My Husband and I
Page 15
As a keen reader of women’s magazines which had been devoting an increasing number of their pages to articles expounding these theories, she had become fascinated by this new approach. It struck a timely chord. The Queen’s life had always been subject to the advice of others. Even in matters as intimate as how they were delivered of their own children, the royal family had been subjected to checks and scrutiny. Prince Philip had been barred from the birth of Charles, Anne and Andrew. The idea of having him there with her would have been almost incomprehensible to most people, if not distasteful in an age so decorous that it forbade the publication of any photographs of the Queen in her pregnancy and never officially acknowledged that she had delivered her first-born by Caesarean section. But this time, she decreed, Philip would attend the birth – the first time in modern history that any royal father had been allowed in to see his progeny born.
More sensitive than his abrasive public image suggests, Philip took a concerned interest in the proceedings, and when the spirits of others started to wane, his cheerful banter revived them. As with Andrew, the baby was born in the bathroom of the Belgian Suite, which had once again been converted into a delivery room. During the Queen’s confinement, black drapes were hung over the floor-to-ceiling French windows which look out over the terrace to the palace gardens and the lake.
Attending the Queen that day were five doctors – her surgeon-gynaecologist Sir John Peel, who had been present at the birth of her three elder children; her new family doctor, Dr Ronald Bodley Scott; Sir John Weir, eighty-two, who had been one of her physicians since 1952; John Brudenell, a consultant at King’s College Hospital; and Dr Vernon Hall, dean of the Medical School at King’s College Hospital – and two midwives: Sister Annette Wilson and Sister Helen Rowe.
Also there was Betty Parsons, whose relaxation techniques and no-nonsense advice had helped thousands of women to deal with the concerns and fears of childbirth. Betty paid attention to breathing and, in one of her most famous exercises, would extol both the expectant mothers and the many fathers-to-be who attended her anti-natal classes to pant like a dog. Relations were not of the smoothest between Parsons and the doctors, who, most conventional in their methods as befitting their eminent positions, had little empathy with Betty’s newer, ‘alternative’ approach. The Queen, however, had enjoyed her training sessions with the former midwife and insisted that she be there at the birth. Philip, too, was supportive. He had drawn the line at attending her pre-natal classes – it was hardly the Duke of Edinburgh’s style – but when Betty had arrived at the palace the morning the Queen went into labour, it was Philip who had quickly ushered her into the delivery room before the doctors could lock her out.
By this stage, though, the doctors were too involved in looking after their patient to worry about Betty. The baby was not due for another week and only the previous morning the Queen had been out walking in the palace grounds with her corgis and Andrew, seemingly on course for a full-term pregnancy. But the contractions had started early the following day and by the evening she was in full labour.
The delivery was slower than they might have hoped for. It was at this point that Philip’s good humour proved so valuable. ‘It’s a solemn thought that only a week ago, General de Gaulle was having a bath in this room,’ he remarked when he walked into the bathroom and saw all the glum faces. It was said in a jocular way, which helped ease the tension that had been building up among the doctors and the nurses attending their sovereign.
Despite the involvement of Parsons, the Queen did not have what today would be called a ‘natural’ childbirth, though by the standards of the time it was regarded as very straightforward and the Queen did not suffer a lot of pain. The birth, however, was ‘a bit slow’, which was why Philip’s asides were appreciated. Finally, at 8.20pm, to the relief of all involved, the Queen was delivered of a ‘small but healthy’ boy.
Although it was the first time he had attended the birth of one of his children, Philip would later declare: ‘People want their first child very much when they marry. They want the second child almost as much. If a third comes along they accept it as natural, but they haven’t gone out of their way to get it. When the fourth child comes along, in most cases it is unintentional.’ He was clearly not going to get too sentimental.
His wife took a keener view of the process. As a young girl, she had declared that, when she grew up, she wanted to marry a farmer, live in the country and have lots of animals. Above all, she wanted four children – two boys and two girls. She had married a sailor, not a farmer, but her other wishes had been fulfilled. So why not a second daughter to go with the two sons she now had? So convinced was she that she was going to have a daughter that she had not bothered to think of boys’ names during her pregnancy – only girls’ names had been discussed.
This was one matter, though, over which even a sovereign had no say and, much to the Queen’s surprise, if not that of her doctors, who throughout had taken the more pragmatic medical view, the baby was a boy. Philip telephoned the news to the Queen Mother at Clarence House, then interrupted Prince Charles doing his prep at Gordonstoun and finally spoke to Princess Anne at school at Benenden in Kent.
Sir John Weir called him ‘a bonny baby’, while Dr Vernon Hall said he was ‘a very serious looking boy’. He added: ‘Everything went well – no problems.’
By comparison with his siblings, he was a small child, weighing only 5lb 7oz, and was finally named Edward Anthony Richard Louis after his godfathers Lord Snowdon, Richard, Duke of Gloucester and Prince Louis of Hesse, prefixed by the old royal name of his great-great-grandfather, Edward VII. His parents had taken a long time in the selection and his names were not officially announced until twenty-four hours short of the forty-two-day deadline which, if it is exceeded, can result in a fine (though not in this case, for the sovereign, as the embodiment of the law, is above the law). He was christened wearing the robe of Honiton lace that had been made in 1841 for Queen Victoria’s eldest child, Victoria, who married the German emperor and whose son, Kaiser Wilhelm II, led his nation into war with Britain.
What the Queen called ‘my second family’ was now complete. Being older, Philip was less demanding of Andrew and Edward than he had been with Charles, while the Queen had acquired the confidence of experience that enabled her to adopt a more relaxed and hands-on approach to motherhood. It showed with Andrew, but it showed even more with Edward. Andrew would always be his mother’s favourite, but Edward was also allowed to crawl around on the floor of her study while she worked on her state papers. Indeed, so intent was she to spend more time with her children that she brought her weekly meetings with her prime ministers forward by half an hour so she would be free to bathe Edward and put him to bed herself. Many working mothers have to adapt their diaries to accommodate children, and the Queen was doing just that so she could give as much attention as possible to both her family and her royal duties.
After the press rumours about Andrew, she also took the precaution of giving her subjects an early sight of the latest addition to her family and made a great show of bringing Edward out onto the Buckingham Palace balcony after Trooping the Colour in June, holding him aloft for the crowds below to see and cheer. As Philip observed: ‘We try to keep our children out of the public eye so that they can grow up as normally as possible. But if you are really going to have a monarchy, you have got to have a family and the family has got to be in the public eye.’
There was a limit to how far the Queen and her consort were prepared to go, however, down this path. Change is rarely in monarchy’s best interest. There is security in sameness; it is a bulwark against the agitations of social upheaval, and the 1960s were a very perturbing time indeed for the ancien regime. Outside the palace walls, a veritable social revolution was taking place, and by 1964 it was well underway. In Britain, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the hereditary 14th Earl of Home, was swept from power by Harold Wilson and a Labour government dedicated to tearing down the old class barriers and
building a modern, forward-looking society in their stead. In such a world, where Wilson was emphasising the ‘white heat of technology’, the monarchy was always going to appear out of date.
Change wasn’t evident only in the UK. In the United States, still traumatised by the assassination of President John Kennedy, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, was signing the Civil Rights Act, the most sweeping civil rights law in American history, which he said would ‘close the springs of racial hatred’. In South Africa, a young lawyer named Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life for treason for plotting to overthrow the all-white government. In India, Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister since the country became independent from Britain in 1947, thereby stripping the Queen’s father, George VI, of his title of Emperor, died. In the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev was ousted in a coup by hardliners led by Leonard Brezhnev.
It wasn’t just in high-level politics that there were so many signs of change. Entertainment was becoming more central to people’s lives, thanks to the proliferation of television. So when Richard Burton married Elizabeth Taylor, the actors’ wedding was given almost as much attention as any royal occasion. For the first time in almost a century, the royal family was being publicly made fun of on television’s satirical That Was The Week That Was, produced by Ned Sherrin and presented by David Frost. The approach to raising their family could not be immune to all these changes.
Furthermore, the western world was gripped by the mass hysteria of that most light-hearted of phenomena: Beatlemania. Even Prince Philip was touched by it. The Beatles, he said, are ‘entirely helpful. I really could not care less how much noise people make singing and dancing. I would much rather they make any noise they like singing and dancing. What I object to is people fighting and stealing. It seems to me that these blokes are helping people to enjoy themselves and that is far better than the other thing.’
The gap between the four long-haired pop stars from Liverpool and the Greek-born prince was nevertheless a yawning one. When the group performed for the Queen at the Royal Variety Show, John Lennon looked up at the Royal Box and invited the poor to clap – and the rich to rattle their jewellery. The ‘impromptu’ remark had in fact been carefully rehearsed in the dressing room beforehand. Several expletives were contained in the original version, which gave crude expression to Lennon’s less than reverential opinion of the British establishment that the royal family personified. The Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, never sure what the iconoclastic genius would do next, was in a tail-spin of worry lest at the last moment Lennon threw caution and career to the wind and delivered the unsanitised version. He did not, of course, preferring cheeky impudence to crude impertinence.
Lennon was not alone, though, in questioning the value of the royal family at that time. At a luncheon of the Foreign Press Association thirteen days before Edward was born, Prince Philip was asked: ‘Do you think that the monarchy has found its proper place in the Britain of the sixties?’
Philip replied: ‘Here we are in the sixties. What am I supposed to say? Perhaps you would enlarge on the question.’
The questioner did: ‘One sometimes hears criticism in the press that the monarchy has not found its place, although it is, of course, playing a useful role in this country, but has still not found the right approach to the problems of Britain today.’
Philip answered: ‘What you are implying is that we are rather old-fashioned. Well, it may easily be true; I don’t know.’
He continued: ‘One of the things about the monarchy and its place – and one of the great weaknesses in a sense – is that it has to be all things to all people. Of course, it cannot do this when it comes to being all things to all people who are traditionalists and all things to all people who are iconoclasts. We therefore find ourselves in a position of compromise, and we might be kicked by both sides. The only thing is that if you are very cunning you get as far away from the extremists as you possibly can because they kick harder.’
He concluded, warming to his theme: ‘I entirely agree that we are old-fashioned; the monarchy is an old-fashioned institution.’ And that was the way it was going to stay. The Queen’s radical decision to have her husband by her side during the birth notwithstanding, the great ship of royalty continued its majestic course with barely a sideways glance at the foam of change churning up around it. ‘I am a traditionalist,’ the Queen bluntly declared, and the habits of her Court reflected that.
The royal family, as well as being an institution that functions best in calm conditions, is also a business. Philip has called it ‘The Firm’, and it employed a full-time staff of several hundred people – cooks, chamber maids, ladies’ maids, coachmen, footmen, valets, butlers and nannies. Hierarchical and tradition-bound, they were dutiful, loyal and clung steadfastly to the old ways, and the palace continued to be run in the most paternalistic manner. But the Queen, for all her riches, was forever looking for ways of making small savings, in the endearing if incorrect belief that by counting the pennies the pounds of royal expenditure would somehow manage to look after themselves. So, for example, Edward slept in the same cream-painted cot his brothers and sister had used, and played with the same toys.
Being part of The Firm meant that other conventions had to continue in their timeless way. Philip may have attended Edward’s birth, but this was no New Man in the making, and two days later and without thinking too much about it, if he thought about it at all, he flew to Athens to attend the funeral of his cousin, King Paul of the Hellenes. He saw it as his royal duty to be there, and that putting on the public display of mourning was more important than remaining at the bedside of his wife, doing his private duty. As so often in the royal marriage, the competing demands of the public and private roles were on display, and the public role won out. The Queen, the doctors assured him, was doing well and she was comfortable in her room. She had a television set and a view of her gardens to keep her interest and she was well looked after by the palace staff, as was his young son.
The moment Edward was born, the royal child-rearing machinery had clicked into gear. The Queen would indeed spend more time with Edward than she did with her elder children, and his childhood was marked by an informality which would have been out of place in Charles and Anne’s day. When it came to his formal education, the Queen, Prince Philip and Sir Martin Charteris, the Provost of Eton at the time, discussed what would be best for their youngest son’s future. They called in James Edwards, headmaster of Heatherdown School, where Andrew was already a pupil, to get his opinion. They had decided on this school for him, rather than Cheam as before, because it was closer to Windsor Castle and many of the Queen’s family and friends had sent their children there.
Edwards was not in favour of the idea of Gordonstoun and told the Queen so. She listened, but in the end Prince Philip won through again and the Queen agreed he should go to Gordonstoun, but not before first joining his brother at Heatherdown. Philip may have been an affectionate father, but he did not agree with indulging children. He remained a devout disciple of Kurt Hahn’s guiding principle: character first, intelligence second, knowledge third. For Andrew, who was not intellectual, perhaps that order was correct. He was not timid like his elder brother and perhaps Eton would have polished off Andrew’s rough corners and given him a better scholastic education, which would certainly have helped him. Instead, he appeared uncertain if he wanted to be a prince or one of the lads, and his inability to solve that dilemma would become something of a handicap. He never became head boy or guardian as his father and elder and younger brothers did.
‘Edward got on with everybody; he was easy to teach and very well behaved,’ Edwards recalled. ‘His elder brother was much more extrovert. There are some children who naturally get dirty and some who naturally stay clean. You can sit a child in a chair spotless and five minutes later he is dirty. Why? Don’t ask me. You can get another child who can spend an hour playing in the woods and he comes out looking like a bandbox, and Edward was one of those children.’
The Queen did not pick up her children from school on their days out, but she always took them back. ‘She used to drive herself in her green Vauxhall station wagon with her detective Perkins beside her,’ Edwards said. ‘She would always come into my study and have a chat about anything and everything. When she talked about the children, she was totally aware of their shortcomings and was extremely patient.
‘One thing she absolutely insisted on, however, was good manners, and it showed. The Queen never let them down. She came to every single school sports day, play and carol service that we had. And over nine years that is good. She only missed one and that was when Edward was playing the part of Saul in The Boy David and she was on tour in Australia on a state [sic] visit. So the Queen Mother came instead.’
It was at Heatherdown that Edward began to develop his enthusiasm for the theatre, and he secured a starring performance as Mole in Toad of Toad Hall. Nicholas Tate was Toad, Andrew Wills was Badger and Alexander Cameron was Rat (while David Cameron, his younger brother, was one of the rabbits). As Edwards recalled, it was a show that had it all: ‘I remember Andrew Wills as Badger and his younger brother was sitting on the aisle in the third row. He was about nine and he laughed so much he fell off his chair and lay in the aisle absolutely convulsed! The Queen’s face was a picture as she looked at this boy rolling about! I was very worried because in one of the songs when they [the weasels] come to invade Toad Hall, they all had flails attached to their wrists by leather thongs. They were waving these clubs about right on the front of the stage with the Queen in the front row, and I thought please don’t break! They were absolutely lethal.’