The Queen Mother (141 page)

Gilliat would see her every morning at about 10.30 with the mail and any official papers she had been sent. A constant source of pleasure both to Queen Elizabeth and to other members of the Household, as well as to his many friends outside the Palace and around the world, Gilliat was a great joy at any party and was always able to break the ice, which was sometimes very thick between nervous guests around the Queen Mother. He had exhibited this skill many years before when he had met the shy young King Bhumibol of Thailand. Everyone was standing around nervously when Gilliat said to the King, ‘Your Majesty, I understand that you are an expert at standing on your head. Do please show us.’ The King obliged and the party then ‘went like wedding bells’.
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Alongside Gilliat was the man with the most difficult task in the Queen Mother’s Household – her Treasurer. After the death of Sir Arthur Penn this job was held for many years by Sir Ralph Anstruther. He was a precise and meticulously dressed martinet whose job was to try and impose order if not limits on Queen Elizabeth’s spending. He was daunting in his appraisals of others and a stickler for proper dress, particularly among the equerries when they arrived to work at Clarence House. He insisted on highly polished black lace-up shoes (he regarded shoes without laces as ‘bedroom slippers’) and detachable starched white collars at all times in London, and he himself never travelled anywhere without at least one black tie and a bowler hat in case he had to attend a funeral. He did not speak of ‘the tube’ but of ‘the Underground Tubular Railway’, and preferred ‘wireless sets’ to ‘radios’.

Together with Gilliat and Anstruther worked her assistant Private Secretary Alastair Aird, another ex-army officer. He had joined her Household as equerry in 1960, took on the role of comptroller in 1974, and became the lynchpin of her Household, in charge of her homes and their contents, her staff and her entertaining. In close support from 1959 was her press secretary John Griffin, a former officer of the 24th Lancers and then of the Queen’s Bays, who fitted well into the easygoing Household. With the press he was laconic, taking the view that the fewer words he uttered, the better he was doing his job. Like others, he stayed and stayed in Queen Elizabeth’s service – until he
suffered a debilitating stroke in 1990, after which she used to invite him and his wife Henrietta to come as guests to Scotland.

Her senior Household were all devoted to Queen Elizabeth but they were aware that her style of living, as ‘the last great Edwardian’, could excite criticism in the more egalitarian times at the end of the twentieth century. Ralph Anstruther, in particular, had to be concerned about the size of her entourage, as well as the cost of her clothes, her horses and her entertaining at home – no easy matter when she liked everything to be of the best.

Her parties tended to go with a swing. She described to Princess Margaret one ecclesiastical reception she gave. ‘I gave a cocktail party for 200 Bishops from overseas – by the time that 8 o’clock came, they were in cracking form!’ They tucked into all the canapés ‘& tossed down martini after martini, especially the Americans who I am sure had been entertained on warm sherry for weeks before!’
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She frequently gave lunch and dinner parties, usually for about twelve people. Guests always loved these invitations: the food was good, the cocktails were mixed and the wine was poured with generous aplomb by her uniformed stewards, and the atmosphere was merry. On fine summer days lunch was often served at a table under the trees in the garden. Harold Macmillan, the former Conservative Prime Minister, thanked her for one such ‘picnic’, saying that it had ‘all the pleasures of informality and none of its disadvantages. A rustic bank is all very well in its way, but it is apt to be uncomfortable and there is always the danger of earwigs.’
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Roy Strong noted, ‘The Clarence House ritual is that of an Edwardian great house and the sight of eighteen people sitting at a dining-room table laid overall alfresco with three menservants ministering to their needs was pure 1890s.’
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Among the jovial and frequent guests were Woodrow Wyatt, a slightly rakish former Labour politician and prolific journalist who became a devotee of Margaret Thatcher and was also chairman of the Horserace Totalisator Board. She enjoyed his gossipy wit as well as his love of racing and often dined with him. Equally, if differently, entertaining was Bruno Heim, who became in 1982 the Vatican’s first apostolic nuncio to Great Britain and Northern Ireland, marking the establishment for the first time of full diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and the Holy See. (This was of significance to Queen
Elizabeth because of her long friendship with D’Arcy Osborne.) Heim was a cultivated man, an authority on ecclesiastical heraldry, and a generous host at his own home where he entertained Queen Elizabeth and many others with his own excellent cooking, generous martinis and champagne enhanced with a twist of sorrel.

Lady Gladwyn, wife of the former Ambassador in Paris,
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recounted a night at the Opera. She and other guests gathered to wait rather formally at Clarence House for their hostess. ‘Suddenly there seemed a movement in the air, a widening of our circle, a rustle of skirts, and in came, with the greatest of informality and the highest of spirits, the Queen Mother. Sparkling with diamonds, in a pink tulle crinoline, and breaking any ice there might have been, she exuded an excited joy that was almost unqueenly.’ Lady Gladwyn was fascinated: ‘such is her power to charm and dazzle, that it does not seem to matter one whit that her inherent stoutness is now completely out of control.’ Other people worried about weight for reasons of health or vanity. ‘Not her. Obviously she relishes her food, her sweets and her champagne, and is not going to spoil her enjoyment of life by bothering about diet and exercise.’ Cynthia Gladwyn was not sure how much the Queen Mother enjoyed
Figaro
. ‘She sat straight as a ramrod and completely still … I thought from where I sat that I could detect a little weariness, a little sadness in her profile.’ (In fact ramrod straight was how Queen Elizabeth always sat: she had been brought up to believe that a lady’s back should never touch the back of her chair.) Lady Gladwyn said that as soon as there was a chance to applaud and comment, Queen Elizabeth’s gaiety returned and she encouraged everyone to clap as loudly as they could and to shout encore.
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Not for nothing did Frances Campbell-Preston later recall that when she started to work as one of the women of the bedchamber – ladies in waiting in daily attendance – for Queen Elizabeth in the 1960s, ‘I stepped back into a world which had died for me in 1939 – a world of butlers, chefs, housekeepers, housemaids, pages and footmen in smart uniforms, kitchen maids, chauffeurs and gardeners.’
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She carried out her duties with wit and brio and became one of Queen Elizabeth’s longest-serving ladies in waiting. Another was Lady
Grimthorpe, who was appointed in 1973 and later became the senior lady in the Household. In 1990 she took over the duties of the Mistress of the Robes – attending Queen Elizabeth at important engagements and arranging the rota of ladies in waiting – after the death of the Duchess of Abercorn, who had held the post since 1964. Elizabeth (‘Skip’) Grimthorpe was the daughter of Queen Elizabeth’s girlhood friend Katharine McEwen, who had become countess of Scarbrough.

The ladies lived with Queen Elizabeth for two weeks at a time. One of their principal tasks, as we have seen, was to deal with the thousands of letters, often requests for help, which she received every year. There were social as well as secretarial duties. Dame Frances Campbell-Preston (as she later became) commented, ‘The job was very nebulous. There were no rules. You did have to answer letters, help plan her engagements, chat up her guests, but no one told you what to do. You did as you liked. She didn’t want stereotypes. She wanted to gossip with you. She was huge fun, but you never got very intimate with her. There was always a line.’ This was perhaps because of her nervousness about the danger of being quoted, or misquoted in the press. ‘She hated being asked questions,’ said Dame Frances. ‘If you asked her how she had liked Churchill, it would be a blank wall. She was very guarded and didn’t want to be caught out.’
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Many other members of the Royal Family share that concern.

The engine room at Clarence House was the equerry’s room. The equerry, typically seconded from one of the Queen Mother’s regiments for a two-year tour of duty at Clarence House, sat behind a large partner’s desk with a telephone and an internal communications box to various parts of the house and to the Mews at Marlborough House. His principal tasks were to help organize the Queen Mother’s private and official travel arrangements while in London and to act as host in her other homes. It was not an especially challenging role and the Queen Mother was a forgiving employer. On one occasion in the early 1970s an equerry overslept and missed an important engagement at which he was supposed to be in attendance. He was forgiven – and received an alarm clock the next day for his pains.

The equerry’s office boasted a large drinks cupboard behind a door disguised by a selection of regimental histories and the like. The office acted as a general meeting place for the Household, and outside guests could be invited there. The equerry’s working day would
usually be interrupted at about noon when his male colleagues gathered in the room. Many of Sir Martin Gilliat’s friends, who included a number of former Colditz comrades, would come to see him before lunch.

The staff whom the Queen Mother saw most often were her maid, her dresser and her two pages. One of the longest serving of her pages, Bill Baker, had worked for her since 1927 and retired in 1975. Walter Taylor, steward at Clarence House, served for almost as long, from 1936 until his death in 1978. These two were succeeded, respectively, by Reginald Wilcock and his friend William Tallon. Queen Elizabeth relied greatly upon them both in later life. Tallon was a cultivated but flamboyant man who became the great character on her staff. His off-duty behaviour as a boulevardier raised eyebrows; with his bouffant hair, his gift for bold repartee and his fondness for a drink, he had various escapades in his private life which might have embarrassed other employers – but if senior members of her Household ever complained about his conduct, she would suggest to them that, although their jobs were always under review, Tallon’s was not.
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After Queen Elizabeth’s death Tallon was offered large sums of money by newspapers to tell her secrets. He refused.

From 1970 onwards there was also her chef Michael Sealey, who described himself as ‘a loquacious West Country yeoman’. Sealey had been third assistant chef at Buckingham Palace since Coronation year and the offer to work for Queen Elizabeth came, he said, out of the blue. Her taste in food was simple and, he thought, derived from early life at Glamis. He said later that choosing the menus was a two-way street. She loved goujons of sole (which she had been served on her triumphant 1938 visit to Paris), and haddock – ‘She would have had that every night. I once tried monkfish and she sent a message “Tell Chef we won’t have that again.” ’
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She insisted on fresh food in season; the only frozen food that Sealey ever served her were peas in Russian salads. She thought Spanish strawberries tasted like turnips. Among other dislikes were smoked salmon (which other people gave her too often), oysters, coconut and capers. She loved omelettes. One of her favourite dishes, which Sealey made time and time again, was
Oeufs Drumkilbo
. Named after the Elphinstone family home in Perthshire, the dish had been created by their Baltic cook; it consisted of diced hard-boiled eggs, lobster, shrimps, tomato, cream and mayonnaise, served cold in aspic.
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Most of the staff at Clarence House saw Queen Elizabeth only rarely. Indeed for some it was only when she gave out Christmas presents. ‘We used to call it school prize giving,’ recalled Lucy Murphy, who started working at Clarence House as lady clerk to the Private Secretary in 1967, and was still there in 2002. Everyone was allowed to choose his or her own gift, which was then presented, unwrapped, by the Queen Mother at individual audiences where only William Tallon and the housekeeper were present.

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W
HEN SHE WAS
based in London, Queen Elizabeth spent as many weekends as possible at Royal Lodge, the pale-pink-washed house in Windsor Great Park on which she and the Duke of York had lavished so much time and affection. She continued to love the house along with new generations of the family. In the 1950s Prince Charles and Princess Anne spent long weekends and parts of the school holidays playing in the Welsh Cottage which had been given to Princess Elizabeth in 1932. In the upstairs nursery at Royal Lodge there were still the rocking horses and many of the toys – a Noah’s Ark and a host of animals – with which both Princesses had played, and from the mid-1960s onwards it was the turn of Princess Margaret’s children, David and Sarah, to enjoy them.

Royal Lodge was a comfortable, easy house, whose focal point was still the magnificent saloon which the Duke and Duchess of York had restored in the 1930s, and which was depicted in the National Portrait Gallery’s well-known conversation piece by James Gunn, showing the King and Queen and the two Princesses in 1950. The room was dominated by the five tall and elegant French windows which gave on to the terrace. Over the fireplace hung, appropriately, a portrait of the Lodge’s original denizen King George IV by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Facing each other on either side of the fireplace were two sofas, one covered in pink damask and the other in green. Other groups of chairs were gathered close to the windows. Tables were piled with books and big pots of flowers. On one end wall hung a fine verdure tapestry from Brussels. A large red and blue Persian carpet covered most of the floor.

Next door was the Octagon Room where visitors might wait before seeing Queen Elizabeth in the saloon. There was a green-marble fireplace with an old-fashioned three-bar electric fire in the hearth, a
hexagonal table piled with books, panelled walls, bookcases filled with worn-looking leatherbound sets, family photographs on the piano. On the wall were the John Singer Sargent pendant portraits of the Duke and Duchess of York at the time of their marriage. The curtains were pink and the armchairs and sofas covered in flowered chintz. The carpet, with a twelve-sided central panel, became very worn over the years, by people and also by dogs. The desk, by the French window, was filled to overflowing with family photographs and large cache-pots of flowers.