Backstairs Billy (18 page)

D
ESPITE HAVING ONLY
a few weeks to live and being in considerable pain, Reg insisted on donning his best white tie and tails on the morning of the Queen Mother’s one hundredth birthday in 2000. He presented her with gifts from the domestic staff along with her usual cup of tea. The other servants were astonished to see him at all as he had been so ill. He could barely walk, in fact, as his leukaemia had been exacerbated by the return of a viral infection. A few hours after presenting that birthday cup of
tea, Reg collapsed and was taken by ambulance to hospital where he was rushed into intensive care. He died a short while later.

Billy was distraught. The two men had been colleagues and lovers for nearly four decades and he confided to friends that Reg’s death somehow felt like the beginning of the end. If Reg had gone, then the Queen Mother was not likely to be far behind.

Billy retreated to his little house on the Mall. And it was here that, for a time, he descended into drink. He once complained that for quite some time after Reg died he found it difficult to enjoy the pictures and photographs he had so carefully collected over the years. ‘What is the point when there is no one else to enjoy them with me?’ he said.

Billy had been at the Royal Opera House with the Queen Mother when news reached him that Reg had collapsed, and when he died a week later Billy began the meticulous process of organising an elaborate funeral for him at the Queen’s Chapel in Marlborough Place.

A fellow servant at the time remembered stumbling into Billy’s office sometime after Reg died and finding the elderly butler quietly weeping as he sorted his various papers. Unusually, Billy was not in the least put out by the intrusion. He simply said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m rather upset at the moment. Would you mind coming back a little later?’ It was typical of a man who could be vindictive at one moment, witty the next and finally quite open about his distress.

He told friends that he felt lost and rudderless, but his real anguish only came out when he drank and he was certainly
drinking heavily at this time, partly because he was upset at losing Reg but also because his strength – and he was an immensely strong man – was beginning to ebb. It was not exactly that he was ill, although as one close friend put it ‘he just wasn’t right’ after Reg died; it was as if some of the cords that bound him so tightly had weakened or snapped.

But Billy’s ill health was also the result of decades spent drinking too much and working hideously long hours. There were rumours too that he had developed HIV. Other staff occasionally heard him crashing around while working late in his office but no one dared check on him. ‘He would definitely fall asleep at his desk,’ recalled one, ‘and then sometimes wake in the early hours and carry on as if nothing had happened.’

Billy’s drinking became a serious matter in the last decade of the Queen Mother’s life. On one occasion Sir Alastair Aird asked to see Billy on the pretext of discussing one of the junior footmen. He mentioned some minor misdemeanour and then in a manner that he clearly thought reasonable and diplomatic he gently mentioned that one or two people had been talking about Billy’s drinking; they had said he seemed to be slightly the worse for wear by mid-afternoon each day. Billy was outraged and not just
because he knew that the Queen Mother would always back him against Aird. On this occasion he adopted his usual tactic: he simply stood up, turned on his heel and walked out without a word. He slammed the door. Aird was furious but knew there was nothing he could do – for now. Reporting Billy to the Queen Mother would be worse than useless. There is no doubt that this was one of those occasions, and there were many, when Aird thought Billy should have been sacked or at least quietly retired. He is known to have confided in the other equerries that the Queen Mother was entirely unreasonable about Billy, who Aird felt was a dangerous liability.

In a remarkable echo of the John Brown–Queen Victoria romance, during which top level meetings were convened to discuss how to get rid of Brown, Aird got together with various other officials in a secret meeting to discuss the ‘Tallon issue’. What exactly was agreed is not known but the meeting would at least have given these men (who were used to getting their own way) a chance to let off steam, and there is no doubt that meetings like this eventually paved the way for Billy’s removal from Clarence House in the weeks following the death of the Queen Mother.

Those who knew Aird speak warmly of him. Major Colin Burgess, who was an equerry at Clarence House for a number of years, is on record as saying that Aird was a decent man, but Burgess – who was from a similar military background – would probably have shared Aird’s views about the importance of the right tie and shoelaces. At times, Burgess’s memoir makes Aird sound like a rather benign but fussy old nanny.

The fact that the Queen Mother always backed Billy when there was a row, proved, in the long run, to be a disaster. It meant he was safe only while she lived. A number of commentators have pointed out that Billy was so obsessed with the Queen Mother that he failed to see the wider picture or to consider the future – his own future. He must have known he would almost certainly outlive the Queen Mother, yet he enjoyed making enemies among those who, once she was dead, would suddenly have the power to get rid of him.

In a conversation a year or two after he retired to Kennington, Billy insisted that he had not deliberately twitted and teased the various equerries. He insisted it was simply that they did not understand the Queen Mother as he did, and as he always put her interests first it didn’t bother him in the slightest if the equerries’ noses were sometimes put out of joint. And he had some inkling that his position might become precarious.

He said:

Even without enemies, Billy must have known it was going to be difficult because it has always been the case that when a member of the royal family dies all the relevant staff lose their jobs automatically. Press enquiries immediately following the death of the Queen Mother produced the following frosty response from a palace spokesman: ‘When any member of the royal family dies their staff, in effect, become redundant.’

In terms of redundancy payments, the lower staff are paid so little that financial recompense is insignificant, while the equerries almost always have private incomes and are not paid anyway. Some of the servants who suddenly find themselves without a job are offered other jobs – often in the royal household – but this is by no means certain.

As the 1990s slowly passed Billy spent more weekends quietly in the Kennington flat he had once shared with Reg, but he still thought of Gate Lodge as home and he was convinced, despite his misgivings, that the Queen Mother’s instructions about what
should happen to him after her death would ensure that, at the very least, he could hope for a relatively soft landing.

For now there was work to do. If the Queen Mother had a less busy public schedule as she reached her mid-nineties she still loved to entertain at home, which meant that in many ways Billy was as busy as ever, despite his own increasingly poor health.

Billy still saw his friends regularly at his champagne parties. He still saw an occasional visitor from Coventry and still went out to pick up young men who were then slipped past the guards at Clarence House just as they had been in the old days, only now the policemen probably believed Billy when he said, ‘Oh, he’s just staying for tea.’

As the Queen Mother grew increasingly frail she continued to rely on Billy, but doctors and others became involved and as she weakened and became confused other advisers whom Billy had formerly been able to keep at bay were able to exert greater influence. She accepted the need for a younger team to nurse her, especially as her lunch and dinner parties came to an end. Billy knew he was being frozen out. He was convinced as he always had been that in matters relating to the Queen Mother’s health he was the best judge of what was good for her, but by now his voice was increasingly drowned out by experts of one kind or another.

He was hurt by this because he had actually had a great deal of experience of looking after her when she was ill. He was always there when she went down with colds and occasional bouts of flu – she would insist that only Billy should be allowed to make
what he described as a royal hot toddy. ‘It was strong enough to numb all feeling!’ he said later.

But more seriously he also helped when she had two hip operations and took some months to recover. He was one of the very few people she would allow to take her arm – so long as they were in private – and help steady her. And he was her main source of solace after a cataract operation. He later said she hated to be immobile and was by no means a good patient.

As Billy had less to do with the Queen Mother and she began seriously to decline, he saw a little more of the other royals, or at least those who had always liked him. Billy had always got on very well with Prince Charles and, alone among members of the immediate royals, he was to visit Billy in hospital a few months before he died.

Charles had written numerous letters to Billy when he was a child and Billy had always seemed wonderfully entertaining and avuncular to the young prince. Charles never forgot and when rumours reached him that, following the Queen Mother’s death, Billy was struggling to survive on his tiny pension, the Prince is said to have added £100 a month.

The extent of Billy’s gradual separation from the Queen Mother can be gathered from the fact that when she finally died in her sleep aged 101, Billy was not told the news by a member of the royal household. Whatever his faults, this might seem a particularly callous way to treat someone who had been so close to her for so long. It was no doubt the result of the equerries sensing that at last they had the upper hand. Billy’s feeling that he had simply been cut adrift
can be judged by a comment he made to his friend Basia Briggs on a number of occasions during the last few years of the Queen Mother’s life. He said: ‘I don’t even know if she likes me anymore.’

Billy knew from newspaper and television reports that she was close to death but he was so shocked he could hardly speak when a reporter from a tabloid finally rang him to tell him the news. In the only interview Billy ever gave to the media – it is a thirty-second clip snatched as Billy tried to reach Gate Lodge soon after the Queen Mother died – he said simply, ‘I loved her’.

Anyone who has seen the clip will detect something very slightly theatrical in Billy’s words, but they are nonetheless charged with deep emotion and they express perfectly the sense one has that the Queen Mother was partly Billy’s employer, partly a maternal figure and partly the central figure in his romantic world. He was in love with her as perhaps the medieval troubadours were in love with those unattainable French queens. The point of their adoration was that the object of it should be and remain ultimately unobtainable. Unlike Queen Victoria’s servant John Brown, who, it is said, was rather bossy and even scolded her occasionally, Billy was genuinely besotted. For him, the Queen Mother could do no wrong, although she might be badly advised by others.

Billy certainly knew about her extravagance but he shared her view that a queen should not have to bother about money. He hated the suggestion that she was selfish and self-centred, an accusation that others have levelled at her. He was also certain that a vital piece of paper had been lodged in the right quarter to guarantee his future after her death. When he was pressed about this
he always insisted that it was the household staff, jealous of his influence over the Queen Mother, who had deliberately destroyed this document in the days after her death.

Though Billy hated to complain, he missed his earlier life terribly once the Queen Mother died. It was some months later that he received a short letter telling him that Gate Lodge had to be vacated. The deadline gave him little time to prepare, but obedient to the command he packed his things and left. There was no leaving party, no letter of thanks, no formal goodbye; an official made sure he was out on time and that all his things had been cleared ready for exile in south London.