The Queen's Houses

by Alan Titchmarsh

  It was to no avail, The Duke positively loved York Cottage and its warren of tiny rooms. Having learned to live a spartan life in small spaces during his naval schooling and service he detested lavish living. Twentieth-century writers were decidedly unkind about the ‘pseudo-Gothic house with joke-oak additions’. In 1947, Harold Nicolson visited York Cottage and wrote disparagingly, ‘It was and remains a glum little villa … indistinguishable from those of any Surbiton or Upper Norwood home’ and a ‘horrid little house’. In 1956 James Pope-Hennessy, the art historian commissioned to write the official biography of Queen Mary, was even more dismissive: ‘Tremendously vulgar and emphatically, almost defiantly hideous and gloomy. To sum up this is a hideous house, with a horrible atmosphere in parts and in others no atmosphere at all.’ But, in fact, the royal couple, who hated their role in the unrelenting public gaze (so much so that when George was required to read the speech outlining the government’s plans for the coming session on the opening of Parliament, George’s hands shook with nervousness), found the seclusion to their taste. The fact that the relative smallness of the house precluded entertaining on any scale was, from their point of view, an advantage. It was all a far cry from the hectic social round so enjoyed by George’s father.

  Park House, another significant residence on the Sandringham estate, was later to be, in 1961, the birthplace of Lady Diana Spencer, later Princess of Wales, and had also been the birthplace of her mother, Frances Fermoy, in 1936. In 1983 The Queen offered the house to the trustees of the Leonard Cheshire Disability charity, which converted it into a country house hotel for disabled people, which, as Park House Hotel, was opened by Her Majesty in 1987.

  Edward VII, on his death in May 1910, bequeathed Sandringham, as a personal possession of the monarch, to his wife Alexandra for her lifetime, together with a legacy of £200,000 (approx. £18 million today). For the next 15 years, until her death in 1925, her son and daughter-in-law, now King George V and Queen Mary, their six children and entourage of courtiers and staff, continued to make do with York Cottage on the estate as the dowager Queen rattled around in the ‘Big House’ with its 365 rooms. But it was their choice.

  ‘FULL OF INITIATIVE, OF INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY, OF ENERGY, WHICH NEEDED OUTLETS AND WIDER HORIZONS’

  Harold Nicolson

  In due course a schoolroom with desks and a blackboard was set up at York Cottage and tutors employed. It was not all a grind – although their regimen was strict – and the royal children benefitted too from being brought up on a large estate. They all, especially Albert, who was in time to succeed his brother as King George VI, imbibed the sights, sounds and smells of the countryside from a local schoolmaster. They learned to shoot, unsurprising given the dominant part it played in day-to-day life at Sandringham. Prince Albert wrote his first entry in the Sandringham Game Book at the age of 12 in 1907.

  The elder children, Edward and Albert, escaped the schoolroom at Sandringham and their martinet of a father who treated his children as if they were a bunch of recalcitrant midshipmen on the quarterdeck, when they followed him into the navy as cadets. George V’s severity towards his children was all the more surprising, given his ideal relationship with his own father, Edward VII. The junior officer training college had, since 1903, been located at Osborne, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria’s hideaway on the Isle of Wight, which Edward and Albert’s grandfather had given to the nation.

  The First World War made its presence felt at Sandringham in 1915 in many different ways. In January two German Imperial Navy Zeppelins, intending to drop their bombs and incendiary devices on industrial Humberside, were caught up in bad weather and attacked the coastal towns of Norfolk instead. One bomb was dropped on the estate and its crater was later enlarged to make a haven for wildfowl. In Great Yarmouth a bomb killed a civilian – the first ever to be killed by aerial bombardment. The Zeppelins returned in greater numbers the following year, some flying directly over the house. Towards the end of that year King George V was thrown from his horse while inspecting troops in France, breaking his pelvis. He came to Sandringham to recuperate and throughout the Christmas festivities that year was in considerable pain.

  A recruitment poster for the Royal Norfolks, which included ‘The Sandringhams’

  The most devastating blow to befall the estate happened in August. ‘E’ Company of the 5th Territorial Battalion the Royal Norfolk Regiment was comprised of estate workers from Sandringham. The company had been formed in 1908 at the suggestion of Edward VII under the command of the Sandringham land agent, Frank Beck, whose father Edmund had been agent before him. Beck recruited over a hundred men to join the colours. Known as the ‘Sandringhams’, the company was shipped out from Liverpool to the Dardanelles to take part in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign. They landed at Suvla Bay and on the afternoon of 12 August, led by 54-year-old Captain Beck, they went into battle against the Turks. In the ensuing brutal, hand-to-hand fight all but two of the Sandringhams were killed, many of them bayoneted or shot after surrendering. A war memorial outside the church on the estate commemorates their sacrifice. Only a 14-year-old boy and William Prentice, who had been a gardener on the estate, survived. Over 150 men from local families were lost that day. In 1919 Captain Beck’s gold fob watch was located in Turkey, presumably looted from his body. It was presented to his daughter on her wedding day.

  In 1919, Prince John, the youngest of George V’s children, died at Sandringham after a severe epileptic seizure and was buried at Sandringham Church. He had been born in 1904 and suffered from epilepsy and some other condition, possibly autism, which required specialist support. From 1917 he had been brought up separately from the other children with his own establishment on the Sandringham estate, forging an especially close bond with his nanny, ‘Lalla’ Bill.

  In all other respects life at Sandringham carried on with naval precision – George V maintaining the house and grounds in immaculate condition, at considerable cost – and with punctilious regard for dress and protocol. In 1921 a letter from the wife of The King’s assistant private secretary describes a dinner after which, ‘We at last wandered back to the billiard room where the King and Prince of Wales [then 26] were having a match. They both looked delightful types of English Gentlemen, each wearing white carnation buttonholes.’

  By all accounts guests found the royal family friendly and approachable. The same correspondent describes George V’s extreme devotion to routine. Having already completed a session of paperwork:

  ‘immediately after breakfast he would walk out of the front door, with a cigarette (in holder) in his mouth and Charlotte, his grey-pink parrot, on his left wrist, his dog following him, to examine the sky and judge of the weather. Wet or fine, winter or summer, he never varied this procedure at Balmoral, Sandringham or Windsor, and indeed, he usually followed it at Buckingham Palace.’

  In November 1925 Alexandra, The Queen Mother, ‘Motherdear’, died at Sandringham. It had been ten years since she had retired there, increasingly deaf and isolated, and over 60 years since she had first become its chatelaine. Always an inveterate collector of bibelots and souvenirs of all kinds, in that time she had amassed a vast collection, which ranged from the utterly priceless to total junk. The following year Queen Mary set to work to go through it all – the late Queen’s sitting room had ‘not an inch of space’ it was so overcrowded. During this process The Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII, known as David) came to Sandringham to stay with her. His mother wrote to The King:

  ‘It was a good thing for me that David came down for two nights & he was simply enchanted with Sandringham in the summer, and with the lovely flower beds in front of the house and with the garden. I don’t think he had ever been here in the summer since he was a child … really this place is too lovely just now and I am so glad to see it once in all its beauty.’

  By August of 1926 all was ready and The King and Queen finally moved, after 33 years at York Cottage, to the ‘Big House’. It was from Sandringham on Chri
stmas Day 1932 that The King made his first broadcast via the Empire Service of the BBC, the precursor of the World Service. Two years before it had been calculated that every second home in the country had access to a radio.

  In the years until his death in 1936, King George V, punctilious in his duties as in everything, felt the responsibilities of his role as industrial unrest at home, the international financial crisis, the growing threat from Irish militants and the waywardness of his eldest son took their toll.

  King of the fast set

  Top: Queen Victoria and a very young Prince Edward, the future Edward VIII, 1894

  Above: Edward VIII, now Duke of Windsor, and Wallis Simpson, 1942

  In many ways, like his grandfather Edward VII, The Prince of Wales was a paid-up member of the fast set, delighting in women, cocktails, nightclubs and dancing. He was not much interested in the rural delights of Sandringham (despite having written in later life, ‘Sandringham possessed most of the ingredients of a boyhood idyll’) and from 1930 lived at Fort Belvedere in Windsor Great Park, close enough to the fleshpots of London and discreet enough to pursue a series of relationships with married women. His private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, after seven years in his service, wrote of him presciently in 1927: ‘the Heir Apparent … in his unbridled pursuit of wine and women, and of whatever selfish whim occupied him at the moment, was going rapidly to the devil and would soon become no fit wearer of the British Crown’. When Lascelles resigned the next year, The Prince told him, ‘I suppose the fact of the matter is that I am quite the wrong sort of person to be Prince of Wales.’ Lascelles reflected later: ‘He had, in my opinion and experience, no comprehension of the ordinary axioms of rational, or ethical, behaviour; fundamental ideas of duty, dignity and self-sacrifice had no meaning for him.’

  On 15 January 1936 George V went to bed at Sandringham, complaining of a cold, and by the evening of 20 January he was dead, his end hastened by the administration of a lethal injection of cocaine and morphine, it was said, to preserve The King’s dignity, to prevent further strain to the immediate family and to ensure the announcement was carried in the morning papers and not by the ‘less appropriate … evening journals’. His body lay in state in Westminster Hall, encased in a coffin made of oak from the Sandringham estate, before burial at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.

  The late King’s will was read to the family in the hall at Sandringham to the consternation of the new King. Each of David’s (Edward VIII’s) brothers was left about three-quarters of a million pounds in cash (equivalent to over £45 million today). He was left nothing except the accumulated revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall and whatever grant Parliament would vote. More than that, he was prevented, under the terms of the will, from converting into cash The King’s personal assets, the racehorses, stamp collection and so on – ‘the Kingship without the cash’ as Lascelles (by then private secretary to the late King) described it. Edward was reported to have said to the lawyer ‘Where do I come in?’ before storming out and spending a great deal of time on the telephone, it was assumed to Wallis Simpson, his current mistress.

  The young Duke of York (later George VI) and his wife, formerly Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, 1923

  One of Edward VIII’s first acts was to abolish Sandringham Time, instituted by his grandfather. Another was to ask his brother, The Duke of York (later George VI), to look at the expenses of running Sandringham and the estate, which to him had become a ‘voracious white elephant’, and to see how costs might be reduced. The Duke recruited his friend Lord Radnor, whose well-run estate he admired, and the two of them spent some time looking closely at the number of people employed – over 400 – what they did and the cost of doing it, as well as the maintenance costs of buildings and plant. The wage bill alone in 1936 was in the region of £34,000 (approx. £2 million today) with further costs of £38,000 (approx. £2.3 million today), making total outgoings of £72,000 (approx. £4.4 million today) a year. Set against that was an income of half that amount. Model estate as it might have been, it was being subsidized to the tune of £36,000 (approx. £2.2 million today) every year, money which had to be found from the Privy Purse. The final report, largely written up by The Duke, proposed economies that might be implemented over the coming years. These were put in train, reducing the staff employed by some 25 per cent, including the land agent, the Head Gamekeeper (no pheasants were bred that year) and the Head Gardener, though the youngest of them was 67. The stud, the stables and kennels were all closed and various items sold off.

  King Edward VIII was not cut from the same cloth as his forebears. For all his womanizing and his high-octane social life, his grandfather Edward VII was a diligent monarch and worked hard at his job, particularly in the field of foreign affairs where his charm, his fluent French and his companionability yielded beneficial results. His grandson was indifferent to the responsibilities of his role, so much so that the government doubted his discretion, fearing that state papers might easily be read by any of the social set that tumbled through Fort Belvedere at all hours of the day and night.

  In August and September 1936 he cruised the Mediterranean with Mrs Simpson and in mid-October brought a shooting party to Sandringham. He spent one night there – the only night he stayed there as King – before an urgent message from the Prime Minister brought him back to London. For the next six weeks the government and The King were locked in negotiation over his intention to marry a divorced woman (in fact at that point Mrs Simpson was still married; she had yet to divorce her second husband) until finally, after consultation with the Heads of the Dominion Governments, an ultimatum was put to him. The King chose to abdicate rather than give up Mrs Simpson, and by mid-December 1936 he was gone.

  Wartime at Sandringham

  War and the modern era

  The Duke of York now, reluctantly, inherited the throne as George VI. He did not inherit Sandringham and Balmoral, which as personal property had descended to Edward VIII, now Duke of Windsor, via his father’s will. A great deal of money, perhaps a million pounds (approx.£62 million today) lump sum, and a further annual sum, was paid to The Duke to annul his life tenancies in favour of his brother, the new King.

  But Sandringham was shortly to feel the effects of another world war. On Sunday 3 September 1939 Queen Mary was at morning service in Sandringham church when the rector set up a wireless in the nave and at 11 a.m. the Prime Minister broadcast the fateful words: ‘this country is at war with Germany’. Sandringham was closed up, in the event of it becoming a target for bombing raids and in response to the ‘Dig for Victory!’ campaign (Britain was a net importer of food and in order to prevent starvation the need to boost home production was vital, as was rationing of food, a measure also brought in soon after the war began). The nine-hole golf course was ploughed up and rye and potatoes planted.

  The young daughters of George VI, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, were sent to Windsor Castle for the duration and The King and Queen divided their time between Buckingham Palace and Windsor at the weekends. Occasional visits were made to Sandringham, when the royal family stayed in one of the farmhouses on the estate. The government, fearful for their safety given the possibility of imminent invasion, set up a bodyguard drawn from the Coldstream Guards, known as the ‘Coats Mission’ after its commander, Major James Coats, which The King referred to as his ‘private army’. One detachment was stationed at Wellington Barracks, beside Buckingham Palace, and another at Windsor. When The King spent a fortnight at Sandringham in September 1941 shooting partridges, a team from the Coats Mission accompanied him and were quartered in York Cottage. In the event of invasion the guard was to spirit away the royal family in two armoured Daimlers to one of three ‘safe houses’ known only to them at the time: Madresfield Court in Worcestershire, Pitchford Hall in Shropshire or Newby Hall in Yorkshire, where arrangements were made to keep the royals in secret, and in safety. By 1942 the threat of invasion had receded and the bodyguard was disbanded.

  Above and below: The
Illustrated War News reports on the increasing use of female farm workers to replace men fighting in the war, 1916

  In December 1945 the royal family were able to celebrate Christmas at Sandringham for the first time in six years. A lady-in-waiting observed how the atmosphere had changed: ‘The radio, worked by Princess Elizabeth, blared incessantly … the new atmosphere was very much more friendly than in the old days, more like that of any home.’ She also noted how hard The King was driving himself and how ‘tired and strained’ he looked. She felt fearful ‘of another short reign’. Within a few years he was diagnosed with arteriosclerosis and in 1951 cancer of the lung. He was at Sandringham for Christmas as usual that year and in early February enjoyed some successful duck shooting. On the morning of 6 February 1951 his valet found him dead in his bed; he had died in his sleep, aged 56. Like his Great Uncle Prince Eddy in 1892, his grandmother Queen Alexandra in 1925 and his father George V in 1936, he, too, was borne across Sandringham Park to the little church of St Mary Magdalene before being taken by gun carriage to the station at Wolferton. There an immaculate train was ready to take the coffin to Westminster Hall for the traditional lying-in-state and on for burial at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on 15 February.

  The Duke of Edinburgh arrives at Sandringham church with Prince Andrew, Prince Edward, Sophie, Countess of essex, their daughter Lady Louise and Sir Timothy Laurence, 2012

  It is over 60 years since the death of George VI, years which have seen many changes at Sandringham under the ownership of Queen Elizabeth II. After inheriting it from her father she asked her consort Prince Philip to assume the task of overseeing the running of all the private estates. Once a year in January he and Prince Charles meet with those in charge of each establishment together with the Keeper of the Privy Purse and his deputy to review progress and plan strategy. At Sandringham Prince Philip has continued the economies put in hand by his father-in-law, but also established a wider income stream, not least from visitors who are now allowed to view both house (opened to the public in 1977) and gardens at certain times of year. The biggest change by far to the house was the 1975 demolition of the old 120-metre (400-feet) long, three-storey service block of around 100 rooms to the south of the house, which contained staff accommodation on the upper floors and a range of food preparation and storage areas below. The estate, too, has been rationalized. Larger farms have been created by amalgamating smaller, uneconomic units so the number of tenant farmers has dropped from 30 to about a dozen, and the percentage of the estate directly farmed has risen to around one-half of the whole acreage but with far fewer workers – less than 10 per cent of the number employed before the war. Wood products from forestry, produce from the farm, rents from the many houses on the estate and those used as holiday cottages, and entrance fees and merchandise sales to visitors became the major sources of income as the estate clawed its way towards the goal of self-sufficiency.