The Queen Mother (140 page)

All such deaths reminded her how ‘curiously alone’ she had become – even in the 1960s. ‘Nearly all my family have gone, & so many old friends, and sometimes one feels very solitary. But I suppose that happens to everyone who lives past 60, and one must not allow the fact to depress one.’
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In a later, more upbeat moment, she acknowledged that with ageing ‘there are compensations, such as
loathing
the idea of going to a Night Club and things like that!’
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A poignant commemoration of her greatest loss came on 31 March 1969, when Queen Elizabeth, with most of the Royal Family, attended the dedication of the King George VI Memorial Chapel in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, as the last resting place of her husband. His coffin had remained in the Royal Vault beneath St George’s since his death. It had originally been intended that a tomb should be made for him in
St George’s Chapel itself, like those of his parents and grandparents. Various sculptors were suggested to make an effigy of the King to be placed on the tomb.
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Jacob Epstein
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was approached, although Queen Elizabeth was concerned that his bold style might be inappropriate for the setting. She herself saw ‘the possibility of something exceptional’, in the words of Sir Arthur Penn, from the hand of Henry Moore. She wanted to discuss it with Moore personally if he were willing to undertake it. But she was reluctant to press him, and the idea was evidently dropped.
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In the end it was decided that rather than a tomb with effigies, a chantry chapel should be built for the King, opening off the north aisle of St George’s. There were delays because the Fine Arts Commission had understandable reservations about the effect of a modern addition to an architectural masterpiece of the Perpendicular Gothic style. But the architects succeeded in creating a simple and harmonious building lit by narrow lancet windows with stained glass designed by John Piper. Queen Elizabeth was pleased with the result, which she described as ‘a truly peaceful & holy place.’
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Q
UEEN
E
LIZABETH
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principal home for the second half of her life was Clarence House. Despite her initial dismay at having to move there after the death of the King, she gradually grew to accept it as an effective London base. With the help of friends and advisers she decorated it well and imbued it with a sense of continuity.

Standing off Stable Yard next to St James’s Palace, Clarence House was built by John Nash in 1825–8 for the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV. Through the nineteenth century the house was lived in by a succession of junior members of the Royal Family. After the last of these, the Duke of Connaught, died in 1942, the house served for the rest of the war as the headquarters of the British Red Cross Society
and the St John Ambulance Brigade. It was damaged by bombing and had to be extensively restored before becoming the married home of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh in 1949.

The front door of the house is approached through black-painted wooden gates on Stable Yard Road, a private street off the Mall. Inside the gates, a gravel drive of barely more than a car’s length leads to the pillared portico. From there it is just one step into the small outer hall where stood a musical clock given to her and the Duke of York by the citizens of Glasgow for their wedding – it was surmounted with a Scottish lion on a crown and was made by ‘John Smith of Pittenweem, North Britain’. The broad inner hall is the backbone of the house and the Queen Mother used it as a gallery for paintings, tapestries and mirrors.

Past an early seventeenth-century tapestry, acquired in 1950, was Simon Elwes’s sketch of Queen Elizabeth in Garter robes, made for his large painting, which hung on the wall opposite, of the King investing Princess Elizabeth with the insignia of the Order of the Garter in the Throne Room at Windsor Castle in April 1948. It is a delicate portrait of a poignant moment as the King made his beloved daughter a member of the oldest and most distinguished Order of British chivalry, 600 years after the founding of the Order.

Elwes’s painting, which was completed only in 1953 after the death of the King, is an important part of the collection built up over decades by Queen Elizabeth. The art historian John Cornforth, in his admirable study of Clarence House, points out that the Garter picture ‘is part of a chronological story that reflects the intensity of the period in which Queen Elizabeth was most active in acquiring pictures by living artists’.
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After the grim menace of the 1930s and the war, and the grey immediate post-war years, there was something ‘doubly celebratory’ about the Garter picture. Victories had been won, evil had been defeated, and the King was handing the promise of the future to his daughter.
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That sense of what had been avoided is also illuminated by a painting further down the hall by James Gunn – it is a conversation piece of several soldiers entitled simply
Field Marshal Montgomery in his Mess Tent in Belgium in 1944
. This shows the Field Marshal himself in a flying jacket and corduroy trousers, sitting around a table with his aides. Gunn had been with them in Belgium in August and September 1944 as the Allies advanced towards Berlin. Eindhoven was relieved
while the artist was there. There is on many of the faces, and certainly on that of Montgomery, a quiet smile of satisfaction. The Queen saw the painting at the Royal Academy in 1945 and bought it; Montgomery was chagrined and tried to acquire it for himself. She declined to release it and Gunn eventually painted another version for the Field Marshal.
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Off the main corridor is the Lancaster Room, which Queen Elizabeth used as a waiting room for those whom she was to receive in audience. It was dominated by the watercolours of Windsor Castle under lowering skies by John Piper, which the Queen had commissioned in 1941.

Leading off the hall is a corridor filled with paintings and mementoes of horses and racing and therefore known as the Horse Corridor. In 1963 Queen Elizabeth added to this collection with a painting by J. F. Herring which represented Cotherstone, a Derby and 2000 Guineas winner owned by John Bowes. Even more striking is another Herring – a sketch of the twelfth Earl of Strathmore on horseback. And at the east end of the corridor hung pictures of some of the Queen Mother’s own horses – The Rip, Double Star and Makaldar.

In the Garden Room the Queen Mother hung over the fireplace the celebrated unfinished portrait of her which Augustus John began at the end of 1939. It was a difficult commission to complete in the brutal circumstances of war, but the result is rather magical – almost a portrait of a fairy queen. In the upright figure dressed in a Hartnell gold and white crinoline, bedecked in glittering jewels and holding red roses in her lap, John captured much of this Queen’s sparkling gaiety.

It was presented to her as a gift in 1961 and she wrote to John, ‘What a tremendous pleasure it gives me to see it once again. It looks so lovely in my drawing room and has cheered it up no end! The sequins glitter and the rose and the red chair give a fine glow and I am so happy to have it.’
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John was overjoyed by her letter and replied that now that the picture was on her wall, ‘I am convinced that with all its faults, there is something there which is both true and lovable. I have really thought so all along but have not dared to say so.’
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Close by was another, very different portrait – she is not in light crinolines but in black, she is uncrowned and looks, as she was, half a decade older and seasoned by the worries of war. There is realism rather than magic in this sketch which James Gunn painted, a few
months after the war ended, for a large portrait of her as Royal Bencher of the Middle Temple.
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Other portraits of her in the house included the profile done for her mother by John Singer Sargent at the time of her marriage, and a sketch for a portrait by Graham Sutherland which was to have hung at Senate House in the University of London.
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The idea of a Sutherland portrait had been long in gestation. In 1951 she had had some doubts about the artist when he was suggested for a regimental portrait. She had seen his painting of Somerset Maugham, which, in the words of Arthur Penn, showed ‘a cynical and desiccated old turtle’.
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By 1959, when the University gave Sutherland the commission, she evidently had fewer qualms. She agreed to his suggestion that she should wear a feathered hat and gave him seven sittings in March 1961. According to his biographer Roger Berthoud, Sutherland ‘found that her flow of conversation made concentration difficult, and he was not used to coping with a face so relatively cherubic and unlined.’
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He produced a sketch which was a good start, but he came to the conclusion that he would not be able to paint a portrait that the University would like and so the project was abandoned. There were many who thought this was a pity – the art historian, friend of Queen Elizabeth and later Director of the National Portrait Gallery Roy Strong remarked that ‘Sutherland focuses on what his predecessors omitted, the acute intelligence of the sitter beneath the beguiling humour.’
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Instead of Sutherland, at Queen Elizabeth’s request London University commissioned a portrait of her from Pietro Annigoni in 1962.
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She gave him about twenty one-hour sittings in spring 1963. The artist wrote later that he warmed more to her than to any other members of the Royal Family he had painted. Both artist and sitter liked the
finished portrait, which showed her with a wry smile and her tasselled mortarboard set at a jaunty angle. But the Court and Senate of the University were disappointed. According to Annigoni, they complained that they had asked her to be painted holding her mortarboard in her hand. Instead she had worn it, saying to Annigoni, ‘Why shouldn’t I put it on my head? After all when I go the University I have to wear it.’
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Upstairs in the corridor leading to the Queen Mother’s own rooms was the arresting large watercolour portrait of her with a bonnet hanging from her arm, painted by Savely Sorine at the time of her marriage in 1923.

Just as Augustus John and Cecil Beaton were bold choices for portraitists in the 1930s, so was Sutherland in the 1960s and, even more so, John Bratby of the so-called Kitchen Sink School in the late 1970s. He was in the process of creating his ‘Hall of Fame’ of people who had marked and influenced the century and was rather surprised when Queen Elizabeth accepted his request to paint her. Sir Oliver Millar, then Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, was in favour of the proposal. He considered Bratby ‘a very entertaining and exciting painter’ and thought that in joining his Hall of Fame Queen Elizabeth would be in ‘delightful and – largely – congenial company’. Bratby painted two pictures of her in day clothes; after the first sitting he commented, ‘I found Her Majesty to be splendid and enchanting.’ He offered her a small painting of a sunflower as a present, which she accepted. But his request to paint her again, in formal attire with a tiara, was turned down. Later, after her first visit to Venice, in 1984, Bratby gave her a drawing of Punta della Dogana, which she hung in the Morning Room at Clarence House, alongside paintings by Sickert and Augustus John.
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Apart from the portraits of herself, the house was filled with her collection of art, including other pictures and busts of members of the Royal Family and of her own family. They included King William IV, Queen Victoria (more than once), King George V and of course King George VI, her mother, her father, her daughters – and many more.

John Cornforth observed that in the Clarence House collection there was much romanticism and much patriotism – and it is indeed that combination which informed so much of the Queen Mother’s life, both publicly and privately.
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But there was also another quality to be
found in her collection – the excitement she had shown since girlhood in mystery and magic.

The collection suggests that she preferred sketches or unfinished works rather than more polished (sometimes ponderous) formal portraits. Aside from those already mentioned, the house contained works by Philip de László, Edward Seago (who gave her many small paintings for her birthday and at Christmas) and others. Throughout the house were objects and paintings and drawings which had been brought to her attention over the years by her artistic guides, Jasper Ridley, Kenneth Clark and Arthur Penn. In 1938 she had bought two paintings by living artists – Wilson Steer’s
Chepstow Castle
and Augustus John’s portrait of George Bernard Shaw with his eyes closed,
When Homer Nods
. In the Morning Room at Clarence House was one of the most ‘modern’ and visionary paintings in her collection, Paul Nash’s
Landscape of the Vernal Equinox
, which had puzzled her daughter when she bought it in 1943.

In her own sitting room at Clarence House, Queen Elizabeth had a big desk latticed with photographs and busts of her family, horses and dogs, and another writing table equally laden with memorabilia, in front of the fire. There was an agreeable clutter in the room, with shopping bags on the floor serving as filing cabinets for letters and bills, mixed from all decades. The room included one of Gerald Kelly’s wartime sketches for the state portraits he painted of the King and Queen. On her large mahogany desk was the Whistler glass engagement-card holder.

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HROUGHOUT MOST
of these decades, Queen Elizabeth’s Household and her staff remained as constant as her kindness, her dislike of change and her powers of persuasion could ensure. As with Arthur Penn, she would never willingly let go of anyone she valued. This was demanding – but few of her Household or staff appear to have been in any great rush to leave.

Her establishment was always grand, but it was also quirky and friendly, perhaps more tolerant of eccentricity than some royal households. Just as Queen Elizabeth enjoyed having unconventional people among her friends, so she accepted foibles in the men and women who served her that other royal establishments might have considered a little risqué. The tone for this was set, not only by herself, but also
by her good-natured and open minded Private Secretary, Sir Martin Gilliat.