Royal Sisters

by Anne Edwards

  “I think both Princesses enjoyed playing in the pantomimes as much as we liked the idea of having our lessons suspended and being inside a real castle, playing with real Princesses. No one ever said that they thought it unfair that the Princesses had lead roles. Somehow we expected that to be the case.

  “I, for one, admired Princess Margaret. I thought her a very good actress. She was the best in our little company. The star, I guess you would say. It had nothing to do with being who she was. Princess Elizabeth was rather stiff. She was never bossy with the other children, but she was quick to correct her sister if she did not approve of her behavior. Princess Margaret liked doing little pranks—moving props, things like that, and she giggled a lot.”

  The pantomimes were given at Christmastime before audiences of over two hundred, which included the Windsor staff, the Grenadiers, the school personnel, and family members. A graduated fee of seven shillings to a sixpence was charged (the latter for rear seats for small children), the money going to a favored fund of the Queen’s. After the final performance, a tea party was given for the cast and helpers in the great Red Drawing Room. The Princesses passed buns, had a personal word for everyone, and recollected amusing incidents of the performances.

  A Windsor dancing class and a Girl Guide company of thirty-six Guides and their captain followed on the heels of the pantomimes. The members were drawn from the school or were the children of the Household staff. Alan Lascelles’s younger daughter, Caroline, was one such “draftee.” Girl Guide meetings were held at the Castle, but they were more democratic than the theater enterprise; all the girls wore the same butcher-blue uniforms and badges were given only when earned. Every Tuesday during the summer, the Guides drilled in hot sun and marched the one mile from the Castle to the mausoleum where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are buried. They did strenuous exercises, followed by organized games; constructed a wigwam with poles; and in the falling darkness gathered around a campfire to sing and to eat their simple dinner (usually beans and a cup of tea). Occasionally they camped out. Lilibet did not care “much for sleeping under canvas. She never actually refused,” Crawfie claimed, “but there always seemed some good reason why she should not do so.... She was getting older, and had been brought up so much alone. I could understand why she did not want to undress before other children ... and spend the night with them.

  “Margaret ... thoroughly enjoyed it all. She had her own flea bag, or sleeping-bag ... and she was a menace to the Guides officer in charge.... From the tent that housed [her] there would burst forth storms of giggles. The Guides officer would appear, say a few well-chosen words, and retreat.... Silence would reign for a minute or two, then a fresh outburst.... Margaret was giving her companions an imitation of the Guides officer’s lecture.”

  Sleep-outs ended with the arrival of the treacherous German buzz bombs. But the dance classes were maintained throughout the long, difficult winter of 1941. The Germans had turned their guns full force on the Russian front. If Russia fell, Britain would stand alone. For six months Churchill had been begging Roosevelt without success for fifty old American destroyers, while secretly he prayed for the entry of the United States into the war. By the end of November, Kiev, Kharkov and Rostov were in German hands, Leningrad was besieged and the German armies were set to launch a final attack on Moscow, where they had already infiltrated the suburbs. But with no winter equipment or the necessary winter clothing, Hitler’s men were rendered helpless. The Russians gathered what strength they had and attacked. The Germans were on the defensive.

  Now came the event that brought Churchill and Britain the aid they so desperately needed. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7. “I knew the United States was in the war up to the neck and in to the death,” Churchill wrote. “So we had won after all!”

  Churchill was right: “The full resources of American man-power and American production” were now behind Britain, but peace was a long way off.

  The alliance of Britain and the United States, following Pearl Harbor, was symbolized in October 1942 by a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt to Great Britain, an event that allowed the sisters a rare drive to Buck House to meet the President’s wife. Lilibet and Margaret did not know quite what to make of their American guest and exchanged “furtive sidelong glances.” Mrs. Roosevelt appeared “enormous, over life-size ... with a roving smile and eyes that never focused anywhere.” Not until long after did they learn that she had recently lost a good deal of her hearing and that the change in her appearance since the King and Queen had met her in the United States three years earlier was caused by the fact that she now had “the look and the voice of a deaf person.”

  She remained overnight. On Sunday morning “the king, queen and princesses saw her off at the door after breakfast, more like friends saying good-by than any formal leave-taking.” She wrote the President that Lilibet was “quite serious and a child with a great deal of character and personality. She asked me a number of questions about life in the United States and they were serious questions [she does not say what nature these were].”

  The Royal Family had members in the fighting forces as did the rest of Britain. George Lascelles, at nineteen, was a Grenadier Guard stationed at Windsor for a number of months during 1942 and then was sent to join a battalion fighting in Africa. The Duke of Kent was on active duty with the RAF. (The Duke of Windsor had left Paris before it fell and was serving as Governor of the Bahamas.) Mountbatten had become a Naval hero after a successful raid in south Norway and the Lofoten Islands in the north. Three months later under his command a more dramatic attack—to disable Saint-Nazaire harbor and disengage the great German battleship Tirpitz—succeeded. Mountbatten received an astonishing promotion. At the unprecedented age of forty-one, he moved up the Navy List from Commodore to Acting Vice-Admiral.

  Young Philip Mountbatten, tall, bronzed and handsome, had followed his Uncle Dickie’s wishes. Although his first ambition had been to join the RAF, he entered the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, served in the Royal Navy from 1939, was a midshipman in 1940, sub-lieutenant in 1942, and a lieutenant six months later after being mentioned in dispatches “’for his services at the searchlight control in HMS Valiant during the Battle of Matapan, the southernmost cape of the Greek mainland.” He was twenty-one and not displeased by the recognition. For a foreign prince to gain British citizenship was a complicated process, and so he remained Greek and was awarded the Greek War Cross of Valour.

  Lilibet and Philip had met in July 1939 (she was thirteen; he was eighteen) when he was a cadet and the Royal Family paid a visit to Dartmouth. “As far as I was concerned,” Philip remembered later, “it was a very amusing experience, going on board the [royal] yacht The Victoria and Albert, and meeting them. Then I went to the theatre with them once, something like that. And then, during the war, if I was here [London] I’d call in and have a meal. I once or twice spent Christmas at Windsor, because I’d no where particular to go.... I did not think all that much about it.... We [he and Lilibet] used to correspond occasionally. You see it’s difficult to visualize. I suppose if I’d just been a casual acquaintance, it would all have been frightfully significant. But if you’re related—I mean I knew half the [Royal Family]; they were all relations—it isn’t so extraordinary to be on that kind of family relationship terms with somebody.”

  Crawfie’s recollections were of “a fair-haired boy, rather like a Viking, with a sharp face and piercing blue eye,” meeting Lilibet (still wearing ankle socks and dressed in the same puffed-sleeve outfits worn by Margaret) in 1939, but she claimed the first meeting took place at the Captain’s House at Dartmouth College and not on the yacht. “The house had a very pleasant lived-in feeling, and the [Captain’s] children had left a clockwork railway laid out all over the nursery floor, and we [Crawfie, Lilibet and Margaret] knelt down to play with it.” Philip then entered. “He was good-looking though rather off-hand in his manner. For a while [he and Lilibet] knelt side-by-side playing with the trains....” Quickly b
ored with this he suggested they “go to the tennis courts and have some real fun jumping the nets.” When they returned and he took his leave, Lilibet commented on ‘how high he [could] jump.’ She never took her eyes off him the whole time. He was quite polite to her, but did not pay her any special attention. He spent a lot of time teasing . . . little Margaret.”

  A major omission in all accounts was the presence of Mountbatten on this short boat excursion to Dartmouth, made by the Royal Family at his suggestion. This was to be the last summer of peace. Both the King and Mountbatten suspected as much. A Royal visit to the young men who might soon be called upon to face the enemy was extremely politic. First the King reviewed the Reserve Fleet at Weymouth, and then went on to Dartmouth to inspect the cadets.

  Philip joined his Uncle Dickie and the Royal Party for lunch on the yacht, at which he was seated beside Lilibet. He returned for lunch again the next day. Lilibet sat “pink-faced” through the meal. Mountbatten found him “killingly funny” and gave him ample opportunity to display his wit. He He left at 2:00 P.M. to attend his afternoon classes. The Victoria and Albert was scheduled to leave Dartmouth harbour at 5:00 P.M. The Dartmouth cadets commandeered whatever sea craft they could find—motorboats, rowboats—and they followed the royal yacht out into the channel. The King, alarmed at the danger for the small boats in such deep water, had the Captain signal them to return to shore.

  “Most of the boys did go back immediately, and all the others followed shortly except this one solitary figure [Philip] whom we saw rowing [after us] as hard as he could.... Lilibet took the glasses and had a long look at him. In the end the King said, ‘The young fool. He must go back, otherwise we will have to heave to and send him back.’

  One of the yacht’s officers shouted at him through a megaphone to turn around, which he finally did—while those on board “gazed at him until he became just a speck in the distance.”

  By Christmastime, 1942, Philip had been to the front, acted commendably, and been given a pass to go home for the holidays. His Uncle Dickie was on duty and he never was too fond of Edwina. He had several other options, but he wrote the Queen asking if he might spend Christmas at Windsor. Margaret was twelve, Lilibet sixteen and the handsome Lieutenant twenty-one.

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  When his ship Valiant was docked in Athens, in 1941, Philip attended a cocktail party where he met the visiting Chips Channon. “He is extraordinarily handsome,” Channon wrote in his diary. He also recorded an afternoon’s conversation with Philip’s aunt, Princess Nicholas, in which she told Channon that Philip was to be Britain’s Prince Consort and that was why he was serving in the British Navy. “He is charming,” Channon admits, “but I deplore such a marriage; he and Princess Elizabeth are too inter-related.”

  Princess Nicholas was the mother of Marina, the Duchess of Kent. She had recently returned from London where she had stayed with her daughter and son-in-law, both confidants of the Mountbattens. Philip’s mother had also returned to Athens from Germany and Princess Nicholas was one of the few people she saw. It seems unlikely that Princess Nicholas would have made such a sweeping statement to Channon without solid foundation. Apparently, a future union between Lilibet and Philip was being discussed in both British and Greek royal Circles.

  Chan non was himself a man of great charm, on intimate terms with the Duke and Duchess of Kent as well as with most other members of the Royal Family, who often were guests at his large London home (sometimes called “the chippodrome”) or his country estate, Kelvedon Hall. His aristocratic in-laws, Lord and Lady I veagh, “while amused at our activities,” he recorded in his diary, “are nevertheless impressed. Their gangster son-in-law from Chicago has put their daughter into the most exclusive set in Europe.” Channon was considered a man to be trusted. What Princess Nicholas said to him, she knew would be held in confidence.

  Philip’s welfare had long been a concern of his relatives. His mother had grown more and more eccentric with the passage of the years, dressed in “severe grey gowns, a nunlike loaf at her brow” and was almost a religious recluse, living apart from his father who “phi-lander[ed] on the Riviera,” (supported by the generosity of his more affluent family).

  From early in his youth, Philip had been a pawn of Mountbatten’s ambitions to have his nephew marry the future Queen, his parents’ economic difficulties and the Greek Royal Family’s wish to align themselves more closely to their British relatives. Philip, it seems, was being groomed for the future role of Prince Consort just as Lilibet was being educated to be Queen. Although he was a foreigner, his great-great-grandmother, like Lilibet’s, was Queen Victoria and he had strong ties to England that would counteract those dissenters who might otherwise object to their relationship.

  Because it had seemed unlikely that Bertie would ascend the Throne, no objections were raised when he chose to marry a commoner. With Lilibet it might be a different matter. Royalists would believe that she should marry a man of royal blood. Because of the war, the list was short. Certainly, Philip understood his position and the expectations placed on him, and his actions can only support the theory that he was a willing participant.

  When Philip met Lilibet in 1939, he was a young man with some experience and well aware of his attractiveness to an impressionable adolescent girl. At that point, and despite Lilibet’s extreme youth, the wooing had already begun. However, it is doubtful that either King George or Queen Elizabeth suspected this might be the case, or that they had any hand in encouraging Philip. The King adored his elder daughter and he wanted for her the same full-hearted love match he had been able to make. He was not keen on the idea of a Prince Consort who might exert power over her, and Philip was a willful, strong-minded young man. Additionally, he was an exiled Greek Prince whose country was unstable. Such a union might create serious repercussions for Britain.

  The status of the Greek Royal Family was complicated, for in recent years the country had switched from king to king, monarchy to republic, republic to monarchy. Prince Philip’s grandfather, although of the Danish Royal Family, had been the first King of Greece, and Philip’s father, Prince Andrew, his fourth son. In 1923, when Civil War had threatened Greece, a Revolutionary Committee had assumed the government and Philip’s cousin George II* was set up as puppet king. Prince Andrew, a general in the army of his elder brother, ex-King Constantine I, and six royalists were put on trial for treason. Britain’s King George V, determined to prevent a repetition of the murder by the Bolsheviks of his cousins in the Russian Royal Family, intervened. The six royalists were executed. But Prince Andrew escaped with his life on a British cruiser sent to Greece to transport him and his family (including eighteen-month-old Prince Philip) to England.

  The family remained at Kensington Palace with Princess Andrew’s mother, Victoria, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, for several months and then entrained for France. There, they left their children in the care of relatives before departing for the United States on Danish passports issued to them by their cousin King Christian X. In America they were the guests of Prince Andrew’s brother Prince Christopher and his wife, a rich American widow, Mrs. Nancy Leeds, who seemed only too happy to subsidize her new, muchprized royal relatives in their desperate hours. Within a year, disenchanted by their inability to enter American society, Philip’s parents, still supported by their sister-in-law, rejoined their children in France. Their world seemed considerably brighter. When Mrs. Leeds died in 1929 and left her great fortune to her American family, Mountbatten’s invitation that Philip come to live in England was providential.

  Almost immediately upon his arrival in Britain, Philip (age eight), was sent to a preparatory school at Cheam in Surrey. During the weeks of school holiday he made his home with his maternal grandmother, who occupied a grace-and-favour apartment at Kensington Palace, and at Lyndon Manor, near Maidenhead, the home of his uncle, Mountbatten’s elder brother, George, Marquess of Milford Haven, whose son, David, was Philip’s age, and also might have been considered a
future contender for Lilibet’s hand in marriage.

  In 1933, then twelve, Philip went to Baden, Germany, to Salem, a co-educational school run by a brilliant Jew, Dr. Hahn, “a German educationist of progressive and unorthodox views.” Philip’s sister Theodora had recently married Berthold, son of Prince Max of Baden, and now lived in Baden, as did Princess Andrew (already separated from her husband). Prince Max had founded the school and Theodora thought that Philip should attend “not only out of respect for her new family relationship but because she felt [Princess Andrew], now entered on her religious work, needed the reassuring presence of her son close by.”

  Philip had wanted to continue his education in England. Although Mountbatten agreed, he could not deny his sister the chance to renew her bond with her son. The liberal ideals of the school clashed with the rising Nazism. By the end of the year the Nazi salute became compulsory and Dr. Hahn came under surveillance when Philip and the other boys refused to answer the salute “regardless of admonitions to caution.” Hahn’s outspoken opposition to the Nazi regime led to his arrest and the abandonment of his school. He was released by British intervention.

  Princess Andrew and her daughter Theodora remained in Baden, but Philip returned to England in the summer of 1934. Hahn fled the Nazis at the same time and set up a new school at Gordonstoun in Morayshire, Scotland, the former home of William Gordon Cumming (disgraced in the famous Baccarat Scandal for allegedly cheating at cards at a table with the future Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales). Philip remained at the school until 1939 when he entered Dartmouth. The year previous, his Uncle George, who had become a father figure to him, had died of cancer. He transferred this strong paternal attachment to his Uncle Dickie, and since his grandmother was elderly, he spent what free time he had at Mountbatten’s lavish London home or at Adsdean, his country estate.