The Queen Mother (102 page)

The visit was fixed for the middle of October 1942, but to the Queen’s embarrassment it had to be delayed because of her illness.
⁷⁰
She finally returned from the peaceful beauty of the Highlands to the grime of wartime London on the night of 19 October. Writing to Queen Mary to tell her of Mrs Roosevelt’s imminent arrival, she said, ‘The whole affair is such a deadly secret owing to the flying risk’; she hoped the President’s wife could spend a night with Queen Mary at Badminton. ‘It is
so
dreary at Buckingham Palace, so dirty & dark and draughty,’ and she felt very sorry for the housekeeper and the maids who had to keep a half-ruined house halfway presentable.
⁷¹
She decided to lend Mrs Roosevelt her own bedroom; she had had some small sheets of isinglass put into the window frames whose larger panes had been blown out. The preparations showed her that it was quite difficult putting up even a single guest in the Palace at this time. Fortunately Mrs Roosevelt travelled very simply, with just one secretary.
⁷²

The President’s wife was delayed by bad weather, and finally arrived in London on 23 October; the King and Queen met her at Paddington station and took her to tea at the Palace with the Princesses. Eleanor Roosevelt found Princess Elizabeth ‘very attractive, quite serious, with a good deal of character. She asked a great deal of questions about life’ in the United States.
⁷³
Mrs Roosevelt was far from demanding, but she was shocked by the conditions in which Britons had to live, even in the Palace. The Queen showed her to her rooms and Mrs Roosevelt observed the draughts, the lack of window panes and the black line painted around the bath showing just how little water was allowed to be drawn. In her diary she wrote that the Palace was ‘an enormous place and without heat. I do not see how they keep the dampness out.’
⁷⁴

That night the King and the Queen gave a dinner for her – the Churchills, Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food, General Smuts and the Mountbattens were among the guests. Woolton told her that the indifferent food – fishcakes, cold chicken and ham with salad and two
vegetables – was much the same as would be found in any house in England, and would have shocked the King’s grandfather. Mrs Roosevelt did note, however, that it was served on gold and silver plate.
⁷⁵

The food may not have been memorable but there was a great air of excitement at the Palace that evening. General Montgomery had that day launched at El Alamein the offensive that would eventually destroy German power in North Africa. The Prime Minister was understandably distracted. Even the showing of the new Noël Coward film,
In Which We Serve
, a hymn to the courage of the navy based on Louis Mountbatten’s command of HMS
Kelly
, did not divert him. He was, according to Tommy Lascelles, ‘like a cat on hot bricks’ waiting for news from the desert battlefield;
⁷⁶
he finally telephoned 10 Downing Street himself and, on hearing that the initial reports were favourable, came back to the party singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ with great enthusiasm and rather less sense of tune.
⁷⁷
Britain’s first victory in three years of warfare was close at hand.

Next day the King and Queen took their American visitor to a lunch attended by heads of British women’s services and organizations. Conscription of women under thirty had been introduced at the end of 1941 – they were allowed to choose between the auxiliary services and industrial jobs. The mobilization had been remarkable: according to figures sent to the Queen subsequently by Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour and National Service, fully 90 per cent of single women between the ages of eighteen and forty were now employed in industry, civil defence or the forces and the corresponding figure for married women with children under fourteen was no less than 76 per cent.
⁷⁸

That afternoon the King and Queen took their guest by car to see St Paul’s Cathedral and many of the bomb-damaged areas in the City and East End of London. Eleanor Roosevelt was stunned. London, she said, ‘is flat for blocks’. She realized that parts of the world’s common heritage had been destroyed, but most shocking of all to her were the countless homes which had been razed.

The following day Mrs Roosevelt left the Palace to embark on an arduous tour of Britain, both to visit American camps and airfields and to see how the British were facing the hardship of war in factories and bombed towns all over the country, talking to hundreds of people. She had a sense of the cold, of the shortages, of the blackout and, particularly extraordinary to an American, of the terrifying nearness of
the enemy. It was ‘a curious feeling’, she said, to stand at Dover and see the enemy lines just a few miles across the Channel. She was struck by English stoicism and enthusiasm and by how everyone contributed to one goal – victory. She found enormous gratitude for American help and
everyone
, she said, was welcoming to American soldiers.
⁷⁹

Mrs Roosevelt travelled extensively, and visited Queen Mary at Badminton. ‘I liked her, she is so nice & very intelligent, has a wonderful grasp of things & is evidently impressed at what our women are doing – what a good thing she came over to see things for herself,’ wrote Queen Mary.
⁸⁰
Lascelles commented of the President’s wife, ‘she looks like a she-camel, and is tough; but I like her, and see dignity, even greatness in her.’
⁸¹
The Queen thought her guest charming, understanding of and sympathetic to ‘our ideals & difficulties’.
⁸²

There was only one minor irritation provoked by Mrs Roosevelt’s visit: she tried – and failed – to persuade the Queen to grant an interview to a friend of hers who was also in London, Mrs Bruce Gould, of the American magazine,
Ladies’ Home Journal
. The Foreign Office supported the idea with vigour but the Queen had no such wish. Tommy Lascelles wrote succinctly in his diary that Americans failed to recognize the unique position of the King and Queen. It would be no more appropriate for them to give interviews than it would be for the Pope to go to a race meeting, or the President to a bawdy house. He thought the British public had no time for a ‘chatty’ monarch – indeed that was why Edward VIII could never have made a good king.
⁸³

Back in the White House Mrs Roosevelt gave a press conference in which she said she had been greatly impressed by the fact that in Britain ‘there is only one thing in everyone’s mind, and that is “we are fighting the war”,’ whereas in America there was much less pressure. She also noted how standards of living had fallen for everyone; ‘for instance, in Buckingham Palace, they will not light a fire in the fireplace until December 1st. That’s the uniform rule.’
⁸⁴
The war, she thought, was changing Britain fundamentally and it would never be able to ‘go back to the old system. The change is in the whole old social scale. Certain types of living will never be possible again. The people are now working side by side, getting to know each other well, as they never did before, from all classes.’ She thought the length of
the war still to come depended on how much Americans were prepared to sacrifice to help.
⁸⁵

Lascelles sent a transcript of this press conference to the Queen, who thought that her guest had drawn ‘quite a good & sober picture of this incredibly gallant country’. Mrs Roosevelt, she thought, had wisely understated the hardships and sacrifices because she did not want to appear too pro-British.
⁸⁶

*

O
N
T
UESDAY
3 N
OVEMBER
the Prime Minister was due at the Palace for his weekly lunchtime discussion with the King and Queen. Churchill endeavoured not to be late for his King, but this lunchtime he was delayed and, the Queen later told his daughter Mary, the King became irritated.
⁸⁷
Eventually the Prime Minister arrived at the Palace, carrying before him a red dispatch box. He strode towards the King, bowed and made an extraordinary announcement. ‘He said’, the King recorded in his diary, ‘ “I bring you victory.” ’
⁸⁸
The Queen was astonished. ‘I remember we looked at each other,’ said the Queen later, ‘and we thought, “Is he going mad?” ’ She added, ‘We had not heard that word since the war began.’
⁸⁹

Churchill knew what he was saying. The King was overjoyed by the contents of the dispatch box. He wrote in his diary that night that it contained two top-secret intercepted ‘Boniface’ radio signals from Rommel to Hitler.
^*
In these messages, wrote the King, ‘Rommel gave Hitler a very depressing account of the battle in Egypt from his point of view. He was greatly outnumbered by troops & tanks & armoured vehicles, & was short of petrol & ammunition in the forward areas & in the rear areas there was none … This is very good news … What rejoicing there will be.’
⁹⁰

Whether or not the Queen was privy to the closely guarded and vital secrets about British decryption of German messages cannot be known. It may be doubted that they were revealed to her. But they were revealed to the King, and he took her into his confidence on almost every matter during the war. Indeed, given the closeness of their relationship it would have been strange if he had not done so. Long afterwards, when asked if she had shared the King’s wartime burdens and whether he had told her much, she replied, ‘Oh yes, he told me everything. Well one had to, you see, because you couldn’t not, in a way. There was only us there. So obviously he had to tell one things. But one was so dreadfully discreet, that even now I feel nervous sometimes, about talking about things. You know, you knew something and you couldn’t say a word about it, when you heard people talking absolute nonsense.’
⁹¹

Next day, 4 November 1942, the King received another welcome telegram. General Alexander, Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, cabled Churchill that after twelve days of heavy & violent fighting the Eighth Army had inflicted a heavy defeat on Rommel’s forces at El Alamein. Churchill sent Alexander’s telegram to the King, who pinned it into his diary, in which he wrote that day: ‘A Victory at last. How good it is for the nerves.’
⁹²
That night, when a BBC announcer interrupted programming to advise listeners that the best news for years would be broadcast at midnight, his voice was said to be trembling with excitement.
⁹³

Alamein was a catharsis. But of course the thousands of personal tragedies continued. That same day the Queen had to send condolences to her friends the Halifaxes in Washington – their son Peter had been killed in the fighting in Egypt.
⁹⁴
Dorothy Halifax thanked her for her sympathy and, with the stoicism which so many people displayed during the war, replied, ‘We now rejoice with Your Majesties at the good news of the battle in Egypt in which Peter was allowed to play a small part.’
⁹⁵

When the scale of the victory at El Alamein was confirmed and the success of American and British landings in Morocco and Algeria – Operation Torch – became clear, Churchill warned against euphoria. ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’
⁹⁶
Some rejoicing was called for and the government ordered that church bells, silenced since June 1940, be rung in celebration. Nothing symbolized better the renewal
of hope than the bells pealing from towers and spires in every parish of the land.

In 1943 Stalin began to inflict serious defeats upon the Germans in Russia. Britain and America made more and more progress in North Africa. On 4 February, General Alexander sent his celebrated telegram to the Prime Minister: ‘SIR, The orders you gave me on August 15, 1942 have been fulfilled. His Majesty’s enemies, together with their impedimenta, have been completely eliminated from Egypt, Cyrenaica, Libya and Tripolitana. I now await your further instructions.’
⁹⁷
The next instruction was to inflict total defeat on the Axis forces still in Africa. This was finally achieved with the surrender of the last-remaining enemy troops on 13 May 1943. ‘It is an overwhelming victory,’ wrote the King.
⁹⁸

The Queen was both infected and a little concerned by the new optimism. ‘I am sure that this year is going to be a difficult one,’ she wrote to Osbert Sitwell, ‘because everyone is expecting so much. I am always a little alarmed when a sense of optimism sweeps the country, tho’ I have infinite trust in the level heads of the Britons who live in these Islands.’ She was more concerned about the perhaps inevitable disagreements between Britain and her allies. She had appreciated the ‘arm-stretching sensation of freedom and independence’ of the terrifying days when Britain was alone in 1940. Now she was ‘conscious of a closing in of too many countries with all their jealousies, bitternesses, & unintelligent criticisms, and yet this must be a wrong feeling, for it is so very important to keep together & work together to win the peace.’
⁹⁹

Relationships among the Allies were certainly changing and not to Britain’s advantage. At the Casablanca meeting with Roosevelt in January 1943, Churchill persuaded the American President that the cross-Channel invasion of Europe would have to be postponed till 1944, and in the meantime the Mediterranean campaign should be emphasized, with an invasion of Sicily. From now on the overwhelming might of America and the increasing power of Russia combined to diminish British influence among the ‘Big Three’.
¹⁰⁰

The Queen continued her visits to places, people and institutions involved in the war effort, often with the King, sometimes alone. At the end of January they visited aerodromes around Norwich. They found it an interesting day, much less formal than usual, the King noted in his diary. They listened as four pilots were briefed for a
mission over Holland in low-flying Typhoons and then watched them take off. Fog forced them back. At Ludham they met No. 167 Squadron, ‘& while we were there one of the pilots returned having just shot down his first Junkers 88. We were all thrilled but he was quite calm.’
¹⁰¹