Backstairs Billy (19 page)
Authors: Tom Quinn
T
HE BIGGEST PROBLEM
now that life at Clarence House was over for Billy was that though he had numerous friends and acquaintances, he worried that many of them had enjoyed his company because of what he did rather than because of who he
was. But, as it turned out, he need not have worried. His friends stuck by him and there were always new friends. But even Billy could not fill all his time with parties and his fifty-one years of service had given him no time to learn how to live in the evenings and at weekends when work is over and there are no parties to go to. For more than half a century Billy’s work and life had been one and the same thing. Now he was on his own.
For years he had organised lunches and dinners for the Queen Mother, but he had never had to make his own meals or wash up – and these were tasks he hated. They made him realise that though he had been a servant, he had enjoyed a uniquely privileged life with dozens of staff at one time effectively working below him, awed by his presence.
‘Oh, he loved it,’ recalled one friend, ‘because every day in the palace when he passed a junior footman, a gardener or a maid or even a lady in waiting he could tell they were looking across at him and thinking, “That’s the legendary William Tallon!”’
It was a curious sort of fame and localised power but nonetheless real for all that. And that is what he really missed when it was all over, which is not to say that he did not miss the Queen Mother too. He did, but if he had been allowed to stay in Gate Lodge after she died – as might easily have happened – he would have been happy and I think might have lived a little longer.
As it was, he shambled along to the shops and bought his food like any other elderly, retired, single man. But he was hopeless at
it and began to eat irregularly and sometimes not at all. He was also shocked at the cost of a good bottle of wine as he hadn’t had to buy wine himself for decades. He occasionally had to drink what he described as ‘plonk’ and even, at his worst moments, ate out of tins. He kept his sense of humour, though, remarking once, ‘I suppose if beans were good enough for Anstruther they should be good enough for me.’
Billy had developed a taste for the finer things in life and he was suddenly cut off from them all. He found himself in what some people called a ‘scruffy, run-down part of Kennington’ shambling along the streets to the corner shop, with a plastic bag and his shirt tails hanging out.
But there were compensations. Because Billy was an amusing man with a remarkable employment history, he was invited to a seemingly endless series of parties which gave him a faint glow of the life he had once enjoyed with the Queen Mother. Occasionally he felt out of place at these gatherings, but then he often under-valued his own virtues as an entertaining and witty dinner guest. As another friend recalled:
Billy sometimes went into terrible glooms that were alleviated only by alcohol. He drank, I think, because he really was an alcoholic in the sense that he relied on alcohol; he relied on having it every day but it was a habit he had got into at Clarence House over many years and he found that even though he couldn’t afford the sort of things he was used to, he had to have something – alcohol restored some of his charm, his confidence and his wit. But the fact that he was no longer
drinking the finest wines in the finest company – as he saw it – took a lot of getting used to and he never really managed it.
He went to parties in Chelsea and Belgravia, in Highgate and Kensington and he was treated in a way that other ordinary ex-servants would never have been treated. He was the grand old man of royal service. It was his unique status, his numerous appearances – admittedly in the background – at royal events, his medals [which included the very rarely awarded Royal Victorian Gold Medal for long service] that made him special. It was all these things that made him a celebrity. And the great thing about Billy was that in his exile he became a humbler figure, some might even say a nicer man. Power had corrupted him a little and he knew it. He had been beastly, he once said, to some of those who worked for him and I think he felt rather bad about it.
Everyone speculated about whether he was writing his memoirs and a number of his friends were absolutely convinced that by the time he died he had written a very great deal.
Another close friend of Billy’s said:
He was definitely writing something, which is perhaps why so many odd things happened after he died. I’m sure that in the same way that someone probably destroyed the Queen Mother’s instructions that Billy should be allowed to stay on at Gate Lodge, they also destroyed whatever it was he had written about his life with the Queen Mother at Clarence House. Why else would a team of people have arrived at the Kennington flat to go through his things so soon after he died? They were there for several days and a great many of Billy’s things vanished as a result.
But if Billy had written about his life in service he did not talk about it much among his friends.
‘I heard people at parties try to draw him out but it never worked,’ recalled a journalist and television scriptwriter who knew Billy in his last years.
This was partly the habit of a lifetime, I think, but partly also that whatever the tabloids might like to think, Billy wanted to save his best stories for publication. The royals, as he explained to me on a number of occasions, grow up in such an exposed way – exposed to public scrutiny – that they are very careful about what they say and do, but they still have lives to lead with all the mistakes and confusions that can involve. And Billy had known them all for so long. He knew the scandals and the tittle-tattle.
Billy had seen the Queen Mother tipsy on many occasions and he’d seen her lose her temper or do absurd things, but his main aim in writing his memoirs would not have been to show her in a bad light. It would have concentrated on the eccentrics who run Clarence House and might well have been Billy’s revenge on the equerries who he felt had treated him so badly.
He certainly also knew a great deal. He knew for example, or at least said he knew, that Princess Diana was having affairs while still married to Prince Charles and long before it was generally known that the marriage was in trouble. He also knew a great deal about the younger generation of royals.
Billy admired earlier monarchs who had remained loyal to their
spouses even if they had also enjoyed the favours of numerous mistresses. He thought it unseemly for members of the royal family to get divorced and felt that in this respect the Queen Mother’s grandchildren had somehow let the side down. He felt the role of the royals was to provide the majesty, the ceremony and the spectacle that gave so many people so much pleasure. Ironically, given his own decline, he was hugely scathing about the younger royals drinking too much and tumbling out of clubs at two o’ clock in the morning.
Billy survived the death of his employer for five years, which was much longer than many of his friends expected. Despite his banishment – and he saw it as banishment rather than that he had simply been made redundant – he retained an inner strength which he himself claimed came from his mother. It was this strength that enabled him to cope with the last and in some ways most difficult period of his life, a period made far worse by the behaviour of a ruthless group of tabloid journalists and photographers.
F
OR THE WHOLE
of the last five years of his life Billy was pursued, sometimes night and day, by photographers who pushed their cameras into his face and by journalists who walked alongside him, sometimes for miles, asking a continual stream of questions, none of which Billy ever answered. Some journalists tried to break into his house while others found out where he was going in the evening and bribed other dinner guests to get him drunk while
they waited outside hoping he would say something indiscreet or fall over.
When continual pestering failed, some of the journalists began phoning Billy and pretending to be one or other of his friends; others tried to photograph him through the windows of his flat, especially early in the morning or late at night, hoping they might catch a picture of him half-dressed. Journalists were frequently seen digging through his dustbins, but Billy fought back as best he could.
I put cat shit in my bin some days and smear it on a few typed sheets of paper on which I’ve written a few bits of gibberish and slightly torn, and it’s wonderful to see how gleefully they pick it all out and get very excited in case they may have discovered something really interesting.
On one occasion Billy confessed he had urinated in a plastic bag which he had filled with old letters and bills that were of absolutely no use to anyone.
‘Oh, it was wonderful to see how excited they were about that,’ he said.
It gave me a wonderful laugh. It was like a tonic, but that’s all you can do. You have to fight them in any way you can. Ringing the police doesn’t help a bit because pestering someone night and day is perfectly legal so long as you can say you are a journalist. I could understand it if I’d committed a terrible crime or something but I haven’t so why don’t they leave me alone?
One journalist who had been among those pursuing Billy at this time recalled the pressure he and his colleagues were under.
Everyone was convinced that if Billy told his story it would be absolutely sensational. The important thing was not what Billy might have said but what he would put his name to – we tried everything from sending very pretty boys around to knock on the door and chat him up, to older women journalists we thought might remind him of the old Queen Mother, but nothing worked. We even tried offering him a lot of money, but he wasn’t biting. Some us began to admire him after a while because he almost never lost his temper and if it had been me I think I might have punched someone!
Billy knew that assaulting a journalist would have been a disaster because it was exactly what they wanted. Once they knew he wouldn’t give them a story about his years with the Queen Mother, the only other option was to provoke him into doing something outrageous.
His lowest point came in October 2002 when he was returning from a party to launch a book by interior designer Nicky Haslam. Someone had promised to take Billy home but a last-minute muddle meant he returned to Kennington alone. Already drunk, he foolishly stopped at the Dog House and continued drinking. When he tried to get home he fell and was photographed sprawled in the gutter.
Meanwhile the partying continued. Billy was determined not to become reclusive in the face of the press onslaught. But his taste for partying wasn’t quite what it had once been.
‘I think I go to these things sometimes because I find it so difficult to be on my own,’ he confessed.
I’m just not used to it and I’m too old to get used to it now. I’d rather sit in the pub because at least there is someone to talk to there. I enjoy some of the parties of course, but would happily give them up if I could go back to my old life.
For many of his friends it was a shock to see Billy in his old, beautifully cut dark suit or in bizarrely ill-matched shirt and trousers wandering rather shakily to the corner shop to buy a cheap bottle of wine. Or, more dangerously, he would spend night after night in the Dog House. He would get drunk and invite absolutely anyone – and everyone – back to the flat. His friends worried he would be beaten up or have his things stolen. But, for Billy, anything was better than sitting in the flat alone.
Getting through the day was even more difficult because he hated cooking for himself and, as we have seen, despised washing up. However, despite this reluctance to spend any time in the kitchen, a number of his friends recall that when he could be bothered he was rather a good cook. ‘He only really enjoyed it if he was cooking for others – for those friends who came to see him.’
He could not afford a cleaner or home help and the flat’s kitchen occasionally became a mess. He admitted that he tended to sit and brood during the day but loved it when old friends called and he was always delighted to be asked to lunch.
One of the royals who always remained on good terms with Billy was Lord Snowdon. The two had known each other for decades.
But if Lord Snowdon was sympathetic to Billy’s plight, he perhaps failed to understand the key issue: Billy felt he had been a part of the royal family rather than simply employed by them. He had learned to live in many ways as the royals lived, with servants to buy and cook his food and wash his clothes. It was as difficult for Billy to live an ordinary life as it would have been for anyone so completely institutionalised. Everyone knew that what Billy really needed – and many would argue deserved – was a grace-and-favour apartment.
Snowdon did his best, however, and when a journalist wrote a long, slightly malicious feature about how the two men met regularly every week for lunch – something that they had not in fact done until then – Snowdon was so incensed that he immediately rang Billy and arranged that they should indeed meet for lunch. It was an attempt to beat the journalists at their own game.
‘That’s the only favour the press ever did me!’ Billy would comment wryly. He loved these lunches and in many ways they helped fill the enormous gap left in his life.
Any contact with the family for whom he had worked so long was welcome, as was contact with old friends who remained in service. One or two of the junior staff with whom he had got on well came to see him. One recalled:
Billy was nothing but kindness to me and I can assure you there were no sexual advances at all. I only worked at Clarence House for
a few years but my memories of Billy are all of his kindness and his humour. I went to see him twice in Kennington after he retired and he made a special effort with tea and cakes, and I noticed the tea was expensive and the cake very good. But somehow the flat didn’t look as Gate Lodge had looked. The lodge seemed to reflect someone who loved his life and was proud of what he had achieved. The pictures were all carefully hung and the photos carefully displayed, but in the Kennington flat there was a slightly gloomy, disordered air and the pictures and other items sometimes looked as if they had lost their sparkle. In that way I think they reflected the fact that Billy himself had lost interest in life to some extent.
The last time I saw Billy he had just returned from shopping and he was decidedly unsteady on his feet. His hair had lost its lustre and it was rather wispy, though he still kept it fairly long. There was a lot more grey in it than I’d ever seen before. The thing that really shocked me was his red face and sagging jowls. His once bright eyes had also dimmed and they had the classic yellowy-red look of the heavy drinker. His suit was in a bit of a mess too, at least compared to how it looked in happier days, but I knew that this was all because he was unhappy and struggled to look after himself.
But if some of Billy’s friends recalled his unhappiness, others tell a different story. Caroline Butler, whose family lived near Billy’s flat in Kennington, remembered a more resilient character. Like many of his friends she felt that Billy had been rather let down by the royal household, but she remembered that he was still capable of enjoying himself despite his loss. She recalled watching
the film
The Queen
with him and his reaction to it. He thought it was accurate, except that it showed the Queen Mother having breakfast with other members of the family. He insisted she always had breakfast in bed.
Caroline Butler believes Billy was reasonably happy in his Kennington retirement. She points out that tabloid stories about a run-down council estate in south London were entirely wrong and that the flat in Chester Way was in an attractive area. She also insisted Billy’s flat was bright and clean and beautifully decked out with all the things he and Reg had collected over the years.
She recalled the street lined with flowering cherry trees, and remembered how, in earlier years, Billy and Reg had proudly showed off their works of art, which included sketches of Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth by the designer Norman Hartnell. According to Caroline, Billy’s proudest possession was a photograph of Reg with the Queen Mother at his side and taken on the Kennington flat’s patio.
W
HATEVER LIFE BILLY
was able to carve out for himself in Kennington it was still a far cry from Gate Lodge. Caroline Butler’s memories of Billy in his final years are surprisingly happy ones. She recalled him being in her parents’ flat often or dining at the Wolseley restaurant in Piccadilly. She confirms Lord Snowdon’s regular visits, and insists that though he was occasionally prone to melancholy Billy was generally happy.
But other friends were not so sanguine; they noticed only Billy’s desperation for company, his dislike of being alone and his palpable air of simply not being able to cope with the mundane tasks of everyday life.
As another friend said, ‘He could cope with gaiety and fun, with partying and dining out – especially at his local Italian restaurant, Amici, which he loved – but when he woke in the morning alone and with not much to do each day he despaired.’
He was not entirely abandoned, however. Prince Charles, in addition to generously boosting Billy’s pension, invited him to tea at Clarence House on several occasions during the last months of his life and Billy returned the compliment by inviting Charles down to Kennington, where tea was served in the beautiful cups that the Queen Mother had given Billy all those years ago.
C
ONVERSATIONS WITH BILLY
during what he sometimes called his ‘exile’ revealed a man who wanted to unburden himself but found it difficult. He paid tribute to his Kennington neighbours who tried their best to make life easier for him by inviting him to parties and lunches.
However unhappy he felt at any particular time, he refused to hear a word against the Queen Mother, but it always seemed that there was something slightly odd – something almost pathological about this. ‘It wasn’t entirely rational,’ as one of his Kennington neighbours said.
We all knew she must have been difficult at times and no one would have thought he was being disloyal if he’d grumbled about her now and then. The fact is he had to have an absolutely fixed point in his life and it was her.
He just kept saying, ‘I loved her, you know’, and tears would well up in his eyes. He reserved his anger for the royal household and though his sense of being hard done by increased in the years after he left royal service, I think he was perfectly rational and in many ways perhaps not nearly as angry as he might have been in the circumstances. He was particularly cross with Anstruther and Aird, the former equerries who he accused of working behind his back and showing a complete lack of respect for the Queen Mother’s wishes. He was really quite bitter about it all.
But it was certainly not all doom and gloom. A friend who saw him frequently in his last year or two said, ‘He loved to talk about the happy times, especially in the distant past. He would begin to talk quietly about all the fun he had during his years of service.
‘“Do you know,” he would say, “we often danced together when no one else was around.”
‘She used to tell me she had enjoyed dancing as a girl but now only rarely had the chance. She felt it would be seen as rather undignified except privately at the annual gillies’ ball at Balmoral, but she would often get up and ask me to take a few steps with her, which I rather enjoyed. She also told me the equerries were always trying to get her
to do things she didn’t want to do. “Including get rid of you, William!” she would say.
‘I think she was teasing slightly but then she was a terrific tease. One very curious thing about her was that I can never remember her fully losing her temper with anyone.
‘It was all part of her wonderful self-control, something the royal family in general are so good at. Losing one’s temper is definitely seen as very unseemly but she had something far more important than temper. She had an extraordinary ability with just a slight change in her look and her bearing to bring you to heel. I think I was rather in love with this power she had and it’s a power HM the Queen has too, but not the younger generation.’
