Backstairs Billy (3 page)

Billy vanishes for a while after the move from Birtley to Coventry apart from occasional glimpses of a lively child who ran about the streets but was curiously fastidious. Friends recall a boy who hated to get his clothes dirty and disliked football, which made him very much the odd man out. He had a reputation for being a bit of a sissy but this was combined with an inner toughness. He may not have been much good in a scrap but he was a sarcastic and quick-witted boy who was good at making the bullies feel foolish. One contemporary remembered that though Billy wasn’t sporty and hated to get into fights, he already had a ‘savage tongue’. It was something he had inherited from his mother, who was well known for her waspish put-downs and for the speed
and fearlessness with which she delivered them. No one ever complained in the Tallons’ shop or was rude to her face because she could turn in a second. ‘One minute she was all smiles then next she’d torn your character to shreds with a pointed one-liner,’ recalled one of Billy’s early friends.

Once, when a boy said something rude about Billy’s mother he was livid and in a split second he turned to the boy – who had a reputation for fighting – and spat out, ‘I don’t know that your mother is any better – all fur coat and no knickers, I’ve heard!’

The next we hear of Billy is when he went, aged eleven, to the local school, Barker’s Butts.

The school had come into existence, in the form in which Billy knew it, following the Education Act of 1944. This set up a tripartite system, with grammar schools taking the top ten to fifteen per cent of each age group (these were the elite), technical schools taking those who were deemed intelligent but of a more practical bent, and finally secondary moderns, notoriously bad schools that were effectively dumping grounds for those deemed good for little more than factory work, driving buses or sweeping the streets.

Billy failed his eleven plus and had no choice but to attend a school that had low expectations for its pupils and could attract only those teachers who could not get jobs elsewhere. He was immensely intelligent, as his later career was to show, but, like so many boys condemned to a dreary future by the old tripartite system, he was rejected by a system that gave you one chance and one chance only at age eleven.

Billy began to think for himself in his mid-teens but by then
it was too late – the end of his school days was already looming. He may have collected beautiful china and pictures later in life but he rarely read for pleasure and had no interest in books generally – both legacies of those early uninspiring years.

But even Billy was surprised that, unlike other aspiring Coventry parents, Mabel and William Sr had not tried harder to get him through the eleven plus and into grammar school.

‘I think they were just tired by then,’ he recalled. ‘And they themselves were not academic or ambitious for me in any particular way. I don’t think they really understood the system either; the implications, I mean, of failure at age eleven.’

But, whatever his parents’ level of interest, there is no doubt that Barker’s Butts was what today would be described as a ‘sink school’. Although many ex-pupils remember enjoying their time there, none made any claim for it as a place that taught you to have high aspirations. Peter McGrath attended in the 1950s. He recalled:

The problem was that Barker’s Butts worked on the principle that the children in its care needed only a very basic education – a smattering of geography and history and arithmetic, a bit of
reading and English grammar, but no French or Latin, no physics or biology. Pupils were being made ready for lives as factory workers and bus drivers, shop workers and dustbin men. The only compensation was that daily life among one’s friends made up for some of what the school lacked. Billy later insisted that though the school offered little, he was not particularly unhappy.

With little academic ambition for its pupils, many of whom were sent out on projects to count the number of cars passing along the street or given other inane tasks just to keep them occupied, Barker’s Butts was a drab environment for a boy with ideas above his station.

The school that Billy knew was demolished in the 1960s as part of a local education authority re-organisation. Architecturally it was typical of early twentieth-century board schools – red brick with tall windows and a vaguely Queen Anne appearance. Unlike many board schools, which were and are rather elegant, Barker’s Butts was a long, low building. Other pupils remember the school with a mixture of resignation and downright hostility. Reg Cotter, who was two years ahead of Billy, recalled, ‘We knew we’d failed from the age of eleven.’

The lucky few who avoided Barker’s Butts went on to grammar school, which meant a professional job and maybe even university in Leeds or Birmingham. Barker’s Butts was what people called the factory kids’ school because without a miracle – and there were few enough of those at the time in Coventry – the factory was the chief employer of ex-pupils. A number of boys recalled that the only relief from the sense that you had failed was sport.
The football club – rugby was for the grammar school boys – made life bearable for those who were good at sport. But this only left Billy on the side-lines both literally and metaphorically.

But if the school lacked the polish of the local grammar school, the city of Coventry wasn’t much better.

Coventry in the late 1930s was one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Europe, but when Billy was seven it was largely destroyed by the Luftwaffe in a series of night-time air raids that set light easily to the ancient dried timbers of the city’s houses.

Billy may well have just about remembered the city before the terrible bombing that laid waste to it.

But if the city centre had survived the bombs it would have been destroyed anyway in the 1960s when much of what did survive the war was destroyed by the planning department of the council. Billy once said, ‘I might have gone back if Coventry hadn’t been turned into one of the ugliest places in Europe. After the 1960s it was ghastly for anyone who loved beautiful things. A real shock.’

This was another reason Billy hardly ever returned in later life to the city of his early years. ‘Coventry is a terrible place,’ he would say. ‘It was beautiful if boring when I lived there as a boy but the
planners finished what the Luftwaffe began and now no sane person would spend any more time there than he or she absolutely had to.’

The so-called Gibson Plan to comprehensively re-construct the city in favour of cars, industry and concrete blocks of flats produced the soulless place we see today. Had the city survived it would have been as popular with tourists as York is today – something Billy himself said on a number of occasions – but when the bombs and, worse, the developers had finished their work, the once beautiful city was left as one of the ugliest urban centres in Europe.

The taste for the past had not yet arrived in England and, like youngsters everywhere, Billy and his friends were not interested in old buildings. They wanted parties and cinemas, bright lights and fun. Coundon could only offer a few old pubs along with acres of dereliction.

But, like all children Billy accepted life as he found it, although at some point in his childhood – and it was unusually early, perhaps around the age of ten – he seems to have become aware that war-damaged Coventry was not for him. He became desperate to get away.

A friend with whom he later fell out, and who did not want to be named, said:

Other friends recalled a boy who developed a closed inner world; a boy who became secretive and a bit of a loner. It would be glib to put this down to his growing realisation of his homosexuality, but that no doubt played a part. Billy’s childhood friend Dick Smith lived just a few hundred yards from him in those early years and he stayed in touch after Billy moved to London. He saw him now and then during his first decade at Clarence House. He describes the teenage Billy as having a detached air, always seeming to be on his own, and by the age of fourteen he had certainly lost whatever interest he had once had in the rough and tumble of street games.

Word quickly spread that Billy had managed to get himself a job in the kitchens at Buckingham Palace. Billy’s mother Mabel allegedly dropped it into the conversation whenever she could, but she was vague about what exactly he was doing. Billy’s friends
thought she was proud of the fact that he’d got himself a job in London but was less pleased that people thought he was working in the kitchens, which she felt was beneath her Billy. And, besides, it was not true.

In the streets of Coundon the words ‘Buckingham Palace’ had a glamour that made people indifferent to the details.

Dick Smith said, ‘We were amazed and, in fact, we didn’t believe it at first, but then none of us at that time knew Billy had been writing to the palace for years. That only came out much later when he was well known.’

B
ILLY’S LONGING FOR
a more glamorous life came to dominate his early teens; but where was this life to be found? Well, surprisingly, Billy found it initially all over the city in the form of newspaper stories and magazine features about the doings of the royal family. Likewise, the radio held a fascination for the young man because it regularly broadcast the voices of the royals, as well as news about their trips around the country and abroad.

The old Bakelite wireless at home where the family would sit and listen to the news became a vital means by which Billy, in his mind at least, could wander far away. And news about the royals was far more uncritical at that time than it later became. Journalists wrote in hugely deferential terms, as if their role were to pay homage to the royals, and that, of course, is in stark contrast to more recent times when journalists began actively to try to uncover damaging stories about them.

But in Billy’s early days, radio bulletins would solemnly report the mere fact that the family had travelled from Windsor to Sandringham, or from Buckingham Palace to Balmoral. The tone of reports in those innocent days was one that only hinted at the sort of glamour that so captivated Billy. Here was a world, he thought, that was filled with golden beings far removed from the grime of everyday life in Coventry; beings who travelled the country and the world staying in glamorous places and who were seemingly above criticism, their every move a source of wonder to the British public. Even the coats and dresses worn by the family were described at length in the newspapers and magazines of the time.

So, deeply moved by all that he saw and heard about this glamorous distant world, Billy began, aged about eight, to collect every possible scrap of information he could lay his hands on about the royal family. He filled notebooks with jottings about the family and beautifully kept scrapbooks bulged with cuttings from newspapers and magazines. The old photograph-filled
Picture Post
magazine was a special favourite and where some boys spent their pocket
money on sweets and
Hotspur
magazine, Billy tracked down and bought every publication that included photographs of the latest royal visit.

For Billy it didn’t matter which royal it was – he collected them all, including pictures and stories about George VI, crowned in 1937, but also Mary of Teck, the late king George V’s consort who was to die in 1953. He even collected pictures of Belgian, Spanish and Swedish royalty.

The main focus of Billy’s attention was undoubtedly the King and Queen. He knew Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had married Albert Frederick Arthur George, the future George VI, in 1923, in Westminster Abbey. The wedding was one of the great events of that year with crowds filling Parliament Square, Whitehall and Victoria Street, but, as we have seen, no one at that time had ever imagined that Albert would become king.

Albert was famously shy and retiring; he was a man with an intense dislike of public speaking – he had an appalling stammer – and the various high-profile duties of a monarch filled him with dread. It was the scandal of his brother Edward’s relationship with Wallis Simpson and subsequent abdication in 1936 that led to an extraordinary change in the young royal couple’s life.

The young Billy was fascinated by this turbulent history, which was still relatively recent news when he was a young man. It was still the greatest scandal of the age.

Meanwhile, as his tiny bedroom walls filled up with grainy black and white photographs and news stories cut from every publication
he could lay his hands on, Billy developed what amounted almost to an obsession with the royal family. He would go as far as to fish old magazines out of dustbins to check to see if he had missed a story. In the days when
Picture Post
dominated magazine sales at the newsagents he made sure he secured copies that remained unsold since at that time magazines were ordered on what was called firm sale (rather than sale or return) so Billy knew that if they were not sold by the newsagent they were likely to be thrown away.

By the time he was fifteen Billy had amassed a detailed dossier – almost a miniature library according to one contemporary – of royal lives. The dossier eventually also included stories about distant relatives of the immediate royal family – including stories about the Russian royals – and it covered a period of more than five years.

Billy’s interest in the royals was in marked contrast to his interest in school lessons. But then he would have guessed that no amount of study at Barker’s Butts would rescue him from his fate. He needed another way out, and so he channelled his considerable intelligence into his royal collection and, by the age of eleven, he knew he wanted to work for the royal family.

W
HEN THE COMPTROLLER
of the Royal Household at Buckingham Palace received a carefully written, if slightly clumsily composed letter postmarked Coventry and
addressed directly to George VI, he must have been tempted to throw it into the waste paper basket.

The letter would have arrived in 1947 or early 1948. It explained that the writer was a huge fan of the royal family, was intelligent and hardworking, loyal, conscientious and honest. The writer explained all his good qualities and then asked if he could have a job – any job – at the palace.

Having sent that letter the young Billy Tallon waited, desperately hoping for a positive reply. The King’s office almost certainly did reply, but it was inevitably a gentle brush off, as Billy was too young to leave school. Undaunted, Billy wrote every six months or so from then on, always politely suggesting that as soon as he was able to leave school he would like to work in the royal household.

At school, as the time for leaving aged fifteen approached, the other boys played football and made paper aeroplanes in lessons while Billy dreamed of a new life far away. He later told a friend that, much as he loved his family, especially his mother Mabel, he felt he did not have any really close friends as a child. Towards the end of his life, Billy said:

Barker’s Butts did put many children in for what used to be called CSE exams. CSE stood for Certificate of Secondary Education, a well-intentioned attempt to find some way to recognise the achievements of children who were deemed non-academic. CSE passes were really worth little more than the paper they were written on. Employers knew straight away that an applicant for a job with CSEs rather than O-levels was a child who had failed so far as education was concerned. Billy knew they were worthless and never sat for them.

Though not academic in the conventional sense, Billy was intelligent enough to know that the school could not give him the start in life he wanted, so the letter writing to Buckingham Palace – he always addressed his letters to the palace – continued as he moved toward his fifteenth year when he could leave school.

As luck would have it, around this time one of his letters struck a chord with someone in the royal household. Instead of the usual reply, something new and exciting arrived in the post. Billy himself said on several occasions in later life that he had written to the royals so often partly because he really did hope to get a job but also because he loved the thick embossed envelopes that came back carrying each reply.

The early letters had all thanked him for his interest but regretfully informed him that there were no vacancies. These replies
and their envelopes were carefully added to his collection of royal memorabilia. Billy never regarded them as depressing rejections; they were simply part of a delightful link to a world he longed to be part of.

But then that very different letter arrived.

It asked Billy to present himself to the Comptroller of the Royal Household as soon as he could. Clearly the endless series of letters had paid off because the interview, as Billy later recalled, turned out to be a mere formality.

He had been terrified he would get lost so he deliberately caught a very early train and then wandered about for more than two hours in Green Park, with Buckingham Palace always in view, until it was time to approach a policeman, show his letter and be taken to the side of the palace and in through the servants’ door.

Having had his duties explained to him – opening doors, general fetching and carrying and being obedient to the senior footmen – Billy was sent on his way.

Billy’s mother was delighted when his return to Coventry was quickly followed by a letter confirming that they really had decided to give her son a job. She too saw royal service as a cut above the rest. She was part of a generation that almost venerated the royals and from having been doubtful that Billy would ever be taken on, she was as astonished as Billy himself when the invitation to the interview and then the acceptance letter landed on the doorstep. She was a proud woman and quickly let it be known among the neighbours that Billy was off to London to the royal household. Her son would not be working in the local factories after all.

Mabel coughed up the cost of the train fare and a short while after the letter had arrived Billy packed his little bag – he had one set of spare clothes, some stamps and pen and paper with which to write home – and caught the train back to London to start his new life.

Always devoted to his mother, he promised to write and return home when he got the chance, but typically he didn’t say goodbye to any of the boys he had known either at school or in the neighbouring houses. Billy’s focus had always been elsewhere and the truth is that he had no particularly close friends among the other Coundon boys. His growing awareness of his homosexuality – still then illegal – no doubt intensified his natural instinct to reticence and secrecy, an instinct that years of royal service would only intensify.

Billy wrote home soon after arriving at the palace to say that he had his own little room and had just had tea which consisted
of ‘eggs and chips followed by jelly’. He loved his family but there was no note of missing them at all in this or in subsequent letters. So far as Billy was concerned, he had finally arrived where he was always destined to be.