington will long remain with us, and we are so grateful to you for having invited us. Our only sadness was that our stay with you was so short, but what we saw has only made us wish all the more that it may be possible for us to return again one day….”
British Paramount News filmed one thousand feet of newsreel on the royal visit to Washington, because after the GI presence in England during the war, Britons were intrigued with America. They packed the movie houses to see the footage. The Foreign Office complimented the British Ambassador to the United States for a job well done, and the Ambassador wrote to the President: “I am so delighted with the success of the visit of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh that I feel I must express my own deep gratitude to you. I know from what they said to us how much Princess Elizabeth and her husband enjoyed their stay at Blair House.”
On their return home, Elizabeth and Philip were buoyed by the praise they received for improving Anglo-American relations. The King and Queen met them at Victoria Station with Prince Charles, who timidly approached his parents as if they were strangers. The photograph of Princess Elizabeth greeting her three-year-old son with a pat on the back would haunt her years later when the young boy grew up and, citing the picture, criticized her for being a cold and distant mother.
The King, who had undergone three operations in three years, said he felt so much better that he wanted to reinstate his visit to Australia and New Zealand. “An operation is not an illness,” he said, “and a sea voyage would be beneficial.” His doctors adamantly refused, so once again Elizabeth and Philip were pressed into service. The King received tentative perm
ission from his doctors to plan a therapeutic cruise to South Africa in the spring, and the departure date was set for the next March. The country rejoiced over the King’s recovery. “By then he was esteemed to the point of tenderness,” recalled writer Rebecca West. A national day of thanksgiving was declared for December 9, 1951. Church bells pealed, the Commonwealth thanked God, and the King knighted his doctors. Five days later he celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday at Buckingham Palace.
Preparing for the rigorous five-month trip ahead, Elizabeth asked that a rest stop be added to the itinerary so she could see the wild animal reserves of what was then called “Kenya Colony.” She and Philip wanted to see the Sagana Royal Lodge at Nyeri, which had been their wedding present from the people of East Africa.
The royal couple left London by plane on January 31, 1952, with a small traveling party. The King and Queen and Princess Margaret went to the airport to say good-bye. Aboard the blue-and-silver royal aircraft, the King turned to BoBo MacDonald, his daughter’s personal dresser.
“Look after the Princess for me, BoBo,” he said. “I hope the tour is not going to be too tiring for you.”
He disembarked and stood at the bottom of the steps, hatless and haggard. Newsreel cameras captured him in an overcoat, standing in the bitingly cold wind. He waved to his daughter and watched the plane until it became a speck in the sky. He never saw her again.
Five days later at Sandringham, in the early hours of February 6, 1952, he suffered a coronary thrombosis and died in his sleep. That morning, as the Queen was drinking her tea, Sir Harold Campbell came to her room to tell her that the King was gone. She hurried to her husband’s chamber, walked to his bed, and kissed his forehead for the last time. She issued instructions for a vigil to be kept at his open door. “The King must not be left alone,” she said. “And Lilibet must be informed.” Quickly she amended her sentence. “The Queen must be informed.”