The Queen Mother (111 page)

In the event no home could be found for the college until 1947, when Cumberland Lodge, a former royal residence in Windsor Great Park, fell vacant, whereupon the King and Queen decided to offer it to Miss Buller’s foundation. They lent furniture, pictures and other household goods to the college, known first as St Catharine’s, Cumberland Lodge, and renamed King George VI and Queen Elizabeth’s Foundation of St Catharine’s in 1966. Miss Buller became warden and Elizabeth Elphinstone assistant warden. A distinguished academic, Sir Walter Moberly, who had been chairman of the University Grants Committee and was the author of an important work,
The Crisis in the Universities
, was appointed principal. Like the Queen and Amy Buller
he was a firm believer in the value of Christian insight in academic studies.

St Catharine’s was – and remains – a Christian foundation but it brought together those with widely divergent political and religious views. Much of its early work was a strenuous attempt to bring out into the open the assumptions which underlie different points of view and to encourage students to persist in such investigations. It promoted the civilized values which had arisen from the millennia of Christianity. The Queen wrote to Elizabeth Elphinstone, ‘I do take it very seriously, and am quite certain that it is doing, & will do, immense good.’
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For decades to come St Catharine’s offered university staff and students the opportunity to examine their own studies and explore the nature of man and society and the Christian interpretation of life as against the various secular alternatives. Its lasting success owes much to the Queen’s patronage.

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T
HROUGHOUT
1946
IT
became ever more clear that the principal consequence of the war was the extreme poverty of the country. The Labour government’s promise to extend state ownership and thus to build a New Jerusalem in Britain’s ‘green and pleasant land’ had been enthusiastically accepted by the electorate in 1945, but inevitably disappointment and even disillusion followed. London remained a wrecked city; too often to the victors their country seemed neither green nor particularly pleasant. Bread had not been rationed during the war – but now it was. All other foods, clothing and fuel were in short supply or even rationed. The spiv had become an important character in the wasteland of post-war Britain: black-market goods were eagerly sought – by those who had the cash. Austerity was the watchword. On the other hand, for millions of people in Britain, perhaps the majority, the post-war years were not overwhelmingly bleak. On the contrary this was the first time in which they could feel security – with full employment, national insurance and national assistance, the advent of a national health service. There was rationing but, by contrast with the years after the end of the First World War, this meant that the poor could obtain food, and limited goods were shared out more equitably. The Labour government was much criticized but it did not lose a single by-election in the immediate post-war years and its vote in many working-class areas actually grew.

The war had demonstrated Britain’s dependence on soldiers from the Empire. And now Britain depended on the Empire for much of her food and raw materials. Royal tours to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere were envisaged as a means of giving thanks to the peoples of the Dominions. South Africa was chosen as the first such destination. During the war the King and Queen had discussed such a tour with their friend Field Marshal Smuts, the South African Prime Minister. For Smuts, the tour was politically important, as a means of uniting the country and bolstering his position against the Nationalist Party, which proposed to transform the existing segregation into apartheid and which was generally anti-British. The formal invitation, when it came in 1946, was addressed also to the two Princesses. For the King and Queen this interlude away from home, with their two growing daughters, had a certain poignancy, particularly since it seemed unlikely that ‘we four’ would remain a simple quartet for very long.

Their departure in early 1947 coincided with the most bitter winter in recent memory. The cold, combined with post-war rationing and the general austerity embraced and imposed by the government, made Britain a truly wretched place. The workings of Big Ben froze solid, as did the Thames. Much production just stopped – the ice and snow forced the coalmines and the ports to close. There was a fuel crisis and constant power cuts. Life was miserable. When the time came for their voyage to begin, both the King and the Queen were reluctant to leave.

The Queen had read widely about both the history and the natural life of South Africa. She understood that the journey would be complicated. Unlike Australia, New Zealand and (to a lesser extent) Canada, South Africa was neither homogeneous nor automatically inclined towards Britain. Instead, two races – the Dutch and the British – competed with each other over their visions and their shares of the country and their relationships with the huge indigenous black population, the Coloureds and the Indians. There were two capitals (Cape Town and Pretoria), two national anthems, two national flags. The King and Queen saw it as one of their primary purposes to try and bring as much unity as possible to the divided nation. The King was invited to open Parliament in Cape Town.

Both he and the Queen had lessons in Afrikaans; the Queen took with her for the voyage the lists of the phonetic equivalents of words
and phrases given her by her tutor.
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Norman Hartnell designed most of the clothes for her and her daughters; in the Queen’s case they had a certain theatricality that served to project her presence to the forefront of every occasion. Her hats, designed by the Danish milliner Aage Thaarup, introduced the swept-up brim, which she liked because it did not hide her face or her smile.

The immediate Household staff for the tour numbered ten; they included Tommy Lascelles and Michael Adeane (Private Secretary and Assistant Private Secretary), Tom Harvey, the Queen’s Private Secretary, Lieutenant Commander Peter Ashmore and Group Captain Peter Townsend (equerries), Edmund (‘Ted’) Grove (Chief Clerk). The Queen took Lady Harlech and Lady Delia Peel as ladies in waiting, and Lady Margaret Egerton was lady in waiting to the Princesses. The Queen also had two maids and her own hairdresser. An official tour diary was kept by the King’s Press Secretary, Captain Lewis Ritchie, RN. Ted Grove wrote long letters home to his wife which formed a more intimate private diary of the trip.

On 1 February 1947 they sailed from Portsmouth in HMS
Vanguard
, a new battleship which Princess Elizabeth had launched on Clydeside in 1944; their quarters were made slightly more comfortable by the Queen’s choice of soft furnishings and familiar satinwood furniture borrowed from the royal yacht. As on previous voyages, prints of familiar scenes adorned the walls: the Queen chose the ‘Cries of London’ series. Off the Isle of Wight, the double column of the Home Fleet made a fine sight. As Princess Elizabeth identified the warships for her sister, the Queen was busy with her cine camera filming it all. Their passage through the Bay of Biscay, however, was rough and disagreeable. The King and the two Princesses kept to their cabins. On the second and third days, only the Queen felt strong enough to dine with the Household. ‘She was certainly looking better than I felt,’ Ted Grove wrote home.
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News of their discomfort was published in London and the ever affectionate Arthur Penn wrote to the Queen to commiserate about ‘the extreme disloyalty of the weather which has dogged you … Even the mainbrace has had to be spliced, I learn, which gives one some idea of the savagery of the tempest.’ He said that he ‘felt very low when I turned my back, on Friday, on the ship which was bearing away so many of the people who contribute most to the happiness of my life … It’s
disgusting
being without you, but I knew it would be.’
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By the fifth day they had passed the Azores, and with the warm weather the King and Queen started to enjoy life on board ship. A friendly sense of fun and games developed. One night under a full moon the Queen, the two Princesses and Lady Margaret Egerton danced an eightsome reel with four ship’s officers on the quarterdeck. Rather as Elizabeth Bowes Lyon used to correspond with her governess, Princess Elizabeth reported to Crawfie: ‘The officers are charming, and we have had great fun with them … There are one or two real smashers, and I bet you’d have a WONDERFUL time if you were here.’
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Amusement on board was ‘home-grown’; the ship’s company gave a floorshow one night, on others Delia Peel played the piano for community singing; films were shown in the King’s dining room. The press photographers begged for something to reveal and captured the family party playing deck games with the naval officers: in the background the royal parents, always impeccably dressed, watched their daughters. All took some part in the traditional high jinks of Crossing the Line. The King and Queen, veterans of King Neptune’s demesne, were given Oceanic season tickets; the Princesses had their noses powdered with a gigantic puff and were given a candied cherry instead of a soap pill.
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On the calmer seas, the royal party were able to visit the escorting ships, including the aircraft carrier HMS
Implacable
, which the Queen had launched in Glasgow in 1942. Now she told the ship’s company: ‘To me that was one of the most memorable days in those long years of war.’ She had followed the voyages of ‘her ship’ with warm interest. ‘
Implacable
made a notable contribution to our final victory, and I need not say that it was with deep pride that I heard of her achievements.’
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Inevitably, the holiday spirit was dampened by the King’s growing anxiety about news of the ever worsening situation in Britain. He felt that, having shared so many trials with his people during the war, he should now be there to show sympathy and solidarity with them. Princess Elizabeth wrote regularly to Queen Mary, and admitted to their feelings of frustration: ‘We hear such terrible stories of the weather and fuel situation at home, and I do hope you have not suffered too much. While we were dripping in the tropics, it was hard to imagine the conditions under which you were living, and I for one felt rather guilty that we had got away to the sun while everyone else was freezing!’
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On the eve of their arrival in Cape Town, the King
sent a telegram to Attlee, suggesting that he should come home by air. Attlee thought this would only increase the sense of national crisis and politely rejected the idea. But the King’s feeling of guilt continued.
⁷³

For the Princesses, never before out of Britain, the landfall in South Africa was exciting. Princess Elizabeth wrote to her grandmother: ‘When I caught my first glimpse of Table Mountain I could hardly believe that anything could be so beautiful.’
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As the ship approached land, a great cheer went up from the dockside. The Queen came ashore wearing an ice-blue dress with floating panels bordered with South African ostrich feathers and a matching hat, also trimmed with feathers. The town was in fiesta mood. ‘There is bunting everywhere and thousands more people have crowded into the town from the surrounding districts … The Queen with her charm has captured them all,’ Ted Grove told his wife.
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The first formal ceremony was a solemn procession of both Houses of Parliament to present loyal addresses to the King and Queen at Government House, and in the first of many additions to the programme the King invested Field Marshal Smuts with the Order of Merit. One evening the Queen added a personal touch to the work of reconciliation between Britain and the descendants of the Boers whom Britain had fought at the turn of the century. After dinner with Smuts at Groote Schuur, the prime-ministerial residence that had once been the home of Cecil Rhodes, she handed back to him the family bible of Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal during the Boer War and a national hero who had died in 1904. The bible had been looted during the Boer War and taken to England; now the little ceremony, in which the Queen laid this immense and beautifully bound volume in Smuts’s hands, struck Lascelles as ‘a remarkable picture in the kaleidoscope of history’.
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For South African society, the garden party at the Governor General’s country house, Westbrook, was a high spot. Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, who wore short afternoon frocks, were surprised that all the ladies of Cape Town were in long dresses.
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The Queen, however, met their highest standards: ostrich feathers decorated not only the sleeves of her long gown and her hat, but also her parasol. The radio carried enthusiastic reports of their progress throughout the country. Enid Bagnold, the author of
National Velvet
, who had come to South Africa in part to see the tour, wrote, ‘The King and Queen’s every breath and movement is blown through Africa
at all hours on the wireless, so that I myself am worked up and await with excitement to know what they are wearing. There was a woman commentator in Cape Town who completely lost her head and kept shouting on the first day “But she’s lovely. Oh, she’s lovely, lovely.” And the Princesses, “Oh, they’re lovely, lovely.” ’
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All of them, but particularly the Princesses, were amazed by the warmth of the sunshine as well as of the welcome. They could hardly believe the vast blue skies, the vibrant colours, the cornucopias of food. The Princesses were no less astonished by the shops and gazed in the windows as they drove by. They had never seen anything like it in England, the Queen later recalled. ‘Rolls of silk, garden chairs, all the things you hadn’t seen at all. A young person growing up in the war was totally cut off from those sort of things.’
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A visit to the races at Kenilworth for the Cape of Good Hope Derby was made more enjoyable when the Queen and the Princesses backed the winner. That night at a ball for the non-European community, the Queen was visibly delighted by a cheerful interpretation of an old-fashioned quadrille. Entranced, the family stayed on long after they should have departed. Ted Grove wrote that the 5,000 dancers, in their evening dress, ‘made a glorious pageant of colour’.
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