by Edna Healey
We lunched down in our shelter, and luckily at about 1.30 the all-clear sounded, so we were able to set out on our tour of East and West Ham. The damage there is ghastly. I really felt as if I was walking in a dead city, when we walked down a little empty street. All the houses evacuated and yet through the broken windows one saw all the poor little possessions, photographs, beds, just as they were left. At the end of the street is a school which was hit, and collapsed on the top of 500 people waiting to be evacuated – about 200 are still under the ruins. It does affect me seeing this terrible and senseless destruction. I think that really I mind it much more than being bombed myself. The people are marvellous, and full of fight. One could not imagine that life could become so terrible. We must win in the end.
Darling Mama, I do hope that you will let me come & stay a day or two later. It is so sad being parted, as this War has parted families.
With my love, and prayers
for your Safety, ever
darling Mama your
loving daughter in law
Elizabeth
P.S. Dear old B.P. is still standing and that is the main thing.46
The sheer daring of the German pilot evoked the unwilling admiration of a police constable, an old soldier, who immediately after the raid said to the Queen, ‘A magnificent piece of bombing, ma’am, if you’ll pardon my saying so.’47
Princess Margaret was not amused. ‘The pilot got a double iron cross, the beast!’48
Both King and Queen made light of the attack, as the Lady-in-Waiting reported: ‘The King was not in the least upset … the Queen was of course marvellous, quite unruffled.’49 But as the King wrote, he later suffered delayed shock, ‘found myself unable to read, always in a hurry and glancing out of the window’.50
No one, not even Churchill, was told how near an escape they had had. Perhaps he would have reproved his King for failing to go down to the shelter when a ‘red’ alert was on. Now, as they continued that afternoon with their planned visit to the shattered East End, the Queen could say, ‘I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.’ The Lady-in-Waiting on duty said, ‘When we saw the devastation there, we were ashamed even of the glass of sherry we had had after the bang.’51 The Queen’s courage has been often praised, but it must be remembered that her Ladies-in-Waiting were also with her in the thick of the Blitz, often worrying about their own families and homes.
Nothing united the country more than the knowledge that the King and Queen shared their suffering. Lord Louis Mountbatten told the King, ‘If Goering could have realised the depths of feeling which his bombing of Buckingham Palace has aroused throughout the Empire and America, he would have been well advised to instruct his assassins to keep off.’52
Two of Nash’s original conservatories were damaged, but the Palace stood firm. Nash’s much criticized construction proved its strength. The Queen asked anxiously after the fate of the altar cloth in the Chapel which was made by disabled soldiers of the last war. An old soldier wrote to assure her that it ‘was not on the Altar at the time the Chapel was bombed. It is in very good order and is being well looked after. The altar cloth that was on I had carefully removed from the debris, cleaned and put away. It is only slightly damaged and can be repaired.’53
Buckingham Palace suffered four more direct hits. On 16 November 1940 The Times reported a small bomb that fell on the Palace Mews. On 8 March 1941 the Northern Lodge of the Palace was wrecked, and a policeman killed by the flying debris.
The full story of this policeman was told only in December 1994 in the London Police Pensioner. It is worth recording the death of one otherwise unsung hero. PC Steve Robertson PC629A was doing a ‘casual’ duty. He was based with other policemen inside the Wellington Arch, which, like Marble Arch, contained a number of rooms. It became a somewhat uncomfortable base for the police on guard in that area. When the King’s old home, 145 Piccadilly, was bombed, it was policemen from this section who helped to dig the caretaker and his wife from the rubble. PC Robertson’s colleague, PC Douglas Lightwood, later Chief Superintendent, Metropolitan Police, who, like many of PC Robertson’s friends, was anxious that he should not be forgotten, wrote:
Most of the Wellington Arch personnel had narrow squeaks at one time or another, but the most serious and most tragic incident was that which befell a close pal of mine, PC 629A Steve Robertson. Steve was doing a ‘casual’ duty on late turn relief on No 1 Garden Beat at Buckingham Palace on Saturday March 8 1941.
During a short sharp air raid by 123 bombers of Luft Flotte Nr. 3 based in northern France that evening, a bomber dropped a basket of 1 kilo phosphorous incendiary bombs on the area around the North Lodge where Steve was on duty. Shunning the safety afforded by the bell steel shelter nearby and ignoring the orders not to tackle incendiaries unless they were threatening the Palace itself, because some contained high explosives which could kill, Steve began to snuff out the blazing devices.
With his attention totally absorbed in this dangerous undertaking, he failed to hear or chose to ignore the sound of another bomber heading his way. A stick of six bombs was aimed at the Palace, the first falling on the parade ground of Wellington Barracks, another on the lawns of Queens Gardens, three on the forecourt of the Palace, and the last one scoring a direct hit on the North Lodge, completely demolishing it. Steve was buried beneath a pile of masonry.
He should have reported off duty at 10 p.m. but when he failed to do so a Sergeant Parrott and another officer went in search. They came upon the pile of rubble which was once the North Lodge and heard a sound coming from underneath, just like someone tapping one piece of stone on another. By clearing some of the debris away they found Steve who, although he was still alive, was barely conscious and in a bad way. They raised the alarm, a rescue squad arrived, and they dug Steve out and put him in an ambulance but he died before reaching Charing Cross Hospital.
The most cruel thing about Steve’s untimely end was he need not have been there at all that evening. He did a colleague a favour by agreeing to do a swap of duties with him.
He added:
Since that tragic night there have been reports of unexplained scratching sounds coming from the exact spot where Steve lay dying, and there has been one report of the ghostly figure of a policeman in wartime uniform which dissolved before the eyes of the onlooker.54
Ghost or no ghost, without the courage of PC Robertson and many like him, there would have been no more history of Buckingham Palace to be written.
In June 1941 another bomb caused minor damage in the grounds. In August 1944 there was more serious destruction when a ‘flying bomb’ landed in the grounds of the Palace, shattering windows and destroying trees. These pilotless missiles, known as the Vi, were unnerving. After the sudden silence, when the drone of the engine stopped, came a heart-stopping ‘crump’. But they were no more successful in destroying the morale of Londoners than the earlier conventional bombs. The invasion attempt of 1940 had failed. The Blitz had shattered cities, but not determination.
In Hitler’s plan the destruction of Buckingham Palace was to be a symbolic prelude to his invasion of Britain. If the King was killed – so much the better.
Day after day the King and Queen toured the blitzed city, Queen Elizabeth deliberately choosing to wear her most cheerful clothes. An admiring woman from Chicago sent her this tribute:
Be it said to your renown
That you wore your gayest gown,
Your bravest smile, and stayed in Town
When London Bridge was burning down,
My fair lady.55
Tirelessly the King and Queen toured hospitals and factories – not only in London, they also travelled in their special train to Bristol, Birmingham, Glasgow, Portsmouth and South Wales, and wherever cities were under attack. The King’s sudden appearance in Coventry, for instance, after the city had been devastated, lifted morale.
Throughout 1941 the bombing of London continued. In the fierce attack of
10 May the Houses of Parliament were hit. The Chamber of the House of Commons was reduced to ashes and the roof of the twelfth-century Westminster Hall was set on fire.
Even the young Princesses played their part. The fourteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth spoke on 13 October 1940 on the BBC radio’s Children’s Hour. ‘We know,’ she said, in her high, clear, girlish voice, ‘every one of us, that in the end all will be well.’56 But it was to be long years before all was well.
On 7 December 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. America now declared war on Japan and Germany. Franklin Roosevelt had been sympathetic throughout the war, giving what help he could in spite of the US’s official policy of neutrality. The King’s friendship with the American President had been maintained throughout the dark days of the Blitz by their informal letters. But in October 1942 it was important to strengthen the alliance and to bring home to the Americans the dangers the British were enduring. It would obviously be impossible for the crippled President to visit Britain himself, but the King had shrewdly judged Eleanor Roosevelt and invited her to visit Britain. She had courage and energy, and was observant, intelligent and articulate. She would report back honestly to the President. Mrs Roosevelt made the perilous flight to Britain. She was invited to spend a weekend at Chequers, and Queen Mary asked her to stay a night with her at Badminton, but nothing gave her a better sense of the danger and misery the King and Queen shared with their people than her visit to Buckingham Palace. The Queen wrote to Queen Mary from Balmoral on 19 October 1942, telling her that ‘Mrs R’ was going to Chequers for the weekend, but
I am sure that she will be so pleased at being asked to visit you.
We are leaving for London this evening, and I must admit that I do not look forward to London life again.
It is so dreary at Buckingham Palace, so dirty & dark and draughty, & I long to see the old house tidy & clean once again, with carpets & curtains & no beastly air raids. I feel so sorry for poor Mrs Ferguson & the housemaids, for it is most depressing having to look after a house that is half ruined!
I am putting Mrs R in my own bedroom upstairs. I have had some small windows put in, and she can use Bertie’s own sitting room as mine is dismantled & windowless. It is quite a problem to put up one guest nowadays! She is only bringing a Secretary with her, & travels very simply & quietly.57
The King intensely disliked going down to the basement air-raid shelter, but with the renewed and intensified bombing the Queen insisted ‘that the housemaids & all except the watchers should take shelter, we shall have to as well, and I behave like a governess & drive Bertie down!’
Mrs Roosevelt came to London more concerned, it would seem, about staying in Buckingham Palace than at facing air raids. ‘But I finally told myself’, she wrote in her autobiography, This I Remember, ‘that one can live through any strange experience for two days.’
I could not travel in such style but as I worried over the problem I realized that I did not have much experience to draw on in deciding what I would need. Clothes had been of very little importance when I visited England during the war. I was flying then and was permitted to take very little luggage. Furthermore, there was no elaborate entertaining during the war and I did not need many changes. Even so, I had been a bit taken aback when I arrived at Buckingham Palace on that trip and was shown my dressing-room with huge closets all around the walls. The maid who unpacked my luggage was well trained but I could see that she was surprised when all she could find to hang up in the enormous expanse of wardrobes was one evening dress, one afternoon dress, a few blouses and an extra skirt!58
Mrs Roosevelt remembered the darkness and freezing cold of her rooms at the Palace, and the shattered windows repaired with mica. These, though she did not realize it, were the Queen’s own rooms, where the hardy Scot had endured the cold. ‘Everything in Great Britain’, the President’s wife recorded,
was done as one would expect it to be. The restrictions on heat and water and food were observed as carefully in the royal household as in any other home in England. There was a plainly marked black line in my bathtub above which I was not supposed to run the water. We were served on gold and silver plates, but our bread was the same kind of war bread that every other family had to eat, and, except for the fact that occasionally game from one of the royal preserves appeared on the table, nothing was served in the way of food that was not served in any of the war canteens.
The dinner given for her in the Palace was, in her favourite phrase, ‘not a hilarious meal’. Churchill was silent and preoccupied, as well he might have been. He was waiting anxiously for news of General Montgomery’s progress at El Alamein. Finally he excused himself to make a telephone call and came back singing lustily ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. He had good news to tell. Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein was to be the turning point of the war.
After dinner they
saw the fine Noël Coward film ‘In Which We Serve’, based on the story of Lord Mountbatten’s ship and partly on the story of Dunkirk. It was a novel experience to watch a movie about a man who was himself present, and a very moving experience to see it in the company of people who must have been deeply stirred by it.
During that visit, as she later described, she drove with the King and Queen to St Paul’s Cathedral ‘because they wanted to give the faithful watchers who had saved the Cathedral the satisfaction of a visit from them … and partly so that I could stand on the steps and see what modern warfare could do to a great city’.59 She never forgot
how people would gather … standing outside the ruins of their houses and waiting until their majesties had tramped through the rubble. Often the King and Queen spoke to them quietly and on other occasions the people would address their monarch, but these exchanges … were always in a tone of sympathetic understanding. The people suffered stoically and I never heard them complain or speak bitterly.60
Mrs Roosevelt was also able to experience royal protocol old-style when she stayed for a night with Queen Mary at Badminton.
Though it was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that had finally brought America into the war, it was these personal ties of affection between the Roosevelts and the royal family that had encouraged the President in his efforts to help Britain during the period of the official neutrality of the USA. On this friendly basis, Churchill had been able to build.
As the war dragged on, Buckingham Palace had become increasingly dilapidated. ‘It is so cold now, with howling draughts through the cardboard windows,’ Queen Elizabeth wrote to Queen Mary. She was beginning to think of taking refuge in a flat they owned in London ‘which we have lent to Harry & Alice [Duke & Duchess of Gloucester]’.61
But, as the King realized, it was of great symbolic importance that they should be seen holding firm at Buckingham Palace.
So they continued to receive guests there: Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and King Peter of Yugoslavia came to stay. Haakon, King of Norway, had removed himself after the bombing of 1940, but still had his mail sent to the Palace.
Although the royal family, like everyone else, had their ration cards for food, furnishings and clothing, they had an extra allowance and in September 1943 the Queen was able to send 150 clothing coupons to Queen Mary; as she said, ‘there comes a moment, as I know only too well, when one simply must have some clothes for all the work that has to be done, and the coupons don’t go very far’.62
Meanwhile Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret watched the progress of the war from the safety of Windsor Castle and Balmoral. When war broke out, the Princesses had been staying on the Balmoral estate and then had been sent to the Royal Lodge at Windsor with their Scottish nurse, Clara Knight (Alah), and Miss Crawford. But, as Crawfie remembered, on 12 May 1940 the Queen telephoned her with instructions to move into Windsor Castle ‘for the week at least’. In fact they were there for ‘five years until the war ended’.63
Although their rooms in the Lancaster Tower in Windsor Castle were familiar – Princess Elizabeth had al
ways celebrated her birthday there – the blacked-out Castle was eerie and icy cold. In that enclosed world their household became doubly important. Alah slept in Princess Margaret’s room, and Miss MacDonald – ‘Bobo’ – in Princess Elizabeth’s. Bobo was to be an important part of Princess Elizabeth’s life. She was, as Crawfie remembered, ‘A sensible Scottish lass, who one felt would come calm and imperturbable through innumerable bombardments. She hails from a place in Invernesshire called the Black Isle.’64 Bobo was to become more than a maid. She was a friend, a companion, an adviser. It is important to remember that during the formative years of the life of Queen Elizabeth II, her most constant companions were sensible Scots young women from ordinary homes.
Crawfie followed a curriculum which Queen Mary had helped to plan, adding, at the old Queen’s suggestion, more history and less mathematics. The Princesses, she said, would never have to do their household books, but history was important for Princess Elizabeth’s career; so she was given two lessons a week at Eton College with the Vice-Provost, Sir Henry Marten. She and Princess Margaret were exceptionally well tutored in French by Mrs Montaudon Smith and later by the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue – a training that has been of lasting value.
If the Princesses needed artistic encouragement they had the example of Sir Gerald Kelly, who was at this time at the Castle working happily and interminably on the Coronation portraits. So, in spite of the war and their isolation, the Princesses’ education was not neglected.
It was during these years that Princess Elizabeth’s love of horses became a passion and one of her main interests throughout her life. She and Princess Margaret groomed their horses and galloped in comparative safety round the Windsor estate. ‘We were in love with our horses,’ Princess Margaret remembered.65
In 1942, when she was sixteen, Elizabeth insisted on registering for war service, and appeared at the Windsor office, looking young and vulnerable in her Girl Guide uniform. To her disappointment she was not allowed to join up until the war was nearly over.