Backstairs Billy (20 page)
Authors: Tom Quinn
Billy loved the fact that the Queen Mother, though rarely indiscreet herself, loved to hear others gossiping, especially if the gossip concerned famous people she had met and especially if they were gay. She particularly loved stories about Sir John Gielgud and his legendary forgetfulness. ‘We arranged to meet many times for lunch,’ she quipped, ‘and he did occasionally remember.’
Noël Coward stories were also a favourite. She herself had once accompanied Coward to the theatre and on seeing him glancing at a row of guardsmen lined up to greet her, she said, ‘Oh Noël, do be careful; they count them when they put them out, you know.’
She loved to tease Billy, too. When unfavourable stories about one of her distant relatives appeared in the papers, she said to Billy, ‘Well, we all have skeletons in our cupboards, don’t we, William?’
She then paused and added, ‘And some of our cupboards have to be rather large, do they not?’
She kept her sense of humour to the end and in the last months before failing health prevented her from seeing Billy, she said to him rather poignantly, as if aware that the end could not be that far off, ‘We’re two old dears, really, aren’t we, William? But we’ve had some fun.’
Billy admitted that in the last fifteen years of her life she had become increasingly dotty, ‘but in such a charming way’, and he rather enjoyed being able to come to the rescue, as it were, more often.
He loved to repeat the story of how she almost ‘came unstuck’ once while driving along the Mall.
Yes, that was a little awkward. We were being driven slowly along the Mall in one of the big official cars and she was doing her wonderful graceful smile with her head tilted to one side and waving steadily at the crowds along the route. She’d had a few gins that morning, but no more than usual – and I know that because I poured them myself – so everything should have been fine. Then, out of the corner of my eye I noticed that, very slowly, she was sliding off the slippery leather seat at the back of the car and down on to the floor. As she sank out of sight she continued to smile and wave as if oblivious to the fact that the crowds could no longer see her. She just carried on smiling and waving until she was hauled back up into position – by me. And then she carried on as if nothing had happened. She was so absolutely devoted to duty that that was typical of her. Sometimes, of course, she
got confused and I saw her once in Clarence House waving regally when only the corgis were around.
Billy’s reluctance to tell more negative stories in later life was entirely superficial. It depended on who he was with and in his last years he was definitely more open than he had been in earlier days.
It’s very difficult to get a flavour of his conversation, but the following gives a good example of how entertaining – and almost indiscreet – he could be:
Before lunch the Queen Mother would always say, ‘I do hope lunch is late, then we can have another drink or perhaps several. Won’t that be fun?’
And the conversations at lunch
could
be huge fun, although the footmen had to try to keep straight faces. The royals in the 1960s and 1970s were probably the only family in England who still had footmen waiting at table.
I remember, at a lunch for one of the Queen Mother’s favourite charities, she was talking about the animal rights movement, of which she certainly did not approve at all. She explained that she had to keep all her fur coats locked up: ‘One has to be careful, you see – they might pour paint over one.’
‘Or set fire to one,’ quipped Princess Margaret, who was sitting next to the Queen Mother. They then both fell about in fits of giggles.
At the same lunch the conversation turned to Prince Philip and someone mentioned the fact that he liked poetry.
‘How extraordinary,’ said the Queen Mother. ‘I have known Philip
all these years yet I did not know he had a guilty secret. He likes poetry. Poor man. How dreadful.’
The Queen Mother loved television and she did several very good imitations of well-known comic characters. Her Blackadder was very good, but best of all was her extraordinary attempt to imitate the comedian Ali G.
So she would say, ‘Darling, lunch was simply marvellous – respec’.’
She loved to tease and she teased all the members of her family as well as me. When she visited Prince William at the University of St Andrews she would ask him repeatedly to make a date so that she could come and spend the night in his room in college. Every summer she would begin to drop hints that she would like to spend a week at Kennington and did I know anywhere suitable. She would say, ‘And do you think when I come to Kennington you would be able to organise a few parties? Then we can forget all our troubles and be gay for a while.’
Often after lunch or dinner she would get up and do a few comic dance steps that looked rather like a Billy Dainty routine – I’m sure it was based on his antics because she loved watching him on television.
Billy often reminded his friends that several of the Queen Mother’s cousins had spent their whole lives in lunatic asylums. He would quip that she herself could seem slightly mad, or at least eccentric. And this eccentricity showed itself in other ways.
One of her closest friends, a former lady in waiting, said the Queen Mother had almost no idea how to dress herself and had the aristocratic idea that it was appalling to have to know whether one’s slip went on before one’s skirt.
‘I always had to remind her to go to the lavatory before we left for any kind of event,’ she recalled, ‘and on several occasions she locked herself in. A dainty little voice would be heard saying, “Terribly difficult to open this door. Could anyone help?” Eventually I waited discreetly outside and later suggested she leave it unlocked in future.’
At lunch with friends or at dinner in Amici’s, Billy would happily tell these and other of his favourite stories about his former employer – just so long as no journalists were present.
He said she had a sharp tongue and a rich and slightly eccentric turn of phrase when she chose to.
There often seemed something very funny about the gap between what she said and her beautiful, upper-class accent. But she didn’t give a fig what anyone thought of her or what she said so long as she wasn’t written about in the wrong way in the newspapers.
But when she decided to let off a bit of steam, it was a shock for many of the servants who, like me, grew up thinking members of the royal family were saints.
Many of the maids who worked at Balmoral, for example, were from small Presbyterian villages in remote areas of Scotland. They’d grown up in communities where the children’s swings were padlocked on Sundays and where laughing was considered sinful if it meant people could see your teeth! They hardly knew what swearing was! The royal family liked their servants to be from these remote areas because they thought they would be serious, quiet and biddable.
I remember one of the maids telling me she always put cotton wool
in her ears in case she heard any cursing from the Queen Mother, which I found hard to believe because I don’t think the Queen Mother ever swore. Another maid explained that she didn’t mind when the Queen Mother threw things at her because ten minutes later the old lady would tilt her head and smile as if nothing had happened. She was cantankerous one minute and all smiles the next.
She was also famous for her practical jokes and when an official she had not met before came to Balmoral for the first time she might shake hands with him and say, ‘I’m so glad you have come to look at the boiler. It has been playing up for some time.’ I think she enjoyed the look of utter confusion on their faces. One or two of the more malicious servants would claim that she really did think they had come to fix the boiler or unblock a sink, but I absolutely refute this!
B
Y EARLY
2007, Billy looked increasingly vulnerable and throughout that year his health deteriorated rapidly. He’d been visited in March by Prince Charles after a spell in St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington and Prince Charles was apparently shocked at his old friend’s decline. Billy’s conversation and behaviour became increasingly erratic and confused in the last months of his life, yet the royal household, which must have
been aware of what was going on, seems to have done little to help him. It could be argued of course that he had long ceased to be employed by the Palace and therefore it was not for them to keep tabs on him. If that is true – and of course it would certainly be true of any other employer – then what happened immediately after Billy’s death is all the more strange. As we will see, as soon as Billy died, officials gained entry to his flat and spent several days going through his things.
In the meantime, Billy’s last few months were a mixture of odd flashes of the old Billy – in the evenings when he was invited to parties – and gloomy days spent filling time. On one occasion he was spotted by a neighbour in the local launderette desperately trying to find coins to operate the machine.
‘He dropped his change all over the floor and I found him scrabbling on his knees and almost in tears,’ recalled the neighbour. On another occasion he was seen staggering back to the flat at eleven in the morning looking dishevelled and confused. He stopped and leaned against a lamppost every hundred yards or so as if he needed to catch his breath.
In the last year of his life Billy also began to speak far more often of his sadness at the way the royal household had treated him. He was so upset that he even talked about moving to France. His idea was to escape familiar scenes that were filled now with bitter memories, but also to escape the tabloid journalists who were still hounding him and trying to get him drunk in the hope that he would disgrace himself in some way. But, without selling his treasured possessions – his last mementoes of the Queen
Mother – such a move would have been impossible. ‘I’m trapped,’ he used to say. ‘I have nothing to live for since she died but I don’t seem to be able to die myself. It’s terrible.’
In his bitterest moments he recalled how in the Queen Mother’s last months he had asked if he could see her – he had been largely side-lined by this time – and permission was refused. The Queen Mother herself was by this time too confused to know what was happening around her. Weakened by extreme old age she was attended only by her medical staff and by the advisers who could now ignore Billy. Frustrated by repeated refusals to let him see his old employer, he at one point became hysterical and was told that if he did not calm down the police would be called.
‘I was upset and they didn’t care,’ he told a friend.
I thought they would have taken account of my long years with the Queen Mother. But as far as the household was concerned, I was simply an ex-employee. I can see why they would have viewed it in that way, but it did rather hurt. It was as if I’d worked in the palace for six months washing bottles and hardly been noticed by anyone. The truth is some members of the royal household rather enjoyed my unhappiness. It was time for their revenge. They knew the Queen Mother could no longer protect me so the knives were out. I suppose I was silly not to have known it would happen.
What Billy had not fully realised was that in a fundamental way Clarence House was like a medieval royal court and that royal favourites rarely survived the death of their protectors.
I was naïve, I suppose. The household disliked me because I was too close to the Queen Mother. I know that was their view because every now and then one of them would get angry with me and say it. I remember one of the advisers saying, ‘Who on earth do you think you are?’ He was furious because I had told him that Her Majesty the Queen Mother had insisted I stay close to her at a particular event. I replied, ‘I’m a shopkeeper’s son from Coventry but I’m afraid my company is preferable to yours.’ I suppose it was silly of me to rise to the bait but I couldn’t help it. The adviser went red in the face and stalked off. I’m afraid I enjoyed my little victory very much but I can’t imagine he ever forgave me.
But Billy’s troubles were to end far sooner than anyone could have expected. On 23 November 2007, he was found dead in his flat by a neighbour. The official cause of death was cardiac arrest – a heart attack – but Billy had been treated at an HIV clinic a few years earlier. His death was undoubtedly also brought on by years of heavy drinking, although he had no sense that the end was near. As one friend said, ‘He did not expect to die that night. He had planned various lunches and parties over the ensuing days and he had a new interest – he was definitely writing down his memories of life at Clarence House.’
At the time of his death he was reported to be seriously underweight and friends said he had been drinking but not eating properly for years. However, the same friends had also noticed that his mood had lifted in his last weeks as he began to enjoy the process of writing about his life.
For the royal household, Billy was easier to deal with in death than he had been in life. The palace clearly felt that it would be too obvious a snub and cause public outrage if Billy were denied a funeral that reflected his lengthy devotion to the Queen Mother, so they made no attempt to prevent the funeral taking place in St James’s Palace, an honour promised to Billy by the Queen Mother many years earlier. Tactically, of course, it was a shrewd move. The royal household would have hoped that rumours about their difficult relationship with Billy would be scotched if it was seen that he was given a splendid send-off.
Y
OU HAVE TO
be rather special to expect your funeral to be held at the Queen’s Chapel at St James’s Palace. Originally the ‘chapels royal’ referred to a select group of singers and church officials who were permanently on hand to serve the spiritual needs of the monarch; it was only gradually that the phrase came to mean actual buildings. Today the term refers to two buildings – the Chapel Royal and the Queen’s Chapel at St James’s Palace.
St James’s Palace itself is one of the oldest palaces still in use in the country and for various eccentric reasons, despite not having been lived in by a monarch for more than two centuries, it is still, officially, the residence of the sovereign. Ambassadors are all still accredited to the Court of St James’s.
Much of St James’s Palace has been re-modelled and re-built
over the centuries but the Queen’s Chapel is largely unspoiled: it remains substantially as it was when built by the first great English classical architect, Inigo Jones. It was completed in 1625.
And it was here on 6 December 2007 that William Tallon, Page of the Backstairs and royal servant for almost fifty-two years, was remembered.
In addition to Lord Snowdon and his daughter Lady Sarah Chatto, guests included Sir Roy Strong, actors Patricia Routledge and June Brown, painters Roy Petley and Richard Stone and TV comic Paul O’Grady. The 200 guests had been chosen from more than 2,000 applications for tickets. One of Billy’s very few surviving close relatives, his cousin Naomi, was also present.
Sir Derek Jacobi read the poem ‘Words in Praise of Billy’ by actor Leonard Whiting. The music, chosen by Billy himself, included the traditional (Mozart’s ‘Ave Verum’) and the contemporary (‘Mishima’ by the American minimalist composer Philip Glass). The Reverend Prebendary William Scott described Billy’s extraordinary loyalty to the Queen Mother, and the assembled guests sang ‘Parry’s Anthem’, one of Billy’s favourites. The service concluded with a reading of Billy’s favourite song, ‘Send In the Clowns’, and then Billy’s flower-strewn coffin left the chapel to the strains of Strauss’s ‘Radetzky March’.
No member of the immediate royal family was there. Even Prince Charles was busy elsewhere. His absence and that of other members of the immediate family was felt by some of Billy’s closest friends to reflect the royals’ ambivalent attitude to a man who, in their eyes, had, despite his great loyalty, over-stepped the
mark; a man who had been too close to someone he was meant only to serve.
Soon after Billy’s death, a small group of men were seen entering his Kennington flat. Within days, all Billy’s possessions were boxed and in storage. There is no proof that things went missing, but the speed with which events occurred shocked Billy’s friends, one of whom said:
It was all very odd. Imagine if you had ceased to work for someone in 2003 and then five years later you die. Would you expect your former employer to visit your house and go through your things? That’s what happened to Billy. We were sure the royal household had sent a team to go through Billy’s possessions before they were sold.
The material that came up for auction some time later represented just a small part of everything he had at the time of his death. I know that because I visited the flat regularly. Another oddity is that not a scrap of written material survived the visit by the unidentified team. I don’t see how you could argue that they were just helping out by clearing the flat.
And does anyone really believe that if they had found Billy’s notebooks they would have preserved them? This seems highly unlikely even if you do not subscribe to some of the more extreme theories about Billy’s death and what happened afterwards. By that, I mean some of the theories that he was bumped off. I don’t think any of his friends really believe that, but it was all very odd.
Other neighbours were convinced that Billy had intended to leave
little gifts to his many friends as he had no close family, yet these gifts did not materialise.
A close friend explains that Billy was terrified the royal household would accuse him of stealing his treasures, much as Paul Burrell, the late Princess of Wales’s butler, was accused of theft after Diana’s death. But Billy had taken precautions. On leaving Gate Lodge he had asked a lawyer to draw up a list of gifts he was taking to make sure that everything was signed for – that he had taken nothing, in other words, without permission.
Some months after the funeral, and with little warning, Billy’s possessions came up for auction. His solicitor, who was also his executor, had made the decision to sell because, unknown to many of his friends, Billy had wanted the bulk of his estate, presumably minus those little gifts that had so mysteriously failed to materialise, to be sold to raise money for a leukaemia research charity. (Leukaemia had killed Reg Wilcox so the bequest was a fitting one.) News spread quickly and the sale aroused huge interest across the world. Curiously, a provincial auctioneer – James Grinter, of Reeman Dansie in Colchester, Essex – was chosen to conduct the sale. Many thought it would have raised a great deal more money if it had been conducted by one of the big London auctioneers, but the executor clearly felt that a few letters and mementos were unlikely to justify any great expectations. How wrong he was. It took more than ten hours to dispose of more than 700 lots.
The highlight of the sale was a short letter written by the Queen Mother to Billy asking him to make sure he had packed enough
gin and Dubonnet for a trip to Scotland. The hand-written letter, which sparked a telephone bidding war, asks Billy to prepare for an outdoor lunch and finishes: ‘I think that I will take two small bottles of Dubonnet and gin with me this morning, in case it is needed.’ The letter’s appeal came undoubtedly from its rarity – few letters written by the Queen Mother have ever come up for auction – but also from its light-hearted confirmation of the Queen Mother’s fondness for gin. The letter went to an anonymous bidder for an astonishing £16,000.
The sale was expected to raise around £200,000 in total but such was the level of interest that the final sum was closer to half a million pounds.
Other highlights of the sale included a letter to Billy from Princess Diana. It was sent soon after the birth of Prince William and read simply: ‘We are not sure at the moment what has hit us, except a very strong pair of lungs.’
The letter made £5,000. Seven other letters from the late Princess made a combined total of £15,000.
A portrait of the Queen Mother, a miniature version of a painting owned by the royal family, went for £30,000.
Despite the success of the sale, still rumours lingered that much of Billy’s material had gone missing, especially his black book, as his diary was known, and those memoirs he was thought to be writing at the time of his death.
But the assumption that these memoirs might have been especially revealing, vindictive or damaging to the royal family may be entirely wrong. Billy may well have confined his recollections
to his happier experiences. Certainly the dominant impression everyone took from even the briefest conversation with Billy was that he felt uniquely privileged to have worked for so long in a job that he loved as much as he loved anything else in his life. In lighter moments he confessed that any disagreements he may have had with his colleagues over the years were no more than one might expect in an environment where people from many different backgrounds worked closely together in sometimes difficult circumstances and for long hours.