by Andrew Marr
The Girl Guiding continued; there were dances and picnics and childhood games. Philip appeared from time to time, blown in on a sea-salted wind. Much time was spent with her younger sister Margaret, born four years after Elizabeth, completing the ‘we four’ quartet of the family. For most of their childhood the girls dressed alike; but they were not alike. There were tales of girlish fights, with Margaret prone to bite her sister, who responded with sometimes cutting remarks about Margaret’s weight and clumsiness.11 Soon enough it was clear to her that if her sister was to be Queen, she was left in a lifelong shadow. She was said to have complained: ‘I am nothing.’ Elizabeth was reported as retorting, ‘Margaret always wants what I want.’ Later anecdotes have Elizabeth firmly if fondly rebuking Margaret for not paying enough attention to being polite in public and being ‘good’.
Temperament is a mysterious ingredient, composed of one’s placing in the family, as well as genes. Margaret, still only fifteen by the time the war ended, was her father’s cheeky pet – funny, clever, musical and allowed liberties, while Elizabeth was being trained for the throne. No doubt Margaret acted up to her place in the family order, but her talents for biting wit, mimicry and music suggest a woman who would have flourished better in other circumstances. In the last two years of the war, Buckingham Palace employed an RAF war hero called Peter Townsend as the King’s equerry. Margaret would eventually turn to him.
Elizabeth had obstinately petitioned her father to allow her to do war work more substantial than the odd radio broadcast or ceremonial position and she finally got her way when she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service. In the ATS, she learned to service trucks, drive cars, take apart engines, and perform some of the drilling she would spend her adult life observing from podiums. It was a very rare chance for her to mix with others of her age, though she was never quite allowed to forget her position, being whisked away after training sessions and rarely enjoying frank conversations with the others. She tried to make friends and hoped to do more; but Hitler fell first. In practical terms her contribution to the war effort was showmanship: to have a pretty young princess in military uniform, wielding a spanner, made fine propaganda.
When VE day finally came, Elizabeth and Margaret were allowed by their father to mingle with the crowds outside Buckingham Palace, marching arm in arm in a small party up Piccadilly, into the Ritz and then on to Hyde Park, singing songs and cheering, before standing outside the Palace with the rest and calling for the King and Queen to appear. With their caps pulled down, and in the crowded streets, the girls were barely recognized, though a Dutch serviceman noticed them and thoughtfully made no fuss. One of those in the group, the Queen’s great racing friend Lord Porchester, then in the Household Cavalry, recalled: ‘Everyone was very jolly, linking arms in the streets and singing, “Run, Rabbit, Run”, “Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line”, “Roll Out the Barrel”, that sort of thing all night . . .’ It is poignant that this almost unique escape into a fragment of street life remains an important memory for the Queen.
The following day, she and the rest of the royal family drove into the East End and then south London to visit the worst-hit of recent V2 rocket attack sites. The Londoners she came across then were the people of a different capital, a different country from the London and Britain of today. They were still overwhelmingly white, extraordinarily shabby and poorly washed compared with modern Londoners, many in uniform and the rest in wartime coupon-bought clothing; a tea-drinking, cigarette-smoking, wireless-addicted people who were turning against the class-bound Britain of before the war. There was another wild party when Japan surrendered on August 14 and the Princess wrote in her diary: ‘Out in crowd, Whitehall, Mall, St J [James] St, Piccadilly, Park Lane, Constitution Hill, ran through Ritz. Walked miles, drank in Dorchester, saw parents twice, miles away, so many people.’12
As monarchy-addicted as ever, the people would shortly kick out the great wartime leader Winston Churchill and usher in a Labour government. George VI, despite his irascible suspicion of socialists, would come to terms with an administration of patriotic, anti-communist reformers and the years of socialism and the championing of equality. His daughter would have to find ways of reigning effectively in the country they remade – part-nationalized Britain of the NHS, new towns and powerful trade unions.
The old grand London the Princess and her friends had partied through, with its aristocratic palaces, hotels and clubs, continued for a while as a citadel of tradition in a changing world. The imperial pomp of the Victorian monarchy was still just visible through the wartime grime. Soon officials in bowlers, striped trousers and rolled umbrellas were again walking to tea in the clubs of St James’s. The Household Cavalry and Guards would be back in their scarlet and their gleaming breastplates, while from the palaces behind them, colonial governors with pith helmets and feathers were being despatched by the Court of St James. And in the aftermath of war, when London seemed a blackened and in places toothless old girl, attempts were soon made to revive the ‘Season’ and High Society of the 1930s.
This was not so easy. London Society, with the court at its apex, had relied on battle-fleets of wealthy aristocratic and landed families, whose sons and daughters would be married off after a round of parties and entertainments. But Britain was broke. Death duties had been increased to 75 per cent on estates of over £1 million and income tax was at historically high levels. Titled London landowners sold off swathes of their property in the capital; around the country, from Scotland to Devon, land was auctioned at rock-bottom prices. Of London’s great private houses, where before the war so many social-season parties were held, hardly one was left intact. Even if they had not been bombed, they were soon knocked down for offices or converted into museums. As for the country homes, 400 were demolished in the decade after the war; in 1955, says the historian David Cannadine, they were going at the rate of one every five days.
The social world her parents had known vanished before Princess Elizabeth’s eyes. Post-war gossips assumed that Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret too might be won by one of the heirs with map-names. The scions of Westmorland, Rutland and Blandford were suggested as potential suitors. The girls certainly enjoyed the company of Guards officers at post-war weekend parties at Sandringham and Windsor. Yet the Windsors were now a social apex without a mountain of wealth and glamour to support them. The old ‘Season’ did return, Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball for debutantes, one of the key matrimonial markets of earlier decades, restarting in March 1946. By May 1948 the grandest of the ‘Season’ events was also back, when George VI in admiral’s uniform mingled with 2,500 guests for the first ‘presentation’ of debutantes since the war. Though Princess Elizabeth was there, attired in dove-grey silk, she was perhaps sceptical, as she would later abandon the tradition. And soon, with the solitary exception (until 1960) of Londonderry House, all the private palaces had gone. The Royals had Clarence House, Marlborough House and Buckingham Palace, but they were left in lonely splendour.13
For the Windsors themselves, life was brighter. The royal calendar, which dated only to the early years of the century, revived in its comforting predictability, a round of Sandringham Christmases, Balmoral summers and Windsor weekends. Horse-racing, like football and rugby, was soon as popular as ever. The Ascot Gold Cup, which had been held at Newmarket during the war, returned to home turf immediately, in 1945. The Grand National, which had been cancelled in 1940, was back again in 1946. The Henley Regatta, cancelled during the war, returned as a shortened one-day ‘peace regatta’ in 1945. Yet the message of wartime service was a solemn one. Royal garden parties were back; but the first were held for some of the thousands of prisoners of war recently returned from Germany. Rounds of hospital, military and civic openings, parades and speeches were also soon being scheduled with a vengeance.
Princess Elizabeth was being trained in public engagements which were mostly stodgily routine. When she was knocked against a tree by her horse while riding at Windsor in Se
ptember 1945, the Palace immediately reassured the press that she would be able to inspect the Grenadier Guards, attend a Girl Guides event and hand out diplomas in domestic science in Glasgow. She was sent to open extensions to schools for the deaf and disability centres in the West Country, a children’s hospital in east London, to the Eisteddfod at Mountain Ash in Wales, where she was proclaimed a bard – one of the Queen’s less likely titles. Her speeches did not sound spontaneous. But she did her bit. In the country she sometimes escaped, efficiently despatching stags during stalks in the Highlands, and displaying her family’s skill with guns, horses and excitable dogs.
Love and Marriage
All the while, Elizabeth had kept her secret, though not from those nearest to her. On 9 July 1946 there was the first ‘proper’ Buckingham Palace garden party since the war, which The Times’s reporter thought a glorious occasion: ‘The spacious lawns of the Palace grounds are still brilliantly green from earlier rains and beneath yesterday’s bright skies were the ideal natural carpet . . . There was as at Ascot, relaxation of pre-war rules of dress . . .’ The prime minister, Clem Attlee, was among 7,000 guests, ranging from foreign Royals to farmers. So too was one Prince Philip Mountbatten, back from service in the Far East a few months earlier. His name began to crop up in other newspaper reports of weddings and parties where Princess Elizabeth could also be found. By the end of the year the Greek prince had successfully applied for British citizenship and readers of The Times were being reassured: ‘Non-naval readers of the report that Prince Philip of Greece had applied for naturalization may not recognize under that title the grandson of one very distinguished British admiral and the nephew of another . . . But for the abnormal conditions arising from a state of war, he would ordinarily have become a British subject on passing out of Dartmouth in 1939 and formally entering the Navy.’ It was a subtle piece of nose-tapping. This was no ordinary morsel of naval gossip.
For by then Prince Philip had asked Princess Elizabeth to marry him and she had told her father. The King, worried that she was too young, insisted on a condition. The young couple would have to wait. Imperial business must come first. The royal family were pledged to visit South Africa. This would be an important and lengthy visit, part of the Princess’s training for the life to come. It would also, of course, give her the time and space to ask herself whether she was sure about marrying, a full four months to reflect before jumping. After eighteen months of close mutual admiration, Prince Philip’s proposal had come at Balmoral. His later, studiously vague account was that ‘one thing led to another. I suppose I began to think about it seriously, oh, let me think now, when I got back in ’46 and went to Balmoral. It was then that we, that it became, you know, that we began to think about it seriously . . .’14 His ‘you know’ no doubt reflects an embarrassment about public soul-baring rather than anything else: like the Queen, he comes from a less mushy generation. She accepted at once, and began to work on her father. It had been a much less complicated wooing than that of George and Elizabeth following the previous war.
But it did not go down well with everyone. The courtiers’ case against the Philip connection has been endlessly told – his German relatives, his bumptiousness, his lack of deference, all of it tut-tutted about by Queen Elizabeth’s family, the Bowes Lyons and the Palace old guard, later described by Princess Margaret as ‘the men with moustaches’. A mixture of snobbery with a whiff of racism echoed through the cold, grand corridors. But it seems that George VI himself took quickly to the young prince – who, it is said, saw the King wearing his kilt and with a grin promptly curtseyed. His caution was more about his daughter’s youth and inexperience: she had met her fiancé, after all, when she was only thirteen. In the meantime there had been serious alternatives put forward. A brace of dukes’ sons and the offspring of an earl had been mentioned. They were all beside the point. Princess Elizabeth manifestly believed in duty but she had a mind and a will of her own. So the couple were engaged, but privately. Any public announcement would wait until the return from South Africa, when she would have turned twenty-one.
The main purpose of the trip was to try to bind South Africa more tightly back into the Commonwealth. The royal party, aboard the last of the great British battleships, HMS Vanguard, left behind a Britain huddling through a grim, austerity winter, among the worst of the century, as they steamed towards sunlight and plenty. The King felt badly enough about it to cable Attlee and offer to come back; the prime minister said no, because the mission was important. In 1947, though the real, India-centred Empire was dying, many British people still thought of themselves as an imperial race and looked to ‘English’ sister-nations overseas as a global family. Empire Day was still celebrated; Australia, South Africa, Kenya and New Zealand beckoned as places for ambitious Britons to settle in and the idea of a globe-spanning British trade system was thought sensible. Few politicians expected independence to come soon to the African or Middle Eastern possessions, and the British army maintained massive bases in the Mediterranean.
South Africa, so rich, so large, so strategically placed, was a weak link. Its rulers divided between the Dutch-speaking Boers and the English settlers, the country had stuck with Britain during the war. Jan Smuts had become the only non-British field marshal at Churchill’s side and a hugely popular figure in Britain; but the anti-British Afrikaners were by now reasserting themselves. Among those on the rise were pro-Nazi racists who would later help create the apartheid system to lock the black African 75 per cent majority out of power. Wooing South Africa – cheering the pro-British faction, calming the Afrikaner one and making gestures towards the black majority – was a tricky, perhaps impossible task. Afrikaner newspapers were often hostile and the King found the strain of endless speeches hard; on one occasion he had to be cajoled into speaking by his daughter. But the welcome and celebrations in Cape Town were exuberant and on the surface, at least, the trip seemed to be a huge success. The royal party were followed by huge crowds. For Elizabeth and Margaret, their first time abroad was very special, a cascade of sensations. Elizabeth learned the absolute importance of time-keeping, prodding her mother forward when she dawdled, and managed to keep looking interested during long days of official engagements. The King’s private secretary thought she had done extremely well, and was cheered about the monarchy’s future. Yet in the longer term the trip was clearly a failure. Afrikaner nationalism rose to absolute power, while the more liberal English were cut out. King George detested the overt signs of racial separation, noted the rising hostility to Smuts, and described the officious Afrikaner police as ‘Gestapo’.
Yet the trip will be remembered most for Princess Elizabeth’s radio broadcast on her twenty-first birthday, making what she called a simple dedication: ‘I declare before you that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Imperial Commonwealth to which we all belong. But I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution unless you join in it with me . . .’ Though the speech had been written by Lascelles, the Princess had contributed her own thoughts and ideas and it made a noise right round the English-speaking world. Listening to it now there is something eerie, atavistic and mysterious about its phrases and cadences, as if a young woman was offering herself as some kind of living human sacrifice. It aroused real emotion among listeners, a call to arms from a Greater Britain. There was, however, soon to be no Imperial Commonwealth left: with India’s independence six months later, the Empire disappeared. King George VI had been a king-emperor. His daughter would not be Queen-Empress. With India gone, South Africa seemed a significant part of the new Commonwealth’s importance, but thirteen years later, after bitter rows and a formal declaration by the Commonwealth in 1960 of its multiracial status, South Africa would leave on its lonely voyage as an apartheid state.
The Princess, after enjoying riding on African beaches, the closeness of the family and the unaccustomed sunlight, returned to Britain as determined as ever to wed. The
announcement came on 10 July 1947. Unlike some of the courtiers, the public seem to have welcomed the news enthusiastically, despite a hostile opinion poll eighteen months earlier. The Prince – as he was popularly known, even though naturalization meant that his title was now meaningless, and a simple Lt Mountbatten would have been more accurate – became for the first time a public figure. His MG sports car was identified, pointed out and photographed. His picture appeared everywhere. He was given a security detail and valet, even though he barely had the wardrobe to be brushed.
At a party to celebrate the announcement, other Royals noted that Prince Philip was still in his shabby naval uniform. His prospects were now golden but meanwhile he was poor. He travelled third class on trains. He was in an entirely different position from the still-rich aristocratic Old Etonians the court circles would have preferred. What he brought instead was a restless, enquiring energy and great physical glamour. His future title, Duke of Edinburgh, was settled with the help of friendly journalists. He would become HRH. The King sketched designs for his coat of arms. Both he and his bride were awarded the Order of the Garter. Thus was a partial outsider prepared for royal authority.