by Andrew Marr
What kind of wedding would it be? This was the darkest moment of the austerity years. In 1947 Britain faced a grave financial crisis, a run on the pound, low productivity, feeble exports and recurrent strikes. That year, rations of meat, bacon, ham and fats fell below wartime levels, to their lowest ever; clothes rations were cut; petrol was in short supply; foreign currency could be purchased only for essential travel. How would people react to a luxurious wedding? Not surprisingly, both court and government trod warily at first. Prince Philip wanted an unostentatious ceremony. His future father-in-law was in gloomy mood about the very survival of the monarchy, with so many grand houses shutting up and the imposition of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. (Spasms of gloom and even panic about the future of the monarchy have been a feature of the Windsor mentality.)
Hugh Dalton, the chancellor, was detested by the Palace, partly because his father had been tutor to King George, and the son was viewed as a class traitor for turning socialist. Now Dalton was preparing a wringing, grinding budget with more tax increases. Many Labour MPs, and no doubt many Labour supporters in the country, did not want an extravagant festival of a wedding. Following the announcement that Princess Elizabeth would be allocated a hundred clothing coupons for her wedding, with bridesmaids getting twenty-three coupons each and pages ten coupons, the Labour MP Mabel Ridealgh complained: ‘It is the general impression among the workers that it would not be proper to spend large sums of money on this wedding when we are asking the workers themselves to economize even in the necessities of life.’15 But Mabel had made a misjudgement. Already, towards the end of 1947 and despite a torrent of reforming social legislation, people were becoming weary of the shortages and red tape Labour was coming to represent. As preparations for the wedding gathered speed, it began to be clear that outside the eager platoons of the socialists, there was little enthusiasm for a puritanical, frugal event. The country wanted colour and it wanted fun. And that, after all, is the job of the monarchy.
Before the wedding went ahead, the King and his government wrestled about how much money Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip would get. George VI had run a tight and frugal court during the war, saving a substantial sum (around £200,000). But was this money really his, or the Treasury’s? He wanted a generous settlement for the soon-to-be-weds. Dalton and left-leaning Labour MPs wanted a far smaller settlement, symbol of a more ‘simple, austere and democratic’ monarchy. Some MPs wanted no money paid over at all, believing King George should pay for his daughter out of his own funds. The row went on, mostly behind closed doors. The government threatened the embarrassment of a committee of MPs enquiring into royal wealth.
The King stood his ground. Eventually Dalton was forced to resign anyway, having leaked his own Budget to a lobby journalist. His successor, Stafford Cripps, despite being another upper-class socialist with a reputation for flinty Puritanism, agreed a more generous compromise. (Like Dalton, Cripps had been no favourite at court: after one wartime lunch, when he instructed Princess Elizabeth not to forget her clothing coupons, she had thought him ‘a dry old stick’.16) When the Cripps compromise was put to the Commons, Attlee’s main argument was geopolitical. A ceremonial monarchy with simple people at its heart was, he argued, a good democratic alternative to fascist or communist symbolism. The job was a real one. It must be funded. So the King passed over half his savings and the couple would get about two-thirds of what he had hoped for. Even this deal only squeaked through Parliament: 165 Labour MPs voted for a lower payment still. There was some evidence afterwards that resentment about the annuities for the Prince and Princess spread beyond the parliamentary Labour party. How popular was the monarchy really? No one was certain.
In 1947, unlike 2011, it was not taken as read that a royal wedding, even one involving the heir to the throne, had to be a grandly public national ceremony. Historically, most royal weddings had been private affairs, with private parties and some waving from balconies or landaus. This time, the choice of Westminster Abbey followed the precedent set only by George VI and Queen Elizabeth and happened after talks involving the prime minister, Attlee. His verdict in favour of the Abbey drew a line under the financial haggling and made the wedding certain to be the major national event most of the country wanted. The numbers of guests who could be accommodated in the vast and ancient space, and the traditional processional route to it from Buckingham Palace, meant that a grand spectacular was unavoidable. Elaborate preparations were made for wireless coverage. Early on it was agreed that film cameras were to be allowed in to make a cinema presentation, later to be shown around the world. Wire, painted wood and electrically lit street decorations were built and erected. Presents began to flood in from around the world, ranging from grand confections of precious stones from Indian princes to what Queen Mary thought was Mahatma Gandhi’s loincloth, which she considered very distasteful. (It was, in fact, simply a piece of linen he had woven himself.) There were tins of condensed milk and fruit from American and Australian well-wishers who worried that the British were still starving. These would later be distributed to some of the Britons who were not quite starving, but were hungry and bored with rationing. From ordinary Britons themselves there were nylons and cigarette cases, humble knitted jerseys and pictures. The presents were laid out in long lines at St James’s Palace, flash and ordinary alike, to be viewed by anyone who bought a ticket.
What was the point of royalty if a royal wedding failed to provide a gleam in darkling times? Princess Elizabeth took a close interest in everything, but in her dress above all. It was designed by Norman Hartnell, the man who so influenced Queen Elizabeth’s image during her early years. His parents had owned a pub called the Crown and Sceptre in Streatham, south London. A sub-conscious influence? At any rate, Hartnell left Cambridge without a degree to become a designer to the rich and fashionable in Jazz Age or ‘flapper’ London, producing clothes for court parties and film stars alike. He moved to Bruton Street in Mayfair, just along from where the Queen herself had been born, and was soon winning royal commissions, including from her mother. Hartnell became Britain’s leading promoter of romantic and extravagant clothing, using a famous French seamstress for his showers of sequins and reintroducing the crinoline. Among his clients were Gertrude Lawrence, Marlene Dietrich and Elizabeth Taylor; among the rivals who admired him were Coco Chanel and Christian Dior.
The dress he created for the 1947 wedding was an extraordinary confection of ivory silk and tulle, corn-ears in crystal, embroidered stars and orange blossom. It required, among other things, 10,000 seed pearls. Almost inevitably there was a minor row about extravagance and patriotism: was the silk from Chinese worms? (Yes, but nationalist worms, not communist worms, retorted Hartnell.) A dozen huge and very rich cakes were ordered. The presents, the food and the dress were symbols not just of a wedding, or the returning glamour of royalty, but of all those things the British wanted for themselves but could not yet have. No one had the coupons for a Hartnell special. Nobody else could legally acquire the sugar, marzipan and candied fruit for the cakes, or do more than imagine the cornucopia of good things pouring in from abroad. But this seemed to produce anticipation, not jealousy. The wedding was like a giant shop window, a million noses pressed against it, and ‘coming soon’, or ‘coming one day’ written overhead. It was an early premonition, at the darkest economic hour, of the rosy consumerist dawn.
A darker future lay ahead for the once-grand family of European royalty who had also been invited. A dusty, rather moth-eaten horde of struggling-on and former monarchs and consorts converged on London with their old jewels and pre-war clothes, reminding everyone that the Windsors were rare, and lucky, survivors. Some were already exiles. Others were soon to be tipped from their thrones. The royal wedding was a reunion of the old clans, but it had to exclude many. The German relatives did not get invitations, for a start; not even Prince Philip’s three surviving sisters. Germans in general were very unpopular and some of the in-laws had served the Nazis. British sur
vival and victory had been won at a horrible human and economic cost, but London was the capital of a successful constitutional monarchy; few other countries could now say the same. Patriotism and monarchism joined arms. The message, the ceremony, was shown on screens across devastated Europe and in America too.
Up and down Britain, as Princess Elizabeth pledged traditionally to honour and obey her husband, millions of her future subjects held a ‘good for us’ party. She was being seen as a national symbol of youth, rebirth, and hope. Of course, nobody at the time could have expected that only five years later the Princess would become a Queen, and that her wedding would be outshone by the grander ritual of a Coronation. In the winter of 1947, it seemed that here were a couple with a long time ahead of them to enjoy a certain amount of privacy and freedom, and one another.
Prince Philip started with a real sacrifice: he gave up smoking to please his new wife. And he quickly discovered how radically their lives would now change. On honeymoon, initially at Mountbatten’s home, Broadlands, they were spied on by snoopers hanging in the trees and pursuing them to church. The King wrote to Princess Elizabeth during the honeymoon to say that as he had handed her over to the Archbishop of Canterbury and married life, ‘I felt that I had lost something very precious . . . I can, I know, always count on you, & now Philip, to help us in our work. Your leaving us has left a great blank in our lives but do remember that your old home is still yours . . .’ This proved to be lucky. The young couple had been assigned Clarence House, just a few hundred yards east of Buckingham Palace. Later the home of their son, the Prince of Wales, in 1947 it was a mess, almost unliveable-in. While the couple waited for building works to be finished, they found themselves first at Kensington Palace and then back with the in-laws at Buckingham Palace. But they did not return to royal routine in every respect. Prince Philip was able to walk to work at the Admiralty across St James’s Park, unthinkable nowadays. At night, apparently, he disdained pyjamas. As has been mentioned, it was a cold winter. Three months later, the Princess was pregnant.
It was during this period, from the late 1940s onwards, that Prince Philip’s association with a cheerfully louche group of men, artists and actors, photographers and aristocrats, began to cause muttering. Baron Nahum, a photographer and friend, had what he called his ‘Thursday Club’ above an oyster bar in Soho where loud and sometimes drunken male parties would take place. Prince Philip has, as it happens, always been a very moderate drinker but this set allowed him to relax properly in jovial, undeferential company. This took him to the edge of a gamey, and indeed seamy, set which later included the defence minister Jack Profumo, forced to resign from the Commons for lying, and the man at the centre of the Profumo scandal, Stephen Ward. There were a few rumours about romances with actresses and society women but after a lifetime’s worth of nosing and probing, not a shred of hard evidence has ever emerged, and it is a subject which irritates the Duke greatly. Because he was already under fire from courtier snobs who accused him of not being a proper gentleman (they meant a landed bore), the gossip was dangerous as well as being hurtful.
The birth of Prince Charles was greeted with cheering crowds outside Buckingham Palace and sonorous columns in the newspapers. The Times produced an editorial which shows just how far the mood of the press towards royalty has changed during his lifetime. This was, the paper said, ‘a national and imperial event’ and brought an heir to the throne with direct Danish blood, the first time that had happened since 1042. Interestingly, the writer thought that one day Charles might inaugurate a dynasty called Mountbatten. As for the Princess, she had ‘fully established herself as the visible representative of the whole of the younger generation, the generation upon which rests the heaviest burden of the Empire’s recovery’. This time round, it was no longer necessary to have a cabinet minister on hand for the birth; by 1948 the tradition had become too embarrassing. Other traditions, though, were maintained: the boy was named HRH Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, covering most of the royal bases. Thanks to his maternal grandmother’s blood, he was the most Scottish heir to the throne since the ill-fated Charles I.
The couple of years that followed were perhaps the happiest of the Queen’s life. She was fulfilling her duties, as the papers had noted, but they were nothing like as onerous as they would become. There was a successful visit to Paris, and in London a theatrical and aristocratic set gathered around the couple now generally known as ‘the Edinburghs’. They finally moved into their own home. Prince Philip was soon appointed second in command of a destroyer in the Mediterranean fleet, HMS Chequers. The Princess followed later in 1949 and in Malta was able to live a near normal life as a naval wife, going shopping, to the hairdresser, making friends, eating at local hotels and restaurants. Even at this stage, the infant Charles was often left in London with his grandparents, something that seemed far less unusual than it would today. Abroad, the Queen began to cine-film her husband, watched him playing polo, and swam and danced. In August 1950 she gave birth to a second child, Anne. Prince Philip rose to command his first ship, the frigate HMS Magpie. The couple could look forward, it seemed, to a long period during which practical work and domesticity would dominate their lives; as Robert Lacey put it to the author: ‘Inheriting the throne was something for the 1960s or even the 1970s.’
Yet almost immediately there were warning signs. The King was ill. It was cancer, presumably caused by his decades of heavy smoking. Londoners who saw him passing in the streets talked about his grey, shrunken face. A series of operations began. Though personally optimistic about his prospects, George VI needed Princess Elizabeth more and more to carry out engagements he could not manage. She had to be in Britain. Prince Philip could hardly command a Mediterranean ship from there, and so he dolefully gave up his much loved job and returned. He may have expected or hoped to return to full-time naval service. He would never do so. His wife took on more responsibility, greeting foreign dignitaries and riding in the King’s place for Trooping the Colour. She presided at the Privy Council just before Parliament was dissolved for the 1951 election, which ended the Labour years and returned Winston Churchill to power. To many it already seemed that the young couple were eclipsing the monarch, rather as later Prince William and his new bride seemed to eclipse Prince Charles.
While that election campaign was being fought, Philip and Elizabeth went on a long tour to Canada, mainly by train, and visited President Truman in Washington, where they were fêted. Truman, star-struck, commented, ‘When I was a little boy, I read about a fairy princess, and there she is.’ Throughout the trip the Princess’s new private secretary, Martin Charteris, had papers for the Accession Council under his bed, just in the case the King died.17 Over the winter of 1951–2, however, the King seemed to have made a remarkable recovery. He went to Prince Charles’s third birthday party, started shooting again and visited the theatre. There was a national day of thanksgiving for the King’s recovery, celebrated in churches throughout Britain. The King was pleased to have Churchill back as prime minister – he was never keen on Labour. He could not, however, manage the next long-planned royal tour, which was to East Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The glamorous young ones would go instead. On 31 January 1951 George waved them off at the modestly sized and freezing London Airport. His life of meetings was about to end; hers, to begin.
People were not prepared for the death of George VI, at home or around the world. He was known to be unwell, but his routine seemed to have carried on well enough after a lung operation. The day before he died he had been out for a few hours’ sunshine at Sandringham, banging away at hares as usual, before going quietly to bed where a footman brought him his night-time cocoa. When at 11.15 a.m. on the following wet, sleeting morning, 6 February 1952, special black-bordered special editions of the newspapers suddenly appeared on the streets of London announcing his death, just half an hour after the official announcement from the Palace, sombre and silent crowds spontaneously appeared on street corners, the Mall and at
Westminster. Churchill, weeping in bed, thought it ‘the worst news’. People came together, then, in public, rather than around television sets. Crowds gathered in newly republican India too, and in Australia and Canada. Even in the United States the reaction was one of shock. One of the globally known figures of the wartime years, the figurehead of a nation still considered one of the world’s leaders, had suddenly vanished. People died younger then, particularly those worn out by stress. But he was only fifty-six.
His daughter learned the news from her husband on their Kenyan holiday. They had been staying at the Treetops rest-house, on a platform in a giant fig tree watching wildlife. On the way there the royal party had come dangerously close to a large cow elephant protecting two calves. She had not scented them. They had guns. Prompted by Prince Philip they had gingerly, quietly, carried on to their vantage point. Perhaps in retrospect the danger to the not-yet Queen has been romantically embellished. But later in her reign, ‘security’ would have kept them far away. Instead, they sat in the tree and watched the elephants play. A local hunter with a heavy-calibre gun was there too, and not only for elephants: the first rumblings of violent rebellion against British colonial rule were being heard all around. Warm, colourful and far away Kenya might be. Paradise, it was not. Princess Elizabeth had been taking cine film of the wildlife, including an old rhino, while her staff at Mombasa were preparing for the next stage of the visit, to New Zealand.
The news that the King had died came first to a senior courtier, Lieutenant-General Frederick Browning. He passed it to Martin Charteris, via a journalist. Charteris confirmed it and then told Prince Philip’s aide, Mike Parker, who told the Prince. Parker was later quoted as saying that Prince Philip ‘looked as if the whole world had dropped on him’ – as, in a sense, it had. His wife had gone out to order some horses to be prepared for riding. He told her. She began almost immediately to write the letters and messages apologizing for cancelling the rest of the trip, and making new arrangements. From the stoic generation, she showed no immediate distress. Lady Pamela Mountbatten, her cousin, went in to console her: ‘In her usual extraordinary way . . . she was thinking about what everybody else was having to do. Typically, she said, “Oh, thank you. But I am so sorry it means we have to go back to England and it’s upsetting everybody’s plans.” ’18