The Final Curtsey

by Margaret Rhodes

  There is a gap until 14 August when she recorded the Prime Minister announcing the complete surrender of Japan, followed on 15 August: ‘VJ Day. Out in crowd, Whitehall, Mall, St J St, Piccadilly, Park Lane, Constitution Hill, ran through Ritz. Walked miles, drank in Dorchester, saw parents twice, miles away, so many people’ and finally, on 16 August: ‘Out in crowd again. Embankment, Piccadilly. Rained, so fewer people. Congered into house [a reference to Buckingham Palace and that rather wild dance] . . . Sang till 2 am. Bed at 3 am!’

  My cousins were obviously having the time of their lives. Meanwhile I had been making occasional forays to Windsor where the Queen arranged rather more sedate small dances for her daughters, attended by young Guards’ officers stationed at the castle and in the town’s barracks. Queen Mary, rather wryly, called these boys ‘the bodyguard’. Princess Elizabeth dutifully waltzed, foxtrotted and quickstepped, and engaged her partners in small talk, but she was waiting for one man to come home from the war. She had been enamoured of Prince Philip of Greece from an early age. I’ve got letters from her saying: ‘It’s so exciting. Mummy says that Philip can come and stay when he gets leave.’ She never looked at anyone else. She was truly in love from the very beginning.

  With total peace came some sobering statistics which told the price of victory and defeat. I read that over 55 million people were killed, from all sides. Then there were the spine chilling images filmed when the concentration camps were liberated. A world food shortage brought the return of rationing on a near wartime basis and there were long queues at food shops. The winter of 1947 blew in with heavy snow storms and sub-zero temperatures, meaning serious fuel shortages and power cuts. A frozen Britain lived and worked by candlelight. So the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Philip Mountbatten, newly minted as a British subject, in November that year, brightened our austerity-ridden post-war world. This time I was on the Palace balcony myself, as a bridesmaid, standing between Princess Margaret and another cousin, Diana Bowes-Lyon, gazing down on the crowds, who from that distance seemed Lilliputian. Our dresses were designed by Norman Hartnell. They were of ivory satin and net silk tulle, embroidered with syringa flower motifs. We bridesmaids didn’t have a girl’s party on the wedding eve as they do now, but we did, on the wedding day itself, have an evening party hosted by the best man, David Milford Haven. He was perhaps not the most attentive of hosts and it was not a great success: anyway we were probably all too exhausted.

  There were eight bridesmaids, the traditional number for a royal bride. We flitted round the red carpeted corridors of the Palace waiting for the cars to take us to Westminster Abbey and I remember waving to the crowds. It was very exciting but I was shocked to learn that the price of a window view in buildings overlooking the processional route could cost up to ten guineas a head, a lot of money in those days. I know that there were some last-minute crises. The bride’s bouquet disappeared. A footman remembered taking it in and bringing it upstairs, but no one had seen it since. With the panic at its height he suddenly recalled putting it in a cool cupboard to keep it fresh — and there it was.

  Then Princess Elizabeth decided she wanted to wear the double string of pearls which had been a personal wedding gift from her father and mother. The pearls could not be found either, but someone remembered that they had been sent over with the rest of the wedding presents for public display at St James’s Palace, half a mile away. The Princess’s Private Secretary, Jock Colville, was dispatched post-haste and he commandeered the car of the King of Norway almost before he got out of it. At St James’s the detectives guarding the gifts thought he was telling them a tall story, but after some while he convinced them and returned clutching the pearls with only minutes to spare. There was a third mishap. The frame of the sun-ray tiara lent to the Princess by the Queen as ‘something borrowed’ snapped as it was being fitted on her head, and the Crown Jeweller, who was standing by in case of any emergency, rushed to his workroom with a police escort and repaired it just in time. Regrettably I lost my lovely dress in a house move.

  I left my MI6 job soon after the end of the war, and thereafter spent a lot of time trying to find new and interesting employment. Eventually I pulled off an interview with the fledgling European Movement. I was invited to lunch at the Jardin des Gourmets restaurant in Soho to meet my putative employers. One introduced himself as Denys Rhodes. It was the start of an exciting and romantic adventure which was to take me to the top of the world — and down again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Love and Marriage

  Denys Rhodes was six years older than me and very much a man of the world. His father, Major Arthur ‘Tahu’ Rhodes, of the Grenadier Guards, was a New Zealander, a member of one of the earliest settler families, once the owners of vast tracts of land in the South Island. Denys was born in Ireland where his mother’s family had roots in the Irish judiciary, the higher reaches of the Church of Ireland and a touch of the ‘Beerage’ because of their links with the aristocratic Guinness brewing family. My mother-in-law, Helen, known as Nellie, was the daughter of Lord Plunket, who had been Governor of New Zealand during the reign of King Edward VII. He bore the standard of the Dominion of New Zealand at the coronation of King George V. Helen, whose mother was a daughter of the 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, and ‘Tahu’ the Maori name with which he was christened, met while Lord Plunket was at Government House.

  Denys was sent to Harrow where he was thought rather clever and then to Grenoble University. As a young man Denys joined the Westminster Rifles, part of the TA, and when the Second World War broke out he enlisted in the 60th Rifle Brigade, fighting across North Africa and Italy, where he was wounded and brought home. After he was demobilised he was taken on by Randolph Churchill, the son of the wartime premier, Winston Churchill, as a sort of unofficial ADC for a lecture tour of America. Randolph was a successful writer but not so successful a politician. They had met during the war. Randolph has often been portrayed as having had a serious drinking problem, and it was rather a kill or cure trip. They survived many misadventures, dug each other out of several holes, but ended up on reasonably amicable terms. Denys helped him in his campaign when he contested the Devonport parliamentary constituency in 1950. He was narrowly defeated and it was his fourth failed attempt to get into parliament.

  Soon after our marriage Denys and I were invited to spend a weekend with Randolph, and one of my recollections was at teatime encountering him, still in his dressing-gown, sitting at the tea table, drowning whatever sorrows he had in whisky. My austere Scottish soul was shocked. That Sunday we were invited to lunch with Winston at Chequers, and drove there in our car. Randolph’s daughter, Arabella, who was then a small child, sat in the back and was comprehensively sick on the way. On that hot July day, over sixty years ago, we arrived to meet her grandfather, the Prime Minister, smelling faintly of sick and looking rather pea-green— not a good beginning. Arabella later took up charity work and became co-founder of the Glastonbury Festival.

  There was a large gathering on the terrace and Randolph lost his head, introducing me to everybody as Lady Margaret Rhodes, which, of course, I wasn’t. Jock Colville, who by then had become Winston’s private secretary, and who knew several members of my family, took me in tow to correct this social solecism, but made it worse, re-introducing me as Mrs Elphinstone, which again I wasn’t. At lunch I — the lady seemingly with three names — was made to sit between Winston and his son. My attempts at conversation with the Prime Minister were received with grunts and finally Winston and Randolph had a row across me. It was a day I wished had never happened. This was at the beginning of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign and I remember being told that when Winston attended his first prime ministerial audience with her she was so over awed at being in the presence of the great man that she hardly dared to speak. He, on the other hand, was overcome with emotion and wept tears of chivalric adoration.

  After his spell with Randolph Churchill, Denys, like so many ex-servicemen, was in an employment limbo. He did
various jobs, including being a private detective and working for a sewage company: I never enquired too much about that. But when I first met him he was in the more salubrious surroundings of the embryonic European Movement, founded in 1947 by Duncan Sandys. Its aim was a united Europe and its first major achievement was the setting up of the Council of Europe in 1949. But, however noble its aims, I formed a less than flattering view of the organisation during my interview in the Jardin des Gourmets. I could never fathom the reason why the Frenchman present, Jean Paul, and Denys thought it would be hilariously funny to pose as being gay. It was fifty years or so since Oscar Wilde had been imprisoned for homosexuality, but same-sex relationships were still illegal and men went to prison if they were caught out. But I needed a job and what was on offer sounded interesting. I was taken on as a personnel officer and for the first few weeks sat in Denys’ office, where he was supposed to be showing me the ropes. In fact he spent most of his time on the telephone chatting up what seemed to be a harem of girlfriends, which at least assured me about his sexual tastes. Consequently he taught me very little about my duties, although I learnt something about him.

  My first European challenge was an important conference in Brussels, for which I had overall responsibility for its smooth running. I was terrified and for weeks before I hardly slept, fretting about all the things that could go wrong. Figures like Jean Monnet, who was busy transforming Europe, haunted my dreams. To my relief the conference went rather well, but my memories of it are more coloured by the après conference activities, particularly the drama sparked off by our unstable accountant, who among other diversions took the night off to go to the cinema to see a frightening film, called The Snake Pit. It tipped him over the edge and he returned to our hotel in the middle of the night in a right old state, racing round the floors stark naked, screaming, ‘Look out, the snakes are here!’

  We were due to leave the next day on the Dover ferry and somehow the poor man had to be got home to England. We locked him in his bedroom and a doctor was called, who sedated him. He called again the next morning and gave him some knockout pills, assuring us that he would definitely remain unconscious until the ferry docked, when we would be met by an ambulance. As luck would have it a storm blew up and the sailing was delayed for several hours. Denys and I were horrified at the prospect of travelling with a fully conscious madman for the whole cross-Channel voyage. But that was what happened, and the only thing we could do was to lash him with ropes to his bunk and take turns in watching him.

  It was an enormous relief when we delivered him into the hands of the ambulance crew and to recover we went to Denys’ mother’s house near West Malling in Kent. She was a widow and a delight to know, with a mop of grey bird’s nest hair and with a Turkish cigarette permanently fixed between her lips. She had some very down to earth habits; she drank pink gins with reckless abandon and always sat with her legs wide apart, so that the assembled company were treated to a good view of her knickers. She had five children all of whom in their different way were extraordinary, some of them with bags of artistic and acting talent. I was totally seduced by this. I had always thought that the Elphinstones were a very close family, but compared with the Rhodes brood and the Plunkets, we were inhibited and reserved. Perhaps it was a Scottish trait.

  The youngest Rhodes daughter, Pam, was vivacious and full of laughter and I was astonished when she went off to be a nun. She used to wear plus-fours under her habit to keep her legs warm in winter. In the end she jumped over the wall, as the saying goes about holy sisters who change their minds, and ended up in Zululand working for the Mothers’ Union, the Church of England organisation, until sadly she died of cancer. Teddy, the youngest son, was a Grenadier, like his father. After he was demobbed at the end of the war he returned home and was careless enough to get one of his mother’s maids pregnant. There was a family panic and he was banished to New Zealand. The unfortunate maid, or fortunate depending on your point of view, followed and family pressure forced him to make an honest woman of her. They were an example of the social mores of the time and I can’t imagine such an arrangement now.

  My mother-in-law had three brothers and two sisters. The eldest brother, also Teddy, the 6th Lord Plunket and his beautiful wife Dorothé were both killed in an air crash in America in 1938. They were on their way to California to a party being given in their honour by William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper tycoon, at his extravaganza of a mansion at San Simeon. His career inspired the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane. Teddy and Dorothé were part of the jeunesse dorée of London between the wars. They were great friends of the present Queen’s parents when they were still Duke and Duchess of York. They left three orphaned sons, the youngest only five. My mother-in-law took them under her wing and installed them, with her five children, in a flat in Eaton Mansions. The Plunket children arrived with their nanny and their own butler. The Rhodes’ family nanny Mrs Appleby was also in residence. During the Second World War London blitz she would work herself into a panic because she was convinced that the Germans would bomb Regent’s Park Zoo, and that the lions would escape and unerringly make their way to Eaton Mansions, get into the lift and exit at the top floor with the intention of eating her. Unbelievable, really, that anyone could be so deliciously eccentric.

  Patrick, the eldest Plunket boy, succeeded to the Barony when he was scarcely fifteen. Four years younger than Denys, he ended up a Lieutenant Colonel in the Irish Guards and was successively Equerry to George VI and Queen Elizabeth II and was appointed Deputy Master of the Household in the year after the coronation. He combined, to the Queen’s advantage, a love and knowledge of art with an awareness of people’s eccentricities and was adept at arranging a seating plan which kept everyone happy. That was something that required an intimate knowledge of all the participants. Any occasion organised by Patrick went with a swing. He was Denys’ first cousin and I remember him as delightful and good humoured, always ready to laugh at any joke and not the least a stuffed shirt. He had known the Queen since adolescence and combined an older brother role with that of a close friend and courtier. She minded very much when he died from cancer aged only fifty-one in 1975, with so much more to give.

  Denys was amusing, witty, six feet tall and handsome, although not in a chocolate-box way. Unfortunately he was penniless. It didn’t seem to matter to me at the time. He first kissed me in a taxi going round Hyde Park Corner, which felt comforting and nice, but I was so surprised that I did absolutely nothing. We started going out to dinner and then to clubs where we could dance, including the 400, the top nightclub of the day. The relationship grew into a serious love affair, but there was a major drawback. Denys was married. His wife was the actress Rachel Gurney, whom he had married in 1945. They were unhappy together and by the time I met him they were living apart. They decided to divorce and began the convoluted process, very common in those days, which involved the husband booking into a hotel and paying a tart to be found in bed with him in the morning, there to be conveniently discovered by a private eye who would give the necessary evidence. For some mysterious reason this plan did not get off the ground. They were in a marital limbo and time was ticking by. Denys and I were still working together and marriage was looming larger and larger on the horizon. I couldn’t imagine any other way than being married in church. Denys was advised that he should try for an annulment. The date for the hearing was some months ahead and when it finally arrived I spent the day waiting with my friend Liz Lambart. When it was all over Denys picked me up and we drove down to his family in Kent. I know no details of what went on but he was granted the annulment.

  Rachel, who was lovely to look at and talented, became a very successful actress and is probably best remembered for her role as Lady Marjorie Bellamy in the television period drama ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’. Eventually she was written out of the series and the method chosen was to send her down with the Titanic. I seem to remember her giving up her place in one of the last lifeboats to her maid. Rachel died in 2001
and I still keep very much in touch with Sharon, her daughter with Denys, who is my stepdaughter, and my four step-grandchildren. I love them all including Sharon’s husband Simon Gough, son of the actor Michael Gough. They lead a delightfully chaotic life in Norfolk, and Sharon and my daughter Victoria are close chums.

  Our wedding

  Wedding day: Among this group are the King and Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Margaret, my parents and my mother-in-law

  The annulment hearing had been before an ecclesiastical court and the whole thing had been a great strain for everyone concerned. But at last it was over and Denys was a free man whose first marriage did not count in the eyes of the law. It meant that we could go ahead and make wedding plans. I suppose, in my parents’ view, he was not the most suitable bridegroom. For instance, he did not have any inheritance to look forward to but they could see how much I loved him. On 31 July 1950 we were married in St Margaret’s, Westminster, with a reception afterwards in Londonderry House, the London residence of the Marquess of Londonderry, who was a distant relative of Denys on his mother’s side. Princess Margaret was one of the bridesmaids, but Princess Elizabeth was absent as she was due to give birth to her second child, Princess Anne. She wrote to me on my wedding morning saying how much she was thinking of me. ‘You must be so thankful,’ she said, ‘that the great day has arrived at last and I am sure it will be a very happy one for you. I can’t really wish you any greater happiness than I have found myself in being married, and I hope that after all the troubles and difficulties your joy with Denys will be extra specially wonderful.’