Queen's House (45 page)

We can be grateful to Crawfie for her picture of the underside of Buckingham Palace. Behind the grand façade there was an army of workmen. The 300 elaborate clocks, so admired by Queen Mary, took two men a week to wind. Thousands of electric light bulbs needed regular attention.

Crawfie met the ‘vermin man', whose job was to trap the mice that
scuttled through the marble halls and nested in unused bedrooms. He used ‘the sticky trap', ‘a piece of cardboard with a lump of aniseed in the middle'. This was surrounded by a sea of treacle with a dry inch all round to give the victim a footing. Attracted by the smell of a lump of aniseed the mouse would be stuck in the treacle. The vermin man would then come and dispatch the trapped mouse.

Crawfie was uncomfortable in her isolated and chilly room, but the Princesses accepted their new home. The King made sure that their schoolroom was attractive, unlike the forbidding attics in which he and his brothers had been educated. He liked having his daughters near him, and encouraged them to keep their rocking horses outside his study door so that he could hear them at play. Princess Margaret was allowed to ride her tricycle down the long corridors, and they had room outside their door for their collection of beloved toy horses. As Crawfie remembered, they remained there until Princess Elizabeth's wedding morning.

The Palace held no terrors for the Princesses; secure in their happy family they enjoyed exploring.

It was strange to hear the little girls' happy voices, laughing and shouting as usual as they ran downstairs and along the corridors to Mummie and Papa's room.

In a very short time [they] set some of the ghosts to flight. The whole atmosphere lightened. Many people noticed this. ‘It was as though the place had been dead and had suddenly come alive,' they told me.
²¹

While the suite occupied by King George V and Queen Mary was being redecorated, the King and Queen moved into the Belgian Suite on the ground floor, which had been briefly occupied by Edward VIII. In Queen Mary's rooms the silk hangings on the walls were her own and she had taken them with her to Marlborough House. Queen Elizabeth chose her own light wallpaper and installed new bathrooms. Kenneth Campbell remembered that when, during the Coronation year, his firm, Campbell Smith & Co., was redecorating the Queen's rooms,

She complained, in her delightfully humorous and gentle manner, that she was a little tired of the everlasting cream and gold throughout the Palace and
couldn't she have something a little different in her own bedroom? We promptly made up a pleasant peach colour and as our foreman was painting a sample on the wall she asked if she could have a go as she had seldom been allowed to do any painting. My father handed her the brush and she slapped away with great gusto.
²²

The King ‘chose to use his father's dressing room as his bedroom … because it reminded him so much of his father's evening ritual of dressing for dinner with his family around him'.
²³

The Princesses' rooms were two floors above, but this did not prevent them from racing down the corridors to join their parents. Princess Elizabeth had her own sitting room, though her maid, Margaret Mac-Donald (‘Bobo'), slept in her bedroom. Crawfie had her own room. The nurse, Clara Knight (‘Alah'), was in charge of the day nursery and the night nursery. It was comfortable enough, but the practical Scots governess saw to it that her charges were not spoilt by luxury.

Crawfie, realizing that the Princesses' life in the Palace was too isolated, asked for permission to set up the 1st Buckingham Palace Company of Girl Guides. Princess Margaret was too young but was allowed to join with a friend as a Brownie. The King was an enthusiastic supporter, for during his years as Duke of York he had set up a boys' camp to which boys from different backgrounds came once a year. Some of his happiest days had been spent with them, joining in their singing round the campfire. Now he delighted to join his daughters at their camp, lustily singing his favourite ‘Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree'. Crawfie wrote

The King made one stipulation only. ‘I'l stand anything,' he said, ‘but I won't have those hideous long black stockings. Reminds me too much of my youth.' … Just at first some of the children who joined started coming in party frocks, with white gloves, accompanied by fleets of nannies and governesses. We soon put a stop to all that.

When half the children did not recognize their own shoes, taken off for a game, the Princesses were scornful. ‘There was never any nonsense of that kind in their nursery.'
²⁴

When, as often happened in the coming years, the King and Queen were away, Queen Mary watched over them. She took them on
instructive trips to museums and brought to life for them the history of their own royal family. Lady Airlie said that she ‘was more interested in the education of the two Princesses than she had been in her own children'. She ‘was very anxious for Princess Elizabeth to read the best type of children's books'. Nor was she the forbidding figure of legend. To the astonishment of the family, after the Second World War she and Lady Airlie were to outshine the young in country dancing at Sandringham, ‘stripping the willow' and weaving through ‘Sir Roger de Coverley' until early morning. ‘We were foolishly pleased to … discover that … she at nearly 79 and I at nearly 80, outshone the young Princesses and their guests.'
²⁵

Queen Mary's influence on Princess Elizabeth was strong and lasting. They had much in common: like Queen Mary, who had lived in the shadow of an outgoing mother, Princess Elizabeth was shy, and throughout her life would always allow her mother to take centre stage.

Princess Elizabeth's love for her maternal grandmother, Lady Strathmore, was even stronger. Visits to her at the family home, Glamis Castle, were pure enchantment. An early photograph shows her arriving at the railway station, descending the steps, one hand in that of the whiskered stationmaster, the other firmly clutching her fishing rod. Queen Elizabeth II has deep roots in the Scottish countryside.

Loving parents, a sensible and devoted governess, and, in the background, those enduring rocks, Queen Mary and Lady Strathmore, gave the two Princesses a secure and happy childhood. So for the family, Buckingham Palace was not a prison, nor a mausoleum, nor an unwanted white elephant, nor an imperial fantasy. Queen Elizabeth and King George VI accepted it and charmed the best out of it, filling the chilly rooms with flowers.

But the King did not have as much time as he would have liked to give to his family or the Palace. He faced urgent problems at home and abroad. There were loud and persuasive voices calling for an end to the monarchy. To many of those without work, the monarchy was at best an irrelevance, at its worst an offence. King Edward VIII had been impressed by the misery of the unemployed steelworkers. King George
VI had a social conscience and unlike his brother could not run away from the problems. In foreign affairs there were difficult decisions to be taken: like his father and all who had seen the devastation and agony of the First World War, King George VI wanted peace, but the growing menace of Fascism in Spain, Germany and Italy, and the rise of the dictators Franco, Hitler and Mussolini had to be faced.

At home there was the immediate problem of the Coronation, which normally took a year to prepare. He decided to keep the date fixed for his brother's crowning, 12 May 1937. Fortunately King Edward VIII had involved his brother in the preliminary planning and King George VI had the trained competence of a naval officer. Queen Mary was ready with advice on the history and protocol of the ceremony.

When the day came, for once she broke with tradition, and though no previous dowager Queen had attended the Coronation of the successor, Queen Mary drove out from Marlborough House in the glass coach to the loudest cheers of the crowd. Magnificently regal in purple and gold, a diamond crown on her white hair, she was all that was enduring to a people whose faith in the monarchy was badly shaken. She wore the Garter Star, which belonged to Edward VIII and which she had firmly borrowed as though to emphasize the continuity of the monarchy. She had picked up her son's fallen baton. She wrote with customary simplicity,

Maud and I processed up the Abbey to the Royal box. I sat between Maud and Lilibet, and Margaret came next, they looked too sweet in their lace dresses and robes, especially when they put on their coronets. Bertie and E. looked so well when they came in and did it all too beautifully. The Service was wonderful and impressive – we were all much moved.
²⁶

Was it Queen Mary, or Marion Crawford, or her own initiative, that inspired Princess Elizabeth to write her account of the day?

The Coronation 12 May 1937. To Mummy and Papa. In Memory of Their Coronation, From Lilibet By Herself.

At 5 o'clock in the morning I was woken up by the band of the Royal Marines striking up just outside my window. I leapt out of bed and so did Bobo. We
put on dressing gowns and shoes and Bobo made me put on an eiderdown as it was so cold, and we crouched in the window looking out onto a cold, misty morning. There were already some people in the stands and all the time people were coming to them in a stream … Every now and then we were hopping in and out of bed looking at the bands and the soldiers. At six o'clock Bobo got up and instead of getting up at my usual time I jumped out of bed at half-past seven.
²⁷

It is a rare glimpse inside the Palace on a great state occasion.

‘At first it was very jolly,' Princess Elizabeth remembered, but she was concerned, as she told Crawfie, that Princess Margaret should not disgrace us by falling asleep in the middle. After all she is very young for a Coronation isn't she? In fact she was wonderful, I only had to nudge her once or twice when she played with the prayer books too loudly.'
²⁸

But Princess Elizabeth found the service ‘rather boring as it was all prayers, Grannie and I were looking to see how many more pages to the end, and we turned one more and it said “Finis”. We both smiled at each other.' In that sentence the empathy between Queen Mary and Princess Elizabeth is strikingly revealed. ‘Grannie' had ‘looked too beautiful in a gold dress patterned with gold flowers. I thought it all
very
wonderful,' the Princess wrote, ‘and I expect the Abbey did too. The arches and beams at the top were covered with a sort of haze of wonder as Papa was crowned.'
²⁹
It was an unusually romantic touch from a girl noted for her practical good sense.

The age-old ritual of the Coronation profoundly moved the King and Queen, and uplifted them, as it had done Queen Mary and King George V before them. Unlike his brother, King George VI was deeply religious. Later he told Archbishop Lang that he felt throughout that ‘Some One Else was with him'. A feeling of exaltation transformed him, making him, as he said, for long periods during the ceremony, unaware of what was happening.

Winston Churchill, watching the Queen, whispered to his wife. You were right. I see now that the “other one” wouldn't have done.'
³⁰
Again and again in the coming years it would be realized with chilling force how nearly the country had escaped disaster, and how fortunate they
were in a King and Queen whose Coronation vows were of such profound importance to them.

Three weeks later, on 3 June 1937, at the borrowed Château de Candé near Tours, France, another ceremony, simpler and sadder, took place. The Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson were finally united in matrimony. Charles and Fern Bedaux had lent their castle fully staffed and free of charge. On the eve of the wedding, Sir Walter Monckton arrived with what the Duke bitterly described as a ‘fine wedding present' from his brother. It was a letter which said that ‘The Duke, notwithstanding his act of abdication shall be able to enjoy for himself only the title, style or attribute of Royal Highness, so however that his wife and descendants shall not hold the said title.'
³¹

The Duke never forgave what he considered to be an insult to his wife. Monckton had warned the Home Secretary that the denial of the title HRH would cause trouble, but he was told that the Dominions would not approve the title for Mrs Simpson. The real reason was that few people expected the marriage to last, and if it broke up, as Wallis's two previous marriages had done, it was unthinkable that she should take her title into some future relationship. And, as Frances Donaldson wrote, ‘As King George VI reminded Baldwin … once a person has become a Royal Highness there is no means of depriving her of her title.'
³²
He was in fact mistaken, as later history was to show.

With the Spanish Civil War in 1936 the curtain had gone up on the tragedy of the Second World War and the first years of King George VI's reign were overshadowed by the growing threat of war with Germany. In March 1936 Hitler had invaded the Rhineland. On 15 March 1939 Hitler occupied Prague and issued the proclamation that ‘Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist'.

The Nazi forces still advanced. Poland was the next target. In March Hitler demanded Danzig from Poland; in April Mussolini invaded Albania. On 31 March, in the House of Commons, Chamberlain announced the support of the British and Commonwealth governments for Poland. In April this pledge was extended to Greece, Romania, Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Against this background of gathering war clouds the government announced that the visit of the King and Queen to Canada and North America would still take place. It was important to strengthen the British links with the New World.

In the royal tours at home and abroad of 1937, 1938 and 1939 the King impressed all with his thorough mastery of his briefs and Queen Elizabeth charmed the crowds with her easy lack of affectation. Then it was realized indeed that ‘the other' would not have done. In July 1937 there was a tumultuous welcome in Edinburgh, where the Queen was invested with Scotland's highest order of chivalry – the Order of the Thistle. In May 1938 their visit to France was delayed by the death of the Queen's mother. The Queen chose to wear white – the alternative mourning – and in Norman Hartnell's white crinoline established her particular style, delighting the Parisian crowds. The visit was not only a personal success; it also strengthened the Anglo-French alliance at a crucial moment in European affairs.