The Queen Mother (123 page)
Authors: William Shawcross
She had been dreading going alone to Sandringham that summer – as Queen Mary wrote in a sympathetic letter, being there for the first time alone ‘must have been a severe test to your shattered nerves’. She understood what her daughter-in-law was going through: ‘all the intimate things one was accustomed to discuss with one’s husband & how one misses the talks’, and felt deeply sorry for her.
60
Doris Vyner was more optimistic – she hoped that Queen Elizabeth would feel the King’s presence close to her at Sandringham.
61
To her surprise and gratitude, that was indeed how Queen Elizabeth felt at
Sandringham that summer. She attended the King’s Lynn Festival to hear a recital by her friend and future lady in waiting Ruth Fermoy, and visited the Sandringham Flower Show, another hardy perennial of hers through the decades to come. She went to a concert by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir John Barbirolli, in St Nicholas’s Church at Dersingham; Vaughan Williams was in the audience and his Fifth Symphony was performed.
These were friendly, unpretentious local events and she loved them. Edward Seago, who came to stay, and Cynthia Spencer, who was in waiting on her, commented on the peacefulness that surrounded her at Sandringham.
62
She was aware of it herself and wrote to Queen Mary, ‘I have felt more at peace than any time since February. Being surrounded by people who loved Bertie, has made me feel
very
close to him.’
63
To her daughter, the Queen, she wrote that ‘I felt an amazing feeling of relief & peace, which I have not felt since Papa died. It was just as if Sandringham opened its arms to me, & I sank into them thankfully.’ Although the house was utterly bound up with the King, ‘I love the people & all that happens here, & to be amongst them is a relief & a healing.’ She reminded her daughter that, when Queen Mary was widowed, the King had told her that she must still treat Sandringham as her home. ‘I would so love it if you would say that to me too.’ She would not come often but she would love to know she could come once in a while.
64
The Queen replied at once to her mother that she was ‘very, very thankful’ that the visit had been so happy. ‘I had been in a fever in case it would prove too much agony for you.’ She said that ‘
of course
’ her mother must continue to treat Sandringham as her home and go there whenever she wanted.
65
After her birthday, the Queen Mother, as always in August, removed to Scotland. First she stayed with the Vyners, making more plans for Mey, and then she went back to the Highlands and Balmoral. She had to prepare for another daunting change: she was to move out of Balmoral and into Birkhall, where she would live without her family. She was concerned; the house had many memories of happy days at the beginning of her marriage but since then she had come to see Balmoral as her Scottish home and after so many years in the Castle, Birkhall seemed very cramped.
66
To her sister May she wrote that it was ‘rather awful’ being there instead of at Balmoral and that she felt completely lost without her husband.
67
Even so, she had some friends to stay, among them D’Arcy
Osborne, whom she taught to play canasta.
68
She told him afterwards how glad she had been of his presence – ‘You were one of the
very
few friends I wanted to see – you were so kind & understanding, and I was so very grateful to you. Next year I hope to be more brave.’ For the moment she took comfort in her grandchildren, Charles and Anne. ‘Charles is a great love of mine,’ she said to Osborne. ‘He is such a darling & so like his mother when she was a small child.’
69
The peace and optimism she had felt at Sandringham did not last through that autumn. ‘I suppose that one will never feel the same again. I talk & laugh & listen, but one lives in a dream, & I expect that one’s real self dies when one’s husband dies, and only a ghost remains.’ What upset her, she said, were people who looked at her with a penetrating expression and asked, ‘are you feeling BETTER’, and those who said ‘ “but what a wonderful death for the King – how that must comfort you”. If only they knew!’
70
Gradually she came out of herself. Edith Sitwell sent her a copy of her new literary anthology,
A Book of Flowers
. This turned out to be an inspired gift. Queen Elizabeth wrote to her:
I started to read it, sitting by the river, and it was a day when one felt engulfed by great black clouds of unhappiness and misery, and I found a sort of peace stealing round my heart as I read such lovely poems and heavenly words.
I found a hope in George Herbert’s poem, ‘Who could have thought my shrivel’d heart, could have recovered greennesse. It was gone quite underground.’ And I thought how small and selfish is sorrow. But it bangs one about until one is senseless, and I can never thank you enough for giving me such a delicious book wherein I found so much beauty and hope.
71
She was still considering how exactly she should continue her official life. The uncertainty was difficult for her ladies in waiting too, as she postponed making any decision about which of them she wished to keep in her new Household. Arthur Penn wrote to Lady Spencer about their anxieties; as a lifelong friend, he understood Queen Elizabeth well. He was both sympathetic to the ladies and frank, if not tart, about a particular failing of their mistress: ‘The Queen, bless her heart, has cultivated procrastination to a degree which is really an art – when one is vexed, as I fear I often am, one should recall that the Bowes Lyons are the laziest family in the world. Against this reflection
it becomes remarkable that she accomplishes so much.’
72
Penn believed he understood why Queen Elizabeth had not yet informed her ladies of her intentions. ‘I think it possible that this omission may be the reflection of what has been apparent from the first, a sturdy repudiation of any idea that HM has any intention, because she is widowed, of relinquishing all to which she has become accustomed.’
73
She did not give up any of her ladies.
During the autumn of 1952, Queen Elizabeth had a long conversation with Winston Churchill. According to his daughter Mary Soames, Churchill took it upon himself to tell Queen Elizabeth that, despite the death of the King and the accession of the Queen, she still had an enormously important part to play in British public life.
She had met Churchill at dinner with the Salisburys on 1 August, and she wrote afterwards to Betty Salisbury, ‘Winston was so angelic about the King – he has such tender understanding, & I was so touched & helped.’
74
Then she saw him again in Scotland; he was staying at Balmoral for the Prime Minister’s annual autumn visit and asked if he could come to see her at Birkhall. Her lady in waiting, Jean Rankin, told him to arrive unannounced, and on 2 October he drove over. ‘He was absolutely charming & very interesting,’ Queen Elizabeth wrote to Lord Salisbury, ‘and I realised suddenly how very much I am now cut off from “inside” information. He is truly a remarkable man, & with great delicacy of feeling too.’
75
This may have been the crucial conversation during which he persuaded her that she still had a vital national role. Jean Rankin saw that his visit made a difference to Queen Elizabeth. ‘I think he must have said things which made her realise how important it was for her to carry on, how much people wanted her to do things as she had before.’
76
Throughout that autumn she began to pick up the pace of her private interests and her official work. The journal of her activities maintained by her ladies in waiting from the 1950s until the end of her life shows how her interests were concentrated: church, army and charities dominated her public life; in private, music, ballet, art and – a relatively new interest – horses drew her attention, and spilled over into her choice of patronages and engagements. Many of her public duties she now carried out with Princess Margaret at her side. Among the official engagements she undertook in Scotland were a visit to the oil refinery at Grangemouth, and the unveiling of the War Memorial to the Commandos at Spean Bridge. As always, she visited the Lord
Roberts’ Workshops in Dundee and the Black Watch Memorial Home at Dunalistair. (This became an annual visit until the 1990s.) In mid-October she went back to London but there was little let-up. In the weeks leading up to Christmas her diary was full. There were visits to her regiments, to almshouses, to prize givings, concerts and recitals, the theatre and the ballet, the unveiling of monuments and many official dinners.
She had another important preoccupation: the search for a biographer for the King. It would not be an easy book to write, she thought. ‘There can be very few Kings of England whose reigns were so harried and harassed by troubles & worries & anxieties on such an immense scale,’ she wrote to Lascelles.
First the abdication, & all the agony of mind. I doubt if people realise how horrible it all was to the King & me – to feel unwanted, & to undertake such a job for such a dreadful reason – & it was a terrible experience. Then the War with all its agony, & then ‘after the War’, which was a dreadful strain upon the King. I suppose that we have been through a revolution and, as usual, people hardly realised what was happening to them. All this crammed into 15 short years – it is a dizzy thought.
77
Lascelles proposed John Wheeler-Bennett, a distinguished military historian, as official biographer. He wrote vividly and accurately, Lascelles considered, and had a reputation as a trustworthy historian; coincidentally he had also been a pupil of Lionel Logue.
78
(He had a stammer induced when a German bomb was dropped on his school during the First World War.) Moreover he had spent much time as a traveller and writer in Germany between the wars and was one of the first British commentators to recognize the evil of Nazism.
79
He was, in fact, well qualified to inspire Queen Elizabeth’s confidence, and to give her reason to believe that he would be sympathetic to the challenges faced by the King.
She saw Wheeler-Bennett just before Christmas 1952, liked him, and agreed that he should be given the task. Early in 1953 she promised to send him, through Lascelles, the diaries the King had kept during the war – a decision which took much thought, for the King had intended them to be kept closed in the Royal Archives. ‘And yet I feel that it is very important for someone like Wheeler B to read this day to day account of these terrible days.’
80
Later in the year she invited the author to stay at Birkhall to gather atmosphere and information.
81
He gained insights, but at a certain cost. Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart later recorded that Wheeler-Bennett:
gave us an amusing account of his visit to Balmoral to see the Queen and to Birkhall to see the Queen Mother. At Balmoral the Queen kept off the book till the last morning when she took Jack for a long eight (?) mile walk. Jack, who was not dressed nor shod for such a walk and was more or less ‘beat’ when he got back to Balmoral, collected his suitcase and drove over to Birkhall. The Queen Mother promptly took him for an afternoon walk as long as his morning walk with the Queen. When they returned to the house, Jack wilted visibly. The Queen Mother said to him: ‘Did my daughter, by any chance, take you for one of her walks this morning?’ Jack admitted that she had. ‘Then’, said the Queen Mother, ‘champagne is the only remedy.’
82
She continued to talk to him regularly as he worked on the book, and invited him to Sandringham as well as Birkhall. Obviously the abdication was one of the most important and most difficult episodes to cover, and perhaps the one about which the Queen Mother felt most strongly. Indeed, when Helen Hardinge, wife of Alec Hardinge, the King’s former Private Secretary, had sent the Queen the manuscript of her book
The Path of Kings
in 1951, the only passage to which the Queen had objected dealt with the abdication, and was critical of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. ‘I don’t like the idea of you writing about this agonising interlude in our history. I am quite certain that you would be wise to say
very little
on this subject – It only does harm, and the effect on people is sometimes so different to what you think it may be …
Please
take it out. Your loving friend, ER.’
83
Wheeler-Bennett naturally conducted many interviews on the subject of the abdication – he spoke to the Duke of Windsor himself, but not to the Duchess – and wrote about the crisis at some length. His account was judicious; like almost everyone who studied the subject he came to feel a great deal more sympathy for King George VI than for Edward VIII. His painstaking, lucid biography, published in 1958, demonstrated well the author’s regard for his subject; Queen Elizabeth was pleased.
For Christmas 1952 the whole family gathered as usual at Sandringham. Queen Mary was increasingly frail – the death of her son the
King was a blow from which she could not recover. She spent much of the holiday in her own rooms, only coming down to join the family for tea. The Queen Mother stayed at Sandringham until late January, and she visited areas of the east coast hit by the worst flooding in decades. She was filled with admiration for the courage of homeless people and wrote to the Queen, ‘it was terribly like the war all over again, the same defiance, the same “I don’t care” & I felt quite shattered & exhausted by memories, & the sad reality of the present tragedy’.
84
She returned to Royal Lodge and on the first anniversary of the King’s death she took communion, with Princess Margaret, at the Royal Chapel. This service became an annual fixture for the rest of her life.
By this time, Queen Mary was nearing death. To one old friend, Lady Shaftesbury, she said, ‘I suppose one must force oneself to go on until the end?’ ‘I am sure’, replied Lady Shaftesbury, ‘that Your Majesty will.’
85
She did; her duty all ended, Queen Mary died peacefully at Marlborough House on the evening of 24 March 1953. A week later tens of thousands of people stood silent and bareheaded as the coffin of a dignified and admired queen, who seemed to have been always with them, was carried ‘slowly and majestically’ away. Her biographer commented that ‘by undeviating service to her own highest ideals, she had ended by becoming, for millions, an ideal in herself’.
86
Her death brought another huge change for her daughter-in-law. She and Queen Mary had enjoyed and suffered much together ever since Queen Mary had warmly welcomed Elizabeth Bowes Lyon into the family in 1923. Not only was an important bond with the past severed but Queen Elizabeth was now the senior member of the Royal Family.
