The Queen Mother (126 page)

From Rhodesia, she and the Princess flew to Uganda and then back towards London. In Khartoum, where the plane refuelled, the two royal ladies were offered warm champagne, which they sipped sitting in garden chairs on the tarmac, after a ‘gloriously incoherent deaf
conversation’ with some Sudanese religious leaders.
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The Queen and Prince Philip came to London airport to meet them.

Three weeks later, after her fifty-third birthday, Queen Elizabeth travelled as usual to the Highlands. She stayed first at Balmoral with her children and grandchildren; it was ‘heaven’, she said, ‘laughing & talking & being a family’ which, she thought, ‘is the only thing worth living for’.
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Then she moved down the road to Birkhall, to which she had invited the Salisburys ‘to stay in extreme discomfort’ in her ‘TINY’ house for a week’s shooting.
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But her guests enjoyed it. Lady Salisbury wrote afterwards that Birkhall ‘was the “warmest and cosiest” place in Scotland, both inside and out’.
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Her husband thought the house delightful and to be back on the hill without the King was touching. ‘The King had been so much the guiding spirit of the place, one felt he was still there all the time, watching us and blessing us with his presence.’
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Not long afterwards, the Queen Mother had new duties to fulfil when the Queen and Prince Philip departed for a five-month tour of the Commonwealth. For the first time in the new reign, she was required to exercise the powers conferred on her by the new Regency Act as Counsellor of State. The other Counsellors were Princess Margaret, the Duke of Gloucester, the Princess Royal and the Earl of Harewood. Over the ensuing months she and Princess Margaret held seven meetings of the Privy Council to carry out the Queen’s constitutional duties on her behalf; they also received numerous British ambassadors who kissed hands on appointment to their postings, and newly appointed foreign ambassadors presenting their letters of credence. She held six investitures at Buckingham Palace and one of those whom she knighted was the ‘dear’, ‘priceless’, ‘angelic’ George Robey of her teenage letters to Beryl Poignand. She invested John Christie, the creator of the Glyndebourne opera house in Sussex, as a Companion of Honour. She also gave audiences to ministers and on at least two occasions she received Winston Churchill. ‘I had a visit from Winston last week,’ she wrote to the Queen in March 1954. ‘What a privilege to have lived in his day – He is a truly great man.’
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Churchill’s health was failing but he resigned only in April 1955, making way for Anthony Eden.

Her duties were familial as well as formal – while the Queen and Prince Philip were abroad, the Queen Mother was
in loco parentis
to
Prince Charles and Princess Anne. She took great pleasure in this task. While the children were staying with her at Royal Lodge, she took them to Shaw Farm in Windsor Home Park. Afterwards she sent their mother a mock-dramatic account of their gleeful progress from one lethal farmyard hazard to the next, turning on taps, setting heavy metal objects swinging above their heads, climbing on tottering straw bales and rusty farm machinery bristling with sharp blades, and relishing a ‘dear little cat hunt’, during which the ‘quite nice’ corgis and Sealyhams turned into ravening wolves. The final delights were a cart full of manure – and a baby in a pram. ‘They cooed and patted its hands and leant lovingly & heavily over it! “Mummy has promised
us
a baby” I heard Charles saying proudly … Having leant over the pigs, & fed the cows etc etc etc, we came home – the children fresh as paint, & me? – well, perhaps well exercised is the word! But they have been so good, and talk about you and Philip a lot.’ She told the Queen how she missed her, and said she had not seen much of Princess Margaret. ‘This I am very glad of for her sake, as she has been lunching & dining out a good deal.’
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That Christmas the Queen Mother presided at Sandringham and reported to the Queen that the children had enjoyed themselves ‘galloping down the passage’ to see the tree and gasping at it with ‘ “oh’s” & “ah’s” & isn’t it
BEAUTIFUL
’. Earlier, at Windsor, she had enjoyed the Servants’ Ball where she waltzed with Lord Freyberg, the distinguished former Governor General and Commander-in-Chief of New Zealand who was now Governor of Windsor Castle. It was ‘very exciting as it was the dance when balloons descend from the roof, & Lord Freyberg went mad & banged housemaids out of his way, & pushed poor old ladies aside in a mad desire for balloons’.
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Perhaps this spectacle would have prompted Isaiah Berlin to revise his later assessment of Lord Freyberg as ‘boring’.
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Prince Charles, she added, had started lessons with Miss Peebles.
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But, characteristically insouciant about formal lessons, his grandmother was determined that he should have fun. She reported that the children were enjoying playing Dumb Crambo in the evenings. ‘It is a great success, & they adore acting, tho’ the rhyming is slightly vague.
Something to rhyme with “stop” – “pheasant” said Charles triumphantly – that’s the way it was played at first, but now they are getting much better at rhyming.’
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Apart from the children, the letters between mother and daughter dealt at length with their mutual interest in horses. With a light touch, the Queen Mother’s letters to her daughter at this time also sought to advise and encourage her in the public role she herself understood so well. ‘We follow your journeys very well by the papers, and some good newsreels,’ she wrote. ‘How well one knows the procedure, & how monotonous it becomes. But one simply can’t think of any other way of letting people
see
the Sovereign, than getting up on a dais & driving round town.’ She hoped Prince Philip was not tired – ‘It makes just the whole difference in the world doing things
together
 … I find that doing things without Papa nearly kills one – he was so wonderful.’
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She remembered how tired they had both become during their own visit to New Zealand and Australia in 1927 – ‘and yet, thank goodness, one is uplifted & carried on by the wonderful loyalty & affection. And one feels again, how moving & humble-making, that one can be the vehicle through which this love for country can be expressed. Don’t you feel that?’
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The Queen wrote back long letters filled with vivid descriptions of incidents and encounters on their trip as well as questions and advice about the horses back home. ‘Racing is incredible out here,’ she wrote from New Zealand; ‘tremendous enthusiasm everywhere. They all bet like mad and like their marathons of eight races at a dose!’
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She was also able to telephone, and her mother wrote to tell her how much she liked talking to her, but with the children always ‘poised to snatch the receiver’ she often failed to give her all the news.
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In early March 1954 the Queen wrote from Melbourne expressing her excitement that she would see her children three weeks earlier than originally planned.
Britannia
, the new royal yacht,
^*
was sailing to the Mediterranean to pick up the Queen and Prince Philip, and the children would be on board. She was sure that they would have changed a lot in the past six months; she was also concerned that they might not even recognize their parents.
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Her mother reassured her, with a gentle hint that it was important to try to remember what it was like to be five or
six years old: ‘one really felt very deeply about things, and you may find Charles much older in a very endearing way. He is intensely affectionate & loves you & Philip most tenderly – I am sure that he will always be a very loving & enjoyable child to you both.’ She had taken Princess Anne to the Royal Chapel near Royal Lodge where the little girl had amused everyone by singing very loudly and tunelessly. ‘She is very intelligent, & very sensitive &
very
funny!’
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The reunion finally took place in Tobruk, on board the
Britannia
. ‘The children are enchanting and it is so wonderful to be with them again!’ the Queen wrote to her mother. When she and Prince Philip came aboard, both children ‘gravely offered us their hands … partly I suppose because they were somewhat overcome by the fact that we were really there and partly because they have met so many new people recently! However the ice broke very quickly and we have been subjected to a very energetic routine and innumerable questions which have left us gasping!’
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*

O
N
20 O
CTOBER
1954 the Queen Mother began one of the most important journeys of her life. She embarked for New York in the
Queen Elizabeth
, which she had launched in 1938, to begin a three-week tour of the United States and Canada. She had been dreading the trip because she would not be accompanied by any member of the family. But she felt obliged to go because the centrepiece was to be the presentation of funds raised in memory of the King, to be spent on training in the USA of young people from the Commonwealth. In the event the trip was a personal triumph which convinced her that she did have an important part still to play in public life.

The outbound passage was rough, but she had always been a good sailor. In New York she stayed with the British Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Sir Pierson Dixon.
^*
His official residence, outside Manhattan in Riverdale, was comfortable and she marvelled in particular at the abundance of American bathrooms and the endless supplies of ‘millions of towels, large medium, small, tiny, face flannels, in great profusion’ with which she was provided.
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She had a busy time seeing much of New York both formally and informally. As she
had expected, at first she found it hard ‘not having any family to laugh with’.
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Concealing this, she visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, attended a luncheon given by the Pilgrims, the Anglo-American society, visited the American Bible Society where she was presented with a special edition of the King James Bible, and toured the United Nations headquarters in the company of the then Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld. When first shown the detailed programme for the day, which included meeting journalists at the UN, she had commented ‘How ghastly.’
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But she did not let her feelings about the press show at all. Indeed press men and women, a tough crowd, praised her for treating them well.
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She was guest of honour at the Charter Dinner of Columbia University, which she had visited with the King in 1939, and she received an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. A ball was given in her honour by the Associated Commonwealth Societies of New York, and she had a private lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt, at Hyde Park – another echo of the memorable 1939 visit. It was a touching reunion of two women who had each contributed enormously to her country’s wartime effort. There was fun to be had as well. She went to see the popular musical
The Pajama Game
, loved the tunes and wished Princess Margaret had been there.
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She ‘adored’ the Empire State Building
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and visited a children’s day-care centre and a home for Aged British Men and Women. On 3 November the Mayor of New York gave her a luncheon and that night the English Speaking Union a dinner. It was at this formal occasion that the cheque honouring the King’s memory was presented to her.

She found the formal dinners the worst part of the American trip. She hated dining on a dais in full evening dress and tiara, stared at by the world under ‘a terrible glare of television & film lights’. Eating in public ‘really is a nightmare, & they give one gigantic bits of meat, bigger than this sheet of paper, practically raw, & then instead of gravy, they pour a little blood over it. Oh boy.’
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At the English Speaking Union dinner her lady in waiting observed that she only toyed with her food, and when she returned to the Dixons’ house, she had a plate of scrambled eggs on a tray, enjoying the informal picnic infinitely more.
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A shopping expedition made to various New York department stores on the afternoon of Friday 29 October was intended to be private but everywhere she went she was pursued by packs of
relentless British journalists and crowds of excited American women. In Saks Fifth Avenue, she, her lady in waiting Jean Rankin, the manager and three Secret Service men ‘made a sharp & cunning dash into the lift, which we stopped between floors, & held a council of war’. They decided to sneak up to the top floor but, as they stepped out there, ‘a gate opened opposite us, & a
horde
of ladies poured out, shouting in triumph. We flew for shelter to “Ladies shirts”, & inside a sort of gazebo of police we tried to do a little shopping.’ This proved impossible, so they ‘decided to make a dash for the ground floor … It was all so like a Marx brothers film.’
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President Eisenhower, who had been elected to the White House in 1952, sent his private plane to bring her to Washington where she had another full week of formal appearances, visits and meals, including visits to the White House, the National Gallery of Art and tours in Virginia and Maryland, both of which she found ‘delightful’.
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She found life in the Eisenhower White House stiffer than it had been with the Roosevelts, and surrounded with more protocol. But, according to the British Ambassador, Sir Roger Makins, the Eisenhowers took evident pleasure in entertaining her as an old friend.
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The Makinses were informal too and at least once they all had a midnight supper on the stairs of the Ambassador’s residence.
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Despite such informality, security was much tighter than in 1939. Her Secret Service people were just like nannies who, she told the Queen, ‘look after one, & look also faintly disapproving or rather loving. I’d like to have one or two to bring home.’
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