Backstairs Billy (8 page)
Authors: Tom Quinn
Billy had a knack of seeming to anticipate the Queen Mother’s needs and in the royal household the family members can tell immediately – or at least they think they can – if someone is prepared to
go the extra mile for them. They recognised loyalty and in their own way they reciprocated where they found it. That’s why Billy eventually got his cottage in the Mall. It also explains why, when Billy got into rows with the equerries and advisers, the Queen Mother almost always backed him.
Of course Billy loved praise; he positively bathed in it, but especially when it came from his beloved Queen Mum. But her fondness for him and his habit of constantly suggesting things to her, often in what looked like an over-familiar way, made the equerries and advisers dislike him.
The Queen Mother was a stickler for rules and for doing things properly, but she was quite arbitrary in terms of which rules were to be imposed rigidly and which were to be ignored. Thus, she never forgave her husband’s brother for abdicating, yet after she was told that Sir Anthony Blunt, the art historian, had spied for the Russians, she continued to see him, even inviting him regularly to share her box at the opera. She liked Blunt; he was distantly related to her family and had taken tea with her in Bruton Street early in the century. She didn’t really care that he had been a traitor. When first told of Blunt’s treachery she is reported to have said it was all a long time ago – which it was – and that it was easy to make too much fuss about these things.
But while Billy was opening doors, pouring drinks and helping lay tables, he was also travelling up to Sandringham in Norfolk regularly, as well as to Birkhall on the Balmoral estate in Scotland. He was cementing carefully his relationship with Elizabeth. He
was also developing a taste for a very different kind of life from the one he had known as a young man in Coventry.
John Hobsom, who was one of Billy’s lovers at about this time, remembered a man driven purely by sex rather than concern for others.
Well, Billy didn’t really have lovers, if by that you mean people he might have felt any loyalty to over any period of time. He was loyal to Reg Wilcox in his own way but that didn’t include sexual fidelity. Neither of them minded about that sort of thing and in a bizarre way that made them rather like the royals. People at the top of the social tree seem to think it is very suburban and provincial to get all worked up just because one’s wife or husband is sleeping with other people.
Billy used to say that worrying about that sort of thing was pointless; he even used the word ‘suburban’ once, which I thought was a bit rich given that he really did come from the suburbs of Coventry. But I think Billy was right, about sex and the royals, I mean. He was always saying that when he went up to Balmoral or Sandringham the aristocrats and well-born friends of the royals were always bed-hopping. I’m pretty sure he was making this up because it was the sort of frivolous, slightly mischievous thing he enjoyed saying, but it didn’t mean it was true. He just wanted to amuse and be slightly outrageous; sometimes it was almost as if he just wanted to make a little noise. He didn’t like gaps in the conversation! He used to joke that it would be fun to sprinkle flour along the corridors where people slept and then see where the footsteps led in the morning.
And also I think because he was wary of so many of the rather
grand advisers he didn’t mind saying they got up to all sorts of mischief, but that doesn’t mean it was all untrue. He even told me once that he knew a very upper-class drug dealer who used to visit Kensington Palace regularly when Diana, Princess of Wales was alive. But you never knew with Billy where truth ended and a good story began!
One of the Balmoral gillies whose main job was to take the Queen Mother fishing remembered Billy and the Queen Mother and their unique relationship.
The Queen Mother and William were
always
waving and smiling at each other even if they were parting company for only a few minutes – in fact William’s mannerisms and whole demeanour become uncannily like the Queen Mother. One of the footmen used to say ‘Billy’s the Queen Mother in bloody drag!’
The Queen Mother herself would smile at the servants but rarely talk much to them, with the exception of William and her team of gillies, who she knew were much better at fishing than she was and, in the inevitable informality of the river bank, you could end up saying things to her that you’d later regret.
I once said rather irritably ‘No, no, no, not like that,’ when for the third time she had cast her line to the wrong place. She looked at me and laughed and said, ‘Who is the queen? Is it you or me? Oh yes, let me see – it’s me, isn’t it.’ But she was smiling all the while so I didn’t think I would be sacked quite yet.
But I don’t think the Queen Mother or any other member of the royal family worried in the least about being thought dotty or eccentric.
In fact they enjoyed talking about their own mad relatives. And I think they rather liked Billy, or at least the Queen Mother did, because he was himself rather eccentric.
She used to say, ‘Well, of course we’re bound to be mad, aren’t we, because we spent so many centuries marrying our own relatives.’
Billy loved stories like this but he was careful to re-tell them only to a small group he felt he could trust. He also felt that every intimate story further strengthened his relationship with the Queen Mother. Towards the end of his life, Billy recounted one of his favourites:
The Queen Mother was lunching with other members of the family when she happened to mention Prince Philip’s mother, Alice of Battenberg.
Another member of the family responded by saying that Alice was a wonderful person, but was also rather obsessive and that her biggest failing was her insistence that she was having a sexual relationship with both Jesus Christ and the Buddha.
The Queen Mother, to Billy’s delight, responded instantly: ‘But then Alice always was very spiritual.’
The Queen Mother could also be rather dotty herself, although she was never in the least out of control. In later life this occasionally became more pronounced, particularly when she was in Scotland where she tended to lower her guard. According to one servant she once spent half an hour wandering around the corridors at Balmoral with a long trail of loo paper dangling out of the back of her dress and the servants were all too terrified to say
anything. The crisis ended only when one of the footmen ran up behind her and stood on the loose end of the paper.
Billy disliked stories that made the Queen Mother seem ill-tempered or impatient but he didn’t mind in the least if they created an image of a woman who was a little eccentric so long as they also suggested her humour, her intelligence or her concern for others. But best of all he liked it when the Queen Mother said something slightly cutting, so long as it was funny. This was true even if the story was at his expense.
A famous story involved Billy and his partner Reg Wilcox arguing over some trivial matter and the Queen Mother, fed up with waiting for Billy, shouting from the top of the stairs, ‘When you two old queens have finished, this old queen would like a gin and tonic.’
The story may be apocryphal, but it fits perfectly into what we know of the Queen Mother’s ready wit. The part of it that is suspicious is perhaps the reference to ‘gin and tonic’ because though Billy himself sometimes absentmindedly referred to the Queen Mother’s liking for gin mixed with tonic, he knew that she actually only drank gin mixed with Dubonnet, which she often mixed herself.
Billy’s trips to Scotland were more or less an annual affair but he never really enjoyed them. ‘I only have the corgis for company,’ he once said. And he was not always too keen on the corgis. ‘I’m going to throw one of them down the aeroplane steps one of these days,’ he would sometimes grumble.
Several servants of the time also remember Billy dancing with
the Queen Mother at various balls in Scotland. She was particularly fond of Scottish country dancing, as is the Queen, and Billy was frequently invited to join in. On one occasion at Balmoral he was so exhausted from dancing that he went and hid in a corridor. A young Prince Charles hunted him down and said, ‘You must come, William; Granny needs you.’
He returned and swept the Queen Mother out across the dance floor before being relieved, ten minutes later, by an equerry who continued to dance with a woman who seemed never to tire. Everyone recalled that she had enormous energy and a great capacity for enjoyment. But she could be cutting if she felt other dancers were not up to her standard. She said to Billy on one occasion, ‘Whenever I dance with David [one of the gillies] I have to remind myself to visit my chiropodist.’
Part of the reason for Billy’s dislike of Balmoral was that other, local servants tended to overshadow him and partly – and far more importantly from Billy’s point of view – Balmoral meant he was trapped in the middle of nowhere. Beyond the gates were miles of open countryside. Compared to the attractions of life outside Clarence House, it was a desert.
E
VERYONE SEEMS TO
agree that in his youth and well into his middle years Billy was pursued, as one friend put it, ‘by sexual demons’. Billy admitted to the same friend that he knew from the day he arrived at Buckingham Palace in 1951 that this was an environment in which he could enjoy himself, because he could tell straight away – using what today would be called his instinctive ‘gaydar’ – that below stairs the palace was filled with young homosexual men.
John Reynolds worked in the kitchen in the mid-1950s. He recalled his early days with Billy and other servants of the time:
You felt almost instantly that this was a sort of family – horribly dysfunctional in many ways, but still a family. Most of the men I worked with were delightful and we did have flings with each other now and then and relationships were established.
Two male servants I remember left the palace to live together and do other things – they set up a guest house in the countryside. But Billy was never going to leave – he loved the work in general and the Queen Mother in particular, which is partly why I think he was attracted to Reg Wilcox. Reg was just the same and would rather have died than go and work somewhere else. They were a good example of how gay couples in service could get together – and stay together.
Those who knew both men insist that Reg was very much the passive partner, something that greatly reduced any chance of serious friction between them. But he and Billy also got on well because they had similar backgrounds and because being in service had been central to their lives before they met.
Other similarities between the two men were striking: like Billy, Reg had grown up in the provinces and his parents ran a fish-and-chip shop. Both men had gone into service because they wanted to escape their humdrum lives and be surrounded by glamour and fine things. Both Billy and Reg loved a life that was, by its very nature, camp.
Several of Billy’s former colleagues emphasise this camp nature of royal service.
‘I don’t think you can over-estimate it,’ said one.
You have to remember that the royal palaces and royal life in general, both for the royals themselves and for their servants, are the essence of camp – it is the highest of high camp. All those golden carriages and absurdly pink twin sets, all those rooms full of Russian china and Fabergé eggs. All that theatrical behaviour based on the grand country lifestyle of the Victorian era having survived into the twentieth century in this one little spot in central London. One of Billy’s earliest jobs, which he adored, was actually cleaning the Fabergé eggs. How camp is that?!
R
EG
WILCOX WAS
born on 4 May 1934 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire where his father ran a fish-and-chip shop in which Reg helped out as a young man. He was called up for National Service in 1951 and served as a private with the King’s Royal Hussars. Two years later he applied for a job with the royal family. After a brief interview at Buckingham Palace he became a junior footman in 1954. He was immediately popular and within months everyone – including the equerries and advisers – knew that Reg was someone rather special. He was seen as uncomplaining, extremely efficient, courteous, good humoured and loyal.
By 1957, he was working for the Duke of Windsor, formerly
Edward VIII, in Paris – by all accounts the Duke had asked specially for Reg. In 1959 the Duke’s circumstances changed – it is impossible now to find out exactly what happened – and Reg was back in London and working at Clarence House. Some have said that Reg, who was openly gay, had committed an indiscretion in Paris, but it is far more likely the Queen Mother needed someone of Reg’s standing and reputation. The Queen Mother’s needs would always trump those of the Duke of Windsor.
However, the Duke did pay the young footman a great compliment at the end of their period together, apparently saying that he had never been more beautifully looked after.
There was a short period after Reg returned from Paris when he went back to his father’s chip shop in Yorkshire to help out when his mother was ill, but by the late 1950s he was back in London again and firmly ensconced in Clarence House, where he was to remain until his death.
Reg and Billy hit it off almost from day one and they quickly became lovers – though as we have seen it was not for either of them an exclusive sexual relationship. They took holidays together and spent a great deal of their free time drinking and organising dinner parties, especially when the Queen Mother was away and they had not been obliged to go with her.
Even when they went away together for work there was time for relaxing. Photographs of the two men show them at the seaside on a number of occasions and there were also indiscreet evenings of drunken revelry at Clarence House when the Queen Mother was away. A photograph uncovered after Billy’s death
shows a decidedly drunken-looking Reg wearing one of the Queen Mother’s tiaras.
It is ironic that a job that put both men potentially in the public eye also protected them from scrutiny. Once inside Clarence House they could do what they liked, safe in the knowledge that little information about what went on would leak out. Servants gossiping to outsiders were almost always sacked if their indiscretions were uncovered, but both Reg and Billy had grown up at a time when homosexuality was illegal so caution was ingrained. They let themselves go only among friends and with a trusted few at Clarence House.
There were exceptions to this when Billy went ‘cottaging’ – although so far as anyone can tell they never went looking for men together. Occasionally Reg or Billy – and it was usually Billy – would return from a nocturnal foray looking bruised and battered after a rough encounter with someone who did not appreciate his advances, but he would be patched up and carry on working the next day as if nothing had happened.
The one time Billy needed a more significant amount of time off was after he was stabbed in the leg by a furious young man who he had propositioned when drunk. The wound took more than a week to heal and Billy had to make his excuses and stay in bed. If the Queen Mother suspected anything she did not say and Billy was sent a get-well card and waited on by the lower servants until he had recovered.
After another slightly less damaging encounter, Billy had to pretend that the large plaster on his cheek was the result of a shaving
accident – in fact he had been badly scratched by a young man he’d picked up in Soho. When she saw Billy that morning the Queen Mother said, ‘I do hope you have not fallen out with one of your young friends. We must ask Reg to keep an eye on you!’
By 1975, Reg had been promoted to Senior Queen’s Footman. Then, in 1978, he was promoted to Deputy Steward and Page of the Presence, working directly under Billy. It was a position he retained until his death. Like Billy, he relished his ancient title, however absurd it might sound to outsiders. He was rewarded with the Royal Victorian Medal in 1979 and then a bar to the medal in 1997. The medal had been established by Queen Victoria in 1896 as a reward for personal services to the monarch. Reg was also awarded the Queen’s Long and Faithful Service Medal.
Other servants with lives outside royal service were always baffled that Billy and Reg should have suffered decades of low pay without complaint, concentrating instead on these meaningless awards. But, for Billy and Reg, they were not meaningless at all – they gave them the status and sense of self-worth they had always craved.
